Using buzzwords means nothing. Just say white male. We know what you mean.
And yet, if the lead of Episode 7 was transsexual or homosexual white man, I reckon we'd be having the
exact same conversation, in largely the same terms. It matters. Diversity matters, intersectional* or not, and referring to those terms as "buzzwords" when they are in fact very useful terms to describe very real phenomenon (or do you have a better term to use for someone whose gender aligns with their sex?) is just downright silly. It's like objecting to being called cisgendered because of some misguided PC crap - my only response there is "what a cissy*".
*okay,
these ones are buzzwords
The idea that a movie can't have a white male lead is ridiculous, but that's the general idea here.
Really? Who was protesting Pacific Rim, a movie with a straight white cisgendered male lead? Who was protesting Captain America, a movie with a straight white cisgendered male lead? Who was protesting Thor, a movie with a straight white cisgendered male lead*? Who was protesting Transformers, a movie with a straight white cisgendered male lead? Well, Transformers fans, because the movies were terrible and
why the heck is the movie of a franchise about giant robots who transform into cars mostly about Shia LeBoring's attempts to bone a human real doll, but you get the idea.
*Racists who objected to the character of Heimdall being played by a black guy, that's who! But not a lot of feminists.
People, by and large, aren't complaining about movies having whitebread protagonists. The complaint is that
almost all movies have whitebread protagonists. That if you think "action movie hero", the immediate default setting is a straight white cisgendered man, to the point where having movies with female protagonists feels like a novelty. I mean, let's be clear here - this
entire thread is about star wars fans who are upset that the lead in the next star wars movie is a woman again, and we've had some pretty clear-headed people, yourself included, complaining about that. Why? Why is it such a bizarre concept for an action movie to have a female lead?
So a movie is considered "forward thinking" if it has anything BUT a white male as a lead. Again, ridiculous.
It
should be ridiculous. But it's a thing, because it is
still a novelty for action movies to have female or black or gay or trans protagonists. If there weren't several dozen Thors and Jurassic Parks for every Salt or Lucy, it wouldn't be considered such a novelty when there's a female lead. But it is, so there are.
I'm just calling a spade a spade here. If this movie had a male lead, the feminists would be having a conniption fit. It's somehow bad to have a white lead now.
See, given that there are actually
quite a lot of movies with white, male leads in recent memory that "the feminists" (whatever that's supposed to mean) didn't get mad about, I'm gonna have to say you're
probably wrong. And most of the movies I
did see feminists getting mad about, they got mad about for entirely reasonable reasons, typically unrelated to the gender of the main protagonists. For example, feminists got
really mad about Pixels, but that wasn't because Adam Sandler is a straight white guy, but because at the end of the movie, they use a female character (who exists pretty much just as eye candy) as a
literal trophy for one of the protagonists. That, and because
everyone should be mad that Adam Sandler still gets paid to make the movie equivalent of advanced testicular cancer.
No, the problem is not any individual movie. The problem is the aggregate. The problem is that when a movie like "Lucy" starts with a premise, "Solo female lead in major action blockbuster", you can already say, "Wow, haven't seen that recently!", while absolutely nobody bats an eye at a white male lead. And that is a
bit of a problem.
