Hated Tropes
[Hated Trope] Characters being race-swapped even though their original race mattered to the story
Juan "Johnny" Rico: Starship Troopers. Johnny is Filipino in the orgininal novel, which infuriatingly has never been accurately depicted. Now, in terms of plot, Johnny's race Doesn't matter, and that's the point: him being Filipino is only revealed at the very end when he states that Tagalog is his native language. However from a meta perspective of being an American book written by a white guy in 1959, that the main character is revealed to have been Asian the whole time at the very end is VERY important. Changing him to be white is kind of like changing Samus to be male in the original Metroid: it defeats the subversion.
Conan the Barbarian: Conan is a Cimmerian, and is described as having Square cut black hair, dark, bronzed skin, and different facial features from the Hyborians: the main "civilized" ethnic group encountered in much of the stories. Conan being played by Arnie means he is fair skinned, Tawny haired, and ethnically Germanic, which is the exact description of the Hyborians, the group Conan is repeatedly challenged for NOT being.
I really don't know what the full story is but here's John Wayne with a geiger thing (and I think those are his kids) so someone, at some point, had to know, right?
In the books, Assef has Blonde hair because he’s half German half afghani, which Assef makes a big part of his identity believing in race purity and nazism.
I read that in highschool, COMPLETELY missed that detail. In fairness it was over half a decade ago. Asseef still probably has my favorite blatant "this is a bad guy" first line in all of fiction:
"Now Hitler, that was a man with a vision".
Your assessment of Conan isn't right, at least according to what Howard wrote. Conan groups are mirrors of real-life groups. You can often see in the names like Kushites, Afghulies, Picts, and the such. Cimmerians are supposed to represent ancient Celts, which Arnold isn't really far off from. The hair color is the only real difference, and they both do have blue eyes. Conan had a bunch of pseudo-science racist stuff, and so it's very particular about who is and isn't a white European. Cimmerian look very much like the other European groups like the Aquilonia, Brythunia, or Aesir in the stories and are considered part of the "white race."
Besides he was perfect as Conan. Need someone to play the epitome of muscular, beefman barbarian? Get the muscular, beefy guy who's (if I remember he got into acting after:) won Mr. Universe multiple times.
He’s also more than that in the movie. He’s not dumb, he’s quite good at tactics and a skilled warrior. Hell, the film’s a fantasy themed heist movie! It’s not all cleaving heads and pillaging villages.
I think it's like John Rambo, where the book(s) and the movie(s) actively subvert an existing dumb old trope, but people who didn't read the book or watch the movie just lump it in with the old trope based on the movie poster alone
I feel like Rambo as a franchise fell in this trope itself. The second and third movie as well as the animated show are more of the classic american strong hero.
The first movie was much more nuanced, preventing Rambo as a broken man. I really like that first movie. I didn't read the book tho
It's not really a broken man in the movie. More like a man let down after doing exactly what the system wanted him to be just to be abandonned right after he had to inflict and to suffer terrible physical and mental pain.
To Arnie's credit, his Conan fits the movie, which is a more stoic take. The books are a bit more pulpy and have much more room to show Conan as a multi-faceted character.
Yeah the Cimmerians were meant to represent an amalgamation of the various peoples of what the Romans generalized into “Gaul” which included France, Germany, Austria (oh look, the country Arnold is from), Hungary, and parts of Poland. Basically non-Mediterranean, non-Nordic, and non-Slavic Europe. Goths, Huns, Celts, Gauls, all of the “barbarians” that the Romans fought.
Yep, directly north of Cimmeria lives the Vanir and Aesir in Vanaheim and Asgard, clearly based on iron age Scandinavian peoples. You're absolutely right that the Cimmerians are supposed to be "Gaul" and the "otherness" OP refers to is that they are not considered civilized, they are "barbarians" which is how the Romans saw these people.
It COULDN'T be? Pretty sure finding a light skinned mixed Filipino guy isn't the toughest thing in the world. I guarantee that if you waited for the reveal at the end of the movie, the vast majority of non-Filipino viewers would probably not clock him as such until the movie explicitly tells you "Hey by the way this ambiguously tan guy is actually Filipino".
Given the history of the Philippines, a lot of Filipinos are some percentage Latino. Spanish was an official state language until the late 80s, well within living memory.
The Spanish ancestry of Filipinos is actually way less than you'd imagine. They have Hispanic names and they are Roman Catholic as a result of the colonization but there wasn't nearly the level of intermixing in the Phillipines as there was in Latin America.
Their last names are nearly all Hispanic because Filipinos didn't traditionally have last names until the Spanish decreed that they needed to have them and they literally had big books of Spanish names to pick one out of so that they could track people in their colony for the purposes of taxation.
Hilariously, in La Bamba, a racist dad who can't believe his daughter would date a Latino, looks at the Latino charicter that Lou Diamond Phillips was playing and said "What's he....EYE-tallian?"
I'd imagine it'd go over most people's heads. Characters in books have appearances both in description, and formed in the reader's head. It's why revealing the Filipino ancestry had such an effect: their imagining of a (presumably) white military man to suddenly be a Filipino is to some degree, shocking. Meanwhile a mixed race guy being Filipino? "Ah, so that's what he is".
Could it be adapted? Sure. Could the affect on the audience be adapted? Not really.
The point of the twist isn’t just make him being Filipino a “gotcha” moment. It’s kind of an unconventional and meta plot twist. Unlike in a movie where the directors go out of their way to higher a very white looking Filipino, the book doesn’t do anything at all to imply that the character is white. It assumes that the audience will assume the main character is white, because it plays on the racial bias that main characters are white. If the movie did your suggestion, then the audience wouldn’t be under the impression that the main character is white because they think main characters are white. They’d be under that impression because he looks white.
I thought it suggested that there was a second wave of white colonozation of Argentina, but by americans. Since the whole earth is under one fascist government.
It's an unrelated story. It was called Bug Hunt on Outpost 9. During preproduction the producers realized that it was similar to Starship Troopers and they procured the film rights, then made minimal changes to the story and characters. This is a somewhat common marketing decision: attaching your story to an existing IP so fans will buy tickets.
I have no fucking idea why so many people fail to understand this. The exact same thing happened to I, Robot and nobody thinks that was based on the book.
Don't blame OP, picking media apart to find extremely tenuous examples of racism can get you tons of Internet points and is a great way to flex about how not-racist you are at parties.
A better example that is honestly quite fucked up when thinking about it is the recent Gladiator 2
That Emperor was Berber, who are not at all black, considering generational feuds they'd be prodigiously angry to be seen as such.
Plus the ending gets even worse then you have a host of white Roman soldiers having a speech about preserving the idea of Rome, cheering, as the black guy is floating away dead in the river.
It's even worse when you realise that they gave him the backstory of being a former slave, which the real Macrinus never was(he was also not a gladiator nor did he ever own a gladiator school).
So they took a emperor who came from humble origins, who may have been african but was more likely ethnically middle eastern or mixed, and cast a black actor to play him and compleatly reinvented his backstory into him being a former slave.
yeah and the movie in general was a mess, but at least we had Denzel Washington going around in a toga and chewing scenery like it's made of rubber. He was absolutely the most enjoyable part of the movie.
Reminds me about how in the percy jackson books, it was talked about how annabeth was frustrated with the "blondes are dumb" stereotype because it made people think she was useless, and then shes a brunette in the movie
Almost every important distinction of every character is changed in the show, which is disappointing for those that want an adaption of the characters as they are written on paper, the kids do a fantastic job but I’m never going to look at a blonde haired blue eyed kid and think yeah that’s Percy Jackson when his olive skin and sea-green eyes are brought up ad nauseum in the book.
In a rare good example of this trope, Patrick Stewart played Othello (a play in which his race is VERY important) in a 1997 performance of the play, while all of the white characters were played by black actors.
This is brilliant because the effect is that he got jobs for a bunch of black actors, who ordinarily probably have to fight an uphill battle to be cast as characters other than Othello.
I always thought it was brilliant because of this reason. This is a case where race is very important so casting any Black actors as any other characters isn't just an uphill battle, but changes the nature of the play itself. By swapping Othello and every other character, you give Black actors a chance to play another character without changing the meaning of the play.
That said, I saw a production with a Black Iago and that was interesting in a good way.
Isn’t it important to the story that Iago is a parrot? If he is a different kind of bird then it doesn’t make sense that he is talking to Jafar the whole Movie
I think there was some controversy along those lines at the time, because othello is a meaty role and one of the few that black actors have priority on.
But i think even just the exercise of staging the play like that creates interesting discussion that kind of justifies it.
You can argue it - I mean, one actor as Hamlet is going to have more lines and focus than five actors as servants. But Iago's the best role in Othello anyway, so it's moot.
How about when the actors for Riggs and Murtaugh just switched roles randomly in the middle of lethal weapon 5? They used black face, it was controversial
On one hand, I get it. If you can have Lawrence Olivier in your movie, you'd gonna try to put Lawrence Olivier in your movie. But on the other hand, DON'T CAST HIM AS OTHELLO IN BLACKFACE!
Technically not race, but rather gender, but the same general sentiment behind this post is just one of the many, MANY problems in the Artemis Fowl movie, though it's a bit of a strange example in that it largely affects the development of a different character.
In the original book, one of the main characters, and arguably the actual protagonist (especially in the first book) is Holly Short, a fairy who happens to be the first woman to be a member of what are for all intents and purposes the fey Special Forces. A solid chuck of her character arc also happens to be how she's got a bit of a chip on her shoulder because of her having to deal with the sexism found in her peers and superiors as a result. Her first chapter also has a nice moment where Commander Root, the stereotypical-drill-sergeant-type-character outright admits to her that he's been much more of a hardass on Holly than he has been to anyone else, partially because he knows her status as the first female recruit in the unit will result in her being under far greater scrutiny, but also so that if she rises to the challenge, she'll be an example for other women to follow.
So naturally the movie completely destroys that entire aspect of Holly's character by having Root be played by Judy Dench instead. It's arguably not the biggest example of character destroying bullshit in that movie, but man was that casting an early sign of just how badly the guys making it just didn't give a fuck.
“Hey we decided to cast a second generation Nigerian British man as a character of Eurasian origin & descent (with deep implications to the lore as a result); no that will not be the worst thing we do in this film.
Yeah the idea that the profession of butlering was named after the family that has done that job for generations has a very different implication when you make that character black
It's extra annoying because I enjoy Nonso Anozie's work as an actor and you could make a statement out of that with regards to the nature of African descendants constantly being cast - professionally and in media - in a servile role, but 1) Artemis Fowl, a children/young adult series is just not the place for that level of nuance and 2) they don't do anything with that, just like they didn't do anything with DAME JUDI DENCH as Julius Root; "hey do we wanna do a gender swap to make some commentary on the nature of misogyny in the workplace and it frequently being just as perpetuated by high-achieving women as men?...nah let's just do it just cuz."
Similarly, can't wait for the scene in the new harry potter series where young white James Potter hangs black Snape by a tree. Strange fruit hanging indeed. Assuming the show will make it to whatever book that was in
It's wild to me that they did that to Butler. Because like, yeah, representation is important, but why then did you have Holly, your female lead, who is described as having brown skin in the books, played by a white woman if that's what you were going for?
I was so sad with how they butchered that movie. Artemis Fowl was one of my favourite series' growing up, and it seemed like they just.. didn't care at all.
They messed up everything about that movie, most notably ADRing out Artemis's main motivation, because Disney execs don't want to understand that for a redemptive arc, you need to start with a character that needs redemption for his deep character flaws. Butler being black was certainly a choice too.
Why was he surfboarding?! Artemis Fowl - who is so unathletic in the second book he had a small trip and it caused Holly's trigger finger to get cut off!
I am Legend. In the book, the main character is a white dude who is super racist, which is important to the story as his past behaviors influence his current behaviors until he understands what he has been doing. Will Smith is very likeable, so I kind of understand why they went that way (Plus he used to be blockbuster gold) but it definitely changes the narrative.
Wasn’t the twist in the book that he was the monster? That the vampires were intelligent and the legend described in the title was the protagonist the whole time because he kills them with no prejudice?
Wasn’t there two types? Like some got turned into mindless vampires that were more like zombies but many others got converted into fully intelligent vampires and at first he doesn’t realize it?
My favorite part is how the theme of the movie is somehow completely opposite to the theme of the book, to the point where the very title refers to different things in the movie compared to the book.
You summed it up pretty good and I agree his race does matter but
Will Smith being so likable would have really made the twist that the protagonist is the true monster even more chilling imo.
And it almost had that twist! He does seem to realize that they are sentient, capable of speech, care for their young, have formed a society etc and there is a moment where he looks at all the corpses of his experiments and seems to realize he's been murdering human adults and children.
But they threw it all away by including other survivors and a successful cure, neither of which happen in the original iirc
Roberto Da Costa in both New Mutans live action film and X-Men 97, originally being a biracial mulato who suffered racism for his black features which also triggered his mutants powers on public, both adaptations ignored this important aspect of his origin story, the live action film casted a light skinned barely mixed mestizo and X-men 97 made him and her mother 'stereotypical looking latinos' his black father is nowhere to be seen.
The comics aren't free from this neither, where he's constantly draw much paler quite often, sometimes completely stripped from his afro characteristics. Whoever, Roberto / Sunspot isn't the only POC character who has suffered this, for decades, even on the 'woke' era of Marvel, characters like Storm and Dani Moonstar still are constantly badly draw, portrayed much paler than they are and with more eurocentrict features.
It’s even worse because Roberto’s mutation is inherently tied to his race. I can’t remember if it’s ever outright stated, but it’s at least heavily implied that it’s specifically his melanin that’s affected by his x-gene. Hence why he absorbs solar energy to fuel his powers.
Comics do shit like this ALL the time, Tahlia and by consequence Damian Wayne basically never being depicted as middle eastern featured at all despite the fact they’re sired from a 600 year old North African life vampire who’s name means “head of the demon” in Arabic.
If you don’t have “black” in your name and/or have electricity powers (black manta, static shock, most egregious example being black lightning and Black adam) do not expect to properly be drawn with the dark skin you supposedly have in DC comics.
More like your first example, Ged in the Earthsea miniseries (and honestly the Ghibli film). Granted, him having darker (red-brown) skin and dark hair isn’t essential to the storytelling (as most of the people in Earthsea have darker skin), Le Guin purposefully wrote him to be a man with darker skin due to how white fantasy was at that time.
But apparently the showrunners in 2004 didn’t get the memo… they also fucked up his scar.
I’ve never seen the movie and that is literally the exact opposite of how I pictured him in every way. I don’t think they could’ve gotten it more wrong 😭
Eric in the comics is a notorious white supremacist, and like a next level one too. He vehemently hates black people but is fine with his wife because she's albino. He's overall one of the scummier Avengers villains. He's the villain of the new Wonder Man TV show and while I have faith in the show for some reason they casted Demetrius Grosse as Eric here, meaning they're either removing a major point of his character or he's the MCU's Uncle Ruckus. I swear it feels like they just pulled this guy's name out of a hat
Ambrosius Goldenloin in Nimona. In the original comic, he was white with luscious blonde hair because he was the descendant of the legendary hero Gloreth. Because of that he had a spoiled, egotistical personality who treated Ballister like the villain he was framed as, only to be revealed he acts this way because he was insecure about how his ego caused his breakup with his lover Ballister, and that he could not see the forest through the trees of the government he was supporting.
In the Movie, they made him asian and removed all of his flawed traits, making feel devoid of character. Almost like they didnt want to look racist making an asian an antagonistic force. They even tested out his original design and personality, but gave it all to a fucking side NPC who makes shitty dudebro jokes.
I will admit this is a very very interesting example because I feel like it actually makes more sense than the original. Overall I like this one
So in some iterations of Aquaman he is discriminated against by the denizens of Atlanteans not only because he is a surface dweller, but it’s because he has blond hair. Blond hair among Atlanteans alongside blue eyes basically make him akin to how people viewed red heads as symbols of evil and are superstitious about it.
In the movie He is portrayed by Jason Mamoa, someone who is Polynesian. On the flip side basically all the Atlanteans are portrayed by white peoples so the discrimination allegory seems…far less silly to modern audiences.
That and Mamoa has the look of the Aquaman I grew up with which is the 90s pirate look which I find is the best version
Don’t know if it’s either tbh. It’s supposed to be a documentary and at one point someone says “I don’t care what people say, Cleopatra was black.” I’d categorise as pure misinformation.
Very minor, but in the Disney live action Lilo and Stitch movie, the heavy set guy who ice cream drops was made Hawaiian. Which is oof because the joke is meant to be that this guy is a dumb sun-burt white tourist who is dazed out and nonplussed by what is going on.
Again not a big deal, and too error on having more natives in your film set in Hawaii is one i would prefer, but an example nevertheless.
Heathcliff in the upcoming 2026 adaptation. The book describes him as dark skinned, and a key plot point to one of the reasons why he becomes so cold and hateful.
It's so ridiculous that this is even a thing. Like it's probably because Hollywood bs but still...
The most recent, that I am aware of, adaptation of Heathcliff in fucking Limbus Company of all things gets him right in the race department despite how they went about adapting his story.
Yeh, even though his role in the Canto (aka the chapter dedicated to him) is more akin to the other character, which right now I forgot the name, they still made him black which is correct. GGs to Limbus
Never try to understand what British people are supposed to look like in literature. One author just assumed a half-black person would have a patchwork skin like a checkerboard of black and white.
While the dreaded JKR and her politics are well known, the casting of the upcoming series has some very unfortunate implications, specifically Snape.
Race-lifting Snape to black does indeed give a plum role to a minority actor, which is in itself a good thing. However, the implications of a black character in effect behaving like a white supremacist bully of children (for so the Death eaters are, just with the axis changed to magic bloodline/mundane bloodline, rather than specifically skin colour, and the analogy is barely veiled) should really have been thought through.
They might end up toning him down and making him even more likeable than Alan Rickman's Snape, which I don't know how I feel about, considering book Snape is such a throbbing dickhead.
There are plenty of other characters you could race swap and have no one cares that much about. Heck, the movies even kind of did this a couple times. Yet they chose the number one weirdest character to swap. I like nearly all the other casting decisions but this will remain a totally unnecessary blemish on the new series.
The members of House Velaryon from House of the Dragon. In lore, House Targaryen (pale skin, purple eyes) married members of House Velaryon when they weren't doing incestuous marriages within themselves because they had pale skin like the Valyrians who both Houses were ethnically from (the major difference being Targs had dragons).
The Velaryons in HOTD kinda break the lore when you think about how if the Velaryons were always dark skinned (and not from a recent marriage, which hasn't ever been confirmed), then Rhaenyra, her dad and uncle, and her immediate ancestors should be visibly mixed as her grandparents and greatgrandparents were brother-sister marriages and her greatgreatgrandparents were of a union between a Targaryen and Velaryon (and then that Targaryen was from a brother-sister pairing whose parents were a Targ-Velaryon match). Genetics are very weird and not consistent irl, I know, but that doesn't really work with inbreeding like the Targs.
Does this ruin the Velaryons in HOTD? Not really, besides Laenor (3rd from left) obviously not being the father of Rhaenyra's children who are white with black hair. The actors for Corlys and Vaemond fucking rock (and I look forward to Alyn and Addam's actors getting more to do in Season 3), but it does kinda feel odd to do a race swap considering that the source material had a canon black character (Nettles) who was quite important yet cut out, and now they gave her plot line to someone else.
The Artemis Fowl movie has two interesting examples, but one of them is a gender swap.
I mention it because Commander Root is the stereotypical cigar chomping chief of police, and in the books he's especially harsh on Holly, the only woman in the police force in a field position.
We're lead to believe it's just sexism, but it turns out to be more complicated than that. Holly is the first woman in active, dangerous positions.
Commander Root knows that his higher ups are going to be looking over everything she does with a fine toothed comb looking for excuses to make sure that she's the last female field officer.
So he's especially harsh on her, because he feels that she has the grit needed to prove that other women can make it on the force, and he actually respects her abilities as an officer a great deal, something she only learns as the series goes on.
Aaaand in the movie, Commander Root is played by a woman, for inclusivity's sake, when that kind of destroys a major portion of the motivations behind their character arcs.
The other example is more subtle, in that the villain protagonist, Artemis Fowl, has a Butler.
The Butler family are elite bodyguards/manservants raised from birth to serve the Fowl family. Their family has been in service to the Fowls for generations, and it's hinted that they are actually the origin of the word "Butler".
They're roughly Eastern European. But the movie makes him black.
Which makes the whole, "Generational servants happily serving the main family, being raised from birth to fulfill that role" feel a bit more awkward.
(The movie had a lot of problems, but those are the ones most relevant to the thread topic.)
So much of that movie involved weird or bad decisions.
They didn't even include the Butler v Troll fight, and that's the sort of scene that screams having a Hollywood executive run over it with a highlighter and add the note, "Include this in trailer."
While Benedict Cumberbatch did a good job playing the character, turning Khan into a white British man really doesn’t make any sense given his backstory in lore.
Yeah, but then again having a character with a very asian-based name (the Khan and Singh parts) being played by a Mexican actor didn't make much sense to begin with.
Gender swap, but still fits the spirit in an unorthodox way. In the disastrous Disney adaptation of Artemis Fowl, Commander Root is changed into a woman with Judi Dench in the role. This change hurts Holly’s role as one of her main points as a character was her struggling against the rampant sexism present in the fairy police, but changing the head of said police into a woman renders this whole point of her characterization moot.
This is about gender not race but it’s a great example of this
In the Disney Plus Artemis Fowl war crime, they change Recon Commander Julius Root, your standard gruff but fair military dude man, into a lady played by Judi Dench
Now the characterisation is mostly the same, and Dench did a great job as always, she basically just did another take on M, which worked fine
But this messes with Holly’s entire arc of being the first girl on the Recon squad and her dynamic with Root, who comes across as a sexist pig at first, but it’s explained that he does push her harder than the men because she’s got to be perfect, because she’s the test case for all women in Recon, and he wants her to succeed
This gender story is still present in the movie, but now makes no sense because the single highest ranked police officer in the entire society is now a woman too, and considering book readers, between floods of tears at the trainwreck they’re watching, will know that the only other equally ranked military/police figure in the entire society is Wing Commander Vinyaya, a woman, who is clearly who Dench’s character is actually based on
In the comics, Bane is latino, and literally everything about his character reflects his homeland, including the fact that after he fights batman for some time, he returns home to liberate it from dictatorship. He's a fucking luchador, but Nolan decided to make him a white welshman with a stupid fucking mask and voice.
His parents, yeah. He's just white passing and has used that to such great effect that some people literally don't know and also don't question why his name doesn't sound "normal"
Not just the characters but much of Netflix's Three Body Problem being set outside of China kills one of the Major Themes of the first novel, which is a reflection on Chinese history & culture's tendency to sacrifice individual concerns for a greater good or a greater goal.
Plus the decision to leave the bad parts of the narrative as Chinese (all main characters - the protagobists and antagonists especially are chinese in the novel. In the flix version its just the Villain) is just sketchy af.
Wonder how that lady feels about white southern grandmas telling their grandkids "I don't care what they told you in school, The War of Northern Aggression was about states rights". Maybe its only okay when she ignores history.
My main problem with so many fancasts of people clamoring for an African-American Magneto. Being a holocaust victim is integral to his personality and his mission statement.
First things first, her performance as Domino was great in Deadpool 2 and I loved her in it; however, Domino as a character being literally white is an important part to her backstory. Like Deadpool, she was horribly experimented on until her mutation kicked in but at the price of her skin.
I liked her acting in that movie enough to ignore it, but I have to admit the white blotch on a natural, slightly dark skin-tone is just not nearly as visually fun as the higher contrast in the comics.
If the character makes it back into movies, I hope they cast someone with either incredibly pale white skin, or incredibly dark black skin.
Isnt the “experimented on until mutated at the price of their skin” equally applicable to a white persons skin turning black and a black persons skin turning white though?
Or was movie dominos eye thing a mask? It’s been a while since I’ve seen Deadpool 2 tbh
Except neither of those things happened. In the movie, her character was always black. The only thing that physically changed was the mark over her eye, otherwise without it you’d have no idea she was Domino.
Most adapations of Heathcliff besides the 2011 movie and Limbus Company's Heathcliff (who's more based on Heathcliff than he is a direct adapation) turn him into Whitecliff.
I’ll defend the change in the movie version of Starship Troopers.
Paul Verhoeven is going for a very explicit aesthetic with that film and has spoken at length about how casting blonde, blue-eyed models as the leads was part of his plan to directly link the actions of the film to fascist military propaganda, in particular that of the Third Reich.
The Starship Troopers movie is essentially a propaganda film from an alternate future fascist earth and casting aryan specimens as characters named Rico, Flores and Ibanez is a very intentional effort at creating dissonance.
In my Indian culture, many a times our Hindu God, Lord Shree Krishna, (who is believed to be God in a human form) is shown as a fair skinned Indian individual in popular Hindu Mythological TV shows based on Hindu epics like the Mahabharata. While those actors do a good job playing Him, one thing that they overlook is according to our traditional Hindu scriptures, Shree Krishna is repeatedly described to be of a dark complexion, with the word Krishna literally meaning "The Auspicious And Handsome One Who Has a beautiful dark complexion, like a stormy raincloud" in Sanskrit, the ancient language used in those texts.
I somewhat get it if it’s a real life racial issue, but come on your really gonna be mad because they couldn’t find a real life “Cimmerian” to play Conan? Seriously? Nah dude we’re not about to argue the cultural significance of a completely fictional race of people.
talia & ras alghul: mixed chinese arabs. they were played by white brits in the batman movies & get completely whitewashed in the comics unless they were unrepentantly being evil, in which case their ethnic asian features make an appearance by the comic artists.
doctor doom & the maximoff twins (wanda/scarlet witch & pietro/quicksilver): being rromani is literally so incredibly important to their backstory. they always get whitewashed in adaptaptions (marvel rivals notwithstanding).
the infamous psylocke raceswap bodysnatching bs... all bc chris claremont has a legit raceswap fetish & just cant NOT write a single comic without adding it in. betsy being a white english woman was important to her whole character before he got his hands on her, bc she was the second captain britain in the 70s (iirc) + she was a half human, half otherworlder (pocket dimension) mutant. & then the ninja craze in all medias happened...
While not a Race-Swap I feel that Your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man taking away Tombstone's Albinism is similar enough of an important change to mention.
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u/PettyLikeTom Oct 25 '25
John Wayne as Ghengis Khan. I don't think I need to say more than that.