sophrosynic:

lj-writes:

lj-writes:

I fucking hate it. There are so many layers of fuckery here it’s hard to unpack, but just confining myself to the casting:

• Nagini is a Sanskrit name and yet she is played by a Korean woman. Not that casting an Indian woman would have made this shitshow any more palatable, but the idea that Asian identities are largely interchangeable? The levels of racist ignorance wow.
• Yet again, the face of “Asia” is the palest East Asians. We already have a problem with Asia, the largest continent in the world and a hugely diverse one, being thought of as mostly Northeast Asia, with other groups regularly erased. Nice way to make this explicit. Again, not that casting a Desi woman would have made it better because this whole idea is so fucked from the start, but it is an extra shit cherry on top.
• The exotic Asian slave woman who in this case is literally dehumanized, just gahhhhh no.
• I don’t blame Claudia Kim for taking the role, actors of color often have to make the choice between shitty jobs and no jobs at all. This may well have been one of her better offers for all we know. I do blame Rowling for masterminding this total shitshow.

I’d like to correct myself on one point: At the VERY LEAST, if this massive fuckup of an idea was going to go through they should have cast an Indian/Desi actress. This whole character concept is a shitty ripoff of South/Southeast Asian culture and an actor from that culture should have benefited from it career-wise. Kim might not have been responsible for the final decision but she did benefit from her privilege as a lighter-skinned woman who keeps being seen as more “Asian” and more acceptably exotic than Desi women and many many other groups of Asian women.

No offence but as a south asian woman this whole “representation” bullshit is the least of our problems. Like, the idea that we would want or need an incredibly racist caricature like this to be “”“accurate”“ in its racism is a fucked up take.

Nobody benefits from this mess. JKR should never have touched this story with a ten foot pole to begin with. Nobody needs shitty crumbs like this for representation. “But at least it would have helped someone if it were accurate!” Oh goodie. Because *that* makes up for what a racist, exotifying, fucked up mess of a story all of this is, where a white British racist eventually keeps the trapped spirit of a brown woman in a snake as a pet. Yeah. That’s not fucked up and terrible at ALL.

There are multiple layers of fuckery to this and all of them are terrible and awful and something JKR should have never engaged with because she is a white British woman who cannot even remotely conceive of including non-white, non-British characters and mythologies in her story in a decent way. Woc deserve better representation than this, we always have, and always will. We deserve narratives that treat us with respect. Period.

Oh I don’t mean this is good representation at all in any way, of course. I completely agree this should not have been a thing in the first place. I was talking purely about an actor’s career that would have been helped or even launched by this shitty, shitty role that would enable her to be in exponentially better movies in the future. Representation wise I can’t even begin to wonder if casting a brown woman as Nagini would be better or worse than the blatant cultural misrepresentation and lightwashing. It’s like trying to decide whether diarrhea or pus is more disgusting.