So, while reviewing the Netflix adaptation of Chinese science-fiction novel "The Three-Body Problem," I mentioned that the series changed the races of a good chunk of the major characters so that they could be played by a diverse cast. I've railed against this sort of thing in the past, such as with the live action adaptations of "Ghost in the Shell" and M. Night Shyamalan's "The Last Airbender" movie. Netflix's "3 Body Problem" doing this didn't bother me as much, and I want to dig into why.
To do that, however, I need to talk about localizations. This is when a piece of media originally written for one audience is adapted for a different audience, usually into another language and culture. This often involves changing places, names, and other cultural signifiers to make a piece of media more palatable for the new target market. Localizations are fairly common. "Three Men and a Baby," "True Lies," and "The Birdcage" were all American films based on French comedies. "All in the Family" and "The Office" localized British sitcoms for American audiences. Plenty of other countries localize American media, such as the Chinese version of "What Women Want" with Andy Lau and Gong Li, or the Japanese "Unforgiven" with Ken Watanabe as a samurai, or the Colombian telenovela version of "Breaking Bad." Many localizations have been very good, interesting pieces of media, but for a long time they were never intended to be seen by the original audiences of their source material.
I don't have an issue with localizations in general, especially when you're talking about kids' cartoons or sitcoms that operate in a very narrow, specific cultural space. However, some of the American ones have been used as an excuse to whitewash stories and contribute to representation issues in the past. The "Ghost in the Shell" movie is a prime example of a piece of media that was trying to have it both ways, courting the fans of the original work and aiming for a new audience, ultimately appealing to neither. The movie is a fairly direct adaptation of the Japanese "Ghost in the Shell" films and comics franchise, still taking place in an Asian country with most of the same character names. There's really no attempt at properly localizing (globalizing? Westernizing?) the story. However, the Asian lead character was rewritten so she could be played by Scarlett Johanssen, and there's no good reason why she couldn't have been played by Jamie Chung or Maggie Q or someone new. Asian-Americans being seriously underrepresented onscreen in American media only made matters worse. The Japanese didn't understand why this was a problem because, of course, they don't have to deal with representation issues.
Netflix's "3 Body Problem" is similarly problematic at first glance. More than half of the characters have been changed from Chinese to Caucasian, Black, Latino, and South-Asian, with a few gender swaps for good measure. Three major POV characters are still ethnically Chinese, and a good amount of the show is Chinese language, but the whole structure has been fundamentally changed. I think it's fair to call "3 Body Problem" a localization, at least partially, because it moves most of the action to the UK and extensively rewrites the characters to fit a Western context. The diverse cast comes across as a good faith attempt to represent the intended Western audience, and I like that the major Chinese characters are very active and have agency. Some fans have complained about parts of the story being changed to reflect Western values, and that's in line with how localizations are supposed to work. You appeal to a broader audience by reducing and replacing culturally specific elements like Chinese politics and history. I'm not sure how much of the show was really meant to appeal to the fans of the book - there were clearly efforts made to portray the Chinese portions of the series accurately and sensitively - but the show is a very different animal from its source material.
However, with media becoming more global, and Americans becoming more willing to watch foreign media with subtitles, how much do we still need localizations like this? We've been seeing formerly separate audiences aggregate and merge for a while now thanks to greater awareness of each other's media. The anime and gaming communities have fought for years against attempts to localize their favorite Japanese properties, preferring the original versions. After the success of "Squid Game" and "Parasite," do we really need an adaptation of a Chinese novel that panders to Western audiences? I don't know the answer to that question, but "3 Body Problem" does offer an interesting test case. The Netflix series is actually one of two television adaptations currently available. There's also a Chinese language serial of "The Three Body Problem" that is much more faithful and was released last year. This is the version that everyone in China is watching, and it's also been made available to much of the rest of the world through streamers like Youtube and Peacock.
So, if you want to watch a more faithful version of "The Three Body Problem," one is available. If you prefer the glossier, Westernized version, that's also available. Either way, the author of the book is getting paid and a lot of Chinese actors are getting work. So while the situation's not perfect, I'm not inclined to be too upset about this one.
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