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Roxxsmom

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Yes, that's what I'm not sure about. For instance, many Neanderthals had red hair, but it was a different allele conferring red color than what we see in a few modern H. sapiens populations.

It's possible the blue eye allele brought from Africa disappeared, and the one from the Baltic is different, or it could even be the same mutation again. But it's also possible the earlier paper didn't look at a large enough population, or their methods may be out of date now. All this genetic information we get is still being revised and modified, and it's a best guess a lot of the time, based on statistics.

As for dogs, there are genetic analysis kits you can get, sort of like a canine 23 and me. They tell you likely breed composition (for adopted dogs), predisposition to certain diseases, and even find close relatives. But people I know have gotten slightly, even dramatically different, results from different companies' kits. I did one called Embark with my dogs, and the results were plausible, pretty much what I'd guessed, but there was still a small amount of uncertainty for a small portion of their DNA for each of them (they say this may mean a distant ancestor who was a "supermutt," but since various breeds are also related if you go far enough back, there's still some uncertainty. I'm guessing this is true for humans too. And they haven't isolated genes for every trait, not by a long sight.

Back to the OP, though. I agree with the others who say it's important to write the story you are comfortable writing. I imagine there are still plenty of white, cishet guys out there for whom wish fulfillment means escaping to a world where only white, cishet guys have any power or do anything of consequence, and where other variants of human either don't exist or are in the background as chattel or highly marginalized aberrancies that aren't mentioned at all. If there is a market for this, there will be agents and editors who will publish such work.

Just don't argue that this is how fantasy stories "have" to be to be believable or that it is only people from other groups who are engaging in wish fulfillment with regards to the kinds of characters and worlds they want to see portrayed.
 
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ChaseJxyz

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I grew up in a town that was 99.9% white. In my high school, there was literally 1 Asian kid, 1 black kid, 1 Jewish kid, 1 blind kid, 1 deaf kid, 1 kid who used a wheelchair, and 1 gay* kid. It was like the Burger King Kid's Club with the "you may have 1 of each" for diversity. But I never wondered "gee, how did they get here?"; I assumed that their families moved there at some point for work or something, just like all the white and culturally Christian families did.

But the stories I wrote and characters I created were really limited because of it, because I only really knew one type of person (cishet able-bodied white and culturally Christian). I tried to write this one novel my senior year of high school and it was about someone who lived in a big city...but I knew nothing about the kinds of people who lived there or what it was really like, since I was from a town that had more corn than people. It was really bad! And everyone was white, cis and het because that's what I thought I was, and that's what I thought stories had to be. Those were the stories we read in school; the only different ones were where being Different was the point, such as stories about the Holocaust, slavery or civil rights. If a character was black or Jewish, it was because their blackness or religion was their struggle, their existence was one of suffering and being a victim of hatred. The only stories I really read that weren't the case was The Saddle Club, where one of the girls was black, but her blackness was almost never mentioned; if it weren't for the pictures on the cover I would have forgotten her skin color, because my brain was wired to assume that everyone was white unless otherwise mentioned. Because everything I read was like that, everyone is "normal," and if someone isn't "normal" there is a reason for it, and that's for them to have to struggle and find a way to be treated like someone who's "normal."

The thing about having diverse characters and stories tells people that they exist in the world and that they deserve to have adventures, too. As a kid I didn't think it was weird, but now as an adult it's really odd that Hogwarts is 99.9% white and culturally Christian, when the UK....isn't. If someone who has non-wizard parents can have magic, then why can't a child of immigrants? Wasn't the whole point of HP that you didn't need to be from a "superior bloodline" to have magic? Wouldn't it be fun if a student snuck into the forbidden part of the library to learn a gender change spell because they were trans? Or if they actually learned in wizard history that there were gay wizards and that the wizarding world thinks it's so "backwards" of muggles to have been homophobic for so long? But no, they learn how to make date-rape potions instead and make fun of Hermione for wanting to end slavery. How boring and unimaginative. I can spend hours thinking about how even the most boring at the surface systems like sex-based magic differences (like in Wheel of Time) would be a million times more interesting if it takes into account things like transgender or intersex individuals. How cool would it be for someone to use both "flavors" of magic? What would the world think of them? There would be a lot of these people, would they be revered, reviled? What if the king that keeps failing to produce an heir then discovers he has this both-ways magic?

But no let's make everyone exactly the same. Let's throw out all these amazing ideas for characters that challenge the perceptions of society and can tackle problems from a unique angle because I can't imagine a world with people who don't look like me. And by me, I mean the person that I thought I had to be because I was never shown other options, I was never told that there was a world outside the gender binary and heterosexual relationships. That my experiences as an able-bodied white person was universal. It's easier to deny the reality that other people experience, but it makes me a less empathetic human being and a worse writer as a result.

*as in, was out and everyone knew it. Me and some other friends have since come out as queer but we didn't know it at the time, mostly because of shit like compulsory cisheteronormativity
 

mccardey

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Just don't argue that this is how fantasy stories "have" to be to be believable or that it is only people from other groups who are engaging in wish fulfillment with regards to the kinds of characters and worlds they want to see portrayed.
And probably don't get too loud about normality being straight white and male. 'Cause the bloom's off that particular rose.
 

be frank

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ChaseJxyz said:
Wasn't the whole point of HP that you didn't need to be from a "superior bloodline" to have magic? Wouldn't it be fun if a student snuck into the forbidden part of the library to learn a gender change spell because they were trans?

Minor thread derail: Given HP was written by a renowned TERF, the chances of that happening in the official canon always lay somewhere between "sub-zero" and "snowflake's chance".
 

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In respect to HP and diversity - I felt like Dumbledore being gay made sense for the character, even though there were a lot of detractors at the time. To me, it explained why it was so easy for him to be seduced by Grindelwald's ideas. He was blinded by unrequited love. There was a lot of subtext to indicate this in the novels themselves; the reveal was unsurprising to a lot of people.

I love the turn this thread took immediately and the diverse experiences that everyone is sharing. I couldn't help but find the original post upsetting and offensive, especially as a brown bisexual woman.
 

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Dumbledore was only allowed to be closeted gay though. What little diversity was allowed to exist, wasn't allowed to thrive.

As for the fat-phobia, I wrote a long reply and the system ate it. Long story short, I really hate how fatness is used to portray unlikeable or silly characters and a general lack of dignity. I also hate that fat actors accept such roles.
 

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As a kid I didn't think it was weird, but now as an adult it's really odd that Hogwarts is 99.9% white and culturally Christian, when the UK....isn't. If someone who has non-wizard parents can have magic, then why can't a child of immigrants? Wasn't the whole point of HP that you didn't need to be from a "superior bloodline" to have magic?

Bloodline is SUPER important in HP. Harry is great at stuff because his parents were great. Hermione is held up as an exception that proves the rule. Voldemort has a whole section devoted to how super bloodline-y he is, and he is a terrifyingly powerful wizard. In addition to inherited talent there's a lot of "sins of the fathers" kind of stuff going on as well.

Hogworts is super white because Rowling clearly doesn't see the UK as being a diverse place, full stop. Though to be fair, outside of London I don't know how diverse it is but it seems like there's a fair amount of whiteness. On the other hand she also made Fantastic Beasts which is even more white than HP, and it's set in one of the most diverse cities in the world.
 

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In her novel The Casual Vacancy, two of the POV characters are a young British-born Sikh girl and her mother (an immigrant from India) respectively. I'm from a Hindu background and of course brown communities are not homogenous, but I related very deeply to the young Sikh girl; it did feel like she had done her research and she approached it in a very sensitive way. This was released in 2012, so a while after HP finished.
 

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Rowling may be a shining cautionary example on how not to handle diversity in many cases. She clearly didn't do a lot of research into character names (Cho Chang) nor inthe cultural elements she was cribbing and misrepresenting in her Fantastic Beasts expansion. And while she later stated Dumbledore was gay, we certainly never saw this (nor the family life of any of the teachers, it is true. They all seemed to live in their offices as Hogwarts and have no spouses or kids). None of the kids were gay, nor did Hogwarts make any provisions for bringing a same-sex partner to the Holiday ball in book 4.

I don't know if she did a better job researching the characters' culture in The Casual Vacancy or not.

As Be Frank pointed out, her transpohobia is likely the reason we never saw any spells or themes related to changing one's gender. In her world, you can turn a teacup into a perfectly alive and (evidently) sentient hamster, but our body's reproductive parts and hormones are set in stone.

I grew up in a town that was 99.9% white. In my high school, there was literally 1 Asian kid, 1 black kid, 1 Jewish kid, 1 blind kid, 1 deaf kid, 1 kid who used a wheelchair, and 1 gay* kid. It was like the Burger King Kid's Club with the "you may have 1 of each" for diversity. But I never wondered "gee, how did they get here?"; I assumed that their families moved there at some point for work or something, just like all the white and culturally Christian families did.

I had a similar experience, as my family moved to Newport Beach, CA when I was six, and I lived there until I graduated high school and went away to college (my dad was a virology prof at UC Irvine). Newport was almost all white back then. I think my elementary school class had a couple kids who were Asian, one gal of Mexican heritage, and that was it. The "n" word was routinely tossed around in casual conversation by kids who had quite literally never met a Black person. My highschool was no more diverse. However, we'd lived in Chicago before moving to Newport, and some of my playmates there had been Black. My folks lived in this little University of Chicago enclave in Hyde Park while my dad was a postdoc there, so there were a number of academic families who came from other countries too. And we had some friends from India from my dad's department at UC Irvine.

I had cousins who lived in LA too, and while they were in a fairly wealthy neighborhood there, they had friends and school chums from much more diverse backgrounds, and many of my aunt's closest friends were Jewish.

So I actually wondered why Newport Beach was so homogeneous.

One thing that was missing from daily life in the 70s, so it's something I was more blind to was diversity of ability. Kids with noticeable physical and cognitive differences still got sent off to special schools back then, so I didn't know anyone who was in a wheelchair or blind or deaf until I was in college. Except for Sally, who volunteered at our local girl's club. She'd had polio when she was a child, but polio was pretty much gone from the US during my school days.
 
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ChaseJxyz

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I used HP as an example because, well, everyone knows it. Everyone in my generation grew up reading it, so for a lot of fantasy writers my age they are inspired/influenced by it in some way or another. I was never a huge fan of it but I couldn't really articulate why until recently. The setting has a T O N of potential but, well, you know.

When I went to college it was like a diversity explosion. Something like 10% of the school was international students, and there was an entire Deaf/hard-of-hearing college. Most classes had an ASL interpreter and all the big events had live captioning. I lived with a Deaf friend one summer and I learned a lot from him, like the controversy about cochlear implants and forcing Deaf kids to assimilate into the hearing world and how annoying/hurtful it is that some people try to "save" them and take care of them unprompted (apparently this was very common in the ASL interpreting major). My job at a public transit agency taught me a lot about accessibility, too, especially in regards to navigating physical spaces.

To me, diversity means an interesting world and interesting characters. A country in a fantasy world that ONLY has white people, only straight people, unless there is some sort of oppressive state religion or policies going on, to me it just says "I can't imagine a world outside of my small hometown of middle of nowhere." Even a country that is majority white is going to have people from other countries coming to trade, maybe hired as mercenary soldiers, maybe they married into the royal family at some point. Even if the culture is that where queerness isn't accepted, there's still going to be people who are stealth. Globally there have been cultures that have had nonbinary gender identities, but they were colonized and forced into binary genders. So if your world has not a single culture that has other types of identities, then it's a pretty boring one. Same thing with characters; a character who's brown in a white country because they were hired to be the royal guard (since hiring them from another country removes political conflicts of interest) is probably going to see things differently than the locals and have different approaches to problems. They may not be aware of the tacit agreements and who's friends with who among the court and they might stumble into something interesting that way. There's!!!! A lot of potential!!! It just kills me to see all this good stuff go to waste. Especially in fantasy, you can literally make or do anything, I do not want to see another Joe Whitebread farmboy discover that he's secretly the son of some really cool guy and he has to save everyone and then gets a hot elven gf at the end.
 

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And while she later stated Dumbledore was gay, we certainly never saw this (nor the family life of any of the teachers, it is true. They all seemed to live in their offices as Hogwarts and have no spouses or kids).
To be fair, how many children's school stories include anything about their teachers' lives?
Isn't that what the 'staff room' in a school is for? Some sort of a dormitory where they are locked up until the next day?
The HP books were about Harry and his friends, and magic. Can you imagine how long the series would have been if she had given space to the adults' personal lives as well?
 
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Guerrien

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As Be Frank pointed out, her transpohobia is likely the reason we never saw any spells or themes related to changing one's gender. In her world, you can turn a teacup into a perfectly alive and (evidently) sentient hamster, but our body's reproductive parts and hormones are set in stone.

This isn't to excuse anything that JK Rowling has said/done more recently, but I think it's worth remembering as well that Harry Potter--the first one anyway--came out in the late 90s. A lot of media released in the 90s/00s doesn't stand up to today's standards of representation (or what should be today's standards of representation--there's still a long way to go). Whether that's the main cast (and majority of the supporting actors) of a show being entirely white, tokenism, or stereotypical representations of LGBTQ+ characters. No, it wasn't good enough, but it was a symptom of the era, not necessarily the views of a writer or showrunner. Again, not to excuse anything JK Rowling has said or done since.
 

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This isn't to excuse anything that JK Rowling has said/done more recently, but I think it's worth remembering as well that Harry Potter--the first one anyway--came out in the late 90s. A lot of media released in the 90s/00s doesn't stand up to today's standards of representation (or what should be today's standards of representation--there's still a long way to go). Whether that's the main cast (and majority of the supporting actors) of a show being entirely white, tokenism, or stereotypical representations of LGBTQ+ characters. No, it wasn't good enough, but it was a symptom of the era, not necessarily the views of a writer or showrunner. Again, not to excuse anything JK Rowling has said or done since.

Indeed, the first Harry Potter book came out in 1997.

It was also released by a mainstream publisher and aimed at the children's market. I personally think that if there had been any mention to a spell changing one's gender, it would have likely been nothing more than a throwaway line - thus, doing nothing for representation. If there was an attempt to fully explore it, it would've been heavily censored, which is even worse.

Edit: To put some perspective on it: it's 2020, 13 years after the last Harry Potter book was released, and many parents are still up in arms about LGBT+ representation in any media aimed at kids. Hugely depressing, but I take solace in the fact that I believe things are changing - albeit, far more slowly than any of us want.
 
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neandermagnon

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I'm not your reader. But I'll point out that the next generation of readers, the ones in high school and college next year, they're not going to want to read monocultural fantasies either. That world, with its restricted straight white male elite power class as the only literate market, is gone.

This is so true. In fact my 14 yr old had a big rant today that reminded me of this thread and specifically this quote.

Basically, there's this cartoon series called "Avatar: The Last Airbender" where none of the characters are white. Apparently someone's made a film version of it, which according to my kid has been totally whitewashed, they made almost every single character white and they can't even pronounce the main character's name correctly. And the entire fandom hates it. (Those are my kid's words.)

The cartoon series has characters who are from from various different ethnic groups (none are European), some with dark skin. However the film version, all the actors are white, except for one who plays one of the bad guys(!!)

My kid absolutely hated the film version and stopped watching it and says this view is widespread among the fandom of the original series. Apparently there are lots of other things wrong with the film version, but to quote my kid "the whitewashing takes it from being just a bad adaptation to being racist."

So yeah, the younger generation isn't putting up with crap like that.
 

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Does anyone else remember the Enid Blyton books from a million years ago? I'm pretty sure that when I was reading them, back in the Late Dark Ages, there was a non-gender-conforming child called George who had short hair and always dressed boyishly. When I went to buy a newer edition for my own kids later, George had morphed into an actual boy, with a boy-pronoun.

I wonder if George is still a boy, or is finally, simply, George?
 

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To be fair, how many children's school stories include anything about their teachers' lives?
Isn't that what the 'staff room' in a school is for? Some sort of a dormitory where they are locked up until the next day?
The HP books were about Harry and his friends, and magic. Can you imagine how long the series would have been if she had given space to the adults' personal lives as well?

True, and when I was a kid, I sort of did think my teachers lived in the teacher's lounge at school, for all the thought I had for their personal lives. I remember how weird it felt the time I actually ran into my middle school gym teacher outside of school one time, and she was wearing "real" clothes instead of a sweat suit.

Though it does appear that the teachers really did live in their offices as Hogwarts, as the marauder's map often showed them in their office at night when Harry was sneaking around. Given the ability they had to step outside the gates and appartate, it seems like they could have commuted from anywhere.
 

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Does anyone else remember the Enid Blyton books from a million years ago? I'm pretty sure that when I was reading them, back in the Late Dark Ages, there was a non-gender-conforming child called George who had short hair and always dressed boyishly. When I went to buy a newer edition for my own kids later, George had morphed into an actual boy, with a boy-pronoun.

I wonder if George is still a boy, or is finally, simply, George?

I remember well! She was in The Famous Five books and was my absolute favourite character. Her name was Georgina but she went by George. As you recalled mccardey, she had short hair and dressed boyishly. I saw her as a role model really, someone who didn't let her gender define or limit her. I'm utterly perplexed that they would make the character a boy in later editions rather than allowing her to be gender non-conforming. They would've also have had to take lines out of the original novel to accommodate such a change, as it comes up in the dialogue.
 
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ChaseJxyz

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This is so true. In fact my 14 yr old had a big rant today that reminded me of this thread and specifically this quote.

Basically, there's this cartoon series called "Avatar: The Last Airbender" where none of the characters are white. Apparently someone's made a film version of it, which according to my kid has been totally whitewashed, they made almost every single character white and they can't even pronounce the main character's name correctly. And the entire fandom hates it. (Those are my kid's words.)

Boy do I know this. So the cartoon was made by two white guys who went out of their way to learn as much as possible of the cultures that they were representing in their story (which is the Japanese (fire nation), Chinese (earth nation), Buddhist monks (air nation) and Alaskan native Americans (water nation)). The film adaption was done by M Night Shamalayn, who's Indian, and he said that his kids really loved it, so everyone was excited that he would do a good job. But everyone was either white or Indian. It also had a lot of stupid effects in it because this was during the height of the 3D movie craze. Literally everyone, not just the fandom, hated it. If you look up any "worst movies of all time" list Shamalyn's Avatar is always high up there.

There is also a live-action show adaption of Avatar in the works with Netflix. The series creators ended up leaving the project because Netflix wanted something different than they did; the rumor seems to be that they wanted to age-up the characters and include more mature themes. Honestly I really respect them for their care in the work they do and listening to people with their work. The sequel series, the legend of Korra, ended with Korra having a female love interest. It gave us some amazing memes ("We're popping the biggest bottles when Makorra happens tomorrow" and "who is the handmaiden and who is the feudal lord") and some Straights tm being so, so adamant that THEYRE JUST FRIENDS!!! JUST GALS BEING PALS!!!! Even after the creators confirmed that they were in lesbians with each other, they still refused to believe it. The comics also have characters discussing LGBTQ stuff in the world and the people of the Avatar world are generally pretty cool about it.
 

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I think a lot about this interview with Dambudzo Marechara where he talks (8:15) about how in his book Black Sunlight, a book that takes place in Rhodesia, a brutal white supremacist dictatorship in Africa, where Marechera himself lived, he does not specify the race of any character in the book. He talks about being frustrated with the expectation to write 'racially', so to speak, even from a progressive angle, having to talk in those terms was a problem to him. "For fucks sake," he says, "having to use all those terms: white, c****ed, native or African..." For him it's necessary to discover a "non-racial way of writing", and he grouses about books which "categorize everybody in terms of race". The interviewer disagrees with him about this, saying that lots of African literature is dealing with the issue of racism and therefore has to talk about race, and Marechera concedes this but considers it a problem; the colonies or former colonies have to write this way because of the material situation, but soon they can be free to stop writing this way.

Our first blush reaction here might be to object that Marechera wants to treat people as idealized individuals who can exist apart from their cultural contexts, etc. The way you act is always informed by your cultural background and place in society... But I think he's right to see this as a limit, and one our imagination might overcome. In a nice talk called Raceless Futures in Crtical Black Thought, Achille Mbembe says that the archive of black thought is "saturated by a dream of the time to come when an indifference to difference has become the norm". He makes a point (in the complicated way only philosophers can) about how race works as a reductive signifier where you decide things about someone based on how they look. The richness of their life in first person is reduced to a third person imbecility, that they are black and I think this and that about black people... Then he runs through a lot of thinkers, writers and artists who imagine alternative ways of relating where this isn't true, or how we might get there. So you might think of it as: there is a 'dialectical alternative', so to speak - much writing can reproduce our social problems in the fiction, and therefore tackle them (and might tackle them well!), but we might set ourselves the task of getting outside of it or finding tools for doing so (esp. in speculative fiction..!)

So, in this way I will stage my objection to the OP's dilemma: the problem with the story about "six straight white men climbing up a hill" is not solved by adding "some other variety of person", it's escalated. The story should not admit such a thing as a 'variety of person.'
 

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I can't help feeling that this is a fad, like space movies, kung fu, and westerns, and like all fads

Thank you for calling part of my culture a fad. Y'know, it's great when the achievement of actually creating gungfu is boiled down to "fad".

But right now everyone's doing it, plopping all sorts of colours and types of people into a story because they allegedly should be there. And with no bearing on the story

Read more widely.

Worse still is this oft-repeated line that people wish to see themselves depicted on screen or in a book.

So, my culture, my nationality, my country, me, should be invisible? When various entities steal parts of my culture and manipulate those elements to suit their arrogant entitlement? How noble to write "worse still...to see themselves depicted"!

...what happens when we start granting rights to artificial intelligences and autonomous robots? Now there's a can of worms we need to be prepared for.

Oh... I see... "minorities" or "all sorts of colours and types" are now equated with programmed machines and robots? We're lesser? Lesser than whom or what?!

Y'know what: go read more widely. Go watch films and series and tv that feature diverse characters. And once you've done that, return and edit this offensive post!
 

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The film adaption was done by M Night Shamalayn, who's Indian, and he said that his kids really loved it, so everyone was excited that he would do a good job. But everyone was either white or Indian. It also had a lot of stupid effects in it because this was during the height of the 3D movie craze. Literally everyone, not just the fandom, hated it. If you look up any "worst movies of all time" list Shamalyn's Avatar is always high up there.

Yeah, whitewashing aside (and that's a HUGE thing to set aside), it was just a godawful movie all around. I made the mistake of watching it in the theater when it first came out. I was SOOO excited. I knew it was bound to be different from the cartoon, and that was fine. I was ready to like it for what it was.

Then it started, and just, ugh.

They mispronounced the main character's name FFS! Imagine going to see a Star Trek movie and watching two hours of Spork and Captain Cork. It was that jarring.

The other thing that hit me really hard was the change to the main character's personality. In the cartoon series, he's a cheerful goofball of a kid. They're trying to save the world and he's all, "yeah, but first we should go to this random island so we can ride on the giant fish that live around it. Why? Because it's awesome!" You can't help but love him.

In the movie, he was just plain gloomy. Remember the Tigger Movie? It was like someone took the Tigger movie and remade it scene for scene, only with Eeyore cast as Tigger. The movie came out in the middle of the "make everything extra-gritty" era, and it shows.

Yeah... it was just an abomination all around.
 

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Y'know what: go read more widely. Go watch films and series and tv that feature diverse characters. And once you've done that, return and edit this offensive post!

Nope. We expect members to own their own words. Make a typo? Edit. Correct an error? Sure, fix it. But you can't "take back" what you said because of pushback.

Own Your Own Words.
 
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