Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-25926288-20150428200304/@comment-1916997-20150501140338

GothicNarcissus wrote: Sorry guys, fighting an unseasonal fl, but I'm here.

Some have kind of got my starting point on regards of ethnicity, which is not the whole point. The Mulan question is a little insight on how we put Western culture at the centre of the world, as we consider it something we can apply to anyone, while still thinking of other cultures as something "exotic", not applicable to ourselves. We are fine with toying with our own tales but we still don't perceive others as something we can treat the same. That is actually building a cultural boundary.

My point being: except for Mulan, so far all of the source material on the show are traditional European fairy tales (which, by the way, predate Disney). "European" as in centuries-old, pre-multi-ethnicity Europe. They are tales written by caucasian people for caucasian people in times and places where there were only caucasian people. Christian Andersen was a Dane: what do you think his Sea Witch looked like? By the Mulan logic, only caucasian people should play those parts. Now, THANKFULLY this is not the case on OUAT, because our society has evolved a lot from then and the show reflects that. The are actually demolishing that kind of boundary. The fact we have a multi-ethnic cast to me automatically rules out there is any form of racist subtext in the show. We are dealing with universal messages in the fairytales and they are shown to include all of humanity in them. This is a very uniting thing in my opinion. Had there been any racism, we would have had an all-caucasian cast to begin with, as in the source material: instead, they clearly only look for actors and actresses who can bring life to those characters, regardless of anything else.

On the other hand, the fact that we as the audience are not ready to have other cultures' tales played by other ethnicities than their own tells us we still need to work on ourselves and bring down our own mental borders before we can go out and point the finger. Those are the same universal messages of our own tales, but we still lock them up in the culture we feel we have borrowed them from rather than accepting them as a global heritage. This doesn't put us in a place where we can judge this perceived and supposed unfairness of the writers towards POC, because we still haven't sorted out the thing ourselves. The very fact we are addressing the matter shows we still consider that a point of difference, while the show is trying not to focus on that and embrace our worldwide heritage, the way it should be. Just my thought. Well written and thoughful, good job. My only argument as far as the "race shouldn't matter, Mulan could be white" is that because we are hardly covering non-European tales, Mulan needs to represent where her story is from. If we had a show like this that focused entirely on Eastern fairy and folk tales, than absolutly I would say make some of the characters white, black, etc. But the fact is, we wouldn't even see this show on American television, because the Eastern fairy and folk tales are not even known to the majority of the American public, which is a shame. Hopefully, over time, this will change, but it won't happen on Once, that I am sure of.