oh, no! the black Snape is coming!

I think reflexive race-swapping and sex-swapping for the sake of what the Critical Drinker calls The Message is a stupid thing, but studios refuse to learn any lessons from sagging ticket sales, and their faith that The Message will one day penetrate bigoted minds is almost admirable in its moronic tenacity.

That said, it's becoming tiresome to report on this topic over and over. The current irony about the potentially race-swapped casting of Snape is that no one complaining has any personal problems with the actor (Paapa Essiedu) himself: even rightie critics speak of his talents with respect. No, the problem is that this so-called "TV adaptation" of the Harry Potter series has been billed as a book-faithful rendering of the story, and making Snape black, when so much textual evidence suggests he isn't, marks yet another dumb decision by studios in their constant yearning for political correctness.

As one of the videos below notes: "blackening" Snape will actually create more controversies than it solves by applying an unnecessary racial subtext to things like how Snape had been bullied in the past, Harry Potter's immediate dislike of Snape, the incident in which James Potter hanged Snape upside-down in a tree, etc.—all of these encounters and interactions become racially tinged, and if they're cut out of the new story to avoid these racial undertones, this will be another blow to the claim that the new series is somehow book-faithful. Fucking with the canon is never wise, and that basic complaint, from LOTR to Potter, has been with us since forever. Wake up, lefties: this has never been about racism.

12 Years a Snape!

ADDENDUM: it's official, they say. I hope the studio loves losing money.