Lin-Manuel Miranda Says Gamergate Inspired Him To Gender-Swap ‘The Warriors’ For New Concept Album, Describes Event As “Terminally Online Dudes Doxing Women Who Dared To Like Video Games”
According to noted Hollywood and Broadway song writer Lin-Manuel Miranda, perhaps the single biggest influence on his decision to pen a new concept album based on the idea of ‘a gender-swapped version of The Warriors‘ was, unexpectedly, none other than the original Gamergate movement.
Titled Warriors and penned by Miranda in partnership with actress Eisa Davis, who BIC readers may perhaps best recognize as having briefly portrayed Captain Girard on the fifth episode of Disney’s Ahsoka series, said album retells the story of the original 1979 The Warriors film, and thus the story of author Sol Yurick’s similarly-titled 1975 source material, with an all-female version of the titular gang, in doing so attempting to highlight the ‘feminist’ parallels between the group’s dangerous lives and the lives of contemporary women.
Notably, most of the other gangs in the story also receive the gender-swap treatment, with The Rogues, The Riffs, and The Hurricanes now composed of women (though The Riffs’ Masai is still male), and The Lizzies, under their name of The Bizzies, being presented as an all-male outfit.
Meanwhile – and likely for pointed reason – the ranks of the named police officers in pursuit of the gangs, as well as the vicious Turnbull ACs, are still made-up exclusively of male members.
Speaking to the Associated Press‘ Maria Sherman in promotion of the album’s release, the man behind practically every recent Disney soundtrack (Okay, that’s a bit of an exaggeration, but he did lead the teams on Moana, Mary Poppins Returns, Encanto, and the upcoming Mufasa: The Lion King, and also contributed to the original songs included in the live-action The Little Mermaid) revealed that while the idea for the project apparently mulling around in his mind ever since the completion of his 2009 film In The Heights, it did not fully materialize for him until roughly 2014 and the advent of Gamergate.
Asked by his host, “What did flipping the genders of some of these principal character’s unlock?”, Miranda explained that, not only was the gender-flipping “the coin flip that made me go, “I think I understand how this could be interesting to write,” but that said online movement was what made the entire concept ‘real’ for him.
“Around the time I had just gotten out of Hamilton, Gamergate was happening online,” explained Miranda. “Anonymous online trolls were just like, ‘I don’t think that women should be in video games. Here’s her f——— home address.’ And that kind of act, the chaos of deciding to destabilize someone’s life and then just going back to your computer, the first thing that I thought of was Luther shooting Cyrus, pointing to Warriors and going, ‘They did it.’ And now the Warriors have the rest of the night with every gang thinking they’ve broken the truce and they’re fighting for their lives over the act of one person with a gun.”
“I made that connection and then thought, ‘Well, if the Warriors are women, how does that change the narrative?'” he added. “At every point, it complicates it in a really compelling way.”
(In a separate interview with The Guardian’s Chris Weigand, Manuel would further describe the events of Gamergate as “terminally online dudes doxing women who dared to like video games”.)
Returning to the AP interview, building upon her partner’s point, Davis further detailed, “I think that it’s just so crucial to think about this — it’s a group of women that no one believes. Everyone is accusing you falsely, as Lin is saying, and what is it that you do? What is it that you try?”
“And of course, the way that we split it up is that there’s both this rush toward home, but then there’s also still a possibility (of peace),” the actress continued. “And so going back to this dream of peace is so crucial. But also, I think it was really important to keep going along the way and making sure that we didn’t actually just have the women step in and still just be doing male things.”
Released on October 18th, Miranda and Davis’ Warriors is now available to spin in both digital and physical forms courtesy of Atlantic Records.
However, despite its existence as an outright musical, as of writing, there are no current plans for the concept album to be adapted to either the live stage or the silver screen.
NEXT: Snopes Insists Gamergate Was A Coordinated Harassment Campaign, But The Facts Say They’re Wrong
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