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(If it's not a bother, love reading your criticisms) can I ask what your recent Dr Strange posts are about? What is the issue with the casting of BC, unless I am completely misunderstanding the situation?

welllll there’s a few reasons.

first, doctor strange’s origin story is the classic mighty whitey trope, an extremely racist narrative that is sadly still commonly used today. to summarize: the mighty whitey trope is when a white man goes to asian country, learns the ~mystic secrets of the yellow people~ and become better than all of the Natives at their own thing. it’s a transparent excuse to use people of color’s traditions and stories but still have it be about white people.

while doctor strange can be read as ethnically ambiguous depending on the artist (steve ditko's original art and emma rios's work are often cited as examples), he has generally been interpreted as white, because when he was created, white was the default. but that doesn't mean he should have been cast as a white man. like I said, his origin story is extremely problematic, even though parts of it have been reinterpreted over the years. but by casting him not only as a white man but as an upperclass british white man, marvel has wasted an opportunity not only to diversify their universe and introduce a leading man of color to their lineup, but to turn doctor strange’s racist origin story around and update it to reflect the changing social norms. the british thing is because doctor strange was definitely american, and they can apparently change him to be british but the idea of casting him as anything but white is absurd.

it is incredibly rare for asian actors to find leading roles in hollywood today and marvel definitely dropped the ball here. plus asia is a massive market, so pulling from their huge pool of stars would be easy. I mean, bollywood alone is the biggest film industry in the world, and they could have tapped into that. marvel has finally announced black panther, so they’ll be expanding their world to africa, and this could have been a great opportunity to introduce an asian superhero. instead, we are getting YET ANOTHER movie about a white man, to add to the what, 13 films they have about white men? and a movie about a white man that will be heavily imbued with probably ambiguously asian culture. taken with kevin feige’s comments about how he thinks he’s being “pressured to diversify” and against DC’s willingness to cast non-white actors in canonically white roles in their upcoming films, it’s insulting.

plus, cumberbatch is just. a bad choice. say what you want about his acting skills, but he is extremely classist, misogynistic, has taken a role as a slave owner to “atone for his family owning slaves,” and took the whitewashed role of an indian character in a franchise with a massive fanbase he didn’t even bother learning about and then was hilariously bad. he is a relatively good drama actor, but he’s just not good in genre pieces. I seriously doubt he can carry a solo superhero film.

so yeah. I’m sure other people have more reasons. I’m not going to go see doctor strange, but this will probably be the last thing I post on the subject because I’m blacklisting everything that could possibly be related to this because I stopped caring about it a long time ago :/