As many of you know the adult casting for the Harry Potter TV series is now out. Whilst there are some spot on casting decisions such as Nick Frost as Hagrid, there are also some impractical ones such as John Lithgow as Dumbledore, given the actor’s age, but one stands out above all as being ill conceived.
This of course is the casting of Snape, now Snape is the central character to the Harry Potter narrative. He is a half blood wizard, this will now be a problem, and severs as a minor antagonist throughout the series for Harry before eventually helping him out of love for his mother.
The casting of Snape is notable for one key reason, they have race swapped the character turning from Alan Rickman to a young black male actor. Now why did they do this well that’s pretty obvious? The cast was too white for modern day Hollywood and even though it is supposed to be the UK in the nineties which was predominantly white, you have to hit your quota.
The reasons this is problematic are four fold, he doesn’t look like the character from a book’s perspective, he undermines other key black characters from the books, it was done for the negative headlines, and the whole everyone is now a racist thing.
So firstly in the books they give a pretty good physical description for Snape, sallow skin, pale, long greasy hair hanging like curtains, so straight, and a hooked nose. Now clearly this is not describing a young black man, and the fact that both HBO and WBD have said they want this to be a faithful adaptation of the books means this is a problem. They cannot claim that with his major change that they are respecting Rowling’s books anymore, and it will only be the first of many changes.
Secondly, characters like Kingsley Shackelbolt and Dean Thomas who were prominent characters of colour in the books, could have been brought in and explored in more detail rather than race swapping a character. This is irritating as rather than explore these underrepresented characters both of which could do with some fleshing out, they are instead taking a well known character and just making him black which adds no new depth or anything like that. Honestly it feels gimmicky.
Thirdly, you have the fact that if this wasn’t just done to tick a box it was done to make people angry and to get people talking. Hollywood is still under the belief that all press is good press and that if they get people angry and making content about their casting or other aspects of their productions that it will translate into more sales. This is wrong. I have seen many people say after the race swap that they won’t be watching the show, because as I said earlier this wont be the only change done to generate outrage, it will go further and it will go deeper, this is a symptom of a wider disease. Many people will stupidly think that someone not watching something over a race swap is racist, when in actual fact they can just see the red flag that something like that generates with regard to respecting the source material and making ‘changes’ and that’s all they need to stay away.
Fourthly in the world of Harry Potter you already have racism to a degree with the idea of half bloods and pure bloods, and now they are going to make this even more overt by having a black man be labelled the half-blood prince, and teach the dark arts it couldn’t be anymore on the nose. Moreover, Harry hates Snape all the kids do, is the show going to say they are all racist, all these white kids hate their only black teacher, seems like a school of bigots. Moreover, Harry’s father was Snape’s bully, and you are supposed to like him despite this, yet the tv show will now have all these kids picking on the half blood boy, or worse yet if Remus, Sirius, James and Peter are white, a group of white boys picking on a black boy. Again the optics are God awful.
There was no need for this change.
Maybe I am making things worse and giving them what they want by spending time writing about it, but I see a bad moon ahead, I see this series becoming a Rings Of Power esque situation wherein it has no resemblance to the source material anymore and just boils down to over produced fan fiction.
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