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Notes -
On the Little Mermaid, I actually don't really have much of a slant either way on that issue. My first reaction was "who gives a shit?" and I didn't dig further afterwards; "Black Little Mermaid" is literally all I know about it.
On further inspection, I think explicit race-casting is cringey as hell, and that there's a little bit of dissonance with what is a very European trope - merfolk, esp. that particular sort -being brought into a deliberately race-agnostic environment.
At the same time, I believe history and mythology belong to the entirety of humanity, and really, as long as you can make it internally consistent (which isn't necessarily a given) who gives a toss? I'm not white, though, which gives me a different vantage point on this whole affair.
It reads much better than the travesty that was the Ghost in the Shell Hollywood adaptation, which was just schizophrenic in how it wanted to approach race, for example. I'd argue it's probably better than if you did a brownwashed Tale of the Bamboo Cutter, or whatever the Fate franchise does to historical figures.
Honestly my entire point is - I just think telling people who are complaining that they aren't being properly being represented that they make no sense, when the reason for that misrepresentation is due to a push by another group to overrepresent themselves for similar reasons, reads like intentional selective blindness with how the context is just ignored.
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