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Funny casting coincidence on the Wheel of Time Show Cannoli Send a noteboard - 19/03/2021 07:46:06 PM

Back when the internet was virtue signaling or otherwise racially posturing about three of the four Two Rivers protagonists being played by light-skinned non-white people, my position was that the badly-cast actor was Barney Harris, to play Mat. Because Harris is flat out white, with light eyes, and Mat is the most pure-blooded of the Two Rivers, a scion of the royal line. So the message is that the whitest character is the most Manethereny of the bunch. I guess the woke people are good with that, so happy are they that the psychotic power-grabber who will sell out anyone for personal advancement and commits war crimes being played by a swarthy woman of indeterminate ethnicity, the dim but hardworking manual laborer and the bad-tempered, emotional and often humiliated woman who calms down when she starts getting dick on a regular basis are played by light skinned black actors. Fine, if that's how they want to roll, IDGAF, just stop calling racism at a fanbase that has been bitten badly by poor adaptational choices in the genre, when Rand being able to pass for a half-breed Two Rivers man is central to his identity issues.

Except I have actually seen Barney Harris in something else. He plays Ned in "The Hollow Crown" an adaptation of Shakespeare's history tetralogies, the character based on Prince Edward of Lancaster, son (theoretically) of King Henry VI. The funny thing about the casting in general is that Prince Ned could not be further from Mat, being rather arrogant and entitled in his major speaking scene, an aristocrat to his toenails, and demanding his captors kneel to him as their rightful monarch's representative. While he was probably cast for his strong resemblance to the actor who plays Henry VI, his mother is played by Sophie Okonedo, who's black. What's funny with regard to my issue with his casting is that someone** thinks he is an adequate choice to play a biracial man. So there you go. Harris might be white, but British Hollywood thinks he can pass in the multiracial grab bag they make the Two Rivers out to be. So when a woke fan-critic suddenly makes the connection I did about Barney's casting, they can be smacked down.

** Presumably Sam Jones, casting person for "The Hollow Crown" and absolutely nothing else I've ever heard of.

Cannoli
“Tolerance is the virtue of the man without convictions.” GK Chesteron
Inde muagdhe Aes Sedai misain ye!
Deus Vult!
*MySmiley*
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