If you’re icked by this week’s icky internet response to a Black actor playing Ariel in The Little Mermaid, you’re not alone. You may have even felt a distinct déjà vu given the recent response to Lord Of The Rings: The Rings Of Power (which feels like déjà vu from reactions to Obi-Wan Kenobi, which feels like déjà vu from feedback to The Last Jedi, and so on).
Of course, it’s absurd to dictate how fantasy characters should look—this just in, mermaids are not real—yet the latest Little Mermaid footage from last weekend’s D23 event, featuring Halle Bailey and her majestic voice, sparked such intense ire that the clip reportedly generated 1.5 million dislikes before YouTube disabled the counter. And in what is starting to feel like a very rote cultural conflict, it’s likely that more toxic responses lie ahead from the anti-woke crowd. From casting announcements for Disney’s Percy Jackson And The Olympians to Marvel’s reimagining of The Fantastic Four on the distant horizon, the trolls are already sharpening their blades (or maybe they’ll just copy-paste their racist responses to the last Fantastic Four adaptation).
Ironically, many of the same people harrumphing about everything becoming political are the ones dragging their Fox News-fueled views into a debate about a mermaid’s hair and skin color. A, you know, fictional and fantastical character in a kid’s movie.
You know she’s a mermaid, right?
Let’s really put a fine point on this: These characters are fictional! They live in worlds that aren’t our own! There’s this magical thing called the suspension of disbelief: we do it whenever we sit down to watch a movie or TV series or stage show about shit that’s made up. And The Little Mermaid is suspending disbelief of the highest order. Not only is she half-fish, she’s animated. Despite Disney continuing its “live-action” remakes by rendering the 2023 Little Mermaid with apparently realistic underwater lighting, are people really hoping for a documentarian approach?
Some of the resistance seems to come from the idea that source material, like the 1989 animated original version of The Little Mermaid, can’t be updated or reimagined. When Amazon’s gajillion-dollar Lord Of The Rings project was first announced, my first assumption was they’d want every opportunity to distinguish themselves from Peter Jackson’s seminal, Oscar-winning trilogy. The jury’s still out on how well the series is finding that sweet spot between familiar and new, but populating this Middle-earth with nonwhite actors was one no-brainer move.
I’m reminded of producer Dylan Marron’s brilliant video series, called Every Single Word, which highlighted the lack of diversity in Jackson’s (and many other) films and added fuel to the Representation Matters movement’s growing fire. (See here how many lines are spoken by actors of color in The Return Of The King below, and try not to blink.)
It’s worth noting that Rings author J.R.R. Tolkien himself, both inspired by Western mythology and a vocal opponent of Nazism, grappled with race and culture in his work; even someone with a cursory knowledge of his world-building knows dwarves and elves, two different races of beings, have a tense history of mutual discrimination. To ignore real-world influences and pretend an author creates fiction in a vacuum is, as a Tolkien character might call it, folly. And even if fantasy fiction were indeed somehow not a product of its time, assuming every character in that vacuum to be white is, as we might call it, chud behavior.
Besides, this is an adaptation. As Richard Newby has suggested, there is no obligation to adhere to an original artist’s intent, imagined or otherwise. Think of how refreshingly Matt Ruff’s novel and Misha Green’s TV adaptation Lovecraft Country flipped the script and approached the racism of its source of inspiration, H.P. Lovecraft, head-on. Values change, stories seek to reflect their time, and audiences evolve—or at least some do, anyway.
Fans, and artists, respond
While D23’s recent first glimpse of this live-action Mermaid reignited the so-called debate about the title character’s ethnicity, the internet has also been flooded with much-needed reminders that onscreen representation can significantly impact audiences, particularly young ones. Here’s how Bailey responded—make sure you have tissues at the ready:
Following the proliferation of a despicable #NotMyAriel hashtag—a breathtaking example of how poorly some internet users choose to spend their time—Bailey told Variety, “I want the little girl in me and the little girls just like me who are watching to know that they’re special, and that they should be a princess in every single way.”
Jodi Benson, the voice of Ariel in the 1992 animated Mermaid, gave Bailey her stamp of approval: “What you bring to the table in a character as far as their heart and their spirit is what really counts.” That underlines an important truth: it’s the inside of a character, not the outside, that matters most. Plus, have you heard Bailey’s voice? Listen to that snippet of “Part Of Your World” and try to convince me she’s not the most talented person perfect for the role.
And in a ludicrous side note, another Halle—Oscar winner Halle Berry—got pulled into the backlash too. (Her post, an image from Charm School of Black women looking mildly confused and annoyed, said it all.)
Other artists are responding to these preposterous firestorms in other ways. The hobbits of Jackson’s trilogy cleverly showed their support for the diverse Rings Of Power cast in a fashion display with the added bonus of a call to action. Ewan McGregor and Hayden Christensen condemned the racist response to Moses Ingram’s inclusion in Obi-Wan Kenobi. And Captain Marvel star Brie Larson has become the leader of her own anti-troll movement, with her recent post indicating how clearly battle lines have been drawn.
It’s time to embrace change, and diversity
Where do all these by-now-predictable backlash cycles leave Hollywood producers and directors debating whether to cast underrepresented talent? Hopefully and ideally, they’ll realize continuing to do so is more than just worth the risk; it’s the solution. As The A.V. Club’s Britt Hayes noted when the racist Little Mermaid backlash first began, “The negative response to Bailey’s casting illustrates exactly why Disney needed to cast her in the first place.”
And hey, if you’re a soulless studio exec only looking out for the bottom line, you don’t have to look at this as a moral obligation. Again, this might be my inner optimist talking, but we’re well past the “diversity equals bankability” argument. Black Panther, Crazy Rich Asians, and Parasite are just some of the titles that have taught us that; this year’s breakaway hit, Everything Everywhere All At Once, centered a Chinese woman as its heroine, breaking records for its distributor. The ongoing era of embracing talent of color in front of and behind the camera can and should be Hollywood’s norm.
So internet trolls need to be drowned out. Maybe some people need to whine, cry, and go through the five stages of grief about their preferred casting choices. They can’t possibly do that every single time a storyteller dares to reimagine a role in a fresh way, so storytellers should continue to do so. Take Elon Musk’s tweet objecting presumably to the “woke” aspects of Rings Of Power, saying “every male character so far [being] a coward, a jerk or both.” Show this guy enough examples of powerful female characters, flood our screens with them until they become commonplace, and surely he and his ilk will eventually get tired of voicing the same narrow-minded opinion.
The nature of our modern-day news cycles also means that every subsequent project that receives an outraged backlash becomes a bit less newsworthy. The trolling may be more focused and organized than ever this year (here’s a thought: Can we disincentivize content creators who monetize each backlash?), but the fever pitch that toxic fandom has reached with The Little Mermaid and Rings Of Power may signal that their story has become too repetitive and predictable to warrant novel coverage.
It would also be great if Disney’s lawyers or whoever is in charge of inhibiting copyright infringement would be on the lookout for things like deepfake A.I. replacing actors’ faces with other actors … Let’s shut that down because that shit is just weird.
So keep it up, Hollywood! And while we’re at it, upending casting expectations need not, in fact, be confined to fantasy and science fiction. I admire the shrewdly color-conscious casting of Jodie Turner-Smith in last year’s Anne Boleyn AMC series, an invitation to audiences to reconsider real-life history without pretending to be entirely color-blind. Again, this stuff is art, it’s adaptation, it’s an exercise in empathy and imagination. Those of us who value such expansion of our minds and hearts can keep encouraging today’s storytellers to give us more of that.