Diversity and Representation in Media

This is the first I'm hearing of people thinking Naveen was white. I took it for granted that he was a lighter shade of black (not to be confused with A Lighter Shade of Black).

So there's a conservative radio show I listen to on my way in to work. They were trying to shit on Beyonce's rendition of "Can You Feel the Love Tonight?" from The Lion King - which they didn't even know the name of and just kept calling "Beyonce's Lion King". Talking about how it was a miserable flop and just a total embarrassment to the legacy of the original.

To demonstrate, they decided to play the audio from the song. First thing I noticed was that the song sounded fine, but the audio itself was scratchy and staticy. But that's beside the point.

It doesn't play for long before the two hosts start in on it. It's too noisy, it's too chaotic, the singing is drowned out by the blasting audio. The singing is dull. It doesn't even SOUND like Beyonce, that's how messy it is.

In fact, they can't even hear Beyonce.

At all.

...

It was at that point that the hosts realized they were shitting on the original song by Elton John. They had played it by mistake. They switched over to Beyonce's version, but they'd already wasted all of their digs so they just sat there in utter silence while her (actually rather beautiful) song played.

At the end, one of the hosts said, "You know, that actually wasn't as bad as I was expecting." Telling statement: they hadn't even listened to the song beforehand.

And from there, they just spiraled into generic anti-remake statements. "The original's a classic. You know, it's iconic. It doesn't need to be redone. Don't fix what ain't broke." Yeah, if it's so f*cking iconic, how come you couldn't tell you were listening to it for the first two minutes? Propaganda FAIL.

I suspect someone in the radio station trolled them on purpose.

Yeah, Naveen's ethnicity is very ambiguous but he's definitely not white. He has a brazilian voice actor but that doesn't really say a whole lot beyond the fact that they wanted someone with a "foreign/exotic" accent for the part.

Edited by Draghinazzo on Jul 18th 2019 at 4:49:39 AM

In every case I've seen where Naveen is portrayed in a live setting, such as in the Disney parks on on Once Upon a Time, he's always been played by an actor of color.

Rosario Dawson and Cree Summer will voice Diana and Hippolyta respectively in the upcoming DC animated movie Wonder Woman: Bloodlines.

Naveen is definitely not white. He's Ambiguously Brown.

I always imagined him as a "Random African Prince", but as I grew up and searched up his name, he may well be Indian (Naveen is a Indian name).

I always pinned Naveen as either black or predominantly having African descendance, even if he's not black identified. This is probably because I remember back when he was black and I never got the memo that he was Ambiguously Brown. It wasn't until I rewatched the film a year or two ago that I noticed that maybe he isn't black.

Edited by Pichu-kun on Jul 20th 2019 at 4:15:00 AM

Trevor Noah's response to Scarlett Johansson's comments regarding diversity.

Some other articles and the video itself, for people who just want to get the information straight without having to wade through a ton of "yasss queen" cheerleading.

I get what Trevor is saying at the end for the most part, but if I could make a slight argument to his case...

... wouldn't any actor who is trans or gay that is wanting to audition for a role that is trans or gay, logically speaking, already be "out"?

I just watched a nearly hour long video on queer cats in Warrior Cats.

There are some stuff I disagree with in this, such as the rant against "SJWs", "special snowflakes", and LGBTQ headcanons, but it's fairly interesting. AFAIK, the series doesn't have any characters that are explicitly gay. Like, explicitly in-series, not Word of Gay. There's a lot of subtext but nothing as obvious as with the straight couples.

Apparently it's a publisher mandated thing. I'm reminded of the Wings of Fire series, which is created by one of the Erin's. It actually has LGBTQ characters. It currently has seven. For example, Princess Anemone has a crush on a female character and Sundew (a protagonist) has a crush on Willow. However, Wings of Fire is published by Scholastic, not Harper Collins.

Edited by Pichu-kun on Jul 20th 2019 at 1:33:28 AM

@Pichu: Yeah, I saw Naveen as the "Nigerian Prince" trope of stories from the 1800.

Frankly anyone trying to claim he's white needs to get their eyes examined,or be dismissed for trolling

He was white at one point in development but Disney opted to make him Ambiguously Brown instead.

You never know… I was baffled to learn Ariana Grande was white…

I didn't know her skin tone was a tan until a few months ago.

Marvel definitely kept their promise with a much more diverse set of projects for phase 4.

Blade is back and no one is saying “a black X”, they’re saying “Blade! Awesome!”

Isn’t that the end goal?

Also, Blade is back.

The OG is indeed back.

Fuck yes

Hopefully Mahershala Ali will work out better than Snipes did.

Almost forgot about some of the stories about Snipes being difficult to work with especially on the set of Blade 3

I wonder if they're going to be a bit more accurate when it comes to his background like his accent and his parents being Latverian.

BLADE IS BACK MOTHER FUCKERS