I just hope they eventually cast some fully Britishized actor originally out of Hong Kong… one trained in certain things Hong Kong actors are known for. I want a kung fu Doctor. :p
Mocking the minority of people who hold these opinions just gives them more attention than they deserve. No one relevant actually cares that the character is being played by a black actor. As always, the majority of complaining is coming from conservative trolls who take their anti-woke brigade to literally any film or TV series that has cast minorities in leading roles. It’s just the same people doing it every time, they are not actually fans of any of these things and were never going to watch them anyway.
Yeah I remember reading similar headlines when Jodie was announced as the next Doctor. Same assholes, different day. I’m more concerned that the first few episodes have had terrible writing.
Space Babies was OK. I liked the bit where the Doctor stared dead into the camera and explained the allegory. That was funny.
The rest have been a load of wank. I had hoped that a bit of time off might have curbed some of RTD’s excesses, but alas.
And Moff’s script just seemed … tired. Like he just couldn’t do it any more. Blah blah, arms suppliers are bad, fish fingers and custard, love will save the day, something something atheism, … .
There’s always going to be dickheads on the internet, and I think in this case it’s a very small group and of that group you could probably count on one had that are actually Dr. Who fans, if there’s any at all.
If it were a significant percentage of fans then there might be something to talk about. But this seems another case of people that don’t know anything about a show and just seeing a black actor being cast in a role what was previously played by a white actor and making racist hay.
Anyone that knows anything about Dr. Who knows the established lore allows any actor of any race or gender can play the part.
WOT having racial diversity in a village where the book made a huge deal about the fact that everyone looks the same due to isolation and inbreeding. That I had an issue with. This is stupid. It is well established that the doctor can come back looking like anything.
a village where the book made a huge deal about the fact that everyone looks the same due to isolation and inbreeding.
Two particular families were called out as marrying into one another often, not the entire village. In fact I feel like Robert Jordan generally does the opposite of what you describe here - he goes out of his way to uniquely describe a ton of Emond’s Field residents, and gave them all pretty varied appearances. Heck, two of the main characters, Mat and Perrin, are different as can be in appearance, aside from the fact that they both have dark hair.
Anyways, either way, even if what you’re describing is accurate, it’s still not a good excuse to get upset that they casted dark skinned actresses for Egwene and Nynaeve.
A similar thing is happening with the new Assassins Creed game. Lots of people trying to make every argument against a black male protagonist without just saying they are racist/white supremacist. I’m sure the game is bad, the last several Assassins Creed games were pretty bad. But blaming this one “historical accuracy” or Ubisoft “pushing an agenda” is an intentional (or maybe unintentional) attempt to justify white supremacy.
I can’t tell if Japanese gamers are genuinely frustrated with the inclusion of Yasuke or if right wingers are comment/review bombing the Ubisoft Japan YouTube account’s upload of the trailer.
Apparently a lot of the angry comments read as if they’ve been put through Google Translate and aren’t actually in Japanese.
I’ll admit to not following the news on this one, but would it be that surprising that Japanese gamers were hoping to feel personally represented in the game?
I tried to be upfront with the fact that I know nothing real about the game. If he’s the main protagonist, I could see that being a thing. If he’s just a character in the cast, then no, that wouldn’t be particularly sensible.
I don’t think it would be totally unfair for people to feel less than fully represented by someone who doesn’t look like them, even if they’re a legitimate historical figure. He’s also not a native historically either. Japan in particular does have a lot of racist tendencies, as far as who’s considered Japanese, to add to the issue.
If the Japanese didn’t think this guy represented the history of Japan very well, then why did they go through the trouble of representing him in their history to this day, for more than 400 years?
I don’t know anything about this either, but yes, It would be, as this seems to be an actual historical Japanese person who existed and was from Africa. Sure, Japan is pretty culturally homogeneous, but not totally. If they’re upset about their actual history then they have a fucking issue. It’s one character.
I legitimately believe the best game in the series was Origins, with Bayek. He had the most relatable character with the most relatable story in the series. More importantly, Origins was an eye-opening experience for me. I resisted playing it initially because I firmly believed playing as a black man would ruin the experience for me. It turned out to be my favorite game, and Bayek my favorite character, and it really made me closely examine my prejudices. Dumb as it may be, playing as and connecting with Bayek made me a better person.
You don’t watch Dr Who because they cast women and black men as the main character
I don’t watch Dr Who because i have hated the piss poor writing since Moffat took over
We are not the same
Yes i am aware RTD is back, he had four episodes to bring me back to the franchise (three with my favourite Doctor) and i only kind of liked one of them.
and that Goblin episode… wtf was that? Dumb… that’s what it was
I thought i hated Matt Smith until i saw him in something that wasn’t written badly. Capaldi could have been a fantastic doctor if the writing wasn’t so shit. I gave up before i got to Whittaker so have no opinion of her tenure
Yeah, modern DW is a piss poor story telling. I can’t get over how bad Capaldi seasons were, he’s such a great actor! And bloody butchered in DW… I stopped watching it around then and don’t really care what’s happening now.
She’s a fantastic actress that had horrible writing. Also, she really aped Tennant’s Doctor’s mannerisms more than making her own, though I’m not sure how much of that was within her control.
Watch Broadchurch if you want to see them in something good~
Yes, so much so! Thank you, when I heard 10 was returning for a special I got so excited I started binging starting back at capaldi since that’s where I’d stopped. I didn’t make it through his tenure before the special aired. I was so disappointed in that first part of the special that I didn’t bother finishing capaldi or watching the next part of the special.
A dragon egg? Instantly laid by a dragon that just hatched from another egg? With the exact same mass and size as the egg the dragon just hatched from? With the exact same craters as the previous egg? And that egg is the moon?
Like the exact same kind of feeling that Supernintendo Chalmers had to hearing about the aurora borealis in Skinner’s kitchen.
I stopped watching Dr Who years ago, because the writing was terrible. The Doctor also suffers from Silver Age Superman Syndrome – they are so overpowered and know everything and are basically infallible. Boring. I don’t care what colour or gender they are, just get better writers.
I would hope they aren’t black, because I really dont want races to exist any more in the future. Intermix until it is all an ambiguous milk in coffee color.
I would suggest there might be more color variation in skin tones in a multiplanetary society due to different levels of solar radiation exposure protection evolving on different planets.
That’s fine as well, as long as the base human is uniformly the same everywhere on earth.
Do you guys really want future humans to still be stuck with racial concepts and divisions? Nation states too I suppose? Fuck that shit. We need to evolve beyond that, and in my opinion that includes modern day ideals of hyper individualism; though I would also argue that a common baseline skin and hair color doesnt mean people can’t differentiate themselves.
We are dying hair, tanning skin, wearing varied clothing, applying makeup, and so forth even today.
I want a future where every colour is beautiful. Uniformity is too bland and too susceptible to mass extinction events. Genetic diversity is what ensures our greater chances of survival, so while I welcome ending racism as a concept, i see our common baseline to be as fellow humans.
For humans, sure, but for a mysterious alien species who are humanoid in appearance but differ significantly in terms of their biology, it may still be accurate that their skin pigment tends to be less homogenous across individuals.
There’s cases where I will play devil’s advocate for such asshats. Some comic-book events feature a black Superman, and that raises questions about whether Kryptonians coincidentally match every ethnic group on Earth, or if they’ve got some skin colors that aren’t an option for humans, or if there’s some imprinting transformation wiggle-room when they show up as babies on rocketships. Remember that Supes works with a dude from Mars - cosmically our next-door neighbors - and his ass is green.
And for the constant murmur of Idris Elba maybe playing James Bond, I have to point out the sliding window of ambiguous canon. From Dr. No until Die Another Day, the previous film was definitely the same guy, probably, and beyond that ehhh don’t worry about it. It was completely unreasonable that Pierce Brosnan during the handover of Hong Kong could be the same man as Sean Connery during the Cuban missile crisis - but there was no hard cutoff. You could suspend disbelief, movie by movie, and never really think about it. Did a character change? Did some details shift? Retcons happen, why worry. Don’t ask what movie Bruce Wayne and his parents were seeing. For forty years, 007 was played by 6’1" commonwealth blokes with light skin and dark hair, and the unspoken through-line is that audiences can be convinced all white actors look alike. Casting anyone else would require acknowledging that the codename can be transferred - or starting a new continuity. (Admittedly less of an issue since the Daniel Craig films pretty solidly cover a new continuity with yet another 6’1" commonwealth bloke with light skin and blond hair.)
But… Doctor fucking Who? They’re shapeshifters. Every single Gallifreyan gets a dozen chances (or a dozen ish, evidently) to completely scrobble their appearance while maintaining a continuous personality. Even their fucking accents can change. Any losers sincerely whining about this are being bigots about an aggressively queer and accepting production. Even the original run started with an educational bent and tried to be progressive for the betterment of its audience.
The people this article mocks might as well kvetch about Star Trek being kind of preachy.
Some comic-book events feature a black Superman, and that raises questions about whether Kryptonians coincidentally match every ethnic group on Earth, or if they’ve got some skin colors that aren’t an option for humans, or if there’s some imprinting transformation wiggle-room when they show up as babies on rocketships.
With Kryptonians, I think if you can suspend disbelief enough accept that a planet in another star system could evolve people that are identical in appearance to humans, then you kinda have to accept that there would also be similar ethnicities there too. I mean it seems impossible someone from another planet would look exactly like a human, so you have to be willing to accept the impossible for Superman to work at all. Also Kryptonians are somewhat an metaphor for Jews and there’s black Jews, so there should be black Kryptonians to fit the metaphor.
And for the constant murmur of Idris Elba maybe playing James Bond, I have to point out the sliding window of ambiguous canon.
Yeah I feel like James Bond is operates under comic book time. So yeah it’s the same character, but part of the suspension of disbelief relies on accepting that we just aren’t supposed to think about how this guy doesn’t age. So the same character changing ethnicity feels like it’s it’s either stretching that suspension of disbelief too much or straight up abandoning the comic book time continuity aspect of James Bond. Either way there’s going to be people bothered by it and it’s not necessarily a racist thing, it’s just not liking that an aspect of a franchise they enjoy has been changed.
Don’t ask what movie Bruce Wayne and his parents were seeing
If you want to feel old, Bruce Wayne could have watched one of the Antonio Banderas Zorro movies as a child and be in his 30s today.
But… Doctor fucking Who? They’re shapeshifters. Every single Gallifreyan gets a dozen chances (or a dozen ish, evidently) to completely scrobble their appearance while maintaining a continuous personality. Even their fucking accents can change.
Some comic-book events feature a black Superman, and that raises questions about whether Kryptonians coincidentally match every ethnic group on Earth
Not exactly, but they have dark and light skin. Krypton’s red sun is a big deal in Kryptonian health. Kryptonian communities living closer to the equator would probably evolve higher melanin the same as humans did. Actually, light-skinned Kryptonians require a bigger suspension of disbelief than dark-skinned ones do.
And obviously the racial dynamics between dark and light Kryptonians wouldn’t be the same as on earth. It would depend upon factors like the shape of continents, the location of arable soil, of large herbivores and of predators, and of minerals.
Fun fact: swords made out of meteorites are a common trope in Japan, because Japan has poor iron and big mountains.
I feel that lore-wise, the doctor changing sex was a bigger test of suspension of disbelief. But they prepped for it by having the Master do it. The Master has previously spent time being a walking corpse, so that is a fairly straight line of baby steps to get there.
Once that’s been established, changing race is nothing. And arguably the doctor has shown a not insignificant amount of racial diversity already to prove it’s not impossible.
The show just sucks for a variety of other reasons.
The show just sucks for a variety of other reasons.
Terrible writing. It’s been bloody awful for a few seasons now imo. I don’t care about the race or gender of any of the actors, but you’ve got to give me good storylines.
The doctor is always a deus ex machina. That’s not the problem. Time lords as a creation are a black box to do whatever you want with now they aren’t even that.
And look at all those names other than Moffat and Davies. This season is literally entirely RTD.
You said you had a problem with the “super special” stuff.
I’m not sure how you can get more super special than being tasked with creating life on Earth, creating the universe as a whole, and, furthermore, being tasked with finding the literal Key to Time by the White Guardian of Time himself.
Your time Lord is actually not a time lord but a space baby that was so even more super special that they are so super scared of what they are but are controlled by others into not being able to live their special life.
This companion is actually the heart of all time and is super duper special.
That companion is also the heart of all time and is super special.
This new companion is a super important and super specially clumsy but that’s cause they have the super special melody in their heart.
Nobody is just a character to be built over time especially the companions since Rose, they are all super duper important from birth and takes away from them being the human to help humanize the alien. They can do something amazing, can it not be that the only way they get to do something special is being born for it?
You could sneeze at the beginning of time and accidentally start life way earlier than it should and that would make you very special. It also wouldn’t mean you were born special and destined for it. You just really had to sneeze.
Doing something incredible because of chance and effort is far more interesting than because they were born to do it.
Being tasked by the White Guardian of Time to collect and assemble the Key to Time (essentially the most powerful object in all of existence) sure sounds pretty special to me.
Generally, being sent on a special mission by a god makes you pretty damn special.
People complained that there was a black character in the video game God Of War Ragnarok.
They seem to ignore the fact that it’s a game series about Greek mythology and that game is suddenly Norse mythology. Guess continuity issues like entirely different cultures are fine as long as we keep it white!
Just want to preface that I completely agree with you, I just want to share some fun trivia. The Greek and Norse mythologies are the same*. They both originate from the Proto-Indo-European people. They’re not the only ones either, the Proto-Indo-Europeans are thought to have a wide reaching influence, even to this day. As stated, Greek and Norse mytholfogies along with the Roman pantheon, Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism, Bahaism, zorastrianism, along with Celtic, Baltic and Slavic mythologies. There’s even reason to believe that the Proto-Indo-Europeans had an influence on Shinto and early Judaism. To my understanding, its believed that Norse mythology is the most “intact” version of the Proto-Indo-European myth. Pretty neat stuff!
I’ve always been incredibly fascinated by the PIE>Hindu>Zoroastrian path and how that may have influenced early Judaism. The vast majority of religious people today practice a religion that is either directly or indirectly influenced by PIE mythos and culture, and that’s just mind boggling!
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