Racebending and Adaptation

Introduction Struggles over representations of gender, race, and sexuality in American popular media date back decades. Organisations such as NAACP and GLAAD have demanded that the entertainment industries increase diversity in terms of casting as well as address racist, sexist, and homophobic stereotyping with the creation of more complex narratives and character development. In the context of non-White racialised representation, the 2023 State of the Media Report, compiled by the Representation Project, indicates that these efforts have resulted in parity with the US population, with more than 40% of characters in box office successes and top ten-rated television series being BIPOC (Cooper 4, 10). That said, BIPOC actors are rarely cast in leading roles, and as such account for less than ten percent of all Academy Award winners and just over five percent of Emmy winners (4, 10). In the case of Black representation, being visible is also about not being seen. Black characters written by predominately White showrunners and producers do not foreground non-White racialised experience in any meaningful way (Smith 779-797; Warner 12-25). The handsome [Black] doctor of the hospital drama, the dedicated [Black] detective of the crime procedural, the hot [Black] Duke of Bridgerton—such characters are typically isolated from community and primarily seen surrounded by White friends and coworkers (Smith 784). Contributing to this in/visibility is the practice of colourblind casting (blindcasting). Adapted from a theatrical hiring practice that was founded on a liberal discourse of meritocracy and equal opportunity, Black actors are hired to play roles written originally as White and/or traditionally played by White actors (Warner 16). Kirsten Warner notes that such performances are based on the “non recognition of race” and requires buy-in from not only producers and performers, but audiences (14). As a result, the Whiteness of the text remains unmarked. To be fair, some of these productions include elements of what Jason Smith refers to as colourconsciousness (780-782), in which Blackness and even anti-Black racism is acknowledged and validated in a few scenes. Despite ongoing criticism by media studies scholars and activists, as exemplified by campaigns such as #oscarssowhite, ratings and box office successes certainly suggest that these approaches to representation and diversity have been accepted or at least tolerated by the majority of predominately White audiences. The rise of the alt-right in the past ten years—a constellation of reactionary politics steeped in racism, white nationalism, misogyny, homophobia, and transphobia (Ouellette & Banet-Weiser 2)—certainly appears to be testing the limits of such acceptance. Those invested in this alt-right discourse see themselves as combatants in a culture war over Hollywood “wokeness”. When directed at transmedia franchise additions, adaptations, and reboots with Black actors in leading roles, their loud complaints on social media challenge the in/visibility logics of blindcasting. These fans see colour all too well, perceiving their favourite universe to be ruined with what they deem to be unnecessary “race swaps”. At its broadest, this article sets out to gauge the reach of reactionary politics in relation to racialised representation and its relationship to a participatory culture that has always been understood as progressive. To do so, I conducted a discourse analysis of fan reactions on Reddit to the first season of AMC’s Interview with The Vampire (2022-). The series is an activist adaptation that goes beyond blindcasting with elements of colourconsciousness to racebend the narratives of three major characters not only in the beloved Anne Rice novel, but also the 1999 film adaptation starring Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt. Fannish Pleasures and Displeasures John Fiske’s work on the pleasures of the televisual text is of salience to understanding the imbrication of fan engagement with politics. Due to its polysemy, Fiske argues, the popular television text (and, I would add, the contemporary transmedia franchise) is open to a wider range of interpretations than a traditional literary novel or art film (56-78). The key takeaway is that signification involves an alignment of the discourses circulating in the text and the social location of the viewer—and it is those moments of alignment that produce the pleasures of the text (56-57). Textual pleasures became the focus of the early studies of fans and participatory culture. In his seminal text, Henry Jenkins argued that fans engage in what he describes as textual poaching to resist aspects of a favourite text that they did not find pleasurable, a practice that involves collective criticism of the production of creative works such as art, fiction, and videos (“Textual Poachers”). Other fan studies scholars, including myself, studied online communities that critically challenged and reworked normative storylines around gender and sexuality (Bury “Cyberspaces”). Fiske’s model also accounts for the flip side of the coin—displeasures and hate when alignment does not happen at all—but it is only recently that fan studies scholars have turned their attention to toxic fandom and reactionary fandom (Williams & Bennett 1036-37). For example, Jenkins references negative reaction to the casting of Michael B. Jordan in the role of Johnny Storm/Human Torch in the 2015 remake of the Fantastic Four (“Negotiating” 158). Bridget Blodgett and Anastasia Salter critically examine hateful YouTube comments for the trailer of the 2016 Ghost Busters reboot starring Leslie Jones, the only Black actor of the three leads recast as female (133–146). Jonathan Gray sums up his position on the fans who responded with vitriol about the casting of Kelly Marie Tran in the supporting role of Rose Tico in Star Wars: The Last Jedi: “they make a strong case that their Star Wars was in its best, most appropriate form when it was more clearly white and male” (131). When AMC announced in 2021 that Jacob Anderson (Game of Thrones) would play Louis du Pointe de Lac (AMC Talk) in its adaptation of Interview with the Vampire, fans could assume that the production would involve blindcasting. Bailey Bass was later cast as Claudia and finally Assam Zaman as a supposedly new character named Rashid (AMC Networks). Once the first episode aired in the US and Canada on 2 October 2022, it became clear that the series is an activist production. In her review of the scholarship, Ann McClellan argues that adaptation offers the possibility of not just transposition but transformation (24). An activist production in relation to racialised representation goes beyond blindcasting and even adding elements of colourconsciousness: it “talks back” to the original text by inserting non-White racialised points of view and foregrounding structural and/or everyday racism (25). Following McClellan, I will use the concept of racebending in relation to the series. It was first used by progressive fans to complain about “whitewashing” in the context of the White voice actors hired for The Last Airbender. According to Jenkins, it was Harry Potter fan Alanna Bennett who aligned racebending with a progressive politics, representing Hermione as Black in her creative works (“Negotiating” 151). The aim of this study is to examine not only how fannish pleasures and displeasures were aligned with reactionary and progressive politics in the context of discussion about the series on Reddit, but also how differing investments shaped the fandom that formed around the series. Although Reddit has a long association with masculine computing and gaming culture (Massanari), the platform is more heterogenous than one might assume, due to its constellation of subreddits; anyone who is a member can set up and moderate a subreddit in a way that lines up with their political orientation. Moreover, Reddit has become a site of participatory culture, succeeding older platforms such as listservs and Web-based discussion fora (Bury “Small Christmas” 44). Given the established association with progressive politics, it should be assumed that the subreddits dedicated to adaptations with more diverse stories and casts in terms of gender, sexuality, and quite possibly race, will attract such fans, not just hostile, white male fans. To conduct my analysis of fan engagement with a racebent text, I reviewed and saved a selection of comments made to the discussion hub of r/InterviewVampire, the subreddit set up for the series. The subreddit had 16,000 subscribers at the time of data collection, and has since grown to 50,000 subscribers, which is relatively small in relation to juggernauts such as Stranger Things with several million subscribers. Due to word limit constraints, I will present data samples primarily from the premiere that focus on Louis, but also from the finale in which Rashid is revealed to be another major book character, Armand. Now You See It The first episode revealed three radical changes to the novel and the film. It adds a new contemporary time period, in which a middle-aged Daniel Malloy conducts a “second” interview with Louis de Pointe du Lac in Dubai, where Louis now lives with his Muslim lover, introduced as Rashid. Instead of a White slaveowner on a plantation in the 1790s, Louis is a Black brothel owner in 1900s New Orleans when he first meets Lestat de Lioncourt (Sam Reid). The producers also queer the relationship between Louis and Lestat and include scenes of a passionate sexual relationship. The majority of comments were positive, which is broadly indicative that the portion of the Rice fanbase that came to the subreddit to share their reactions did not align themselves with reactionary politics. Much of the praise for the premiere focussed on the quality of the production and did not directly mention the racebend: Redditor01: As a big fan of Anne Rice and of the first film ada

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