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NEWS: Live-Action Sword Art Online Producer: Series Sold to Netflix, Will Have Asian Lead Actors

But SAO was a game made by Japanese for the Japanese market... maybe you can throw in some foreigners but they'd have had to travel to Japan to buy the game.

Paulo27 wrote:

But SAO was a game made by Japanese for the Japanese market... maybe you can throw in some foreigners but they'd have had to travel to Japan to buy the game.

Well some of the foreigners could be living in japan and also you don't have to travel to japan to buy japanese games. You can buy them easily online.

CurseTheSky wrote:

and absolutely NOTHING to do with the fact that the lead actor is Caucasian.

LOOK at him though Would you cast this punk as Goku? Does he LOOK like Goku?

Pretty sure SAO was something you lined up in front of stores for.

It's really sad that the Hollywood adaptation to get it right with casting had to be "Sword Art Online." Hopefully, due to cultural boundaries, things like the cousin incest subplot, Asuna's damselization, and the sexual assault scenes get altered.

Animeking1108 wrote:

It's really sad that the Hollywood adaptation to get it right with casting had to be "Sword Art Online." Hopefully, due to cultural boundaries, things like the cousin incest subplot, Asuna's damselization, and the sexual assault scenes get altered.

Yeah, those elements were just so damn weird and awkward. Kawahara isn't a great writer, but even for him those were really bad. In fact, they're really just better off skipping that arc.

Honestly, "Accel World" was better. It may not be perfect, but at least Haru is an intentionally flawed character, unlike Kirito. That's another thing I hope they fix: making Kirito less of a Gary Stu.

Exactly. People who say "the race of the actor doesn't matter, as long as they act well" seem to think that Hollywood is a fare meritocracy. They miss one of the main complaints people have about whitewashing: that actors are rejected because of their race all the time, despite being good actors! Blind casting is unfortunately rare, and most casting directors are looking for white actors and only white actors. If you actually look at what Asian-American and other minority actors have said about their experiences being dismissed and rejected *because* of how they look, you'll come to realize that the problem *isn't* that there are not enough good, talented Asian-American actors, the problem is that they're not offered opportunities for roles.

Now, in this show's case, I got the impression that they might be interested in a truly international cast to expand the scope of the story, which would be awesome. But even if they're planning to only use Americans/Native English speakers for the roles, there's nothing wrong with the screenwriter saying: "these characters were Japanese in the original novel, so Japanese (or Japanese-American) actors should play them in the show". I'm surprised such a simple, basic idea is getting so much pushback. You'd think a black actress was cast to play Hermione in a Harry Potter play every day, the way people think that the best actors always get the good parts (TL;DR Blind casting is good. Specifying minority actors for roles may not be as good, but it's better than the standard "rejecting minority actors and only casting white actors by default").

If they wanted an entire Asian cast for the live action adaptation and for it to be as close to the source material as possible then it should have been made in Japan.