Saw How to Train your Dragon in a waiting room today and it made me think on it.
I hear all the time people complaining about diversity casting of typically white or male roles. "Why do they have to change it?" Why does it have to stay the same?
I think I am in the middle somewhere here but I feel I am in right place. Diversity casting just because you have the power to do it is sometimes groan worthy. SNL pokes fun of casting Sterling Brown in Frozen 2. Kenan Thompson finds it absurd he is there in Scandinavia? And its faux pas to cast white people in Asian stories. So the theory of keeping cultural or ethnic stories representative stands.
And we get to both How to Train Your Dragon and Thor. Thor was easy, as the Asgardians were aliens and just observed by the Norse. But How to Train Your Dragon was amazing, with two or three sentences they reasoned out how a story initially northern European was now fleshed out by people from all over the world. Not only did it make sense but it made the story as a whole so much richer.
Dr Who changed faces because someone asked why it was always to a white guy, does it always have to be a white guy? And someone said, good point. But Dragons? Its so much greater storytelling than why not? Inclusion and diversity in casting plus seconds of dialog took the story from a regional tale to a global threat. No longer are they in the movie as some would argue "someone was told they had to hire [insert minority]," but with this new dept of storytelling, not having diversity would make the whole thing seem low budget.