All articles tagged with #race swapping
J.K. Rowling publicly supported HBO’s Harry Potter reboot and urged calm on social media as Paapa Essiedu is cast as Snape, a race-swapped move that has sparked renewed discussion about how race and casting choices will shape the book-to-series adaptation over the coming years.
The depiction of Aragorn, a character from Lord of the Rings, as a black man in a Magic: The Gathering card game has sparked controversy online. While some argue that race-swapping improves representation in popular works of fiction, others say it is not true to the source material. Aragorn is described in the books as of Numenorean descent, a fictitious group of people who were fair-skinned. However, in a letter, Tolkien wrote that Numenoreans were "best pictured in (say) Egyptian terms," though it is debated whether he meant in cultural or ethnic terms.
Adele James, star of Netflix's "Queen Cleopatra," dismisses the backlash from Egyptian nationals and their government towards the docuseries' race-swapping of their history, stating that "blackwashing isn't a thing." She believes that the response is based on self-hatred and racism. James defends the series' race-swapping, claiming that the response from the Egyptian people is "100% fundamentally rooted in racism, which is a very modern ideology." "Queen Cleopatra" is now streaming on Netflix.