One of the biggest challenges in modern storytelling is finding ways to make fictional worlds feel more reflective of the audiences reading and watching them today. Most readers agree that greater diversity in fiction is a good thing, but there is often far less agreement about how those changes should be implemented, particularly when adapting existing stories for a new generation.

In this week’s blog, Ginger examines why some diversity decisions are embraced by audiences while others generate controversy, and what authors can learn from the difference. Using examples from film, television, books, and recent adaptation debates, he explores how character dynamics, worldbuilding, and narrative context can influence whether a creative choice feels thoughtful or forced. In the end, the choices writers make should always serve to make those characters and stories feel authentic, intentional, and true to the world they live in.

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Let me be upfront about something: I am the problem.

I am a 48-year-old upper-middle-class British man living in New York. I have strong opinions about fictional characters. I grew up on a diet of stories where everyone who mattered looked more or less like me, and I am precisely the demographic that tends to populate comment sections with complaints whenever a beloved character gets recast as someone who isn’t white, straight, or male. When people talk about resistance to diversity in popular media, they are—despite my best efforts not to be part of the problem—talking about people like me.

But sometimes, even my opinion carries some weight. And when it comes to the current debate around casting a Black actor as Severas Snape in the new Harry Potter television series, I think there’s a conversation actually worth having. 

To quickly catch you up, in case you missed it, there’s an upcoming new HBO adaptation of the Harry Potter books. It’s going to cover all the ground that the wonderful movies already covered, just with a new cast of actors filling the roles once occupied by the likes of Daniel Radcliffe, Rupert Grint, and Emma Watson.

One of the casting decisions was to cast British actor Paapa Essiedu in the role of Severus Snape, one of the most important roles in the story, and it’s caused quite a bit of controversy because Essiedu is Black, and Severus Snape was always described as a pale, sallow man. People are objecting to the casting of “Black Snape” and, for once, it’s not just tedious middle aged white men. A LOT of people are complaining, and I think it’s worth discussing why.

So please understand that I’m not opening this conversation from a place of reflexive outrage driven by my upbringing and background. I want to have this conversation because I think the approach being taken towards the new Harry Potter television show illustrates something genuinely important for anyone writing fiction today, and especially for self-published authors making deliberate decisions about how to build and populate their worlds so they reflect the reality we live in.

The Source Material Wasn’t Exactly a Masterclass

The first reason why this is a conversation worth having is because it’s worth being honest about where Harry Potter starts from. J.K. Rowling made a visible effort to include characters from different racial backgrounds in her books, and that deserves some acknowledgment. But Rowling is, like me, an upper-middle-class British person, and by 2026 standards, a lot of the choices she made come across as painfully tone-deaf. 

Cho Chang as the Chinese character? Kingsley Shacklebolt as the African character? These are names that feel less like real people and more like a diversity checklist completed with the cultural awareness of a 1990s geography textbook.

Given the significant and entirely legitimate scrutiny Rowling has faced regarding her attitudes towards trans people, it makes complete sense to re-examine her books through a more critical lens—and in a modern adaptation, to want to introduce diversity that feels more authentic and considered than the original. That impulse is entirely right! 

And the casting of Noma Dumezweni as Hermione in Harry Potter and the Cursed Child on stage in 2016 was a wonderful example of this. Of course, it caused the predictable Twitter storm, but then people saw Noma perform and the conversation largely ended. She was brilliant in the role, and as a result, people examined the source material and largely admitted that Hermione’s race is not a meaningful part of who the character of Hermione is. She was a great choice for more diverse casting.

Which brings us to Snape.

Why “Black Snape” Feels Different

Paapa Essiedu is a genuinely exceptional actor, and that’s not in question. The question is whether recasting Severus Snape as a Black man was a thoughtful creative decision or a cynical one. Unfortunately, it’s the latter that a significant portion of the fandom (not just the tedious contingent of middle-aged white men like me) seems to feel.

Here’s the issue: Snape’s story, as written, involves sustained bullying at the hands of James Potter and his friends during their school years. It involves Harry’s deep suspicion of him across the first three books. It involves a character who exists at the margins, who is treated with cruelty and mistrust by the protagonists we are meant to root for. In the original text, all of this exists within a broadly all-white social context, and the reader processes it as a story about class, jealousy, and misused power.

But put a Black man in that role, especially since he’s one of very few Black characters in the story, and the entire dynamic changes. Now you have a narrative in which a Black man is relentlessly bullied, suspected, and mistreated—all while surrounded by white characters, in a story that doesn’t have the self-awareness or the framework to address what that actually means. 

The risk is that recasting Snape introduces a racial dimension to existing cruelty and then fails to examine it. That’s not representation. That’s a problem.

The more logical candidate for recasting, and one that would have worked beautifully, would be Hermione! We already broke that ground with the stage production. There are no character dynamics in the books that are complicated by Hermione being Black. Her relationship with Ron, her friendship with Harry, her intellectual arrogance and her fierce loyalty, none of it has a racial dimension that would be distorted by the change. It would have been seamless, and it would have centered Blackness in a protagonist, not in a victim.

There’s even an argument to be made that Hermione was Black in the books. Rowling never explicitly mentions her race (although she does say that Hermione was her stand-in in the books) and distinguishing features like her hair actually support a claim that she could be. It’s a recasting that works so well and simultaneously highlights how recasting Snape works so poorly. 

The Rule of Cool (and the Lessons It Teaches)

That being said, and again owning my position as a tedious, middle-aged white guy, there’s a counterargument to all of this. I’m talking, of course, about Idris Elba playing Roland Deschain in the movie adaptation of The Dark Tower.

As a Stephen King devotee, I should have been furious about this. Roland in the books is explicitly white. And more than that, his whiteness matters, because Susannah Dean, one of his companions, is a Black woman from 1960s America whose initial suspicion of Roland is a fundamental part of the character dynamic. Recast Roland as a Black man and you eliminate an entire dimension of the story. The complaint is completely legitimate.

And yet Idris Elba in that role was extraordinary to watch. In a movie universally considered to be “bad” he was incredible, and most people’s objections about the recasting evaporated within minutes of seeing him on screen. There’s a “rule of cool” that operates here. If the casting is good enough, if the actor brings enough presence and charisma to a role, audiences will follow without complaint. 

The same principle explains why somebody like me might ordinarily object to the character of James Bond being recast as anything other than an upper-class white Englishman, but I’d immediately make an exception for Idris Elba. Talent and screen presence have a way of making arguments irrelevant. It’s IDRIS ELBA for God’s sake! He’s a British institution! 

And ironically, given its problematic literary heritage, the James Bond franchise actually provides the clearest examples of diversity done right. In the Daniel Craig era, Moneypenny was recast as a Black woman, played by Naomie Harris, and she was wonderful! Nobody complained because Moneypenny’s race has never been a meaningful part of her character before (Hell, she’d been recast as a Canadian in the movies before!) 

In the newly-released First Light video game, M is played by Priyanga Burford, a British Indian actress, and the response has been similarly muted, because even fans of James Bond understand that M is a role defined by its function (and has already been successfully inhabited by a woman in the form of Judi Dench.) 

Likewise, in the Daniel Craig movies, Black actor Jeffrey Wright played the originally blond, Texan Felix Leiter. Despite being the opposite of how the character was described in the books (even claiming to be from Milwaukee, Wisconsin, instead of Texas) he became so definitive in the role that when he died in No Time to Die, audiences genuinely grieved (myself included.)

What the Bond franchise understands—and what the Harry Potter adaptation appears not to—is the distinction between recasting a character whose race is incidental to their story, and recasting one whose racial context is woven into the dynamics around them. It also understands the value of creating new characters rather than defaulting to race-swapping existing ones. 

When the actor playing Bill Tanner was unavailable in the 1990s, they created Charles Robinson, played by Colin Salmon, as a new Chief of Staff rather than a recoloured version of an old one. Nobody cared, because there was nothing to complain about. A new character brings no baggage. 

Likewise, Samuel L. Jackson’s Nick Fury has arguably become the definitive version of a character originally based on Dean Martin, and once played by David Hasslehoff. The “rule of cool” in the presence he brings to the role is helped enormously by the fact that the groundwork was laid in the Ultimate Comics universe first, so the casting felt intentional rather than arbitrary.

What This Means for Your Fiction

We need more diversity in popular media. This is not a debatable point. It is simply true, and older properties being brought into a modern context need to reckon honestly with how white, how straight, and how narrow their original visions were. 

Harry Potter, James Bond, the fantasy genre, science fiction—all of it carries the weight of a very particular kind of cultural default, and refreshing that for a new generation is not just commercially smart but morally right. But the way you do it matters enormously. 

As a self-published author, you have something that major studio adaptations often lack: The freedom to be thoughtful. You can build diversity into your world from the ground up, so it never feels retrofitted. You can create characters whose identities are specific and considered rather than symbolic and generic. You can ask yourself not just “is there a Black character in this story?” but “does this character’s Blackness inform who they are, and if so, have I written that honestly?”

When diversity is done with intentionality—when it serves the story, when the casting or characterization is right, when the “rule of cool” is genuinely earned—even middle-aged white men with strong opinions and a habit of tediously complaining will not only accept it, but embrace it. We’ll cry when Felix Leiter dies. We’ll follow Noma Dumezweni anywhere.

But when it’s done cynically, performatively, and without thought for what the change actually does to the story, we’ll notice. And honestly, we won’t be the only ones.

The goal isn’t to silence the critics. It’s to make work so good, so considered, so genuinely alive, that the critics and the tedious middle-aged whitemen have nothing left to say.

But that’s just my opinion, and I fully embrace how blind that opinion might be given my background. I’d love to know your thoughts, especially about how they’re approaching the recasting of this new Harry Potter television show. Let me know in the comments down below, and don’t be shy about what you say. I have a thick skin and an open mind and I’m ready to hear it.

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