Color Me Tired

Posted on by accordingtohoyt

The other day I was ambushed by an otherwise HIGHLY entertaining musical of Pride and Prejudice that had, as one of the four sisters of Elizabeth Bennet a young black lady. I was upset at it because it made the whole production bizarre. “Was Mrs. Bennett unfaithful? Is Mr. Bennett blind?”

A friend who does small production amateur theater told me “Look, it’s probably a small production, they go with what they have.”

Turned out she was right. It was a tiny theater company with a limited number of actors, explaining why Colonel Fitzwilliam is Asian and Mary Bennett is black. Fine. As I said, the musical, which was free on one of the ridiculous number of free-because-you-use-this-other-service streaming services we have, is highly amusing and entertaining.

But my friend also said that given she’s been turned down for theater roles for being too tall, too short, too white, she didn’t mind color blind casting.

Okay. Fine. I also wouldn’t mind color blind casting. But that’s not what we have. What we have is a situation in which black actors can get hired for all sorts of roles, including having a black actress (no, I’m not going to use masculine default. Acting involves the body.) playing Anne Boleyn, but a precious snow flake can be upset at someone playing Aida (btw a Mediterranean role, and historically played by a white singer, in darker make up.)

A situation in which bog-standard Regency Romances had to be twisted and become a parody alternate-reality (in which in England before this period there was apartheid, as though England in the middle ages to the regency were the South Africa of the past. The most disquieting thing here, is that I think this is what the producer thinks.) to explain why half the nobility is of African origin, and most couples are bi-racial, and yet people get all bent out of shape if Ghost in the Machine casts a white Actress.

Look, it might be just a theater thing, sure. Arguably having a white person play Aida is (though we Mediterraneans are white, or consider ourselves so, some of us just of Latin culture. It’s sad to see my family retroactively thinking they’re as a race. Sigh.)

In a profession where girls can be boys playing girls playing boys, casting is a little loose.

But if it’s loose it must be loose across the board.

And we must not invent new histories to justify it. And historical figures should be played the race they were. I would no more approve of a white person playing Shaka Zulu than I approve of a black woman playing Anne Boleyn.

Mostly because you know there are a number of people who never read. Ever. And who assume whatever they were shown on TV really was the past. And next thing you know, we have scholarship like the libelous and poisonous 1619 project.

Want to have color-blind-casting. All well and good, but a) it has to be the same across the board. We just play silly buggers with every possible role: Henry VIII is a svelte 16 year old female. Anne Boleyn is a black woman in a wig, Cleopatra is a freckled redhead. Julius Caesar an Asian female.

No? Then it’s not color blind casting. It’s an attempt to corrupt and confuse history and people’s minds. It’s spinach and it can got to h*ll. (I like spinach, but I don’t eat it because of its being “good for you.)

Note small theater companies are exempted from this. After all, they have trouble enough filling roles. But big production companies? If you’re going to play fair, play fair. Heaven knows you have enough money.

No white washing. No black washing. No black face, and certainly no yellow/white/purple with polka dots face. Do as close a casting as you can.

No more excuses. Sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander.

Dear media, your racist slip is showing.

351 thoughts on “Color Me Tired”

  1. Cleopatra is a freckled redhead

    Hmmm… Given the right ginger, it could be done… There was this girl I knew back in 19—nevermind…

      1. A lot of the Ptolemies were blonde, and I’m pretty sure Queen Berenice, of Comes Berenices fame, was blonder than a blonde thing.

        Cleopatra had brown hair, I think. Can’t remember. Not a redhead or a blonde, which was sad for her because that was a fashionable look, and her nose was kinda impressive. But her eyes were supposed to be bright and entrancing, and she was smart and could converse in all sorts of languages.

  2. Genuinely color-blind casting did once exist, such as Denzel Washington being Keanu Reeves’ brother in Much Ado About Nothing. Denzel was cast, presumably, solely for his star power–and delivers. No comment about the current fad for jamming Asian and miscellaneously brown extras into conspicuous-but-background locations for the sole sake of jamming miscellaneously brown extras into conspicuous background locations.

    1. The stumper for me is Henry Golding in the latest Persuasion as William Elliot. He had been offered Captain Wentworth, which okay, you add a couple of lines somewhere establishing that his father was a merchant captain who traded with China and married a Chinese woman, and as far as I’m concerned, you’re all good, assuming the actor actually nails Wentworth’s sanguine, rather extroverted personality and doesn’t overdo the brooding. Beyond his kinship with the Crofts, I don’t think we’re told anything about his family, so that could theoretically work. Instead, Golding decided he wanted the villainous role of Anne Elliot’s cousin, and because he’s a fairly big name, the producers gave it to him, never mind that the Elliots are probably too snobbish to have Mediterranean in-laws, let alone Asian ones.

      I’d overlook it if everyone was clear that this was just escapist fiction like the Knight’s Tale, but when you have people swearing up and down that Henry and Mary Crawford are black (on the strength of his standard-issue curly regency hairstyle, and the description of his complexion by an author who used “brown” in P&P to mean “tanned”), it’s clear that a lot of people are taking this stuff literally, and that’s unwise.

      1. /shrug/ haven’t watched the new one, never will, but the consensus seems to be that the current Captain Wentworth has the charisma of a wet paper bag, so perhaps Golding would have been much better in the role.

        I’m willing to suspend my disbelief IF the media doesn’t spit in my face, insult my intelligence, or mock me when I do so.

        A handsome, charismatic actor playing an interesting, well-liked character = I’ll go for it. Badly written, badly acted = no.

        1. From the clips I’ve seen, they were trying for broody with Wentworth, which is neither an original take on the character (see Ciaran Hinds, who portrays him as basically a virtuous, seafaring Mr. Rochester), nor particularly faithful to the book, where he strikes me as a sort of responsible-adult version of Frank Churchill.

          The director’s claims that she was trying for a more rugged, manly character than all those OTHER posh, foppish interpretations of Austen’s heroes was particularly hilarious. I was like lol, woman, Colin Firth, Ciaran Hinds, Mark Strong, Johnny Lee Miller, David Morrissey and the late Alan Rickman say “Hi.” The late Franco Volpi says “Salve.”

      2. We watched the Joel Coen 2021 production of MacBeth recently, and it wasn’t a bad production otherwise, but a most of the cast, apart from Coen’s wife as Lady MacBeth, was black, including a whole family living in a castle…It’s jarring…The number of Africans living in 10th century Scotland was almost certainly zero, as was the number of Scots who had ever seen a black person…The casting destroyed the authenticity of the whole play…

        1. I guess they don’t realize at the same time there were no blacks in 10th century Scotland, there were no whites in Africa either.

          Showing a white European with red hair in 10th century Africa would be just as anachronistic.

          But no, there were no blacks in Scotland because racism.

            1. But the whole show was in black and white, with walls of endless height and sky made out of paper.

              And heck, in Throne of Blood, EVERYONE was Japanese.

          2. In the 20th century, a film shot in Africa had people coming from miles around to get a look at the blond lead actress.

            1. Not only that, as a towheaded girl living in Germany, I got my picture taken by Asian tourists.

    2. Denzel is one of the few actors (any race or sex) can play anything convincingly. The Pelican Brief role was agnostic in the book IIRC, but he is so convincing in the movie it’s how I visual the character now. When I first read the book I sort of imagined a younger Hal Holbrook in that role.

      1. I remember seeing the news about the recent version of MacBeth, and being confident that everyone involved just wanted to see Denzel play the role.
        And I was interested in seeing it, myself.

        1. Denzel is a fine actor, but he doesn’t fit the part at all, IMO…He’s also too tall and physically powerful…

    3. And there’s even textual support for it in the play!

      “If their Lordships have been deceived in this, the practice of it lies in John the Bastard.”

      Okay, I’m sure that’s not what Shakespeare meant with that line, but it does work.

    5. That was exactly the movie I was thinking of when reading this! And I did not mind it in that case because 1. It was novel and didn’t seem like a political statement… it seemed like a big name star who could bring people into the movie theater who seemed to really enjoy a chance to be in The Bard’s play… uh… movie. 2. That was such a fun movie who could complain about it?

    6. I thought of this performance while reading Sarah’s post. It was a terrific version of the play. Good acting is good acting.

  3. There’s a few cases where they actually did colorblind casting because the guy they hired was so PERFECT for the role.

    Fury in the Marvel movies is an obvious example, but Kingpin from the Daredevil movie in … somewhere around 2004… was freaking AWESOME.

    :looks:

    2003, Michael Clarke Duncan.
    https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0003817/

    Yes, it was outstanding enough of a job that I actually remembered a year off the top of my head.

    The key is, they need to respect the character.

    All these silly bugger games? They don’t respect anything. It’s just a tool for power.

    1. Yes, Marvel has done some things very well with its casting. Those two are obvious examples. However, Brie Larson showed all the range of dung beetle in Captain Marvel.

      1. In fairness, that’s perfect appropriate for the character.

        There’s a reason she spent a quarter century’s worth of comics in a coma.

        1. The only things I enjoyed about the Captain Marvel movie were Nick Fury, Phil Coulson, and Goose the cat/eldritch abomination. I cringed so hard at the ending with Yon-Rogg (Jude Law).

          Him: “Turn off the light show and prove to me that you can beat me without…”
          Her (blasts him in the face): “I have nothing to prove to you.”

          I mean, yeah, but… cringe. I think my problem there is that I see hero/villain relationships, particularly with villainous mentors and hero origin stories, as the hero working hard until they become the villain’s equal/rival and actually stands a chance of beating them. The more powerful/dangerous the villain is, the better, because that’s where your hero will be at the end of the story.

          When the villain in Captain Marvel isn’t even worth two minutes of the hero’s time… she just lays him out like that… it just feels wrong, and stupid, and weirdly embarrassing. What was the point? Where’s the pay-off? This is just sad.

          2. The Supers genre is a soap opera. Everything revolves around relationships.
            Kewl Powerz and Fantasy of Power get people interested, but it’s the interpersonal drama that keeps people buying issues month in and month out.

            It feels wrong and stupid because it was a flagrant violation of genre conventions, taken without purpose, and without the setup necessary for a decent subversion.

          3. Eh, I can see a story where the heroine realizes that the villain is always setting things up to play to his strengths and refusing to play his game, or that proving things to the villain can’t be done and is just a game to him.

            Elan letting his father drop into the middle of the desert. . . .

      2. If I remember correctly, the original character was… iffy, as well.

        That’s why Rogue killing her off wasn’t a horrible idea.

        1. Never read Marvel regularly but she originally got her powers from sex with the original Capt. Marvel. So interstellar interspecies STD.
          I suspect the writers were told to introduce a female version….and this was how they felt about it.

      3. My main complaint about Brie Larson is her legs are too short. She looks ridiculous running. Like an 8 year old. Can’t get over it.

        The rest of the performance, I don’t mind. If I didn’t know who she was I wouldn’t care about the obvious political/physiological undertones standing out like sore thumbs all over the plot. As it was, they kept her reigned in enough for Samuel L. Jackson to save the movie.

    2. Fury’s race change was based on his appearance in the Ultimate comics, where he was intentionally drawn to look like Jackson. Rumor is that a deal was made, and Jackson gave permission to use his likeness so long as he was cast it a Nick Fury role ever opened up.

      The rest is history.

      On the other hand, you have Fox casting black actor Michael B. Jordan (IIRC) as Johnny Storm in the attempted Fantastic Four reboot. That was roundly mocked, since his sister was white.

      Color blindness will only extend so far, though. A white Wakandan would cause a furor. But so far, I don’t think Marvel (as opposed to Fox) has cast a minority actor in a role where a minority wouldn’t fit.

      1. Not a rumor, was confirmed that the guys writing ultimate asked permission to base Ultimate Fury off of Jackson, and got a resounding “Yes” with the “requirement” that he be allowed to play the character if they made a movie.

        1. Those poor dears. Did their arms ever recover from all that twisting? 😛

          BTW, everything alright? I noticed you vanished for a few days.

          1. Family obligations.

            Tiring, but good– amazing, actually, NOTHING WENT WRONG.

            I was thinking it’d start Friday– started Wednesday.

      2. That white sister was actually explained in the movie, as her having been adopted by his family. Which was nice to see something different from the usual. Unlike the one with Jessica Alba and Chris Evans being brother and sister.

        I did mostly like the Fantastic Four reboot as a movie that wasn’t a Fantastic Four movie, if that makes sense. I’d like to see a good F4 movie, or a Doctor Doom movie.

    1. I don’t do movies any more because reasons, but MCD was great in the short-lived The Finder TV series. He was more memorable than the nominal star of that show.

  5. Opera has long been colorblind until you get a black woman and a white man singing about their family resemblance.

    1. Opera is full of fat people singing about how they’ve been starving to death for six months of winter.

      But when Mimi dies, you still cry like a baby for the huge, obviously non-tubercular soprano of healthiness.

    2. Unless you’re a blond haired blue eyed guy who wants to sing Porgy.

      Local tenor made worldwide career, doing a concert back home with the local symphony in the nineties, said he was going to sing us the songs he couldn’t sing professionally because he was the wrong race.

      Later I got to see him sing Caveradosi in Tosca, too.

      1. I suspect that part of his problem may have been that Porgy is a bass-baritone role. Singers that can manage that role and Cavaradossi are pretty few on the ground. (Or was the tenor not the blue-eyed blond of the first sentence?)

        The number of sopranos that can sing a major-opera-house-worthy performance of Aida have never been more than a few dozen and any one time. Is it any wonder that the number of those who are also black is a single digit number?

        It could be worse. The number of tenors who can sing Verdi’s Otello well is itself a single digit number. The number of those who are also black is the null set.

        1. I think Jesse Norman did Aida at some point, so at least one. I’ve seen her as Sieglinde in PBS Die Valkure from their 90’s Ring Cycle. Problem was her twin Brother Siegmund was a rather delicate Tenor with a porcelain complexion. Some how Ms. Norman pulled it off she was definitely that good.

          1. And Leontyne Price is on the short list for best Aida. “2” is a single digit number, no?

            Back in the day, I always thought some enterprising impresario should find a black Baritone and cast Price and Jon Vicker in a photographic-negative Otello. (That is, Vickers is white and everyone else is black.) Never happened that I am aware of.

  6. I would no more approve of a white person playing Shaka Zulu than I approve of a black woman playing Anne Boleyn.

    You have to admit: a pasty white freckled ginger standing in the Zulu lines would be hilarious.

      1. There’s a fanart depicting Black Panther as a blonde-haired white guy that appears on Twitter occasionally, to much wailing and knashing of teeth from the woke crowd. 🙂

        1. See, and that’s the thing. Anna Bolena can be black all she wants, and “experimental production set in a modern SCA campground” or “modern set design production set in a spaceship” could also cast however they wanted.

          But if you pretend to be historical fiction and not pure drama, you have to commit to the bit.

  7. I agree completely. You probably shouldn’t watch the new Netflix version of Persuasion.

  8. Bridgerton kind of threw me for a loop initially, but I got over it soon and just went with it. It makes for a fun few hours with the wife, even if it’s silly beyond belief.

    1. Haven’t seen it, but everything I’ve heard puts it in the Knight’s Tale (with Heath Ledger) category of deliberately and unapologetically anachronistic, which generally isn’t my thing, but doesn’t actively annoy me either.

      1. I like how A Knight’s Tale tells you up front what it is. When the crowd at a medieval joust is singing “We Will, We Will Rock You”, the filmmakers are telling you straight up, “This is pure silliness. We’re not trying to make a historically accurate movie, we’re just having some fun, and we hope you’ll come have fun with us.” And they tell you that right up front, which I appreciate. It’s like dropping the right genre signals into your book in chapter 1, rather than chapter 8: the reader who doesn’t want to read that genre, or the viewer who doesn’t want that style of silliness, can close the book or turn off the movie with no wasted time. And so those who continue watching/reading, because they were in the mood for that, are in for a good time.

        1. OTOH, “Moulin Rouge,” completed the job of turning us right off (the close-up crotch shots of the dancers in the opening credits had started it) when the lead character started singing, “The hills are alive, with the sound of music…”
          My beloved HATES that movie. We stayed for the rest of the flick because we were with another couple, but boy, was it awful.

          1. I could do without the exploitation stuff, but Moulin Rouge caught my sense of humor. In some ways, it was a movie about the songs that were on MTV cable at other people’s houses, and also La Traviata. Which I was down for.

        2. > “I like how A Knight’s Tale tells you up front what it is.”

          Pippin also does this.

          In the webcomic world, there was also Knights of the Old Coding. King Author summons one of his knights via an intercom system, and said knight’s very first line is “I hate anachronisms.”

    2. It was fun, and we watched it, but it is COMPLETELY unnecessary to black wash, and I know highly visual people like mom (She IS an artist) believe it and go “I guess they never told us that” even though she’s read real history.

    3. I’ve seen too many people who now have this as their version of the Regency period. It’s bad enough having different “interpretations” of present day events, much less actual settled history. The female on male rape also makes me extremely uncomfortable.

    4. I only watched the first 2-3 episodes. Having read the whole series a few years earlier, I mostly wanted to see the period costumes. My preferred reading genre for years has been Georgian/Regency. So the casting of black actors/actresses in some of the roles just clashed with my whole perception of the story and the time period and spoiled my enjoyment of the series, because I couldn’t see any good reason for it other than wokeness.

      With that said, in the context of the re-write, I think the casting choice for Lady Danbury was absolutely inspired! Adjoa Andoh OWNED that character, exactly as I had envisioned her when reading the books. 😉

  9. As any fool can see from TV, most couples are interracial, at least 30% of the population in homosexual, and Dads are at the bottom of the intelligence lottery, below Moms, Kids, and pets, in that order.

    1. Dads have been at the bottom of the intelligence lottery at least since 1950s sitcoms. It’s not some new woke thing. Even Heinlein used that trope in The Rolling Stones, where Roger Stone complains of having the lowest IQ in his family.

        1. Most of the time. But when Edith says, “Roger, I am a doctor,” he backs down. Every time. Her professional commitments come first.

    2. And white couples are far less intelligent than their black neighbors. The skip forward button gets used a lot when we’re watching TV. $SPOUSE watches vintage game shows on Buzzer (shrugs) while I’ll watch the occasional recorded show. We try to catch a mystery or three each week on DVD. (Sometimes what’s on Public TV; the local station has a new-to-us season of Midsomer Murders. Haven’t looked for Grantchester. Not sure I want to.)

      1. We’re pretty much given up on anything contemporary – my daughter and I are watching the British series Dalziel and Pascoe, and she is watching the original Magnum, PI.
        We’re beyond sick of woke entertainment media.

        1. — “We’re beyond sick of woke entertainment media.”

          I’m currently majoring in Film Production and Content Development, and looking at three classes this semester in the basic category of ‘movie-making.’ There’s an idea that’s been banging around in my head lately of finding/building some conservative/Christian entertainment studio alternative to Hollywood. Preferably something that doesn’t feel constrained to make every movie a bang-you-over-the-head-with-Christianity conversion story. (It’s not that conversion story movies are always bad – it’s that they’ve become such a tired cliche, and generally are poor movies with wooden acting. Or at least that’s what I’ve heard.)

          I want to see really awesome movies with gorgeous sets and astonishingly beautiful costuming. I want characters who I genuinely like and respect, and villains I love to hate. I want to watch a movie without groaning “Oh, here we go again,” as the main character turns out to be either a personality-challenged Mary Sue or LGBTQETC. If the current media industry is incapable of providing those…

          Thanos (puts on the Infinity Gauntlet): “Fine. I’ll do it myself.”

          1. “Christian” is constraining, precisely because of what you said.
            “Non preaching” would be better. As long as it doesn’t go out of its way to bash Christianity and the West it will flourish.
            I have a dream of seeing the darkship books as movies.

            1. When I’ve got more spare cash and less worry that spending it will leave me the stereotypical ‘broke college student,’ remind me to buy the Darkship series. (Unfortunately, my library system doesn’t seem to have any of your books.)

              After I fall in love with the universe and have some position/platform from which to work, I can bring you in as a consultant and we can do the thing. (I’m of the opinion that people who do not love the books should not make the movies. Yes, Percy Jackson and Artemis Fowl movies, I’m glaring at you.)

              1. [i]people who do not love the books should not make the movies.[/i]

                Paul Verhoeven call your office.

                  1. Wow, thanks!

                    Umm… huh, how to handle the situation. Tell you what, could you email me at l ? From that, I can direct you to might-be more secure email services and communicate plans there?

                    Note: edited to remove email address. Emailed.

            2. That’s what I was clumsily thinking. 🙂 Reminds me of Breitbart’s original Big Hollywood movies, which warned you when and where to expect the “sucker punch”. I want sucker-punch-free movies.

            3. Sigh I have a dream of seeing the Luna City series as a half-hour TV comedy, and the Adelsverein Trilogy and the sequels as a mini-series…
              No offers so far. but I live in hope.

              1. I dreamed that Dan and I with the boys and their families (so the time is not yet!) going into a theater for the premier of a Few Good Men.
                This was most notable, because this song ran over the credits and the escape from jail. Why is this notable? I had no idea the song EXISTED until after.

                So…. I feel like I’ve been given a glimpse, to keep me going. Maybe.
                The movie was not — derp — A Few Good Man. It was called Uprising.

          2. (It’s not that conversion story movies are always bad – it’s that they’ve become such a tired cliche, and generally are poor movies with wooden acting. Or at least that’s what I’ve heard.)

            Amen to that. No pun intended. As a geeky kid growing up in fundamentalist circles, I had Christian fiction of every stripe thrown at my poor wee head by concerned relatives/teachers/schoolmates. 95 percent of it is horrid, 4 percent of it is mediocre, and the shining one-percent remainder is usually “stealth Christian”, i.e. Connie Willis and Madeleine L’Engle. (Admittedly, it’s been a while since I tried to read overtly Christian novels, so the situation may have changed. I am not remotely interested in exploring. Read ONE good religious indie fantasy since then.)

            But yeah. I would love, love, love to see good conservative and/or Christian entertainment. Good as in “skillful”, not “morally inoffensive”. Literature and music sometimes manage to pull it off, but visual entertainment has got to be exponentially harder. In my inexperienced opinion. 🙂

            1. The War of the Realms series by Chuck Black wasn’t awful – or at least was interesting enough for me to want to finish it. The conversion story doesn’t really have a well-thought-out atheistic perspective in the main character, but he’s in high school/college and not a debate kid/theology geek, so it’s understandable that he wouldn’t be the most skilled of atheist apologists. And I was mainly there for the angels vs. demons fantasy-feeling war. (Although I don’t think one can depict angels, fallen or otherwise, really accurately in fiction – at least not without a metric ton of research and a lot of thought put into it. Tolkien probably did a good job in The Silmarillion, but today’s fiction basically uses ‘Angel’ and ‘Demon’ as names for fantasy races currently engaged in a holy war or political schism. See Good Omens, Lucifer, Supernatural, etc.)

              And Bryan Davis’ Dragons in our Midst and the follow-up series had kriffing dragons, so they were pretty cool. The third series, “Children of the Bard,” had a reasonably engaging love-to-hate villain in Tamiel.

              I don’t know if Diane Duane’s “Young Wizards” series counts, but those were awesome. She starts getting infected by Political Correctness in the final book, but it’s not the bash-you-over-the-head-with-it so common nowadays, and I could ignore it for the sake of the story. (Granted, once again, that the Lone Power is not an accurate depiction of the devil… but it’s certainly closer than Lucifer and Supernatural.)

              But I digress… should movie-making be a job I can get into and do well at, I’ll try my best to make a great many things worth watching.

              1. …but today’s fiction basically uses ‘Angel’ and ‘Demon’ as names for fantasy races currently engaged in a holy war or political schism.

                Vorlon vs Shadows

                1. Another Babylon 5 fan, yay!

                  And yes, absolutely. But people nowadays don’t have the creativity/theological competence to realize that they’re writing aliens rather than spirits either in service to or rebelling against God and come up with new names for the species.

                  1. > “Another Babylon 5 fan, yay!”

                    There are a few of us here. In fact, there’s a few B5 clips that keep coming up in call-and-responses. Like the one about Zathras.

                    …Or was that his brother Zathras? Or his other brother Zathras? I can never keep them straight.

                  1. Order and Chaos rather than actually good and evil is older than that– I think it’s partly because of the horror of actual objective morality, but I know the “the good guys are actual evill, duuuuude” shows up way back when.

              2. Stephen Lawhead had quite a few Christian books that were well worth reading a few years back. Frank Perretti (sp.?) was a pretty good read back in high school, but I haven’t followed him enough to know if his later books wte as good, or if his writing stood the test of time. Of course, Weber’s Safehold series is very Christian from a certain point of view…

                  1. I loved Stasheff, for the most part. But my hyper-protective mother got an eyeful of his latest-at-the-time – “The Warlock Heretical” and threw one hell of a Southern hissyfit.

                    Didn’t stop me; my first boyfriend’s mother objected to Heinlein, so we had a mutual smuggling pact.

                    1. My mom objected to books in general. That…. worked 😉 (Yes, she read them, but NOT fiction. Fiction was annoying and a waste of time and filled my head with THINGS…. Eh.)

                    2. So, she wanted your head left empty?

                      We’ve got too many empty heads running around as it is.
                      ———————————
                      If everybody is thinking the same thing, most of them are not thinking.

                2. I liked the two “Darkness” books, and thought Lawhead’s middle grade books were decent-to-good. But I got raised on Heinlein and Sturgeon, plus C.S. Lewis for the religious side, so the bar was pretty damn high. 🙂

              3. “Deep Wizardry” is on my top-five list of comfort books. 🙂 I think I fizzled somewhere around the Mars books – the later ones are good, but don’t have the oomph of the first three. But the redemption of the Lone Power in #3 is glorious reading for me.

                1. Stars, yes. That scene was amazing. (Unrealistic, but it’s fantasy anyway, so why not?)

                  Yeah, the later ones are more funny and less ooomph. I’m okay with funny, though, so it’s all interesting reading to me.

                    1. I loved that bit. Very much. And loved the setup for it in the first book where Nina drew the little arrow for the way out in the Book.

                      I admit, I kept hoping when I found out there were more sequels that Nita and Kit and Dairine would at some point re-encounter and work with the ex-LP. Last I recall, we got still-evil, ambivalent, and as-It-should-have-been, but I thought Fairest-and-Redeemed — operating under similar constraints to those shown for other Bright Powers to work with the wizards against one of Its other aspects — would have been fun.

                    2. Honestly, yeah. I was kind of waiting for that too…

                      I remember there was a scene in the tenth book that I really liked where Nita was having a dream conversation with the Lone Power. But I absolutely think there could have been really cool situations where Fairest-and-Redeemed plotted against Fairest-and-Fallen alongside our intrepid heroes. Particularly if Fairest-and-Redeemed was in disguise for most of the story (maybe similar to Machu Picchu?). I have an addiction to disguises, honestly… heroes or villains.

                      Sigh. I guess this is what fanfiction is for!

                2. I was surprised to find out there was a fourth — the third seemed like it would be hard to follow up. Enjoyed some of the later ones but didn’t love them as much… though I remember being more emotionally involved than I am now.

                3. “Deep Wizardry” is a wonderful story. When that trilogy is finally unpacked, I want to read it again. 😉

              4. My favorite commentary on the whole “they’re basically fantasy races” thing you point out– The Devil Is A Part Timer.

                Treats it with all the respect it deserves. ^.^

                  1. I need to watch more than dribs and drabs, it looks as good as Miss Kuroitsu from the Monster Development Department.

                    2. Japanese of course. [shocked face!] Dubs are the work of the devil! Japanese with subtitles is the Way of Righteousness.

                      What? I’m a weeb. We are weird. ~:D

                    3. You can always switch the language to Japanese in ‘Setup’ but you ONLY get the choice if it’s dubbed.

                      It’s impossible to follow the subtitles without hitting PAUSE when multiple characters are speaking at once, or interrupting each other, like during an argument.

                      Anyway, there are a lot of excellent dubs. Also a few lame ones.
                      ———————————
                      They say I can’t be a nonconformist because I’m not like the other nonconformists.

                2. Asian cultures tend to have a slightly different take on it than most of the rest of the world, likely due to the different religious and cultural backgrounds. In Chinese xianxia (cultivation) fiction, demons are generally the more chaotic types, versus the more orderly divine residents of the heavens. Further, people on both sides of that divide can be good or evil, and it’s not unheard of to have a heroic demon protagonist (usually when this happens, the “heavenly” forces are overwhelmingly arrogant and judgemental jerks). Protagonists who are residents of the heavens usually end up with good friends (sometimes at the start of the story, sometimes acquired during it) who are demons. Conflict is inevitable between the two sides, of course. The demons tend to have more people who are openly greedy, while the divine tend to be more judgemental (and often just as greedy, but they do a better job of hiding it). One side or the other might be pushing for a conflict between the two groups. Or just as often, the leadership of both sides wants peace, but the lower ranks keep inciting incidents in an effort to start a wider war and finally wipe out the other side once and for all (or to distract attention from some greedy scheme that they want to implement).

                  One recent series that I watched had three sides – the divine, the demons, and the devils. The former two were as described above. But anything related to the devils was pure evil.

                  1. Shuffle! (a harem anime) has the King of Demons and the King of Gods hanging out as buddies, and Dadding together, and the general effect is great. 😀

                    [But in this case, I was pointing to the specific Devil Is A Part-Timer anime being influenced by American stuff. It’s like how Log Horizon has a “totally not a ninja Turtle” character. ^.^ )

                    1. Ah. I watched about half of the linked video, and the only really American impressions that I got were the character’s name (which is definitely not from an Asian source), and the obvious McDonald’s spoof. The bit I saw of the judgmental hero out to defeat more or less seemingly harmless “evil” (in this case, a fast food worker) doesn’t seem so out of place with some of the more self-righteous characters in xianxia fiction.

                      As for the not a ninja turtle in Log Horizon – wasn’t he an American player? I seem to have a vague recollection that that group was coming from the part of the world where the American servers were based (since Log Horizon had a massive combined world, but the server you logged into in the real world determined which in-game region you played in). It makes sense that he’d be playing a ninja based off of an American cultural icon.

                    2. I haven’t watched Lucifer– I don’t need high blood pressure!, I get cranky over the playing-freely-with-mythology of Supernatural! — but fellow geeks who’ve watched both assure me DiaPT has hilarious call-outs.

                      It’s mostly a matter of cross-pollinating cultures. ^.^ Leonardo the turtle fighter from New York, who is playing on the Asia server, isn’t funny if you haven’t seen TMNT.

                    4. Yeah.
                      “Why are they making a point of making the good guys being so horrible, but not really making the bad guy justifiably good?”

                    5. Yep. Dan was watching it, which meant I got second-hand watch, and I kept shouting at the screen. It took him a few more episodes to get the “unclean” feel than it did me.
                      It IS superbly written. Which is worse.

                    6. Xianxia demons are usually more like Chinese demons or Buddhist/Hindu demons, so they really are just “another species.” It’s like “elves join a motorcycle club.”

                      One of the xianxia has a sea planet of “sea demons,” which it turns out are basically all ascended sea creature shifters with a grudge against humans who fish. So the MC’s animal companions call them “seafood” all the time.

                    7. The moment I spotted Lucifer on Netflix, I knew I wanted to stay away. I also got annoyed at how frequently it got recommended as a show I ought to watch. One of my friends is keen on it (though I don’t know if he’s actually ever watched it) because apparently the title character is based on his portrayal in Sandman.

                      As for Asian demons –

                      Yeah, I suspect I’m missing a lot in the cultural shift. Then again, the translated term demon can cover a wide range of things. It can cover vicious monsters more ugly and brutish than an ogre. Or it can cover beings that are more or less magical humans who just don’t like to be bossed around. It can also refer to non-humans who gain awareness through self-cultivation. One TV show I watched had a group of demons who were firebirds who had taken human form. At one point late in the series, a phoenix was shown, and explicitly identified as a resident of the heavens, and the natural enemy of the firebirds.

                      And that, of course, prompts the question, “Well, what’s the difference between a phoenix and a firebird?” That wasn’t actually explored, since the phoenix in question was the only one that appeared, and spent probably a minute at most on the screen.

                      The thing that I’ve come up with is that demons are – more or less – those beings that either through choice or circumstance exist outside the order laid down by the current occupants of the heavens. And note that if the series has a (near) supreme being, he is not an occupant of the heavens. He resides somewhere else (probably deep in contemplation), and limits his interactions with the rest of the characters. His direct influence within the story will be limited, and if he appears at all it will be brief. The series I mentioned above with the firebird introduced the (near) supreme being toward the end of the series. It turns out he had explicitly told the current ruler of heaven on at least three different occasions to not pursue certain courses of action. But the ruler of heaven thought he knew better, and ignored that advice with – as we were shown at the end of the series – near-catastrophic results.

                    8. :snarls at mention of Sandman:

                      Look, European stuff with “Satan but good” sucks.

                      Asian stuff has “it’s a translation flaw” involved.

                      (Gaiman is slightly less bad than Moore. No, I don’t care if someone thinks they’re better than sliced bread.)

              5. > “The conversion story doesn’t really have a well-thought-out atheistic perspective in the main character”

                Speaking as an atheist: you have to remember that atheism isn’t a philosophy, but merely an answer to one question of metaphysics that can fit in a huge variety of otherwise-differing philosophies. Also, it doesn’t even need to be a fundamental belief (and shouldn’t be, given that it’s a negative position). In my case it’s just a secondary consequence of other, more fundamental beliefs.

                In other words, there really isn’t any one “atheist perspective” other than “don’t expect anything from gods.”

            2. If you can find Charles Williams, he did some very good fantasy-with-Christian-themes novels. They might be public domain by now, though I doubt it.
              My personal favorite is, “The Place of the Lion,” where a circle of wannabe spiritualists accidentally open a portal to the realm of archetypes.

          3. One thing that has baffled me is how do little groups put out stuff like all the Dust films, but somehow it’s too much to get some beloved stories converted into movie format.

            College kids making movies that make money on youtube = possible. Someone like Larry C can’t scrape together enough production cash to make it happen for an MHI series? Why not?

            You don’t need fancy expensive FX & costuming, or even set filming if you’re doing an animated version. Is there just not enough demand to ever make it worthwhile? Could you kickstart something for $200k?

          4. > “There’s an idea that’s been banging around in my head lately of finding/building some conservative/Christian entertainment studio alternative to Hollywood.”

            I can’t remember the details, but I think Kevin Sorbo – the former Hercules star – was up to something like that. It might be worth looking him up.

            1. Ben Shapiro / Daily Wire is too; they already have a series out with Gina Carano.

    3. If I were running the FCC, I’d be pulling broadcast licenses for that alone. Television should uphold parental authority and patriotism.

    4. Keep in mind that in reality, blacks make up about 13% of the US population, and gays about 3%. Trans are less than 1%. Compare this to what we see in the media now. From that, you’d assume at least 3 times those numbers.

  10. One of the few advantages of having grown up being bullied is that one learns early on to spot bullies and bully psychology when one sees them. It is a common mistake to think that bullies are weak because they primarily attack the weak and vulnerable. More correctly, they are predators and like any other predator, prefer prey who don’t fight back. What gives them their kicks is power, the power to inflict pain, or to compel others to do painful things. It’s like a drug, and like other addictive drugs, they can never get enough of it.
    Reasonable people will make reasonable accommodations. Bullies are not reasonable. They will demand you bend over backwards to appease them, then give you a shove to knock you the rest of the way over and walk on your face. The classic defense is correct. Grow a spine. Do not apologize and cower at a threat display. (Why fight, if you can intimidate, right?) Refuse to pay the Danegeld.

    Make no mistake about it, the woke crowd are bullies. That’s what all the concern about microaggressions is about. They are looking for something to be offended by as an excuse to make unreasonable demands. Watching the impossibly absurd contortions of their victims to avoid giving offense to those are only interested in how far they can push said victims is just sad, and a bit sickening.

    1. Speaking from experience, yes. Caving in to a bully, or even just trying to avoid encounters, will get you nowhere. They’re doing this because they LOVE it, and they’ll find a way.

      Somehow, as a kid, I never really believed I was either capable or allowed to strike back — but the couple times when I snapped and hit back with sudden violence, it worked (stabbed a big bad bully in the leg with a pencil once, and I do mean stabbed; he never bothered me again).

      The remedy for traditional bullies is pretty straightforward. But crybullies (aka SJWs) are the worst ones of all — so much worse — because they’ll get the people whose job should be to defend you on their side.

      1. It is so much harder for kids these days that are targeted by these crybullies. Back in the day, you could actually fight back and end it. You could even go home and get some relief. But now with social media there is no escape and even the parents get involved on FB or Nextdoor Neighbor apps. There is no escape from Them. I think that is in large part why there is an epidemic of suicide amount young people.

        1. Sigh. Yeah, that makes an uncomfortable degree of sense.

          My brain decided to take this and say: “Okay, intellectual exercise. How would an amoral mastermind with an ‘ends justify the means’ approach to strategy and tactics beat a crybully?”

          If you have the power/authority/self-reliance to just ignore them, that’s good. In those cases, you just answer: “You’re offended? Good. Be offended.” It’s not a problem unless you allow it to be a problem. But assuming you don’t…

          ‘Cry first’ might work, if you could do it believably and reliably. Identify the culprits and accuse them of racism/sexism/whateverism before they can accuse you. Make yourself the victim. Forge evidence and get the teachers/authority figures to focus on them as the problem rather than you. Of course this only perpetuates the system, and the strategy relies on others believing you over them. It also requires that you know who to target before they target you.

          ‘Make them unbelievable’ is a good way to start, if you can manage it. In a school situation, suck up to the teachers as much as humanly possible. Be their perfect little angel, and they’ll assume anyone trying to accuse you of being mean just misunderstood you. Of course the crybullies probably already occupy these positions, so that likely won’t work well either. (Also, it’s difficult to play that role all the time, particularly if you dislike those whose boots you’re kissing.)

          Anyone have any ideas? Feel free to put your ‘Evil Genius’ hat on and plot to your heart’s content.

          2. Just make sure the body is never found.

            …What? Who said Orvan gets to be the only monster here? 😈

      2. One of the reasons I was so often targeted by bullies was because I was so easy to tease, and my reactions were so entertaining. The advice that eventually worked best was “don’t react”. Damn. Do you have any idea how tough it is for a weakling kid with Asperger’s syndrome and no inclination for violence to develop the self-control to not react to taunts and provocation with a show of tears or temper? Probably not, unless you’ve been on a similar path. It took years, and I couldn’t have done it without a model. There’s one in the New Testament. The ability to stand your ground and be a rock or a tree, to take a licking and keep on ticking, is a kind of strength, too. The tendency to overreact is still there, and I can still get ambushed, but it can be done.
        BTW, Jackie Robinson did the same thing.

        1. me? unless it was by adults, where that advice worked, chasing them around the room beating them worked best.
          which is why all the other odds congregated around me.

          2. This worked when we were growing up. When hubby was growing up. One could fight back, win, and not be targeted by TPTB. One could fight for someone else who couldn’t fight back, and not be targeted. The whole “meet me back behind the bleachers” was at thing.

            Best we could do for our son is let him, and TPTB, know very clearly that should he be attacked, he had the right of self defense. Then We as His Parents would step in and deal from then on. Yes, would have meant taking money from the school district. Funny. He was never targeted. He wasn’t particularly big when in younger grades, but he did put on growth spurt. Didn’t become the mountain of a couple of his cousins. Not scrawny either.

        2. I had a principal ask me, “Have you tried not being so weird?” It was a very good question and actually helpful because I HADN’T tried that and didn’t realize I was weird. If you met my family, you’d know why.

          Now days it would be protective coloring to be as weird as possible. Just let your freak flag fly. Then people would assume your tormentors we’re being some kind of ‘phobes.

          1. I wouldn’t have had the faintest idea how to go about not being weird. Most of the ways in which I was Odd were beyond my control. For those that weren’t, I was more proud than ashamed. So I’m a BookWyrm? That meant I knew lots of stuff, and even grudging respect paid to Mr. Encyclopedia was better than none at all. So I’m obedient to the teachers and don’t cut up in class? Well, this was back in the bad old days when the Board of Education was sometimes made of wood, and before its application to the buttocks of disruptive students was considered abuse. I learned from the negative examples, having sufficient trouble as it was without fighting the adult system too. So I go off and play by myself? Well, being rudely and forcibly disinvited by not quite all and sundry from participation in their groups does tend to have that effect. (I had a few friends, or at least not-enemies, but some of their friends…well.)

  11. Remember kids: the West was irredeemably racist in the past.

    Also: the West was also totally color-blind and had the exact same racial mix as modern America.

    Has your thinking doubled yet?

    2. Ah, but you see, we have now acknowledged our irredeemable racist past, and our new, improved diverse, inclusive casts are part of our ongoing effort to atone for our sins.
      Blech.

    3. Second look at Benjamin Sisko’s “That’s not how racial dynamics worked in mid-20th century Vegas” disclaimer? The debate in Badda-Bing, Badda-Bang about the Theme Park Version of history versus the reality somehow got a lot more relevant in the meantime.

      1. There was that and one other moment (I can’t remember it, but it wasn’t Beyond the Farthest Star, which handled it’s subject matter pretty good) where it felt like Siskos actor forced in some modern racial issue in a way that didn’t feel natural. It bugged me when I first watched it, in the early 2000s.

        However, that wasn’t too bad either, as Sisko was treated as being silly. The only ‘racial dynamic’ being violated was who was allowed to show up at the club. The band didn’t have any black people, the club just didn’t ban people based on race. Or species. Which his girlfriend brought up, when she pointed out that they also wouldn’t have let aliens in. So while I dislike the inclusion of Sisko complaining about that at all (it feels really petty, especially since Sisko isn’t a student of history, and might not even remember correctly what CENTURY the American Civil Rights Movement happened in), at least the point was made by everyone else that caring about that was absurd.

        1. I dunno, he expresses moderate disapproval, to a family member, of the idealization of a period in history which he thinks shouldn’t be idealized. He doesn’t attempt to interfere with anyone else’s entertainment, and when they need his help he decides to play along. That’s pretty broad-minded by today’s standards. Also he has a repeatedly expressed interest in baseball, extending to players like Jackie Robinson. It’s not like this is the only example of him showing an interest in the culture of that period.

          I don’t recall him saying anything particularly preachy in his Sisko avatar in Far Beyond the Stars. (For one thing, he doesn’t need to, given the rest of the story). I do recall reading that he was very annoyed with the idea of Sisko ditching his pregnant wife to go hang out with the Prophets, and that influenced his handling of his last scene on the show. We live in a culture where like, 95%+ of pop culture is devoted to making fatherhood look uncool and unworthy, so I kind of get where he was coming from on that.

    4. Sounds like somebody never watched “Bonanza”, which was aired starting back in 1959, or any of the other Westerns that were standard TV fare back in the 1950s and 1960s. Admittedly, this is the West that Never Was, but given the number of Indians, blacks, and chinese who were shown as victims of prejudice and defended or treated fairly by the Cartwrights et. al., it’s not so very racist as all that.

      1. I can’t remember the movie’s title, but there was a big deal black and white western with the Heroic Cowboy saving the Indians from the Evil Indian Agent, and in the end the love interest explained she was teaching on the rez because she’s half Indian, and the Heroic Cowboy’s response was, roughly, “so?”

        Thing is, the movie actually did a good job of telling a story….

        That it wasn’t a big deal kinda screws with their Special Good People points.

      2. I remember one episode where it was Basque shepherds who were the victim group to be defended. I had no idea what a Basque was at age 9, and now I wonder how many American adults knew in 1974.

        1. ….I gotta ask, did they do Spanish Basque or French Basque?

          My godfather was Spanish Basque, and for an idea of how much of a BDD this was, my dad got instant Best Buddy status because my godfather/his boss brought over (checks mental map) a guy’s great-uncle by marriage.

          Which they identified in like ten minutes of chatting from California county stuff.

              1. Oh, now I remember: there was a line that IIRC went something like “how did you know it was them?” “they wore basques.” — which confused me a great deal when I was in my 20s and learned that a “basque” was a women’s longline corsety thing. 🙂 (I think they meant the vests.)

  12. I am fine with color blind in opera because you are casting by voice . But a single black sister ? That’s just distracting.

    2. I am cynically amused by Amazon’s abomination of a Tolkien adaptation, wherein the king and queen, despite being canonically first cousins, are white and black in that order. (I am cynically amused at almost EVERYTHING there, actually, except for the fanfic-writing section of my brain, which is jumping up and down and screaming in rage because I could’ve come up with better in half an hour.)

      1. Someone already came up with better. The early life of Aragorn would have been quite good.

      2. Oh, Merlin, is it really that bad?

        What am I saying, of course it’s that bad, it’s a modern adaptation of what used to be good. Ugh. J.R.R. Tolkien is probably rolling in his grave.

        i have some hope that the upcoming D&D movie ‘Honor Among Thieves’ will be entertaining. Not much, but some. The trailer looks fun, at least.

        2. How do we know that the dead don’t come back to life?

          Because J.R.R. Tolkien hasn’t returned to life as a revenant to wreak bloody vengeance over what Amazon’s writers have done to his life’s work.

          Personally, I said “Nope!” the moment I saw a beardless female dwarf in the trailer. Haven’t paid a bit of attention to it since.

            1. Given the mess that The Watch made of Cheery, it’s probably a good thing overall

            2. One of the things I notice about the woke, is that they REALLY hate canon. Even when they have the perfect opportunity to fulfill their goals if they understood the canon, they don’t do it. Besides the Dwarf women having beards (which is even mentioned in the movies, so I don’t know what their excuse is), I’m reminded of Romana in Doctor Who. Romana was one of the Doctor companions.

              She was a Time Lady, who unlike The Doctor, actually completed her education. She was the only companion that could regularly outsmart The Doctor, and they had a good ‘book smarts vs. street smarts’ thing going on. What’s more, she has a perfect, pre-existing explanation that requires ZERO ret-conning for why she survived the extinction of the Time Lords (She was last seen in another dimension which was explicitly very difficult to access). And on top of that, having spent more time out in the universe, might have built up her street smarts even more, making her even more of a match for the Doctor. And also, people wanted to see her back.

              But rather than bring back Romana… and maybe give her her own show, they decided to make The Doctor a woman. They had the perfect opportunity to do what they wanted. They could even have just slightly exaggerated her competence in order to make her ‘better’ than The Doctor. But they didn’t. Just like they didn’t give us a woman with a beard.

              2. My favorite idea:

                A woman is walking through a landscape showing scars of an old war. The TARDIS appears with the usual clamor. She hesitates. She walks up. She opens the door and goes in and says, “Grandfather?”

                The TARDIS starts to move again. A voice says, “We haven’t seen him either.”

                A woman walks out and explains she’s Romana. She has two companions. An elderly male Tharil (silver fur instead of gold, still leonine, of course) and a boy, whom she explains is a Thal. They were trying to set up an alternative to police time after the Daleks killed the Time Lords. Then the TARDIS appeared and abducted the three of them by luring them in.

                The quest to find the Doctor! To protect Time! And then to argue with the Doctor about whether their decisions were wise, because they did stuff he wouldn’t, and vice versa!

              1. Yes. We were told this at world fantasy, where my reaction was to tell the group of largely Catholic writers I was sitting with “If they need a miracle, he should revive my career.” 😀

                1. Well, last I heard, the same bishop who declined to support Chesterton and his wife’s cause (because not enough local devotion according to him, and who cares about the rest of the world) also declined to support Tolkien and his wife’s cause (because same).

                  So they must have found another bishop who counts for it, or the old bishop retired, or saw sense, or got smacked with a miracle. Or maybe the Pope just decided to equipollent canonize, because he’s a giant troll and occasionally in a useful way.

                  I’m going to have to look this up.

                  1. OK, don’t see anything new, but apparently the bishop of Birmingham declined to support the cause of Tolkien in a more encouraging way than the bishop of Northampton reacted to the GKC cause. (They are two different guys.)

                    So there’s a prayer card for praying for the cause, even if that’s about all that’s been approved. And a Facebook group.

                    There have been four votive Masses offered for the Cause, and they also got a really fun poster and Marian consecration approved, which has Silmarillion played off against the Bible type of meditations, if I’m reading this right. And there’s a Catholic summer camp with a Tolkien theme. (Catholic summer camp at Fort Scott was really fun, so I hope the kids have at least as much fun as I did.)

            2. Would his revenant wreaking bloody havoc on the writers of the Amazon show qualify as one of the necessary miracles?

          3. Hey, hey, shaving is a personal choice. Don’t push your Beard Chauvinism on the dwarf lady!

            Especially since she can break you in half… 😛
            ———————————
            “When have any of our plans ever actually worked out? We make plans, we show up, and all Hell breaks loose!”

        3. The showrunners saying “we’re telling the stories Tolkien never wrote” was enough to push the Big Fat Nope button for me all by itself. Haven’t looked at the trailers or anything.

          This is the richest, most fully realized fantasy world ever created, with amazing characters like Feanor, Galadriel, Maedhros, Fingolfin, King Thingol, Beren and Luthien, Turin, Hurin, et al., fighting a noble, but doomed contest against bigger-than-life bad guys and monsters from Morgoth to balrogs to Glaurung and Ancalagon the Black…all those AMAZING mythological and personal storylines…and their take is that Tolkien somehow left the most important story untold?

          Peter Jackson missed the mark in a lot of ways with his movies, especially The Hobbit trilogy, but at least you can tell that he and his scriptwriters LOVE Tolkien’s stories. And he does know how to make movies. The progtard wokesters doing this show on Amazon seem to fear and resent the source material, and so are taking refuge in “improving” it by means of shitty fanfic. And from rumors I’ve heard, they may not even know how to film a story, either. They can feck right off. The best possible outcome right now would be for that series to fail so hard that the entertainment biz doesn’t dare to touch Tolkien’s material again.

          Okay, rant over. As a nerd who has practically lived in Middle-Earth since first reading the books 35 years ago, I can get really torqued about this stuff.

          2. What are you talking about? LOTR wasn’t bad, as adaptations go, but for the Hobbit movies? Peter Jackson only tore the guts out of the story and stuffed the bloated carcass with every action movie cliche known to Hollywood. I cringed at the first one, gagged and facepalmed my way through the second, and utterly refused to see the third.

              1. The Goblin King in the Misty Mountains, or Bolg and Azog? Because the Goblin King scene under the Misty Mountains actually stayed almost 100% to the scene in the Hobbit in sequence and structure.

                1. The one with the breaks-tone gutting. One of the dwarves slices the goblin king across the gut.

                  It just…. I could roll with it , up to then, but that BROKE it.

            2. I’ve only ever seen the Assault on Dol Guldur scenes of The Hobbit movies. I honestly rather liked those scenes, ignoring the rabbit drawn sleigh and the Radagast the Brown interpretation that really should not have ever existed.

              Galadriel was pretty darn awesome as the party sorceress. Seeing Saruman as the good guy was also fun, and the fight scene against the Nazgul was so cool.

              But yeah. No interest in anything else. None whatsoever.

            3. Well, not exactly. What he tried to do is integrate The Hobbit with the background events provided by Gandalf at the Council of Elrond in Fellowship (which weren’t shown in the movie at all) and expanded on (somewhat) in the Appendices Tolkien himself put at the back of Return of the King. All of which Tolkien added when he started LOTR in the Hobbit’s Middle Earth,

              1. It didn’t fit anyway. Although the White Council thought they had driven the Necromancer out, it was soon revealed as only pretense. Everyone was saying “Yay, we won, we drove the Necromancer out!”, while it would have been entirely in character for him to have the lurking suspicion “That was too easy. Something isn’t right here.” Said suspicion all too soon confirmed as correct.

  13. So I get the modern trend to push the politically correct actor into a role whether it really fits or not but it has become absurd and for that reason tends to destroy the actual story. Sometimes it is really stupid and over the top (Black, female 007?) and just doesn’t work but, on occasion, it can be done effectively – not often just once in a while. This is why I have been watching ‘old’ TV shows – got the whole JAG series from the library as an example. A lot of the older movies still hold up too.

    One film, done very well and really enjoyable was The Shawshank Redemption. However, I still can’t get past the Morgan Freeman character… a black man in the same prison yard as a white man back then?? Never happen. Much less them being able to be friends within the prison system of that time. Oh well, still a good story and enjoyable movie.

    I am just waiting for a remake of Custer’s Last Stand with a black female lead as Custer. Now that has potential!

    1. I think the black female 007 was the producers’ attempt to get the wokestani to leave them alone. That character was never meant to be the new James Bond: Bond had quit MI6 at the end of the last movie, so the “007” codename was no longer in use. New agent achieves “00” Status, new agent gets the next available number.

      That said, “No Time to Die” was, from my understanding, a hot mess of a film (haven’t seen it myself: had no desire to after the snoozefest that was “Spectre”), but hyperwokism was not one of its many failings.

      1. I would be fine with an Idris Elba Bond. Skin color is a lot less important to the character than masculinity and suavity. And seeing as how the last fifty years of immigration from the Commonwealth have created a substantial non-white population in Britain, it wouldn’t be jarringly anachronistic the way casting historical characters with black actors is. And a black Bond could actually realistically work undercover in a larger chunk of the world.

        Not that I trust a modern studio to write a black Bond into a thrilling non-woke action- adventure; I’m just saying the pieces are there to do it well.

        1. I’d be all for Idris Elba as 007… 10 or 15 years ago. Unfortunately, he’s too old at this point. Bond is supposed to be young-ish: mid-to-late 30s at most. Idris is 49 now, which means that he’ll be at least 51 by the time his first film comes out. Even if they manage a movie every other year like they did back in the 70s and 80s, three movies in and he’ll be in his mid-to-late 50s.

          1. The franchise has been there before (“there” being age-blind Bond-casting) with Roger Moore, who was born a year before Sean Connery and therefore was older (45-46 years) when he took up the role than Connery was when he left it. It didn’t end well.

            1. Exactly. One of the reasons Moore left the series when he did was because he realized he was older than Tanya Roberts’ (the Bond Girl in A View to Kill) mother.

            2. We watched the Moore Bond films after his passing and I rather liked them.

                1. I think I was 10 or 11 when I had a bit of a crush on him. Dad surfed across the submarine car scene from Spy Who Loved Me, probably my first exposure to Bond and I…dunno, just liked him in that bit. He felt like a Buck Rogers/Flash Gordon kind of hero. Maybe it was the jaw or the eyes.

                  I go back and forth on whether he or Brosnan is my second-favorite Bond, but they’re both undeniably in the top three for me.

                    1. For me, the running-across-the-alligators scene in ‘Live And Let Die’ was when I nodded and said, “Yeah, okay, he can be Bond.”

                    2. I like the mid-air fight over the parachute at the beginning of Moonraker. It inspired the climax of one of my own books (Saving a Queen).

              3. I like him too, he just got embarrassingly old for the part by the time the dust settled (partly because the producers felt they needed an established actor to compete with the off-brand Never Say Never Again).

        2. “And a black Bond could actually realistically work undercover in a larger chunk of the world.”

          Remember the scene in Live and Let Die? “White face in Harlem, Bond; that’s some disguise!”

          1. Exactly. Like, if there was ever a justification for racially motivated hiring, it’s in selecting undercover agents! Sending Roger Moore’s Bond to Harlem was colorblind casting at its most stupid.

      2. I watched “No Time to Die” last week. I’d agree that hyperwokism was not a problem. The real headache was that it wasn’t a Bond movie, it was a John Wick film. One long fight sequence, not a lot of plot. They really should have just recast the character and rebooted.

        1. That’s about what I heard. Big on action, almost no plot or character development, and a villain that was more of a plot device than an actual character.

          1. I felt like it was a better stab at Bond finding The One and almost settling down than either OHMSS or Serious!Casino Royale. In terms of characterization, the one place I thought they really fell down was Bond telling the love interest “I love you” in English. I would expect Bond, who doesn’t do feelz and is presumably multilingual, would feel more comfortable talking about mushy stuff in the woman’s language (in this case, French) than in his own. Probably my least unfavorite of the Craig Bonds.

  14. Oh yeah… Just watched Blazing Saddles a couple of days ago… now that was brilliant casting!

    1. Blazing Saddles never could be made now. I’m surprised Blazing Saddles hasn’t been deep sixed, axed, scrubbed, and otherwise erased.

      Agree with the brilliant casting.

      1. I’ve already got my copy!

        Amazon had a 1-day sale several years ago — 9 Mel Brooks movies for about $25.00. I jumped on it.
        ———————————
        “The sheriff’s a—”BONG
        “He said the sheriff is near!”

  15. When it’s the result of picking the right actor for the role? Absolutely. I was skeptical about Mos Def playing Ford Prefect–I didn’t think he was right for the role–but literally the first ten seconds of his first scene in the movie made me an instant convert. The casting of Samuel Jackson as Nick Fury? PERFECT choice, so good that it’s hard to think of a better alternative.

    Any other reason, no. These days, race is just being used–by certain parties–as a bludgeon with which to cudgel their political enemies, and there’s a distinct odor of “what can we do to REALLY piss them off” about some of these instances.

    1. Mos Def worked. He was totally not the Ford Prefect of the books, and it worked so well! My fellow grad student and I weren’t sure if we were in the right movie during the opening (missed the pre-film stuff because of traffic) until the “so long and thanks for all the fish” line. That’s when we started laughing and grinning at all the jokes, in-jokes, and other stuff. We got death-glares from the people who didn’t know the series (books OR radio plays).

  16. We stopped watching television cop shows because they became so boring. As soon as a white Christian appeared, you knew the final shocking plot twist would be that the Christian, not the multicultural street thug, would be the killer. I won’t even start watching a show until I’ve researched it a bit first. Casting matters. Writing matters. And the garbage we’re seeing in our popular media today is terrible. I reject it.

    2. Yep. That’s why I gave up on Law & Order. The baddie was always a white Christian “fundamentalist,” Big Pharma, a PMC, or other strawman conservative stereotype. If it was a brand-new episode, then the baddie would be whatever the Left’s current “Right-Wing Boogieman of the Week” had been 6 months before.

      1. And back in the 1960’s *(or maybe early 1970’s) THE sign of acceptance of blacks as Serious Actors was, “When there can be a black villain.” And, oh, how retrograde this “inclusion” is!

        No, not all villains must be black, nor all blacks villains. But skin color (and so many other things) should NOT be a giveaway of character. If the ‘bad guy’ can be anybody (and the good guy as well), it’s MUCH more interesting! “Oh, John Q. Businessman is automatically the baddie? My, what LAZY, contemptuous (for EVERYONE) writing.” TV like that got me interested in radio & books.

      2. I was once watching an episode of Airwolf where there was this semi Amish sect and later the villainous leader was talking to a female subordinate among their fling….

        Turns out they were in the power of some secular terrorists holding the children hostage. As our hero, having rescued the children, flew out to stop the attack, he asked them to pray.

        It was a shock

  17. There’s an interesting movie from the early 90’s called Suture that deliberately uses actors, one black and one white, and who in other ways look absolutely nothing alike, to play nearly identical characters. All the other characters can’t tell them apart (well, nearly all), and once I caught on, I liked what they did. It allowed the viewer to immediately identify who’s who, so that the thrust of the story was on the characters rather than an observation exercise.

  18. A particularly good instance of true color-blind casting – and the highlight of an otherwise mediocre-at-best film – was Danny Glover as Commander Frank Camparelli in “Flight of the Intruder.” In the source novel, Camparelli is heavily implied to be white and is self-described as “Third-Generation Mafia.” The film neatly handwaives a black man having an Italian surname via Camparelli’s claim that “at some point in my past, there was a wop in the woodpile” And the “Third-Generation Mafia” claim can easily be interpreted as a (successful) attempt by Camparelli to mess with a rookie pilot.

    1. Yes. That was one of the great lines in the film, and the character worked very well. (I still liked the book better, but that’s usually how it goes. [Except for the original Bladerunner].)

      1. Oddly, FotI is one of the rare instances where I enjoyed the movie more than the book. I’m willing to chalk that up to my listening to an audiobook version with a mediocre narrator.

      2. Re: Blade Runner, I could never get into any Philip K. Dick stories; they always seemed to me as if he was on something heavy, and weren’t even very entertaining. That said, Blade Runner was, IMHO, very good because it bore only a vague resemblance to “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?”. Just my 20 mills; YMMV.

        1. I read The Man In the High Castle thirty years ago, and my reaction when I got to the end was “wtf did I just read?” and then later, “what was the point of that anyway?”

              1. Aha! Of course! To paraphrase someone or other, I may not know Art (or even art), but I know what I like. 🙂

  19. It used to be a practice for actors to alternate between Iago and Othello. No chance of that anymore.

    In theatre, as opposed to movies, I have no problem with whatever color the actors happen to be since the stage is so artificial anyway. In movies, I find it jarring and terribly condescending. Luckily, I never go to the movies and seldom watch TV. I used to love movies, but I haven’t watched an American flick in years.

    1. I recently had reason to hunt down a decades-old text put out by Scientific American. It was so long ago that Scientific American was, then, both Scientific AND American! And now it is neither.

        1. The last good articles I read in that were from the early 2000s, but they were experimental archaeology about metal smelting in the Peruvian coastal cultures. It’s hard to make “if you use blow-pipes to increase furnace heat, you can smelt arsenical gold. But it’s rough on the goldsmiths” PC or Woke. Oh, and one about pyroclastic flows zapping paleo mammals in the Andes. Again, volcanoes are not the least bit PC when they are turning entire ecosystems into crispy critters and baked potato chips.

          1. volcanoes are not the least bit PC

            Mother Nature is a B*tch. 😆

            1. Tossing the PC into volcanoes might not be a bad idea. I hear the Japanese have one erupting right now.

        2. As I recall, the copyright was 1960. 1960, which was, technically, the last year of the 1950’s – perhaps the last Full Decade that “Scientific” AND “American” had correctly understood meanings.

    2. Saw Othello on Broadway with James Earl Jones as Othello and Christopher Plummer as Iago. Glad I did.

  20. I forget what TV show it was, but when I heard of how they handled a cast change, no matter what I though of the show, I was impressed. This was in the early days of TV when “You can’t do that” wasn’t a thing, unless it was a matter of “THAT does NOT go out on the air!”

    So after season N, actor/actress left for whatever reason. At the beginning of season N+1 ( I think it was… might have even been mid-season) “So-n-So, who played $PART has left the cast. So now $PART will be played by Thus-n-So. Thank you.” and then… the Show Went On. No silly Mystery Changes.

  21. Well, you know, because Western Civilization is so hopelessly racist and America is so completely irredeemable, it is not enough to only have “colour-blind” casting. Because that’s racist. Right? We have to have ALL the parts be minorities.

    We have to erase white people from the screen entirely, otherwise it just isn’t fair. You understand, and of course you will comply. You are The Borg. You have been assimilated.

    In that vein, we have the new and exciting War On Farming. They appear to be entirely serious about this, by the way. The Canadian federal government is mandating cutbacks in the use of fertilizer. They do not seem to be paying attention to the locust-horde of protesters that just ripped through the parliament buildings of Sri Lanka, the Freedom Convoy that shut down Ottawa for a month, or the Dutch and German farmers who seem set to do something pretty final to the Dutch socialists.

    Here’s George Monbiot “explaining” that meat, poultry, dairy and bread are “an indulgence we cannot afford.”

    You won’t even get bugs. You will eat “fermentation products.” Also know as pond scum. And you will LIKE IT.

    For those who don’t know, George Monbiot is the guy who wants to get the global human population down to 500 million.

    Modern media is getting you ready to live in a jail, pretty much. No farming, no traveling, no home. Live in mass-housing, get yeast-gruel once a day in the communal gruel dispensary, and work the yeast vats so you can get gruel tomorrow.

    I don’t know what makes them think we’re going to let them do it. That part of all this is a mystery.

    1. Because, you know, in the final analysis, FOOD is an indulgence we cannot afford…

      Tell ya what, Georgie boy, you can be the first to throw yourself into the Soylent Green vat!

      1. Oh yeah. Food is a luxury good. He came right out and said it. Marmite, that’s the thing. We will be eating yeast and algae cakes, and liking it. I can’t believe that the friggin’ news reader didn’t come right out and say “Maybe you will, George.”

        1. Just read a version of Love Like Salt where the father, as always, thinks that his daughter who loves him as meat loves salt does not love him. . .

    2. They think that because no one’s told them no and made it stick. Because no one’s hurt them – physically, them, in specific – for doing what they’re doing, hard enough or often enough or consistently enough for cause and effect to penetrate the mental wall of What They Want.

      1. And I specify “hurt” because people like this only respond to their own, personal, physical pain. They have no shame, and they have no sympathy for others. The only consequences they understand are “that made me – me! – bleed.”

        And even then all they’ll think about is how to hurt you back, or (better) scheme and plot so someone else does it. Not that they need to change their own behavior. Because They’re Never Wrong, You’re The One Who’s Evil. (Because you don’t give them what they want. Even if it’s giving them something they wanted a minute ago, but they don’t want it now, you’re the evil one.)

        1. “And even then all they’ll think about is how to hurt you back, or (better) scheme and plot so someone else does it.”

          Then why give them further chances?

            1. Yep. But if it’s you or them, and you only get one shot…. make it count.

        2. They not only didn’t pay a price, they got rewarded, the same way that the cabal that tried their genuine coup attempt against Trump in connection with the 2016 election got rewarded. And then they wonder why trust in institutions is at an all time low.

    4. Sadly, Monbiot keeps on writing for the Groan and not setting us a good example by removing himself from the resource users. The least he could do is show us how it’s done.

      A commie, son of a commie. Dedicated to death like all the commies.

    5. Sure… let’s rely on the Lunies to supply all our grain. THAT could never backfire!

      1. I keep hoping he fails to look both ways and gets run over by an electric truck full of tofu or organic kale, but not yet.

        1. One can only hope.

          Well, if one doesn’t want to draw the wrong attention.

          Wait, we’re probably all on a list already.

          1. I didn’t say I hope he dies, just that I hope that the karma truck thumps him. And everyone points and laughs as he’s seeing swirling stars and birdies, like in the cartoons.

      2. I remember the big noise about the Club of Rome thing back in the 1970s, Small Is Beautiful, all this stuff. It was crap then, so easily refuted. I made myself unwelcome in a class by pointing out that using their own numbers, the ‘small is beautiful’ dorks were creating more pollution that the big companies they were complaining about, they just didn’t make it all in one place. I recall the professor frowned at being called out like that and continued on regardless.

        Monbiot is still spewing the same tired crap that 20 year old me dismissed as idiotic in 1979. Not because I was some kind of wunderkind, but more that is was such weaksauce self-refuting bullshit. But there he is, still on TV, still telling everybody the world is ending.

        On the other hand, Georgie is looking kinda rough. Maybe the lifetime of lying and the Leftie academic lifestyle is not all he’d hoped it would be, eh? Poor thing.

    9. “…get the global human population down to 500 million”

      Georgie Monbiot dangling from a lamppost: “Getting the population down to 500 million, one Leftist at a time”…

      1. Wow! Way to go, WP! This was a reply to The Phantom’s post of 12:42 on the 26th; I have no idea how it wound up here.

        Oy…

    11. George Monbiot…got to remember that name. When it’s finally time to get serious about reducing the world’s population, I’ll start with him.

    12. “So, Georgie boy, what did YOU have for lunch? Yeast gruel? Algae cakes?”

      “mumble mumble mumble”

      “Did I just hear ‘steak and potatoes’?”

  22. Diversity: giving all periods and cultures across time and space the exact same racial/sexual mix and attitudes of modern American liberals.

    1. My usual snark is their diversity is strangely uniform and their inclusiveness is rather exclusive.

  24. The Wrinkle in Time adaptation seems to have been made by people who actively hate the source material, but it had representation and got the message out there.

    Not the author’s message, but a message.

    1. Ugh, yes. I haven’t watched it. I don’t intend to.

      On the other hand, I always liked the 2003 version. My siblings and I watched it on Netflix way back when we still used Netflix. At some point, I might buy the DVD. Sure, it’s not really an accurate adaptation of the book, but it’s an entertaining film despite that. The Man With Red Eyes takes up the role of main villain and plays it really well, with It being more of a background baddie/environmental hazard at the end of the movie. And the Tesseract scene is incredible! The soundtracks are beautiful too, especially during aforementioned Tesseract scene.

    2. Before it came out, a lot of people were looking forward to it.

      After it came out…

      1. I note with considerable satisfaction that people stayed away from that movie in droves. It lost a $130 million bucks, last I checked. No respect for the source material. As usual.

  25. Stephen King is vile human being, but Shawshank Redemption is a damn good story and an excellent adaptation, and I can’t imagine anyone but Morgan Freeman as Red (who got his nickname in the text story cause he had red hair).

      1. If you’re making a movie and have a chance to cast Morgan Freeman in a role – ANY role, George Washington, Marie Curie, Joan of Arc, Tekumseh – cast him!

        1. There were black Shawnee, because the Shawnee were perfectly willing to adopt runaway slaves. (And they didn’t pull as much crud on the black people, because they knew they wouldn’t want to go back.)

          Mind you, the Cherokee and some other tribes did not adopt black slaves.

          But the Shawnee at the time of Tecumseh were still reorganizing after running away from the Iroquois in six or seven directions, and they brought back some fragmentary tribes when they finally could head back to Ohio. So they were pretty openminded about warm bodies.

          That said, I’m not sure we’re ready to cast a black Panther Across the Sky.

        2. I still fantasize about Morgan Freeman as Umslopogaas to Sean Connery’s Allan Quatermain in a faithful version of Allan Quatermain.

  26. I blame Disney. They did a production of Cinderella produced by Whitney Houston with Moesha as Cinder. My wife is black and our kids are mixed, obviuosly. Liked the production and laughed our asses off at the gene mixing.

    1. On Bridgerton on Netflix. When I saw the previews I initially thought it was some fantasy and was amused. Then I read about both the book series and the Netflix producer. The series was apparently a well recieved example.of the genre (not something I read but popular so there you go). The producer was an idiot who heard that Queen Charlotte was black and ran with it….so I suppose it is a fantasy.
      I found more detail on the black charlotte thing….on snopes.
      They leave as inconclusive but from the tone of the writing in the article it appeared to me that the author thought the whole thing was horse hockey.
      It started with the same british historian who blackfaced Anne Boylen.
      My question for our hostess as this goes back to a mistress of one of the kings of Portugal is this…where Moors subsaharan black muslims or north africans which means caucasian mediterratians from the southern shore.

      1. Obviously, I’m not Sarah but in History “Moors” refers to North African (whites) and Arabs (whites) rather than sub-Saharan black Muslims.

        Mind you some legendary Moors were described as having very black skin but the people telling the legends likely hadn’t met in true Moors.

        1. Complicated by the tendency to use “Moor” and “Muslim” interchangeably. See Kipling:

          “The furrows of far-off Java, the isles of the Spanish Main,
          When they hear my harem is empty will send me my brides again.

          I will take no heed to their raiment, nor food for their mouths withal,
          So long as the gulls are nesting, so long as the showers fall.

          I will scent ’em with best vanilla, with tea will I temper their hides,
          And the Moor and the Mormon shall envy who read of the tale of my brides.”

          1. Nod, there was a strong link (in usage) between Moor and Muslim.

            But the European Contact between Christian and Muslim was from the Middle-East and North Africa not from sub-Saharan Africa.

            1. Thanks for the Moor confirmation. I no longer trust the internet.
              Of course this means having James Earl Jones is blackfacing Othello but Omar Sharif would probably be ok.

              1. Depends, because in ENGLAND there was a tendency to use “moor” for black. See “Dark as a blackamoor.” So Othello might have been black in Shakespeare’s view.
                The Moorish cavalry was almost entirely Berber, so actually black.
                I figure Portugal has more African genetics from Roman legionaries but hey.

                1. There were black Moors who invaded Spain, as well as various other ethnicities of Muslim.

                  But their settled policy was to have a ton of blonde and redheaded Visigoth wives/concubines. So there were not a huge number of black people in Spain after a few centuries, and the guys who were, were very inbred clans.

                  1. There were quite a few occasions when the Spanish Reconquista guys were embarrassed that their “pure blood” was more Roman/Mediterranean looking, and thus darker than the blonde, blue-eyed Muslim kings of Granada. IIRC, which I might not.

        2. LOL. Honey, some British would think I have black skin. Some people in South Carolina in the eighties called me a “Sand N—–” Which of course meant I dissolved into tears and was scarred forever.
          Okay, fine, my answer was “What sand? The North of Portugal is white clay.” 😛

        3. There are illuminated pictures of the bride from the Song of Songs using actual black for her skin but giving her blond hair and blue eyes and very European features — a thin nose even by European standards.

          She looked more like an anime character than someone actually alive.

      1. All black is fine. All white is fine. All Asian is fine.

        But your average fairy tale moves about by walking. They do not have the tech to travel far.

        1. A very good point. One could make a defense for having a Fey/Faerie show up looking different because they’re Fey. That’s pretty much the whole point. They’re supposed to look Other and Not Of Our Kind.

  27. Diversity, Equity, Inclusion (DEI) programs only cut in one direction, it’s a double standard in all its manifestations. DEI also runs counter truth-beauty-goodness.

  28. I wonder if we scream black/yellow/white face everytime they change a characters race if that would get them in fighting.
    Also on Bond….in Live and Let Die Felix Leiter was black.
    Pander Handling at its finest.

    1. I always preferred the fanwank that “Felix Leiter” is the code name for whatever CIA guy was assigned as Bond’s stateside minder.

  29. When I was a preteen I knew that people in Jamaica where black.
    So when I read that Hamilton was the bastard son of some noble from Jamaica…I thought he was black.
    Heh.

  30. Lol. I approve, and (more importantly) appreciate this rant.

    Julia Webb

    Sent from my “smart” phone, so please forgive any bizarre typographical errors.

    >

    2. Remember how it looked like biker gangs might end up driving Antifa out of CHAZ a couple of years back, but didn’t get the chance?

      We might actually get to see that show this time. 😈

  32. For an early discussion of socialist realism see Howard Fast(ov) finding James Earl Jones cast as eastern European traditional Jew on a small stage unrealistic. Fast(ov) was subject to party discipline for failure to honor socialist realism. Notice the timing here:” in 1957, he wrote: There was the evil in what we dreamed of as Communists: we took the noblest dreams and hopes of mankind as our credo; the evil we did was to accept the degradation of our own souls—and because we surrendered in ourselves, in our own party existence, all the best and most precious gains and liberties of mankind—because we did this, we betrayed mankind, and the Communist party became a thing of destruction.”

  33. I can’t watch most network TV shows, since unless the character has been grandfathered in, all the main heroes are usually female, usually BIPOC, sometimes with trendy pronouns, and often just…insufferable. Any non female, BIPOC character is a supporting character designed to show that the STRANG WAMAN PRATAGANIST is a STRANG WAMAN PRATAGANIST.

    Almost all the villains-once again, unless grandfathered-are white males, usually some kind of authority figure that is covering up the crimes of…guess who!…white males.

    I had gotten some confirmation of an “unofficial” bit of information I’d learned that if you’re white and male, don’t bother trying to get a book published by any of the major publishers out there. Especially if you’re white and male and heterosexual and are slightly to the right of Leon Trotsky. If you’re anywhere that is slightly to the right of Leon Trotsky and you don’t have multiple New York Times bestsellers under your belt, don’t bother trying to get a book published with “traditional” publishers.

    …and people wonder why I have a lot of petty cash right now, despite a FEROCIOUS hunger for new entertainment.

      1. I’ve got to sort out so much crap it isn’t even funny.

        That, and I’ve gotten suggestions on things to read, and the “great force” aspect of bad books comes into play very quickly.

  34. Fellow alt-right extremist misogynist.

    There is no grand ancient super-conspiracy to make women weaker than men.

    For an ancient super-conspiracy, you would need a starting point when there are humans capable of thinking.

    The issue is in the neotony and related adaptations necessary to have the spare brain material for thinking.

    In particular, women with the flexible pelvis for bearing big headed babies.

    Issue is, this subtly screws up structural potential compared to men. This is actually known, but the people who know it don’t talk about it in public.

    The pelvis difference causes a subtly different loading of the legs when used exhaustively and energetically, and muscle fatigue then has a much greater tendency to torn ACLs.

    So, from a period predating modern humanity, up until modern surgery, if a human population had a custom of exercising girls to the degree that boys can tolerate (and maybe need), you would maybe lose a lot of girls dead. Torn ACL that can’t be surgically fixed results in permanent crippling, and permanent crippling can actually be pretty lethal fast.

    1. I’m familiar with this, because it was mentioned in my several of my physical anthropology classes, several of which were taught by a professor who’d won an Ig Nobel Prize for research into why pregnant women don’t fall over (women having a degree of lumbar lordosis that shifts their centers of gravity slightly, IIRC).

  35. The subject of this post is explains why I have never seen, & will never watch, (among a lot of other things) the movie ‘Walk the Line’. It pissed me off when I saw the trailers. I met Johnny Cash (not a big brag, in northern Middle Tennessee, you run into musicians now & again in odd places): Phoenix doesn’t look much like Johnny, and the Female Walking Chin looks nothing AT ALL like June.
    What bothered and still bothers me is that these were real people, recently deceased at the time. An enormous number of people knew exactly how they looked, sounded, and moved, yet the producers of the movie ignored all that.
    The male The Walking Chin is, of course, Bruce Campbell, pbuh.

  36. Speaking of actresses:

    My reactions run along the lines of:

    Dear G-d, please make it stop!

    I can’t mock this person. She doesn’t need my help to do it, anyway.

    The coeds who once lived across the street from me in The Underground had a saying for this. In superlative form:
    Yes, you, too, can state and restate the very, very, obvious.

    If you have to deny that you are a lizard being, it proves that you are one. That’s how it works with racism, sexism, and homophobia, right?

  40. I once saw a production of Henry IV Part One in Ashland, Oregon with Hotspur played by a young woman in camo with a big butt. It didn’t persuade me, not so much because of the big butt but because she was just not believable as the most testosterone fueled character in all Shakepeare

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