Casting a Black Actor as Snape in the New Harry Potter is... ... ...You Know What... ...I Just Can't Do This
I'm out
In HBO’s upcoming reboot of the Harry Potter series, the role of Severus Snape — which was previously played by a white actor — will be played by Paapa Essiedu, who is Black. The decision has sparked backlash, though it also responds to criticism that the Harry Potter series is too white.
A society’s artistic works reflect its values. What we see on screen helps define us as a culture. And that’s why the decision to cast Essiedu as Snape — and the response to that decision — is a clear sign that we, as a society, have become…uh…we’ve devolved into…
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…
You know what? Fuck it — I can’t do this shit anymore.
Who gives a fat rat’s jizzpouch about any of this? This debate exists in a galaxy several light years beyond retarded. I’m a grown fucking man, I’ve got a kid and a mortgage, I can’t treat the casting choices in the Little Wizard Boy TV show like they’re the Cuban Missile Crisis. It’s insane-times-a-billion that there are adults in our society — people who can VOTE!!! — who would devote one nanosecond of their precious time on Earth to fretting over the skin color of the mean professor at Magic University.
To tell the truth, I hadn’t even decided where I was going with this article. Was I going to be furious because Snape is white in the books (is he white in the books?), or up-in-arms because there’s one Black guy at Hogwarts and he’s the bad guy? The “bad guy” outrage is pretty dumb, because Snape isn’t a stereotypical scary Black guy character — he’s not a Chicago street pimp mugging people at knifepoint. And doesn’t Snape turn out to be good? And don’t the people screaming for more “BIPOC” actors want them to also get juicy bad-guy roles — can they only play Johny America, the Nobel Prize-winning firefighter? On the other hand, the “they’re erasing white characters!” stuff is inane, too — is race even part of the Harry Potter universe? Do the characters have races — aren’t they witches or vampires or some shit? My answer to all these questions is: “Fuck this, fuck this, fuck this, I hate this so fucking much, yes I write a newsletter and culture war = clicks but I’d rather floss my asshole with barbed wire than pretend to care about any of this über-retarded bullshit.”
