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Tuesday, October 16, 2018
Mortal Engines' Gross Excuses to Change Hester's Appearance
The Mary Sue: Mortal Engines, the upcoming Peter Jackson-produced epic based on the book series by Philip Reeve, is slated to arrive on December 14, and one of the biggest controversies around it involves the film version of the character Hester Shaw.
1 comment:
Lenora G
said...
The notion that someone is unlovable if they are even the least bit different disgusts me, but I also wonder why the author didn't fight harder for his property to go to someone who was willing to respect it. If he felt this strongly about the appearance of the character, why did he sell the rights to people with such a conventional standard of beauty? His original intention is noble, and I have to guess that these men are as disgusting in person as they sound on paper, in which case it should have been easy to know that they had no place near his film. If someone doesn't look like a goddess that does not make them unlovable by a conventionally attractive man. Time and time again I have seen beautiful men with women the world doesn't consider conventionally attractive, and there's always the assumption that he must be valiant, for loving her after her weight gain or disfigurement, for loving her in spite of, not loving her as a whole. I've even caught myself in these mind sets sometimes. When I watched Sierra Burgess is a loser (which is problematic for it's own reasons) I found myself unable to believe that such a beautiful man could love her as she is. I think a part of that might have been the lack of chemistry, but most of it probably had to do with my own preconceptions that beautiful people date beautiful people. This is something we all need to work on, but the fact that they took a text that explicitly stated what she looked like and decided that it was not believable is kind of inexcusable. It doesn't matter what you look like, you deserve to be loved and to have healthy relationships, and Peter Jackson doesn't have the right to tell us differently.
1 comment:
The notion that someone is unlovable if they are even the least bit different disgusts me, but I also wonder why the author didn't fight harder for his property to go to someone who was willing to respect it. If he felt this strongly about the appearance of the character, why did he sell the rights to people with such a conventional standard of beauty? His original intention is noble, and I have to guess that these men are as disgusting in person as they sound on paper, in which case it should have been easy to know that they had no place near his film. If someone doesn't look like a goddess that does not make them unlovable by a conventionally attractive man. Time and time again I have seen beautiful men with women the world doesn't consider conventionally attractive, and there's always the assumption that he must be valiant, for loving her after her weight gain or disfigurement, for loving her in spite of, not loving her as a whole. I've even caught myself in these mind sets sometimes. When I watched Sierra Burgess is a loser (which is problematic for it's own reasons) I found myself unable to believe that such a beautiful man could love her as she is. I think a part of that might have been the lack of chemistry, but most of it probably had to do with my own preconceptions that beautiful people date beautiful people. This is something we all need to work on, but the fact that they took a text that explicitly stated what she looked like and decided that it was not believable is kind of inexcusable. It doesn't matter what you look like, you deserve to be loved and to have healthy relationships, and Peter Jackson doesn't have the right to tell us differently.
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