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Are they whitewashing all the characters or just Scarjo? Its hard for me to get up in arms about a white actress playing a character whose body is almost entirely robotic. I'm not sure Motoko Kusanagi even *has* a race.
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Apr 20, 2016 18:39
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Squinty posted:Lots of the complaints are coming from working Asian American actresses, who have literally never been offered a role that big in 100+ years of Hollywood and likely never will before they retire. Yeah, and that's a legitimate issue, but it doesn't seem like this particular character is that good of a place for that battle. Tilda Swinton getting cast as the ancient one, OK, that I get completely why it's a problem. But Kusanagi arguably doesn't have a race. It's like complaining about the race of the voice actor for Shodan in a system shock remake.
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Apr 20, 2016 19:00
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mr. stefan posted:Kusanagi is a Japanese national with a Japanese name working for the Japanese government with an explicitly Japanese-coded cyberbody in most versions of the story, she's pretty obviously Japanese. As a nationality, yes, sure. But it's established in the TV show that she had a fully artificial body ever since childhood. I think she even body swaps a few times. Like, the whole movie could just be the week she was wearing a more Caucasian cyberbody model. Maybe a better way of saying it is that she doesn't have a fixed race.
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Apr 20, 2016 19:27
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Squinty posted:I mean, race is a social construct, not a physical trait, and the character thus far has always been portrayed as socially and physically Japanese. If they want to make the point that race is superficial and irrelevant, part of the shell and not the ghost, then the fact that they could never have made this film without casting a pretty white girl as the lead kind of betrays that hypothesis. OK, fair points. I get why this is an issue, I think it's just setting off my grognard pet peeves. Edit: I also think that this thread, hell, this page of this thread, has probably spent twice as much time discussing the racial aspects of this casting decision as anyone inside the studio dis before it was announced publicly. Hieronymous Alloy fucked around with this message at 19:49 on Apr 20, 2016 |
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Apr 20, 2016 19:37
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Neurolimal posted:I'm against whitewashing GITS, but its not a controversial statement to say that many japanese animation styles default to or idealize white features. It's a strange part of asian culture in general (especially Korea). There is *some* truth to that, esp as regards skin tone and hair color, but part of it also is that many characters are just drawn racially neutral, as iconic cartoons, and then Western audiences see them as Western while Asian audiences see them as Asian. You can spot this phenomenon if the cartoon contains a character intended to be British / American -- they'll have blond hair and be drawn with long, sharp features and a big nose. (And if British, they'll probably be the villain). Edit: why do I know this much about anime, I thought I hadn't watched that much of it Hieronymous Alloy fucked around with this message at 20:17 on Apr 20, 2016 |
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Apr 20, 2016 20:14
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