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What bugs me about BBC American changing the genders of several Discworld characters for the Watch series is kind of hard to explain, but I’ll try. I promise, it’s NOT a matter of me being ‘a purist’ about an adaptation, or being ‘closed-minded’ or ‘a misogynist.’ This isn’t a case of me being a douche moaning because ‘a woman can’t be in charge of a city’ or ‘this is just SJW bullshit’ or whatever. This isn’t the same as neckbeards being pissed when Thor is a lady.
The thing is, one of the integral Things about Discworld is that Terry Pratchett took established tropes and messed with them. He took tropes from fiction and lampshaded and subverted them. And he also created characters that reflect real-life ‘tropes’ and used his stories to poke fun at, and poke holes in, social norms, traditions, stereotypes, and such.
For example: Lord Havelock Vetinari is presented as a trope character. He’s a tall, thin, aquiline man with arched, quirking eyebrows who says things like ‘commence’ and ‘do not let me detain you.’ Part of the point of Vetinari is that he appears to be the quintessential Evil Machiavellian Tyrant. And the rest of the point of him is that he’s not just that, and doesn’t conform wholly to the traits the casual reader/viewer will immediately ascribe to him based on those superficial similarities to the trope. Part of the trope is that Vetinari is an aristocratic man. A woman Vetinari simply does not fit even those superficial trope characteristics. And therefore a woman Vetinari cannot subvert OR lampshade the trope. And therefore a woman Vetinari is not Pratchett’s Vetinari.
For example: Dr Cruces, along with many, many others among Pratchett’s Ankh-Morpork-dwelling characters, is the embodiment of the Rich White Man, both in fiction and in real life. Pratchett’s white aristocratic male characters tend to fit a certain mold, and they certainly aren’t portrayed kindly. Instead, Pratchett tended to punch upward at that type of character, and therefore that type of real person, by emphasizing their flaws like racism, general closed-mindedness, sexism, classism, etcetera. Part of the trope is, actually, the maleness of it. That’s not to say that rich white women can’t be awful too, but Pratchett specifically chose to criticize men of that ‘type,’ when he created certain characters. Having a woman be Dr Cruces, or filling more of the aristocratic Ankh-Morpork roles with women, dilutes that criticism.
For example: Vetinari and Cruces are both Assassins (though only the latter is active presently), and in describing the Assassins’ Guild Pratchett was pretty clearly at least in part sending up British boarding schools and Old Boys’ Clubs of all kinds. Canonically, the Guild hasn’t until more recently admitted women at all–and Pratchett meant it to be that way, not because he as the author was being sexist, but because part of that particular trope and that particular real-life type of organization is No Girls Allowed and he wanted to critique that and make it seem laughable. Having a woman be Cruces, the head of the Guild, and having a woman be Vetinari, a well-known and prominent graduate of the Guild School, makes the Guild look much more progressive than it was intended to be. And thus, it makes the overarching storyline of Ankh-Morpork gradually becoming more progressive and inclusive over time seem more unnecessary.
Anyway, in sum, a lot of the point of the Discworld books was that Pratchett was messing with tropes. Some of those tropes include the genders of characters. So, while normally I’d be like ‘Yes! Yay more women! This is great!’ about adaptions of other media, I just don’t think this particular case makes a lot of sense, and that in some instances it actually detracts from what Pratchett was trying to say. IDK if it makes sense or if I’m saying what I am feeling in a coherent way, but anyway that’s what I think, more or less.
Excellent points, you pinned down what I’ve been struggling to express all day.
And, I would like to point out, that a lot of the empowerment element of Pratchett’s existing female characters was often in how they railed against such stodgy old institutionalized sexism. If this is a world without sexism, then you’re diluting the strength of the likes of Sybil and Angua because they didn’t have the same hurtles to overcome.
RIGHT. EXACTLY. Meanwhile so far from what I’ve seen they’re dumbing Sybil and Angua down into Strong Female Characters Grrl Power Yeah Sexism is Over! instead of staying true to a) Sybil’s brusque but kind, loud but gentle, nuanced brand of Behind Every Great Man is a Greater Woman femininity, or b) Angua’s struggles as the only woman (later one of a few women) in a male-dominated profession. Sybil especially is a force to be reckoned with in the books, but she isn’t a traditionally sexy, sassy, physical fighter type who goes out and does vigilante justice (instead, she does incredibly effective letter-writing campaigns on perfumed stationery and donates entire buildings to the public good, utilizing her privilege, wealth and influence against the forces of racism and poverty), so she’s just boring I guess. And I’m worried they’re going to do that thing to Angua where she’s strong and capable and put in charge of training the rookie recruit Carrot who will suddenly surpass her and become the hero while she scoffs with ineffectual catty sarcasm and then eventually falls in love with him.
Also they took Cheery, a binary trans woman, and made her non-binary. Like you already have this working narrative right there! Wonse is another character that only really works as a white man, and not just that, the BBC’s Wonse a wizard! While witches stuff isn’t relevant to the watch series, having a female wizard who didn’t fight tooth and nail to be there feels like a slap in the face to such a big part of the series. And while Carcer isn’t genderbent, he’s not white. And that’s just…yikes. They also still cast Vimes as a white man, but cast a poc for a character who is supposed to look exactly like him (Keel).
I was already annoyed at the change to Cheery, because while I am very yay about nonbinary representation, I don’t feel like it should come at the expense of trans woman representation. I can see what they’re trying to do there, and I do think that’s a story that needs to be told, but like…make a new character then? Let Cheery Littlebottom be a woman and then make a new character who could perhaps befriend her, and they can talk about gender stuff and help each other? That would be fun.
And for Carcer, the same thing applies for race as I talked about as to gender in my OP–Carcer is the trope of the dangerous entitled white boy serial killer. His character is very, very tied to that image, of the white man who sees everyone else as things that don’t matter and who can be played with and killed without conscience or consequence. That’s not a trope you want to place on a black man’s shoulders, mostly for the ‘yikes’ loaded racist reasons, but also for the reason that it just doesn’t FIT. But then, it seems like they are changing Carcer’s actual character and personality to make him some kind of wounded, wronged victim seeking justice (presumably in wrong, violent ways, but still). If that’s the character, it’s not actually Carcer, so I guess this ‘Carcer’ can be black because it’s a somewhat less blatantly offensive role to stick a black actor in (described that way he sounds kind of like Killmonger in Black Panther? although pitting him against heroic white man Vimes is still kinda…yeahhh that’s gonna need to be treated pretty carefully). But…on the other hand why change the character so much, when Entitled White Man Terrorist Kills a Lot of People is fucking…relevant as hell as an antagonist these days?
Casting a black man as Keel while Vimes is a white dude is so amazingly nonsensical that I have nothing else to say about it, except that it raises so many more questions about how the books’ stories, particularly Night Watch, are even being slapped together for this series.
Meanwhile oh my god I did not read carefully enough to know their Wonse is a female wizard. Save me lord, no one involved in this production has ever read a Discworld book in a way where they truly understood it, did they. Or did they, and they’ve all just consciously decided to throw it all out because lol they can tell better versions of these stories with better versions of these characters than Sir Terry Fucking Pratchett. I’m. Okay I gotta stop talking and thinking about this for today because every new thing I hear about it makes my jaw drop further and I’m afraid it might fall off.
Carcer isn’t just entitled terrorist white man, part of his point in Night watch is that he shows dictatorial government will always favor peoples like him in their police force because they will not hesitate to kill if told to. Add to that that he is dismissed as a “poor, innocent child with a bad and unfortunate upbringing” by Phrenology (A very real pseudoscience that was used as an excuse for Racism and classism), and what you got is a character about how Racism, classism, and totalitarian government will benefit the most sadistic, cruel and evil peoples.
And if they removed this theme to replace it with “oppressed peoples exist, but they shouldn’t use violent means or oppose the status quo, because that makes them bad!” (Which, since Carcer is a villain, is likely to happen, unless they really change the plot completly), then that suck.
Like, if they’d really wanted to be brave about it and really *actually* add more diversity, casting Vimes with an actor of color could have been really cool. And it’d play nicely into the whole “did not come from privilege and WOW are all the rich assholes pissed that he gets promoted and pissed off when Vimes doesn’t let them ignore the law” thing
I believe the word we’re all looking for here is “haphazard”. All of the changes they’re making aren’t done with care, or foresight, or regard for optics. For a counterexample, may I present Exhibit A:
This is Joan Watson, played by Lucy Liu. She is an Asian woman portraying a character traditionally portrayed by a white male actor (John Watson of the Sherlock Holmes franchise). The reason why this works is because a) there is nothing in the original John Watson character that requires him to be a white man and b) there is nothing in the original John Watson character that makes it uncomfortable or incongruous for him to be portrayed by an Asian woman.
The Watch producers are completely forgetting that second point.
Like, technically, there’s nothing that says a woman can’t play Vetinari. Blind casting, best person for the role; that’s all great. But there’s extenuating factors that play into that choice that make it unusual at best and wrongheaded at worst.
It’s been brought up before - Carcer Dun being portrayed by a black man isn’t a great look. Being a black man myself, having a psychotic killer be changed into someone that looks like me doesn’t make me feel good. It makes me feel like the producers think psychotic killers should look like me. Now, I know intellectually that’s probably not what they’re going for, but feeling that way is a completely different thing, especially given how people who look like me have been portrayed in the past. Even if we’re dealing with Discworld characters, there’s still Roundworld baggage that we have to deal with.
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