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Hilarious Racists Vs Thor kerfuffle

post #1 of 137
12/16/10 at 10:48pm
Thread Starter 
Boycott-thor.com

As reported on Slashfilm and Devin's new thing, Racists are launching a hilarious attack against Thor, because of the casting of Idris Elba as Heimdall. I'm all in favor of this, as I enjoy people making arguments that are blatantly awful.
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post #2 of 137
12/16/10 at 10:51pm
Oh lord. I remember a coworker bitching about Michael Clarke Duncan's Kingpin for that very same reason. (No, he couldn't come up with a better choice.)
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post #3 of 137
12/16/10 at 10:58pm
Thread Starter 
This ain't some kind of comic book nerd thing though, this is straight up white supremacists. They're saying that Marvel and Stan "Lee" Leiber are inserting social engineering into European Mythology. Yay, they're pissed about Thor!

Oh, and they're referring to Idris Elba of The Wire and Luther as a "hip hop DJ".
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post #4 of 137
12/16/10 at 11:03pm
Well good. At least I won't have to see/run into any of those idjits when I go see it.
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post #5 of 137
12/16/10 at 11:08pm
I brought it up as a point of curiosity when the casting was first announced, since the idea of a black Norse god struck me as little less arbitrary than, say, a black Spider-Man, and I was told that they aren't actually THE Norse Gods in the comic, but aliens. Is this not true?
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post #6 of 137
12/16/10 at 11:11pm
Yeah, this shit is crazy. Anyone who follows the link is in for a treat. A fowl racist treat but a treat none the less.

It's a perfect storm of racist assmunchery in its way. First, a black guy steals the presidency. The next thing you know they're stealing our Nordic mythology. I WANT MY COMICS BACK!!!!

By the way, did you look up the guy who started the blog up facebook? Frankly, he looks a little swarthy to be worrying overmuch about this type of thing. Mediterraneans, bah!
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post #7 of 137
12/16/10 at 11:13pm
Meanwhile, no one seems to care that this man is playing a Norse god as well.

http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0038355/
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post #8 of 137
12/16/10 at 11:13pm
Who gives a shit? Just because its a bunch of white dudes in the comics, that doesnt mean that there can't be black Norse Gods.

The whole idea is ridiculous. The Norse created these Gods as a part of an Origin story; clearly, if the Gods made the world, they made black people too.

The way people stick to strict literalism when it comes to their pet causes is insanity, whether it be comic books or some foreign, long dead mythology.
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post #9 of 137
12/16/10 at 11:17pm
Thread Starter 
My favorite thing about it is that someone actually cares about what race Heimdall the Norse God is portrayed as. Truly, we are an entitled people if we can spare outrage on this.
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post #10 of 137
12/16/10 at 11:20pm
I'm all over the place on this. If we were going to see the pantheons of Yoruba mythology or Native American folk tales or a film telling the epic quest of Horus and we saw a bunch of English actors playing the parts we'd roll our eyes at the ridiculousness of Hollywood once again pulling another Little Buddha. And it does smack of tokenism considering there's almost a 99% chance when we see crowd shots of Asgard it's gonna be all white guys, that one Asian guy, and one black guy. If they want this world to reflect the racial split on Earth, then white characters should only be a fraction of the groups on display, but nope all we get is Stringer Bell.

However, as soon as I saw that trailer all I could think was "HOLY SHIT RED GLOWING EYES AWESOME AWESOME AWESOME I WANT TO WATCH THIS RIGHT NOW" so you could say I'm okay with the casting.
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post #11 of 137
12/16/10 at 11:21pm
Sooner or later, someone is going to come into this thread and argue for this idiotic sites position, and they'll say something dumb like, "well, were the Norse God's ever portrayed as having African ethnicity before this? Because if not, then I kind of see their point."

Whoever that is, fuck those people. Fuck them good and hard.
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post #12 of 137
12/16/10 at 11:22pm
Too late.
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post #13 of 137
12/16/10 at 11:24pm
Quote:
Originally Posted by TheMantis View Post
Meanwhile, no one seems to care that this man is playing a Norse god as well.

http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0038355/
His shot in the trailer was actually my least favorite part, he didn't look anything resembling dour, forbidding, pissed, violent, or any of the other classic characteristics we expect from badass medieval Tatars.
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post #14 of 137
12/16/10 at 11:25pm
Quote:
Originally Posted by Mezz View Post
Too late.
Are you referring to me? Because I don't know shit about Thor, nor really care about it. I was just asking out of curiosity.
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post #15 of 137
12/16/10 at 11:27pm
No, not you, Patrick (by the way, fuck your avatar, it creeps me out). I was talking about Stormin. I'm rolling my eyes at the idea of tokenism in a god damn Thor movie.
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post #16 of 137
12/16/10 at 11:30pm
The Norse gods have also never previously, to my knowledge, been portrayed as being buddies with Iron Man. But skin color is definitely where I draw my personal fidelity-to-dead-religion line. Fo sho.
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post #17 of 137
12/16/10 at 11:31pm
My favorite thing is that the movie seems to have no Donald Blake and Jane Foster has been changed from nurse to an astrophysicist (which seems to indicate the movie will also drop the ambiguity and flat out state asgardians are aliens) and somehow the skin color of Heimdall is earthshaking sacrilege. I do love the fact that this site is literally related to hate groups, makes it really easy to dismiss anyone else that has a problem with Idris freaking Elba being in a Marvel movie.

Incidentally, that site has this comedy gem:

Quote:
Black Panther is a “genius,” who has a Ph.D. in physics from Oxford. He also keeps it real be having a harem of “wives in training.” When not fighting “racist” South Africans, he comes to the USA to fight the Ku Klux Klan.

So Marvel has a history of publishing an explicit black racial hero, who still appears today on an explicitly black cable network.

Yet the same company doesn’t think whites should have anything uniquely their own, not even their own mythology!
I love the quotation marks around "genius" and "racist" South Africans.
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post #18 of 137
12/16/10 at 11:33pm
ah, racism...the intoxicating stink of the world wouldn't be the same without it.
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post #19 of 137
12/16/10 at 11:35pm
Quote:
Originally Posted by Schwartz View Post
The Norse gods have also never previously, to my knowledge, been portrayed as being buddies with Iron Man. But skin color is definitely where I draw my personal fidelity-to-dead-religion line. Fo sho.
I mean, the movie lost me personally when Thor wasn't red-haired. I mean, can you imagine what the dead vikings would think about that, in those few spare moments between dying from their wounds and being reborn the next day to fight again in Valhalla? Not to mention WHERE ARE HIS FUCKING GOATS?
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post #20 of 137
12/16/10 at 11:39pm
Thread Starter 
It's a mentality that I find fascinating, because it's so willfully wrong. I really like when they protest that they're not racists. Just fucking own it, for God's sakes.

I'd be happy to cut Stormin slack on this too, as the casting pretty much is tokenism. I just don't think that's in any way a bad thing, especially since we're not talking about a black actor playing Lincoln or something. Also, the casting is clearly pissing off the exact right kind of people.
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post #21 of 137
12/16/10 at 11:40pm
Quote:
"I wouldn’t expect to see many Brad Pitt types walking around in The Black Panther’s Wakanda Palace!"
There's no way they'd ever even greenlight a huge superhero film with an all black cast. So yeah, you wouldn't.
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post #22 of 137
12/16/10 at 11:41pm
Branagh's been doing this for years. If these dolts could comprehend Shakespeare they would've flipped when he cast Denzel Washington in "Much Ado About Nothing" and Adrian Lester in "Love's Labour's Lost".
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post #23 of 137
12/16/10 at 11:44pm
Quote:
Originally Posted by Mezz View Post
No, not you, Patrick (by the way, fuck your avatar, it creeps me out).
How's this?
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post #24 of 137
12/16/10 at 11:52pm
Quote:
Originally Posted by TheMantis View Post
Meanwhile, no one seems to care that this man is playing a Norse god as well.

http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0038355/
Well, he's not a god, and besides, he was made up by Marvel, so there's nothing mythological for them to be deviating from.
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post #25 of 137
12/17/10 at 12:12am
Well, what about Alba in Fantastic Four? A lot of people were pissed about that casting and continue to cite it as a mistake due to her race. The puzzling thing in that case is that they went to such extremes to make her look as white as possible (blond hair and blue contacts) when they could have just hired a white actress.
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post #26 of 137
12/17/10 at 12:21am
Quote:
Originally Posted by levrock View Post
Branagh's been doing this for years. If these dolts could comprehend Shakespeare they would've flipped when he cast Denzel Washington in "Much Ado About Nothing" and Adrian Lester in "Love's Labour's Lost".
Both of those cases are much more legitimate targets of criticism as well. In the latter case, the casting requires you to believe that all the leads are either colorblind or utterly retarded for the storyline to work towards the last leg of the story. In the former, Don John--played by Keanu Reeves--is supposed to be the brother of Denzel's character.
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post #27 of 137
12/17/10 at 12:25am
This thread needs a real racist to make it interesting.
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post #28 of 137
12/17/10 at 12:30am
Isn't part of Branagh's thing casting with "theatre" rules? It's not even tokenism or political correctness, I think. I don't know what his interpretation of Heimdall will be, but I'm willing to bet he saw something in Idris Elba that gets it across.
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post #29 of 137
12/17/10 at 12:38am
Quote:
Originally Posted by Francis Wolcott View Post
Isn't part of Branagh's thing casting with "theatre" rules?
Yes. Does it matter to the literalists and the plausibles? Not a whit.
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post #30 of 137
12/17/10 at 1:01am
Quote:
Originally Posted by Patrick Ripoll View Post
How's this?
Magnificent bastard, you.
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post #31 of 137
12/17/10 at 1:07am
Some people need to simply be bulldozed into the sea.
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post #32 of 137
12/17/10 at 1:34am
Thread Starter 
Quote:
Originally Posted by HarleyQuinn22 View Post
Well, what about Alba in Fantastic Four? A lot of people were pissed about that casting and continue to cite it as a mistake due to her race. The puzzling thing in that case is that they went to such extremes to make her look as white as possible (blond hair and blue contacts) when they could have just hired a white actress.
Really? The only complaints I remember were about her being a terrible actress, and even then, once people saw the movies, it became clear that it was the least of their problems. But of course they were mad, they're racists.
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post #33 of 137
12/17/10 at 1:38am
Quote:
Originally Posted by HarleyQuinn22 View Post
Well, what about Alba in Fantastic Four? A lot of people were pissed about that casting and continue to cite it as a mistake due to her race. The puzzling thing in that case is that they went to such extremes to make her look as white as possible (blond hair and blue contacts) when they could have just hired a white actress.
Yeah, I don't recall much furor over that casting aside from a vague murmur of complaining. But then, I didn't really follow that production at all.

But their moronic attempts to Aryan-ize her? Creepy as shit.
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post #34 of 137
12/17/10 at 2:07am
The problem with that was that they had Chris Evans as her brother. At least be consistent.
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post #35 of 137
12/17/10 at 2:19am
Quote:
Originally Posted by HarleyQuinn22 View Post
Well, what about Alba in Fantastic Four? A lot of people were pissed about that casting and continue to cite it as a mistake due to her race. The puzzling thing in that case is that they went to such extremes to make her look as white as possible (blond hair and blue contacts) when they could have just hired a white actress.
The problem with the Alba casting wasn't that they cast a Latina to play a white lady, it was that they cast a Latina to play THE WHITEST LADY IN COMICS. Seriously, Sue Richards/Invisible Woman is pretty much Donna Reed/Florence Henderson with superpowers, so hiring anyone "exotic" to play such a whitebread character was gonna raise a few eyebrows.

The whole "not matching Chris Evans" thing was also puzzling.
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post #36 of 137
12/17/10 at 2:29am
We really need a racist here. Is there some kind of pay-per-thread-trolled service for this, or should I have not mentioned that and opened one?
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post #37 of 137
12/17/10 at 2:55am
Quote:
Originally Posted by Francis Wolcott View Post
Isn't part of Branagh's thing casting with "theatre" rules? It's not even tokenism or political correctness, I think. I don't know what his interpretation of Heimdall will be, but I'm willing to bet he saw something in Idris Elba that gets it across.
This is the answer right here. A thousand times, this.

Quote:
Originally Posted by Patrick Ripoll View Post
I brought it up as a point of curiosity when the casting was first announced, since the idea of a black Norse god struck me as little less arbitrary than, say, a black Spider-Man, and I was told that they aren't actually THE Norse Gods in the comic, but aliens. Is this not true?
To get around to answering your question, that's pretty much true. The Asgardians in Marvel comics are the aliens who inspired the mythology. How much emphasis gets placed on sci-fi space adventure, how much on swords and sorcery, and how much on conventional Manhattan superheroics depends on who's writing the comic from one year to the next.

They do refer to themselves as gods, probably because it's fewer syllables than "Asgardians." And Odin does occasionally confer with Zeus, Osiris, Amaterasu, et cetera, the leaders of other extradimensional races who have inspired worship among humanity, when there's a particularly cosmic threat afoot. The line from the trailer about "where I come from, science and magic are one and the same" is very much in the spirit of the thing.
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post #38 of 137
12/17/10 at 3:08am
For what it's worth, Wikipedia says this:

Quote:
Thor: The Mighty Avenger

In Thor: The Mighty Avenger #6, Heimdall, much like his Marvel Universe incarnation, appears as the guard of the Bifrost bridge, sports a goatee and wears a horned helmet that casts his eyes in shadows. Unlike the Marvel Universe version, however, this Heimdall is black, a shapeshifter (taking the forms of Surtur and Fin Fang Foom) and a clear superior to Thor in combat. Heimdall is ordered by Odin to keep Thor from returning to Asgard. He is also revealed as the one who separated Thor from his hammer.
I have no clue what "The Mighty Avenger" is, or how its different from standard Marvel continuity, but it does seem similar to what's shown in the trailer.
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post #39 of 137
12/17/10 at 3:20am
This thread just raises my interest in Thor much higher.
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post #40 of 137
12/17/10 at 3:22am


Because apparently I have to share the despair. Sorry.
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post #41 of 137
12/17/10 at 3:23am
Pretty sure it's not in the main continuity, unless they're playing the Earth 616 vs. Earth XXX game.

It looks like it's in the vein of the Mighty Adventures line which are kinda kiddified and simplified versions of the comics with less continuity and dudes getting their intestines ripped out through their mouths.
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post #42 of 137
12/17/10 at 3:34am
Quote:
Originally Posted by Sebastian OB View Post
This thread needs a real racist to make it interesting.
There was a long thread about this on a Swedish message bord when it was announced back in April. This was the first post:

"Now they've gone too far. What the hell are they thinking when they cast a negro as Heimdall? At most he could have played a slave. I can't see this as anything else than pure provocation and an attempt to further humiliate and diminish the memory that remains of our old, proud culture.

There's no way in hell I'll see that piece of shit film, and I'll boycott the PC pussy Kenneth Branagh for ever!!

What do you think? Is this part of the giant PC crusade meant to make us white people feel like we have no culture or history? Could this happen to any other religion? Maybe a Thai Jesus?"
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post #43 of 137
12/17/10 at 3:37am
I just read a comment by somebody nicknamed Fight the Racists calling Elba's casting "another example of the ethnic cleansing of whites" (emphasis mine).
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post #44 of 137
12/17/10 at 3:46am
In which I throw gas on the fire. Hollywood has been casting white actors to play Jesus for a century without white people complaining. What makes Heimdall important enough to warrant this sudden interest in fake historical accuracy?
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post #45 of 137
12/17/10 at 3:50am
Quote:
Originally Posted by Jexxon View Post
There was a long thread about this on a Swedish message bord when it was announced back in April. This was the first post:

"Now they've gone too far. What the hell are they thinking when they cast a negro as Heimdall? At most he could have played a slave. I can't see this as anything else than pure provocation and an attempt to further humiliate and diminish the memory that remains of our old, proud culture.

There's no way in hell I'll see that piece of shit film, and I'll boycott the PC pussy Kenneth Branagh for ever!!

What do you think? Is this part of the giant PC crusade meant to make us white people feel like we have no culture or history? Could this happen to any other religion? Maybe a Thai Jesus?"
That reminds me of a Sunday school class session I had at a Wisconsin Evangelical Lutheran Synod parish. Right after the teacher read the physical description of King Saul--which reads like a physical description of Osama bin Laden--one of the other kids who hadn't had her curiosity drilled out of her dared to make the observation that the Israelites seemed to match the physical description of modern day Middle Easterners. The teacher nearly became apoplectic and then went into "bless your heart" mode while assuring her and the rest of the class that the ancient Hebrews were white.

Some people just seem to completely lose their shit when you try to divorce the concept of the Divine from whiteness. I just can't wrap my mind around it. With the religions of the Near East, at least, even the most basic knowledge of history makes it really, really clear that Caucasians were really late additions to the Abrahamic tradition.
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post #46 of 137
12/17/10 at 4:18am
Thread Starter 
God, reading some of these comment sections make the Aicn talkbacks look like the fucking Algonquin Round Table. I honestly wasn't aware how bad things were in the dark corners of these here interwebs. This started as funny and now it's less so.
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post #47 of 137
12/17/10 at 4:59am
OK, since this thread needs some racism, I'll bring it.

Screw the Norse gods. As an original civilized person i.e. a Greek, I say screw all you northern barbarians. No civilized free man gives a shit about your bullshit fake gods. This is what you take offense with? Just recently we got a Celt paying Zeus, the father of gods and men. A fucking Celt? They're a mere step above jackals. And not only that. There was also a whole other herd of barbarians pretending to be gods and heroes. Germans. Gauls. Even Picts. My skin crawls. I mean if they couldn't get any Greeks for it couldn't they at least try someone half-civilized, like an Italian?
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post #48 of 137
12/17/10 at 5:10am
Quote:
Originally Posted by Francis Wolcott View Post


Because apparently I have to share the despair. Sorry.
Awww! Fuck you for showing me that! It started out funny, then it was funny and scary, then it was just bloody terrifying. I want to round up every single one of those people and shove them in a giant cannon and blow them into space.
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post #49 of 137
12/17/10 at 5:37am
Quote:
Originally Posted by Reasor View Post
In which I throw gas on the fire. Hollywood has been casting white actors to play Jesus for a century without white people complaining. What makes Heimdall important enough to warrant this sudden interest in fake historical accuracy?
Damnit, I'm a continuity nerd! I like my Buddhas Indian, my Jesuses (Jesi?) Levantine, and my Pontius Pilates Telly Savalas!



Edit: Trust Stelios and Werewolf Girl to win the thread.
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post #50 of 137
12/17/10 at 6:04am
Quote:
Originally Posted by stelios View Post
OK, since this thread needs some racism, I'll bring it.

Screw the Norse gods. As an original civilized person i.e. a Greek, I say screw all you northern barbarians. No civilized free man gives a shit about your bullshit fake gods. This is what you take offense with? Just recently we got a Celt paying Zeus, the father of gods and men. A fucking Celt? They're a mere step above jackals. And not only that. There was also a whole other herd of barbarians pretending to be gods and heroes. Germans. Gauls. Even Picts. My skin crawls. I mean if they couldn't get any Greeks for it couldn't they at least try someone half-civilized, like an Italian?
Bravo. Here, have another bail-out, you charismatic bastards.
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