politics

I mean I would sort of agree that most of the time it doesn't really add to the story that much, or, isn't that valuable, because mostly, from what I've seen, people would much rather have their own stories with their own heroes and role models that are natively written to be their same race. I.e. people like miles morales, people care much less about the little mermaid. It's less valuable, you're kind of, partially right to decry it as being surface level, pandering stuff.

At the same time, I would say that the upside people see generally about these stories is really just that they can see and associate themselves with the role models. This is especially important for kids, who are going to be more prone to relating with things on a surface level, I think, but I think it's probably important, in general, to be able to see role models of a variety of skin tones, cultures, whatever, in your media. If I'm remembering, there are actually studies on this sort of thing, that increased diversity in media consumption can decrease racism, though, I'm not sure to what extent that's correlational. I think it was pretty directly causal in the studies I'd seen, but I could be misremembering, I don't really know shit, I'm just a dude.

I think my main disagreement with your point is that I don't really think it's taking away anything from the story to do a race swap. It's pretty much strictly neutral, to possibly good. I think this is outweighed by the quality and disadvantages of doing a stupid live-action adaptation of a previously existing work in general, though, at least as far as artistic merit goes. I straight up don't think I understand the position that, say, changing the little mermaid to be black, implies that black people are, say, better than ginger people, or something to that extent? That ginger people are nonexistent? Hear ye on this theory: Perhaps it is the case that, when adaptations of common works are remade, side characters tend to be ginger specifically because they are side characters. Gingers with obviously freckled faces tend to get slotted into side-roles because they don't conform to the classical standards of "whiteness" as much. Obviously, if I were to do a very cheap, stupid re-adaptation of that work, I'd race-swap the side characters, over the main character. This isn't really true of the little mermaid, but you can see that this logic holds for a lot of other works that people tend to complain about, when they complain about race-swapping. It's possible that it's not so much a specific decision, as a kind of, cynical marketing decision. I mean, you can even see this straight up just in the idea of re-adapting existing works, rather than creating new works that just involve black writers, or what have you.