r/TopCharacterTropes • u/Character_Growth_397 • 13h ago

Hated Tropes Things meant to be progressive just end up being incredibly offensive

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What If - In one of the comics Miles becomes Thor, and it's full of stereotypes about black people such as the Mjolnir having graffiti on it and the infamous "by Odin's fade"

Emilia Perez - Everything about the movie

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u/Silent_Biscotti_9832 13h ago

Another from Artemis foul is that the butler is black and they made it clear the butler’s bloodline served the fowl family for generation after generation

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u/RetroRaiderD42 13h ago

I'm more annoyed that he's described as "Eurasian" but w/a case to be made for an Arabian actor playing him, making it a rare case of casting of a black guy making the casting less progressive/boundary-pushing than it could have been.

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u/Mister_Dink 11h ago

My read on him was more that he came from the communities in the southern portion of the Soviet block, where you have non-white, non-slavic peoples. So maybe ethnically Uzbeck or Kazakh.

Would also have been cool. I can't recall a single movie character from that part of the world who isn't "ethnically ambitious unnamed terrorist," or "Sasha Baron Cohen being racist, but most people think it's funny enough to not matter."

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u/_bossREM888 9h ago

I also thought it probably meant that instead of mixed race especially since his name is Domovoi which is Russian and I’m just learning is a term for a house elf or household spirit which i guess just doubles down on the butler thing while showing a connection to the faeries. (I never googled that before)

But the term Eurasian is kinda ambiguous and sort of confusing if the Butler family has also lived in Ireland for hundreds of years

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u/MyAltFun 9h ago

He is pretty reliably confirmed to be at least Russian and Japanese, likely with a mix of other things as well.

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u/_bossREM888 6h ago

Does that mean the author said so or is it stated in the books before? I remember being pretty confused about it

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u/Fit_Fail934 3h ago

Could be wrong I haven’t read the first book in a while, but he was described as being able to blend in between Russian, I think Slavic and I think Japanese.

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u/Sajintmm 11h ago

I feel like at the moment the default boundary push is a black actor typically lightskin or an East Asian actor but that leads to a lot of other racial and ethnic groups just kind of forgotten about

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u/Turbulent_Lunch4548 2h ago

described as "Eurasian" but w/a case to be made for an Arabian actor playing him

That is a great idea!

The point of him being non-descript Eurasian was that even though he was a giant, he could be almost anywhere in the world and with just a few tweaks of appearance could look like a local and be able blend in: except for in Africa probably.

And now with the actor and styling choices (bleached blonde) they made him look like a person who would stand out anywhere in the world, even in Africa!

That's really funny to me.

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u/_bossREM888 13h ago

And because of that they decided that he doesn’t like to be called Butler despite it being his name and a plot point in the books when he tells Artemis is first name

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u/Karasu-Fennec 9h ago

They did
Fucking

W H A T

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u/Yojo0o 13h ago

Oh. Oh.

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u/Karth9909 3h ago

But also make Holly white when she was brown

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u/paganbreed 13h ago

This one isn't quite so bad, is it? Are interracial marriages so modern an invention?

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u/Quenz 13h ago

That's not the implication. The implication is that he's a modern day slave, one that his family acquired and has bred through the years.

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u/paganbreed 7h ago

I haven't watched the movie, hence the question. That's actually what the movie conveys?

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u/Quenz 7h ago

I don't know. But by race switching the character, you open that interpretation. Like in Harry Potter, James Potter bullied Snape because "he didn't like the way he looked," implying that Snape just looked like a creep. Make him black, and now James looks like a racist, which was one of the main themes near the end of the series.

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u/paganbreed 7h ago

I see, okay thank you. Points noted

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u/tigerrish1998 13h ago

It can imply the Butler family started as the Fowl family's slaves. Black people in the US haven't historically been free enough to willingly serve anyone for "generations and generations".

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u/Chidoriyama 12h ago

Whole thing takes place in Ireland though iirc

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u/tigerrish1998 10h ago

In hindsight that makes a lot of sense with the character names and types of fae and such. It's been like 20 years since I read Artemis Fowl though so that's a detail I didn't remember.

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u/paganbreed 7h ago

Oh, I get it now. Thanks

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u/Cybercatman 12h ago

The problem is, if i remember right, that Domovoi Butler is supposed to be of Eurasian descent, and asian looking enough to pass as chinese in one of the book, and his look is supposed to not stand out when following Artemis during events but also look threatening when he need to intimidate people.

So in the movie, we have a black man with a russian first name (not really a common combination) that have his whole family (including previous generations) working for an aristocratic european white family, it kinda play in the bad stereotypes of the black butler.

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u/_bossREM888 6h ago

Right so they felt the need to say he doesn’t like being called Butler despite it being his name because of the black butler stereotype which is a “joke” that would likely to go over kids’ heads in a kids movie and gets rid of the kid friendly joke that Artemis has a butler called Butler who is actually a bodyguard. All in order to not cast an Asian actor.

Also they swap out Butler’s cool teenage sister for a younger niece who has no relevance to the plot. But that’s not really this trope just annoying. Though the double toasted podcast did make fun of the only two black characters in the movie being related

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u/paganbreed 7h ago

I see, so the change was very superficial is what you're saying. Well, that sucks

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u/InuredEel 12h ago

Assuming this is a good faith question, Interracial marriage wasn't legal in every us state until 1967, and was illegal across almost the entire country through 1950, and was even then extremely uncommon until very (relatively speaking) recently. While marriage between white and black people was never made explicitly illegal in Ireland, it would've been pretty darn rare, even around the time Butler was born.

Things have changed pretty drastically in the past century or so.

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u/paganbreed 7h ago

It is indeed a good faith question... But your response has me suddenly wanting to ask why everyone keeps mentioning the US.

Have I somehow missed that they made him American?

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u/InuredEel 6h ago

No, but legal rulings are a more objective metric of social sentiment than anything that can be given for Ireland. While race relations in Ireland were slightly better at the time than in the US, interracial marriage was still very much taboo, and the majority of black people in the country were foreign students who returned to Africa after they graduated, further reducing the chance of interracial marriage.

The reason I (and I'm assuming others as well) bring up the US is that it was one of the only places at the time that there were large enough numbers of both white and black permanent residents to really have much of a concrete record of race relations. It's also the history I'm more familiar with.

Perhaps a somewhat more relevant example is King George the VI approving a ban on interracial marraige in South Africa in 1949. I initially avoided using South Africa as a reference due to it being more extreme, but it is a commonwealth nation, and it does give some insight to the views of the British monarchy at the time. Interracial marraige remained illegal in South Africa until just 40 years ago.

I'm using legality for these examples as it's objective, but it's important to keep in mind that legality isn't the same a social acceptance, which is more relevant to butler's case.

Another example of how (black/white) interracial relationships were viewed is Star Trek making history with the first on-screen black/white kiss in 1968. William Shatner purposefully messed up the versions of the scene without the kiss to force it through production, as the producers were worried it would be too controversial to air. Butler would be roughly 5 years old in 1968, for reference. The US again, but the UK didn't do anything of the sort until much later, much less Ireland specifically.

More importantly than any of that though, is the fact that Butler's actor is not biracial, making the question of interracial marriage irrelevant, and possibly explaining the downvotes.