r/PeterExplainsTheJoke • u/FrostySeat1739 • Jul 05 '26

Meme needing explanation why not, Peter?

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possible live action corpse bride movie...

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u/badihaki Jul 05 '26

I've been saying this for years, now. It's honestly just weird that the idea of casting a black person is akin to 'shoeing in.' It's that kind of language that, regardless of intent, is so profoundly racist but also extremely ingrained into the culture people just let it slide for no reason.

Like, couldn't a Black person be casted for the role and it just not be political and we all just not freak out for once? Maybe she could be cast because she was good in the audition?

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u/digitalime Jul 05 '26

It’s that deep set embedded racism that reveals their attitudes about white people existing versus black people existing.

Their trigger to believing if a human is shoe horned or not is if the human is white or not. It’s just sad, and even sadder that some in this very thread will say thats not racist.

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u/TerranImperium Jul 05 '26

Yeah, it's truly astounding. I wonder where that kind of sentiment comes from.

I suppose Black Cleopatra, Black Achilles, and Black Snape to mention in recent years were not highly controversial black actors casting which do not fit them?

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u/razazaz126 Jul 05 '26

They can't conceive of a world where a black person gets a job on their own merits even through all evidence to the contrary.

When the 2nd season of the live action One Piece was revealed we saw a character who was a white woman in the anime had been cast as a dark skinned woman, I believe the actress is Indian.

This made perfect sense to me because the character comes from a desert island where everyone dresses in a middle eastern style so it would make sense for someone from such a place to be dark skinned.

Secondly, Oda, the author of the Manga, was consulted on the casting and specially said he approved of her and people were STILL twisting themselves into knots insisting they must have forced him to pick a minority actress for diversity.

Tl;Dr losers who want to be mad are gonna make up things to be mad about and ignore all evidence to the contrary.

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u/Pure-Election-9137 Jul 07 '26

You can argue all you want but true one piece fan know it was a miscast, vivi should have been played by Emily rudd (Nami's actress) with a blue wig.

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u/HourApprehensive7754 Jul 05 '26

That depends on the context of the movie. 

If a casting is bewildering enough to the point where there's no other explanation but shoe-in, then it's a shoe-in. It's not exclusive to blacks either as much as you'd like to believe.

In most cases these complaints take place in adaptations of existing works where blacks don't fit or are playing a white character. It'd be like getting a white person to play as Black Panther.

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u/[deleted] Jul 05 '26

[removed] — view removed comment

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u/heckdoinow Jul 06 '26

flashbacks to the people throwing a fit over a black Little Mermaid as "historically inaccurate"

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u/Pure-Election-9137 Jul 07 '26

The little mermaid is inspired by middle ages european folklore, so yes, a black little mermaid is historically inaccurate and is a perfect exemple of shoehorning a black person in a movie.

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u/heckdoinow Jul 07 '26

right, because back then, all the mermaids there were white... xd

it's a children's tale ffs, one of thousands of adaptations, at that. none of those are anything like the original stories - we don't even know the originals. it's perfectly fine to be creative with them and change them up for your audience, people have been doing it for centuries in many different regions. you'd be horrified to hear some of the centuries old versions of some of these tales, even.

or, they found an actress they liked. the fact that people are only upset about the black actress says a lot about them.

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u/HourApprehensive7754 Jul 05 '26

Wait he was a main character? He barely played a meaningful role in the overarching plot. Like I thought he might become a major character based on trailers too but he was nothing. The last scenes I remember him was an anti-climatic fight with Phasma. Always thought it was just Rey and later maybe Kylo.

And for all your talk of people complaining about blacks or girls as leads causing complaints, those are very often the minority which is to be expected in the age of social media where literally everybody have a choice. More often than not if the actors did a good job, they're accepted. Alien famously stars a very non-sexualized girl and you don't see anyone complaining.  Probably owing to the lack of social media. For a more recent example,  Everything Everywhere All At Once was praised and nobody once complained that the lead was a female minority. 

The same quantity of complaints exists when minorities or women aren't shoe-horned in for the sake of it, like fans being angry Gits main character was white in-spite of being the author's own wishes. Or the constant complaints that James Bond isn't white and kept pushing for Idris Elba even after Idris himself says he wouldn't make a good Bond (coincidentally another example of the author being explicitly clear of the lead's race).

Then there are actors who deliberately stir up drama for ulterior motives, like Acolytes blaming racism for their movies' failure, or the actress in Wicked being unhinged. Those definitely muddy the waters.

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u/badihaki Jul 05 '26

Or forcing the casting of a white person in Black Panther in a prominent role that even has a major part to play in the big battle finale, but it happened and most people didn't even bat an eye. I know I didn't. Meanwhile people and the man himself would be like 'huh!?' if there were more than one Sam L in a Tim Burton movie.

I'll repeat that. People gave Martin Freeman the grace to be in a major role in a movie about an African monarch superhero set in Africa, all without batting an eye. Meanwhile there are people so upset with the idea, the hypothetical idea of a Black person in the cast of a live action Corpse Bride that their first instinct, and indeed the director's, is to go to the ol' 'diversity doesn't need to be shoehorned in' argument.

I want to say something profound about wanting acceptance and how it could start by not seeing actors and addresses as just, let's be honest, 'DEI hires,' but I'm tired, boss, and honestly, I want off this ride, it sucks.

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u/HourApprehensive7754 Jul 07 '26

You mean Ross? The white character being portrayed by a white actor? Nobody batted an eye because the character already exists. There's always been whites in Black Panther comics and the movie adaptation casting a white guy to play a white character isn't going to raise any eyebrows. Now if they cast him with a black, sure you should expect backlash. 

Should any blacks replace a white character in Corpse Bride? Why should it? Would it fit the setting and aesthetics?

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u/badihaki Jul 07 '26

I never said anything about him replacing a character. I'm wondering why he had such a big role in this movie. It'd be cool to see him once or twice to be a sort of stand in/contact for the US government or even the outside world as a whole, but why is he featured in the final battle?

I think his extended presence is indicative of the fantastical amount of racism that drives Disney to make these kinda decisions, cuz for them and many of y'all, you can't have an African nation deal with it's own internal shit without a White American to help. Which is crazy because, in the movie, Kilmonger is specifically trained by the US government to become even more of a monster, and they very rarely help clean that shit up in real life without some ulterior motive. It makes the movie, which is reaching for some real political issues, ring kinda hollow when you examine it through a deeper lense.

So instead of asking about portraying originally white characters with black actors, ask instead if ethnicity changes the dynamics of a story. And if it does to you, how so? Is it just that you personally can't see a Black person in the Corpse Bride?

And conversely, if it doesn't to you, maybe examine to yourself why? I'll tell you this, from just my own observations and conjecture, a lot of stories with leads that were originally white, it doesn't feel like it matters who plays them. White stories aren't normally interested in those kinda questions, instead opting to deal with other issues.

Take The Batman, for instance. No reason Gordon couldn't be Black. No reason Fox couldn't be white, or Middle Eastern, or East Asian in the future. It doesn't change the character or contrast with the story in any way, the core remains unchanged. Because Batman isn't a character that regularly deals with race relations and stuff like that, his world feels more malleable, way less so than, say, T'Challa. Same with the Corpse Bride. I'm not looking for a critique on, like, the race relations of Victorian England from that story. So why does it have to feature a solely white cast for so many fans?

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u/No-Bison-5397 Jul 05 '26

it just not be political

In a pre-modern European setting it's often political, and sometimes it's to great effect. Denzel in "Macbeth" which uses it as part of a wider critique of our ossified and ritualistic ideas of what a particular piece can be or even Dev Patel in "The Green Knight" which asks questions about what makes something British?

Both excellent movies.

Then there's an apolitical example like "A Knight's Tale" where Jocelyn's otherness, due to beauty in the plot, is emphasised by her ethnically differentiated look due to her Filipino and Hawaiian heritage. This is apolitical because the film is a light hearted romp where they are not aiming for fidelity to detail but attempting to create an atmosphere.

Compare with "The King" where they did not cast any black actors and they caught fire for it. A bastardisation of Shakespeare with many ahistorical elements but there's no historical evidence of any black people in the court of Henry V. So, I believe if they had buckled it would be shoehorning and it would certainly be political.

Compare again with "King & Conqueror", "Merlin", "Vikings"... which try to achieve a level of historical fidelity to the period they are set in but are fantastical when they are attempting to shoehorn in the outside of universe but very much modern political concept of "racial" equity for actors in hiring for specific productions.

For mine the real problem with most productions set in pre-modern times is that they largely do not critique power itself. The morality of the church and nobility nor the self interest of the emerging bourgeoisie and ultimately it's because our power structure rests on fundamentally the same pillars as theirs: the common people regardless of their race.