The first part of this FAQ was posted here (click here) three days ago.

This post is longer than the previous one. Skim until you find a part that you want to read, then read carefully before responding.

To start this post, here are two responses that summarise the previous post. Skip down for the new FAQ, Part II.

/u/WakandaDrama wrote: The biggest point of this entire thing is this: POC (people of colour) are no longer mascots for popular consumption. There [is] a sea of talented artists and actors of color who can't get work in Hollywood because apparently, the only people who buy movie tickets are white people. It is a massive problem in the creative fields. If you complain, people insult you with the revisionist usage of "SJW" or point to the token guy in the corner. It makes POC believe that they can't get work in Hollywood. Yes, its bloody tough, but being a shade darker closes doors in your face.

It bothers me that in America, where killing and making fun of minorities for centuries was accepted and encouraged and even documented in song and film, [some] are shocked and even insulted when people complain they don't feel represented or catered to in the media they consume and/or rightly pay for.

People complained no one ever read the Iron Fist comic before they asked for a race swap. Now here we have, a Japanese comic, and [they] now want to claim "she's a cyborg, race doesn't matter," or some [nonsense] about how Asians really want to be white so it's cool.

/u/Akeno_DxD wrote: Pretty much every thing you've stated is very much spot-on. I've used many of these points with others in discussions about this movie, myself. I'm honestly surprised more people don't agree.

FAQ, Part II

/u/maiden_masher wrote:

Is the new movie's setting in Japan? Are there any confirmation of it?

Answer: There have been no reports to the contrary, as far as I've seen, read or heard.

Since the original film and anime source material took place in Japan, Director Rupert Sanders would have to confirm that the location had been changed -- otherwise, it's safe to assume that it's still Niihama City. There's no reason to believe that the film is set anywhere else.

If whitewashing is such a big problem in Hollywood, why talk about Ghost in the Shell, specifically?

Answer: The stories spliced together for the 2017 live-action GitS film were lifted directly from the source material. The rewritten backstory for Scarlett Johannson merely removes about 85% of what makes the story worth telling (the transhumanist philosophy) and replaces it with RoboCop (a murder/revenge plot).

If Sanders wanted to create an "adaptation", it would have made sense for it to be set in America or some fictional city -- not in the same place and time as the original, with the same characters (whose ethnicities have been inexplicably scrambled).

If anything, mangling the story and casting a white woman as Kusanagi makes the film's entire premise flimsy and unbelievable. That's the opposite of "bankable", and very specific to Ghost in the Shell.

why is skin color and race so important...? shouldn't we, as a society, be over that kind of stuff since decades?

Answer: The fairytale of a "post-racial society" is completely indefensible right now. Hate crime rates, for example, are skyrocketing. Further reference: 1 2 3 4 5

Culture is where people learn and reinforce their beliefs about each other, especially if you don't personally know anyone in the cultural/ethnic groups represented (or misrepresented, or erased entirely) in the mass media.

Whitewashing of 2017 Ghost in the Shell is an example of continuing trends that have been at work for decades.

So yes -- films, music, books, anime, and manga matter, and discussion about them in the context of society naturally also matters.

/u/spembex wrote:

I'm just surprised how nobody ever mentions many good asian actors that have been cast in important roles in this movie.

Answer: That's true. It still doesn't change the fact that Kusanagi's role is whitewashed -- actually, it makes it even more obvious.

Motoko has aracial shell in all incarnations of GITS as her body is most common (you could say low tier) on the worldwide market, although it hides very next gen parts inside.

Answer: There is no such thing as an "aracial" human body. This is the same as saying that anime characters have "no race", when they are obviously drawn to look white.

Most people admit that Kusanagi looks white; only a few people pretend that she has "no race", because it simply doesn't make any sense unless your agenda is to pretend that different ethnicities (not "races", incidentally) don't exist. In modern science, "races" do not exist; ethnicities definitely do.

I have strong suspicion that Rupert Sanders cast ScarJo without actually knowing all this himself - ie he basically fit the canon with her casting but by mistake as supported by the fact they changed her name unnecessarily.

Answer: He would have to be completely clueless not to know about the whitewashing controversy in Hollywood. Regardless, fans started loudly telling him that he had made a mistake as soon as ScarJo was cast. The script and casting could have been changed. Instead, Sanders chose to ignore the fans and continue as planned. He knows exactly what he's doing.

How come the outrage over casting is reserved for ScarJo?

/u/VoxelMusicMan answers:

...generally speaking, Hollywood is reluctant to hire non-white actors in leading roles. It's not inherently worse to cast white actors than to substitute or mix around characters' ethnicity. It's just that there's a desire to see more diverse leads in general.

Also, the fact that Motoko Kusanagi, who is necessarily Japanese, is played by a white actor is a more significant change than the changes in the supporting roles. Her struggles with questions about identity and humanity reflect the struggles of Japan, especially in the GITS universe. To me, at least, this is just a symptom of Hollywood's habit of dumbing down source material to try to cater to the masses. Look at how the plot seems to be about finding out who her parents are. What happened to the questions about what a ghost actually is? Where is the character who seems to redefine what is human by emerging from technology rather than biology?

Plus, I could totes see Borma being black.

As for the substitution in Asian actors, Hollywood assumes (correctly) that a huge majority of the audience won't notice or care. Remember that we are not the target audience.

Look, you can be enraged at the changes or love them or be indifferent or anything. Just try to understand why Hollywood does what it does, and why GITS fans react the way they do.

Imagine that future Japan isn't as notoriously xenophobic as it is now. What could the characters' ethnicities be?

Answer: You could make the argument that the Section 9 team is "international" based on their names.

And of course, the most obviously Japanese character of all:

Remember that, as with everything else in this meticulously crafted story (the anime and manga), the characters' names are almost certainly intentional. Even if not, there's no reason to think that someone named "Kusanagi Motoko" would be anything but Japanese.

Scarlett is only white American actor on the team.

Scarlett Johannson is also portraying a Japanese woman for no apparent reason aside from an opportunity to whitewash the role. That's the problem. All of the non-white characters are secondary players in Kusanagi's story. If anything, it makes the "diversity" of the other characters seem like an attempt at deflecting the whitewashing of the main character, who -- at least based on her name -- is from Japan.

The 2017 film has unnecessarily re-written Kusanagi's backstory so that, as far as we can tell thus far, her Japanese self is literally murdered and replaced by Scarlett Johannson. That's nothing if not extremely ironic. ;)

Re-writing Kusanagi's character is also part of the dumbing-down of the story itself; as it is now, the 2017 film more closely resembles a gender-switched Robocop reboot than a live-action Ghost in the Shell. If Sanders had cast a Japanese actress, there would have been no need to explain why a white woman is pretending to be a Japanese character named Kusanagi Motoko -- and they definitely wouldn't have needed to change her name ("Mira Killian?" Seriously?).

Also, many fans are aware that "white" characters in anime look and behave in ways that signal their non-Japanese ethnicity. Kusanagi is very much like most other Japanese characters (yes, she's a "cyborg", we know already), and not at all like the "white" ones. So both generally and specifically, in terms of both plot and character, the whitewashing of Ghost in the Shell matters and is important to discuss.