karkles-the-adorabloodthirsty:

cecilfuckingbaldwin:

puppetmoshpit: jingle-fox: animalbks: awesomegirlystuff: What the fuck? Whitewashing? It’s a danish fairy tale! You can’t just throw in diversity for the sake of it. It has to make sense, thats like if people were like “Why are there only Chinese people in Mulan?” Because it takes place in fucking China before anyone immigrated their! THANK YOU THANK. Because there was never anyone in Denmark that wasn’t white. Oops looks like you’ve got to tell all the Inuit people living there they need to move. Oh yeah, better tell all of those Danish people of color to get the fuck out. Because only white people ever lived in Denmark.

It’s not like Denmark has a racism problem or anything.

/face to the palm

I think there should be more POC in Disney films. But misusing the word whitewashing does not help our case, ever. Whitewashing is when you make a character/person that was originally not white (like Mulan, or Isis, or Anansi, take your pick I don’t care) and make them white. In Hans Christian Andersen’s original tale, all the characters were white or assumed to be white. Elsa in particular is based on the character the snow queen, who is explicitly described as being, literally, white:

It was a lady; her cloak and cap were of snow. She was tall and of slender figure, and of a dazzling whiteness. It was the Snow Queen. (http://www.online-literature.com/hans_christian_andersen/972/)

If the snow queen was never physically described, or this story had taken place somewhere where the /vast/ majority of the people, especially people in power, are non-white, saying it was whitewashing would make sense.

Secondly, Denmark today is mostly white (mostly ethnic Danish, in fact [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Denmark]); ethnic Danes are mostly white; and while I don’t have pre-Viking or Viking-era data at my disposal, I think it’s safe to say that most of the people who lived in Denmark at the time the story takes place were who we would now consider ethnic Danes. White people were certainly in charge at this time, with little dispute.

It’s impossible to whitewash something that was already white. Let’s instead fight for a decent Disney movie based on a fairy tale from somewhere other than Europe, ‘kay?

tl;dr? Stop. Abusing. A. Word. That. Is. Useful. And. Means. Useful. Things.