I was reading the Variety piece about Halle Bailey's recollection of her time as "The Little Mermaid," and was groaning by the end of the first paragraph.
Not because of anything Bailey said, mind you. The actress was gracious about her experience, even though quite a bit of it was actually negative. Her interview with The Independent wasn't anything to write home about, but if Variety is good at one thing, it's taking parts of sentences and framing them as the wokest thing you've ever heard.
I'm not going to talk about the entire article from Variety, because you really only do just need the first paragraph to see where this was going:
Three years after the release of Disney’s live-action “The Little Mermaid,” Halle Bailey is looking back at the experience of playing Ariel and how she ultimately felt freed by the discourse that erupted around her casting. Racist trolls were outraged at Disney for casting a Black actor as Ariel, which made Bailey the target of online harassment from toxic fans. But she doesn’t look back at the film’s release with any negativity.
The dispensing of buzzwords right off the bat really is impressive. "Racist trolls," and "toxic fans," and, of course, the smoking gun, "online harassment."
You'll recall Bailey, a black actress, was cast as Ariel in Disney's live-action remake of "The Little Mermaid," which had many movie-goers scratching their heads and objecting to the race-swap. The original Disney Ariel was a pale-skinned, wide-eyed youth with fiery red hair, which is a combo that many on the left seem to want to eliminate from media wherever they can.
The backlash around the race-swap was about the inconsistency of the character representation, of course, but also — and I'd say mostly — about the fact that this was clearly a swap based on socio-political decision making and had nothing to do with "casting the best person for the job." I can remember the moment the announcement was made, the accusations of racism were already being made in anticipation of the backlash, before the backlash had actually begun. Even then, I don't think I ever saw anyone say they didn't want Ariel to be black because they hated black people.
The reasons for rejecting a black Ariel were legitimate, but as you can see, the leftists and the access media didn't care about the nuance. They were chomping at the bit to declare it was all because of racism.
Now I'm watching the same thing happen again, but this time with the race-swap around Severus Snape, one of the primary characters from Harry Potter. It's a decision that's even more bizarre than the Ariel race swap, and for varying reasons, many of which would make story elements and character decisions actually racist.
If you want to know more about that, I advise you to watch this video from Nerdrotic, which breaks down the stupidity of this decision quite well.
One of the key takeaways is that the race-swapping of Snape is going to herald some very serious changes to the new "Harry Potter" series on HBO, all of which seem to be socio-political to some degree.
Don't be surprised when you see an overtly gay moment from Dumbledore, among other things.
But as you can imagine, the media has been practically giddy with the racism accusations. All the usual suspects are throwing the word around, including Variety, The Hollywood Reporter, Rolling Stone, and The LA Times. What's sad is that I didn't have to tell you they did that. You already knew without even seeing it. The pattern is so established at this point that it's surprising when the access media actually gives a fair take.
I think the Nerdrotic video does a very good job of pointing out the issues and problems with Snape's race-swap, none of which actually involve being racist, yet the media wants it to be racism so bad that they'll dismiss all other arguments and nuanced takes to just blanket the entire movie-going public with the racist label. A pretty bold move, calling millions and millions of people "racist" for not agreeing with a race-swap decision, especially when we've loved and applauded others. This is the same movie-going public that went and saw black actors and black films, giving them millions and millions of dollars and praising them as fantastic cinema.
I see people who are constantly trying to move past racism and a media that wants nothing more than to drag people back into it. If that's the case, then the only people who truly want racism are the ones who consistently virtue signal about how evil it is.
This makes the access media, and indeed the left it spawns from, the most racist people in the room.
