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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   31873 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 10, 2023

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Going off on a tangent here, but yet another live action remake of a Disney classic animated movie is going to be released next year (I think) and judging from prelimary photos, it's going to be - interesting.

They're making "Snow White" as a live action movie. Rachel Zegler will play Snow White and Gal Gadot will be the Wicked Stepmother Queen. All well and good, but the seven dwarves are - by the looks of it - not going to be dwarves. EDIT: and of course no Prince Charming, Snow White is a Strong Independent FairyTale Princess who don't need no man, she dreams of being a leader herself.

These photos were first claimed to be fake, and to be fair I couldn't believe anything so badly costumed was real, but then the revised commentary on that was "these are not official photos", they're using stand-ins and they're pick-up shots (whatever those may be).

Judge for yourselves as to how you would describe the Seven Companions 😁

Now, it could be that these are indeed fake photos to mislead people snooping around trying to get shots on-set, and I hope so. But one never knows, do one?

They're making "Snow White" as a live action movie. Rachel Zegler will play Snow White and Gal Gadot will be the Wicked Stepmother Queen. All well and good,

"Mirror mirror on the wall, who is the fairest of them all?"

"Fairest? Not you, and surely not your stepdaughter. Cruella de Ville has a shot at it. Maybe Hannah. Fairest. Ha. You know I'm a normal mirror when you're not waking me up, you could see for yourself!"

There's "fairest" as in "lightest-skinned" and "fairest" as in "most beautiful". I think a lot of people think Gal Gadot is an attractive woman, so "aging queen whose vanity is what makes her insecure" works just as well there. The Snow White actress is half-Polish, half-Colombian, or quarter-Colombian at least, so again we're not talking totally South American Hispanic/Latina. Traditional Snow White has coal black hair anyway. So that one is "they don't understand the source material, and the folkloric tradition of 'black hair from the raven, white skin from the snow, red cheeks from the blood on the snow', but it's not as awful as it could have been" for me 🤷‍♀️

I'm more concerned about the awful looking costumes so far. Even the one for Snow White looks cheap and poorly-designed, something for an am-dram presentation rather than a multi-million dollar big studio adaptation.

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I doubt it--why should some corrupt wicked stepmother care about who's the fairest of them all in that case? Her motivation is that she wants to be fairest, and anyone with that motivation isn't exactly going to hunt down the people fairer than them.

Indeed. Though the movie need not make sense of course. The stepmother does indeed mean "fair" in the sense of "beautiful", but in Snow White specifically, beauty is tied into pale skin. It isn't just that; Snow White is white from birth but doesn't surpass the Queen until she is seven years old.

Oooh, that one makes sense, because one report had it that there wouldn't be any Prince Charming and that Snow White wanted to be a leader! So Justice Snow could indeed be the interpretation going on there!

they're going to interpret "fairest" as "most even-handed, just" and not "lightest-skinned."

Not sure if joking, but "fair" in the context of "somewhat archaic faery-tale English" just means "beautiful" -- I'm actually somewhat surprised that they haven't cast a black girl tbh.

Not sure if joking, but "fair" in the context of "somewhat archaic faery-tale English" just means "beautiful"

True. But in the tale Snow White was considered beautiful largely because of her fair skin (as contrasted with her red lips and black hair), which she was literally named for.

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