well, it's pride month, so exactly like this
this post was submitted on 10 Jun 2025
-20 points (18.8% liked)
Asklemmy
48701 readers
1186 users here now
A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions
Search asklemmy π
If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!
- Open-ended question
- Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
- Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
- Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
- An actual topic of discussion
Looking for support?
Looking for a community?
- Lemmyverse: community search
- sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
- !lemmy411@lemmy.ca: a community for finding communities
~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_A@discuss.tchncs.de~
founded 6 years ago
MODERATORS
My opinion is that I'm not watching anything by that anti-trans bigot.
My opinion is we should stop giving JK Rowling money and push her out to sea on a small iceberg.
I've never been a fan of Rowling. It always bothered me how much of her writing was lifted from better sources, but I let it go because the movies were fun and it got kids into reading. Discovering that she has always been a bigot, and her insistence on actively promoting discrimination, just erases all the goodwill she built up.
Case in point, Snape is a shit character. Just awful. People coo at the "always" moment from the movie because it came with a glowing doe dancing around the room, but it wasn't an interesting or poetic moment. First of all, it's not something that Dumbledore didn't already know. If Rowling was a better writer- You know what, no, that's not the point of this rant, and I don't have the time to enumerate all the shit great actors turned into gold.
But making Snape a black man puts a lot of story beats into a different context. Was James a racist? Were the other maurauders racist? Did Lily have feelings for Snape and suppressed them due to concerns about how an interracial relationship would affect her standing?
Changing the race of a character isn't a big deal when the characters are well-written.
Irrelevant considering that support for the show will be turned towards letting JK Rowling continue to enact her rabid hatred of transgender people.
Any amount of support for official Harry Potter content, other than buying the books secondhand, directly funds and abets trans people dying.
Fuck off
My opinion is that this is a dumb question, and fuck Rowling.
Stop giving that cunt money and the spotlight!
Itβs also both rage bait and bait for social justice warriors.
My opinion is that "Black Snape" is a poor choice of words.
Why do we care about the race of a made up wizard.
We should talk about how Harry Potter enriches a terf instead.
White snape was strange. With potions can we get a blue snape?
I got into it with friends last weekend when they were talking about Black Adam. I told them it's 2025, they should just be calling him Adam.
If the author hasn't become so β¦ unlikable, I'd say, that the skin color of an actor would only bother racists. With her being the TERF, she've became β¦ I'll not pay any more money for products of hers.
Maybe. Snape isn't exactly a sympathetic character, though; he almost was, but ended up being a true villain.
Maybe you're right, with a different author perhaps this would be uncontroversial. It's hard to not read racism into it given her politics, though. The only thing that would have looked worse, given her nationality and politics, would have been if they'd made Snape Pakistani.
Who gives a fucking shit the planet is burning π
Not watching that. Trans rights are human rights.
I didn't even know that there was a new Harry Potter series
They should have had the guts to make Harry trans.
"You're a biological woman, Harry!"
Tbh, I'm not interested in the show.
However, IDGAF.
Hire a good actor, period. Nobody can top Rickman at all, so anyone taking the role on needs to be able to reinterpret it entirely, change the way Snape's menace and arrogance are shown.
While there are physical descriptions in the books for all the major characters, the original movies didn't stick to them perfectly in all cases. And I don't think they did with Snape fully.
So why the fuck does it matter if the actor isn't lily white (heh)? Can he act is the important part if anyone is going to watch it at all. If you're going to turn a book into a show after it's already been turned into a wildly popular movie series, you could cast everyone looking exactly like the books, and there's still going to be complaints from the movie fans.
So fuck it. Make Dumbledore a trans man, or a trans woman. Make Mcgonagle Cherokee. Make Harry Xhosa, or a Southerner from the U.S. Give Ron blue hair, a septum piercing and dress him in leather. There's always going to be pissed off existing fans of something that's as huge as Harry Potter. It isn't like some niche comic book where a character looking different is going to piss everyone off. The fan base will be split, period.
Shit, if I was going to watch it at all, an unexpected casting choice would make me more eager, because at least then I'm not going to be watching the movies dragged out over months.
I honestly agree. The casting of the movies was perfect in my opinion. Mr and Mrs Weasley. Snape. Trewlawney, mcGonagle. Harry, Ron, Hermione. It was great casting up and down. They're never going to get a cast like that again, so honestly who cares. That's how I view this whole show. It's just a cash grab, so who cares.
Since this is a reboot. I do not care who plays what parts. Nor what the story is or isn't. I'm not watching.
Had they not made it a reboot but a continuation of the story, or even a story set many years before the original movies. I'm not talking a prequel that is a direct tie in, but maybe a new story but set in the past. Then I'd be interested. I'm done with reboots.
I think it's a great idea to show how the Dark Lord isn't prejudiced in the muggle way, judging people for their gender, sexual orientation, or the colour of their skin, but rather their blood purity only. A black pure blood is obviously superior to a white mudblood.
Miles Morales isn't race swapped, though. He's a different character. But I do agree with your larger point that Rowling sucks as a writer and as a person, and that race swaps don't matter if the characters are well written.
dude, for 70+ years spiderman was white
Spider-Man (Peter Parker) is still white. Spider-Man (Miles Morales) has always been mixed race black and Puerto Rican. Spider-Man (Miguel O'Hara) will be Mexican-Irish. Spider-Man (Hobie Brown) is black, although he frequently goes by Spider-Punk. Spider-Man (Takuya Yamashir) and Spider-Man (Yu Komori) are Japanese, and have been around since the 70s. They are different people who exist in universes with Peter Parker. There are also universes where Peter Parker is Peni Parker (Japanese), Pavitr Prabhakar (Indian), and then there are all the other Spider girls, Spider demons and Spider monsters, not to mention all the Spider-adjacent clones, offspring, and villains who posed as Spider-Man while Parker was incapacitated (which happened twice).
He still is. Peter Parker is still Spider-Man, Miles Morales is a completely different character who is also called Spider-Man.
There is more than one spiderman
These comments...
They should've made Ron Somali and Hermione Pakistani/Indian/Chinese if they truly wanted to mix tribes up while keeping it sensical. Snape kinda has to be a white, nerdy and socially awkward guy (he's always given angry school shooter vibes, right?), or a skinny Indian guy maybe? Either way, it's an entirely unnecessary reboot with a bit of a 'shock factor' to justify its existence and force some people to waste their money in curious anger... I won't even waste the bandwidth it would take to pirate it!