one of my best friends is transmasc nonbinary and expressed to me that they were privately worried about watching Murderbot with friends bc of the discourse re: casting (mostly, "that's not *my* Murderbot, that's a dude") and how it reaffirms that if you're masculine you're not nonbinary "enough".
now that it's out, it's depressing just how much of the same shit I'm seeing on the fediverse.
I said I would watch it with them so we could talk, because I love the books and based on the trailer I have no issues with any of the casting.
and also because as a soft butch nonbinary person who doesn't get read as nonbinary *enough*: fuck, yeah, I get it, I wish people weren't shitty too.
(going to use quotes here in place of more detailed qualifiers many here probably don't need spelled out from me)
I'd been focussing so much on a "white dude" having been cast that I had not tried to disentangle the "white" part from the "dude" part.
So, this helps me with that, I think?
Overall, I've been keeping in mind that Wells has had some sort of active role in the production and have figured it deserved a look, at least.
(saw ep1 last night)
@idlestate considering how Murderbot is described in iirc book 2 or 3, I felt like the casting was fine, esp. in light of EVERYONE ELSE they cast.
idk, the focus on Murderbot being a white dude feels like it's ignoring eg Mensah (who has a fairly substantial role in the books) in favor of the kind of gross tokenism Fedi is so fond of.
Like, y'all will yell about how media needs to be more diverse while harassing actual BIPOC off the platform. SPEAKING FROM EXPERIENCE THERE.
@idlestate @titania when the show was originally announced, Skarsgård was the only one who’d been publicly cast and Martha Wells was the only person who wasn’t a cis white man of the five or six people they’d announced on the production team, which made the whole thing seem like a bit more of a boys club when there was a dearth of other info.
But Skarsgård seems to get the character and the trailer made it clear they weren’t just aiming for a bland white dude action flick by casting him (plus, the rest of the casting was clearly done well). so you know, the show having an unfortunately normal amount of “wow hollywoods writers and producers sure are mostly men” isn’t really worth grousing about for a million years.
@Satsuma I should be very clear that the grousing I've seen was post-trailer. Pre, I could understand. Post...
At a certain point I need the white people of the world to acknowledge what tokenism actually looks like.
@idlestate @titania yeah post trailer i’m a lot more likely to think you’re either a crank who complains endlessly without bothering to check whether the new info lines up with your original impressions, or you’ve dismissed the entire rest of the casting as unimportant which doesn’t say great things about you
@titania yeah i mean, it would have been nice to cast a nonbinary actor in a nonbinary role, and i do hope they at least have some non-cis people on board as consultants but there are plenty of nb people out there who look exactly like Skarsgård so that’s not an issue of “too masculine” per se
@Satsuma the people commenting that he's too masc are also listing suggestions for actors who, uh, well
Let's just say that I don't think the problem is the actor, it's the idea that masculinity and nonbinary identity are not at odds with one another
@Satsuma yeah like I have seen a bunch in the last few days about how it was a missed opportunity to cast someone besides "another white dude" which makes me wonder how much attention was paid to who else is in it and what their roles are.
Plus complaining that it "should have" gone to a nonbinary actor, because Skarsgaard is "too masculine" to play Murderbot.
The whole thing strikes me as really gross tbh.