M. Night Shyamalan really sucks.

[ishyface]

queenlyzard linked to this earlier: These Are My Colours by ssj10, a post about the whitewashing of Avatar: The Last Airbender in the upcoming M. Night Shyamalan film. For anyone who doesn't know: the original show was set in a fantasy world and featured characters who were primarily Asian and Inuit. The live action cast includes such non-white people as, um, Jackson Rathbone. (Who said that "I think it's one of those things where I pull my hair up, shave the sides, and I definitely need a tan." Why, that's brilliant, White Dude! Although getting a tan might be too much bother- why not just apply a little face paint and speak in a funny voice, that should get the point across.) The only main characters who remain POC in the film are antagonists.

Yeah. I, uh, won't be going to see this movie.

Okay, so I am white as fuck. I am privileged as fuck. My background is pure Anglo-Irish. I don't know what it feels like to deal with racial discrimination, or to grow up in a world where nobody looks like me. I don't.

However! I am also queer. And I remember being a wee Ish and discovering Tanya Huff and realizing that hey, people write fantasy novels with gay people in them. Gay people who are heroes! And don't die! And fall in love and fight evil and save the world! And stuff! It was the first time I'd ever found those kinds of stories about people like me who weren't just tragic figures or the butt of some stupid joke or evil child-molesting villains (Terry Goodkind, you may SIT THE FUCK DOWN), and I loved the shit out of them. If I'd found out that someone was making a movie out of, say, The Fire's Stone, but decided to make all the main characters straight (except for the antagonist, because everyone knows it's fine for the evil dudes to be homos!), I wouldn't have been able to shrug it off or see past it or "enjoy the movie for its own merits." A big part of why I loved those stories was because I saw myself in them in a way I didn't in stories without any queer characters. Erasing that would have felt like erasing me, in a small, symbolic way.

When I think about the way this movie has been cast, I think about all the people who saw the show and loved it not just because it was good but because they saw themselves in it in a way they didn't see themselves anywhere else. Because the heroes were people who looked like them. And I think about how it must feel to have that taken away, to have a bunch of Hollywood talking heads say, "No one will enjoy this story if its heroes look like you, so we are going to make them white. Oh, except the bad guys, they can totes be brown."

I don't know what that feels like, but I can fucking guess.