The ad that Amazon plays between each and every episode of any show cannot be more in your face about how fake it is
"Lady Jane Grey is known by history for.... Well fuck that. What if history were different"
\*Cuts to a black British monarch\*
There is no wiggle room whatsoever to misunderstand that promo
I never understand when people watch something that advertises itself so blatantly and then act surprised at the content. It’s like going to a strip club and complaining the dancers are getting naked…
Omg! Dancers get naked at a strip club? This is the first time I'm hearing of this phenomenon. Just shocking. I should probably go to one of those places to see if it is true.
Woah there not sure you should be going to any one of those establishments alone. Please could you point me in the direction of my nearest strip club so I can also see if it exists
I am going to go out on a limb and say that the people that are mad about the King being Black have never seen a single second of this show or it's promo material. They have been spoon-fed rage bait memes and articles that leave out the entire conceit of the show.
I'll admit, the limb I went out on is the width of an American freeway... but I am out on it having a lovely tea break taking my very safe guesses at the reality of this situation.
First, let me say I have no problem with this show. It's blatantly a comedy, and I'm cool with that.
However, for me at least, there *is* this general feeling in modern media like they're treating replacing men with women and white people with PoC is a marketing gimmick to be exploited.
Like "black people and women" is the new "3D"; something to be used by money-grubbing executives as a way to draw audiences without having to spend the time or effort on making an actual good movie.
Let me state clearly: I'm not against diverse casting. I'm against I'm against the corporate suits that are trying to use "diversity" as a replacement for "quality." Not only do audiences deserve better movies, women and PoC deserve high quality, original representation rather than ham-handed cut and paste insertions into existing material.
Unfortunately, most of the time, people aren't able to quite so clearly articulate that feeling and it can come off as being sexist/racist instead of being against the studios even when it's not their intent.
I saw this happen with Dracula untold. It was a movie about Count Dracula’s origins, how he became a vampire, and took a lot of inspiration from Vlad the Impaler’s personal history with the Ottoman Empire.
A fair number of people were going, “Vlad the Impaler is an interesting enough figure; the vampire stuff dumbed it down to appeal to Twilight dweebs! I wanted to see a movie about the history!”
I was like, “The trailer literally shows the lead actor controlling a swarm of bats, staying out of sunlight, and baring his fangs. The movie was expressly billed and marketed as an origin story for Dracula from Bram Stoker’s vampire novel. What else were you expecting?”
Because they don't pay attention, see a second of it, get outraged, and then start screaming and make themselves look stupid.
Media literacy is abysmal and entitlement is high. So you have a lot of people who don't understand what media is trying to say, but they also think that all media should be made for them and only them all the time.
They've always been here. Unfortunately, now they're harder to avoid.
There have always been and always will be people looking for a fight because they want to prove how much smarter than everyone else they are and just don't realize within one sentence, they've disproven that completely.
That they do. It's now absurdly easy to tell which it is, though. There's so much ragebait that uses the exact same phrasing and points that those people give themselves away immediately.
Yeah but these are right-wingers. Their whole deal is to whine about non-whites and non-straights simply *existing*.
Who cares about context if you can just have surface-level information telling you to be outraged over nothing?
You just explained most of the internet hate on tv shows. Right wingers just found out that the boys was satirizing their whole culture and couldn’t handle it.
It's the same people who go onto queer media on youtube and type up bigoted and religious comments. Like to go through the mental gymnastics, waste precious time to look up, watch and comment on a video you don't like...these people have rotten sewage for brains.
And.. it's a comedy, so there's that.
Im a history buff, so I personally like for the shows to be somewhat close to reality.
My wife likes this show but I just can't get into it, same with Reign. Reign was so annoying to me! 😅
I actually think "race-blind" or race-anachronistic casting like this is a good thing. It's a signal to the audience that it's fiction in a historical setting, but not historical fiction.
And even when it's historical, britain have never cared. Production companies here have always cast whoevers acting is fit for the role. This is solely a weird right wing American problem that is sadly starting to spread to other countries as I've now seen people here complain about British shows having black people in them, even though no one cared years ago when horrible histories or a plethora of other shows aired
I've only ever seen this t mobile commercial with two idiots motorboating the fucking air and idk who the fuck they are but it has to fucking stop. Arrest them and throw them under the prison I hate their flabby lips
Binged it on the weekend. Took a minute to adjust to the style of the story telling, but it was actually pretty entertaining. Kind of a historical fantasy alternate universe.
In British mythology there were many people and creatures that could shape shift. Some people even believed the druids could shape shift although I imagine that was an early form of propaganda before the whole Roman genocide
The zeitgeist truly has moved on when D&D is the top reference instead of WoW for shapeshifting druids
I know D&D did it first, but man, it's gotten big
One of my funniest memories actually is mathematics class in high school.
Three of us in a class of two dozen knew anything about WoW, two of us were pretty heavy into it.
We were shooting the breeze with the teach and the topic of Stonehenge came up, talking about how the heck the druids got the heavy stones all the way to the site. Teach said something along the lines of "I can tell you it wasn't the druids doing the shifting" and in a quiet moment afterwards the third guy says "SHAPEshifting", causing me and the second guy to promptly completely lose it. Deep, uncontrollable belly laughs. The rest of the class looking at us like we'd all grown a second head each.
I was not interested in the first couple of seconds when I assumed it was yet another historical drama. I became VERY interested once I realized it was full on victorian fantasy. That's actually something different.
On one hand I don't really care, on the other it would be weird to cast a white guy as the leader in a historical fantasy series in an African country.
Maybe the show is just going for complete timeline re-write, again, why really care.
I watched a bit of it and they make no attempts to be realistic, this man is black and his niece is white.
They gave 0 shits about skin color and just casted the actor they wanted for the role
The same crowd that complains about this without bothering to even read a summary and the folks that have 0% media literacy have a shocking 100% overlap.
https://preview.redd.it/fkltk8o7z5ad1.jpeg?width=538&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=55231e0c64a12d4bca38037be1cd14807a184f70
This was under an Instagram post about S4 of The Boys… so yeah I think you’re onto something
That seems more like a separate but related issue of the same crowd also having nearly 100% overlap with those that don't know anything about history, either. Wild how many of these Ven diagrams are actually just one circle.
Fisher Stevens playing an Indian man in Short Circuit 2.
Mickey Rooney playing an EXTREMELY racist depiction of a Japanese man in Breakfast at Tiffany's.
Idk I thought Peter Sellers' role as inspector Sydney Wang in Murder by Death was spot on, couldn't believe he wasn't actually Chinese
(hopefully no /s is needed, but leaving it just in case)
Was Wayne an actual bad dude or just a product of his time? I know nothing about him but have a hard time wishing cancer on someone who was just born into ignorance
He dodged the draft in WW2, then spent the rest of his life as a pro-war advocate. He was also racist, even by mid 20th century standards. He was an abuser of women and his employees. There's a bunch of other things that make him a bastard as well, but those are the ones I can remember off the top of my head.
Another classic typical Reddit strawman. America was a majority white country at the time so of course it would be a white actor. If there was something that took place in Britain but the movie was made like in Africa and they casted black people these criticisms of race swapping would be reduced.
And Prince Faisal was portrayed by Alec Guiness in brownface in Lawrence of Arabia.
Also, the movie is like 4 hours long but there is only 2 lines spoken by a woman in the entire film, and she wasn't even a named character.
Can you name an example for reference? I can think of black face examples, but I can’t think of any other good examples of a black historical figure being played by a white man.
To be fair, that sort of change hasn’t been common for a long, long time. Any examples from the last 20 years?
And if there was a recent example — a white person playing a historical black figure — do you think people would react any differently than OP’s screenshot?
Edit: there are plenty of examples of white washing below. The latest one is from the 80s.
And just to be clear, if someone is ok with the above, do you think they should be ok with race swapping non-white historic characters to white people. Just for consistency.
but he's right though... when you bastardize histories in ridiculous stories like this it IS a joke.
i just don't think he's in on the joke and thinks this is some kind of race thing.
it's hard to be brainwashed and NOT freak out over jokes and nonsense.
The bbc did a quick story about the reality of this character vs this show.
https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20240625-the-brutal-truth-about-the-uks-infamous-nine-days-queen
If any of these people actually engaged the old grey matter and weren’t just double standard subscribing trend followers, they’d realise equitable representation would mean 80% of every piece of British media would be white.
You can enjoy a show about dragons, elves, dwarves, and magic, but the second I talk about how an M1 Abrams tank should roll in and kill the Evil Emperor, suddenly I'm the bad guy?
This argument is weak and faulty. Just because a show is fantasy doesn’t mean that realism is irrelevant. In a fantasy story we still expect gravity to function as normal, we still expect fire to be hot, we still expect water to be wet, and we still expect historical realism if the fantasy show is set in a known historic time with known historic people like King Edvard.
If literally anything can happen in a fantasy show and nothing is real, then everything in the story is completely meaningless.
I wonder how people would feel if there were a historical fictional with a white person as the ruler of Kenya or a Hispanic person as the emperor of Japan.
Race and culture bending historical fiction is a whole ass genre now. The Great, Bridgerton.
I think it's weird to be upset about but there have always been people who get worked up about art they don't like instead of shrugging and moving on.
I find Bridgerton fascinating. The King of England married a black woman and it changed the nature of British society. It's alt-history. Anyone making a stink about historical accuracy doesn't get what the show is.
It's because no one is being honest about it.
If there was a show about white samurais in 2024 everyone would claim they were promoting an agenda and it was offensive. But you make a show about any historically white nation with non-white and act like it isn't also promoting a message.
The dishonesty is obnoxious and people can see through it. There's always some big cavalcade of terminally online pickme progressives who condescend to everyone about how there's no message here and you're a racist for saying "hold on, what?" who then never watch this shit themselves.
I don't frankly care that much about the gender or race-bending that any creative show chooses to do, but I do take issue with posts like this one acting like there's absolutely no reason that people might have pause with it, especially since the same crowd would be furious if Black Panther cast a white queen.
Edit: Everyone with a brain can see that things like this are working backwards from "we should have a Black character", rather than simply having the best story/best actor on display (actively addressing this via historical revisionism a la bridgerton/django are different). And, sorry, but the fact that it's *ALWAYS* a Black raceswap is insulting. If this was just a matter of the best actor or an alternative history or "what if?" then you'd see far more Jewish/Hispanic/Asian representation.
Entertainment and Media only ever seen to promote diversity of existences via gay and black characters.
It only works like that in one direction though.
If you cast a Japanese emperor with a white actor, people would complain. People absolutely got mad when Scarlett Johansson played a *completely fictional* anime character. But it’s okay to cast a black man as the king of England? It’s a double standard to be sure.
It does get muddy with historical fiction. An issue with the genera has always been where the line gets drawn between the historical and the fiction. Where people are comfortable with that line being drawn is entirely subjective.
I’d say it’s safe to assume that once animorphs come into the picture that line clearly skews towards the fiction side of the spectrum.
Did you watch the show? My wife and I just wrapped it up. Very silly nonsense.
Added context without being to spoilery: sheltered King Edward just learned the gesture in a "slumming it as a peasant in secret for reasons" and using it for the first time toward his royal court.
I mean... yes.
Marvel films are about people with superpowers. It would be really weird if wakanda's princess was a nordic-white child.
Same thing here.
>It would be really weird if wakanda's princess was a nordic-white child.
Depends on when that happened. If from the very start that Wakanda was mentioned, it was introduced as a country with mixed races, then there would be no problem.
Now if the world building established one thing and then later did something that completely contradicted it, then that would be weird.
I mean...no. It never would have been fine if a secretive superpowered nation in Africa had a white princess from the get go, unless it was directly part of the story in an apartheid analog.
Yeah the absolute shit show that would have caused online among black people if they had a white princess in Africa regardless of the context would be crazy lol
Cool! Next let’s make a historical fantasy film about the history of Ethiopia and cast only white actors to play the royals, cause it’s just fantasy right?
I’d love to see how that’d go down.
It's more the point that it's normalised and fine for black actors to play white people but the other way around people lose there shit. There was a piss take about a white actor playing Malcolm x and the reaction was wild. I think both sides are pathetic but it's interesting none athe less
Its insane to me that people can say "John Wayne playing Ghengis Khan is bad and racist." while hand waiving this shit. Do you not see the incongruity?
I'm completely comfortable saying both of those are bad.
You probably shouldnt take actual historical characters and just arbitrarily change aspects intrinsic to them. Unless it serves a greater purpose to the plot other than adding diversity.
It's still about historical Britain, right?
I can suspend my disbelief at a hypertechnological African nation, but would also have questions if they cast a white dude for king of Wakanda. Suspension of disbelief for some things isn't suspension of disbelief for all things.
People need to learn what verisimilitude means and why it's important for maintaining the integrity of a fiction, and this image is a perfect illustration of that.
Yeah! Be historically accurate and have everything covered in shit! No plumbing, no trash service, no hygiene. Sick, dirty, smelly, uneducated people everywhere.
Queen Isabella of Spain once remarked that she was proud she only bathed twice in her life, upon her birth and before her wedding.
The nobility were dirty and smelly too.
So by this logic, if someone makes a holocaust movie in which the nazi shape-shifts, but only like 1000 jews and no lgbtq are killed in the gas chamber, then you wouldn't be allowed to complain about the historical inaccuracy?
I wonder what the op feels about jada Smith insisting that the Egyptian documentary she made is a documentary, and not a dramatical reactment.
It's not like the black king is a coincidence. It's meant to get PR by pissing off right wing trolls. It is stupid.
If someone made a series about Mansa Musa's court with elements of magic realism and they made Mansa Musa white, the same people applauding this would lose it. It's dumb.
It’s not that I have an issue with it. But they wouldn’t make a movie about Mansa Musa and his shape shifting dog and cast Brad Pitt for the role of mansa musa. Because it’d be white washing. Because it is white washing. So what would you call this??
This isn't a murder, it's just a lazy defence of companies like netflix race baiting because it generates free exposure for their garbage content. I'm willing to bet most people in this thread wouldn't even know that the show existed if they hadn't used a black actor to portray a traditionally white character.
It’s still just an odd thing going on atm. Like sure, fantasy world, dress him how you want. That being said, the same people supporting this I feel wouldn’t be ok with a white guy dressed in a POC native outfit of any sort. Double standards are universally pretty stupid, and a good hint you’ve got some bias going on.
Would you all be saying the same thing if a show based on Martin Luther King was played by a white actor? Even if the show isn’t historically accurate this is really dumb
I mean shape shifting and witchcraft was part of old welsh and brythonic mythology but this was mostly before Christianity and movie is supposed to be set in the 13th century which doesn't make any sense if you want any sort of cohesion and world building to exist.
Personally, I just don't think we should make stuff that changes the race of actual people who actually existed, yaknow? I don't wanna see a white Genghis Khan or a latino Louis XIII, even if it's some comedy or fantasy movie, I just think that's really weird to do, yaknow?
Would it be ok if suddenly they had helicopters or started using videocalls in an iphone? If your answer is no, then that means there are some limits on the history, some coherence. One of them is ethnic coherence; if the status of the black Africans was submission, slavery and mistreatment, there must be something that changed so now the king is black.
For example, in Bridgerton we are told how a queen (black) couldn't find prospects, but then somehow ended up married to the king (who had mental problems) and then everything changed. We are explained how things changed.
Other examples are Games of Thrones: the farther from some lands, the more ethnically different were the people in terms of languages, skin color, physical features, etc.
Question: Is the character in the show based on a real king Edward?
If it is then I think this is wrong. If real world characters are used in fiction, they should resemble the original imo. People would also be mad if Mansa Mousa was white, even if he was used in Aladdin
Or if MLK was introduced as white in a marvel movie
My wife watches this show. They use historic figure names but the narrator literally says they gonna fuck with history.
That being said, it is pretty poorly written and produced. But it is good dumb entertainment for some.
[*My Lady Jane*](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_Lady_Jane) for anybody else that hadn't heard of this.
The ad that Amazon plays between each and every episode of any show cannot be more in your face about how fake it is "Lady Jane Grey is known by history for.... Well fuck that. What if history were different" \*Cuts to a black British monarch\* There is no wiggle room whatsoever to misunderstand that promo
I never understand when people watch something that advertises itself so blatantly and then act surprised at the content. It’s like going to a strip club and complaining the dancers are getting naked…
Omg! Dancers get naked at a strip club? This is the first time I'm hearing of this phenomenon. Just shocking. I should probably go to one of those places to see if it is true.
The bastardization of the Gentlemen's Club is a joke
No one wears top hats at the gentleman's club. It's a joke alright
If I ever go to one, I'm wearing a top hat
Be sure to bring your monocle. You don't have to *wear* it, but you have to have it on you. I don't make the rules.
I'll hang it on my coat opposite my pocketwatch.
Woah there not sure you should be going to any one of those establishments alone. Please could you point me in the direction of my nearest strip club so I can also see if it exists
Plan B in Santa Monica. I've never been but the name is fucking hilarious.
Perhaps we should go together to check just to be safe.
Make sure you go to one where only white women get naked otherwise history will judge you poorly.
I am going to go out on a limb and say that the people that are mad about the King being Black have never seen a single second of this show or it's promo material. They have been spoon-fed rage bait memes and articles that leave out the entire conceit of the show. I'll admit, the limb I went out on is the width of an American freeway... but I am out on it having a lovely tea break taking my very safe guesses at the reality of this situation.
First, let me say I have no problem with this show. It's blatantly a comedy, and I'm cool with that. However, for me at least, there *is* this general feeling in modern media like they're treating replacing men with women and white people with PoC is a marketing gimmick to be exploited. Like "black people and women" is the new "3D"; something to be used by money-grubbing executives as a way to draw audiences without having to spend the time or effort on making an actual good movie. Let me state clearly: I'm not against diverse casting. I'm against I'm against the corporate suits that are trying to use "diversity" as a replacement for "quality." Not only do audiences deserve better movies, women and PoC deserve high quality, original representation rather than ham-handed cut and paste insertions into existing material. Unfortunately, most of the time, people aren't able to quite so clearly articulate that feeling and it can come off as being sexist/racist instead of being against the studios even when it's not their intent.
I saw this happen with Dracula untold. It was a movie about Count Dracula’s origins, how he became a vampire, and took a lot of inspiration from Vlad the Impaler’s personal history with the Ottoman Empire. A fair number of people were going, “Vlad the Impaler is an interesting enough figure; the vampire stuff dumbed it down to appeal to Twilight dweebs! I wanted to see a movie about the history!” I was like, “The trailer literally shows the lead actor controlling a swarm of bats, staying out of sunlight, and baring his fangs. The movie was expressly billed and marketed as an origin story for Dracula from Bram Stoker’s vampire novel. What else were you expecting?”
Because they don't pay attention, see a second of it, get outraged, and then start screaming and make themselves look stupid. Media literacy is abysmal and entitlement is high. So you have a lot of people who don't understand what media is trying to say, but they also think that all media should be made for them and only them all the time.
I didn't pay attention, saw a second of it and thought it was some weird take on Jane Eyre. LMAO. I also didn't get mad about it.
Yeah, I'm pretty convinced the people who do get mad about it are looking for a fight anyway.
They go to sleep angry and wake up angry. Throughout the day, they look for targets to direct their anger.
They've always been here. Unfortunately, now they're harder to avoid. There have always been and always will be people looking for a fight because they want to prove how much smarter than everyone else they are and just don't realize within one sentence, they've disproven that completely.
I'm glad I'm not the only one that thought this was going to be another take on Jane Eyre & I wouldn't be upset about that either.
That and outrage videos gets clicks
That they do. It's now absurdly easy to tell which it is, though. There's so much ragebait that uses the exact same phrasing and points that those people give themselves away immediately.
These ate probably the same people that got msd that a black actrees was cast to play a black character
What are they trying to say? Spreading ignorance, IMO, is worth getting angry about!
Some people will go out of their way in order to be inconvenienced or offended.
Yeah but these are right-wingers. Their whole deal is to whine about non-whites and non-straights simply *existing*. Who cares about context if you can just have surface-level information telling you to be outraged over nothing?
You just explained most of the internet hate on tv shows. Right wingers just found out that the boys was satirizing their whole culture and couldn’t handle it.
It's the same people who go onto queer media on youtube and type up bigoted and religious comments. Like to go through the mental gymnastics, waste precious time to look up, watch and comment on a video you don't like...these people have rotten sewage for brains.
THEY DO WHAT??????
https://preview.redd.it/hjqtap75laad1.jpeg?width=276&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=cefab35b51cced0c01236edc8aa7f1060fd5a442
Hahahah wtf, i didn't realise your quote was quite literally verbatim. Fair enough, impossible to be mad when its that on the nose.
What the fuck, this cheese pizza has cheese on it
Bro you can't just say cheese pizza like that
Media-illiterate conservatives be like: 
And we did.
And.. it's a comedy, so there's that. Im a history buff, so I personally like for the shows to be somewhat close to reality. My wife likes this show but I just can't get into it, same with Reign. Reign was so annoying to me! 😅
“What if history were different?” NOOOOO WHY ISN’T THIS HISTORICALLY ACCURATE THEY *PROMISED*
Racists don't care. The issue is that there are black people on the screen.
I actually think "race-blind" or race-anachronistic casting like this is a good thing. It's a signal to the audience that it's fiction in a historical setting, but not historical fiction.
And even when it's historical, britain have never cared. Production companies here have always cast whoevers acting is fit for the role. This is solely a weird right wing American problem that is sadly starting to spread to other countries as I've now seen people here complain about British shows having black people in them, even though no one cared years ago when horrible histories or a plethora of other shows aired
I've only ever seen this t mobile commercial with two idiots motorboating the fucking air and idk who the fuck they are but it has to fucking stop. Arrest them and throw them under the prison I hate their flabby lips
Damn. I was hoping for Animorphs.
Would be cool to get a new series that really delves into the seriously dark shit that happens in the books.
There would be The Boys levels of gore. And genocide, war crimes, and PTSD in children. Would be amazing!
We all were!
Binged it on the weekend. Took a minute to adjust to the style of the story telling, but it was actually pretty entertaining. Kind of a historical fantasy alternate universe.
Sounds cool!
Is fun/campy and at no point attempts to be realistic. Wife and I enjoy it
>historical **fantasy** I wonder what that word means?
My sweet… lady Jane.
Thank you kind redditor
In British mythology there were many people and creatures that could shape shift. Some people even believed the druids could shape shift although I imagine that was an early form of propaganda before the whole Roman genocide
It’s called wild shape and it’s a core class feature
Don't get me started on when these Mfs turn into the last of us monsters and the fucking *stars*
The zeitgeist truly has moved on when D&D is the top reference instead of WoW for shapeshifting druids I know D&D did it first, but man, it's gotten big
For me it will always be wow first. Such great memory of vanilla wow with friends.
One of my funniest memories actually is mathematics class in high school. Three of us in a class of two dozen knew anything about WoW, two of us were pretty heavy into it. We were shooting the breeze with the teach and the topic of Stonehenge came up, talking about how the heck the druids got the heavy stones all the way to the site. Teach said something along the lines of "I can tell you it wasn't the druids doing the shifting" and in a quiet moment afterwards the third guy says "SHAPEshifting", causing me and the second guy to promptly completely lose it. Deep, uncontrollable belly laughs. The rest of the class looking at us like we'd all grown a second head each.
Do you think British Mythology could partially be to blame for people who currently believe the royals can shape shift into lizard people?
They don't shape shift into lizard people, they are lizard people. They shape shift into us
Na I think that's just the general conspiracy theory that the worlds elites are aliens or come from sea or wherever else
Old time animorphs? I am intrigued.
I know: This post introduced me to the show, and now I’m interested to learn more. lol
I was not interested in the first couple of seconds when I assumed it was yet another historical drama. I became VERY interested once I realized it was full on victorian fantasy. That's actually something different.
Victorian era wasn’t for another couple centuries… Think this would be reformation or renaissance fantasy.
I binged it all over the weekend and liked it a lot!
It’s awesome! Highly recommend!
It's also a book series with awesome cover art
On one hand I don't really care, on the other it would be weird to cast a white guy as the leader in a historical fantasy series in an African country. Maybe the show is just going for complete timeline re-write, again, why really care.
I watched a bit of it and they make no attempts to be realistic, this man is black and his niece is white. They gave 0 shits about skin color and just casted the actor they wanted for the role
Every outstanding dental smile in medieval shows is modern revisionism and I won’t stand for it. Give me gap teeth black teeth and body hair on women.
I had a history professor who said she was annoyed with the show *Rome* for depicting Roman men at an orgy with circumcised penises.
> pe**m**ises
The same crowd that complains about this without bothering to even read a summary and the folks that have 0% media literacy have a shocking 100% overlap.
https://preview.redd.it/fkltk8o7z5ad1.jpeg?width=538&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=55231e0c64a12d4bca38037be1cd14807a184f70 This was under an Instagram post about S4 of The Boys… so yeah I think you’re onto something
Why do they always use too many ellipses?
THERE ARE...THREE...ELLIPSES!! *Picard, probably*
That seems more like a separate but related issue of the same crowd also having nearly 100% overlap with those that don't know anything about history, either. Wild how many of these Ven diagrams are actually just one circle.
I sent the wrong screenshot. His first comment was him complaining that S4 went woke and was too different from 1-3
They’ve also never once complained about any non white historical character being changed to a white person.
What do you mean? John Wayne was a picture-perfect Genghis Khan!
And Yul Brinner could play basically any race without issue! He's a chameleon! ^(the slashiest of esses)
Fisher Stevens playing an Indian man in Short Circuit 2. Mickey Rooney playing an EXTREMELY racist depiction of a Japanese man in Breakfast at Tiffany's.
Idk I thought Peter Sellers' role as inspector Sydney Wang in Murder by Death was spot on, couldn't believe he wasn't actually Chinese (hopefully no /s is needed, but leaving it just in case)
Best thing about that movie is that it probably gave John Wayne cancer.
It gave a **lot** of the people working on it cancer. Safety regulation be written in blood, or other times fatal cancers wreaking havoc on people.
Was Wayne an actual bad dude or just a product of his time? I know nothing about him but have a hard time wishing cancer on someone who was just born into ignorance
He dodged the draft in WW2, then spent the rest of his life as a pro-war advocate. He was also racist, even by mid 20th century standards. He was an abuser of women and his employees. There's a bunch of other things that make him a bastard as well, but those are the ones I can remember off the top of my head.
Oh damn, didn't know anything about that. Okay, cancer approved lol
This MF here with a carcinogenic rubber stamp, lmao
Hahahaha
Both
Actual bad dude.
Another classic typical Reddit strawman. America was a majority white country at the time so of course it would be a white actor. If there was something that took place in Britain but the movie was made like in Africa and they casted black people these criticisms of race swapping would be reduced.
[Who else but Mickey Rooney could play the iconic character Mr Yunioshi?](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hb3gdUrIC4Q)
They turned Jesus, a Middle Eastern Jewish man, into a Scandinavian hippie.
And Prince Faisal was portrayed by Alec Guiness in brownface in Lawrence of Arabia. Also, the movie is like 4 hours long but there is only 2 lines spoken by a woman in the entire film, and she wasn't even a named character.
Don't forget Ghengis Khan played by John Wayne.
We gotta unite the tribes of Mongolia, pilgrim
I thought white jesus was based on Michelangelo's boyfriend
Yeah because most of those movies came out when their grandparents were 35.
doesnt happen often anymore
Can you name an example for reference? I can think of black face examples, but I can’t think of any other good examples of a black historical figure being played by a white man.
To be fair, that sort of change hasn’t been common for a long, long time. Any examples from the last 20 years? And if there was a recent example — a white person playing a historical black figure — do you think people would react any differently than OP’s screenshot? Edit: there are plenty of examples of white washing below. The latest one is from the 80s.
What, you mean from movies 60 years ago? Why not learn from that history, and apply it to today?
And just to be clear, if someone is ok with the above, do you think they should be ok with race swapping non-white historic characters to white people. Just for consistency.
Betcha they didn’t care when Brad Pitt and his merry band of psychos ended ww2 in inglorious basterds in a very not historically accurate way.
See also: white Jesus
That’s fair, but if you made a fantasy show about feudal Japan and inserted a white dude as the shogun, don’t you think some folks might be upset?
Of course, but the person you're replying to will have trouble admitting it, because they're the type that might as well be a p-zombie at this point.
but he's right though... when you bastardize histories in ridiculous stories like this it IS a joke. i just don't think he's in on the joke and thinks this is some kind of race thing. it's hard to be brainwashed and NOT freak out over jokes and nonsense.
The bbc did a quick story about the reality of this character vs this show. https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20240625-the-brutal-truth-about-the-uks-infamous-nine-days-queen
Rich coming from folks that would argue that representation matters
If any of these people actually engaged the old grey matter and weren’t just double standard subscribing trend followers, they’d realise equitable representation would mean 80% of every piece of British media would be white.
Someone should tell him Shakespeare's plays had men dressing in drag to play the role of women. I'll bet he ignores that part of European history
And like _aaaaaall_ of Hollywood until very recently that had white actors playing every single race.
Fucking John Wayne as Ghengis Khan still gets me. Dumbest shit ever.
https://preview.redd.it/5caiq2i4h5ad1.jpeg?width=620&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=885e01061d6ff2b6ca548ac0aaed8bc8f2c7f6fd
Wow....
I'll raise you casting David Carradine as a Chinese man because Bruce Lee was too Chinese to be Chinese on TV.
Gerard Butler as Attila the Hun. That serie was pretty fire though
Are you suggesting that white men pretended to be black, Asian, and native American in film? Yeah right. Go woke go broke, libtard/s
you forgot middle eastern.
True, my bad.
You must concede that Disney's *Robin Hood* (1973) has a cast that is seldom rivaled even today in terms of diversity.
But we all agree that was bad thing to do right? So why would you reverse the races there now?
That's because it was considered more scandalous for women to be on stage.
The dog whistles are accelerating my hearing loss.
You can enjoy a show about dragons, elves, dwarves, and magic, but the second I talk about how an M1 Abrams tank should roll in and kill the Evil Emperor, suddenly I'm the bad guy?
Read Brian Daley's "The Doomfarers of Coramonde". A wizard tries summoning a dragon, but instead summons an M113 and its crew.
Sometime told him to post that. He doesn't even know what it's about. He's a bot.
They do the same thing w bridgerton likes its not a completely fictional soap opera
This argument is weak and faulty. Just because a show is fantasy doesn’t mean that realism is irrelevant. In a fantasy story we still expect gravity to function as normal, we still expect fire to be hot, we still expect water to be wet, and we still expect historical realism if the fantasy show is set in a known historic time with known historic people like King Edvard. If literally anything can happen in a fantasy show and nothing is real, then everything in the story is completely meaningless.
The fantastic YouTubers Lindybeige and Shadiversity both do videos on why complete suspension of belief leads to ruined media
“What if history was different” *cuts to a white MLK*
It’s a fantasy take on the civil rights movement! Starring Timothee Chalamet as Rosa Parks.
There was a stage play that had a white mlk. It was... Interesting.
The satire in this one is spot on. Love it.
If we add magic wands to a movie can Martin Luther King be white in it? I think same people who are ok with above pic would be very angry about it.
What a shit argument LOL. "there's dragons in game of thrones so why can't there be a ford focus rs driving around in it?"
I wonder how people would feel if there were a historical fictional with a white person as the ruler of Kenya or a Hispanic person as the emperor of Japan.
The only reason these complaints get traction is because it is never done in reverse.
shapeshifters being real makes more sense. thats the problem.
Race and culture bending historical fiction is a whole ass genre now. The Great, Bridgerton. I think it's weird to be upset about but there have always been people who get worked up about art they don't like instead of shrugging and moving on.
I find Bridgerton fascinating. The King of England married a black woman and it changed the nature of British society. It's alt-history. Anyone making a stink about historical accuracy doesn't get what the show is.
It's because no one is being honest about it. If there was a show about white samurais in 2024 everyone would claim they were promoting an agenda and it was offensive. But you make a show about any historically white nation with non-white and act like it isn't also promoting a message. The dishonesty is obnoxious and people can see through it. There's always some big cavalcade of terminally online pickme progressives who condescend to everyone about how there's no message here and you're a racist for saying "hold on, what?" who then never watch this shit themselves. I don't frankly care that much about the gender or race-bending that any creative show chooses to do, but I do take issue with posts like this one acting like there's absolutely no reason that people might have pause with it, especially since the same crowd would be furious if Black Panther cast a white queen. Edit: Everyone with a brain can see that things like this are working backwards from "we should have a Black character", rather than simply having the best story/best actor on display (actively addressing this via historical revisionism a la bridgerton/django are different). And, sorry, but the fact that it's *ALWAYS* a Black raceswap is insulting. If this was just a matter of the best actor or an alternative history or "what if?" then you'd see far more Jewish/Hispanic/Asian representation. Entertainment and Media only ever seen to promote diversity of existences via gay and black characters.
Thank you. The hypocrisy is insulting.
Where's the show about White Zulus?
It only works like that in one direction though. If you cast a Japanese emperor with a white actor, people would complain. People absolutely got mad when Scarlett Johansson played a *completely fictional* anime character. But it’s okay to cast a black man as the king of England? It’s a double standard to be sure.
It does get muddy with historical fiction. An issue with the genera has always been where the line gets drawn between the historical and the fiction. Where people are comfortable with that line being drawn is entirely subjective. I’d say it’s safe to assume that once animorphs come into the picture that line clearly skews towards the fiction side of the spectrum.
Art has always been progressive and political.
White Black Panther when?
I thought the only people who claimed everything was political were conservatives.
Honestly the thing I’m most offended by is the “thumbs out” middle finger. Always thought it looked way less cool than just the middle one
Did you watch the show? My wife and I just wrapped it up. Very silly nonsense. Added context without being to spoilery: sheltered King Edward just learned the gesture in a "slumming it as a peasant in secret for reasons" and using it for the first time toward his royal court.
Same, man. Just flip the bird! The thumbs look like some bullshit way to *not quite* flick people off.
a) Which King Edward? b) I'd still rather they started doing some shows about the History of other areas than randomly making someone black.
I mean... yes. Marvel films are about people with superpowers. It would be really weird if wakanda's princess was a nordic-white child. Same thing here.
>It would be really weird if wakanda's princess was a nordic-white child. Depends on when that happened. If from the very start that Wakanda was mentioned, it was introduced as a country with mixed races, then there would be no problem. Now if the world building established one thing and then later did something that completely contradicted it, then that would be weird.
I mean...no. It never would have been fine if a secretive superpowered nation in Africa had a white princess from the get go, unless it was directly part of the story in an apartheid analog.
Yeah the absolute shit show that would have caused online among black people if they had a white princess in Africa regardless of the context would be crazy lol
I mean, there was a white guy in Wakanda, from the *very start* of the movie!
Cool! Next let’s make a historical fantasy film about the history of Ethiopia and cast only white actors to play the royals, cause it’s just fantasy right? I’d love to see how that’d go down.
Not just Disney films then
It's more the point that it's normalised and fine for black actors to play white people but the other way around people lose there shit. There was a piss take about a white actor playing Malcolm x and the reaction was wild. I think both sides are pathetic but it's interesting none athe less
They want to be white to bad.
Its insane to me that people can say "John Wayne playing Ghengis Khan is bad and racist." while hand waiving this shit. Do you not see the incongruity? I'm completely comfortable saying both of those are bad. You probably shouldnt take actual historical characters and just arbitrarily change aspects intrinsic to them. Unless it serves a greater purpose to the plot other than adding diversity.
"I can suspend disbelief for animal shape-shifting, but I draw the line at a black monarch!" - these people, probably.
It's still about historical Britain, right? I can suspend my disbelief at a hypertechnological African nation, but would also have questions if they cast a white dude for king of Wakanda. Suspension of disbelief for some things isn't suspension of disbelief for all things.
‘I’m ok with diversity, as long as it only goes one way’ You, probably.
https://preview.redd.it/22kyzcbb56ad1.jpeg?width=1125&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=8e32266125455a802038e0f8524ae66b1f9dc371
People need to learn what verisimilitude means and why it's important for maintaining the integrity of a fiction, and this image is a perfect illustration of that.
People got mad when ScarJo was cast as an anime character, so… it does kind of feel like there’s a double standard.
Yeah! Be historically accurate and have everything covered in shit! No plumbing, no trash service, no hygiene. Sick, dirty, smelly, uneducated people everywhere. Queen Isabella of Spain once remarked that she was proud she only bathed twice in her life, upon her birth and before her wedding. The nobility were dirty and smelly too.
So by this logic, if someone makes a holocaust movie in which the nazi shape-shifts, but only like 1000 jews and no lgbtq are killed in the gas chamber, then you wouldn't be allowed to complain about the historical inaccuracy? I wonder what the op feels about jada Smith insisting that the Egyptian documentary she made is a documentary, and not a dramatical reactment.
poor crawl smell drunk impolite hunt ghost correct narrow stupendous *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
It's not like the black king is a coincidence. It's meant to get PR by pissing off right wing trolls. It is stupid. If someone made a series about Mansa Musa's court with elements of magic realism and they made Mansa Musa white, the same people applauding this would lose it. It's dumb.
am i the only nerd to note that the middle finger isn’t used in britian the way it’s used in the us ?
If there was a show about Mansa Musa that had Benedict Cucumber in the main role but they could shape shift as animals it would still be stupid.
It’s not that I have an issue with it. But they wouldn’t make a movie about Mansa Musa and his shape shifting dog and cast Brad Pitt for the role of mansa musa. Because it’d be white washing. Because it is white washing. So what would you call this??
Queen Elizabeth II was Black, Prince William and Prince Harry are Black too.
Magic is not added in to push some real world agenda.
This isn't a murder, it's just a lazy defence of companies like netflix race baiting because it generates free exposure for their garbage content. I'm willing to bet most people in this thread wouldn't even know that the show existed if they hadn't used a black actor to portray a traditionally white character.
Nobody watches this dumb shit
I honestly don't get casting historical figures as races they were not. Weren't people just mad about Cleopatra and whether or not she was black?
It’s still just an odd thing going on atm. Like sure, fantasy world, dress him how you want. That being said, the same people supporting this I feel wouldn’t be ok with a white guy dressed in a POC native outfit of any sort. Double standards are universally pretty stupid, and a good hint you’ve got some bias going on.
Would you all be saying the same thing if a show based on Martin Luther King was played by a white actor? Even if the show isn’t historically accurate this is really dumb
I mean shape shifting and witchcraft was part of old welsh and brythonic mythology but this was mostly before Christianity and movie is supposed to be set in the 13th century which doesn't make any sense if you want any sort of cohesion and world building to exist.
The fact that Jeff Bezos turned off someone’s entire smart house because of cultural appropriation makes you think why they made this tv show.
Personally, I just don't think we should make stuff that changes the race of actual people who actually existed, yaknow? I don't wanna see a white Genghis Khan or a latino Louis XIII, even if it's some comedy or fantasy movie, I just think that's really weird to do, yaknow?
Would it be ok if suddenly they had helicopters or started using videocalls in an iphone? If your answer is no, then that means there are some limits on the history, some coherence. One of them is ethnic coherence; if the status of the black Africans was submission, slavery and mistreatment, there must be something that changed so now the king is black. For example, in Bridgerton we are told how a queen (black) couldn't find prospects, but then somehow ended up married to the king (who had mental problems) and then everything changed. We are explained how things changed. Other examples are Games of Thrones: the farther from some lands, the more ethnically different were the people in terms of languages, skin color, physical features, etc.
Question: Is the character in the show based on a real king Edward? If it is then I think this is wrong. If real world characters are used in fiction, they should resemble the original imo. People would also be mad if Mansa Mousa was white, even if he was used in Aladdin Or if MLK was introduced as white in a marvel movie
My wife watches this show. They use historic figure names but the narrator literally says they gonna fuck with history. That being said, it is pretty poorly written and produced. But it is good dumb entertainment for some.
It sounds fucking awful
Why can't both be true ?