Alternative title: How I learned to stop worrying and love JK Rowling (Token blacks outweigh Transphobia, it's simple DEI math.)
CW: Liberal Smugness, Harry Potter
I normally don't share this guy here, but this...uhh...Essay I think has to be seen to be believed. Maybe this is too mean, but I've been watching this guy for years and his uhh...decline, which I've been using as a standard candle for general liberal thoughts on things. Turns out all you need to get them to stop boycotting something because of bigotry is allowing them to stroke their ego about how great they are about another kind of bigotry!
Let me know if this isn't a good fit for slop. It's dumb, but harmless, I just had a good laugh reading it and hoped others would too.
WARNING: LONG!
Black Snape, A media analysis by one of my favourite liberals:
You know, I've changed my mind. I think I am going to watch that new Harry Potter series on HBO...
...I mean, when they reveal the cast photo of the three new kids, it brought back warm memories from the first time they did that, like 25 years ago? Remember that, when we all got our first look at the Rupert Grint?
Oh god, I'm old.
Also, I've completely come around on the casting of black Snape. I think it is a stroke of genius. This is one of the those "Michael Keaton can't play Batman, Heath Ledger can't play the Joker, there's no way that Tom Cruise can play the vampire Lestat!" moments. People don't think it can work, but when you actually see it on screen, you'll get it.
You see, I think it would be a mistake for this new Harry Potter series to try to slavishly replicate the film series. It has to forge its own identity, it should travel a slightly different path...
... the reason it should do this is because the first time people experienced Harry Potter, there was always the element of mystery; we didn't know what the answers were, and half the fun was speculating about what was really going on. But now, we do have all the answers -- we know what the deal is with Voldemort, we know about the Deathly Hallows and the Horcruxes, we know everything...
...and on that first time through, Snape's true character was a complete mystery, deliberately hidden. He always appeared to Harry and the audience as old, mean, and unlikable, a sinister asshole who eventually became a traitor and a cold-blooded murderer, right? It was only at the very end that we learned that Snape was a secret hero, that he sacrificed everything, that he had this deep core of nobility that he had to conceal from the world for the greater good...
We know that now. So trying to hide that truth by having him be old and unlikable would be pointless. Paapa Essiedu is younger, more handsome, and will play a more seductive, sexier, more doomed goth-boy version of the character. He can be the charming and dangerous serpent-man who is seduced by the dark side -- not just the mean old white man who hates children, grr, children!
...
And then of course there is the racial aspect.
Yes, it will be fraught. But it will also be potent.
Everyone has already brought up the teenage bullying flashbacks, which only appeared in the movies for about two seconds...
[ "Leave him alone,” Lily repeated. She was looking at James with every sign of great dislike. “What’s he done to you?” "Well,” said James, appearing to deliberate the point, “it’s more the fact that he exists, if you know what I mean…” ]
...the fact that he exists.
Could anything be more relevant today?
Think of how this will hit with today's kids. White chud kids will love it. Harry Potter's dad was a jock who viciously bullied the black kid for years, and then married the girl that the black kid had a hopeless crush on. James Potter, so based, gigachad!
And black kids will of course relate to Snape, who was guilty of nothing but being awkward and brainy -- but was shit on everyday by the rich white kids. I don't know for sure, but I suspect that black kids today feel far more senseless hatred coming at them from all sides than they did back in the '90s, which sucks. When they go online and see the little racist chud Elon fanboys posting endless racist cartoons and they realize, goddamn, these white kids just hate the fact that I exist.
It is very sad. But when we look at how stupid and vicious our society has become, we can no longer pretend it doesn't exist, we can no longer pretend that we live in a colorblind world. We have to explore it. We have to confront it.
Black Snape is going to be fucking epic. He will be a hero not just to Black kids, but to any kid who feels unfairly hated for no good reason.
That's going to be far more interesting than just "a mean old white guy pretending to be Alan Rickman."
Seven seasons of dank memes, bro. Even I can't fully grasp the insanity of what we are going to witness online.
...
Perhaps you think that it's wrong to change anything. Many people are conservative, and conservatives don't like change. They don't want anything new to happen, and that it is the dull duty of every storyteller to respectfully repeat what someone created before them, we must be slaves to tradition because the people in the past knew better than us and we must never question them, right?
No.
Never.
Stories will always mutate and change over the years, just like life itself.
...
..
I recently saw that movie The Northman, which is an amazing and brutal movie that I highly recommend. And when watching it, my ears perked up when I learned that the main character's name is "Amleth."
Amleth... Prince Amleth, like Hamlet?
Shakespeare's Hamlet?
Why, yes.
Think of this.
The Ancient Scandinavians dreamed up the tale of Prince Amleth who knows how many years ago, but it was first recorded in the 12th century by the Danish historian Saxo Grammaticus...
...and hundreds of years after that, William Shakespeare used it as the basis of his most famous play, turning the story of the Danish prince into a courtly stage play full of beautiful poetry...
...and here, just a few years ago, Robert Eggers adapted the same story into a dark and incredibly entertaining movie full of brutal murder and naked Viking swordfights, complete with a Bjork cameo and a tastefully nude Anya Taylor-Joy.
Shakespeare's Hamlet and The Northman are both very different takes on the same source material. The individual creators made it their own.
The creators of the new Harry Potter series should do the same thing, and black Snape is going to be an integral part of that.
I'm very curious what they're going to do with Voldemort.
So, mark this down.
I officially endorse black Snape and think that he is going to rule.
.
.
.
And on top of all of that, let us remember that Paapa Essiedu isn't just some guy, he's a classically-trained British actor..
[ "In 2016, Essiedu starred in the Royal Shakespeare Company productions of Hamlet as the titular role and King Lear as Edmund. The judges described Essiedu's Hamlet as one the audience listened to "completely still", observing Essiedu's performance could turn on a sixpence – sweet, playful and flirtatious one minute, and fiercely intelligent the next. "Like all great actors", a judge commented, he "made all the lines his own". His Edmund in King Lear was reported to convey a chilling contempt and cynicism.[10]"
...hell yeah.
The dude is kind of slumming it, but getting some nice paychecks to add some dignity to the silly Harry Potterverse. They are lucky to have him.
Let him cook.
Let Paapa cook, bro.
^__^
The answer I've usually gotten to that sort of question is either a "they're just as bad (but in secret so I don't have to provide evidence for my claim)" or "They'll collapse any day now. Maoists always do that weird Ultra thing where their view of AES is identical to your average Liberal.