I didn’t watch Denzel’s Macbeth, but the clips seemed fine to me. Macbeth is a story about elemental drives like ambition and envy. It really doesn’t matter that the milieu is Scotland. That’s why any random set of actors could act Macbeth and I think it would work.
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Victorian England high society though… the milieu’s presumption of its own cultural superiority *is* the essence of it. So tales of manners that insert other cultures into it sets up way too much interference.
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Also, there is a whole universe of commodity stories that routinely get transposed to different cultural keys with zero issues. Indian movies are routinely remade across regions with mechanical ports of milieus. Hollywood movies are remade with varying degrees of seamless ness.
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Purely “cultural” movies in modern milieus are trivial to transpose. Usually what mucks it up is an element of technology or other accumulating strand of history that has western path dependence. It would be impossible to remake The Right Stuff in Bollywood.
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Key point that I think is unsustainable. Milieu-manners fiction that fetishizes a real culture that thought of itself as superior doesn’t really work unless you studiously maintain extreme historical ignorance.
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Replying to @vgr
I work in women’s romance and I think the piece you’re missing is how compelling that kind of status romance is to mass market women, but also how woke mass market romance consumers are now. I don’t think all-white Victorian even gets a look now
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I cringe even with non-transposed stuff I like when the bubble pops (eg moments in Christie or Wodehouse where veil of British normalcy thins). Even stuff like Downton Abbey that nice-washes class-relations within domestic UK culture is barely watchable if you know too much.
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It is interesting that the OG status romance authors like Jane Austen and Edith Wharton are notable for sharp satire, but when transposed to TV, that seems to almost always get lost in unironic status romance fetishization. The dress-up and ballroom dancing overwhelms any satire.
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If I had to make up 3 laws of “transposition fiction”, they’d be:
Rule 1: Only transpose between equiv-tech milieus unless it’s a purely cultural story
Eg: ancient to ancient, medieval to medieval, Western Europe to Japan/Korea
Exception that proves the rule: Wakanda
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Rule 2: Only transpose status fiction about milieus that assume their own natural superiority between gradient-matched milieus
Eg: racist British royals —> racist Japanese royals
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Rule 3: In SpecFic, strength of speculative conceit must be >>> strength of transpositional conceit
Eg: Foundation, Rings of Power
Bridgerton = vacuous counterfactual (Victorian England is DEIverse for no good reason)
Man in High Castle = substantive counterfactual (Nazis won)
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Lol
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Replying to @vgr
Gestures wordlessly at the entire meaning of the British Empire.
Replying to
Rule 4: If enjoyment of fiction requires you to studiously maintain historical ignorance, it is bad fiction. Suspension of disbelief should be possible in the context of accurate historical beliefs.
Eg: Knowing dinosaurs had feathers really doesn’t really ruin the movies for me
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Yeah, this is why Robin Hood having a black buddy from the crusades worked fine for me. In a pre-tech milieu where Europe’s identity wasn’t strongly rooted in recent historical tech/science superiority, it kinda works fine. Also the Merlin show where Guinevere is black. twitter.com/MattAlhonte/st
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Victorian England is tough because black/brown people *were* present in the milieu in inferior roles. In a show like Bridgerton it would be hard to meaningfully insert a British Raj subplot. You have to assume Raj didn’t happen in counterfactual but high culture stayed the same.
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Also you have to ask: how were Indians of the sort depicted in Bridgerton S2 (upper/middle-class integrationist) actually perceived in pre-independence India? Not very positively I’m afraid. The “wogs” were subject to equal contempt from both the British and Indian nationalists.
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A real example of this sort of person would be Michael Madhusudan Dutt. Decent mid-grade poet.
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Agreed. But it’s a fine distinction. Presumably some moorish warriors might have been present in Robin Hood’s England. It’s unclear whether making them a noble-born pseudo-yeoman’s best buddy is anymore realistic than making Guinevere black. But both work for me.
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Replying to @vgr
Wait, wait, these are not the same!
Azeem is explicitly a Moor, an outsider who comes to England from the crusades. The character Azeem is ethnicity Moorish and is cast to match his race.
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Some other examples:
I think the Watchmen show worked though I didn’t finish
I don’t think Lovecraftian Horror show worked
Falcon and Winter Soldier handled the transition to black captain America exceptionally well, creative,y integrating both the fantasy and real history
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Yep. This is a big part of it. Stories that don’t handle milieu transpositions well end up doing unintentional reputation laundering. This is why “what if south had won the civil war” is not an innocent premise. It will work or not depending on who does it and why.
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Replying to @vgr
I side-eye well-meaning historical reconstructions that present diversity as a fact when historical circumstances dictate (often emphatically) otherwise. This feels like it lets historical racist societies off the hook for their attitudes to make contemporary viewers comfortable.
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Agreed. To make Batman black you’d need to transpose really strongly to a black high-society milieu. Like make Wayne Sr. say a black Detroit politician who builds a post-automotive real estate empire. Or a hip-hop mogul.
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Replying to @vgr
@marcbernardin has talked about this via Bruce Wayne being a white guy is part of the powerful high-society character.
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Agreed. I just don’t think the argument works. Like at all. And I say this as a big admirer of the actual Hamilton and his role in sparking global industrial modernity by triggering the American prototype.
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Replying to @vgr
Hamilton is doing something different than the others - not changing the historical characters themselves but rather arguing that these actors are inheritors & representatives of the American revolution as much as white actors.
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Incidentally, I used to be in theater throughout school and college, in both English and Hindi. I think my first role was a sailor extra in a 1st grade musical production about Columbus discovering America. It was a parable about having confidence.
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Still remember the song we had to learn:
“When everybody thought the world was flat
Columbus said it’s round
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He had Co-oo-on-fidence”
Imagine a bunch of 7-year-old Indian kids singing that in Spanish sailor costumes in 1982 or something 🤣
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In college I once played a high-society English lady in a performance of some comedy… it was an all-male dorm so female roles had to be played by guys in drag. Won best actor for that.
In Hindi too, played strongly North Indian characters.
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This sort of thing works ok so long as it’s entirely a matter of practical casting constraints. If you want to tell Columbus story and the only available actors are brown kids, fine use them. The problem arises mainly when the casting intends to send an alt-interpretive “message”
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Going back to OP, normie discourse is so fraught and culture-warry because most normies have zero interest in actual history and believe some genuinely motivated fantasy version of it. So it’s fiction-vs-fiction. A bit like being mad because LOTR isn’t consistent with Star Trek.
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This thread and responses are a very non-normie way of talking about it, not because we’re any smarter or nobler but because genuine, non-identitarian curiosity about actual history (all history, not just your own) makes a difference in how you process history-inspired fiction
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tfw history itself is non-canon 🤣
This might be the basic problem. History itself isn’t as friendly to canonized aesthetics the way fiction inspired by it is. But it’s not a simple problem of erasure in official histories. It’s a more general mythologizing cleanup sensibility twitter.com/MattAlhonte/st
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Remember, until very recently, the main purpose of historical scholarship was not to simply study and reconstruct the past but justify present behaviors. Lawyer historiography, not judge historiography.
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Just struck me that while today, almost all transposition has been from European to non-European milieus, this was not the always the case. I was reading the Decameron a while back and some stories seemed suspiciously familiar… turns out they were imported from the Panchatantra
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Narrative is a sensemaking technology for historical data. The specific bit of history where it was first used is really not that relevant. This matters beyond fiction, there’s a reason we’re analyzing US-China geopolitics in Thucydides trap terms.
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It would be ludicrous to claim that replacing one variable in the Thucydides trap pattern with China is “wokification.” The intent is insight (eg: how is US different from Sparta, and China different from Athens?), not representation.
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When representation is the only motive the sensemaking aspect of the pattern has no traction. This doesn’t affect SpecFic as much. To the extent Foundation is a Rome —> Trantor transposition, the Trantor end is a free variable. You could do the whole thing with Chinese actors.
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By contrast earliest Asimov robot books are strongly set in 20th century USA. Harder to transpose. The later robot books (Lije Bailey) set 1000 years from now arguably would *not* work on screen without transposition. Extrapolating 1950s US would look like Jetsons caricature.
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I think you can compute the represented/representing/spectator 3-way-milieu fit in a systematic way to predict if it will work. It’s a function of how each of the 3 milieus models the other two. SpecFic can reduce this to 2 if it is far out enough the represented is unreal.
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Critically, I think a good rule is: the representing milieu (the cast as a whole) can’t have an obvious political interest in a hostile subversion of the spectator milieu’s political interest in the represented milieu.
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I think a related thing pisses off right-wing malcontents the most: these DEIversified shows are not made for them at all but they think they’re the rightful audiences. But otoh they can’t make such lavish shows for themselves.
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It’s a flavor of appropriation but to call it that would be to admit weakness.
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The money paying for this show came from a huge retailer with an extremely diverse workforce that sources almost everything it sells from Asia. I’m trying to imagine… is there an extremely end-to-end white business rich enough to bankroll such a production 🤔
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I suspect this has a subtle effect. Increasingly the end credits of any big production look like a vast sample of global media production capabilities. It is typically way more diverse than the on-screen cast. Half the CGI and FX seems to come from Asia.
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This vast global machine is primarily making shows and movies for itself. Not for any small homogeneous group that might have a stake in the historical source materials. They’re just not rich enough to be worth the trouble.
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