Unless a characters race or gender or ethnicity or (dis)ability is a key component of either their arc or the story as whole (e.g. the plot depends on it), who the fuck cares who’s playing who? I saw the same thing happen when the Dune movie had the Liet-Kynes character portrayed by a black woman. It makes absolutely zero difference to the story what gender or race Liet-Kynes was and she was really good anyway.

I only dislike it when historical shows or movies race swap, cause it kinda ignores the racism of that community at that point in time. Like a black woman playing queen Elizabeth wouldn’t make sense. Or Cleopatra for that matter

I find it a little interesting the effect of casting women and people of color as Imperials in the Star Wars universe. The Empire is explicitly supposed to be a fascist racist organization. The casting of all lily-white poncy British-accented dudes in the original trilogy is supposed to read to the audience as “These are the bad guys; see how colonialist they look?”, while it’s the rebels and outsiders who are ethnically and gender diverse. The existence of Thrawn and Isaard in the expanded universe was supposed to highlight just how brutal and talented they were, that they were able to succeed in such a racist and sexist Empire, even given their backgrounds.

I understand the idea of wanting more diverse casting in modern Star Wars, but making the Empire diverse seems to confuse the visual metaphor just a tad. I suppose that they’re keeping the “Empire is racist but only in the sense of it’s human-supremacist,” but it still seems a little odd.