What bugs me about BBC American changing the genders of several Discworld characters for the Watch series is kind of hard to explain, but I’ll try. I promise, it’s NOT a matter of me being ‘a purist’ about an adaptation, or being ‘closed-minded’ or ‘a misogynist.’ This isn’t a case of me being a douche moaning because ‘a woman can’t be in charge of a city’ or ‘this is just SJW bullshit’ or whatever. This isn’t the same as neckbeards being pissed when Thor is a lady.
The thing is, one of the integral Things about Discworld is that Terry Pratchett took established tropes and messed with them. He took tropes from fiction and lampshaded and subverted them. And he also created characters that reflect real-life ‘tropes’ and used his stories to poke fun at, and poke holes in, social norms, traditions, stereotypes, and such.
For example: Lord Havelock Vetinari is presented as a trope character. He’s a tall, thin, aquiline man with arched, quirking eyebrows who says things like ‘commence’ and ‘do not let me detain you.’ Part of the point of Vetinari is that he appears to be the quintessential Evil Machiavellian Tyrant. And the rest of the point of him is that he’s not just that, and doesn’t conform wholly to the traits the casual reader/viewer will immediately ascribe to him based on those superficial similarities to the trope. Part of the trope is that Vetinari is an aristocratic man. A woman Vetinari simply does not fit even those superficial trope characteristics. And therefore a woman Vetinari cannot subvert OR lampshade the trope. And therefore a woman Vetinari is not Pratchett’s Vetinari.
For example: Dr Cruces, along with many, many others among Pratchett’s Ankh-Morpork-dwelling characters, is the embodiment of the Rich White Man, both in fiction and in real life. Pratchett’s white aristocratic male characters tend to fit a certain mold, and they certainly aren’t portrayed kindly. Instead, Pratchett tended to punch upward at that type of character, and therefore that type of real person, by emphasizing their flaws like racism, general closed-mindedness, sexism, classism, etcetera. Part of the trope is, actually, the maleness of it. That’s not to say that rich white women can’t be awful too, but Pratchett specifically chose to criticize men of that ‘type,’ when he created certain characters. Having a woman be Dr Cruces, or filling more of the aristocratic Ankh-Morpork roles with women, dilutes that criticism.
For example: Vetinari and Cruces are both Assassins (though only the latter is active presently), and in describing the Assassins’ Guild Pratchett was pretty clearly at least in part sending up British boarding schools and Old Boys’ Clubs of all kinds. Canonically, the Guild hasn’t until more recently admitted women at all–and Pratchett meant it to be that way, not because he as the author was being sexist, but because part of that particular trope and that particular real-life type of organization is No Girls Allowed and he wanted to critique that and make it seem laughable. Having a woman be Cruces, the head of the Guild, and having a woman be Vetinari, a well-known and prominent graduate of the Guild School, makes the Guild look much more progressive than it was intended to be. And thus, it makes the overarching storyline of Ankh-Morpork gradually becoming more progressive and inclusive over time seem more unnecessary.
Anyway, in sum, a lot of the point of the Discworld books was that Pratchett was messing with tropes. Some of those tropes include the genders of characters. So, while normally I’d be like ‘Yes! Yay more women! This is great!’ about adaptions of other media, I just don’t think this particular case makes a lot of sense, and that in some instances it actually detracts from what Pratchett was trying to say. IDK if it makes sense or if I’m saying what I am feeling in a coherent way, but anyway that’s what I think, more or less.
