ONTD

Over the last several months, many people in the Sherlock Holmes fandom have been very upset that Lucy Liu is playing (Joan) Watson in the CBS modern adaptation of Sherlock Holmes, which is named “Elementary”. Understand that this is a modern adaptation that cannot fully resemble the current Sherlock Holmes films nor the current BBC TV series due to certain legal issues.

Essentially, the fandom is upset because Watson is Asian and a woman – especially the Asian part.

Here’s an example of a racist reaction on Tumblr:

Quote:
theblueboxtraveler:

I was okay with the woman idea, because I thought that would add an interesting twist, and the series already sounded pretty terrible so what could it hurt? And that’s what reboots are for right? Being horrible bastardizations of the original story, with an interesting twist?

But apparently Lucy Liu is going to be playing himher. Now, let me start off by saying I have nothing against Asians or any other race whatsoever. But I honestly think this is pretty fucking retarded, primarily because she’s Asian.

John Watson is a British white male, and you’re turning him into an Asian female?

I’m sorry but how do you even what?

I’m not being racist here, it’s just that that’s about as far from canon as you can possibly get, short of make him a giant crab monster from space.

At Comic Con Lucy Liu responded to the racial controversy:

“I mean the thing is, when you go into anything everyone has an opinion. And when we did Charlie’s Angels, everyone was like ‘This is going to be a huge flop, this is a disaster, this is a mistake.’ And all I could think about was, ‘Wow this is amazing,’ because they’ve cast an Asian person as one of the Angels, and when I was growing up it was the idea that it was all Caucasian. So that was, for me, like, ‘who cares about anything else’?

And for me this time it's about that Watson is a female. And a lot of people who are of ethnic background have come up to me and said, It's so great that you're playing Watson and you’re representing a big, you know, minority section of actors and people in the world.”

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