Sometimes I think it’s a matter of being able to see it coming. Same principle as “fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me.” The Anne Boleyn show obviously didn’t invent cynical race-swapping as an attention / free marketing generating technique, but it was definitely a huge step up in the sheer level of cynicism: the first really prominent example of just outright goading the audience by taking a main-character figure who really lived and who we have paintings of, and making her the wrong race on purpose. It was so blatantly cynical, and such a new level of boldness that we hadn’t quite encountered before, that I can forgive people for being stunned into silence a bit.

But that only works once, for obvious reasons. Once you’ve seen them blacken Anne Boleyn, you’re not surprised when they blacken Cleopatra, and people are more prepared for the fact the industry will pull stunts like that, and thus more prepared to call it out when it happens. But I’m glad people are calling it out. It could have gotten high audience scores and the Hollywood press, which operates largely as a mutual back-scratcher with actors (who scratch back by granting access which sustains the press in their cushy non-contributing jobs), would STILL write the same articles about how racist “some” fans are. They would just take a “even when the thing is successful, racists still complain” tack as opposed to this “why are racists review-bombing?!?” tack. So since the press will try to work the racism angle either way, people might as well call out shitty products and especially call out shitty cynical techniques for generating attention.