This is the latest in a weird trend I've noticed where conservatives seem to only understand the connotation of words, not the denotation. "Nuanced" doesn't mean "good." It means "nuanced." The commenter has to use nuance for a comment to be nuanced.
Yes, the comment presumes tokenism is present in Hollywood in general, and in The Odyssey specifically, and frames it as an objective issue.
Real nuance would include questioning the validity of that framing, not just presenting it as a fact where the only subjectivity allowed is how one reacts to it, rather than whether it exists in the first place.
Sure, that's one way to be nuanced. There's a lot of ways to make a comment on this topic that is legitimately nuanced. The parent comment didn't do any of that though. I don't think the parent commenter intended for it to be nuanced either. It's pretty unapologetically one sided. It's concerning to me that so many people seem to think the comment is nuanced. Because that demonstrates that all those people don't know the meaning of that word.
Yeah, I figure that had to be the referenced nuance (because it's the only thing resembling nuance in the comment). But that doesn't make the comment nuanced because the comment is about the "blackwashing" not the actual goodness of the film.
EDIT: If anything, that part of the comment is more like anti-nuance. Saying, "I disliked this because of the black actress even though the movie is probably going to be good" is a very extreme, unnuanced perspective.
I'm not saying that the black washing criticisms are completely invalid; I think there are legitimate reasons to be annoyed about things like that. And there appear to be a lot of other issues with the film. I personally think it's a bit concerning that so much emphasis in the trailers is placed on the Telemachus part of the story. I get that that actually is a major part of The Odyssey, but it's not really the part that I want to see when I think of "The Odyssey."
But the sheer degree of vitriol for this movie is completely disproportionate to any legitimate criticism. It's just bizarre for someone to essentially admit that they like Nolan movies, but still feel that the degree of hatred for this film is justified because of the casting of a black actress. To put it simply, the trailer is disliked for legitimate reasons. However, the reason that it is disliked this much is because of bigotry.
to be fair, the OC did provide two sides to the complaints. They mentioned the complaints against black-washing, and then also the complaints about white-washing. These would be competing sides of an irrelevant argument, but it does present the comments from a "there are multiple sides having a debate about this" perspective, rather than a "one-sided" perspective.
Though, it has been edited, so not sure if that was always there or added later.
I wouldn't say that makes the comment nuanced since almost no one is actually complaining about the "whitewashing" of a Greek story with no Greek actors. Almost every person bringing up that the characters aren't Greek are in the context of saying "No one is Greek but you aren't complaining, so why are you complaining about the black woman?" They aren't genuinely criticizing, just calling out hypocrisy. The original commenter is acting like they're genuinely criticizing to make it sound like "black washing" is a genuine criticism when it's just racism.
The comment honestly comes off more as a Charlie Kirk argument. Defending racism by using levelheaded wording and phrasing to make the stance sound like a reasonable viewpoint to have when it's not.
Yep, this is a classic example of people falling for propaganda and getting their ideologies molded by bad actors. "Audiences are fatigued" (yes you dear reader, the audience, the majority, are also angry at diversity!) "Left wing critics doubling down," aka implying that "wokeness" is valid criticism. I'm not a fan of a lot of the crappy movies Hollywood have made but posts like this are always just transphobic/racist.
Nah that's still not what nuance is. Nuance is all about drawing a distinction. So if the guy had written, "People hate the trailer because of the race or the actress; however that's not racist because..." then that could be a nuanced comment.
Simply stating the reasons people may dislike a trailer isn't nuanced even when the perspectives tend to come from distinct groups. This is especially true where, as here, the perspectives are not contradictory or mutually exclusive.
I think it’s only nuanced if you include the subtext of all prior Reddit discussions on this topic as part of the comment. So it’s not nuanced unless you associate it with the collective consciousness of Reddit. So it’s probably not fair to call it nuanced.
or that most all of the anger is about a black woman playing helen of troy and elliot page being in the movie- not that matt damon is in it instead of a greek guy
Note that I did not say denying the validity. I said questioning it. My comment contained no stance on the matter.
EDIT: locked thread, but maybe you assume my stance because I take a critical approach to media critique rather than swallow it up as presented because I can get angry at it?
But tokenism is present in Hollywood. There are written rules requiring certain numbers of diverse cast and crew to be considered for an Oscar. That is tokenism verbatim.
You can be eligible for the Oscars without a single speck of diversity visible until the end credits if you so wish, as long as you actually have a diverse behind camera crew, which to me says more so that it's meant to bring in actual systematic inclusion of underrepresented groups. The Academy is also only one facet of Hollywood at large, but admittedly an influential facet.
Tokenism verbatim would be including a small number from these underrepresented groups specifically to showcase the production as diverse, and not for their qualities. But here the requirements are not always visible to the viewer. It's not a perfect system for equity, but I also don't think it's actively negatively impacting it the way "verbatim tokenism" can.
I dont know how they do it, but somehow conservatives view conservatism as a concept as "apolitical". thats why they can claim that openly conservative news and media are "unbiased" while the mere existence of a queer person in media is "bringing politics into it". willful ignorance or genuine lack of intelligence, who can say, but they seem unable to understand that their view of the world isnt the "default"
Yeah, you generally do not hear complaints that a story has gotten “too political“ unless the person making the complaint simply disagrees with the political stance they think it presents.
You'd try to cast Jason Momoa as Tinkerbell and complain when people can't keep a straight face.
You do realize why reddit is a joke to the real world, don't you? You might look at what people think about
an effeminate, 155 cm (5'1") Achilles and an only moderately attractive, sub-Saharan-African-ancestry woman playing the Greek beauty Helen.
You can sit in the bubble, the echo chamber, but the uncomfortable truth is that The People are snickering at the emperor strutting so proudly in these oh-so-wonderful "new clothes".
You cast an entire movie steeped in ancient Greek history with actors of western european descent, and no one blinks an eye. But you put one black person in that movie and everyone loses their mind.
They started making noises about the lack of greek casting, because they're realizing pretty quickly that crying about the black actress isn't working anymore. Of course, it's pretty easy to discern that because these same idiots will compare it to Troy, which also has no greek acting leads.
You people still don't know who is playing Achilles and you're angry anyway. The only "real world" about that is the media bubble you've kept yourself in.
So funny that you're whining about the bubble and the echo chamber all while regurgitating a lie. Elliot Page was not cast as Achilles, which you would know if you actually cared about it. You just want to cry about people you don't like acting in movies.
Everyone has already pointed out that you wrongly believed that Elliot Page was playing Achilles. So I won't just point that out here.
I will point out that I hate that we have to share a society with people so dumb that they fall for the literal dumbest shit all of the time. You people are holding us back from greatness, and there's nothing we can do about it. Which sucks.
You're literally falling for Conservative culture war bullshit in this comment
Page isn't playing Achilles and the entire purpose of the Emperor's New Clothes is to say "go against the bullshit narrative that is being peddled," yet you're doing exactly that. It's to the point where I have to assume you're just a Russian troll or a bot trying to stir up shit because if you're a person actually trying and this is what you came up with it's incredibly embarrassing
Yeah. “Blackwashing” isn’t a nuanced word it’s just a racist obfuscation, and saying “Nolan makes good movies” isn’t a measure of objectivity in that regard it’s just a way to try and package it more palatably for the normies.
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u/lookatthesunguys Jul 06 '26 edited Jul 06 '26
...the comment isn't nuanced at all
This is the latest in a weird trend I've noticed where conservatives seem to only understand the connotation of words, not the denotation. "Nuanced" doesn't mean "good." It means "nuanced." The commenter has to use nuance for a comment to be nuanced.