Velma, its backlash, and how South Asian women are represented on TV
A few recent series have notably nuanced depictions of brown teens. This is a promising development. (Those racist reactions? Not so much.)
TV Features Velma
It’s unlikely anyone had Velma marked as 2023’s first controversial TV show on their bingo card. But in retrospect, it shouldn’t be surprising that a retooled version of the Scooby Doo gang would have plenty of people up in arms (especially in The A.V. Club’s review comments and my Twitter DM’s) when the animated comedy premiered last month on HBO Max. (The first-season finale hits the service on February 9.)
Developed by Charlie Grandy, the animated prequel follows Velma Dinkley (Mindy Kaling), Daphne Blake (Constance Wu), Fred Jones (Glenn Howerton), and Norville “Shaggy” Rogers (Sam Richardson) in high school. They haven’t yet banded together to form Mystery Inc. or taken the Great Dane under their wing. But they are going through a formative time.
Velma, obviously, is the heart of the show. The series is primarily her origin story—that is, a bisexual South Asian voiced by Kaling. It’s full of pop-culture references, cornball zingers, and relationship drama that now feel synonymous with a Kaling project. This familiarity is one of the main reasons Velma was criticized early on. Well, that and the fact that Velma isn’t white. Because how dare the producers try to reimagine a cultural figure to make her more universal, right? To be clear: This is hardly the first time Velma has been essayed by an actor of color (see Gina Rodriguez in 2020’s Scoob!, and Hayley Kiyoko in two Scooby Doo! movies in 2009 and 2010).
So yes, Velma Dinkley feels similar to The Office’s Kelly Kapoor or The Mindy Project’s Mindy Lahiri. Except there’s a major difference: Kaling is not a writer on Velma (not that assessing Kaling’s work isn’t valid, like how brown women in her shows mostly end up with white men romantically). Part of the Velma backlash seems to be an aftereffect of Kaling being one of the few South Asian creators in Hollywood to go mainstream. As IndieWire’s Proma Khosla aptly stated last month, the discourse might stem from fatigue. The industry still doesn’t have enough opportunities for South Asian writers, directors, and actors to tell nuanced, original stories. And there’s no drive to promote them adequately (although Kaling has certainly helped pave the way in recent years).
Personally, Velma struck a chord with me despite its generic mystery and cheesy one-liners because it shows a messy, unsure-of-herself brown teen striving to do better. (Find me an adolescent who doesn’t turn their identity crisis into an overblown catastrophe.) And it’s especially poignant because of the disappointing and limited South Asian representation in animation, with the most widely regarded character still being The Simpsons’ Apu (Hank Azaria). It’s contemporary shows like Velma or Disney Junior’s Mira, The Royal Detective—tonally different but with central South Asian characters—that help change audiences’ perspectives and hit home for yours truly.
This type of disruptive yet heartfelt coming-of-age depiction is a throughline in some other recent TV shows as well, including the Kaling co-created Never Have I Ever on Netflix and The Sex Lives Of College Girls on HBO Max. The list includes Disney+’s Ms. Marvel and even Bridgerton. It’s rare to see multiple young brown female characters in rapid succession with distinctive, engaging stories despite intersecting themes of parental relationships and self-awareness.
Velma’s love for crime-solving stems from a desire to find her missing mother; NHIE’s Devi (Maitreyi Ramakrishnan) finds it tough to connect with her strict mom after her dad’s death; Ms. Marvel’s Kamala (Iman Vellani) navigates the discovery of her superpowers, which are rooted in her ancestry. Meanwhile, TSLOCG’s Bela (Amrit Kaur), and Bridgerton’s Kate (Simone Ashley) and her younger sibling, Edwina (Charithra Chandran), aim to live up to their families’ expectations while hoping to chart their own paths. They all falter and act selfishly in ways that negate the usual South Asian stereotypes of being a model minority, demure, nerdy, etc. Each of them demonstrates that young brown women can, in fact, be a mix of flawed, chaotic, vulnerable, and so on.
This brings me back to Kaling, one of the few big Indian American names in Hollywood. Her characters undoubtedly share a kindred comedic spirit, whether in a movie like Late Night, an IP-bound Velma Dinkley, or a six-season sitcom like The Mindy Project. If you’re a fan, you know this. It’s also clear that she draws from her personal experiences, like losing her mom to cancer, or an internet-favorite “will-they-won’t-they” with B.J. Novak. Her brand of comedy might not be for everyone, but no community is ever a monolith. Pinning all hopes for representation on one person isn’t a worthwhile endeavor. There are several other talented artists of South Asian descent helming their own ventures: Nida Manzoor (We Are Lady Parts), Manjari Makijany (Spin), Sujata Day (Definition Please), Agam Darshi (Donkeyhead), and Minhal Baig (Hala), just to name a few from recent years, although we could use plenty more.
This is all to say that there is still a lot to say. Is Velma an intentional departure from the traits we’re used to? Sure. Is the execution perfect? No. Is it a fun time? Definitely. But the glaring backlash against the show not only exposes blatant racism—hey, if you didn’t complain about Azaria voicing Apu, you shouldn’t gripe about Kaling’s take on Velma, Wu’s portrayal of Daphne, or Richardson’s version of Shaggy—but also highlights a lack of empathy and understanding about why these stories matter. We should be celebrating thoughtful representations of South Asian teens onscreen, whether it’s Velma or the characters in any other projects I’ve mentioned. Apparently, there’s a lot of catching up to do.
335 Comments
If they’re not going to have Scooby, they could at least introduce a talking Golden Agouti Gerbil character.
My brother’s wifes family is Pakistani. We’re white Italians (fight me Laguizamo I’m not fucking latino) and I’ve dated a handful of south asian women… all of those women in the header image are totally cuties (Vellani gets points beyond her years cuz shes so damn charming). I just honestly don’t understand why people get so upset by seeing them on screen?
I’ve honestly been severely disheartened by the racist backlash to Velma. Groooow the hell up.
As a fellow white Italian, someday we’ll show up in TV shows as educated, law-abiding helpful citizens. Probably about the time my uncle gets out of jail.
So you getting some valuable on the job business and HR training in the mean time?
The backlash is because the show is pure shit. It has nothing to do with race and EVERYTHING to do with it being a poorly written unfunny catastrophe.
What is the race of your brother’s wife? I need to know if I’m going to take your opinion seriously.
That’s really cool how you, a white man, gains so much authority on this topic thanks to your brothers wife. What other powers does your brothers Pakistani wife give you? Racist moron.
Perfect reply, thank you.
Guys, we should listen to him. His brother’s wife’s family is Pakistani. He’s an expert.
For some reason i like this show. The meta commmentary really brings it home. It is not Community, but it is the closet we will get
To anyone who feels the need to complain about the race-changing in Velma, just shut the hell up and go somewhere isolated. Nobody is interested in your hateful bullshit.
But can we have the opinion that its a mean-spirited awful show anyway? Is that allowed, oh guardian of internet criticism?I mean, it would have at least been a nice tribute to the original voice actor to make Shaggy Arab.
Watch it pal. This guy’s brother fucks a Pakistani. He’s an expert.
While they can speak to similar issues of representation, I’m not sure Azaria voicing Apu (and the question of whether voice actors need to match, loosely or precisely, the ethnicity or background of their characters) actually relates much to changing the backgrounds or traits of a live action character (you could be pro-one, anti-the other, and have a cohesive ideological justification.) But beyond that, Velma isn’t bad because some people are upset they changed the character’s race, it’s bad because it’s bad. Minority-created media should be allowed to be mediocre or worse and we move along the same way as with something created by a straight white guy, instead of having to write some article like this defending it when there are plenty of South Asian-featuring media on TV right now that critics and audiences agree are better! They’re mentioned in this article!
Minority-created media should be allowed to be mediocre or worse and we move along the same way as with something created by a straight white guy, instead of having to write some article like this defending it when there are plenty of South Asian-featuring media on TV right now that critics and audiences agree are better! They’re mentioned in this article!Yep. This. This shit ain’t hard to parse.“They made Velma all WOAK!” – stupid criticism not based on the actual product.“Yeah, this show just isn’t funny, because the jokes either don’t land or land too damned eagerly.” – criticism based on the actual product.
The actual product is woke though lol. I mean look I will acknowledge the term gets abused a lot, but if this isnt woke nothing is woke.
Ask yourself:
1. Am I white?
2. Is the thing I am criticizing starring or made by a not-white?
If you answered ‘yes’ to either or both, you are a racist.
– Debra Leevil.
Are you an idiot?
Perfect comment! Couldn’t agree more.
You’re right. The Apu situation is objectively problematic, while depicting a fictional character differently in a different adaptation is not.
So if The Simpsons ended now and in 10 years it gets rebooted with a white guy(or I guess yellow guy) playing Apu you’d be okay with it?
Your brain really doesn’t work well, huh?
So white men cant voice indian men but women can voice young boys?It works well enough to see your hypocrisy. Can black voice actors voice white characters or no?
This false equivalence shtick might be more effective if you weren’t so profoundly fucking stupid, kid.Adults playing kids to avoid violating child labor laws is TOTALLY the same thing as minstrelsy!So dumb.
If it’s wrong for white men to voice indian men, then clearly the same logic should be applied to any instance of black men voicing a white man.At least be consistent. Progressives always have an excuse for their lack of moral coherence.
Dude, you could have just gone to school and got a decent enough understanding of the world to realize that your profound thoughts are idiotic.
You can’t excuse your hypocrisy so you just call me dumb. Typical.
It’s not hard to be consistent kiddo. Why is it difficult for you?
I can’t believe I’m agreeing with IContainMultitudes here… what the hell are you talking about? They said nothing even remotely close to whatever strawman you’re accusing them of.
They haven’t called me dumb? Sure they have.They haven’t tried to make excuses for their double standards? Sure they have.Let me bottom line it: if it’s okay for black actors to voice white characters, then it’s okay for white actors to voice black characters. His posts clearly indicate he finds one okay but not the other. Which is where the hypocrisy comes in. He literally says a white guy voicing a black cartoon character is objectively harmful lol. It’s not, this is insanity.
-_-I’m talking about this entire thread, one in which you started this whole argument by responding to this;“You’re right. The Apu situation is objectively problematic, while depicting a fictional character differently in a different adaptation is not.”With this;“So if The Simpsons ended now and in 10 years it gets rebooted with a white guy(or I guess yellow guy) playing Apu you’d be okay with it?”Which makes zero sense and doesn’t apply to their original comment. Your comment is literally the textbook definition of a strawman argument. You then continued to make strawman arguments and whataboutisms, digging deeper into your pool of what ifs.I’m about to call you dumb too, if you can’t grasp what I’m trying to convey to you.
I highlighted his hypocrisy. This shithead is known for being a hypocrite. I was curious if he’d be consistent, he wasn’t. Crying about whataboutism is just someone whining their lack of moral coherence got called out.
Call me dumb all you want, that is your right.
Look, I’ve argued with the guy in endless threads like this too, I’m not even really here to defend him either, I just couldn’t pass up how incredibly strange/misguided your argument is. I’m not sure if you know what a strawman argument is… but nearly everything you’re saying is a textbook example of one.
If changing characters is okay if it’s a different adaptation then, if one truly believed that, a white Apu in a reboot would be okay. That was my point. I never said he believed it or didn’t believe it was okay, I asked if he’d be okay with it. From his hostile replies I’m guessing he would not, but he can of course clarify and tell me I’m wrong.
They haven’t called me dumb? Sure they have.Well, that’s only because you are—like Donald Trump, you’re an intellectual dust mite pretending to be a Very Stable Genius.
Clean your room, stop eating Doritos, take a shower, open your bedroom window already! Shave or trim everywhere and go outside already
Do better with your next response.
Your entire fucking online presence is you trying to claim that it is hypocritical to think that one objectively harmful thing is bad but another thing that is superficially similar but not remotely harmful isn’t. When presented with the reality apparent to everyone except a mentally limited troll about how very, very, very obvious and significant differences render your false equivalence nonsensical, you just pivot to a new bullshit false equivalence.I get that you lack the ability to engage in debate in any way but this one, but if that’s the case, you could maybe be a bit more selective with it and choose examples that aren’t so colossally, laughably fucking stupid.This is the Dunning-Kruger effect on steroids. You think you’re clever because you’re way too fucking stupid to understand the reasons why you aren’t. Rinse and repeat.
“Your entire fucking online presence is you trying to claim that it is
hypocritical to think that one objectively harmful thing is bad but
another thing that is superficially similar but not remotely harmful
isn’t. When presented with the reality apparent to everyone except a
mentally limited troll about how very, very, very obvious and
significant differences render your false equivalence nonsensical, you
just pivot to a new bullshit false equivalence.”But we aren’t talking about harmful things, nobody is harmed if a white person voices a black character, and vice versa.
“I get that you lack the ability to engage
in debate in any way but this one, but if that’s the case, you could
maybe be a bit more selective with it and choose examples that aren’t so
colossally, laughably fucking stupid.This
is the Dunning-Kruger effect on steroids. You think you’re clever
because you’re way too fucking stupid to understand the reasons why you
aren’t. Rinse and repeat.”You’re just butthurt your hypocrisy got pointed out.
Jesus, you are a cretin.With a single, lame trick that impresses no one.
Facts matter. A white guy voicing a black cartoon character is not objectively harmful by any stretch of the imagination.
Murdered that fucking strawman. Impressive.
It’s not a strawman, you literally called it objectively harmful.
I was talking about your entire shtick, but the harm is related to white actors playing characters that are hurtful, regressive stereotypes, not white actors playing non-white characters. Nobody complains about this when the characters are non minstrel show characters, dipshit.Again, had you gone to school, you would have learned about this kind of thing, and would be less confused by perceiving hypocrisies that don’t exist.Anytime you get this feeling, remember that it’s because your dumb as dirt.
Yet you’re saying I’m once again doing my “shtick”. Nice backtrack though.The little black girl from “Big Mouth” was not a stereotypical black girl and still folk cried she was voiced by a white woman. So nah it’s not about harmful stereotypes.Plus the fucking Indian stereotypes in Simpsons did NOT end when they recast him. A for effort though.
Oh, they recast Apu, did they? Please tell me more about this totally real thing that totally happened and totally helps your totally sincere point, son.
Hank Azaria no longer voices him, and his behavior didn’t change. He didnt suddenly stop running the convenience store, etc.Nice try tho kiddo.
“Plus the fucking Indian stereotypes in Simpsons did NOT end when they recast him.”Citation of who they recast and what problematic behavior has been observed since, please.Damn, you were so fucking sure that was a thing.
It’s cool if I was wrong about recasting him, and cuz I’m a nice guy: I’ll even let you continue to ignore how dipshits whined about a white woman voicing a black girl in Big Mouth despite it not being a stereotypical character.Oof that wasn’t the victory you thought it was, I hate that I had to take it away from you son 🙂
Given your very demonstrated tendency to just totally make shit up, I’m going to need some citations to explain how that recasting was NOT the result of the actor deciding to move on from the role.There were totally so many of these dipshits, right? SOOOOO MANY.
Difference between being mistaken and making shit up, but nice try.
I never said she got fired from the show. I said dipshits whined about it despite her not portraying a stereotypical black character. So you trying to claim it’s just about whites voicing stereotypical black characters doesn’t really ring true. She “moved on” due to the backlash, not like she got offered a bigger role and could no longer commit, it was specifically all about her race.
Heck I even remember people whining the movie Dunkirk was “too white” lol.
Yeah, and that was making shit up.“He was recast” would be being mistaken. Sharing details of what happened after he was recast is making shit up.Making shit up that did not help your argument, since you wanted that to just be about the race of the actor rather than the nature of the character. Which is what the issue was. Which is what you confirmed through MAKING SHIT UP.What backlash? Citation, please.
No, didn’t make shit up. This hill? Avoid dying on it.Google is your friend kiddo, but you are permitted to feign ignorance if it helps you. If you need to believe she quit and apologized in a vacuum? Cool.
The last thing you said was completely fabricated. So is this nonsense, until you prove otherwise.My friend Google says this was an internal decision not driven by any kind of backlash and that you’re creating super lame strawmen in a desperate attempt to create another stupid and pointless false equivalence to avenge yourself on the evil wokesters who convinced girls not to talk to you.
A quick google search of “big mouth white actress backlash” literally just popped up an article talking about her quitting after the backlash.But yeah man, she quit and apologized for no reason. Go with that.
There was backlash in the beginning, it was renewed after George Floyd was murdered, which lead to her leaving and apologizing for her white privilege.
Source: trust me, bro.
Still waiting for your source that the *real* issue progressives had was white people voicing stereotypical black roles and that they would be fine with a white person voicing a non-stereotypical black person.
The source is “digital spy”. Yet I’m betting linking you to articles discussing the backlash wouldnt be enough, you’d then want me tracking down individual whiners, etc.
So, you’re sourcing this to a single headline that uses a word for an article that doesn’t actually cite any actual backlash? Fucking awesome. You’ve conclusively proven that headlines are often written by people who didn’t engage with the article. Pretty typical shit for people who didn’t go to school.This was such a massive fucking problem that you came up with two examples, neither of which fucking happened.You’re fucking amazing.As for the source you asked for, consider starting with the movie about Apu that was the beginning of the pushback against Apu. At great length, they explain their objection. Spoiler: the race of the actor is minor, and only matters BECAUSE of the nature of the character.There are still TONS of cartoon characters of color voiced by actors of different race, but since they aren’t colossal regressive racist stereotypes, nobody cares.
The article mentions backlash against her too, it’s not just in the headline lol.
You made a claim, I noted the Big Mouth example as something that refuted the logic you were putting forth.I’m sure tons of unpopular cartoons *do* have lots of instances of a person of color voicing someone white or vice versa, but I’d be surprised if any of the really popular current cartoons have any white people voicing black characters.
This should hardly be shocking, just look at race swapping characters. I would wager a lot of people here would find it more acceptable to change a white character black than vice versa, stereotypes or not.Not to mention pretty much everyone on The Simpsons is a stereotype.
Nope.How many deliberate lies does it take until one incel realizes he’s full of shit?Uneducated, socially isolated, racist troll is PRETTY FUCKING SURE he can predict human behavior, you guys.
One of the digital spy articles about it literally says it “has come in for criticism”, but okay split hairs if you want.
Feel free to prove me wrong: is it just as acceptable to make an established black character white as it is to make an established white character black?
Citation please.Dude, consider just not imagining other people thinking things that make you mad and focusing on things that are real.
https://www.digitalspy.com/tv/ustv/a32964910/big-mouth-netflix-missy-jenny-slate-recast/
“In light of the Black Lives Matter movement, actress Jenny Slate’s
portrayal of the biracial teenager in the animated Netflix show has come
in for criticism, and she has now decided to step away from the role.”You can pivot to “the word backlash isn’t in the headline or article!” if you need to do so man.Well I wouldn’t need to imagine if you’d just give a clear answer. Yes or no are both equally acceptable?
So, you’re saying there was no backlash then, right? Because the thing you quoted does not in any way suggest that there was any backlash whatsoever to Slate having that role, ever.I know that the white people who didn’t go to college crowd believe that Googling a phrase and getting a hit constitutes a source, but one thing you would have learned in school is that it’s kind of important that that source actually makes the claim that you are using it as a source for.In this case, that shit did not happen. Global trends creating the possibility that something might be criticized and a massive wave of ACTUAL CRITICISM are not the same thing, meathead. Again, if you weren’t so fucking stupid, you wouldn’t keep faceplanting. But you are so, so, so fucking determined to create equivalences between REAL THINGS THAT ACTUALLY HAPPEN and things that you are able to imagine COULD happen if the people on the other side acted the same way you people do (because you’re pretty sure that people that you don’t interact with have the same kinds of biases and insecurities that you have).That’s pretty dumb, kid.
Literally says there was criticism, which yep is a form of backlash in this context given the critique isn’t about her performance but solely based on skin color. You are of course free to disagreeAnd there we go…can’t even give a yes or no answer because you know it would expose your hypocrisy.Nice racism there too, perfection.
“Has come in for criticism” = “could be criticized”You said there was a massive backlash. So far, your friend Google has only indicated that one blogger imagined that there could conceivably, some day, be at least one person who criticized it.Please refer back to the part where I said your absolute stupidity was making your life harder.
No that’s not what that equals lol, your attempt at spin is getting pathetic. Still waiting on a yes or no answer to my question. Are you too stupid to answer?
Again, you will probably walk away from this exchange sure you won, because you are literally too fucking stupid to understand how fucking stupid you are.So stupid that this isn’t even funny anymore. It’s sad.Have a great life being outraged because you can shut your eyes tight and imagine someone doing something that outrages you!
Im quite sure you didn’t win, and it seems to have made you angry. Still props: you performed some Olympic level mental gymnastics today. And still managed to fail to answer a simple question. And the cherry on top is you accusing me of being outraged even as you seethe in impotent rage. Good stuff.
Okay, sweetie.
You know playing some Hogwarts Legacy would probably make you feel better. Great game, getting good reviews as well.
It took you until reply 375 of getting whipped on a completely different topic that you are human waste on to eek out “hog warts legasee good lol”? Christ you’re worthless.
I noted his hypocrisy, nobody got whipped son.Yeah it’s a great game maybe if they played they would calm down instead of seething with rage because they’re a hypocritical piece of shit.
Yes, people with nothing to say about anything go on about vaguely-defined hypocrisy a lot, and somehow they always think they’re the uniquest snowflake in doing so, c h a m p .
Nothing vague about it, but your opinion has been noted 🙂
I mean…this entire conversation has clearly been a 40 year old using ChatGPT to argue against itself.Why are you spending any emotional energy on this, haha?
Do you not understand what an accent is?
Duh it’s a type of Hyundai
Hey now – you guys are kindred spirits!I’m just glad you white, bourgeois, involuntarily celibate teenagers are screaming at each other here rather than threatening to rape women to death on Twitter!!!
“The little black girl from “Big Mouth” was not a stereotypical black girl and still folk cried she was voiced by a white woman.”Go back and read what happened, because what you said is NOT what happened.
Maybe you’re a straw man, man! Ever think about that?No worries, gang! I think I finally came up with something that will silence even chest!
I have dreams where I’m made of straw and a horse eats me. It’s intense.
I shall not be silenced. Of course people could just not respond to me and keep this as their echo chamber. I mean it mostly still is anyways.
Your organic body pr4ivilege is showing
yikes.
Maybe that would hold water if there were more Persons of Color pretending to be White and not utterly the other way around. As it is, you sound like Charlie Kirk or Jordan Peterson, which means everything out of your mouth is intellectually dishonest and argued in bad faith.
If you wanna bring up labor laws, explain child actors.
What part of “child actors” do you not understand?
As long as that’s all they do to them.
Please stop letting this racist dumbwit out of the greys.
Sorry; won’t happen again.
I was talking about me. Get ready for an endless stream of strawman arguments that are surprisingly incoherent. I AM FREE!
Ookla was awesome.
Still waiting on proof of the whole racism thing, but if you’re too afraid to respond I accept your surrender.
Where is the racism son? Calling out some worthless assholes hypocrisy is racist?
If not for the overtly racist greys IContainMultitudes wouldn’t have anyone here to intellectually best on occasion.
There’s a reason he doesn’t reply to anyone else!
But chest Rockwell’s arguments are ironclad! I dare you to find an instance where they have lost. And if you don’t respond, I will win by default. These are the rules of the greys.
Yeah! How comes some bigoted pseudointellectual halfwit like chest Rockwell gets brought out of the greys, and I’ve been condemned in here like Marley’s ghost for years now…?
How can you reboot Scooby Doo without Scooby Doo??? Nobody cares about Velma or really any of the other humans except for Shaggy. It’s like the He-man reboot that didn’t feature He-man… You want to tell stories about minority women, do it in an original story. Don’t try to bait and switch your shitty reboots on us… /puke
He-Man features heavily in that reboot…
Since Scooby Doo is nowhere in the title, I don’t know why people expect to see Scooby Doo.
I have always — always — hated that fucking stupid dog and his obnoxious voice. Dropping the dog is the only good choice Velma made!
and we move along the same way as with something created by a straight white guyLike maybe something co-created and written by this guy?
Protecting another mediocre white man behind the shield of representation. The show is shit. This ideology over art approach has tainted The AV Club’s criticism.
When it comes to Apu I thought it was silly. Why didn’t the voice actress who voices Bart resign so they could hire a 10 yr. old boy to voice him?
Also…this isn’t even “minority-created media,” haha – the showrunner is a straight white guy!
It feels like pieces like this are the result of the author processing, very publicly, the fact that a show she felt it was very important to defend didn’t turn out to be very good.
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I have been waiting for the AVclub to release an article defending its worst review in years.
a retooled version of the Scooby Doo gang would have plenty of people up in armsOne reason being that it’s terrible.
I guess a lot of people like to pretend this is raping your childhood or whatever but I have to just clarify something here: everyone knows your lying shut up and accept that your racist / bothered by seeing people that aren’t white on screen. Everyone knows that’s what this argument is a cover for so just shut the hell up and go waste some air not near me, thanks.
I’m not white and the show is fucking garbage. Fight me.
Lol. Every movie/show/book/album created by a non-white person isn’t good by default. What a dumb idea.
I guess it makes it easier to walk through life assuming everyone who disagrees with you is just a garbage human being. Just don’t expect everyone else to play along.
What part of Italy do you live in ? and also your English is very good.
*You’re not a very intelligent person.
I’m also South-East Asian by descent and also want to fight Cosmic Ghost Rider for at different times being a lackey of both Thanos and Galactus.
Have you watched the show?Because you’ve posted a whole bunch (through multiple unrelated posts, as usual) about how everyone who has any complaints must be white and racist but like, you haven’t said a single thing about the show itself.There have been some amazing shows recently featuring or centered on South Asian characters, including one race-swapped classic character with Ms. Marvel and multiple with involvement from Mindy Kaling herself.Velma sucks. I wanted it to be good, I wanted it to pull through, I’ve watched all eight episodes so far (Fog Festival being the best of the bunch), but it sucks. It would suck if it were all-white, it would suck if it were unrelated to Scooby Doo, it would suck if all the characters were straight.Oh, fun fact! Velma was created by a white guy, has one (1) non-white person on its seven-person writing team, and zero (0) non-white directors (out of four). So maybe when people say the whole thing feels completely disingenuous whenever it tries to address minority issues there’s a reason for it.You want a good show focused on South Asian people? Go watch Never Have I Ever. It even has a lot of the same creative team as Velma, but it’s infinitely better.
As a black person who liked scooby doo and still watches cartoons this show is super heated garbage. The story is garbage, the jokes are garbage, the emotional whiplash the bad writing inflicts is garbage. And all the characters are cruel assholes who I am supposed to root for but, then we spend half the show making fun of the white guy with a serious medical condition, but it’s supposed to be funny because white guy. This isn’t like some crime show that always had rich white guys as the villain, rich is not a medical condition, and the joke about comedians not being funny anymore after Me Too, wtf was that. And I love gender switching, race switching whatever switching, like the idea in Hades that the Greeks are white, but the Greek gods are everyone’s God’s and thus multiracial really stuck with me as cool. Velma is bad.
Is “everyone” in the room with you now?
What young man wouldn’t want to go by “Norville”?
Most of the criticism I’ve seen of Velma has run along the lines of it being smug, mean-spirited, and not nearly as smart as it thinks…with the related criticism that the Scooby Doo connection only exists because the show wasn’t good enough to be made on its own merits.“But Velma’s can’t be BROWN!!!” hasn’t factored into it.
“But Velma’s can’t be BROWN!!!” hasn’t factored into it. Yep. What little of that I’ve seen has been on the part of the gravy-chugging dipshit brigade, which…yeah, that was always gonna happen to an extent. It’s just…not great, apparently. I couldn’t get more than 15 mins in.
Yep – the most vociferous criticism I’ve seen has been from people like Scooby Doo and/or animation in general, saying “this just isn’t good.”
Question: What kind of gravy?
Her ethnicity is the focus of lots of criticism, and pretending that it isn’t a factor in why people even give enough of a shit to weigh in on the quality of the ten-millionth Scooby-Doo iteration feels insincere. People tend to spend a hell of a lot more time complaining about pointless but harmless adaptations of things when there has been some kind of diversity-based change, even when they focus on other complaints.
This one’s also getting way more attention because it got an unusually large marketing push for a new Scooby Doo project and it’s the first one aimed explicitly at adults. Even without the racism, people who don’t normally care are reacting because people who don’t normally care are the ones this is aimed at.
Tangentially related video:
Oh, “That I’ve seen” is a very important qualification!The assortment of unanimously left wing, largely queer and/or POC creatives I follow on Twitter have been saying “Oh, so this is Mystery Incorporated, except written by a straight, white, male, faux-woke hack who hates Scooby Doo, but isn’t a talented enough writer to get this made as an original property.”I’m sure other quarters of the internet have very different lines of criticism.
I think this is the most accurate take. The reasonable corners of the internet are saying “this isn’t good but it’s not terrible enough for me to get upset about it.”It isn’t worth watching but it’s not bad enough to inspire the volume of reviews it’s getting. I feel like it would be largely ignored if the characters were white and straight.
I actually feel like it would be mocked far more aggressively if everyone were white and straight!Like it’s a textbook example of shitty premise that only got a greenlight by attaching itself to a beloved IP.
Maybe, but this reminds me of when Elizabeth Rohm was written off Law and Order. “Is it because I’m a lesbian?” Came out of absolutely nowhere and had nothing to do with her character as anyone knew her. Everyone who’s watched Scooby Doo knows Velma, and deciding that her status as a bisexual south Asian somehow was formative to the character after 50 years is even more out of left field. It comes off like something that would be floated after bong rips in a dorm room. I don’t think people are mad, just asking “why??”
Velma and Marci forever, dammit!
Maybe what? You’re questioning whether the character’s ethnicity played a role in the criticism while criticizing the character’s ethnicity?People are asking “why?” I mean, when taking a thinly defined secondary character and centering her in the narrative, adding additional character detail seems pretty critical. And inasmuch as the original white creators centered themselves by making all the characters white (as in most white-created media), Kaling centered herself by making the character reflect herself more. Pretty typical stuff, and pretty easy to understand.None of this makes a show good, of course. But you illustrated my point that even the people who are strictly making content quality complaints are largely doing so because of the identity details.
“Maybe” was referencing “People tend to spend a hell of a lot more time complaining about pointless but harmless adaptations of things when there has been some kind of diversity-based change”Because yes, maybe that’s the motivation of some. It’s also a lazy excuse for poor response to a show, and convenient because you’re asserting an unproveable thesis (thus asking others to prove a negative). Because in this case it’s a retconning of a character people have known for 50 years with no indication whatsoever that her behavior, motivations or outlook are based in being a bixesual south Asian. This comes off as a poorly executed edgy reinterpretation of a known character in a show that viewers find deliberately 0ffputting.
Do you have this little self awareness?
Said the ChatBot to the human.
Tfw you’re so locked into an incel echo chamber that anyone who doesn’t share fringe racist nerd views seems inhuman.
Pot, meet Kettle.
I don’t see anything inherently wrong with reimagining the Scooby gang like they did in the show and making Velma bisexual and South Asian. No one is saying this is the definitive Velma and that in all the series, “her behavior, motivations or outlook are based in being a bixesual south Asian.” The premise for this show is more, “what if Velma was a Mindy Kaling type with a tortured backstory and also in a love triangle with Daphne and Fred.” So not retconning, just a different interpretation of the character. If that tweak enabled them to explore the character in new ways or tell interesting stories, that’s reason enough. The problem is that it doesn’t seem to have accomplished that. I watched one episode and found the comedic tone kind of weird/off-putting. “Poorly executed edgy reinterpretation” is accurate, but not because they made Velma bi and brown. I am confused why you seem to be saying that it’s a lazy excuse to say the show is getting extra criticism because of the diversity change, yet your main criticism of the show is that this Velma is bisexual and South Asian, as if that contradicts the heart of the character somehow. Unless you’re one of those folks who think the true Velma only likes women…
the people who are strictly making content quality complaints are largely doing so because of the identity details
And you’re basing this on…?People are talking about this iteration of the show more than previous ones because it’s a widely-marketed series from HBO aimed at adults rather than a direct-to-DVD movie aimed at children.Is there a racist backlash? Yep! Happens with every minority-lead show regardless of quality. But it’s also a show made by industry veterans for a wide audience and is perfectly capable of being evaluated as such. It’s pretty infantilizing to act as though anything starring Mindy Kaling is beyond critique due to her race when she has run, written, produced and acted in plenty of hits in the past. This one’s a flop on its own merits, but Mindy has another great show on TV right now.And hell, I wanted this to be good. A queer-skewed adult-oriented mystery-comedy cartoon is exactly my speed, and I see no problems in making the gang less lily-white. But goddamn is the final result rough.
Only focusing on the bad faith criticism of a small but vocal group while ignoring the overwhelming of good faith fair criticism is the go-to method of defending a show these days, rings of power paved the way for velma
LOL right. “good faith fair criticism”
Oh God…now it’s pretending that Rings of Power isn’t both terrible and offensive!The shoddy AI writing your opinions clearly didn’t include any Irish inputs!Best case scenario: Programmer is the same guy who opined about U2’s Grammy wins showing how much they love English artists.
Deciding that everyone else in the world is an NPC is a huge red flag for psychosis.Right there with being unable to enjoy genre fare because of the existence of people of color.Best of luck with all of that.
Oh, I’m both you and that Rockwell guy are sock puppet accounts, with the same person plugging prompts into ChatGPT along the lines of:“Respond to this article like a neckbearded 30-something, fedora enthusiast who harasses women online for not liking Bernie Sanders”and“Respond to this article like a neckbearded 30-something, fedora enthusiast who harasses women online for not liking Jordan Peterson.”Now, he’s making you fight!Cracks are showing, though – Arondir was the only watchable part of that feckless, interminable show, which failed over 10 hours to justify its existence.That’s why I specifically cited those deeply offensive Harfoot accents, which caricature the original survivors of English colonial oppression.
Imagine being this dude and thinking other people are stereotypes.
Jinkies! The software clearly didn’t pass muster against a response mocking its callow inability to engage with opinions like “Arondir is dope, but the rest of the show is a disgusting exercise in valorizing English racism and imperialism.”(I’m team “The ‘Velma’ show is a disgusting, insulting, disgrace…because no Velma in any universe would ever have any interest in fucking Fred, even if Marci were gunned down by Nazi robots)Guessing this is the programmer, with a feckless attempt at damage control?
This 10000%.
“Her ethnicity is the focus of lots of criticism”No it isn’t.
This thread suggests otherwise.
Nope.
dude just listen to the isolated audio of the show is you need to in order to be understand the criticism: the writing on this show is bad, obnoxious, cringe, shite. it just is. it’s ridiculous we’re pretending otherwise
It’s what I call “The Last Jedi Syndrome”. Most of the people who hated the movie didn’t hate it because Rey was female. Folk tried to prop up the rare sexist criticism to try to paint the majority of critics as operating in bad faith.
I’d say there was a much larger volume (if not ratio) of hateful crap directed at TLJ than Velma, if only because it had a far larger cultural presence.Which is awful, because TLJ’s treatment of its female characters is one of the many reasons it fucking sucks.
Yeah I’d agree with that, but people still used a loud but vocal minority to paint all the negative reviews as sexist.
For sure – and it’s not actually different from JK Rowling, et al using the subset of psycho incels who picked the “progressive” side and send her daily rape and death threats to discredit anyone who calls her a hateful asshole.
Agreed, folk like AOC use the death threat thing too.
And all the people sending those death threats are fucking pricks who should be shamed and IP-banned from whatever medium they’re using to send those threats.
Yes I’m not sure why people think death threats are gonna win people over. Has anyone ever been like “You know I wasn’t going to change my mind until you threatened to rape me to death, now I’m sold”.
A lot of the jokes they shared in the trailer were jokes other Scooby-Doo reboots from 10-20 years ago did better.
Mystery Incorporated has a gay, sarcastic Velma AND a Fred with such a warped conception of masculinity that he views his feelings for Daphne as “Not Manly,” haha!(Also, Traps and Ascots!)
Fred is trapsexual!
Im sure there are a contingent of people that take issues with the diversity angle of Velma, but frankly the show is terribly written and frankly off putting in ways that have nothing to do with the cast’s diversity. If anything the cast’s diversity is a GREAT idea, it’s just wasted on this abjectly terrible show.
It’s unfocused, crude for no reason, the jokes are flat, the characters unlikable. When they make jokes about diversity it gets weirdly self-defeating, as-if this show was written by an alt-right site as a parody of liberal entertainment. It’s a cringe fest.
I haven’t seen it, but based on that description it also ignores that Velma is the sweetheart of the Mystery Machine bunch.
It’s frankly shocking how unlikeable they make Velma. Even beyond that, multiple other characters in the show point out how “ugly” and annoying etc Velma “is.” It’s kind of wild. And ignore that Velma is like, the go-to “hot” cosplay for anything scooby
Yeah, they seem think that the concept of children’s characters telling dirty jokes is so inherently funny that they didn’t actually have to come up with funny jokes, haha!
Except it should. Velma’s whiteness is inherent to her character as whiteness is inherent to all white people, fictional or not. Whether white people like to admit it or not, whiteness is absolutely a thing.
Honestly , 90% of the criticism I’ve seen (and this includes animated streaming sites where people are there can be assholes), has been that it seems to be a totally different show that was showhorned into a scooby doo IP ( also a lot of it compared it pretty unfavourably to Mystery Inc , which was still a kids show , but had a fairly adult story arc.) .There was also the usual “go woke go broke “chuds but they were in a minority .
Hell, I’d say Mystery Incorporated was light years ahead in terms of emotional maturity.
I appreciate that you haven’t seen it, but the race-swapping is brought up all over the place. I agree it is smug, mean-spirited, shockingly dated, and not very smart or funny.
And I appreciate that you read the first sentence, haha!I had to explain the “I’ve seen” qualification below – I do my best to stay in an internet bubble free from people whose reaction to the race swapping was anything other than “Hm. Interesting idea!”, haha!
Yah well I’m always gonna give you benefit of the doubt cos of your freaks &, geeks username 🙂
Glad you don’t just view my name as a placeholder😜
The best review of it I read was “It was written by the sort of TV writer who only wants to impress other TV writers”.
I think the problem with Velma was just that it’s not actually good.
So then it’s continuing in the proud tradition of Scooby-Doo. What’s the problem.
THANK YOU. Never got the appeal, even as a little kid. Whenever it was on, I would just be wishing it were Merrie Melodies or Underdog.
I do agree that the show was never…awesome. I preferred Wacky Races.
It appealed to me at age 5, but not much beyond.
I like the character designs, iconic shit like the Mystery Machine, the dope theme-song. Top-notch voice acting in the original series. It’s also the same thing every episode, and yea, “cartoons,” but it’s shockingly repetitive. And that’s the OG. Almost all ancillary or later versions are absolutely terrible. Mystery, Incorporated is the exception that proves the rule.
I never got Scooby as a kid but both my kids love it and I’ve learned to appreciate a lot of it. The animated direct movies are all over the place quality wise but even some of those have some gems or just cool shit. Like this
It is a kid’s show. Ppl seem to forget that. 😉
And I thought I was the only one…Not to dunk on things that other people like, but I was genuinely shocked to realise ‘Scooby Doo’ was treasured by some people. I honestly thought for many years it was a justly forgotten relic.
It’s mainly because of the 10 year old show that gave us a gay, sarcastic Velma, who was in love with Lindsay Weir, starring in a violent, deeply serialized action cartoon.Amy Acker as an extradimensional being talking to Scooby Doo in The Black Lodge is a hell of a lot more appealing to adults than this Brickleberry nonsense.
…and now I have the Underdog theme song going through my head… When criminals in this world appear,
And break the laws that they should fear,
And frighten all who see or hear,
The cry goes up both far and near for
Underdog,
Underdog,
Underdog,
Underdog.
Hard to argue with that.
This.People are suddenly pretending that Scooby-Doo hasn’t always been pretty bad. They did a smart New Coke thing with Scrappy-Doo in that those episodes are so terrible that the others look decent by comparison, but there has never been an iteration of Scooby-Doo that is worth watching if there is anything else on TV (which, in my childhood, there wasn’t, but times have changed).
scooby doo mystery incorporated is definitely great and worth watching. be cool scooby doo is also pretty fun.
PUPPY POWER!
I agree it was never all that great, but it stopped short of being cringe, which Velma is very cringe.
Mystery, Incorporated (2010) is a treat.
I’ll take your word for it, but I can’t imagine that I’d feel the same.How about a correction: “the various adaptations of Scooby-Doo have overwhelmingly been awful…”
Glad we’ve crystallized your take, “ChatGPT for how to make liberals look like idiotic, thin-skinned, ignorant jackasses.”It boils down to:“I hate everything about a property of which I have zero familiarity, so I’ll defend to the death a shitty copy pasta from a straight, edgelord, white guy as a Stunning and Brave statement of Queer Defiance.”
It did give us this though:
Scooby Doo has always been bad (with the exception of Mystery Incorporated).Scooby Doo has not, until now, featured lines like “I spit the truth like every comedian before hashtag MeToo” and “he looks like Hitler, and I’m not just saying that because we compare everyone to Hitler these days”The show’s dialog frequently plays like a series of awful Bill Maher bon mots, which is infinitely more obnoxious than Scrappy Doo having an annoying voice or whatever.
Everyone always praises Mystery Inc but I always bounce off it because… I don’t like Scooby Doo! I find the dog annoying! I find dim-witted Shaggy annoying! They are not characters around which I desire to spend any time, and MI being the ‘good’ one can’t escape the crushing weight of its central character being a tiresome dullard.
Here’s the thing though:As a child, I watched Scooby Doo and enjoyed it, because bright colours go funny fall down noises.Would I watch it as an adult? No, it’s crap you can put on to keep a child quiet for a few minutes (and that probably would even work these days), it’s not aimed at adults, at all.As an adult, would I be interested in a show, made for adults who watched something as a child and enjoyed it? Sure, that sounds fun, I have fond memories of watching these characters that are so famous nearly every generation since they were created knows them.As an adult, would I expect a show to be good? Yes, otherwise, why would I watch it?
As a child I watched it to either kill time while eating my breakfast before walking to school or on Saturday mornings because it was either that or Superfriends or whatever. In the late 70s/early 80s ALL kids cartoons were shitty (except for Bugs Bunny) so you didn’t really have much of a choice. Scooby Doo was familiar and not as dull as Tarzan or weirdly creepy as Sid and Marty Krofft’s bullshit.
((Except for Mystery Incorporated.))
I think it’s a clear cut example of why not every children’s cartoon needs an “adult reimagining”. I grew up with Scooby but after a certain age I stopped watching it because it didn’t appeal to me anymore, and that’s ok. It’s ok to outgrow something.
There’s a reason it’s a big
I think Mystery Incorporated and A Pup Named Scooby Doo were good cartoons.
It’s definitely a show you age out of by around age 6.
Being a fan or not of the original Scooby Doo has no bearing on the quality of Velma, which is just indefensibly dreadful entirely on it’s own.
There were cartoons I just never got into as a child, and Scooby-Doo was one of them. I’ve never cared about this IP, but I still empathize with fans because I’ve been there. Just not with this. So with the Velma situation, it is just something to grab the popcorn and watch.
SHUT YOUR MOUTH!!!
The show made to entertain Boomer children as cheaply as possible so that they could then be shown commercials for sugar cereal wasn’t very good. Its status as a cultural icon is fueled entirely by nostalgia and repetition.I know this is unpopular, and I’m brave for saying it.
100% this. I loved the original Scooby and also Mystery inc show (a top 10 ever cartoon to me).
Never let the truth get in the way of generating clicks.
Two things can be true:1. Representation is good, as it acclimates people to the idea that they don’t have to flip the fuck out when characters don’t look like them (or them-adjacent).2. The world wasn’t screaming for a mediocre version of Daria, regardless of gender or race.A further two things can be true:1. I can believe that representation is good.2. I can also believe that the product should be evaluated on its merits. And I wasn’t a fan of what little I saw (wasn’t compelled to consume more).
I’ll second all the other comments that it’s not the “wokeness” of the show that’s the problem, it’s that it’s just a bad show with annoying characters. Everyone on the show is selfish and annoying with the possible exception of Daphne. For some reason, though, I can’t stop watching.
Fuck Mindy Kaling. She’s a dogshit person with scummy views. If she were a white woman, or man, her career would have nosedived instantly after making one problematic comment after another… or when she jokingly bragged about sexually assaulting a male costar.Also, propping her (or the awful show) up, when both are irredeemably bad for a multitude of reasons… makes you look like a moron.
Right? I feel like I’m losing my mind hereI always think she’s super funny in most interviews, but if you watch Anything she’s ever made (or read her books), it’s a Lot of super gendered garbage stuff…it just happens to come from a brown woman who – I guess – had to really fight to have her shitty standard patriarchal opinions voiced
I watched only one and a half episodes of Velma; changing the races of certain characters is not an issue at all, really. It’s the material given that’s the problem.
I love Mindy Kaling, but not enough to watch a Scooby Doo related project. But everything I’m hearing, even on “woke” sites is that it is just bad, unfunny, and a little mean. That’s fine, Mindy has hit a lot of home runs, she was due for a strikeout.
She sexually assaulted someone on set, but she’ll get away with it without any real attempt at cancellation.
The problem with Velma is that it sucks. It severely miscalculates the mean jokes to genuine emotion ratio, making everyone so intensely awful to each other than the moments of attempted sincerity feel empty and manipulative (Always Sunny has the good sense to not ask us to care about their plight). And the jokes are just… bad. Almost all of them have far too much wind-up for the eventual punchline, and the sheer number of “it’s just like TV” jokes are staggering.Representation is great! Velma being bisexual and South Asian is a totally valid approach to her character! But this is some Allen Gregory / Sit Down, Shut Up / Brickleberry level garbage, held up by some occasionally great animation and a joke here or there that actually works. It might be possible to re-tool and find a better balance in the second season (Parks & Rec and The Office both managed), but this first season has serious problems.
Never Have I Ever is fantastic. Ms. Marvel wasn’t my speed but it was clearly hitting the tone it wanted. It’s okay for Velma to faceplant.
…woah , leave Sit Down, Shut Up* alone , it was (at its time ) as close as we’d get to an arrested development reunion ,and it was silly but fun .*(also I heard good things about the aussie live action original version )
RIP Mr. Stern
I told you not to be stupid, you moron!(rest in power, king)
How do you feel about President Kennedy asking Congress to support more democratic programs?
Proper modulation
Testing, testing…ONE, TWO…!
And Brickleberry. I don’t wanna hear any bad talking’ about Brickleberry.
Out of curiosity, how many did you watch? I think it’s gotten much better with the jokes and the cynicism.
I’ve seen all eight episodes available so far, mostly because I find its choices weirdly compelling, even if the actual content is mostly repulsive or just flat. While none of them are quite as awful as the first episode overall, Velma’s still an absolute self-obsessed nightmare to both Daphne and Norville, Norville is every nice-guy stereotype rolled into one with every single positive attribute tied at some point to his obsession, and Daphne… is okay, for the most part, and the one character who mostly works.Fred is just weird. Not in a way that works right now, but in a way I could see working with a bit more focus. He feels like he escaped from Drawn Together.
The other aspect of the show that really doesn’t work for me is how everyone is now head-over-heels into Velma, even as she manipulates and abuses them constantly and the show makes utterly clear that she’s also gross as hell (not in a self-conscious teenager way or in a shitty racist way, in a “she literally eats out of the garbage” way the show really leans into). It absolutely doesn’t work, which is why two of those crushes had to start before the series began and the third one had to be joked into existence, yet a huge amount of the show’s plot and emotional beats all center around it.
But you admit – it’s compelling! I think that’s worth noting amid all the noise that it’s the worst thing in the world.I think Howerton is great as Fred, and the arc where he reads “The Feminine Mystique” is hilarious.
“Compelling” isn’t always positive, and that’s definitely the case here for me. Foodfight is a compelling movie, but it’s because the choices it makes are so utterly bizarre that it’s hard to look away.Velma’s mostly fascinating due to the extreme disconnect between the talent on display on the art side of things, the note-perfect performances (Howerton is fantastic, but honestly everyone is – I think Velma’s a terrible character, but Kaling’s performance absolutely can’t be blamed for it), and the atrocious writing that undermines everyone’s hard work so thoroughly that it feels like there’s mole trying to take down the production from within.I do think there’s something here, but the writers are going to have to do a major overhaul to make it work.
I was watching it and quoting to a discord server, just shocked at how bad the dialogue actually was.
Ms. Marvel’s issue was that all the best parts of Ms Marvel involved zero superheroics. (And watching her painfully boring Tech Friend pine for her when she showed no interest in him in any shape or form but the narrative seemed to expect me to feel for his plight landed with a thud. Fuck off, kid. She ain’t into you, move on.)
Seems like a lot of the hate this show is getting was brought on by the choice to make an animated show w/ an adult audience as its target that hates its expected audience. Its also not helped by character assassinating choices like making Fred an incel.
Saloni, it’s a talking dog show that thinks its too cool to have a talking dog.
Ok but Never Have I Ever and Ms. Marvel are good, and Velma was bad
Ms Marvel was a joy to watch, and as someone from England, I really, really appreciated the amount of time they put into the horror of Partition.
Yeah I wasn’t really digging it until it got to those Partition episodes and wow were those powerful.
I’ll be honest and say I didn’t get that far. I recognized that it was good and well made, but not for me. It was too teen for me. Maybe I’ll go check out those scenes.Contrast with Velma, which was just bad.
Honestly, if someone could just make a Mystery Incorporated edit where Velma is noticeably darker, you’d already have a basically perfected version of this – you want meaner, bisexual Velma? That show had meaner bisexual Velma.
And really, who cares about who Velma likes to bang and why would you want her to be meaner, anyhow? That’s not entertaining, that’s just changing things for the sake of changing things.I just think it’s really weird that people spend so much time thinking about who a character from a kids cartoon show wants to bang. There have got to be millions of better ways to spend your time, damn!
I can’t believe I have to tell you this in the year of our lord 2023, but sexuality is a more complicated experiential spectrum than “who you like to bang.” And framing it as such feeds into the conservative talking point that all queer identity is inherently sexual and thus should be excluded from all media aimed at younger people.
Velma developing a romantic interest in a female character is relevant to the story because that character is relevant to the story. When that character (spoiler) gets gunned down by subterranean nazi robots in order to buy time for the Scooby gang to stop Cthulhu, Velma’s emotional and romantic connection to her enhances the emotion of the moment.
Man, what a weird show.
“I can’t believe I have to tell you this in the year of our lord 2023,
but sexuality is a more complicated experiential spectrum than “who you
like to bang.”I mean, you don’t have to. And, honestly it’s not though, it’s really about who you want to bang and who you don’t want to bang. Dress it up in “romantic interest” all you want but that’s what it is. And it’s fucking weird to think about it so deeply in the context of a children’s show.
Christ, the homophobia.
Go ahead and quote the part where I say anything negative about homosexuals.
You just told a queer person directly that my identity as a queer person can be boiled down to who I want to bang – after I said straight-out that it is way, way more complicated than that. I mean, setting aside the fifty years of queer academic theory that you’ve clearly never even sniffed, it’s a wild kind of arrogance to be like “I know what your lived experiences are better than you, and I’m certain they’re not relevant to storytelling.”
The definition of homosexuality is almost entirely based upon wanting to bang or at least date someone of the same sex that you are. ‘Queer’ is entirely different and isn’t really part of what I’m discussing. Velma is specifically defined as ‘bisexual’ in this show, and that is entirely based on who you want to bang. Sorry if that’s offensive to you as a queer person but it’s factually correct.And no, your identity as a person is never based on who you do or don’t want to bang. If me talking about textbook homosexuality is somehow threatening to your identity, you may want to look to define yourself by more than your queerness.
This is fucking “I’ve taken basic biology, so I know there are only two genders” level of discourse right here. Yeah, honey, the dictionary definition of homosexuality says one thing. Congratulations, you have learned the absolute bare minimum. Now do the part where you learn more – like the fact that life as a non-straight or non-cisgendered person has a vast and wide amount of unique experiences, anxieties, expectations, and the like – varying even more across different cultures – and all of those coalesce into different kinds of stories to tell that go far beyond who someone wants to bang.
Put more succinctly – gay kids often (including myself) know that they’re gay long before they hit pubescence and have any interest in sex. You can try to deny that all you want, but it doesn’t make your position based any less on ignorance.
“This is fucking “I’ve taken basic biology, so I know there are only two
genders” level of discourse right here. Yeah, honey, the dictionary
definition of homosexuality says one thing.”Yep and that’s the way the word is defined.
“like the fact that life as a non-straight or non-cisgendered person has a
vast and wide amount of unique experiences, anxieties, expectations,
and the like – varying even more across different cultures”Yep, that’s the general human condition.
“gay kids often (including myself) know that they’re gay long before they hit pubescence and have any interest in sex.”Oh yeah I’ve known those kids. One of my friend’s brothers was dressing in a boa and dancing along with drag queens on TV when he was like 4, it was awesome. I’m not at all going to try and deny it, though it seems like you really want me to deny it…?
I feel like you’re out here looking to get offended, projecting beliefs you think I have upon me and, overall, would love for me to be a homophobe, so you can tell me how horrible I am.
No, I’m assuming you’re an ally who is parroting a viewpoint that is ultimately harmful unintentionally – because if you understand that your 4 year old friend’s brothers experiences as a queer person were distinct and not wholly rotating around sex, then you understand that reducing any conversation around queerness (used, as a note, as a stand-in for any and all non-cishet identities, not in the way that I’ve seen some folks use it as a stand-in or alternative for pansexuality/nonbinary identity/etc) to being strictly about sex is profoundly diminishing.
And that it opens the door up bad faith shitheads who will use the exact same argument to argue that, like, Steven Universe is a show for groomers because it has lesbians.
I mean, maybe in a world without centuries of entrenched homophobia and heterosexuality being considered the norm you’d be correct to say it’s all just about who you want to have sex with. But can you honestly say you don’t recognise there are sociological aspects to being queer? Even just the fact that “coming out” is something most queer people have to do but straight people don’t means there’s a whole ‘nother aspect to it. Being gay can definitely shape a character, even if that character is never depicted having sex or even a romance.
And what is the specific desire shaping this gay character who never engages in onscreen sex and romance?Because, as we all know, Character Writing 101 is “What does X want. What does X need.”
Well,a) that’s only a consideration if you consider that character is only important insofar as it advances the plot. For example, Sherlock Holmes’ fondness for playing the violin is a characteristic that recurs in almost every adaptation of the character, despite it not generally furthering his wants and needs in the story. But it does give us a little more knowledge about who he is, i.e., someone who does have passions outside of crime solving.b) a gay character might want or need acceptance of their identity from their peers and/or family, and be seeking that even if they’re not actively looking for a sexual or romantic partner during the course of the story.
And what aspect of their identity does a bisexual character want and need their family to accept, if not their attraction to both genders?The guy’s being unnecessarily crude, but he’s not *wrong*, haha.
At this point I’m starting to feel like you’re being wilfully obtuse, but here are some things a non-heterosexual character might need their loved ones to accept about them: that they feel isolated and rejected by a heteronormative society; that they can’t trust that they are accepted for who they are, because the people around them have assumed that they’re straight; that sometimes they’re going to feel angry about the way they’re treated by the world in general, and that they’ll need some patience and understanding regarding that; that they may not go down the traditional routes of marriage and child-raising, because those institutions seem hostile to them sometimes; that there are times when they will prefer the (platonic) company of other queer people over cis-het people because that makes them feel safer and more genuine.Like, is it honestly that hard to see that there are aspects of specifically queer story-telling that aren’t “I’m looking for someone to bang”?
Thank you for that exhaustive list of possible knock-on effects of the character’s sexual desires’ being misaligned with the expectations of our patriarchal, heteronormative society, haha!
Man, that was a gut-wrenching scene. You don’t even see it, but the sound of machine gun fire and the little whimper Scooby does as he looks backwards tells you everything.
Of course, VxHDW is VERY SPECIFICALLY the reference point for why the “Velma” show sucks so deeply, haha!
As for her being meaner, it’s mostly a way to give her some space and utility removed from the rest of the gang. A cast of five well-meaning doofs is just a little less versatile than four well-meaning doofs and their suspicious, acerbic smart friend.
“A cast of five well-meaning doofs is just a little less versatile than four well-meaning doofs and their suspicious, acerbic smart friend.”It’s a children’s show about a van full of hippies and their talking dog. And, later, about the special guests they were able to get because ‘the ‘70s’. The jokes were ‘Wow Shaggy eats a lot!’, ‘versatile’ isn’t a word that gets anywhere near their wheelhouse.
The original show was, sure. And then they kept making different shows with different vibes and objectives. I’m talking about a specific one made forty years after the one you’re talking about.
To be fair, the jokes were also “Velma lost her glasses!”
Honestly; those two things have one origin:How fucking great Mystery Incorporated’s very gay, very sarcastic Velma was.
I hope when you turn this in to your HS English class you get that B+ you’re angling for.
ZING!This is a *chef’s kiss of a comment!
That’s just mean to everyone who’s ever gotten a B+ in middle school English!
“Is the execution perfect? No. Is it a fun time? Definitely”Ummm no, and my family is from Trinindad and I’ve live in the US my whole life, so I’ve delt with racism from every time of person in the USA as a kid. I wanted Velma to be good, man did I want it to be good. Just to shove it to the racist, but the show is boring. It’s shock for shock value sake and I can’t stand it. I’ve never cared for Mindy and was hoping she crused this but she didn’t. It’s awful.
It is not the audience’s fault that a show is hot garbage. It is not racist to dislike a show that is hot garbage. It’s potentially kind of racist to try to defend hot garbage by pretending it’s a race question, maybe?
We are increasingly expected to enjoy art (or not) depending on the identity and political beliefs of the people who make that art, and castigated when we do not fulfill that expectation. This is a distressing trend.
I firmly believe that since around 2016 there have been some movies where they add in stuff that will be perceived as “woke” just so they can handwave away criticism if the movie isnt well received. So instead of the movie being bad just because it is bad, it becomes bad because bigots are the ones criticizing it. And instead of bad review scores on IMDB signaling it’s bad…it just means it is a coordinated review bombing campaign by trolls.
I’ve seen some critics handwave away the backlash to Velma as just racism and misogyny.
I think a whole bunch of content creators are coming at their projects from the perspective that white people are going to automatically hate their work due to simple racism. As a white guy, I simply do not care what the origin story of a show or movie is (as in the creators, not the characters). I care about whether I’m entertained, which is supposed to be the whole point. Meanwhile, “hey, remember Velma? Well now she’s a bisexual teenaged south Asian!” is not in and of itself any kind of selling point whatsoever. Is. It. Funny?
It’s to the point where they would have been better off to create an original series about a mystery solving Asian teen. I’m not even sure who this show was intended for since it seems nobody really likes it.
“I’ve seen some critics handwave away the backlash to Velma as just racism and misogyny.”Like this article for example
I’m sorry I don’t like Velma. Please don’t think less of me. I really tried to get through that first episode but it’s not for me.
I think the show is fine. Obviously, we are now enemies, forever.
Have fun at your Klan meeting you evil bastard.
To be clear: This is hardly the first time Velma has been essayed by an actor of color (see Gina Rodriguez in 2020’s Scoob!, and Hayley Kiyoko in two Scooby Doo! movies in 2009 and 2010).
Awkward use of ‘essayed’ aside, the fact that you’re talking about the character rather than the show means that ‘Velma’ should not be italicized.
I think the thing that bothers me here the most is dragging Miss Marvel into this, as if by association I’m supposed to think “Well, this show has to be as good as that one if the protagonist is at least as brown if not browner!” Except that Miss Marvel is a crazy good adaptation of a character I would have thought very difficult to adapt, and Velma is just a mean spirited mouthpiece for Kaling’s barely-concealed reactionary sensibilities.
*Ms.
I think trying to handwave away Velma’s issues as it being the target of another vocal minority hategroup is disingenuous. Just because a certain subset of people online attack the show based on misguided surface level observations doesn’t magically make the show good or worth investing in. This rounding of the wagons needs to stop. If they attack the show, then you need to offer up real critique of the show, and it can’t be based around trying not to agree with “the other side” on the one thing that managed to stick as they were flinging shit around.
Plus nuance is a thing. I can say that race swapping literally everyone except Fred is silly and kinda racist(keeping the rich spoiled asshole as the only white member of the scoobies now), but even if there were no race swaps the show would be bad.
mindy is a white chaser soo…
Fred wasn’t even the rich one in the rest of the series, Daphne was. Fred worked a bunch of different jobs to make ends meet, Daphne had a butler named Jenkins.
The changes are just so bizarre. Still wanna know who this was for, they even made a MeToo joke lol. Something like velma goes “I speak truth like comedians before MeToo”.
Mindy Kaling admitted to sexually assaulting someone on the set of the Mindy Project. During a scene she placed an unscripted kiss on a male actor. Then jokingly said he’d be fired if he said anything.
That, by definition, is sexual assault. It’s not that I want Kaling cancelled, but I’m curious why there hasn’t an attempt by progressives to do so? It would at least show consistency. I’d say she got a pass due to being liberal, but Louis CK is liberal and didn’t get one. So I have to assume it is her gender and minority status.
*farts*
You’re contributing to climate change, which impacts people of color more. Your bigotry is awful.
#lol #yolo
Never Have I Ever is great, and everyone should watch it. It’s funny, heartfelt, and well-crafted, and in addition to the excellent onscreen actors, John McEnroe, seemingly out of nowhere, submits an all-time great Narrator performance the likes of which we haven’t seen since Ron Howard.
“sarcastro7 had gone too far, and they had best watch their mouth.”
To be clear: This is hardly the first time Velma has been essayed by an actor of color (see Gina Rodriguez in 2020’s Scoob!, and Hayley Kiyoko in two Scooby Doo! movies in 2009 and 2010).This is why I was annoyed with Kaling and Velma before the show. She was going around very loudly bragging about that her Velma would be the first time Velma was played by a woman of color, and that for the first time she would be queer. Neither of those statements were true. It seemed like bragging about accomplishments that she didn’t achieve. The children’s cartoon was more upfront of about Velma’s sexuality than the edgy show Velma was. This felt like virtue signaling in the worst way where it was basically an insult to the people that laid the ground work for her, while ignoring their work. At this point in time if Velma isn’t queer, she’s not Velma. She doesn’t get a point for doing the base level work.
It’s not really virtue signaling so much as Kaling really wanting attention but not being very talented.
All representation is good.Not all shows with representation are good.
You can make Velma any color you want but stop defending this unfunny piece of trash show. It’s easily the worst piece of television released year. The ultimate hate watch show of 2023.
Ms Marvel – GoodVelma – Vapid trash that should be obliterated from the minds of anyone who had to suffer through it. Of course you made it about race, because if a show is criticized there has to be some type of racist element to it. The show is criticized because, like this article, it’s garbage.
Fucking Scrappy Doo though. He’s the worst.
the backlash is because Velma represents the worst sort of (uninteresting) “provocation” in which beloved characters are made to do and say extremely uncharacteristic things.Turning Velma and Daphe into drug dealers, the gratuitous violence (poor Fred!), Shaggy selling his kidney…??? It’s like a bad SNL parody of an “edgy reboot”.
Seriously, this sounds akin to the Mario Kart movie trailer from just last week.
It’s the same joke that Venture Brothers made 15 years ago, except that VB didn’t try to build an entire series around the one-note joke. Also the writing was so much better that they aren’t even in the same solar system, but it’s VB, that goes without saying.
I’ll just quote from this Gizmodo article on the new Winnie the Pooh horror stupidity:this horribly grandiose vision that lacks self-awareness while indulging in the worst impulses of childish narrative rebellion. Frake-Waterfield imagines he’s edgy for creating a “fat Tinkerbell on drugs” as if shitty stereotypes and half-baked nostalgic “twists” are enough to convince his audience he has imagination when most of them aren’t laughing at the joke, but at the idea itself.
Wow you REALLY missed the mark with any critique of this show. Yes representaton matters, but at the expense of a joyless, humorless and down right mean show? Idc about the IP being damaged, it will live thru this, but not a single character on that show has a redeeming quality or redeeming arc. They made a Gen Z Seinfeld but turned the mean all the way up and jokes all the way down. It’s just already dated pop culture references. You can feel a mid 40s writers room cackling as they had characters say “hashtag ____” like it was the best joke ever. Your own bias and desire to be seen in pop culture is jading your own journalistic endeavors. It’s a bad look and an even worse read.
“These Scooby snacks are making me thirsty!”
I’m all for a bisexual South Asian Velma– I’ve just held off on giving the show a chance because Mindy Kaling seems to be friends with a lot of openly transphobic celebs.
Great – no one cares.
I can’t speak for everyone, but I watched two episodes of Velma, and I genuinely believe it’s an awful show. I like Never Have I Ever though, so I don’t buy that I dislike Velma because I’m subconsciously racist against young South Asian women. The show just sucks.
We all have our crosses to bare. Unfortunately for South Asian women their cross is Velma and the heaping pile of shit that it is.
Oh, hey guys! Is everyone here to talk about that new Velma sh—
You might want to try reading this. It’s an actual good article about Velma.https://www.theatlantic.com/culture/archive/2023/01/hbo-max-velma-review-mindy-kaling-backlash/672796/
paywall
Representation is such a tough topic to talk about and I very much appreciate this take on it. It requires talking about the forest and the trees, to mush a metaphor possibly past usefulness… it’s a conversation about the climate around a conversation as much as the “points” that people bring up. I’ll hazard to say that my initial feelings, as someone steeped in 80’s/90’s identity politics of assimilation, are usually everyone doth protest too much, but then, if I hold my commentary a bit, maybe I can learn more about a topic. Which is to say, it’s not math and 30% racist comments and 60% reasonable criticism and then 10% twitter or whatever, every comment and every discussion is steeped in degrees with all of it, as is the experience of watching.
This is what some groups of people accuse critics of doing…And then you go and do it: Using race as a shield from criticism. I don’t care about Velma either way. I do care when articles like this prove those people right.
Why does it bother you if they are proven right? Does that mean you’d prefer the other side be proven right? Not like one is better than the other.
It doesn’t bother per se (in fact, I’m amused) But let’s just say… It’s not a ‘good’ thing to be right about. It essentially means we have a real problem with professional criticism in the modern day. And that’s not good. Especially for the art.
People don’t hate Velma because it portrays her as a POC. They hate it because it portrays her as a POS!
Im a South East Asian woman but I think this show is trash even if I took away it’s roots from Scooby Doo. Velma is literally an entitled brat in the show. She thinks Norville belongs to her to boss him around, she’s the embodiment of internalized misogyny for hating on other women who’s not her mom and hate them cuz they’re “hotter” than her then assume they’re basic for being “hot”. She even makes fun of the “Me Too” movement and enforces stereotypes thinking she’s so self aware. And to think that the writers want us to root for her. I don’t wanna be represented by someone like her if she was from SEA. How are your standards so low that you think someone like this is good “representation” for you?
I had not issue with Velma being a POC. My issue with that show was it was bad as a Scooby Do show.
It seems like the whole Velma thing is revealing a bit of a double-edge to the sword of increased media representation, or perhaps more accurately the use of increased media representation as a marketing tool and potential indicator of quality: in keeping with Sturgeon’s Law, a good percentage of these projects are just as likely to be as shit as the projects about straight white people.
But the people doing the straight white people projects dont have the built in excuse of “you hate this cuz racism and sexism!” they can bust out at a moments notice.
Sometimes it feels like India’s upper class has exported the very worst of its culture with its emigrants. Privileged rich girls demanding everyone’s attention for shows about their stupid selves and preemptively calling everyone else a racist. Trying to assign themselves oppressed-minority credibility by calling themselves “brown.” This essay describes a whole ecosystem of the same self-righteous crap. Those aren’t noble fighters for justice, they’re privileged people acting privileged.
Most of the criticism I saw came from brown women on Twitter. They’re the racists?
I was wondering how this site could try to gaslight us by blaming the backlash on racism, but then I looked and the author gave this show a B+ rating lol. That’s high even among critics right? Rotten Tomatoes has critics score a 42% and audience score a 6% lol. You know a woke show is bad when it cant even crack 50% among the professional critics. She-Hulk has a friggin 80% on RT. Of course only 33% from audiences, but no doubt this will be blamed on review bombing.
I’m as queer as they get and I thought Velma was mean-spirited trash. It was pretty upsetting because Velma is a character I personally love and was excited to see this show for; I was excited to see a queer Velma and i’m fine with diversifying— making Velma brown doesn’t really seem out of place to me. The humor just… doesn’t work. This isn’t Sunny, it’s Scooby. (also is no one going to mention that making Shaggy black was a little questionable considering that character’s cultural associations with being a weed smoker. no one?)
They made black shaggy anti drug though…because of course they did lol.
Turning Fred into a horribly mean, pre-pubescent, white privileged, and misogynic pseudo-rapist with a mockingly tiny dick, esteem issues, daddy issues, and a complete lack of feminine understanding… wasn’t the big comical flex the writer’s thought it would be.And Velma being so annoying, cynically mean spirited, downright foolish, and woefully ignorant of people’s feelings, while also being passively and actively racist/sexist throughout many of her “jokes” has nothing to do with her being brown or bisexual. If she wasn’t brown, then maybe she might not have so many lackluster jokes aimed at white men, and that could change a bit of the comedy’s landscape… But that’s hardly the problem here.Everyone in this show is plainly insufferable. The plot of the “mystery” is hardly even a mystery, since most all of the advancing points are obvious and effortlessly thrown into Velma’s lap—so she doesn’t do any legit mystery solving. Many of the episodes are disconnected plot-wise, and the show’s excessive approach to meta gag humor loses steam after the first episode. There are so many plot holes and problematic jokes that just don’t land that I kinda deem it to be one of the worst written shows of the decade… That’s the real problem here: the writing is awful and the characters are horrible.Velma is a bad show because it’s bad. The main character being brown and bi-sexual has nothing to do with this criticism. It’s an insultingly bad take on Scooby-Doo that should have been its own thing.
Finished the season.Velma mostly stuck the landing (wrapped up the mystery pretty well and smoothed out a couple of the worst aspects of the character arcs), but it didn’t justify the journey it took to get there. I can see the potential for a second season (which has already been confirmed), but there’s a LOT of work to be done.The criticism is entirely deserved, but the seeds for something better are here. Hopefully the writers got the “Velma is a hateful and disgusting little trash goblin” stuff out of their systems.
People genuinely don’t like Velma because it’s a bad show. I sat through two episodes and I really resent the idea that me being racist against South Asian women is the only logical explanation for why I didn’t like something so smug, mean, and desperate.
Using your example of Apu as a jumping off point, Apu is certainly flawed as a broad stereotype but he’s an original character. He’s not an edgy, ironic, meta self-layering over an established iconic character.
Velma is not good, and while there is certainly racist backlash, there is plenty of just plain critical backlash. This feels like an attempt to gaslight people into avoiding criticizing the show for fear of being grouped with the racists.
“If you hate Velma, you’re racist!”More like, If you love Velma, you have horrible taste.
Just reading all these comments here, I’m noticing the overall sentiment (here anyway) is something along the lines of, “Velma’s just not a good show. Not because it ruins Scooby-Do, or because the main character is changed from white to not white and is now ‘woke’. It’s just bad.” Which, fine. But if that’s the case, why do so many people feel the need to come to comments sections to state, “I just don’t like it because it’s bad”?If the problem is (as I’ve seen here) that we should just move on from it like we would any bad show created by a mediocre white man, then why not just do that? If you see an article that’s in praise of it, why the compulsive need to come here just to say it’s just a bad show?I know the “Let people like things” meme has been misused over the years, but I think this is proper use of it. If it’s true that the show is just a bad show, and not bad for being actively harmful, then why is it so important to find someone who likes it to tell them that it’s bad?
You’re gonna say this to folk whining about Hogwarts Legacy too I assume, right?
A couple things:
If the problem is (as I’ve seen here) that we should just move on from
it like we would any bad show created by a mediocre white man, then why
not just do that?
Plenty of shows and other assorted products from mediocre white men get dogpiled all the time, particularly ones based on pre-existing properties – just look at the discussions surrounding any comic book movie. And, as I’ve noted before, this is a show from a mediocre white man: its sole credited creator, head writer, and owner of the production company making it is Charlie Grandy. And the majority of the writing team is white (there’s one non-white person out of seven), along with all of the directors. The cast is diverse, but the creative team is not.
why do so many people feel the need to come to comments sections to state, “I just don’t like it because it’s bad”?
Because it’s annoying to be told “you don’t like the show due to its casting” when that isn’t the case, similar to when Billy Eichner insisted that Bros flopping was down to homophobia rather than a combination of rom-coms being at a historic low in their popularity and Eichner himself being Marmite in human form. Mindy Kaling has had plenty of successful, well-liked shows in the past (hell, she has another one going right now), so that kind of dismissive and accusatory attitude to valid criticism just sucks.
If it’s true that the show is just a bad show, and not bad for being actively harmful, then why is it so important to find someone who likes it to tell them that it’s bad?
Nobody’s hunting down Velma fans telling them their show sucks, but this is a pop culture website discussing a heavily-marketed show with a specific angle on the backlash against said show. Where else are people supposed to discuss the show, and the negative reaction to it, if not here? It’s not like AV Club comments sections were being overrun with Velma discourse outside of this.
And the people who don’t like the show watched it because it’s a heavily-marketed event release from HBO aimed at adults based on a nostalgic property. This isn’t a case of people wandering over into someone else’s ball pit just to shit in it, this is the intended audience giving their reaction to a show that was aimed at them.
I mean, it’s almost like this is a comment section for an article on a pop culture blog which is specifically about the motives people purportedly have for criticising Velma.Let people like things, sure, but this is specifically a discussion about why people dislike Velma, and specifically one which heavily implies if not outright states that the bulk of people who dislike Velma are doing so for disingenuous bad faith reasons due to racist motivations. And this might seem odd, but most people don’t like being collectively accused of racism because they don’t like a cartoon.
…Curiosity?
Always crying racism, maybe the show just sucks. I personally enjoy the majority of Kaling other work, but frankly this show was bad, jokes were poor, writing was poor, execution was poor and it tried way way too hard to be meta. Everyone is allowed their opinions but I’d suggest bringing something real to the table instead of simply calling racism, like it is suppose to be a Scooby Doo prequal but forgot that and turned into a basic Kaling show.
While I’m sure there are plenty of racist assholes who hate it because of her race I can say confidently that I hate it because it sucks. Ridiculously edgelord, try-hard humor and a slew of obnoxious Twitter-fueled buzzwords and attitudes crammed in to show “This ain’t your momma’s Scooby Doo!” It’s not at all *fun* to watch.
…Ma’am, people in the LGBTQ+ community were criticizing this show. People from all over the spectrum where complaining about the show for justifiable and unjustifiable reasons.
Please please please don’t use the “Racism” card to shield the show from valid criticism. The show just isn’t funny. It’s not very good and yes there are people who definitely don’t like it because she’s brown but that doesn’t change the fact that it’s not a good show.