User blog comment:Uknownada/Luffy's Quest: The One Piece -- Part 1/@comment-24769684-20151216220620/@comment-34981281-20151217112232

Danny Trejo and Garp. That's just perfect.

And okay. Real talk now. (If you're hoping for a joke or a punchline, I'm sorry. This comment is just going to be my actual thoughts on racial casting) And I know a lot of people won't like it or care, so just don't even bother reading.

Casting Zoro as black was a joke, but the punchline is Hollywood. Nada and I started writing this script as an inside joke to eachother to parody horrible Hollywood adaptations. Hollywood producers are so disconnected and pretentious (uh, like me, I guess?). But I am interested in what makes me think so definitively that Zoro can't be cast black.

Color-blind casting is really cool. Or is color-blind even the right term? Because changing the race of a character does have an effect in changing a performance due to how it's percieved. Now my opinion is mainly based in Broadway, where this is a more directly-tackled issue, and just where I'm more familiar with it. If you're in the musical world, you know the hottest thing right now is Lin-Manuel Miranda's Hamiliton. The story of the founding fathers done with rap music, and several of the historically-white characters being cast black or latino. But I remember, and I don't have a quote on this, Miranda saying it was done so that we would forget what we think we already know about the founding fathers. It allows us to see the characters then as America is now. The race did make a difference, and a good one.

And in the world of Hollywood, the same stands. Here's a non-race example: Bolivar Trask in Days of Future Past, portrayed by Peter Dinklage. Peter Dinklage was born with dwarfism, and you can't cast him in a role without completely acknowleging it. But he doesn't play Mini Me in Austin Powers or some mascot in a sleezy car commercial. He plays tasteful characters who live with being born differently. When Days of Future Past handed him Trask, a character who's bigotted against mutants and set to destroy them through military action, they added an entire layer to the character without even having to say it. Trask hates mutants, but he himself was born with an actual mutation of sorts.

But Hollywood continues to fuck up with casting all the time. Recently, Tiger Lily. Why were so many people pissed off to see Avatar the Last Airbender cast with exclusively white and Indian actors? It wasn't a lack of diversity. It was because it was unfaithful to the original works. It doesn't make much sense to me. Avatar is a fictional universe, and while it was inspired by a lot of different eastern cultures, it's clear that the four elements have rich cultures and races of their own. Personally, I was more bothered by the movie's horrible portrayal of eastern philosophies than eastern actors. That's beside the point, though.

Why can we accept X-Men taking creative liberties with the casting, and not The Last Airbender? The X-Men movies are based on the characters and settings of the original comics, but never attempted to adapt the story. Days of Future Past was an original story INSPIRED by the source material. And audiences view it as such. M. Night Shyamalan did attempt to adapt the direct story of Avatar. And piss-poorly. When doing that, you have to really focus on bringing new life into the original story exactly for what made it great.

Can there be a such thing as a good live-action One Piece film? Who knows? But if there were a good One Piece film, it would have to be a careful, faithful adaptation of the story. The best casting for Zoro would be someone Japanese, which was our Oda-given nationality for him. The expected casting would be someone white. 'Cause that's what American-made films tend to do. But in our Hollywood-parody script? I picked out a very talented black actor who could do so much better than our shitty One Piece movie. Because that's the kind of stupid casting that Hollywood would eat right up.

So not that anyone asked, but that's my explanation of black Zoro. And moreso, my explanation of caucasian Luffy, which nobody had a problem with for some reason?