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This is just ... horrifying
Okay, so fans always complain about the casting when their favorite book gets made into a movie.
But the Twitter quotes in this article are an order of magnitude beyond regular, disgruntled fannish griping. They're AWFUL. And they're a really specific kind of awful.
Basically when they discovered that the character Rue in the Hunger Games movie was portrayed by a black actress -- not a big surprise, seeing how she's black in the books -- certain elements of the fandom flipped their nut in a really ugly way.
These are people saying, flat-out, in so many words, "when I found out Rue was black, her death wasn't as sad". <-- DIRECT QUOTE, YOU GUYS, DIRECT QUOTE. WHAT.
These are people who are so completely gone in the humanity department that they will, in public, call a 13-year-old actress a "black bitch" and a "nigger". Just for existing on their screen.
All of this on Twitter.
There is a part of me that really wants to believe most of these people are just shit-stirring, that they say these stupid, fucked-up things more because they want to get a reaction than because they actually believe what they're saying. Maybe, I guess, because I don't want to believe the world is that awful.
But, as the person who runs the Tumblr collecting the quotes says:
It's hard to disagree, y'know? There are people who without a trace of irony and under their real, legal names will come right out and say that someone's death means less because they're black. (Here. Now. In 2012.) And yeah, Rue is a fictional character, but this attitude -- some people's lives are worth less, some people's suffering is worth less -- doesn't come out of nowhere, and is why things happen like Trayvon Martin's murder (in which an armed adult pursued and shot an unarmed teenager who was walking home, and the police initially failed to investigate or even to inform the family of their son's death).
But the Twitter quotes in this article are an order of magnitude beyond regular, disgruntled fannish griping. They're AWFUL. And they're a really specific kind of awful.
Basically when they discovered that the character Rue in the Hunger Games movie was portrayed by a black actress -- not a big surprise, seeing how she's black in the books -- certain elements of the fandom flipped their nut in a really ugly way.
These are people saying, flat-out, in so many words, "when I found out Rue was black, her death wasn't as sad". <-- DIRECT QUOTE, YOU GUYS, DIRECT QUOTE. WHAT.
These are people who are so completely gone in the humanity department that they will, in public, call a 13-year-old actress a "black bitch" and a "nigger". Just for existing on their screen.
All of this on Twitter.
There is a part of me that really wants to believe most of these people are just shit-stirring, that they say these stupid, fucked-up things more because they want to get a reaction than because they actually believe what they're saying. Maybe, I guess, because I don't want to believe the world is that awful.
But, as the person who runs the Tumblr collecting the quotes says:
There are MAJOR TIE-INS to these reactions and the injustices that we see around the world today. I don't even need to spell it out because I know that you're all a smart bunch.
This is a BIG problem. Think of all the murdered children. Think of all the missing children that get NO SCREEN TIME on the news.
It is NOT a coincidence.
It's hard to disagree, y'know? There are people who without a trace of irony and under their real, legal names will come right out and say that someone's death means less because they're black. (Here. Now. In 2012.) And yeah, Rue is a fictional character, but this attitude -- some people's lives are worth less, some people's suffering is worth less -- doesn't come out of nowhere, and is why things happen like Trayvon Martin's murder (in which an armed adult pursued and shot an unarmed teenager who was walking home, and the police initially failed to investigate or even to inform the family of their son's death).
no subject
And yeah. *clings to you*