• themeatbridge@lemmy.world
      10·
      2 days ago

      I’ve never been a fan of Rowling. It always bothered me how much of her writing was lifted from better sources, but I let it go because the movies were fun and it got kids into reading. Discovering that she has always been a bigot, and her insistence on actively promoting discrimination, just erases all the goodwill she built up.

      Case in point, Snape is a shit character. Just awful. People coo at the “always” moment from the movie because it came with a glowing doe dancing around the room, but it wasn’t an interesting or poetic moment. First of all, it’s not something that Dumbledore didn’t already know. If Rowling was a better writer- You know what, no, that’s not the point of this rant, and I don’t have the time to enumerate all the shit great actors turned into gold.

      But making Snape a black man puts a lot of story beats into a different context. Was James a racist? Were the other maurauders racist? Did Lily have feelings for Snape and suppressed them due to concerns about how an interracial relationship would affect her standing?

      Changing the race of a character isn’t a big deal when the characters are well-written.

  • theywilleatthestars@lemmy.world
    121·
    2 days ago

    Irrelevant considering that support for the show will be turned towards letting JK Rowling continue to enact her rabid hatred of transgender people.

  • davel@lemmy.mlEnglish
    183·
    2 days ago

    My opinion is that this is a dumb question, and fuck Rowling.

  • BroBot9000@lemmy.worldEnglish
    132·
    2 days ago

    Stop giving that cunt money and the spotlight!

    It’s also both rage bait and bait for social justice warriors.

    • Chris@lemmy.world
      171·
      2 days ago

      Why do we care about the race of a made up wizard.

      We should talk about how Harry Potter enriches a terf instead.

    • Dr. Wesker@lemmy.sdf.orgEnglish
      2·
      2 days ago

      I got into it with friends last weekend when they were talking about Black Adam. I told them it’s 2025, they should just be calling him Adam.

  • Isa@feddit.org
    91·
    2 days ago

    If the author hasn’t become so … unlikable, I’d say, that the skin color of an actor would only bother racists. With her being the TERF, she’ve became … I’ll not pay any more money for products of hers.

    • 𝕽𝖚𝖆𝖎𝖉𝖍𝖗𝖎𝖌𝖍@midwest.social
      3·
      2 days ago

      Maybe. Snape isn’t exactly a sympathetic character, though; he almost was, but ended up being a true villain.

      Maybe you’re right, with a different author perhaps this would be uncontroversial. It’s hard to not read racism into it given her politics, though. The only thing that would have looked worse, given her nationality and politics, would have been if they’d made Snape Pakistani.

  • southsamurai@sh.itjust.works
    3·
    2 days ago

    Tbh, I’m not interested in the show.

    However, IDGAF.

    Hire a good actor, period. Nobody can top Rickman at all, so anyone taking the role on needs to be able to reinterpret it entirely, change the way Snape’s menace and arrogance are shown.

    While there are physical descriptions in the books for all the major characters, the original movies didn’t stick to them perfectly in all cases. And I don’t think they did with Snape fully.

    So why the fuck does it matter if the actor isn’t lily white (heh)? Can he act is the important part if anyone is going to watch it at all. If you’re going to turn a book into a show after it’s already been turned into a wildly popular movie series, you could cast everyone looking exactly like the books, and there’s still going to be complaints from the movie fans.

    So fuck it. Make Dumbledore a trans man, or a trans woman. Make Mcgonagle Cherokee. Make Harry Xhosa, or a Southerner from the U.S. Give Ron blue hair, a septum piercing and dress him in leather. There’s always going to be pissed off existing fans of something that’s as huge as Harry Potter. It isn’t like some niche comic book where a character looking different is going to piss everyone off. The fan base will be split, period.

    Shit, if I was going to watch it at all, an unexpected casting choice would make me more eager, because at least then I’m not going to be watching the movies dragged out over months.

    • Scrubbles@poptalk.scrubbles.techEnglish
      2·
      2 days ago

      I honestly agree. The casting of the movies was perfect in my opinion. Mr and Mrs Weasley. Snape. Trewlawney, mcGonagle. Harry, Ron, Hermione. It was great casting up and down. They’re never going to get a cast like that again, so honestly who cares. That’s how I view this whole show. It’s just a cash grab, so who cares.