Quote Originally Posted by A.A.King View Post
It is a similar problem to trying to interpret Zootopia as a story about actual racism. Sure, in-universe there are creatures fighting other creatures based on how they are born, but given that that particular fighting is based on an a past prey-predator relationship that does not exist among real word humans you really shouldn't try to read in-movie groups as specific real world groups.
Yep, Zootopia is an extremely good story about intersectionality, but if you start trying to map it 1 to 1 you're going to have all sorts of problems.

As for Artemis Fowl and Butler, I would agree that Butler is probably the only person in the whole damned series that absolutely should not be black unless Artemis is, too. It's actual tokenism writ large; they want their key leads to be white, they want one person on screen to be black so that they aren't called out for racism, grab the most prominent person who isn't a main character, call it a day. There's a whole discussion about fantasy settings that exclusively have a single black person and it's always a middle-aged man who is in a role of martial subservience to the actual main character.

It's the same sort of thing that led to "the black dude always dies first" being an action/horror trope; they didn't die first because they were black, they died first because they were the least developed characters. But they were the least developed characters because the most-developed characters were always white, so...