Nick

I don't add bananas to my smoothies. Why? Not because bananas are bad (I love bananas). They contain polyphenol oxidase, an enzyme that can break down polyphenols. And studies suggest that when you add banana to a blueberry smoothie, you may absorb fewer of the beneficial polyphenols from the berries! So instead, I use avocado. It gives the smoothie the same creamy texture with the bonus of monounsaturated fat in avocado, which can increase absorption of carotenoids like lutein and zeaxanthin from kale - nutrients important for eye and brain health. I talked about this recently on my appearance on The Mel Robbins Podcast.

It seems like the film's advertising did basically everything right. There was no "muh diversity" or "decolonizing the Odyssey" or whatever, just regular casting that prioritized talent rather than race/gender ID/etc. Didn't matter, the chuds still pissed themselves with anger

When we're viewing fiction, some suspension of disbelief is typically required in order to accept the narrative. But the demanded scope of that suspended disbelief has to compellingly fit what's being offered to us. With this particular historical fiction, the scope demanded of the audience, for many, was too wide given expectations the material itself that had been established over milenna. In this case, the audience was implicitly expected to accept that there was some massive rewrite of the geopolitical and cultural history between Africa and Europe, such that Helen of Troy could be black. The scope was too wide for many, and those audiences weren't buying it. The deviation from historical accuracy was just too orthogonal, and literally just came across as political. And once you've lost the audience on that front, don't expect them to accept the trans casting choice as anything other than political either. Just to help pump your intuitions here, would you similarly defend an historical fiction where Martin Luther King Jr was made a Japanese woman because the film producers "prioritized talent rather than race/gender"?

When we're viewing fiction, some suspension of disbelief is typically required in order to accept the narrative. But the demanded scope of that suspended disbelief has to compellingly fit what's being offered to us. With this particular historical fiction, the scope demanded of the audience, for many, was too wide given expectations the material itself that had been established over milenna. In this case, the audience was implicitly expected to accept that there was some massive rewrite of the geopolitical and cultural history between Africa and Europe, such that Helen of Troy could be black. The scope was too wide for many, and those audiences weren't buying it. The deviation from historical accuracy was just too orthogonal, and literally just came across as political. And once you've lost the audience on that front, don't expect them to accept the trans casting choice as anything other than political either. Just to help pump your intuitions here, would you similarly defend an historical fiction where Martin Luther King Jr was made a Japanese woman because the film producers "prioritized talent rather than race/gender"?