Racebending

Yeah. I was being slightly euphemistic. That’s it exactly.

I've seen more complaints about MCU Daredevil wearing a yellow costume than I have about him lacking red hair, and keep in mind that the yellow costume is from the comics. Almost none of Jimmy Olsen's live action actors have been redheads, but only Mechad Brooks had to deal with hostility directed at him from the fans. The new Red Sonja movie was originally going to star a half-Nigerian actress who left due to scheduling conflicts and was replaced by a white woman. One of the first comments I saw in response to that decision was "a redhead has been spared".

Matilda Lutz, the new actress for Sonja, is a white brunette, in case that wasn't clear.

This brings to mind Lucia from the Devil May Cry games who is one of the few redheads in the games and was the closest thing to a non-white character until Morrison was brought into the games and made black. I say closest in Lucia's case as she's an artificial demon who looks like a Dark Skinned Redhead and isn't actually human.

Edited by windleopard on Oct 21st 2023 at 12:11:22 PM

Maybe it all began with The Shawshank Redemption...

Edited by Smeagol17 on Sep 12th 2022 at 11:56:38 AM

I assume that when you racebend Red Sonja, you keep the red hair anyway, the name is kind of a clue.

Triss from the Witcher was in this category too. Although so did Fringilla - by a darker-skinned actress - and she is brunette.

Although to be fair, the people I have seen criticizing Triss' cast did not complain about her skin color so much as they did about her overall looks - forgetting that while she is a redhead in the books, CD Projekt Red very much skimpified her for extra sexy points.

Edited by Bexlerfu on Sep 12th 2022 at 1:49:04 PM

When you look at it in the wider context, a lot of the complaints fit into a pattern of people consistently trying to avoid calling various minority people unattractive, while obviously wanting to.

It also sometimes comes with that "well, if you're so fine with this kind of casting, you'd be fine if Hollywood adapted traditional African folktales with all white people, right?"

And it's like...no? I'd really not be okay with that. The thing about like...the Little Mermaid or Jimmy Olson or whatever is that there's no particular reason they need to be white. Like, at all. (And stuff like casting Gemma Chan in a British historical drama or things like Bridgerton aren't an issue, IMO, because colourblind casting for things that effectively have been consistently remade for decades is a pretty standard tradition) If Hollywood adapted like, the Anansi stories for some reason, and cast all white people, that's just straight up racist because those stories haven't been adapted before. It's the reason Neil Gaiman scuttled that first film adaptation of Anansi Boys.

Given their disproportionate presense in comic books, maybe some (many) people just really like redheads.

Artists like them because they can really make the 'red' stand out,it's often their defining feature,like Poison Ivy is often depicted with green or pale skin but her hair will always bright red

IIRC, in comics, it's a leftover from the Four Colour era, where the artists had to be pretty damn picky about what colours they picked. It's also why a lot of golden age superhero designs are pretty garish or have odd colour combinations.

You have four characters with similar designs who need to be easily differentiated on a limited palette and on pages that have a chance of not printing very clearly? At least one's gonna be a redhead.

x4 I'm not sure racism is the major factor here. If I go back to VG Triss, that's a character that if memory serves got "interviewed" in a Playboy, with naked artworks and the like, and whose entire wardrobe consists of necklines that all are more plunging than the next. She was designed with quite a bit of eroticism in mind, and many, many female characters share that trait. Even if, in her case, it is a complete violation of her book backstory, where she got so horrifically burned that she never shows any skin outside of her hands and face. She also acted on her crush on Geralt in the games - not the case in the books.

So when the TV show comes out and actually follows the book instead of the games by not making Triss an object of desire, her skin color matters less than the lack of bloodflow she causes towards the groin area.

There hasn't been quite as big an outcry for Zoe Kravitz in The Batman, because she gets to be Ms. Fanservice as expected of Selina Kyle. Same with Zazie Beetz as Domino in Deadpool (another non-redhead that got racebent, actually).

Edited by Bexlerfu on Sep 12th 2022 at 12:38:28 PM

Twitter Bans Weirdo Who Shared Racist Video Changing Halle Bailey's Ariel From Black to White

Oh yeah, that whole thing about "we removed the woke actor" and him trying to claim it wasn't racist.

Nope, it was racist as shit.

"I don't understand why people think that this racist thing I'm doing is racist!"

At this point, I'm wondering if fan cuts are necessary. Look at the one from Obi-Wan.

They're not.

I don't think people make fan cuts out of 'necessity'.

That "Turn Ariel's actor's skin to white" story reminds me of how someone on this site went to Pokémon Sword and Shield and tried to replace the character image for Nessa with an edited image that made her skin white. Thankfully the edit got undone, but wow was it pathetic and sad.

So, what do you guys think of "adaptational race swapping"? Basically, the races between two characters are swapped from the source material to adaptation.

I admittedly have only seen this once in a Power Rangers fan film where Jason was black and Zack was white, the inverse of the original show.

I don't mind it? You can say that they have put a new spin on two different characters, and representation-wise it comes out equal. It sucks for the people that liked the old versions, but there's also going to be people that like the new.

What do you think of it?

Edited by Kayeka on Feb 4th 2023 at 12:40:01 PM

As my saying goes, "Execution is the key".

I'm not sure myself. I suppose it's one of those things that you have to take on a case-by-case basis.

I suppose it would be bad if one of the characters is obviously more major than the other, and then they swapped the major role to the white actor.

That's basically my rule for this entire subject.

Are there examples of Racebending where you like or appreciate the change but still think an original character could have just as easily worked?

An example being Artemis Crock from Young Justice. On one hand, I do like how the show portrays her and her relationship with her mother and her sister. On the other hand, I do wonder if it would have been better to create an original character instead.