I’m no Whedon fanboy- frankly I think he’s incredibly overrated and I will never understand how he gets a pass for being “feminist” when so many of his female leads are... problematic (multiple blank minds, a literal prostitute, etc) but: I really don’t hold him responsible for the problems in Age of Ultron. The…

ha. Yeah, it took me a long time to come around to be a semi-Whedon fan after Alien Resurrection. But I definitely appreciate what he brings.

Thank you!

Think about doing your same hypothetical test with the Simpsons. They have yellow skin and blue Afros - why do you perceive them as white? It works the same with anime. They have very generic features without a lot of racial identifiers, so you can project whatever you want on them.

The article isn’t stating that about The Jungle Book either. Read the article and not just the title: it’s stating that we need to place Kipling and the book in their proper context.

Do Japanese people draw Asian smiley faces? They don’t go to the effort to mark every image as Asian, they read Asian features into unmarked, neutral art. We look at neutral features and see Caucasian influences because we are reading our bias onto a neutral figure.

Honestly I’d have prefered Swinton, Chiwetel or Mikkelsen as Strange. But as others have noted, Asians are under represented onscreen, so The Ancient One needed to be Asian. Especially if you’re keeping the servant that way.

Replacing a heroic Asian character with a white person, replacing a white villain with a black one, yet keeping the subservient butler Asian... doesn’t seem like much of a help, somehow.

Wow. It’s even harder to swallow that whitewashing than I thought it would be... Shame because I love Dr. Strange (hoping this movie means finally a trade with the Roger Stern/Marshall Rogers run) and I really wanted to like this.

The show’s failings on this point are even more apparent when the writers, at every opportunity give Rick and his group every possible moral out when it comes to conflict with another group. They are either attacked first, or the other group is shown to be a bunch of complete psychopaths. The Governor, the Termites,…

Thanks for the insight. I only watched one of those shows (The Wire) so I’m a little limited on this analysis. I get the argument though. Without being familiar with the specifics, my thought is that those shows are set in a “civilized” world. There is an infrastructure guiding how we as viewers see those choices,…

Agree with you, except for the writing part. You need the struggle to make in compelling. Its about people letting go. Rick has already said, “fuck this world, you took my wife and my sons eye. I will never hesitate to kill to stay alive and keep my people safe”. That is kind person in you follow when the world has…

Things also learned from Buffy (and other Whedon works):

You raise some interesting points about how far a network will go though I don’t necessarily agree with your conclusions. I do think that how they actually shoot and edit it is going to be interesting if it’s not Daryl/Glenn/Abraham.

The graphic designer's artistic license may have to be revoked after this.

No. Adding an actual miniority doesn’t make the previous cultural appropriation go away.

Exactly. If they ONLY went with an Asian and leaned into a ton of shitty Asian stereotypes, then that would be awful, but I think most people are cognizant enough that Marvel WOULDN’T do that, that they’d do it a lot better and make Danny have a character and a personality OUTSIDE of being a good Martial Artist.

Arthur Chu wrote a really good essay that talked about this for The Daily Beast:

Yes, and having a black kid dance around a watermelon with a bucket of cluck in his hand is merely a joke to highlight the problems with agriculture in the South.

You really don’t know what racism is, do you? You keep using that word, but I don’t think you actually know what it means.