Fear of a Black (Fantasy) Planet

[tablesaw]

No time for a list of things just yet.

The casting for the live-action version of Avatar: The Last Airbender has been announced. See if you can spot a problem:

Comments

[tanyahp]

The "industry" is incredibly biased. Okay, racist. There's very little accountability, they want to "sell" to whomever they perceive to be the "primary target audience" and this usually excludes everyone who is not white (it's stupid, considering that whites will, with luck, no longer be the majority in my state and in many other states in ten or twenty years, but...well, it sucks for the nonce and will continue to suck until we break down the racism in Hollywood.) imo. I am also a big Avatar fan, as is my sister, so this comes as a blow. But after they utterly destroyed LeGuin's Earthsea, I have no more faith in the system to adhere to a vision other than that resembling the worldview of a neo-nazi.

[tahnan]

To be fair, you should be a little clearer when you say "they" destroyed Earthsea, insofar as that wasn't Hollywood, that was the SciFi Channel. And because it bears repeating:

Somebody asked Whedon at a convention whether he had talked to the Sci-Fi network. This was just after Sci-Fi had cancelled the incomparable Farscape while retaining that show with the real-life “psychic” - not a fictional show about a psychic but an actual con artist playing his cruel hoax for a studio audience - and other, similarly un-sci-fi fare. Whedon responded that he had called the Sci-Fi Network about Firefly but they had told him it was too science-fictiony for them.

By no means am I saying that Hollywood, or "the system" isn't racist; just that SciFi utterly screwing up a science fiction vision isn't really evidence of it.

[cramerica]

I remember being distressed about the SciFi Earthsea rendition, and reading LeGuin's take on it. Especially her quote:

"I think it is possible that some readers never even notice what color the people in the story are. Don't notice, don't care. Whites of course have the privilege of not caring, of being "colorblind." Nobody else does."

Unfortunately, then and now, I think this describes my initial take on the subject much of the time.

I hadn't seen that Joss Whedon quote, though-- thanks for repost.

[tablesaw]

By no means am I saying that Hollywood, or "the system" isn't racist; just that SciFi utterly screwing up a science fiction vision isn't really evidence of it.
I honestly am unable to get a coherent understanding of what you're trying to say in this statement.

[tahnan]

I'm saying that The Scifi Channel didn't screw up Earthsea for race issues; they screwed up Earthsea because they hate science fiction and will inevitably screw up anything they get their hands on. That's a fact about the Scifi Channel's approach to science fiction, not a fact about their approach to race, or anyone else's approach to race.

[tablesaw]

I'm still not getting what you're saying.

In my post, the pages linked, and these comments, there have been several examples that evidence the same pattern of turning non-White characters into White characters during an adaptation process. Why is Sci-Fi's Earthsea miniseries not a part of that argument? Why does Sci-Fi "hating science fiction" exempt it from this?

[tahnan]

I'll give it one more shot, with the caveat that I may duck out of the thread soon, since I think in general I'm not making myself clear here.

Tanyahp said: "But after they utterly destroyed LeGuin's Earthsea, I have no more faith in the system to adhere to a vision other than that resembling the worldview of a neo-nazi."

If I may paraphrase, this means "Them destroying Earthsea is, perhaps on its own, evidence that The System cannot represent people of color." My argument is that:

(a) "Them" = "The Scifi Channel", and not "The System".

(b) The SFC destroying Earthsea is not evidence that other production companies(*) cannot represent people of color. I'm not necessarily ruling out using it as part of a pattern. But I am saying that losing all faith in the system because of what SciFi did to Earthsea is like losing all faith in the justice system because of what Bush did to habeas corpus: given that Bush hates the Constitution the same way that SciFi hates science fiction, it's only proof that someone with no interest in doing

[tablesaw]

I don't know whether tanyahp will return to this thread to clarify her own meaning, but your paraphrased quotation strikes me as incorrect. It was you who brought up the Sci-Fi channel as an entity separate from "Hollywood" or "the industry," and you haven't explained why you are so insistent on it being so. The Sci-Fi channel is a major cable network. Though it's been passed around, it's always been owned by major entertainment conglomerates (Paramount, Viacom, Vivendi, NBC, etc.) Hallmark is a major American production company. They are part of the industry, and not minor ones

[tahnan]

I hear you, and I know there are a lot of interwoven issues here; I think I'm nevertheless going to stand by my point.

(Much of which has more to do with linguistic analysis than the wide variety of other, valid issues you bring up. For instance, I don't think causation is something I introduced out of nowhere. "After" has a simple temporal meaning-After the rain stopped, the hail started-but in many uses it does in fact imply causation-After Obama got elected, I felt hopeful again can be used to simply say that my feeling hopeful started in mid-November, but it certainly suggests that there's a cause-and-effect connection. ...ok, this is already far longer than the quick "I stand by what I said" that I meant to post, so honestly, stopping now.)

[tablesaw]

I would be interested to talk more about the linguistics, though possibly in a less complicated setting.

[tablesaw]

... And although we're focusing on adaptations, this is an issue that also occurs when a white writer creates a story filled with white people, which is then adapted by Hollywood/the industry/the system into a story still filled with white people. That causes the same damage, and is far more widespread. So when an author takes great care to work against this, and the adaptation undoes all the work, it's a particularly egregious, rage-inducing indication of the attitudes of the people involved.