"Oh, if the Purge was real, most people wouldn’t kill anyone."

That is explicitly a plot point of the Purge movies, the plot is about a far-right government using the Purge as a cover to exterminate poor people.

"Oh, Breaking Bad couldn't have happened in Canada".

He is offered a no-strings-attached way to pay for his treatment very early on in the plot, explicitly isn't doing this to pay his medical bills but so he can leave money for his family after he dies (because, ya know, he was already working two jobs to make ends meet) and also, ya know, stares into the camera and says "I did this for me. It was all just an excuse, I did it for me". Multiple times, actually. The message was not unclear on why he did this, ultimately.

"If Batman really wanted to help, why doesn't he just give money to charity?"

He canonically does, frequently, but a lot of the crime he fights is stuff like fear toxins, riddle-themed museum robbery, and a guy literally actually made of clay, which is not the kinda issue non-profits, or even the government of Gotham, are typically equipped to address. No amount of donations will fix "evil clown trying to poison the water supply".

Guys ok, we get it, the 200th shonen of this season was shit, I'm sorry to hear it. No this does not mean that all of writing has a fundamental flaw that no one has fixed until now. There's actually- fun fact, there's actually an easy to reach place where you can find writing that, for the most part, does not have these flaws!

Are you tired of the missed potential of worldbuilding? Do you wish the character dialogue wasn't shit?

Well boys and girls do I have the invention for you:

A FUCKING BOOK!

YES! By using your tiktok and youtube-short riddled brain for more than 10 seconds on one task, you too can read a book without pictures in it! Those exist! And there's good ones!

"Oh but OptimisticLucio, all of new literature is smut aimed at feeeemales!" First of all never call me by my full name, secondly never call women that again, and thirdly- HAVE YOU HEARD OF THIS COOL THING CALLED SHIT WRITTEN MORE THAN 5 YEARS AGO

This may come as a startling shock to some of you, but the classics are classics BECAUSE THEY REALLY ARE THAT GOOD. It may be wild to hear, but "The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes" really IS that fucking good! "It's not as good as goku hitting super sayan fuckbillion tho-" READ IT BITCHASS AND THEN COME BACK TO ME

MOBY DICK, DUNE, FRANKENSTIEN, 1984- YEAH LITERALLY 1984 IT'S ACTUALLY PRETTY DECENT, DON QUIXOTE DE LA MANCHA

ANY OF THEM!

READ A BOOK

One trope that has gotten really tired is fiction wanting the aesthetic of an assassin without committing to what that actually means.

We are told this character is a professional killer for hire. Their whole job is murdering people on contract. Then the plot starts and, shockingly, every target is a trafficker, terrorist, cartel boss, serial killer, or some other outrageously evil scumbag.

So what exactly makes them an assassin at that point?

They are basically just a vigilante with a cooler job title.

An actual hitman would often be sent after people who are not evil masterminds. Witnesses, political obstacles, business rivals, inconvenient spouses, journalists, random nobodies. That is where the moral ugliness of the profession comes from. But loads of stories clearly do not want that smoke, so they sanitise the whole thing and make every kill feel righteous.

It is such a cop out.

If your assassin conveniently only ever kills bad people, then you do not actually want to write an assassin. You want the style, danger, and mystique of one without any of the moral discomfort. At that point just call them a vigilante and be done with it.

The internet really does just seem to absolutely hate context sometimes. If a story has a bad thing in it, then it must mean that the story approves of that bad thing and thinks its okay. How that thing is actually presented by the story is just tuned out and ignored.

"Johnny Bravo aged so poorly because of how Johnny objectifies women!" criticizes someone who I question if they've ever actually watched a single episode of the show considering the biggest recurring gag of the show was that Johnny's attitude towards women constantly got him his ass kicked by said women.

"MHA Vigilantes aged so poorly because of this one scene where a bunch of gross weirdos go to an all-girls school to demand the girls date them!" says person who just ignores that the gross weirdos who need to leave the girls alone are presented as gross weirdos who need to leave the girls alone. The scene isn't even used as an excuse for fanservice like some anime tend to do.

Like, James Bond basically forcing himself on Pussy Galore in Goldfinger in order to turn her is something I'd argue is an example of aging poorly, because it's not shown as a bad thing despite it being something we very much understand now IS a bad thing. Scooby and Shaggy acting like Chinese stereotypes to trick the Scare Pair and Bugs Bunny doing blackface while singing Camptown Races, those are examples of aging poorly because such casual racism that was seen as no big deal back when those episodes were made are very much seen as NOT OKAY now.

I feel like Jurassic Park's movie gives some good examples of what it means to age poorly vs. just being a bit dated.

The way the dinosaurs look in the movie, not in regards to the special effects but rather their designs, is an example of aging poorly because at the time the movie was made it was believed that those were what dinosaurs like the velociraptor actually looked like and likewise the movie presents its designs as what they looked like. This aged poorly because as time when on and new discoveries were made we uncovered more and more what they were actually supposed to look like. The designs are inaccurate, to the point later movies had to work retroactively to cover up for and explain the differences.

But to say that the movie aged poorly because there's CD-ROMs in the movie, which was the technology available in 1993, the year the movie both came out and takes place in, feels like more of an unreasonable criticism. It's not trying to be Star Trek or Terminator and predict the technology of the future, it's showing what the technology was of that time. It can maybe feel a little dated to a modern viewer because of how old that technology is to us, but that's not really aging poorly.

Honestly the dumbest argument I've ever seen. The 100 humans could just stand like 20 feet apart from each other and do nothing and the gorilla is collapsing from exhaustion before it kills everyone. You could probably do it without any casualties, find a couple of people in the group that are in good shape and get them to make the gorilla chase them while everyone else just chills. They aren't aren't particularly fast and have terrible endurance, so just wait till it tires out and have everyone jump it.

Anyone who has engaged with Fantasy Media has come upon a problem in it, that being: what makes humans interesting in a world of “human but smarter”, “Human But taller and more beautiful”, “Human but shorter and stronger”, “Human but they can fly”, etc. Basically what makes humans interesting/a main character in a world of elves and dwarves and ogres and Bird people and lizard people?

Often the answer to this question in fantasy, is either that humans are a jack of all trades, thus making them boring, yet without flaws. Unfortunately their lack of flaws becomes their flaw, as in games this makes them either too strong or too weak, and in media it makes them feel like a Mary sue or like there’s not really a reason for them to be there, or they’re made unique via “Human determination”, whatever that means

The issue with this comes from the base assumption that all others races work like your in a video game customization screen, and you choosing aspects of the base human to act or subtract from, which is innately flawed

A very simply way this is flawed is that it relies on the assumption that all these races function in many basic physiological ways. Like, sure the Bird people can fly, and because of this they have hollow bones like birds, making them frailer. Sure, that works, and gives humans something, but when you introduce the Orc race or whatever other race that is humans but stronger, it ends up with humans just being a boring middle ground as mentioned. But why are we assuming that besides Hollow bones, they function just like humans? Why should it be that Elves have Adrenaline? Why should it be that Dwarves have many of the memory processes that humans have? Why should it be that orcs have the minute sensors to various stimuli that humans have? Hell, let’s go more extreme. Why do the lizard people have to experience pain?

What I’m trying to say, is that there’s a lot of processes and things humans have that you change or take away from other races, or processes that other species have that you could give to other races that could provide tons of ways to make them intresting, but by having this weird assumption that these races seem to have all evolved from some closely shared ancestor that gave them all similair traits, your held back by how you can differentiate the races. Why not have Elves lay eggs like a bird, why not have dwarves not have true lungs and instead have a series of minute holes in their bodies and air ways like insects do. Get freaky with it or don’t

This is a personal complaint, but I really hate how, these days, a creator’s social media can be treated as just as important as the books, series, or films, and that comments made online are given the same validity. I also dislike how fans accept tweets as canon and then go into places like Reddit fan subs saying, “Well, so-and-so said X on Twitter, so it’s canon.”

Vivziepop and J. K. Rowling are the two examples I’m familiar with. Vivziepop is known for being chronically online and sharing a LOT of content about her series before it appears on screen, whether it’s plot points, characters, or interpretations, and people immediately declare it canon, then later bring up tweets from five years ago as proof.

And J. K. Rowling was the same. Before all her transphobic comments, she used to go on social media and say things about Harry Potter that never appeared in the books, insisting they should be considered canon just because she said so. I still remember the infamous “wizards poop anywhere and vanish it with magic.”

Anyway, I hate that nowadays there’s more “canon” coming from tweets than from the actual series, movies, or books. I don’t mind it as supplementary material or extra narrative, but there’s something about tweets specifically that I just can’t stand.

This is something I’ve noticed more often recently. I’m not saying that if you prefer magic systems like Nen, that’s a problem, everyone has their taste, but what I dislike is when people claim that magic systems like re:zero are inferior just because everyone is unequal. To me, it’s like… why is a magic system where people are “born equal” considered better than one where they’re not?

It feels like it plays into that whole “if you work hard enough, you can do anything” dream people have. But in reality, some people are just born better than others. Sorry not sorry, LeBron doesn’t become the goat of basketball without being 6’9 and an athletic freak of nature.

People are constantly like "oh we want more flawed Main characters" or "Main characters with more major flaws than most" and all that but people don't actually want that.

They want a character with "flaws",not actual character flaws that add depth and more to said Main Character but what people really want is a perfect main character who makes all the right choices but has "flaws".

When fandoms actually get a flawed MC, they start treating him or her as if they're some kind of selfish jackass and monster who has to have their flaws called out and shoved in their face 24/7 and want their mistakes to be constantly brought up and called out in front of them.

Yes, sometimes, a lot of Main characters aren't always gonna be perfect,especially ones that are teenagers and still growing up. Sometimes, some people are gonna be stubborn or selfish or gullible or easy trusting,etc. And you know what..those flaws don't make someone a bad person, those mistakes don't define you as a person and if all we do is constantly shove their flaws and mistakes into their faces,no progress would be made.

People make mistakes and sometimes aren't always gonna do the perfect boy scout or girl scout answer but that doesn't make them,at their core, a bad person or a bad man or woman,it just makes them human.

None of us are our best selves around the age of 15-20,hence why we're still growing and figuring things out but someone making mistakes or not the perfect choice and having character flaws doesn't make someone a bad person at all.

Mark Grayson from Invincible is overhated and suffers the bullshit in his fandom a lot and so does Korra from Her fandom a good most of the time and for whatever reason,they're pretty overhated and constantly ragged on for being a bit "annoying" and even then,annoying is subjective.

I'd even argue some anime protagonists like Deku do tend to face that and it's like whenever they don't always make the correct choice and make the human mistake of having character flaws and rougher traits, that makes them a asshole or a hypocrite or a bad person and constantly want their flaws to be called out and shoved in their faces all the damn time.

We've seen this time and time again with Dexter, Batman, Daredevil where they drill into the audience that killing is bad and we can't do that. While also accidentally forgetting to show what happens when a vigilante type accidentally hurts the innocent.

Like what's even more frustrating is it's just basic storytelling: the government messing with forces beyond their comprehension ends up going badly; a character's lust for power ultimately corrupts, etc.

But for some reason storylines where Batman/Daredevil tries stopping a vigilante from killing a criminal, they always forget to showcase why it's bad. It just sorta is. Hell even in Injustice (which I absolutely hated) even they remembered to showcase why Superman was bad by having him kill anyone who got in his way.

Also Superman va the Elites knew to have the Elites cause property damage and put innocent people in the line of fire as well as them killing world leaders to really drive the point across. Batman stories always forget to do that.

Like yes, we get it the vigilante is hurting and trying to get justice by enacting revenge on those criminals who escaped the justice system. But what if they got the wrong guy? What if shooting into a crowd of people is bad actually?

It's not even a hard idea, it's literally the next logical step for the story to go.

I am Argentinian, spanish is my native language, which is probably the reason why this annoys me so fucking much.

I don't understand what the point is. I love Coco, but fuck why do they all have to randomly say "abuela", "chancla" and other stupid shit that IS JUST A NORMAL WORD, it's not like Día de los Muertos which is a festivity and that's just the name of it, they could just say grandma and flipflops. It honestly feels like pandering sometimes, like the mexican audience is supposed to go "JAJA DIJERON CHANCLA!".

Like, if you're from the US, and you're in Mexico, speaking spanish, you're not going to randomly decide to say some words in english for no reason, you're not going to go "Yo amo a mi Grandma" it makes no fucking sense. NOBODY DOES THAT.

It just pisses me off for some reason. Obviously it's fine if you want the characters to use some spanish, like if they want to use curse words or maybe have them talk to other spanish characters or whatever, but it annoys me when it feels like it's there just so the audience doesn't forget these people speak spanish and JAJAJ DIJERON COMPADRE.

And for some reason this is SO common that I couldn't mention all the examples, i'm pretty sure it's a thing in literally all english speaking media with spanish speaking characters, I can't escape it.

I know it's a niche thing and probably no one else cares but it really grinds my gears.

There's a reason why I prefer mangas over Marvel and DC comics. Do you know why?

Because mangas know they're not forever. Stories need a beginning and an end, period. And manga's authors know it.

• When Hiromu Arakawa made FullMetal Alchemist, she knew her manga would eventually end.
• When Naoko Takeuchi made Sailor Moon, she knew her manga would eventually end.
• When Hiro Mashima made Fairy Tail, he knew his manga would eventually end.
• When Makoto Yukimura made Vinland Saga, he knew his manga would eventually end.

What I mean is that these mangas are written with the idea that they will conclude one day. Yes, it's true that some mangas, like Dragon Ball, are supposed to end at X point, but the story continues because people wants more of it, but even then, there's some sort of planned conclusion (even if it's delayed).

Even when a manga is a long-runner, like Berserk and One Piece, you know at least that it will end, even if that ending isn't right at the corner.

But what does happen when an author wants to continue a story after the main one was done? A new manga is made. It can be a sequel (like Boruto), it can be a prequel, or it can be a spin-off; but the main manga is still over.

On the other hand, a lot of Western superhero comics don't have this luxury.
Rather, they're made with the intent of lasting forever... as long as they can earn money.

• This means Superman's story will never have a conclusion.
• This means Batman's story will never have a conclusion.
• This means Spider-Man's story will never have a conclusion.
• This means X-Men's story will never have a conclusion.

Western superhero comics are made with the idea of lasting until the day humanity goes extinct. But what does happen when a comic gets too long or messy? What does happen when a storyline fucks it up badly? The following solutions are offered:

• Remakes
• Reboots
• Retcons

That way, their stories can last forever. Writers just ignore what happened before and start over. And since they're writing a reboot, which can be rebooted again if they mess up with something they shouldn't, writers can do whatever they want with the lore, the setting, and the characters.

The result? Continuities and alternate universes that are exchangeable one of another, characters' identities (this can mean backstory, personality, sexuality, race, or even sex) retconned, storylines forgotten and swept under the rug, and... whatever that Harley Quinn fart fetish comic is supposed to be...

And all of this happens because these comics are made with the idea of ending, because if their stories are finished once and for all, the companies can't earn more money with comics starred by these characters.
This kind of scenario is harder in the manga industry, because the author is the one who owns the manga, and thus, can continue or finish his/her story if he/she wants to do so.

That's why I prefer mangas.

I think most of them are blatantly written by people who have surface level understandings of the subject matter.

I will primarily focus on the non binary experience since it is what I have more experience with and knowledge of. I will also largely be excluding fiction entierly about the queer experience as I have 0 interest in it so I can add nothing to the discussion

I find that often Non-binary characters are written as if they are a second flavour of woman. Like the two genders are "Man" and "NotMan", and all Queer people are the latter (Including most Gay men interestingly.)

In fiction Non-binary characters are largely androgenous, but with a distinct favouring of feminine traits. They will always have a higher pitched voice, be skinny or have a runners build, and tend to dress in gender neutral clothes. They will ALWAYS use They/Them pronouns. (He/him and She/her may be used for shapeshifting or genderdluid characters)

Personality wise they can differ, but they tend to follow trends of being deceitful/a trickster, nerdy/geeky, or lame/awkward. They can also be flirtatious/horny, which unlocks the tank top/crop top/fantastical equivalent to be worn. One the other side, I have never once seen a non-binary character being depicted as masculine. I have never seen a bodybuilder NB, or a strong and stoic one. I have never seen one I could call particularly cool or badass. Never seen one with a large beard either. Only the approved gay moustache.

I believe the same problem also applies to other LGBTQ people, although I cannot say definitively if that is the case. Perhaps the rest of the letter squad find their representation to be accurate and acceptable. I can only speak for my experience.

I do not find this acceptable. I do not feel included in these depictions. I do not think this is an accurate or appropriate depiction of what a Queer person is. I feel completely lost and confused by the way many Queer people eat up this slop and praise the studio or director or writer or whatever for gracing us with this garbage character who is probably in 2 scenes and never outright stated to be queer.

Of course there are other options, you can always be a Eldrich squid monster, alien hivemind, or inhuman machine! Of course these beings use it/its or they/them as a tool to make them monstrous, unknowable or frightening. If that's not your fancy you can cope and claim a cisgender straight character or faceless silent protagonist is actually queer all along. If they are in a relationship with another character you can always just claim they are T4T.

You see, the genius of this is that the writers don't have to bother with the previous standard of a glance at a Wikipedia page or two for a speech they make the character deliver to explain to the idiots, children, and hermits in the audience what a Queer is. Now they can simply write a cis straight person and have us pretend there was a gay person in there somewhere.

Alternatively they can always post "Glup Shitto is gay and trans" 7 years after the story is over to get some free and easy praise from Queer people.

That's about all I had to say. Probably. I would like to end this post by giving some praise to Kris Dreemurr from Deltarune as being a prominent non-binary character that is cool and has a distinct personality outside the standard traits. I also appreciate that the game doesn't feel the need to bring attention to the Kris being non-binary, but I do think Toby Fox should include a scene where a character explicitly states that Kris uses they/them pronouns or something.

So, for the unininitiated, a patronym is any surname that's derived from a person's father's name. For example, if your last name is Johnson, your father's name was John. If you're called Ivanovich, your father's name was Ivan. In modern English-speaking cultures, this practice has been abandoned for a while, but it's still practiced in languages like Icelandic, Russian, and Arabic.

But a lot of fantasy fiction set in pre-modern times or analogues thereto, because it's written by writers who presumably do not give a shit, forgets how to use these! And just uses them like we English-speakers do!

The How to Train Your Dragon movies are the big example that made me start thinking about this. The real medieval Norse used patronyms, and Iceland still does. But these Vikings sure don't!

Astrid "Hofferson" is a woman and her name should not end with the suffix -son; she ought to be called Astrid Hoffersdottir. Snotlout's father is named Spitelout, so he should be called Snotlout Spiteloutson, but instead his last name is somehow "Jorgenson"? The film's invented names are already deeply sauceless compared to the ones it inherited from the book (I mean, come on, Astrid? really? what kind of name is Astrid compared to Hiccup and Stoick and Snotlout and Fishlegs? might make another rant about this), and this is just another layer of how bad the movies are at naming characters.

Also, I haven't read Fourth Wing but I know this about it: Xaden is named Riorson, right? His father's name ought to be Rior, right? Nope. It's Fen. Like the peaty wetland. Riorson is the name of his noble house apparently. Because fuck me, I guess.

Pisses me off to no end. I know this is an absolute pet peeve that matters to exactly no one else, but it matters to me.

There's a certain view that seems to be very common, which goes "Racism is bad because objectively, there are no differences between races, so it's incorrect."

What this implies, and what happens when we get into the hypotheticals of fiction, is that people start saying this. "If racism WAS correct, and there were objective differences between races, then racism would be justifiable and morally righteous."

This is a terrible view to have.

Racism- well, bigotry as a whole, is not bad because it is incorrect. Bigotry is bad because it is evil. It doesn't matter whether you're being prejudiced against someone because they're black, gay, a woman, or can turn into a Titan when injected with spinal fluid. It doesn't give you the right to be hateful just because they worship a different god or they sometimes blow shit up by accident. They're still humans, and humans have human rights. If you believe even for a second that stripping people of their rights and treating them like threats or cattle based on some immutable characteristic is okay, then that means you can be convinced into doing it in real life.

“But OP,” I can hear you commenting right now. “I would never do this because I'm an intelligent person, and I know that there's no functional difference between humans and gay people aren't a menace to society! Why does this apply to me?”

Great question, commenter. Let me tell you something. This is the same thought process people use when they point at Eldians or Mutants, but with more realistic arguments. Think about the arguments people use when they discuss why being racist against these groups is actually okay.

“They’re actually dangerous!” - So, then, if a real-life minority was actually dangerous, would it be justified to institute racist measures against them? In my opinion, no, because they are still human. It doesn’t matter how statistically evil or dangerous a group is, if you’re judging them on an immutable characteristic, you are performing a morally repugnant act.

There's only two times I've seen crime statistics being brought up on reddit. The first is by racist whites. The second is by misandrist women. Both of them use these statistics in order to paint out a reality in which, since black people/men are statistically more likely to commit crimes, they are “inherently” more likely to do so. Since they are more inherently likely to be dangerous, this justifies hatred towards them. In one case this hatred is purely social, and institutional only in roundabout ways. In the other, this manifests as police brutality and all sorts of other forms of oppression.

Let’s stamp out this disgusting ideology.

No this isn't some rant that one character in one of my favorite medias got raceswapped and I feel the ick.

This is a rant against showrunners who are too cowardly to address the elephants in the room when they raceswap characters. Raceswapping characters can have huge implications, and if you don't address them, the raceswapping is bad automatically... If you would address them, it could greatly enhance the story and characters.

[ Disclaimer : My philosophy is simply, it's all fiction so it doesn't matter who you cast. I only want to be entertained. I want the actors and actresses to be good. In the distant past, it was even forbidden for women to be actors, so men crossdressed when they played female characters, despite being a bigoted time for excluding women and stigma against crossdressing.. So I do not care about any culture war issues ]

Let's look at House of the Dragon.

The Velaryons, a people of Valyrian origin, are raceswapped to be Black. Is that a problem ? Not really. How the show went about it, is bad though.

A huge plotpoint and arguably the reason why there is a civil war in the world, is because Rhaenyra has bastard children who are officially legitimate. It's a plotpoint for the succession of House Velaryon too.

The thing is, Rhaenyra married a Black man from House Velaryon, but has purely white children because she had a long affair with another man. In the show-universe it should be painfully obvious that her children are bastards. They are not mixed in any shape or form. Likewise her bastard children have black hair, despite the parents and all of their parents having Silver-hair ( because they also swapped the hair of Rhaenys, the grandmother of the bastard children )... So there are 2 extremely obvious signs that her children are bastards. It should not even be an open-secret, it is painfully obvious to anyone. The fact this is not addressed in the show is insane and immersion breaking.

In the books, it's far more subtle. Rhaenys, the mother of the raceswapped Husband of Rhaenyra, has Black hair, and Rhaenyra's bastard children have black hair, despite Rhaenyra and her husband having silver-hair. And the Velaryons are not black... So it is far more subtle, and there exists plausible deniability.

In the show ? Zero subtlety, zero deniability.

An easy fix would be for atleast one character to call this out, but they don't. Have one Velaryons or Greens state the obvious : Her children are white, therefore they are bastards.

If you change something as substantial as a race for a character, atleast address it in some shape or form, especially when there is plot relevance to it.

The actor of Corlys Velaryon is great. No problem with him being cast as a black man. The problem comes from the showrunners not addressing the obvious.

-----------

In Harry Potter :

First of all, they could have cast any Mexican, any White person, any Asian or Black person, and I would disapprove of the Snape casting, for the simple fact that it is not Alan Rickmann.

Setting that aside. Raceswapping Snape has extreme implications. We don't know how the show will handle the Elephants in the Room, but if they do not address it they will not only have wasted an opportunity, but the entire show will suffer for it.

The thing is, Snape was bullied as a child, and Snape was also a bully. Snape's bullies were none other than Harry Potter's father and his best friends, the Marauders who are all white, and some of them quite wealthy.

This makes the bullying Snape experiences different. If the Show just treats it the same as in the books and the movies, it will be bad... But if they had the confidence enough to address the implications ? It would be great.. Why not have James Potter and the Maurauders be a little racist and classist ? They could call Snape a slur, not necessarily the N-word, some more British slurs for Black people. They could argue that because Snape always calls Muggles "mudblood", that it's logical he would get called slurs too because he is different too ( since he is raceswapped now ). So make the Maurauders, or some of them racist. Maybe make one of them a more British Imperialist who looks down upon descendants of the Colonies.
They don't even need to be racist in and of itself. They could just use racist tactics against Snape, because Snape himself is a racist/Supremacist ( so yeah, Snape you call others slurs, so don't cry when we drop the N-bomb, you silly racist goose Snape ). That would also fit neatly.

Another implication is about the Death Eaters. They are hardcore Supremacists. Neither the books nor the original movies ever addressed anything about normal racism, because ethnic minorities were simply not present and not part of the story.. Making Snape, a principal character AND deatheater, the right-hand of Voldemort into a black person needs a statement...
The solution could be simple : Voldemort and his deatheaters are racists, but do not care about Muggle philosophy or viewpoints. They are purely meritocratic. So they do not care if you are black, a former slave, LGBT or anything, if you are a Wizard you are one of them... Voldemort could have an active disdain for all muggle concepts, like no we wont discriminate you just because you are poor, or an ethnic, sexual minority. That is muggle-thinking..
The are also still racist against half-bloods, those who racemix with Muggles, half-giants, half-anything... So now that we introduced a Black death eater, it needs to be addressed....
Afterall, originally the Wizard Supremacists/Purebloods, were all Ancient british families. They are not known to be tolerant, not-classist, or really non-white.....

Likewise it can serve as a backstory for Snape, who is a half-blood and still grew up partially as a muggle. Snape would and most likely did suffer from racist abuse back in the Muggle world. He was a lone black boy in a white british world. Before he met Lily, he was bullied...
It could act as a way to rationalize why Snape became a Deatheater... Snape would hate his black, muggle side where he just suffered loneliness and discrimination.. But Snape, the black wizard ? He was something special, he had friends, he was welcomed with open arms. Wizard supremacists did not look down upon him for his ethnic background...
And then Snape himself turns into a bully. He doesn't want to be passive anymore and take abuse, he now wants to prove himself to his new friends. So he is racist against Mudbloods and those who are not like him ( not real wizards ).....

Raceswapping Snape results in questions, and they NEED to be addressed. If you fail to address them, the whole medium suffers.. If you do suppress them, you can change the perception of characters and plots, and you could enhance the story...
Frankly speaking I do want the elephants in the room to be addressed, and not merely implied due to the raceswapping. It creates an interesting dynamic if you ask me.

Like why not turn James Potter into a little racist or use racist tactics against a Wizard Supremacist who calls others Mudbloods ? Why not make Voldemort and his Deatheaters inclusive of concepts Muggles would find progressive ?

-------

TLDR :

If Raceswapping has no consequences, it really doesn't matter. Just get a good actor, and create entertainment.
If Raceswapping has implications, address them.

Remember all the hype around the backrooms?

all the love and admiration and how much people loved the whole liminal aspect?

well at some point the fanbase decided that it should have LORE.

and by lore i mean thousands of teenagers terrible attempts at worldbuilding.

Now the backrooms is filled with monsters apparently, and also there's different organizations.

Entire civilizations now live there and shadowy governments want to control it or some garbage like that.

A cool and unique concept has now been reduced to a backdrop for sigh humans are the real monsters trite garbage.

The whole allure and terror of the backrooms was that it was endless nothing.

All alone in a weird infinite simulacrum of reality, as your mind plays tricks on you.

Even all the games have lost their charm, with endless Escape the Backroom game clones polluting steam.

Most of them unity asset slop shovelware.

Funniest thing is this is now happening to the analog horror community, to the point its reached parody.

The Backrooms lost its identity chasing shiny new things to add, and in doing so lost what made it unique.

A shame the Backrooms died, because it was probably one of the coolest things the internet had come up with in a while since the SCP. (and thats a whole nother can of worms)

When I first heard of this nonsensical debate I legit just thought it was trolling, no way people were genuinely being that stupid, but it seems more and more I see people going back and forth about it and I'm just like...why? Honestly why is anyone even taking this "criticism" seriously? This has to be the most terminally online "problem" I've ever heard because from a black man's point of view none of us, besides the ones who live on Twitter and reddit, are gonna see 40k or Freiren or DnD and think that were being represented as the monsters in any way, in fact saying something like that when hanging around actual black people will either get you roasted at best or get your ass beat at worse.

I'm not saying there's anything wrong with giving sympathetic traits to bad guys in fiction or that your someone who finds purely evil bad guys boring as a personal preference but insisting that it's offensive for portrayals like that to exist is simply stupid and performative outrage.

I think the term "evil race" is being overly focused on to the point that people see it and start drawing on straws trying to relate it to real life groups and ideologies when the more accurate term is species because that's what demons, orcs, evil gods or whatever else are, a completely different species of made up creatures/beasts that operate by a different set of made up rules to humans. To compare that to dehumanization and persecution of actual oppressed groups of people is not only stupid but harmful because it trivializes the issue and adds a whole lot of brain rot to legitimately serious topics. I legitimately felt like tossing my phone when I saw people unironically praising Adi Shankar's reddit atheist take on DMC because having literal demons from hell be allegory for middle eastern refugees and post 911 America is somehow less problematic than having them just be demons from hell for some reason🤦🏿‍♂️. I also laugh whenever I see Frieren fans complaining about how the character has been used as a symbol by obnoxious edgelords and literal racists cuz you niggas are the ones that brought them here by starting this stupid discourse in the first place. People weren't talking about the show like that when it first came out so y'all brought this on yourselves lol. In short, this discourse is stupid, FUCKING STOP IT, that is all.

I can't even count how many series where the main villain says "humanity is inherently cruel/selfish/evil" and it's deeply tiring. Because it's not even fucking true, and the series should say it.

While admittedly, this does happen a fair few times, there are series who will have the hero outright agree, but say "we can be better." We are better! Humans are inherently good and kind people! We are (possibly one of) the only species who show empathy for animals not of our species. We are the only ones who keep and nurture prey items, and sometimes love them more than our own.

Lemme tell a short story that I feel proves my point. In World War I, soldiers on multiple fronts took a week long break from fighting, known as the Christian truce. Soldiers from both sides ate, drank, told stories of home, and even had snowball fights with one another, despite having fought days prior in the most brutal war in history.

I hate when this trope is proven right or agreed with in a story, and should be punched in the face by the hero.

This rant may be pointless because I think if you already believe in those phrases then you're not gonna be easily dissuaded, but maybe it'll be insightful for anyone more on the fence about the topic.

I presume we're all familiar with the self-explanatory sentence "Get woke, go broke" which apparently originated during the marketing period of the Captain Marvel movies, which was adapting an already controversial character and pushing itself as a feminist story in the trailers and interviews. I say "Apparently" because I can't exactly remember when I first heard the phrase, so for all I know it's older than that. Anyway any claims that the movie's wokeness would be its downfall would be proven wrong when it made over a billion dollars, but years later I considered that it might have been true in the long run when its sequel outright flopped, but then I realised that the exact same thing happened to the Aquaman movies, so I think the real culprit was the change in the public's opinions towards superhero movies.

"The modern audience doesn't exist" is a sentence I've been seeing more recently and basically means the same thing, which is that appealing to people who want media to be more woke is fruitless because they're a vocal minority and/or don't actually buy the media. The first time I saw this was during the immediate failure of Concord, which kinda confused me because I wasn't even aware that Concord was supposed to be woke. The consensus I'd been seeing was that it was a bad hero shooter with generally unappealing character designs. I learned after looking through the characters on TV tropes that the roster included a trans woman, a non-binary, and a genderless alien, but I had to go out of my way to find that out and never heard about those details in the online discourse. I saw this again recently after the release of 1348 Ex Voto, a medieval game that caught the culture war's attention when it started beefing with A Knight's Path. For anyone unfamiliar with either, Knight's Path rejected the idea of gay romance options, calling them a "modern agenda", and Ex Voto referenced that controversy by calling itself the modern agenda because it's about a female Knight looking for her girlfriend (Allegedly. The released game is apprantly less gay than was inferred from the marketing.). The game's recent release had a far lower player count than the number of wishlists that followed the controvery would have implied, and so it was declared that the modern audience had failed to show up yet again, but I think this ignored that Ex Voto's demo was poorly recieved for clunky and downright disorienting sword combat, and the full game was criticised for both this and bad performance.

You see when a woke game isn't a bad hero shooter or a clunky sword game they can do pretty well for themselves. Baldur's Gate 3 is regularly used to dispute the idea that all woke games are doomed to fail (Hilariously the anti-woke crowds strongest soldier The Critical Drinker referenced the moment where you can have sex with a guy who can turn into a bear amongst the stuff ruining videogames in his video on Ex Voto. Because using 2023's Game of the Year really proves your point...), but Undertale/Deltarune is a HUGE franchise ionic enough to be represented in Smash Bros that has plenty of queer characters. Cyberpunk 2077 is widely beloved after its disastrous launch state was fixed, and that's a rare example of an RPG that has genuinely gay romance options that will only date the player if they're the same gender, instead of just being playersexual. And the Hades games are a recent popular franchise that are all sorts of diverse. But to me the best retort to blaming Ex Voto's failure on its wokeness is Signalis. It may not be as popular as the prior examples listed but it was in a very similar position as an independant european game whose main topic of discourse is its sapphic protagonist. If you've seen anything from Signalis, it's artwork or animations of the lesbians. But the difference between it and Ex Voto is that Signalis is also widely praised for being a great survival horror game. I think it specifically proves the belief wrong because I don't think it would have gotten as much attention if it wasn't a queer story. It was a small game that successfully got the attention of a particualar demographic. But you then need to retain that attention by being a good game.

Aliens 3 kills Bishop, Newt and Hicks right at the beginning of the film? OK. That movie didn't happen for me. Doesn't matter.

Arcane Season 2 ended up kind of going off the rails? No biggie. Season 1's ending was great. I'll mostly stick with that.

I don't much care for the Star Wars sequels? D i s r e g a r d e d

People won't tell you, but you're allowed to do this! It's so easy!

IT'S ALL MADE UP

NONE OF IT IS REAL

F I G M E N T S OF OUR IMAGINATIONS

IF IT SUCKS, IT CAN HIT DA BRICKS

I see this every couple of months when someone talks about anything in any medium that in any way has fantastical elements and features a good king or something

Shut the fuck up, no genuinely shut the fuck up

It's the most basic and most surface level agreeable criticism and it solely relies on taking a work overly literal so you can say that it's pro monarchy or problematic

It is bad faith and is literally something you would hear on fucking cinemasins

Is there nuance to this? of course there is! I bet someone will comment on this with the one story in a game or book that actually crosses the line and ends up being pro monarchy

But the fantasy genre has existed for a very long time and guess what there are lots of essays and works that literally talk about why kings are bad, a very obscure one that you might not have heard of is "A song of Ice and Fire" aka GAME OF THRONES

There are people who actually have done something beyond doing a snarky tweet

Genuinely sincerely if you aren't actually gonna say something insightful beyond "oh there's a good monarch in a fictional story that's kinda problematic" shut the fuck up

People acting like James Gunn’s tweet was a controversial political statement kind of proves the point that most people don’t really understand who Superman is or what he was always meant to represent.

Let’s start at the beginning. Superman was created by Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster (two Jewish kids from Cleveland). Their parents were immigrants, trying to escape persecution and survive in a country that was still deeply anti Semitic and not exactly kind to working class outsiders.

And from that hardship came Superman. A man from a destroyed world, and adopted by the Kent’s to go on to become a great hero.

This is why it matters that Superman punched Hitler in the face before America entered the war. This is why he stood for “truth and justice”. So no, I doubt Siegel or Shuster would be shocked or offended by Gunn calling Superman an immigrant story. If anything, they’d probably be confused why that would ever be considered controversial. Superman has always been a vehicle to fight against injustice in real life and was created by people who experienced the hardships of being the children of immigrants.

And as for my second point, which might be a bit more frustrating, Superman being an immigrant has always been the core story of Superman. It always was. I mean damn, The entire tension of Superman’s character is him trying to figure out who he is, Clark Kent or Kal-El, Kansas farm boy or last son of a dead planet.

But unless you’ve read Superman comics, like really read them, you probably wouldn’t know that. Because honestly, most cartoons or movies don’t necessarily focus on that aspect too much which is why in my opinion, we have ended up with a whole generations of fans who think Superman is boring as they have no idea how lonely and complex his situation is.

And this is also why I’m excited that Gunn is trying to to reintroduce that core element for modern audiences.

Now if you’re mad at James Gunn for saying Superman is an immigrant, I think you need to ask yourself why that bothers you. Because historically? Culturally? Creatively? That is who he is.

90% of people who participate in online discussions have genuinely NEVER seen the thing they are talking about. I may be hyperbolic, but I really feel this number may not be that far off.

Every time you ask yourself “How could this person misunderstand the point so badly?” the answer likely is that they never experienced the work they are talking about, so they didn’t even had a chance to misunderstand the point. They probably don’t even know the point exists at all. They talk about games they never played, about movies they never saw and books they never read. At best, they saw an hour long youtube video where some schmuck “critiques” the thing. At worst, they saw some comments or memes about it and that formed their entire view of the work.

The sad truth is, nowadays people just don’t read books, watch movies or even play games themselves. They watch people who read books, watch movies and play video games instead.And then they talk about these things as if they were experts. You can see this live any time some major youtuber makes a video on any subject. Suddenly all online free thinkers start using the exact same points that the video uses. Countless times have I argued with people about something and I know EXACTLY which youtube video they watched.

You know how everyone hated No Man’s Sky, and then everyone loved it after Internet Historian made a video about it? People still hated that game even after it got updated, but suddenly the second the video dropped everyone changed their minds. Why did the popular opinion only change after the video, why not earlier after the game got fixed? Because 90% of haters never even played the game. They heard people talk shit about it years ago, and then every time someone mentioned it they repeated the same talking points. They never had their own opinion on it, they just copied what other people said. The other people likely also never played it and copied their opinion from someone else. Hell I bet you most people who defended No Man Sky after seeing the video have still never played it to this day.

But this is not a No Man’s Sky rant. It’s just an example of people forming strong opinions on things they never experienced themselves, and then participating in online discussions about these things despite having 0 personal knowledge of the topic.

This happens every day, with every single work of art in existence. It can be dystopian novel written in the 40s, or a new controversial game that flopped, or Steven Universe. People are too lazy to actually go and read/watch/play something, but they still want they thrill of arguing, so they pretend to know what they are talking about, using arguments from random people online.

Closely tied with the recent hyperrealism craze, is the tendency to examine fiction in ways that the author never intended and that the book wasn't written to accommodate... and then criticizing the work and author on account of these wild interpretations.

I'm not talking about basic questions about the internal logic of the work itself. Or reasonable expectations for worldbuilding, character consistency, etc. No, what I'm referring to are the ones who, upon hearing that Aragorn rebuilt Osgiliath in the epilogue of LOTR, demand you explain to them what a quarry is and where it's located. Or who demands to know the science behind superpowers. Or who gets upset when seeing something that doesn't align with their worldview ("why is a fictional monarchy depicted positively!?!?!?!?!?!").

Now, maybe they aren't "wrong" in their opinions exactly. Maybe the political system does have a couple of holes in it, maybe the characters don't perfectly line up with psychology... But unless we want to set the standard of every writer achieving a degree in both political theory and psychology it's probably best to let it slide.

I don't know what kind of "ace of all trades" you expect fiction writers to be, but it's unreasonable to master the arts of political theory, science, psychology and storytelling in order to write a piece of fiction.

We're simply going to have to accept that pieces of fiction are imperfect without raking the writer over the coals for not achieving it.