Originally published at: "The Little Mermaid" gets review-bombed by racists | Boing Boing
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Because of course they are. There are bitter people in this world who just want to shit on everyone else’s joy.
Meanwhile, I’ve heard nothing but great things about this one. A lot of surprised “hey, that was WAY better than expected” reviews. Not really my cup of tea, but I’m glad it’s finding people receptive and excited.
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These days, someone who says “you’re destroying my childhood” is basically admitting that they’re a bigot.
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If I cared as passionately or had as much energy to devote to my causes as the racists who are determined that positive representations of non-white people cannot be allowed, I’d be damn nearly unstoppable.
What did that guy Yeats say about the worst being full of passionate intensity?
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Why shit on it in a racist way when you can shit on it for being an unnecessary, godawful cash-in like all the other live action Disney rehashes?
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If only they had cast a real, live mermaid. I hear that the lead from The Shape of Water has a sister… /s
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I haven’t seen this, nor have I seen the older animated version, but I think the Jungle Book does a lot of stuff way better than the earlier version, and we adored Pete’s Dragon, and Dumbo was pretty good and the original is difficult to watch now.
Everything Disney does is for cash. Some of it is better than it has any right to be.
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Wait until these morons learn Jebus wasn’t white.
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I used to strongly dislike Disney on principle. Then I had kids. There’s a lot of stuff out there aiming to amuse hyper little monsters, and mine were hard work in the rug-rat phase. At least with Disney there was a certain quality to the production, and you had to admit that it was the work of a lot of talented people. I decided to begrudgingly tolerate The Mouse, especially after the self-parody that was Enchanted.
It’s such a shame people feel the need to go after Halle Bailey. She seems like such a bright spark with more great stuff ahead of her in her career.
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The kid wants to see it, so I’m taking her this weekend. If nothing else, at least my spending money on this would annoy Desantis.
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IMDB and similar review sites are mostly ignored, which makes the scoring highly susceptible to forum-raid behaviors. This is pretty easy to design against (ie community as a whole gets averaged into one ‘vote’ per day, highs and lows get thrown out) but most of these sites like the attention, so they are happy to pander to the hate mobs, for ad views, which makes me so very tired.
There are perfectly good metrics of audience approval, such as Comscore audience surveys, which industry uses when they care about the actual result. For a while The Last Jedi was the worst rated movie of all time on Metacritic and also a B+ on surveys.
Who cares, right? Except participating in hate mobs is how you radicalize people further up the ladder of engagement, and the end of that ladder is young men gunning down churches and nightclubs.
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/20563051211021378
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There’s plenty of good reasons to not support remakes of animated films, but the casting choice isn’t one of them unless said actor is Ezra Miller, then there’s good reasons to not like them due to their own escapades. But seriously, people not being white playing a fantasy character is like the silliest thing to argue over. I’ve had this convo with someone on Second Life but she just thinks it’s bad without giving one good reason beyond “well I can’t see Ariel being black…” I’m like Ariel doesn’t friggin’ exist, Karen (not the person’s actual name).
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I’ve not seen this but I presume that it’s as poor as the other live action remakes that Disney has been making recently. Surely this controversy is just handing them free publicity.
I came here to say this.
I mean, it’s not deplorable yet still not worth much to criticize content creators (albeit large corporate ones) on the “necessity” of remixing / rehashing decades-old content. If you love the old stuff, fine: let creators create and be at peace.
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Yeah everyone who has talked to me about it has said it’s one of the most successful live-action Disney efforts they’ve seen.
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Unless they are a child; in which case the person ruining their childhood is probably a bigot or needs reporting to Child Services.
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If these bigots don’t like Black Aerial, maybe they would prefer the one from the Tempest; buff guy Aerial?
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Because they are racist, and they don’t actually care if the production is good or bad.
Do try to focus on the actual point at hand.
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That’s the part that gets me. Yet another version of a fairy tale so old that it has a version in dozens of countries, and the “not factual” part to these knuckleheads is not ‘mermaid’ but rather brown-versus-cream colored ‘skin’.
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The MAGA crowd likes their fantasy characters cis, straight and WHITE. Santa Claus, the tooth fairy, god. (A friend’s mother in law wanted a Santa lawn thing and the store offered them in caucasian or African American skin tones. Guess which they were out of. So she bought the one they had, got some paint that matched her preferred skin color and painted the plastic statue with a peachy-pink skin tone. Looked like something out of Five Nights at Freddys
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