As for the anachronisms and the erasure of racism and classism.... I feel like we've had discussions on here about this very thing in the past, usually in the context of filmic adaptations of books (cue @cupiscent !)
Boy howdy yes, do I have some thoughts in this area!
I've been thinking a lot about "colourblind" casting in recent historical television, particularly when I was watching
The Great, which took this approach. It seems to me that it goes:
Pros: 1. Work for talented actors of colour! 2. Kids/people get to see that everyone can be interesting characters, not just white folks!
Cons: 1. The work then cannot engage with matters of race in that historical period. 2. Actors and writers of colour often get paid less and treated worse than white folks.
I think J touched on the cons already, and very eloquently. Too much of this sort of thing runs the risk of people thinking that, to use my
The Great example, Catherine the Great's Russia didn't have any racism, after all, there were Indian and Black nobles! We don't have to do anything about racism other than include people of colour in our stuff! And obviously neither of those things is actually true.
However, at present, I look at things like
The Great and
Bridgerton and go, ok, so diverse casting means they can't engage with race. Were those stories ever going to engage with race anyway? (Considering one of the major criticisms of Georgian/Regency romance as a whole subgenre is that it's hideously blind about the slavery and racism propping up the fancy rich nobility--no!) Obviously, if you're making a movie like
Belle--explicitly about race in that historical period--you don't go with colourblind casting. But if you're just making a "fun quasi-historical romp" of a show, then
inviting everyone to join in the fun seems only polite. And can actually prompt conversations about how history was neither that fun nor that inclusive for a lot of people.
Plus, getting more actors and writers of colour involved in big productions can boost their careers and mean we can hopefully start getting more stories--historical and contemporary--that are stories of and about characters of colour. (For instance, and I don't actually know the answer on this, do we get
Atlanta partly because Donald Glover was in
Community?)
Completely unrelated, but what is DOTA? You clearly don't mean the computer game... or do you?
