People still aren’t over the whitewashing in “Ghost In The Shell” and they made their feelings perfectly clear when Paramount Pictures launched a meme generator website to promote the film.
On iammajor.me, fans can upload photos and write their own text to create a movie ad that reads “I am Major” along the bottom.
Major is the name of the film’s lead character, who is played by Scarlett Johansson, despite the fact that the character is supposed to be Japanese.
According to NextShark, the ad campaign was promoted over the weekend with a 30-second clip of Johansson in character, saying: “I am hunted. I am the hunter. I am fearless. I am coming for them. I am Major.”
It’s clear the ad was meant to be empowering, as some examples of written text for the meme include “I am fearless” and “I am a leader in my community.” Despite this, the marketing scheme completely backfired when viewers decided to use it to troll the film instead.
In the user-created memes, many called out the film, the studio and Johansson herself for contributing to the whitewashing problem in Hollywood.
Many also used the meme generator to criticize Johansson’s previous response to the whitewashing controversy, which was that she took the role as a feminist move.
Some also created memes to fire back at other white actors who took roles away from Asians, including the late Mickey Rooney, who portrayed an Asian man in “Breakfast at Tiffany's,” Emma Stone, who played an Asian-American woman in “Aloha,” and Matt Damon, who was portrayed as a white saviour in “The Great Wall.”
But perhaps the saddest meme created was one that pictured a young Asian girl. “I am still waiting to see myself as the hero,” it reads.
With so much backlash over whitewashed films, it's time for Hollywood to finally wake up and realize that representation does matter.
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