Fandom Snowflake: Challenge 12 Recasting
Jan. 23rd, 2022 12:44 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ysabetwordsmithChallenge #12
In your own space, tell us who you would recast in a film, tv series or webseries, or maybe someone voicing a cartoon or videogame. Or who would you cast to play a character in a book, comic or maybe even your own fiction! Leave a comment in this post saying you did it. Include a link to your post if you feel comfortable doing so.
In the interest of participation, I'm going to riff this a bit, because recasting is something I almost never do. I'm not good with names and faces, so there are very few actors that I like and see often enough to recognize, let alone be a fan of.
The vast majority of the time, if I like a character/show at all, I get attached to that actor. Change the actor and I am unlikely to watch or enjoy the results. I dislike most remakes, because they not only change the actors but usually the tone, which pulls out much or all of what I liked in the first place.
Even with some canons that set it up well, like Doctor Who, I can't make the switch. The fandom generally says, "Oh, you like the new one as much as you did the last one." Not me. I enjoyed Tom Baker, a couple of movies, and one truly brilliant fanmovie; but none of the other main incarnations. Which is kind of sad, because I like the idea of characters who reincarnate or otherwise morph. I even made an open-source fandom for that, The Blueshift Troupers -- but I did lay specific guidelines for how to maintain character continuity across different performers.
One exception is using different actors to portray different ages, the way X-Men doubled back to tell earlier stories with younger actors. That sometimes works for me.
Another is content based on a cycle or mythos instead of a canon, and that includes things that the owner thinks is a canon but is really something else. King Arthur and Robin Hood are examples of old cycles; Sherlock Holmes is younger; I have enjoyed many different renditions of those because people deliberately riff them. For instance, the Ursulan Cycle is genderbent King Arthur, and I'd probably love a live-action version of that. Much the same is true of fairytales, which have the advantage of being iterated across many cultures already, plus you can buy interesting guidebooks like The Hero with a Thousand Faces or the Aarne-Thompson Index. In light of this, I sometimes indicate "played by" for those iterated cycles if I'm writing fanfic for them, like Mark Ruffalo for Hulk. It's more hit-or-miss if the creators don't actually know what they're doing, like Marvel and DC. (In their defense, most people who make comics are not writing majors, but that still impacts the storytelling.) I've enjoyed most iterations of Hulk, but only some of Batman. And if it's not even that far along, I'm much less likely to indulge a switch.
This tendency is less intense with cartoons than with live action. I'm more flexible about voice actors than face actors, if the rest of the presentation is appealing.
So, does anyone else get attached to specific actors and then not want to follow others? If so, do you have exceptions to that? Has anyone else riffed this challenge because it doesn't fit them very well?
In your own space, tell us who you would recast in a film, tv series or webseries, or maybe someone voicing a cartoon or videogame. Or who would you cast to play a character in a book, comic or maybe even your own fiction! Leave a comment in this post saying you did it. Include a link to your post if you feel comfortable doing so.
In the interest of participation, I'm going to riff this a bit, because recasting is something I almost never do. I'm not good with names and faces, so there are very few actors that I like and see often enough to recognize, let alone be a fan of.
The vast majority of the time, if I like a character/show at all, I get attached to that actor. Change the actor and I am unlikely to watch or enjoy the results. I dislike most remakes, because they not only change the actors but usually the tone, which pulls out much or all of what I liked in the first place.
Even with some canons that set it up well, like Doctor Who, I can't make the switch. The fandom generally says, "Oh, you like the new one as much as you did the last one." Not me. I enjoyed Tom Baker, a couple of movies, and one truly brilliant fanmovie; but none of the other main incarnations. Which is kind of sad, because I like the idea of characters who reincarnate or otherwise morph. I even made an open-source fandom for that, The Blueshift Troupers -- but I did lay specific guidelines for how to maintain character continuity across different performers.
One exception is using different actors to portray different ages, the way X-Men doubled back to tell earlier stories with younger actors. That sometimes works for me.
Another is content based on a cycle or mythos instead of a canon, and that includes things that the owner thinks is a canon but is really something else. King Arthur and Robin Hood are examples of old cycles; Sherlock Holmes is younger; I have enjoyed many different renditions of those because people deliberately riff them. For instance, the Ursulan Cycle is genderbent King Arthur, and I'd probably love a live-action version of that. Much the same is true of fairytales, which have the advantage of being iterated across many cultures already, plus you can buy interesting guidebooks like The Hero with a Thousand Faces or the Aarne-Thompson Index. In light of this, I sometimes indicate "played by" for those iterated cycles if I'm writing fanfic for them, like Mark Ruffalo for Hulk. It's more hit-or-miss if the creators don't actually know what they're doing, like Marvel and DC. (In their defense, most people who make comics are not writing majors, but that still impacts the storytelling.) I've enjoyed most iterations of Hulk, but only some of Batman. And if it's not even that far along, I'm much less likely to indulge a switch.
This tendency is less intense with cartoons than with live action. I'm more flexible about voice actors than face actors, if the rest of the presentation is appealing.
So, does anyone else get attached to specific actors and then not want to follow others? If so, do you have exceptions to that? Has anyone else riffed this challenge because it doesn't fit them very well?
