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This is just another instance of reputation laundering of black people by hollywood, although remarkably incompetently executed in this case. Having Yasuke be a secret Assassin mission giver/NPC makes way more sense than having him be an actual stealth assassin type. Only way that would work is if they made him the ninja and let his black skin work with the noh stagehand outfit for perfect night stealth, but that is too daring for even Ubisofts modern retardation. Having a fucking samurai in full yoroi somehow be an assassin, and leaving yasuke unmasked to emphasize his blackness has to be deliberate incompetence at this point.
In the end, hollywood and its adjacents keep making the same mistake: inserting black people into cool shit doesnt make black people cool, it makes that cool shit just shit. They fucked up with Cleopatra, they fucked up with Lord Of The Rings, and they'll fuck it up with Yasuke.
Christ, they can't even commit to doing something when a black man doing cool shit really happened. What the fuck happened to adaptations of Alexandre Dumas dad, or the awesome life of Haile Selassi. The list is not exhaustive or long but surely it is better than enshittifying established cultural properties just to please some click-starved journalist doomscrolling twitter.
The answer is always, always, always the same. And it's not even just minorities. It's why there's a girlboss in your old thing.
It's expensive to do something novel, and most people don't care about African history. A studio is likely not taking a $100 million gamble just to find out how much they don't. They want to pander but not that much.
However, this other thing has a built-in audience already. They tend to just buy shit (nerds being such reliable consoomer has its downsides) and they've already accepted some female/race-swaps (e.g. growing up BSG was already doing it) with minimal or ultimately meaningless grumbling. Why not more?
(I think the writing is worse now and everything is far more offputtingly oppositional but that's me)
Is there a reliable base of consooming nerds? Star Wars toy sales are the metric I use, and star wars nerds and normies aren't buying sequel trilogy shit. Its all clone wars cartoon era stuff and original trilogy. BSG starbuck sex swapping is a really popular example, but to my mind it is a bad one. The overlap of BSG2 vs original BSG fans is pretty slim, most BSG2 fans are sci fi starved nerds who wanted anything after babylon 5 and star trek went off the air. Space 1999 and Andromeda unfortunately did not catch on, and the race/gender 'swaps' of BSG2 were ultimately incidental.
Fair enough. Let's say they perceived nerds as reliable consoomers.
As for the rest: BSG didn't just change Starbuck and introduce Laura Roslin (so two female regulars), most of the prominent humanform Cylons were female. That's a big change.
It was noticeable. And was noticed. It was just that the writing was "woke" but not yet in the particularly oppositional sense that seems to characterize modern gender swaps where they a) cannot seem to have a counter-balance where male virtues were respected (BSG being a milscifi show helped here) and b) seem to actively want to insult the legacy audience. RDM was more likely to lecture you on imperialism and genocide than mediocre white men.
RDM was relatively deft in how he navigated things, both on and off-screen. The actors had the same initial reaction as modern stars to the backlash but the less connected internet (Katee Sackhoff talks about having to go to an internet cafe to pay to read the hate, which is funny) and the fact that studios didn't see attacking racist fans as part of the promotional strategy all helped.
Another way to read BSG2's success is that it kept or neutralized the oBSG fans (sometimes literally buying them off like Richard Hatch) and brought in new fans who were driven either by wanting to see any scifi on screen or the contrast with existing works (I was a Stargate kid and BSG was...very different. Having both was great). In the end, it was likely a net gain (especially since BSG, with all due respect, was not really like SW at that point)
This is what studios are trying to do. Keep legacy fans that love SW/whatever and are starved for it, while bringing in new "diverse" fans - basically they just want to grow the pie, even if that means losing some more legacy fans . They fail at it, constantly, not because the idea is bad (a ton of people showed up for the Force Awakens, that was also its high point in "undecided" markets like China) but because the culture has polarized so much as to make the execution almost inevitably awful.
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As I recall, the Jamaican Maroons were badass and used the "all look the same" trope to pull some ninja crap in their rebellions. FFS, wouldn't Black Flag have gotten into that general time and region?
Black Panther illustrates that there is/was demand for black people being awesome in their own right, not as a participation trophy in other people's stories. You'd think someone would have picked up on that and done something based on historical black badasses. Instead, they tried making a movie about a notoriously atrocious slavemongery kingdom as though they were the exact opposite, and when that failed, shrugged and went back to the cultural colonialism treatment.
They did. They couldn't help but screw it up because too much of the truth was inconvenient.
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