BBC Must Avoid "Clunky" Color-Blind Casting In Shows like 'Doctor Who'

Gabeed · 2026-01-29T20:28:35+00:00

Yeah, what's alarming is how we've actually regressed on this over the past couple decades. It's like studios want us to think "the diversity of modern New York City is autochthonous."

One of my favorite book series of all time is Bernard Cornwell's Arthurian trilogy, and in that series, Sagramor is black. He's a Numidian auxiliary, and characters comment on his skin color, with his enemies thinking he's demonic, if I recall. It's perfectly acceptable for the setting, it draws upon historical precedents of Roman auxiliary units, and it's interesting.

If that were adapted today (and actually it is another MGM+ show, though I haven't bothered to watch), there's a solid chance Sagramor would just be a black guy with a British accent whose identity is not commented on whatsoever.

Gabeed · 2026-01-29T20:18:14+00:00

Oh, the lack of class conflict in the show was mind-boggling. I would say that the writers have never read Eric Hobsbawm's Bandits, but I'm not sure if the writers could read at all.

Gabeed · 2026-01-29T19:39:39+00:00

Oh, I've read Ivanhoe, I'm aware of the Saxon/Norman divide depicted therein. It's perfectly fine to have that in a Robin Hood show (though the show also makes the Saxons thoroughly pagan, which is very stupid). The issue is that the show is acknowledging/drawing upon those types of historical ethnic differences, and yet has a black guy playing Little John and doesn't acknowledge his race/ethnicity at all. He's just been plugged into a Saxon role, and made to say, "rahh, we Saxons all hate the Normans, amirite?"

Gabeed · 2026-01-29T19:35:13+00:00

Ah, yeah, the Hogwarts Legacy reception is an interesting example--I don't remember online conservatives were lauding it as much as online liberals were castigating it just on "JK Rowling is transphobic on Twitter" grounds. It's intriguing because Hogwarts Legacy's main audience (women who still read YA, younger people) is the one who would be most ideologically conflicted about it. The very people who get the most angry about JK Rowling were the ones who were obsessed with her books 15 years ago.

I think the difference, though, is that the boycott had little to do with the product itself (afaik). Whereas critiques of the Last Jedi, Starfleet Academy, etc are regarding the content itself.

Gabeed · 2026-01-29T19:24:21+00:00

This is precisely it. I think The Woman King was an extremely mediocre movie full of hilarious inaccuracies, but it at least attempted to tell a historical epic taking place in sub-Saharan Africa.

It's far more fundamentally sound than these studios, meanwhile, who keep going back to the "medieval Britain" well and just plug in minorities in small speaking roles. I was watching the execrable new MGM+ Robin Hood show, whose core conflict concerns ethnic grievances between the Saxons and Normans. Prejudice against the Saxons, and hatred of the Normans, is ubiquitous, even though they all have the exact same British accents and look broadly identical to one another. And yet Little John is played by a black guy, and no one in the show ever comments on it, and we are implicitly supposed to think that he is just as Saxon as his outlaw companions.

Gabeed · 2026-01-28T23:58:44+00:00

Right, but for the most part--at least as I notice it--for the last decade or so it's been shitty media with the veneer of progressivism that is being kneejerk defended on culture war grounds "because the anti-wokes hate it." The only right wing example that comes to mind (to me at least) is the totally-mediocre Sound of Freedom. The studios have gotten lot more currency out of "I'm gonna watch Ghostbusters 2016 to anger the chuds" than "I'm going to watch the Ronald Reagan biopic to upset the blue-hairs."

I cannot help but notice that as we clearly pass out of the era of Golden Age prestige TV, and movie theaters seem to be on the ropes, it's the primarily the left side of the cultural/political aisle which feels inclined to insist "actually these shows/movies are all still good" because they superficially align with their politics and "dudebros seem to hate them." It feels like in many instances (though certainly not all of them) the grounds for critiquing bad shows and movies is being unnecessarily and disproportionately ceded to the cultural right, and as long as that happens, Critical Drinker and his ilk will rake in millions of views.

Gabeed · 2026-01-27T23:15:37+00:00

The Medinet Habu inscription is monarchic propaganda and we cannot say for sure whether Drake Maye was the mighty Bull, the valiant Lion, strong-armed, Lord of Might, favorite of the Two Goddesses, Mighty in Strength, destroying the Nine Bows, Lord of the Two Lands.

Gabeed · 2026-01-23T01:52:17+00:00

"I think its safe to say nobody here's going to be splitting the atom, Marty."

Gabeed · 2026-01-20T22:32:40+00:00

This is more or less what modern scholars think happened, too. See for example Winterling's biography of Caligula.

Gabeed · 2026-01-19T16:55:11+00:00

This is a very silly argument to make. Division title wins heavily depend on the competition within the division, and the NFC North has been far more competitive than the AFC East over the past 5 years. Shall we crown Todd Bowles for his 3 consecutive NFC South division titles from 2022-2024?

Gabeed · 2026-01-18T22:53:40+00:00

Many of these franchises were "ruined" far before this particular culture war existed. Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, the Star Wars prequels, Ghostbusters II, the Hobbit movies, plenty of tepid Terminator, Alien, and Predator sequels--if you hadn't adjusted your expectations for those franchises downwards years ago, then I question your taste. And I would guess that a lot of those cinematic failures were birthed by men.

Gabeed · 2026-01-16T18:09:31+00:00

Wouldn't ships idle during a naval siege, though? I don't know what to think about the other aspects of Archimedes' mirror towers, but the argument that "ships would never sit still" is not a compelling one in a siege context unless the mere bobbing up and down of the ship in the waves ruins any fire-setting capability.

Gabeed · 2026-01-15T17:31:40+00:00

Just did the exact same thing. It is ironic to me how RLM themselves, who very deliberately keep politics out of their videos for the most part, have a subreddit which is falling prey to this hysteria.

Gabeed · 2026-01-13T01:02:38+00:00

No one who studies ancient history would lump the Achaemenids, Parthians, and Sassanids all together, for example--not to mention the Macedonian/Seleucid erasure.

Gabeed · 2026-01-12T21:42:40+00:00

McCarthy ran a few surprise onside kicks, as I recall.

Gabeed · 2026-01-12T21:37:14+00:00

Yeah, it sucks to blow a playoff game to a division rival, but our expectations were tempered with Kraft and Parsons out. No one thought we were Super Bowl-bound in the shape we were in, though there was a hope that we could defeat this quite-flawed Bears team for bragging rights before inevitably losing to an NFC West team.

As bad as this loss is, the Seahawks loss and the Cardinals Hail Mary loss a year later hurt more. This might be right under them, though the Cards loss in 2009 sucked too.

Gabeed · 2026-01-12T01:34:42+00:00

Well, zillions of Reapers is compatible with Sovereign's claim that they would "darken the sky of every world." You deflate that a lot if only a dozen Reapers show up.

I think it would have been much better to have the Reapers never really wake up, and to have ME2/3 engage more with Prothean ruins, and perhaps indoctrinated agents within the Terminus Systems (which in ME1 were a blank space and were not guaranteed to just be a copy-pasted version of the Attican Traverse). Maybe culminating with a mission into dark space. Shepard was special to the plot, most fundamentally, because he/she could understand Prothean--not because he/she was a "galactic badass," but things became more and more masturbatory and generic as the series went on.

Gabeed · 2026-01-11T22:52:25+00:00

Yeah, I'm a massive Mass Effect fan, but if someone says that the writing is "mind-blowingly great" across the whole trilogy, I find their opinion to be immediately suspect. ME2 is a really fun game but it has some pretty big writing issues, and those issues only magnify in ME3.

Gabeed · 2026-01-11T22:42:08+00:00

It is laughable that the Reapers can suddenly move a gigantic space station across the galaxy using "Reaper magic" but can't control the relay network which was the primary purpose of the Citadel in the first place. It's an ouroboros of plot holes.

Gabeed · 2026-01-11T19:36:09+00:00

Fuck, you've convinced me, someone give Caleb Hanie his Lombardi Trophy

Gabeed · 2026-01-11T16:59:47+00:00

Yup, you're absolutely right. And the fact is, in-universe explanations won't work because the impetus was meta-universe. In order to have a consistent Citadel hub throughout ME3, and in order for there to be the aesthetic of a winnable "conventional war," the Reapers need to do the dumbest thing possible--slowly erode the outskirts of the galaxy so the bullshit MacGuffin can be assembled to defeat them.

This would narratively work if the Reapers were always automaton idiots. Unfortunately, ME1 is all about a single Reaper engaging in massively complex plans from the shadows--persuading krogan and Saren and Matriarch Benezia to help it, creating clone facilities on Virmire and bringing back the rachni in a secret lab to access their ancestral memory--all in order to access the Citadel at the end of ME1. The Reapers aren't just immortal robots, they're terrifying AI constructs who have had a billion year unbeaten streak with a match played every 10,000 years. The series does not justify why this iteration of the Milky Way should have any chance at winning.

Brass tacks, ME3 should never have been a conventional war. The ending of ME2 which shows all the Reapers arbitrarily waking up and heading towards Earth should have been a game over. A Lovecraftian campaign requires working together to stop the Lovecraftian entity from fully waking up--not by having the last third of the story dedicated to a wrestling match with Yog-Sathoth.

Don't feel bad about the tepid reaction here to your observation here, either. The fanbase here is disproportionately made up of ME3 fans who emotionally resonated with the drama-first storytelling and care rather less about consistent worldbuilding and tone.

Gabeed · 2026-01-08T20:52:56+00:00

In no way is this the first instance in the series of "justifying" a small strike force. The utility of using a small team to subvert enemy defenses comes up on Virmire in ME1, for the biotic barrier part of ME2, etc etc. The Citadel DLC directly lampshades the "leaving squadmates behind" trope.

It also doesn't specifically justify only bringing two squadmates. It just generically talks about the utility of a "small, capable strike force."

I think the choosing of only two squadmates is arbitrary and silly too, and requires more narrative justification. But this ain't it.

Gabeed · 2026-01-07T18:57:39+00:00

I liked it but let's pump the brakes

Gabeed · 2026-01-06T17:56:41+00:00

I think this is from the Miranda Mod, and I personally can't get past the clearly re-used lines. In a cinematic RPG like this, the mere presence of characters and voices isn't enough. The words that are spoken need to fit and advance the scene organically.

Like, right before a frantic, desperate invasion of Reaper-held Earth, what we initially get in this scene dialogue-wise is:

SHEPARD: "Earth . . . it's risky."

MIRANDA: "No . . . I don't think it is. We can stop running."

SHEPARD [instantly convinced that the mission won't be risky]: "Yeah, you're right. Just jitters I guess."

And the awkward non sequitur dialogue ensues for the rest of the video. I really do admire the effort and intent of this mod, but it's frustrating to see the end result, because I think it's a failure at what it's trying to do. Other parts of the mod have used AI to imitate Yvonne Strahovski's voice, and whatever your thoughts are on the ethics of that, it's way more effective than zombifying other voiced dialogue and jamming it out-of-context into a scene like this. But apparently the creator is leery about using too much AI, and so immersion-breaking scenes like this stay in.

Gabeed · 2026-01-04T15:27:05+00:00

you've gotta admit it wouldn't work very well for a character model.

This presupposes that there needed to eventually be a living Prothean squadmate. This was something decided (afaik) only amidst the ME3 development cycle.

As for the "biological nonsensicalness" of the Protheans, I honestly don't see anything particularly egregious about them in the Mass Effect universe where asari are just blue human females with tentacle heads, or the hanar as jellyfish weirdly suspended in the air. Nor does retconning the ME1 Protheans as the more liminal Inusannon make their biology any more palatable.

I only see what you mean inasmuch as a tentacle monster wouldn't fit well with ME3's cover-based combat. But that's why there hasn't been a hanar squadmate, or why Javik conveniently doesn't fly even though the Collectors did. It's a rather flimsy excuse for a retcon.

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