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Would the cyclops explain Laertes being played by an actor who is Maori?

This bigot is stupid because Africa is right fucking there. But audiences at large might ask 'what the fuck?' if anyone in ancient proto-Greece was plainly Native American. And that mass response almost cannot be wrong. Anything that takes everyone out of the story is a failure of storytelling. Working around that is not difficult: do it early. That's how you make people go 'holy shit, a cyclops!' instead of 'why the fuck does this movie have a cyclops?'

Suspension of disbelief is not something the audience owes. It's a trust that the story will follow its own rules. Every story has rules, and the ones it does not provide are filled in with ones you already know. That includes rules from other stories: nobody in Harry Potter bothers explaining that brooms can fly. But that made-up element is not carte blanche for someone to wield a lightsaber. The rules you know for fantasy would excuse a surprise dragon, but not a surprise spaceship. Nor could an eleven-year-old boy from jolly old England whip out a handgun, without breaking immersion, even though handguns are real. A story where that kind of character can have that kind of object takes an entirely different shape.

It is important to avoid bad arguments even when dunking on the dumbest motherfuckers alive. We don't need to undermine the concept of criticizing fiction, just to tell a crybully racist to fuck off.