what is so fascinating about all this is that there are so many other ways they could have handled this situation or prevented it from happening in the first place, but this is apparently them trying to salvage things.Ā Reading the article, the subject (Cargill)ās blame game sounds almost strategic (full of logical holes but, strategic).Ā Heās not telling the audience, āeveryone is stupid for calling us out on our racist trash.āĀ Heās saying, āI tried to not be racist and I tried to do this in a way that pleased everyone and some people just canāt be happy.āĀ Because that distinguishes the potential audience between āsocial justice warriors,ā already an internet pejorative, and āeveryone else.āĀ You donāt want to be an annoying SJW, do you?Ā So youāll go along with what Cargill says then, right?Ā Itās still very childish, but itāsā¦interesting.Ā Let me set it up and see if I canāt play with this a bit.
If thereās one thing that American audiences hate, itās being told that our art is bowing to the demands of foreigners/censors.Ā But this way, the way that Cargill is spinning it, you say no, Marvel is not bowing to the Communist Party of China, theyāre not compromising art to make money, no, theyāre standing up to whiny social justice warriors on the internet.Ā Theyāre trying to be inclusive of Chinese feelings.Ā That sounds much better.
Ugh, and the WAY they try to spin the China thing too.Ā This is the worst paragraph, Iām just gonna c/p it in all its rageworthy filth:
Created by Stan Lee and Steve Ditko as part of Doctor Strangeās origin story in Strange Tales #110 in 1963, the Ancient One seen there is, as the screenwriter describes it, as āa racist stereotype who comes from a region of the world that is in [a] very weird political place. He originates from Tibet, so if you acknowledge that Tibet is a place and that heās Tibetan, you risk alienating one billion people who think that thatās bullshit and risk the Chinese government going, āHey, you know one of the biggest film-watching countries in the world? Weāre not going to show your movie because you decided to get political.āā
First off, white washing a character is not a great improvement on a racist stereotype, like at all.Ā But he went there for the sympathy vote, invoking the storyās shitty racist origins as reason why him making a change is good.Ā And thatās a fair point: the character should change (not necessarily lose his ethnic and national identity altogether, just you know, get written less racist).
He justifies changing the ethnic identity of this character because, he says, keeping the Tibetan storyline would be āalienating one billion people who think that [Tibetan independence is] bullshit.āĀ Alienating the maybe six million TIBETAN people isnāt the problem.Ā What the screenwriter says is, āone billion people who think that thatās bullshit.āĀ Much more digestible.Ā Also mathematically one billion is more than six million and in ticket sales.
Even when Cargill calls China āone of the biggest film-watching countries in the world" and talks about the (purely financial) fear of not getting a movie released there, itās still part of the sympathy ploy. Ā See? Ā He just wants to make money. Ā What could be more understandable, more American?
THEN, he constructs this hypothetical where the Chinese government bans his film saying he MADE it political.Ā Not China.Ā Chinaās censorship laws didnāt make this political.Ā Chinaās occupation of Tibet did not make this political.Ā Whiny people on the internet made this political by insisting the Ancient One be Tibetan.Ā Cargill was just working to make a fun movie out of a comic book, and as we all know, comic books are never political in origin (here is a picture of Captain America punching Hitler because you know you were thinking of it).Ā Dr. Strange has, by Cargillās logic, never been political.Ā Dr. Strange totally didnāt travel back in time to meet one of Americaās Founding Fathers on the bicentennial of the signing of the Declaration of Independence.Ā No, according to Cargillās logic, the story was never political in the first place.Ā So if the story were never political, then writing a Tibetan character out of existence (to appease an occupying government) is NOT actually eviscerating the storyās political backbone.Ā Whew, glad we cleared that up!
Cargill attempts to justify the white-washing by saying if the character canāt be Tibetan, it wouldnāt be ok for the character to be any other sort of Asian ethnicity, because that would be racist against Asians. Ā So instead of dropping the character entirely, or writing around the censors (a thought which apparently never occurred to anyone in this process), he was FORCED to make the character white, ok? Ā To appease everyone, ok?Ā His art suffered because people are mean.
The fine art of getting shit past censors (which is an art honestly) is apparently lost on Marvelās team here.Ā They didnāt even try; thatās what Iām hearing.
tangentwithtanner
jacobvanloon
prguitarman
turnnoffyourmind
