So I watched the movie adaptation of The Shamer’s Daughter today - the first book in a great fantasy series which sadly never became A Thing outside Scandinavia. So now I have a bunch of feelings and opinions that I really want to write down, even though probably no one will care. Thus, a cut.
(background if you’re still here: Ten-year-old Dina is the protagonist of this first book of the series. She is a Shamer like her mother, which means that if she ever looks someone in the eyes, that person will immediately remember everything they’re ashamed of, and feel very bad about it. If she concentrates, she can see these memories along with the other person, a sort of magical flashback. A Shamer can also consciously affect a certain voice which compels the listener(s) to Do The Right Thing – so they could order someone to stop killing innocents, but could not order that same person to resume the killing.)
Let’s talk about Dina. Dina who is sharp and stubborn and caring, who uses her Shamer voice to make the guards give water and soap to the innocent stranger who just had to sit for a night and a day covered in the blood of his dead family. Dina who trusts her mother’s judgment and Shamer skills enough to treat the stranger’s innocence as fact, even though a lot of evidence says he’s a murderer.
The scene with the water and soap is not in the movie, but that doesn’t matter too much to the viewer’s understanding of Dina. The young actress portrays her very well, and we do get to see this aspect of her personality in another scene, when she uses her Shamer abilities to protect a girl she just met from her abusive older brother. Even though Dina is trying to hide at this point, and this use of her abilities is what ultimately gives her away, she can’t just stand there while someone’s being treated unfairly. She has to help.
A more important criticism is the race issue. In the books, Dina is kind of brown, while her mother and (what later turns out to be half-)siblings are white. And this is a big part of her character! Not only is she an outcast in her village, because who wants to be friends with someone you can’t look in the eyes without feeling bad, she doesn’t even visually fit in with her own family. Also, her foreign father becomes very important in the third book which is simply amazing, so there’s that, too.
Meanwhile, movie!Dina is white and looks a lot like her mother. And yes, it is difficult to find good child actors, and maybe this actress really was better at playing Dina than anyone brown who showed up, so they simply had to cast her. This is possible! She did play Dina really well, and Denmark doesn’t have that many brown people! But they could at least have dyed her hair black and make-upped her skin a bit darker. Movie make-up artists are good enough to change an actor’s age by 30 years, they could probably manage to convincingly darken her skin a bit. She’d still have the face structure of a white person, but that makes perfect sense canonically, since Dina is half white.
At least Dina’s mother was perfectly cast. She fits the book description very well, and she speaks with an accent. And while she is never explicitly said to have an accent in the books, she isn’t explicitly said to not have one either, and having one actually makes perfect sense for a character who is basically the adult version of Dina, with all the perpetual not-quite-fitting-in that brings with it. Writers, this is how you make changes in a movie adaptation!
However, her awesomeness doesn’t hold throughout the movie. In the book, there’s a scene near the end where Dina and her mother are chained up and blindfolded, and they think they’re about to be publicly executed by way of Being Eaten By A Captive Dragon. (In fact, some allies are about to save them, but they do not know this.) Dina is scared and clings to her mother, who puts on her Shamer voice and tells the watching crowd that public execution of a child probably isn’t morally right. It almost works for a second, and Dina mentally remarks that using the voice on that many people is very impressive, and that she doesn’t have nearly enough training to do such a thing.
In the movie, it’s Dina who does it. Her mother just stands there. I guess the moviemakers made this choice to give Dina one more Awesome Moment, but the thing is, these books are primarily meant for 9-13 year olds. (They happen to be sufficiently good that if a former fan decides to reread when they’re older, they’ll fall in love with the whole universe all over again, but that’s neither here nor there.) And I remember being in this target group. I loved Dina and identified with her, exactly because she was imperfect. She was scared and sometimes stupid, and she literally peed her pants with fear the first time she was nearly eaten by a dragon, and that’s what made her a believable ten-year-old. Younger!me could identify with this character not despite, but because of her imperfections. So that’s annoying that they removed one of them.
It also pretty much destroys the mother’s character. In the books, she’s this strong and sharp and stubborn woman who raised three children on her own and would do anything to keep them safe. In the movie, she’s suddenly not.
More to come later, probably, since I still have Things To Say about Nico.
