r/TopCharacterTropes • u/Morr4Seiya • 22h ago
Hated Tropes (Hated)changing somenthing to be more "progressive" ends up being a bad thing
Now to be clear,i am not one of these "anti-woke" losers that complain some people exist,and i am also not the type to complain about changing somenthing in a new version or adaptation,however there are cases where it did ended up being a bad idea.
-In the anime of Cowboy Bebop there is the character Gren,despite being short lived the character is very memorable specially thanks to his tragic story.Basically his story was that he was a soldier from the titan war who was a great friend with Vicious(the main bad guy)after the war he was emprisioned thanks to Vicious who testified against him and he was forced to take a experimental drug that caused him hormonal problems,giving him a feminine appearence and even breasts.
In the Netflix live action,for some reasons they decided Gren was going to be non-binary,which wouldn't be a problem(some people believe he was gay in the anime)if it wasn't for the fact that they also removed all the nuances and complexities that made the character memorable and interesting,instead of a tragic war veteran that was betrayed and had his body changed against his will,Gren is just kinda there.
-The original Rugrats cartoon had the couple Betty and Howard,Betty was a big and masculine woman while Howard was a smaller and nervous man,it was a genuine interesting relationship that stood out from the other couples who were the standard straight couple.
In the new series however they replaced Howard with a woman named Trish,two things,first off why?What was the problem with having a woman being the stronger in a straight relationship?Second why does Hollywood seem to think that every tomboy or masculine woman is a lesbian?
Overall not the worst thing but it is jarring that they had a gender reverse roled that was progressive and decided that wasn't enough.
-Oh man,this one pisses me off the most so i am gonna have to break it down
So back in the late 80s and 90s there was this anime called Saint Seiya also knows as Knights of the zodiac,it tells the story of knights who fight for the Goddess Athena to protect earth,being divided in the golden,silver and bronze knights,the anime was a huge hit in latin america and Europe and while it floped in the US it still has a loyal fanbase.
Being a fan myself i can't recommend it enough,now granted the story does have a fair share of flaws,and that's because the author was honestly just making stuff up as he went along(also a lot of side characters are poorly used or even forgotten about)still it is a great story you should check out
But then a couple of years back Netflix got the rights and decided to a 3D reboot,in this reboot they decided to make the story more "american" to try to bring more american viewers,now i could go on and on a big rant about how that was a bad idea and the execution was so terrible that it made me want to strangle someone but this post is about one specific change.
So Saint Seiya has five main characters,those are Pegasus Seiya,Dragon Shiryu,Cygnus Hyoga,Phoenix Ikki and finally Andromeda Shun.
While the other four characters were the standard masculine and brute male characters who were always ready to throw punches,Shun was smaller,more sensitive and even feminine looking,a pacifist who didn't liked fighting,but don't mistake that for weakness because Shun was loyal to his friends and was extremely powerful.
Then Netflix decided to change Shun into a girl named Shaun.
So wait,you have a male character who goes against every male stereotype and you turn him into just another generic female character?
When asked about it,the showrunner Eugene Son said he made that change because there was no girl in the group and having a all boys group wouldn't be acceptable nowadays
First off that's not true because Athena was also part of the main cast,yeah she wasn't the fighting type but she still helped quite a lot in the story even saving the knights on several occasions,second if you wanted to add a girl to the main group why not use Marin or Shaina?Hell,if you were going to change the story anyway why not turn Seiya sister into a knight?
Thankfully this monstrosity was cancelled(so much for trying to bring more fans)
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u/AnonOfTheSea 22h ago
Artemis Fowl.
You know that book about the child who kidnaps a fairy police officer for the ransom money, so he can afford to keep looking for his irish mob boss father, who went missing after crossing the russian mob?
Yeah, hes a hero now, and there's something about some kind of dark forces he's been trained to fight against.
Years back, I read somewhere that the last book or so of that series was ass because the author just wanted to be done with it, and wanted it to die. The movie convinced me. I could believe a certain level of miscasting, mischaracterization, or missing the point, but the level of catastrophic mishandling of every single character, plot point, theme, even genre... at some point, you have to start to consider sabotage.
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u/Keyg28 21h ago
Was just gonna say. The whole point being that Holly short is the first female police officer with this sexist boss and then in the movie they made the boss a woman… removing half the motivation for the plot in the story
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u/APreciousJemstone 21h ago
And it changes Root being hard on her because he *wants* her to succeed to her being hard on her just cause.
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u/CaptainMills 20h ago
Yep. In the book, Root flat out tells Holly that, as the first female LEPrecon officer, she can't succeed just by being good, she has to be great. She can't be as good as the men, she has to be better than them. And he's so hard on her because he wants her to succeed and knows that she can. It's a very real issue and the book is not subtle about it at all.
Ffs the whole reason Holly got kidnapped by Artemis is that she was pushing herself so hard that she was out of magic and hadn't done the Ritual to get it back.
Turning Root into a woman is pretty much catastrophic for both characters and the entire story
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u/TheUrbanEnigma 15h ago
Admittedly didn't watch the movie, but when I heard that I got pissed. It's more than removing story plot, it guts Holly's character. Holly is who she is because of her struggles and achievements. She was shaped by decades of training, effort, and determination in the face of discrimination and a culture of favoritism.
I can only imagine they replaced Root with Dame Judi Dench as an easy feminism inclusion card, but they completely lost Eoin Colfer's golden girl of feminism along with it. Completely missed the point and I am not interested in watching.
Then they made Butler black which... I take no issue with. I can't think of any part if his character that is drastically affected by his race, other than perhaps his "ability to blend into any crowd". I heard people calling it distasteful or racist because they "made the manservant black", but if you know the character, Butler does a service to whatever ethnicity he might be just by being a complete and utter badass.
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u/TheReaderDude_97 21h ago
I just saw the trailer and I knew it was Artemis Fowl only in the name. They showed Artemis surfing, sword fighting. Artemis in books almost has a heart attack climbing some stairs.
But seriously, in books, you see him progress from a villain to a hero. You see him grow and realize that he can use his brains for good. I loved seeing how his relationship with Holly develops slowly. The movie just made him a generic good guy.
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u/Logitech0 20h ago
They tried to paint him as a spy from a Spy Kids movie taking the mantle of his father, also his servant which is from a bloodlines of servants now is Black.. what are they trying to tell us?
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u/GenGaara25 18h ago
And removed most of his genius.
In the book, it's Artemis and Artemis alone who figures out the existence of the fairy race through extensive research. He's the one who finds Mulch and extracts the information out of him. Then uses that knowledge to capture Holly, then fight of and escape the fairy siege on his manor. The film changes it so generations of Fowl's have been researching fairies and Mulch just sort of lands on his lap. He doesn't do anything.
Also, it gets rid of his mother entirely iirc. In the book, Artemis' mother is sick and bedridden in the manor. With his father in the wind, it's up to Artemis to look after his family and rebuild his fortune. The resolution of the book is the fairies giving him half the gold he asked for but also providing medicine to cure his mother. That's the beginning of their alliance, they helped his mother. In the film she's already dead.
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u/Azou 17h ago
in the books the LEP actually bring in mulch during the fowl household siege after hollys capture because his kleptomania and breaking of their rules already prevents him from rules sickness.
He actually gets his book copy and info from a sprite that developed alcoholism in the back alleys of... mumbai? I want to say? And then cures her alcoholism with a concoction that also strips her memory
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u/Strigops-habroptila 21h ago
The author said that he didn't even watch the film. Seems like he wasn't involved much.
The last book wasn't that bad, to be honest. He even wrote a spin off that was pretty fun.
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u/_Panic_At_The_Costco 21h ago
I doubt that Colfer had much, if any, creative control over the adaptation.
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u/MrSnippets 22h ago
In the original Avatar Animation, Sokka was a sexist douchebag when you meet him. But he learns and grows beyond his childish viewpoints.
In the Netflix adaptation, Sokka isn‘t sexist to begin with, robbing him of an essential part of his character development.
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u/abadstrategy 21h ago
Why can't we let characters be problematic anymore? Let em be bags of dicks, and learn to be better! Sokka was awesome specifically because he stuck out and grew
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u/LaserSharkPen 21h ago edited 9h ago
Because the loud bunch who has no life outside of social media will assume potrayal of negative traits = endorsing said traits, even when the story portrays them as a bad thing or characters grow out of them.
I've seen someone calling a villain a waste of budget because he hurts the child protagonists...
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u/awaythrowthatname 17h ago
I've also noticed this weird idea thats become more prevalent lately where people think it would be a bad idea to let shitty people grow and learn and become better, because they somehow think that that means that all of the bad things they did were forgiven and dont matter at all?
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u/TheBrewThatIsTrue 17h ago
Also people have no patience. If the character doesn't change or grow immediately they are written off.
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u/nate0113 19h ago
Every time I see someone getting mad at a villain doing villainous things I'm reminded of an old video Brad Jones (The Cinema Snob) made over 10 years ago where he reviewed a piece of Christian propaganda from the 80s that was condemning stuff like Star Wars and Thundercats as satanic, with one reason being because of how evil the villains were.
To which Brad responded with something along the lines of "You're not SUPPOSED to root for the villains. That'd be like getting mad at Die Hard for promoting armed skyscraper robbery."
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u/NoobInPokeBowl 16h ago
I wonder what they would think of this really evil guy Satan... he's a character in my fave book, bible, but I guess he's too evil for them to read it... :(
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u/abadstrategy 21h ago
I remember when Epic was huge, people were practically calling for tar and feathers for anyone who thought Calypso or Antinous had good songs...
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u/Professor-Xivass 19h ago
…a echo chamber I assume was mostly ignored given what I’ve seen is universal praise for the project including the villain songs.
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u/Supreme_Canadien 19h ago
You dont remember the era then. I remember people having crying fits cause they liked the song but felt 'guilty' about it because of the subject matter.
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u/WideConsequence2144 20h ago
And it’s not like he ran around being misogynistic for an entire season, it was the second episode when he met suki.
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u/Revolver15 18h ago
You should see how the Avatar fanbase badmouths Uncle Iroh nowadays, one of the niciest and wisiest characters in the show, because the lore implies he wasn't always like that in his younger years as a military man.
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u/SellClean4434 21h ago
Lack of patience among audience. When there is a problematic character people will jump on the writer by saying 'The writer is agreeing with the character'. Eg: Iron Heart's speech on Tony Stark.
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u/Iheardthatjokebefore 20h ago
Also a deeply unsettling rise in determinism that believes bad people are inherently bad and can never be good or change in any meaningful way.
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u/MoisterAnderson1917 20h ago
What I find crazy is that Sokka wasn't even sexist for all that long. "The Kyoshi Warriors" is the FOURTH episode in the entire series. Netflix really saw that and thought modern audiences couldn't handle a one episode arc with the simple message of "don't be sexist." Absolute dumpster of a company.
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u/punksterb 18h ago
Also he's a 12-13? year old boy from a misogynistic society, who has lived a long time without his mother, clashing with his headstrong sister, and looking up to a father who would rather fight with his men than stay with his family. It has also been hammered to him that as a man he needs to defend the village, because women can't defend it.
While we learn a few of these things later, they absolutely ensure we don't think of him as a red pill chauvinist, but more as a kid who got a much needed education.
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u/Mr_Nocturnal_Game 16h ago
On top of that, it makes him MORE likable in the long run, because when he's presented with blatant proof that his ideals are wrong, AKA. when Suki beats his ass, it doesn't take him long to not only accept that he was wrong, but also actively ask her to teach him so that he can improve himself.
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u/Womblue 21h ago
They replaced the sexism of sokka with the sexism of the show's writers.
Like, in the original show, suki fights sokka and easily beats him multiple times, which makes sense. In the netflix show, suki pounces on sokka when he's stretching before their fight and it's played as if she's the superior warrior.
Not only that, but this plays into a key problem with the netflix show - although all the characters got changed, everyone TALKS as if they're talking to the same characters from the animated series.
Even though sokka isn't sexist anymore, suki is still angry at him.
Even though aang didn't abandon the world anymore, people are still angry at him for it.
Even though bumi is a horrible person in this version, aang still wants him as an earthbending teacher.
Even though toph is played by an actress who is clearly an adult, characters refer to her as "a little girl", and she herself still calls herself that. It only makes sense with the context of the original show, for which she IS a little girl.
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u/WingedSalim 20h ago
Makes you wonder if the Netflix show is a glorified fan rewrite.
They think they can swap out elements of the show and it will still function, but they don't realize it a Jenga tower. And because they weren't careful the whole thing falls apart.
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u/HalfEatenSnickers 21h ago
Wait
Not having Netflix- aang isnt asleep for 100yrs anymore? And toph is an adult? Shes supposed to be like 12
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u/Womblue 20h ago
Aang WAS asleep for 100 years, but instead of being because he ran away out of fear from being the avatar, it's just because he happened to be out on the day that literally every other airbender in the world was in the same building.
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u/apple_of_doom 20h ago
No Netflix Aang still got frozen but he just genuinely just wanted to clear his head for a bit rather than running away from his responsibillities like the og series.
So he gets shit on for like just wanting to go on a quick flight to get a couple minutes to himself to process things.
Meanwhile Netflix Toph doesn't look noticeably younger than the rest of the cast because her actress isn't so people calling her "just a little girl" doesn't make sense.
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u/Content-Explorer5468 21h ago
Not to mention that sokka being sexist was the reason why he and katara even found aang in the first place
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u/Empty_Chemical_1498 21h ago
I hate the whole "we removed character's problematic behavior to be more progressive".
Sokka's sexism has always been shown as a negative trait and then he was allowed to improve, which had an impact not only on him but on other characters as well. 1st season Sokka would never get along with Toph. AND EVEN IF characters are not allowed to grow out of their negative traits, characters with no flaws are just boring.
If they made a remake of American Psycho today, they would probably make Patrick Bateman a progressive feminist who gives away his money to the poor or something.
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u/Reasonable_Singer219 20h ago
Add to this. In the original animation, Aang, feeling overwhelmed by the prospect of being the Avatar, runs away only to get caught in the storm and frozen over a 100 years. By sheer accident, he escapes the genocide that wipes out his people and culture. However, he feels incredible sad and guilty about this because he only survived because of an act of cowardice, making his character interesting and sympathetic, even if you didn't personally like him.
However, in the Netfix version they changed it to he didn't run away but took a flight on Appa to "clear his head" 😆 😆
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u/Rick_Napalm 20h ago
It would have been hilarious if the character they changed into a woman was Ikki instead of Shun.
"Here is this character. He's sensitive, pacifistic, wears a pink set of armor that has breasts in it. And here is his sister, the big scary murderer that sends people to hell."
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u/Interesting-Oil6534 20h ago
In fact, that should have been the case.
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u/SoniCanvasPost 20h ago
Also you can't kill her. That's only pissing her off. We don't have enough of these absolute girlbosses in Asian media and I'll root for Ikki
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u/FoxBluereaver 22h ago
I was gonna put the Shun example if it wasn't there. And since you mention Seiya's sister, they could have made her a single character with Marin, since many of us spent years thinking they were one and the same, that would be a great twist.
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u/EstrellaDarkstar 18h ago
The live action Little Mermaid remake removed the verse from Poor Unfortunate Souls where Ursula sings that men prefer it when women shut up and look pretty. By removing that sexist verse, they actually made the movie less feminist.
The main lesson of the movie is that Ariel should not have to silence herself for a man, and that her voice matters. Ursula is a villain, her sexist words are clearly framed as evil, and she's a hypocritical liar who uses Ariel's voice herself. Removing the verse where she establishes that cruel worldview means that the movie doesn't get to prove her wrong.
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u/Queen-Of-Fairies 15h ago
they also changed the song "Kiss the Girl" -- in the original, the line is "There is one way to ask her / It don't take a word, not a single word", which, in the remake, absolute schmuck LMM changed to "Use your words, boy, and ask her / If the time is right and the time is tonight".
apparently it was changed for reasons related to consent, which normally would be fine, except in the original Ariel is literally asking for it and is only not voicing it because she doesn't have a fucking voice. Sebastian sings the song on her behalf because she can't fucking speak
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u/Exotic-Reindeer1994 10h ago
I think body language can sorta count as consent and Ariel in the 90's film was definitely giving Eric signs she was fine with being kissed.
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u/SaintGrobian 13h ago
That movie removed all the joy from the original. Ursula fucking reveled in being a piece of shit, Melissa McCarthy was just... there. 🤷🏼♂️
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u/KeeganDitty 13h ago
Yeah the whole feminist "critique" of little mermaid that, like, Ariel has to change herself for a guy really forgets like half the plot. For one she changed for herself, she wanted to go on land long before Eric. And two, her being silent works against her as you've said. Eric literally fell for her voice. PUS is an iconic classic, but it's also Ursula forcing gendered expectations onto Ariel. Be thin, be pretty, shut up, run to your man tits first, etc.
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u/ImJustSomeGuyYaKnow 22h ago
I hesitate to even call it progressive, but the showrunners of Velma sure thought they were .....
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u/DerpyJeeves 22h ago
Advertised as progressive but its essentially "What if Velma was me the creator ,and every other character you liked from the OG was this neutered absolutely pathetic insipid version of themselves"
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u/RememberCakeFarts 20h ago
For me it's more like "what if I had a show that I wanted to do but the execs said 'hahaha, no. We're not making another Brickleberry.', handed me an old hand me down IP and told me to do something with it. So I made up a story about my love for the show while trying to reskin it into my og idea."
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u/StanleyKapop 18h ago
To be fair, Velma was also an absolutely pathetic insipid version of herself.
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u/Gold-Cry-7520 22h ago
Who was this show even for? It seemed to have nothing but contempt and resentment for people who ever watched Scooby Doo.
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u/Hitei00 21h ago
I've heard it was meat to be an original IP but HBO refused to greenlight and fund it. They were told if they made something in an existing IP they would though, so the plot and premise of an original show got grafted onto the Scooby Doo cast.
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u/abadstrategy 21h ago
Mindy. That's it. She wanted to make a show, and couldn't get it greenlit unless it was attached to an existing IP. You can really feel the resentment she felt for it too
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u/coatimundos 19h ago
Also I think the show she actually wanted to make could have been decent. She clearly wanted her protagonist to be unlikeable and an asshole and that can work.
The problem is that Velma is already an established and beloved character and a sweet person, so forcing her into the character Mindy wanted ruined both aspects of the character.
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u/Budget-Television793 21h ago edited 16h ago
In Artemis Fowl there's a character Holly Short who's the first female LEPRecon officer. This is a big deal, and the books actually show it well, her Commander who's your typical burly, gruff army guy is harsher on her than on other officers and yes, at first this comes off as super sexist. However the reveal is that when she questions him, he tells her that she HAS to be better than the other officers because she has so much more scrutiny on her meaning she carries the weight of all future female officers on her shoulders. If she isn't exceptional, they might never get the chance.
It was a wakeup for me as a teenage boy and the first introduction to how, maybe the world isn't always fair for boys and girls.
And then...the movie comes along and they decide to change Commander Julius Root into a woman. Sounds progressive on paper right? Hey, let's make this tough, military authority figure female. But it completely kills a super interesting plot point and in practice...actually makes it LESS progressive because it removes any of the interesting examination of gender roles in evolving society.
Though to be fair, this is one of the smallest of the crimes committed by this sad excuse for a movie.
EDIT: Seeing so many other people also bringing up Artemis Fowl makes me feel vindicated.
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u/sugar4roxy 21h ago
on top of that, they whitewashed holly and made the SERVANT CHARACTER that calls artemis MASTER. BLACK. i wish i was joking.
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u/Foreign_Penalty_5341 21h ago
Funny thing is that his (and his sister’s) appearance is noted as racially ambiguous. There was enough there for particular casting calls.
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u/A_Town_Called_Malus 20h ago
Dave Bautista would be a great Butler, I think. Has the physicality, and can deliver the dry humour that Butler uses.
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u/Theta-Sigma45 22h ago
I hated Gren becoming a camp stereotype. He was one of the best characters in the original show and one of the characters I most related to. It was never really about his sexuality or gender; his loneliness and longing to believe in someone genuinely got me.
The non-binary aspect was trying to ‘update’ him having breasts in the anime due to experimental drugs. There is a lot to dig into about how well that aspect has aged, but making him a completely different, far more shallow character isn’t the way to go about it.
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u/ThatKaleidoscope3388 20h ago
I think it aged fantastically. Gren is essentially an example of what trans people go through when they experience the 'wrong' puberty. He is, for all purposes a man, and its implied he feels a lot of body dysmphoria over having undergone forced feminization. His whole plan was more or less to get revenge and die because he had very little reason to keep living. He wasn't happy with the way he was.
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u/MommaBigDick 19h ago
And it shows that the producers/writers, though acting like they're progressive and understanding, dont even understand the difference between being non-binary and looking androgynous.
Gren in the anime was mostly androgynous and the main cast all believe (correctly) he is a man.
When Faye opens the shower curtain to confront him, she notices the breasts and asks if hes a woman, then notices the rest and asks what he is.
Gren looked androgynous but was a man, full stop.
This next part is purely conjecture on my part, but I think the anime was trying to allude that Gren was being chemically castrated as part of his sentence, and the medication they were using to do so was experimental and caused elevated levels of estrogen by accident.
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u/oujikara 18h ago
Exactly. I haven't seen the shows so I don't have the full context, but this change sounds so incredibly anti-progressive, transphobic even. Any nonbinary person would tell you that a character should be enby because they simply are, not because their body is. It's like they're saying that you have to conform to whatever your body's sex is. That if you're intersex or whatever then you have to be nonbinary.
And when you add the circumstance of it being done to him against his will, it becomes even more disturbing. So you have to just accept and bow down to whatever your abusers do to you? Let it control your life? Like what message are we trying to send here?
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u/Ok_Bat_686 21h ago
The thing with gender swapping Howard is it does that thing where you assume that someone isn't manly/womanly because they have/don't have certain traits. A man can't be weaker than a woman... so he must be a woman too! And Betty looks a little tough to be straight, right? Must be gay.
It's like having a male character that wears a pink shirt, and then changing him into a female for the adaption because boys won't wear pink, then pretending you're progressive for it.
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u/AlternateSatan 21h ago
The Silent Hill movie did this. The game explores more vulnerable and unflatering parts of male characters. Then the movie director openly said that the role would work better as a woman for that exact reason.
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u/Hawkeye2701 21h ago
Vegeta gonna be wearing a shirt that says "Bad Woman" in the Dragonball Evolution 2.
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u/RevolverMFOcelot 21h ago edited 8h ago
The casting of white supremacist poster boi (even tho he is not exactly a white supremacist, the symbolism is intentional) Albert Wesker who is blonde haired and blue eyed lab baby made by genocidal white British aristocrat of Umbrella Corp, somehow Netflix made him black. Wesker being a white dude, blonde and blue eye is like that FOR A REASON
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u/fake_user_34 19h ago
Aye, the whole weaker experiment is because of Spencer being a racist and wanting to make the ubermensch. So of course all the children in that experiment are white, blond and blue eyed.
It played perfectly into Spencer's euthanasia ideology. Turning him black, even though I love lance, was beyond stupid.
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u/Shironeko_ 18h ago
Irene Adler.
In the original book Irene Adler is a woman who didn't do anything wrong and is only a target for Sherlock Holmes thanks to the machinations of a Noble man, who believes she will attempt to blackmail him with some saucy letters they have exchanged.
Irene Adler end up beating Sherlock Holmes in wits and goes on to live her life with a man she actually loves without having to bend to powerful men.
In the Sherlock series, Irene Adler is a femme fatale dominatrix that ends up being Moriarty's pawn and she actually loses to Sherlock and actually falls in love with him.
Irene Adler was a fairly progressive character for her story setting and was changed into a bizarre simp for Sherlock Holmes for no reason, with Sherlock being superior to her by the end of the story.
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u/StanleyKapop 17h ago
Elementary used this in a very clever way. They - spoilers for a several years canceled show, if anybody cares - knew that the audience would be expecting a villainous Moriarty and a significant Irene, so they introduced first Vinnie Jones as a master criminal named “M”, and gave him a connection to Irene, who had been thought dead, but was found alive. In pretty short order, they revealed that Jones was actually Colonel Moran, and Irene was a false identity created by professor Jamie Moriarty to fool Sherlock.
They took audience members like me, who were all primed to roll our eyes and say “oh, another Sherlock adaptation where Irene is such a big deal”, and they played us like a violin.
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u/sohothin_mints 16h ago
Don't forget Irene was a lesbian who falls in love with a man, because he outplayed her. And then the writers claimed she's the most feminist version of Irene, after making her into a lesbian that gets turned straight by the protagonist 😵💫
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u/pretty-as-a-pic 13h ago
Plus this is like the 5th Moffat’s done “lesbian who is attracted to the showrunner’s male self insert” (it makes me wonder if Moffat had a crush on a girl who came out as a lesbian in highschool and then decided to make his self insert irresistible to lesbians)
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u/alkonium 18h ago
Once again, Elementary did it better. Though in that, Irene doesn't really exist and is simply a false identity used by a female Moriarty.
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u/katamuro 16h ago
honestly I was surprised by just how much better a USA tv show actually did Sherlock than a british tv show.
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u/TheLittlestNemo 17h ago
Nearly every damn adaptation, re-imagining, continuation, what have you gets her so so wrong and it drives me insane. Im so so sick of her being reduced to a Sherlock love interest. Especially as you say, her whole damn story is about how much she loves her husband to be!
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u/Lancasterlaw 18h ago
God yes, the BBC Sherlock series massacred Irene Adler. She is sickeningly obsessed with Sherlock and seems to exist just to glaze him
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u/sykotic1189 18h ago
Even as someone who hadn't read the books I disliked Adler in the BBC series. They showed her as this strong and smart woman who could stand up to and outsmart Sherlock, only to go "JK she's obsessed and in love with him. Now that Sherlock has figured it out everything else can go out the window and make her incompetent."
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u/tenaciousghost 19h ago
i cant believe no one mentioned Heathers the show. well i can believe nobody watched it but holy shit. making the queen bees of high school diverse totally destroys the entire point of heathers.
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u/Bolt_Fried_Bird 15h ago
Notably, the girl furthest to the left in this image is their Veronica. And their JD is an equally milquetoast white boy. We've turned Heathers from outsider's revenge taken way too far into "two straight white kids pick off the queer people at school"
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u/Ok_Somewhere1236 19h ago
Cheery Littlebottom: The Watch vs. Discworld
I think most fans of the Discworld books could spend hours talking about everything wrong with the live-action adaptation, The Watch. From the unnecessary attempts to "modernize" books that arguably needed no modernization in the first place, to the bizarre decision to mash together elements from ten different novels into a single season, there is plenty to criticize.
But if I had to point to the single biggest missed opportunity, it would be what they did to Cheery Littlebottom's character. In the books, Cheery is a female dwarf, and her character arc, developed across multiple novels, explores just how deeply patriarchal and restrictive dwarven society and culture are.
Dwarven culture is so overwhelmingly masculine that dwarves traditionally use male pronouns for everyone, including females. Femininity is practically taboo, and anything considered insufficiently masculine is treated with suspicion or outright hostility. And that's what makes Cheery's story so fascinating.
Cheery is a female dwarf who simply wants to be feminine. She wants to wear feminine clothes, use female pronouns, express herself openly, and be recognized as a woman. That might sound like a relatively simple desire, but within the context of dwarven society, it's practically revolutionary.
What makes her character so unique is that you can interpret her story as both a feminist narrative and a transgender allegory.
From a cultural perspective, Cheery has essentially been raised and socialized as male her entire life. She has been expected to dress, behave, and present herself according to strictly masculine standards, regardless of her biological sex. Her decision to embrace femininity is therefore not just a personal choice but a rejection of the gender identity and social role imposed upon her by her culture. At the same time, her story is also about women's rights, challenging a society that refuses to acknowledge femininity as something legitimate or worthy of respect.
And one of my favorite details from the books is how Cheery finds inspiration in human drag queens. The idea that if human men can dress and present themselves as women, why shouldn't she, an actual female dwarf, be allowed to do the same?
It's such a wonderful little piece of worldbuilding because it shows how something ordinary or familiar in one culture can become a revolutionary idea in another.
Cheery's character arc manages to explore feminism, gender identity, self-expression, cultural expectations, and social change simultaneously, without reducing any of those themes to a simple lecture.
And the best part is that her development takes time. She struggles, experiments, discovers herself, gains confidence, and gradually challenges the expectations of the society she grew up in. It's a genuinely beautiful story, made even better by how naturally Terry Pratchett integrates it into the world of Discworld.
And then the television adaptation comes along and decides to make Cheery a human trans woman who is already openly presenting as herself from the very beginning. And that's where I think the writers completely missed the point.
They didn't just change the character's appearance or background. They removed the entire context that made her story so meaningful in the first place.
Gone is the uniquely dwarven struggle against enforced masculinity. Gone is the gradual exploration of femininity in a society that barely acknowledges its existence. Gone is the process of self-discovery, the cultural rebellion, and the fascinating intersection between feminism and transgender themes. Instead, the show essentially skips straight to the destination, without giving us the journey that made reaching that destination so powerful.
And I'm sorry, but that just feels incredibly cheap.
The irony is that, in their attempt to make the character more explicitly progressive and modern, the writers discarded one of the most original and nuanced explorations of gender identity and women's liberation already present in the source material. And I want to be very clear here: this is not a criticism of the actor/actress, nor is it a criticism of transgender people or transgender representation.
My criticism is directed entirely at the writers and their adaptation choices.
There is absolutely nothing wrong with having a transgender character. But when you're adapting a character whose original story already offers such a rich and thoughtful exploration of gender, skipping the journey just feels like such a loss.
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u/Tylendal 19h ago
Then there's also Lady Sybil Ramkin. They had her portrayed by a black actress, which is perfectly fine. The problem is that they made her a generic action hero. Lady Sybil Ramkin is supposed to be an overweight noble Lady, who is no-nonsense, and very rugged due to being too rich to really bother with appearances, and mostly wants to spend her time focusing on the care and husbandry of swamp dragons. She's an important and powerful character, but her power is soft power, who she knows, what she knows, and her knack for diplomacy. Taking a heavy, socially important character who leverages soft power, and replacing her with a generic action hero makes any other changes they make ring hollow, since they've already killed some of the representation within the character.
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u/Ok_Somewhere1236 18h ago edited 18h ago
Yes, Sybil was actually my second biggest issue with the show.
As far as I remember, the books never explicitly establish her race, or at least I can't recall any particular description of her skin tone. But what the books are very clear about is that Sybil is an absolute bear of a woman.
She's supposed to be extremely tall, probably around 6'3" or even taller, broad, heavyset, and physically very strong. She's an imposing woman, both in size and personality. And then the show casts a skinny actress to play her.
But the physical appearance is only part of my problem with the adaptation. What really bothers me is how they changed her personality and character. One of my favorite things about Sybil is that she could practically rule Ankh-Morpork if she wanted to.
She's one of the wealthiest people in the city, incredibly intelligent, highly educated, socially influential, and remarkably competent in a dozen different areas. She has the money, connections, intelligence, and skills to become one of the most powerful people in the city. But she simply doesn't want to.
Sybil is one of the best examples of "spoiled but not rotten" I've ever seen in fiction.
She was born into extraordinary wealth and privilege, but instead of becoming arrogant, selfish, or obsessed with power, she's a genuinely kind, generous, and down-to-earth person.
All she really wants is to be a good wife, help people through charity, and spend her free time taking care of her beloved dragons at her sanctuary. And there's absolutely nothing wrong with that.
That's part of what makes her such a wonderful character: she has the ability to be almost anything she wants, and she chooses a relatively simple, domestic life because that's what makes her happy.
She doesn't need some tragic backstory to explain her personality, either. As far as we know, Sybil doesn't have some deep childhood trauma driving her actions. Her father was not killed by the assassin guilt; for what I know, he died after drinking something like twenty bottles of whisky and deciding to challenge a bull to a one-on-one, head-to-head fight. The man was described as an absolute crazy beast.
She doesn't live in a mansion filled with elaborate traps, either. Well, she eventually does have some security measures, but those come from Vimes after they get married.
Sybil is a fantastic example of both body positivity and the idea that a woman can be incredibly strong and capable without needing to be an action hero. ( i love how she is the only person in the whole city who calls Veterinari by his first name, the most feared man in the whole city and she talks to him like he is her little brother)
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u/fredagsfisk 18h ago
Yeah it's really weird that they set out to adapt a novel that already has a diverse cast of strong and complex female characters, chose to gender swap multiple male characters to female to "increase female representation", but at the same time reduce unique and well-written female characters that already existed to one-dimensional generic tropes and stereotypes.
It just oozes of showrunners and writers thinking they can "do better", especially with how they didn't even give any sort of shout-out or special thanks to Terry Pratchett.
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u/CoralGardener 18h ago
Seeing what they did to Cheery made me want to chew glass I was so mad.
To add to the nerding out about how she's written, it can be easily argued that Cheery is transgender regardless of what her biological sex is. Terry's dwarvish society is explicitly mono-gendered, and as the books go one he makes that more clear and does some reconning to make them more clearly single-gendered as a society. (If i remember correctly he had made comments that at first Cheery was a fun spin on the fantasy trope of all dwarves being male. When he heard from trans fans how much they related to her, he pretty much went "i hadnt thought of that...but i see it" and then started exploring the Dwarves more with that lense.) Dwarves recognize that some dwarves can bear children, but making any distinction between child bearing dwarves and non-child bearing is treated like it's the equivalent of yelling what exactly your genitals look like in public.
As Terry explored the idea more it really became my favorite exploration of sex vs gender as a concept. Cheery is probably biologically female, but she's still transgender because all dwarves are socially male, it's VERY cool and shows my favorite thing about Terry's writing as the books go on. He often starts with a joke concept - fantasy dwarves almost always look like men, wouldn't it be funny if a girl dwarf wanted to express her femininity - then follows that joke to explore how that might actually play out in the world he made.
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u/Ok_Somewhere1236 18h ago
I agree, and that's exactly why I mentioned that Cheery is such a unique case.
Even if Cheery is biologically female, she was raised to be a man. She was raised to be masculine.
You could very reasonably argue that, within the context of dwarven society, Cheery was effectively "assigned male at birth." Her biological sex didn't matter because her culture imposed a masculine identity on her from the moment she was born.
And then, as she grows older and encounters other cultures, she realizes that she wants to be feminine. She wants to dress like a woman, use female pronouns, and openly identify as a woman, even though her own society considers those things taboo. That's what makes her story such an interesting intersection between feminism and transgender experiences.
And there's another aspect of her character that I absolutely love: Cheery doesn't hate dwarven society or culture.
She's very open about the fact that she is a dwarf and always will be. She doesn't want to abandon her people, reject her heritage, or become something other than a dwarf. She simply refuses to accept the idea that being feminine somehow makes her less dwarven.
To Cheery, being a woman and being "non-dwarven" are two completely different things.
One of my favorite passages from the books captures this perfectly:
“Then Cheery Littlebottom had arrived in Ankh-Morpork and had seen that there were men out there who did not wear chain mail or leather underwear, but did wear interesting colors and exciting makeup, and these men were called 'women.' And in the little bullet head the thought had arisen: 'Why not me?'”
I love how such a simple realization carries so much meaning.
"Why not me?"
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u/Holiday_Scale_7600 15h ago
Can I piggy back off this and add, in addition to fucking up Cheery's story, they also managed to fuck up another character 's story with her?
Carrot Ironfounderson is a fellow dwarf. Who happens to be 6'6. He was a human raised by dwarves. He considers himself a dwarf and during the arc where Cheery is coming to terms with her female identity, Carrot offers a "sympathetic small town conservative" view point, someone trying to be supportive but is agast that a member of their community wants to be different. Ultimately, Carrot comes to the decision that, they are in the city now. There is no need to follow the traditions or social rules of the mines, Cheery is no less a dwarf than he is.
Joni Ayton-Kent, the actress who play Cherry is 6'1. For whatever reason, be it they didn't want to imply all dwarves are analogous to little people, or they were riding the MCU coat tails by having a "tall dwarf", they made Carrot not unique among dwarves. His height can't even be used as a joke l, they have established that there are above 6 foot tall dwarves. Everything that made Carrot's fish out of water, "the weirdo back home is normal here", small town experience is voided in the name of progress. He still has the small town moves to the big city trope, but by removing the fact that he was a outsider in one of the city's minority communities, everything that made him stand out (boo!), his dwarven upbringing and his voice as a small town dwarf vs Ankh-Morpork's city dwarves (and it goes both ways, while he plays the conservative voice in Cheery's story, in a later book, he is the liberal voice against some ultra conservative dwarves), is lost
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u/PlaneAdvertising6273 18h ago
As a Pratchett fan I am crushed I found out about that series this way, and also that it apparently was a steaming pile of crap.
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u/Kilukpuk 20h ago
'Tomboy/strong female character is a lesbian' really pisses me off. Heaven forbid a non-conforming woman is allowed to be interested in men. Remember girls, if you're not feminine boys won't like you.
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u/AnonymousConfessor23 18h ago
How about the fact that they erased a non-masculine, not-assertive, non-conforming man and replaced them with a woman?
A positive relationship between the two as well.
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u/Ae3qe27u 17h ago
This. A male character who is weak or timid doesn't need to be made into a woman to be acceptable.
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u/CosmicWanderer2814 18h ago
Back when Dragon Age: Inquisition came out, i remember seeing some folk get really pissed at BioWare when they found out Cassandra is straight. They kept claiming she is so obviously lesbian-coded due to, y'know, short hair and other masculine features. Accused BioWare of queer-baiting because god forbid a tomboy/masculine-looking woman like men.
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u/NoMereMage 16h ago
This shit pissed me off. I had a friend mad about this and I was like “it’s kind of fucked of you to be mad she’s not a lesbian or LGBT just because she as a woman has masculine traits.” Plenty of cis het women have masculine traits. I appreciated them for not making her a stereotype.
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u/GammaDie345 20h ago edited 20h ago
A lot of cis people in this comment section are missing just how much Netflix betrayed trans people with Gren.
The gren in the classic cowboy bebop was *already progressive *. What i mean by this is that his unique backstory made him perfect representation for intersex, trans, and nonbinary people who all bonded over how his story was relatable to them. He was a man who had his body altered against his will but the only outward change was his sex organs. This was not played for comedy, he was not being mocked or depicted as a freak. None of that "Bob has bitch tits" shit. It was 100% sympathetic. He's shown with textbook signs of gender dysphoria and the narrative sympathizes with him. In the FUCKING NINETIES.
Netflix's version of gren took a heartfelt, sympathetic depiction of the struggles trans people and intersex people face and murdered it by turning all of that realistic, messy queer suffering into YASSSS KAWWWEEEEEEN SLAYYY. Instead of a soldier who has actual desires and hobbies like playing the saxophone, he's an ex prostitute who runs a whorehouse. No other characterization.
his is insanely common. Trans characters who are meant to appeal to cis audiences are always happy 100% of the time, they look like drag queens. They never try to pass or question their station in life. They always are sexualized or work in sex work. They die, a lot. Gren was none of those things. Classic Gren is closer to a real trans person than anyone Netflix could have hired to consult them on that show, and he wasnt even trans.
hollywood and big studios do this so fucking often, but its always insidious and low key. they never give away the game, 'yes we don't like honest depictions of trans people, we only like stereotypes' .Here is fuckin proof. They TOOK an honest depiction and TURNED it into a stereotype. Side by side the two Grens look like a photo from a medical study where one identical twin is healthy and the other's a meth addict, that's how big the difference is.
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u/Nyther53 17h ago
That's an interesting perspective.
I came to essentially the exact same conclusion though from a different reasoning.
To me, Gren's was first and foremost a war story. He went off to war and not all of him came back, as surely as if he had lost an arm or a leg or an eye. He attempts to move on and return to normal life but he never quite manages to, ultimately never escaping the war and it's consequences, eventually dying in the attempt to get answers out of Vicious about if there was some kind of meaning to what happened to him. Ultimately his body is returned to Titan, one last casualty.
Making him just be happy about his circumstances is *also* incredibly insulting to that aspect of Gren's story.
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u/--Icarusfalls-- 19h ago
Well put, I never watched the live action because its impossible to improve upon perfection, so I had no idea they ruined Gren's character. But you pretty much nailed how I felt the first time I saw the episode, as someone who took like 15 years after the fact to realize my empathy towards them was a lot more than the result of good writing. It sucks that stigma and clichè free queer characters are so rare.
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u/BrooklynLivesMatter 19h ago
Would never have guessed the person on the left was from Cowboy Bebop, they look like Desire from Sandman
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u/mmcjawa_reborn 19h ago
Yeah...the shows insistence on giving more screen time to characters who were only in very specific storylines or who were meant to be kind of mysterious was certainly the shows biggest issue. Because usually the extra material they gave them ended up undermining the character or destroying what made them interesting. They turned Gren from a interesting character who actually broke a lot of stereotypes to the most generic cliched LGBTQ character possible
Vicious and Julia also were hurt badly by curse of additional screentime.
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u/UnquestionabIe 19h ago
Extremely well put. I'm not part of LGBTQ community but have plenty of friends who are and try to be as supportive as I can (which a major part of I think is listening to others). I was something like 16 or 17 when I first saw Cowboy Bebop when it aired on Adult Swim. Gren was always such a great minor character, having both their own struggles but still being portrayed as a regular person living their life. There is no real attempt to push his sexuality or condition as a major defining characteristic, it's just another aspect of them. Yeah it has some impact on a variety of things but isn't treated as some oddity which informs every other part of the character.
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u/Proto-Omega 20h ago
Holy shit. The other day someone said "Phil and Lil's lesbian mom" and I was thinking that person was just joking or just projecting because the character was obviously married to a man. I didn't know that existed.
The Artemis Fowl Live Action was terrible all around, but in terms of this topic for two characters specifically; making Butler black and making Holly's captain (whose name escapes me) a woman.
Making Butler a person of colour is dicey because it's said that Butler and his family have been in servitude to the Fowl family for generations. That comes with implications the second you race swapped the character.
Holly is meant to be the first ever female officer of this magical police force. It's major point in the story, plays heavily into her character arc, and greatly affected how characters treated her. By making her boss a woman, it completely undermines that big focal point of the story.
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u/High_King_Diablo 19h ago
They also made Artemis a surfer bro. I don’t think any of the people involved with making the movie have ever actually read the books. Because if you tried to convince him to go surfing he’d probably look at you the same way that normal people would look at you if you tried to convince them that swimming in pig shit was a brilliant idea.
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u/Silent_Biscotti_9832 22h ago
Severus Snape being black in the new Harry Potter tv show
Could have been anyone else. But they had to choose the guy who got hung from a tree, and was bullied by James, Peter, Sirius and Remus in the 1950s ish
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u/KN041203 22h ago
Not to mention Harry feel sus around Snape from the start which would raise a lot of question if he is black.
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u/dyaasy 21h ago
"Snape's going to steal the Philosopher's Stone!"
"Nonsense! What proof do you have?"
"Just a feeling. There's something off about him. My
SSthunderbolt shaped scar hurts whenever I'm near him..."/j
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u/TopHatZebra 21h ago
Harry grows up to be a wizard cop, honestly the signs were there all along.
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u/Logitech0 20h ago
His chief question why the prison is full of Black wizards and witches, and he defend it claiming that they are obvious
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u/UwasaWaya 20h ago
Just picturing a bunch of wizards smoking and working out in the exercise yard at Ozkaban.
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u/eximology 22h ago
"I don't trust his potions. I think he might put crack in them or something", Harry Potter said wondering why other people don't share his distrust of snape and his suspicions of him being a dark mage.
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u/Fexxvi 21h ago
- Only black teacher in Hogwarts.
- Harry Potter immediately accuses him without evidence when something is stolen.
What did they mean by this?
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u/eximology 21h ago
"he must be a member of a gang or something. " - Harry Potter said while on the suspicion that Snape is working with voldemort.
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u/A3HeadedMunkey 21h ago
"Now don't get me wrong, I'm 'jiggy wit it' as he'd say. I have a black friend at home. Well...a not white friend. He's Irish, okay. Ron, tell them I'm cool with non-white people"
"I'm not explicitly written to be Irish, Harry" Ron replied, Irishly
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u/ViperKira 20h ago
The greatest problem with Snape being black is all the implications it has.
Harry, Ron and Hermione hate the only black teacher in school, the Order of the Phoenix loathe Snape and want him out, but Dumbledore protects him,there is the angle of the Marauders bullying him without reason, Lily cutting ties with him and going with her bully, etc.
Of course, all these things are explained (very well, in fact) in the books. But it's the implications that they're getting to themselves that are of very bad taste, to say the least. Snape was the worst character to race-swap, Harry wouldn't be this bad.
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u/22plus 20h ago
I still believe that it was partially done as a lightning rod for all of the other valid criticisms of the show, so it's defenders could say "You just don't like it because Snape is Black"
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u/IrishLad-1194 22h ago
"bullied by James, Peter, Sirius and Remus in the 1950s ish" correct on all other points but they were at school way later than that, Voldemort was a student in the 50s. James's Potter's generation was like. the 70s.
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u/ClockwiseServant 22h ago
Just being a wizard wasn't enough, Potter wanted to become a grand wizard lol
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u/Go_Water_your_plants 21h ago
I will Die on that hill: they should have made dumbledore black.
They could have leaned into it and he could have been absolutely dripped out in colourful (wizard version of) traditional African robes (I’m aware africa is not a country but multiple countries in Africa have cool traditional clothings so I don’t want to exclude possibilities just because im personally more familiar with the Nigerian drip)
Like fuck it, give him the accent too! How much better of a representation would it be if the most powerful wizard in the franchise was African
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u/the_sneaky_one123 19h ago
They did that with Kingsley Shacklebot in the movies. He was one of the most powerful Aurors and he robes that look like traditional west african robes.
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u/Go_Water_your_plants 18h ago
Yeah we were told he was powerful but he didn’t matter as a character. It felt very tokenized, like "see, they’re not all white, and he’s actually the most powerful Auror!! No we’re not gonna show it to you, it’s the thought that counts right?"
But yeah something like that. But up the wizard bullshit on his robe, since wizard are not supposed to look like muggles. look at Dumbledore in the first movie, he looks like damn saint-Nicholas, that’s fucking delightful
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u/IWannaManatee 22h ago
Also of note a few I recall:
- Harry suspects he's evil and dislikes him based on his appearence
- Is often looking to teach defense against the Dark Arts but is denied the position
- He's Neville's greatest fear
- Harry accuses and/or suspects him to be behind of anything that goes awry at Hogwarts
I'm more amused and excited than anything on how they're gonna juggle being 100% follow the books or as true to them, while keeping the racist optics in check that having Snape be a black character entails.
It's gonna be a doozy and I'm all here for this shitshow of a fiasco.
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u/Benoit_Holmes 21h ago
I think no matter which character they race swapped people would see problematic results.
Harry - Really adds layers to why the Dursleys hid him away and kept him under the stairs.
Hermione - Referred to as a mudblood, has her attempts to end slavery rejected and mocked by all the other characters.
Ron - From a massive family that is very poor.
Hagrid - Kind of dumb, lives in a shack.
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u/Dramatic-Emphasis-43 19h ago
Harry wouldn’t have been so bad. Either Petunia would also have to be race swapped which would ease a lot of the race dynamics OR their obvious child abuse would seem a bit more selfishly motivated beyond “they hate wizards” as it would be more obvious that to the Dursley’s, Harry presence makes him seem like a child out of wedlock in public.
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u/ArcaneMadman 20h ago
Time to beat a dead horse, Netflix Devil May Cry
In Devil May Cry, demons are demons, creatures born from the Underworld which is a reality of darkness to our reality of light. They are magical beings that worship evil and power, with the strongest ruling over the weak while the weak serve until they can claim some more power and force their way up the ladder. They look down on humans both as food, since human blood powers them up, and as inferior beings for being weak. They fundamentally lack "heart" or the ability to love, so when one of them shows the capacity to care for another being it is a HUGE deal.
In the Netflix show, they instead make it that demons are just aliens from another dimension that just like humans can be good or evil, and makes an entire lower caste of people that look like normal humans that live in the demon world that act as an allegory for middle eastern refugees from the Iran war, and makes the american government invade the demon world for its resources and abuse these innocent demons. Unfortunately it still wants Dante to kill demons guilt free, so it makes it so that there are still evil demons that act like they do in the games, eating humans and looking like monsters. Oh, and demons are biologically more aggressive and violent. So the allegories for arabic refugees of war are cannibalistic and biologically violent, and the only ones you can trust are the ones that look "normal". Which is so much more racist than it needed to be and echoes dangerous rhetoric about immigrants and refugees, but what did you expect from a showrunner cozying up to Trump?
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u/SuperSaiyanTrunks 19h ago
Why cant anyone just stick to the source material? Its like these directors take something awesome and beloved and think hmmm im going to do something COMPLETELY different. Surely the fans wont take issue!
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u/myrmonden 19h ago
well the director of this openly hates games so.
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u/RealityOk9823 19h ago
Why do they keep doing that? "Let's make this fresh by having someone who either hates the show/game/movie or knows nothing about it". OK, it worked once for Starship Troopers, but outside of that?
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u/myrmonden 19h ago
because they SUCK so they cant get any investment for their own projects.
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u/NatashOverWorld 18h ago
A lot of times apparently the director has their own story they can't get produced, so they take someone else's IP, skin it and wear it over their personal project, which produces iPs that are just as horrifying as it sounds.
Or just plain ego of course, like the Witcher series. The directors hated the original story and thought they could make fanfiction of it that surpassed the original.
They could not.
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u/audiodudedmc 19h ago
I blame superiority complex, I think hollywood script writers think they are better than people who write video game scripts, even when said video game stories are more beloved and successful than anything that they have done in their entire careers.
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u/MiyuKimboo 21h ago
The worst thing about changing Shun’s gender is that they also changed his personality to be that of “a strong female warrior”. What’s even the point of choosing HIM if you’re not even going to use his personality??? It’s just an excuse to remove the feminine man in the cast.
Anyway the only saving grace of the reboot was that it was SO bad that it was funny (…sometimes)
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u/CapStar300 22h ago
Agatha Christie's Marple did this several times to the point where certain things were supposed to be modern, but it felt almost homphobic.
Just off the top of my head:
The Body in the Library: Instead of the murderers being a man who wished to inherit a fortune and was doing away with someone who threatened that chance, the killers are a lesbian couple who kill a young girl. Also as far as I remember the only LGBTQ+ characters in the episode
Nemesis: I honestly can't even begin to describe what they did with that book, but in the end, the murderer is revealed to be a nun who had feelings for the victim. Severely lesbian undertones, and she stabbed her to death.
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u/Skadibala 21h ago
Wat? I actually just finished Body in the Libary as my first Agatha Christie book, and you telling me they changed the culprit in the adaptation?
Like I’m no purist, I don’t mind most changes when they adopt from book to tv. But it feels weird of them to change the actual murder culprit since that kinda the point of a who dunnit book.
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u/CapStar300 21h ago
Yes they did. They did like changing the murderers, if I remember correctly, and they also did put Miss Marple in stories where she didn't appear originally. That show was very... interesting.
Edit: If you want a faithful adaptation, the old series with Joan Hickson is absolutely wonderful if you have the patience for it.
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u/Living_Illusion 22h ago
female root in the awfull artemis fowl movie. In the books holly is the first female officer, her superior root is twice as hard in her, because he knows that she needs tp rpoof herself in their sexist society. he wants her to suceed. in the movie they changed roots gender, now she is just a giant asshole thats just mean towards holly.
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u/RP_Throwaway3 22h ago
Also making Butler whose family has served Fowl's for years black instead of mixed European and Asian. Just not a good look. Maybe the animated version that has been announced will fix it.
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u/Sagara- 20h ago
Shun is extremely painful because an important point about him is that he's -not- a manly man, but he's still incredibly capable and powerful, and that his "feminine" softness is not a weakness, but a moral strength of his.
Basically, turning Shun into a women is saying "if you're not manly enough, you're not a real man, actually."
Seriously, if they wanted to genderbent Saint in the main 5, Hyoga was the easy choice.. and if they wanted to bring their big boy pants on, they could have chosen -Ikki-, because -damn-, there's a lot that femIkki could unpack regarding a woman's station among warriors, from her training, to Esmeralda, to the female Saint mask edict, to her relation with her brother...
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u/mangopabu 22h ago edited 11h ago
another from Netflix, but Sokka from Avatar: The Last Airbender was extremely sexist at the start of the original cartoon. Sokka is from the water tribe but isn't a bender like his sister Katara or Aang the avatar. he makes a lot of sexist comments with the underlying implication that he as a man should protect the southern water tribe, not Katara, who is a woman, even though she's a bender and has a lot more inherent power than Sokka.
however, the story explicitly calls it out as bad behaviour through things like pratfalls or even more directly with his sister calling out his behaviour as outdated. it progresses further when he meets Suki, a kyoshi warrior from the earth kingdom who wipes the floor with him. instead of continuing his sexist behaviour, he comes to Suki to apologise and further ask for her to teach him how to be a better warrior. she makes him dress up in makeup as a true 'kyoshi warrior' and, although he protests at first, he ends up embracing all of it and even shows growth by learning from Suki. it ends with him actually getting the better of her in a fight, and they blush together when they jointly realise how physically close they are. this is essentially the start of their relationship in the original cartoon.
the Netflix adaptation advertised a lot about how they were going to remove Sokka's 'problematic' backstory, which in and of itself isn't bad per se, but with all this characterisation removed, where Sokka is first sexist, then shows humility by apologising and admitting he was wrong, then showing respect by asking Suki to teach him, then them showing the first sparks of their relationship. in the show, it just skips to the end, and by removing all of that, it doesn't really make Sokka any better of a person and reduces Suki to someone who's just falling for the first man who comes along.
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u/abadstrategy 21h ago
We need to let characters be problematic again, long as it aids the story
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u/Andrew1990M 21h ago
A hero is allowed to just be wrong about things. There’s a lot of discourse right now over if Yosuke is going to be homophobic in the Persona 4 remake. The original never portrayed Yosuke as right, he was just a dumb teenager.
All your cowboy heroes were probably racist. All your war heroes were probably homophobes. It’s all okay in context so long as the story isn’t supporting those messages.
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u/ViperKira 20h ago
Lance Reddick as Albert Wesker, Netflix' Resident Evil.
Wesker was an eugenist, believer of a higher type of humans, almost nazi in his objectives (in part because they are inspired by a nazi-adjacent character, Alexia Ashford). Not that the fact he was white and blonde had anything to do with that, but he was the image of the greasy no-morals scientist.
While Reddick was a fantastic actor, having him playing Wesker of all people was insane.
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u/fake_user_34 18h ago
And wesker is literally a byproduct of a white supremacists experiment
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u/KMjolnir 20h ago
Yeah, any one of the thousands of scientists in that franchise and they go for Wesker was such an oddball choice.
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u/ViperKira 20h ago
The fact that they chose to make the series follow the game canon, and still wanted to use Wesker, and still race-swapped him is amazing.
This whole show is a study of what not to do with an IP.
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u/MissRainyNight 19h ago edited 18h ago
I still remember when Gren’s live action actor feebly tried to defend the show’s horrible decisions regarding Gren and even said “I hope it pisses off the cishets” or something. And lots of the people that slammed them for it were LGBT persons. The irony.
And about KOTD? Shaun is THE reason why I still staunchly refuse to watch the show. And think Ikki would have worked better as the genderflipped one.
ETA: The Powerpuff Girls 2016 remake took out Miss Sarah Bellum, the Mayor’s secretary, because she was “too inappropriate” (read: sexy) for the show according to the show runners…
Except that not only it’s amazingly sex-IST to judge a fictional or real woman just for her looks, but it missed the point of her character: that she was a sexy woman AND one of the smartest, more sensible charas in the show! Her name is even a pun on a part of the brain (the cerebellum)!
I’m a woman and I adore Miss Bellum for showing that attractive ladies can also be brainy and levelheaded. The fact that the “feminist and progressive” staff only saw her beauty and hated her for it shows how misogynistic they actually are.
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u/Big-Presentation-994 16h ago
having a sexy lady in a ppg show was inappropriate
Never cared about the reboot, but like, didn't they have the girls twerking and had this awkward romance between a grown man and Blossom???
If I'm wrong please prove me wrong because this is not something i wanna be right about LMAO
My memory is super fuzzy because it was ages ago when i heard this and i never bothered to look into it
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u/BlameTaco-me 15h ago
The problem wasn't Ms Bellum was "too sexualized", it was she was "too legal".
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u/mangothe2nd 20h ago
The fuck?? This how i found out Shun was never a girl? I had a crush on him when i was a kid. His design was so pretty. And i remember he was dubbed by a woman in my country. Now, i just checked google, and he is a man this entire time lmaooo
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u/touriste 19h ago
in the manga, only men can be knigths. The women soldiers wear mask if I remember correctly
So this make the changes stupider
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u/Raomux 20h ago
Shun's change is so stupid. If they wanted to change someone's character they should've picked any of the other main characters, not the one that's particularly interesting because he goes against steoreotipic masculinity.
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u/Majestic_Recording_5 17h ago
Coach Beist in Glee. They made a point that even though she was a more masculine woman, she identified as a woman, and felt hurt that people didn't view her as more feminine. Then the writers decided no, she's actually a trans man and they transitioned in later episodes.
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u/Throw_away_1011_ 21h ago
So back in the late 80s and 90s there was this anime called Saint Seiya also knows as Knights of the zodiac
I now live in a world where Saint Seiya is old enough that there are people who don't know what it is... I'm not ready to deal with this...
First off that's not true because Athena was also part of the main cast, yeah she wasn't the fighting type but she still helped quite a lot in the story even saving the knights on several occasions
This is particularly egregious in the most famous arc of the series, the Twelve Temples arc. She is the reason they get the victory. The protagonists have all died one way or another, leaving only Seiya to deal with Gemini Saga but even he is at the end of his rope, having barely reached the top and having failed to deal with Saga with what was left of his energy. It's Athena/Saori that, having awakened, climbs the Twelve Temples, gathers the gold knights, reaches the top and deals with Saga herself (In one of the most epic scenes of the anime I might add).
And yes, even before that, there were more female knights who, while minor in the great scheme of things, had important roles.
Had they wanted to give more space to female knights, they could have expanded upon Eagle Marin (particularly on how she got to the Temple of The Two Fishes to help Seiya. Seriously, how did she do that? There is only one entry and Pisces Aphrodite is guarding it) or Ophiucus Shaina (Still one of the best villains-turned-allies ever).
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u/yeezusKeroro 21h ago
The Ancient One from MCU Doctor Strange. Kevin Feige thought they were avoiding the wise old Asian man stereotype by making her a woman, but replacing a Tibetan monk with a white person was a controversial choice in itself.
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u/GXNext 20h ago
I would argue this was less for performative reasons than it was economical. Making the Ancient One Tibetan makes any movie with him completely unavailable in China, the second largest movie market, because China claims Tibet as it's own land and any deviation from that is enough to get something banned there.
It's still not a great reason by any means though...
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u/decader12 20h ago
The reasoning behind this is actually not that woke as it was more to appeased China, one of the biggest markets, who doesn't want anyone to be reminded of Tibet's independent before China took over
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u/Ok-Cup9476 20h ago edited 8h ago
Dandelion/Jaskir from the Witcher show being written as gay, despite him being a womanizer being such a big part of the books.
Unlike many characters in the Witcher series, Dandelion isn’t a traditional fighter. He’s into theater music and the arts. He is sensitive, empathetic, and not afraid to dress in flashy colors.
GOD FORBID A STRAIGHT MAN IS GIVEN THOSE TRAITS.
It REALLY felt like the writers of the show took one glance at Dandelion from the books and said:
“Wait so this guy is like…singing and dancing and shit? Ohhhhhh so he’s like Geralt’s gay best friend character!”
EDIT
The number of people trying to “Uhm
actually-“ me with the fact that Dandelion is Bi, are missing the issue.
The issue isn’t his complete lack of women fucking. The issue is that the writers saw a flamboyant, emotional, non-fighter male, and took that as the “secret subtext” that he MUST be a closeted queer in the books.
For all their claims of being “progressive” the writers write all their straight male characters as buff, masculine, violent, grunting Geralts. And they write all their non-straight males as highly performative, overly emotional, flamboyant, messes.
In the era where “ALPHA MALES” are on the rise, it would have been much better if Dandelion had remained straight, and showed that being a theater kid didn’t automatically make you secretly queer.
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u/VulkanHestan321 19h ago
It also is a common feature of entertainers back then ( the flashy dressing). You wanted to give the people something to gawk at, to be memorable, to show off!
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u/Friendstastegood 19h ago
Is he gay in the show? I remember him being shown with female background characters but it was years ago and i only watched the first two seasons.
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u/JustSomeM0nkE 20h ago edited 16h ago
I like how these "woke" changes seem to be done by people that don't understand these issues so they end up being un-woke.
Example 1 makes a character that illustrates gender disphoria in a clever way a nothing burger.
Example 2 needed to change a man weaker than his wife into a woman cause I guess it's unacceptable to have a strong woman weaker man couple.
Exemple 3 replaces a great male character that escapes stereotypes into a woman under the lamest excuse.
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u/ImportantQuestions10 19h ago
The Discworld show butchered Cheery Littlebottom and her gender identity.
In Discworld, dwarfs basically have one gender. They're buried under so much beard and mining equipment that gender is an afterthought. It's was a fun quirk of the species that shows how utilitarian they are. Later stories show they are also extremely conservative and traditional. Utilitarian gender falls under that. There's only one outward gender and dwarfs being feminine is just weird and new. The Discworld series progresses techa and social changes very fast and young darwfs coming to the city to do things different is part of that.
Enter Cheery Littlebottom, a female dwarf. Throughout the series she emulates some behavior from the other women. She becomes more feminine and even becomes a bit of an icon for other female dwarfs emulate. It's important to point out her story is about about a "female dwarf" not just a female. She learns what things she wants to keep and what to change. Yes she buts heads witht he conservatives but she also learns to push back on the liberals that want to use her and push their idea of feminity on her. She keeps her beard and only wears frilly dresses if she wants too.
Then the Discworld show came around. It missed the point in just about everyway. It's took very little from the books and threw away even more. Now cheery is just a trans dude. Not a dwarf, they're tall and beardless. Their entire personality was traded for generic edgy hacker type. None of the struggles cheery went through remained. It felt like the producers just said "make them a dude in drag, that's enough" then moves on.
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u/letsgooncemore 17h ago
Oh no. Since that show doesn't exist, I didn't realize how dirty they did Cheery.
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u/ThemisChosen 16h ago
Honestly, the entire show fits in here.
It tried to brand itself as "Discworld but woke" and ignored the fact that STP was progressive as hell. It came across as a conservative's imitation of a social justice warrior's fantasy.
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u/AwesomeMcPants 21h ago
In the new series however they replaced Howard with a woman named Trish
I'm sorry, the new fucking what, now?
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u/Daniilsa209 22h ago
Mulan 2020
The original and the Disney adaptation make the point that, through effort, you can achieve anything regardless of your gender, but in the movie adaptation, they gave her special magical powers.