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Well Arnold Schwarzenegger is not the only star in a film. Typically in Schwarzenegger films there are plenty of white men (speaking to my own demographic) speaking English and making cultural references I understand that more than outweigh how alien Schwarzenegger's body is, even if white.
Racial representation is not everything but it might be the single largest factor going into why I will gravitate towards something. Like maybe it's 30%, and various other factors represent 20% and so on. (If ethnicity is a combination of race and culture then I suppose that is really what I'm getting at.)
Slice of life-style dramas do need to be culturally familiar, again with race acting as a rough proxy. I recently watched the Polish series High Water, about the floods of the '90s. The main star was a heroin junkie. Now, I watched that series because the flood was interesting. I couldn't hang with just a Polish drama about a heroin junkie. But I know I could do that for its American counterpart.
Basically some other culture's/race's noir or rom-com is nowhere near as interesting as my own. There needs to be some wild external factor that would be interesting anywhere, e.g. in Squid Game.
I can imagine your enjoyment of a cultural even is predicated on the participant's skin hue being as closely matched as possible to your own. I mean, everybody has their kinks. I don't have to understand yours. I just think it's very weird for this particular kink to become a culture-wide rule.
That sucks for me, because now I have to stop watching everything from Agatha Cristies' detectives to American romcoms to Hong-Kong martial arts movies to Korean historic epics - nothing matches my cultural background as an Eastern European Jew. I could probably still enjoy Sholom Aleichem maybe... but he talks too much about living in the shtetl, and I grew up in an urban culture in 20th century, so no luck for me again. But wait, there's a respite - their skin tones still roughly match mine (even the Hong-Kong guys maybe close enough? please?), and that means that it's all the same culture, since there's only one culture per skin tone, so yay, I am saved.
I think you are voluntarily robbing yourself of a wealth of cultural experiences. I'd suggest to try to expand your horizons and you may discover people that are different from you may be also interesting. You don't have to, of course - it's just a choice that is available to you.
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My understanding is that korean and spanish soap-operas have a significant white audience. Would this be contrary evidence?
[EDIT] - Kung Fu films. Manga and Anime. At the high end, foreign film of all kinds. I just straight-up don't think this argument engages with the available evidence.
When the Brazilian soap operas were introduced into Soviet market in the late 80s - previously unfamiliar with them - the whole cities shut down when the regular installments were broadcast. You could walk into a store and not find anybody to serve you because everybody was watching (but anyway, what business did you have walking around when you're supposed to be watching too?). It was hugely popular, and Brazilian soap operas remain very popular among some categories of people to this day. It also introduced the Brazilian word fazenda into Russian - where it became to mean the same as dacha.
It was the same in Hungary. All the grandmas watched the Mexican and Brazilian soap operas throughout the 90s. The first classic was Escrava Isaura back in the 80s. Then in the 90s it was Esmeralda, La usurpadora, and so on. Today many watch Turkish soaps. In the 90s the series Dallas was also hugely popular. Surely my Eastern European peasant grandparents watched Dallas because they shared the culture of Texan oil magnates. And also Latin American culture, sure. Oh wait, no, it was because of skin tone (grandpa got quite tanned on the sun, working outdoors, so he surely identified with the Brazilians).
I think Americans don't quite get how absolutely normal it is in rest of the world that TV doesn't depict your own culture, cities, stories etc. People who travel to the US are often surprised that "wait, this is really like that, and it's not only the movies?", like yellow school buses, college football, high school lockers, doorknobs, whatever. It's all foreign but we are used to TV being a different world. When my grandma saw the skyscrapers in the Dallas opening sequence it was as foreign as watching some sci-fi. But she still liked the series because the human stories aren't all that different. Sure, you miss many cultural references but it's rarely crucial for the entertainment.
Let's not get carried away. Almost(?) the entire cast of Dallas was White. Most characters in Latin American soaps are White, and Black/Indigenous characters are there as essentially exotic tokens.
So it's not culture then. Back to skin color. Okay, then why was every little girl playing with black baby dolls ("négerbaba") during socialism? "That one was available" is not sufficient because as far as I heard first hand, kids and parents had no problem with it and liked it.
That's not my point. My point is that the characters in those series were still relatable to Eastern European viewers, racially speaking. Had, say, J.R. Ewing suddenly appeared in the business district of any local capital in his Mercedes-Benz and usual attire, he wouldn't have stood out, unless his cowboy hat was on. Everyone'd have assumed he's just another local big shot. With respect to negro dolls, I don't think their popularity, which I assume was real, somehow contradicts my point. Again, we're talking about stagnating socialist economies of shortage here. Seldom was any available product unwanted. People were also happy to watch trafficked Western movies on VHS, which were mostly crap even if one discounts the awful fandub, because at least it was different from anything on the two TV channels that were available etc.
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I m highly recommend Mr. Sunshine.
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How much of that is confounded by evidence of white folk having low to negative ingroup preference?
No clue. How popular are marvel movies or action flicks in Africa and south america and china? I'm pretty sure they're super popular, aren't they?
Comparing US production popularity abroad to foreign production popularity in the US is not a like for like comparison.
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