system
A chat on subreddit /r/me_irl
human
They could have just race-swapped Fred, then, instead of throwing out Shaggy's personality completely.
gpt
Bingo. Instead they overcorrected Shaggy/Norv and made Fred a hot mess instead of the stable golden boy he was. Fred was a solid and stable character as is, he wasn’t perfect but he was a sweet guy who took care of his friends. The peeks I’ve seen of this made him a hot mess. I’m not engaging anymore with this series as it’s too messy. I get they want to normalize POC as they should, but not in the particular way of minimizing white people to such a degree it makes the introduced variety feel forced. You don’t make a right by adding more wrong. Honestly I don’t know what they were thinking here, my guess is they didn’t want the white guy to be the stoner and thus be represented as “the bad guy” (due to the drug crisis affecting white men in particular). However they could’ve let Shaggy just be the himbo that he was just like the OGs did, if people conclude he’s into drugs that’s a carryover not really canon. But by fucking up Fred they fuck up the entire gang since they operated on two very different sides of the same coin: Fred was the lead while Shaggy was the action. Velma was the brains and right hand man. Daphne and Scooby are the distractions. Throwing off Fred you throw off their entire operation and without Scooby the show further makes little sense.