maninahat said:
If you're going to be pedantic about demographics, then realistically the doctor should have been female in at least half of her incarnations, and at least one of them Asian British. Oh, but they're only casting their first female doctor now after 50 years? Guess that pedantry doesn't work to well.
Except the idea of Time Lords switching genders wasn't introduced until NuWho, so the idea of 50/50 can't be applied retroactively. I don't recall anyone clamouring for male versions of Romana, Susan, Jenny, River Song, or the Rani for instance.
Course, the genie's out of the bottle at this point, but I've never been a fan of the gender flip idea, regardless of which way the flip is going. Rest assured if Romana returned for instance as a male, I'd find it as offputting as Missy conceptually. Which sucks, because I like Missy as a character, but I've never been able to equate her as being the Master. It's quite possible for the Doctor to have other childhood friends after all.
maninahat said:
If we go on the old argument that they hire actors on merit, that simply raises the broader problem of the lack of well known non-white actors who have been given significant acting roles in the past. To argue it is a meritocracy, you have to go with the argument that white men must have so far been inherently better actors than anyone else. Sarkeesian is absolutely right to acknowledge what we have here is just a baby step.
Except I'm not arguing that. No-one is. The ability of an actor isn't tied to race. I mean, let's look at the UK figures:
*White: 87.2%
*Black/African/Caribbean/Black British: 3%
*Indian 2.3%
*Pakistani 1.9%,
*Mixed 2%
*Other 3.7%
The statistics are iffy (go over 100% if you do the math), and they're from 2011, but under the premise that everyone within the UK has equality of opportunity, and acting ability isn't tied to ethnicity, then presumably, the number of actors within the UK should reflect this. Of course, not everyone has equality of opportunity, but even then, I'd like to think that even if you get a leg-up to the audition stage, the audition itself should be based entirely on ability, with the exception of doing casting where ethnicity is relavent (e.g. setting or character).
Shifting geography a little, in the libraries I work at, there's a lot of foreign videos/movies that show mono-ethnic casts based on their location (Vietnam, Turkey, India, China, etc.). I'm not put off by that, because a) race shouldn't matter except in special circumstances, and b) they're presumably based on the demographics of the country where they're shot at.
