So it seems like a non-creative way to get free promotion, but I think it distracts from storytelling.

The example I remember is how bad the 2016 ghostbusters reboot was. And the studio had this whole narrative about how sexist trolls were maligning the movie and this got repeated with any criticism. It seemed like astroturf that highlighted a small amount of internet sexist complaining and used it to smear any criticism for any reason. That seems like something that would be attractive to a beancounter-type.

I personally think they are simply not capable of making something engaging, BECAUSE they feel the need to promote todays philosophy over good storytelling. (They as in the streaming services)

And it's not just characters they destroy, but beauty, any past tradition whether good or bad. It really is about dismantling everything. (and somehow magically once you dismantle everything some sort of equity based marxism is what we're supposed to have). Why is marxism as a philosophy immune to dismantling? That's the million dollar question...

because then you'd have to confront that african empires had slaves too

That'd be a hell of a story. Compare the extent of an actual African empire: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mali_Empire

I only hope it will end soon.

And it's hardly rewriting parts of LOTR to have a black actor portray Legolas. Everything is still the same except the color of the guys skin. You'll be fine.

2022 it's something much more sinister. It's the entire postmodern philosophy mixed with equity forced into stories. LOTR is about good and evil and the triumph of good. It doesn't dismantle what good or evil is, it doesn't question everything, it's just a great story.

Unfortunately modern writers cannot bring themselves to write stories like this anymore, everything has to be questioned, everything has to be changed, everything sacred has to be unsacred, everything beatiful has to become ugly.

It's hard to put it into words. But it is happening. People in the media industry really have lost all sense of good storytelling.

That's what the GP is complaining about.

And I don't get why that rates a "Fine". What's wrong with race neutral casting?

> 2022 it's something much more sinister. It's the entire postmodern philosophy mixed with equity forced into stories. LOTR is about good and evil and the triumph of good. It doesn't dismantle what good or evil is, it doesn't question everything, it's just a great story.

You can't look at Tolkein's life and the LOTR and then just call it a great story. You can see the echoes of his personal experience in the work. It's no different than today.

That's exactly what people mean when they say wokesters use people's cultures as skins, with no content.

If you wanted to add African representation, let's say Zulu, you'd add something specific to Zulu culture: people, language, songs, stories, etc. But instead they just change some skin colours in an existing story.

That's not representation, that's just skin.

I don't really want to get into the validity/efficacy of that. I just don't really have an informed opinion. But I do think that's the reasoning.

I think that wanting to have a more diverse cultural backdrop for the stories we tell is something I can definitely get behind, but I don't think it's really that related to having a more racially diverse cast for a story with a decidedly Anglo/Euro origin.

If they produced movies with original storylines more regularly, then every minority would naturally find something they could relate to, simply because author would naturally produce contents aligned with their time.

Instead of that, studios give the impression of beeing hostage of the "diversity mob" which demand its payback on every single content. It's just pathetic, and a missed opportunity for truely great and interesting content.

What? Is there a law that says I can't enjoy art that doesn't include my skin color? If there's a TV series about Nelson Mandela, would you be okay with a white actor playing him? What about Rosa Parks? It's for inclusion right?

What I describe means you don't effectively hang a "Whites Only" sign on one of the larger productions happening today.

I guess that's the interesting problem the studios and equality advocates should try to solve. To me, what they're doing right now is close to an insult to the african-american community. It's like saying "there are really no original cultural production coming from your community, nor anything remotely interesting in your past writing about, so we'll have to recycle ours to make some room".

Again it's just skin color. Little bit dramatic to call that destroying continuity.

The thing you complain about is in the source material. Remember? "No man can kill me", "I am no man", stab stab stab.

>But watching these women beat up men is laughable tbh. Maybe ask some famle survivors of domestic violence how they feel about this.

How is that any different than tiny weak Hobbits killing giant spiders and otherwise being the heroes of the story?

Weak actually being strong is a repeating theme across the fanatasy/superhero/comic genre. And since they're primarily written by physically weak nerds the motivation is obvious. Now that women are being included in the process they're doing the same thing for the same reasons.

What you'll notice is that in better storytelling, there will be an explanation of why the hobbit can beat the giant spider. Outsmarting it, being invisible with a ring, whatever. Good storytelling means you make the impossible seem possible.

Now, all we have is token women who we all know are there because they are women, beating up men in ridiculously impossible ways, with no explanation of how. It's just that the writers want you to know that women are strong grrrrr. Because feminism. Well, it makes for terrible cinema.

Disclaimer: I have been handled pretty easily by women in BJJ and kickboxing / boxing drspite being 20 kg heavier and a head taller. And I am not un-trained. Get over it, competent and strong women do exist.

Edit (because I have to get of my chest): The latest Dr. Strange is propably the best example of bad story telling I've seen in a long time. I quit the MCU after Black Widow (I like the character and Scarlett Johansson) and swore to maybe watch the next Thor, max. Until I saw Dr. Strange was already free on Disney+, and I needed some distraction. All that bad film did was making me not watch any MCU film ever again...

I've seen a lot worse. Didn't seem bad here.

Please give me a timestamp in this scene when that happens:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MfJirrzRQ60&ab_channel=TheLo...

> Using the Phial of Galadriel, they managed to at first fend her off. The light of Eärendil's Star shone from the Phial, causing unbearable stabbing pain to Shelob's darkened senses, but she returned to attack Frodo, poisoning him with her stinger in a surprise attack just as they reached the exit of the cave on the Mordor side. Her venom paralyzed Frodo, and she then wrapped him in her web.

> Sam then assaulted the creature using Sting and the Phial of Galadriel in order to rescue his master. In a pitched battle, Sam managed to stab one of her eyes and injure her leg, but she held the upper hand. However, when she tried to use her stinger to inject Sam with venom, he dodged at the last moment and was able to stab her in the abdomen with Sting. This wounded her enough that Sam forced her to retreat using the Phial of Galadriel.

I'm not sure where good storytelling comes into men in films dodging bullets and beating up dozens of assailants or why the stylised violence suddenly becomes less believable because the person winning against improbable odds is female though. Or where the Tolkein original plotline involving a woman with a broken arm defeating a Nazgûl lord so strong it's prophecied no man can kill him in a swordfight fits into woke propaganda trends :D

Been happening since forever. Jesus was a dark-skinned Middle-easterner. It's funny that in nearly every story over the world of people who have claimed to seen Jesus in a miracle, he appears as their own race!

We can not prove anything about Christ's appearance and Christian values do not change based on that. So it's only natural that people will represent Him as they are used to see their own people.

It is a whole other game to change the description of a character with a well-established description and a set context.

Then the story is literally about a bunch of races solving a problem by working together. I mean the text it self literally celebrates diversity. Why wouldn’t you depict that in your casting?

This gets confusing e.g. in Star Trek where races exist in the fantasy sense and in a cultural sense (e.g. Being black (cultural race) is as much a part of Benjamin Sisko as being a human (biological race) is).

I think the both terms are correct, but I like races better because species also includes every lifeform which can never be characters, like ravens, wargs or even tobacco plants.

I don't recall there being any children of dwarves and men in the Tolkien legendarium, though I've not read it all by any means.

Given how common "interfertile but with sterile offspring" is between related species in nature, it's relatively rare in games and fantasy settings.

Usually.

Postmodern films got a tiny resurgence around 2007, but never with the same popularity as the pomo scene of the 90s.

So Lord of the Rings is made between those two modes. The movie industry is living in the wake of the unexpected Titanic success, and the studios are trying to create the next big hit. Movies like Gladiator, Pearl Harbor, Cast Away, Meet the Parents, The Mummy, Moulin Rouge! or Chicken Run etc. is what most people are seeing. The themes of the post modern movies is indeed far away.

Taking a cultural landmark and just repackaging it (new version with 20% more "minorities"!) where the race of the actors does not change anything for the story being told is just cheap tokenism.

By all means, I'd love to see new stories and new characters, and these stories could benefit greatly from a diverse cast. You can use the diversity then to show how different people value different things, how conflict can come up due to these differences, how conflict can be solved despite these differences, and so on... let's just not pretend that this crap that Hollywood wants to shove down our throats is any good just because it ticks the right woke checkboxes.

So what's the problem with casting someone of a different race then? There are plenty of talented non-white actors in Hollywood that get passed over for roles because the "canonical" race of so many classic characters is "white". I agree that the motivation at the corporate level is sometimes to check a "diversity" check box - but for the actors this means getting work and getting paid as opposed to not.

The issue is with the lack of new stories and the idea that just putting some color on "stories where the classic characters is white" is enough.

Diversity is something to be cherished. But if all we do is to, e.g, take Mozart pieces and give to conductors of different races and backgrounds, are we really promoting diversity or are we just putting a corporate spin in institutionalized racism, and implicitly perpetuating the idea that "classical" (or better, "erudite") music can only be valued if it comes from dead white people?

I haven't been watching much TV or movies lately, and one of the main reasons is that it seems that most of things come out are just re-heated servings of old stuff. The one exception that I can think of is Atlanta, which deserves praise exactly because it is more focused in telling a story and taking risks than in merely following a certain formula to please the audiences.

So, to repeat: the story of LoTR has been told already. It has its context and its place. To get diversity now, I rather see these talented people telling new stories, with their own voices and their own perspectives, not just put on some kind of display by the studios and used to manufacture fake virtue.

Every film makes hundreds of decisions to appeal to different sections of movie audiences and live up to expectations of modern movies from casting unusually attractive people to typecasting English accents in a non-English world to cutting half the original scenes in a book and shoehorning an implied love interest in there, yet somehow all this pandering to consumers' cultural sensitivities that actually change established storylines get less hostility than the decision to cast a black woman in a fantasy series whose entirely new [for licensing and lack of material reasons] plot lines aren't even known yet. If people consider Tolkien's world not having segregated casting to being "crap Hollywood wants to shove down our throats", it's hard to believe they're doing so more out of concern diverse issues aren't being represented properly and less out of hostility to the idea that white people might not always be the default.

the irony is of course that whilst being far from woke, Tolkien thought white supremacist ethnography utterly risible, included a Legolas/Gimli subplot as heavy-handed as any Hollywood antiracism parable, wasn't especially bothered about describing skin tones or appearance, and to the extent he did, made it clear that Middle Earth as a precursor to the modern world included darker skinned people.

Anyway, you just missed the point and I am not in the mood of arguing with someone who can't understand nuance in thought. Have a good day.

Go ahead and tell me where I am saying anything about my personal opinion about this particular show. (Hint, I didn't!) Also, please tell me why you chose to ignore everything I wrote in the third paragraph of the top comment.

You are passing a value judgement over what you think you read instead of what was actually written, and you continue to try to push that as an argument.

Stories have internal consistency. So while Tolkien has dragons and magic, they all make sense together. If a character pulls out an iPhone it doesn’t fit and detracts from the stories.

Saying “but iPhones? That’s a bridge too far, how can you believe in dragons but not iPhones.” The story isn’t random and it’s not everything.

Tolkien goes into genealogy of characters so switching the skin color requires lots of other changes to maintain that sense of reality. If a character now has purple skin instead of green skin, then that might mean something.

I think this also applies to any story and it’s not so much about changing characters demographics and more about bad storytelling that detracts from the reality of the story.

But Tolkien didn’t specify what traits inherit in which races did he? How do you know how skin tone inherits in this magical world?

Even in our universe we have species such as Chimpanzees which grow darker skinned as they age? How do you know the same doesn’t happen with wizards? In our natural world color is indeed quite dynamic. Even human skin tones, hair colors, etc. are quite dynamic in our world (even among related individuals). In a magical world there is nothing preventing the different races from being even more dynamic and diverse.

Note that Middle-earth Earth ('Arda') supposedly is normal Earth: LotR takes place during the Third Age, whereas we're currently in the Sixth or Seventh Age.

Modern humans are one of the most homogeneous species we know of (apart from the our crops that we have bred into homogeneity) and even humans show very dynamic inheritance patterns. A red hair can pop up after several generations of different hair colors for example.

There is no reason to assume that genetics in different (often magical) species is less dynamic then in modern humans. If anything we should have more variety and more dynamic traits as different races are interbreeding then today. If only for the reason that more diversity opens more possibilities for more creative and fun stories.

It depends on the setting.

If you did a find/replace on LOTR for "ivory" with "ebony", zero elements of the story would be impacted.

The world was designed in this way for a reason, by the author. It's the same thing the other way around: changing every character from black or 'asian' to white, if the story is otherwise unaffected, would be ridiculous.

"It must be to appease Twitter, can't possibly be because the actor had a good audition" seems pretty racist. If Amazon was afraid of Twitter, they'd be pro-union.

> It's the same thing the other way around: changing every character from black or 'asian' to white

That's not the same thing, though. The new LOTR series hasn't changed every character to Black or Asian. Nowhere near it.

But yeah, it'd be pretty weird if a TV adaptation _was_ word-for-word the same as the book, honestly. That's virtually never done, and rarely ends well when it is.

Also, I think most aren't actually opposed to minorities being in the show, but rather the hamfisted way they think theyll be included with. (I personally expect racism being a big part of the show that will need to be fought.)

Not that I think this is _particularly_ relevant (as mentioned elsewhere, most of the characters aren't even _human_, and it's not like he generally specified "but if they _were_ humans, the Ringwraiths would definitely be white"), but LoTR was finished in 1949. There were lots of non-white people in the UK in 1949; if you've heard of the Windrush scandal, the people impacted by that arrived the year before, and it's not like they were the first non-white people in the UK...

I agree that this would be extremely hamfisted. Especially considering the books already have some metaphors for racism like the strained relationship between elves and dwarves. However, I also think this kind of a thing is just a symptom of bad writing - not some woke conspiracy.

The Rohanim, for instance.

Or, in the racist euphemism way you've chosen to use it, the Haradrim.

[0] Vancouver School Board cuts honours programs

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/vancouver-sc...

https://vansd.org/highly-capable-services/

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/04/us/california-math-curric...

"The draft rejected the idea of naturally gifted children, recommended against shifting certain students into accelerated courses in middle school"

> The model has been in place since 2014, yielding a few years of data on retention and diversity that has been picked over by experts on both sides of the de-tracking debate. And while the data is complicated by numerous variables — a pandemic now among them — those who support San Francisco’s model say it has led to more students, and a more diverse set of students, taking advanced courses, without bringing down high achievers.

> California’s recommendations aim to expand the options for high-level math, so that students could take courses in, say, data science or statistics without losing their edge on college applications. (The move requires buy-in from colleges; in recent years, the University of California system has de-emphasized the importance of calculus credits.)

What’s deeply evil is your opinion purporting your straw man is the only way forward to blatantly push your agenda.

Edit to add:

Seeking equity is about surfacing relevant merit, and fighting irrelevant demerits. For example if someone has the skill to be a great engineer they should not be given the job of taking notes in meetings just because they are a woman. Gender is irrelevant to engineering. But many people who aren’t male find their engineering career progression slowed because of their gender. That is not an equitable outcome.

But obviously it’s impossible to create an equal outcome: you can’t magically make everyone on Earth a great engineer.

To me, “freeing the outperformers” sounds like “meritocracy” which I wholeheartedly support!

Equity is pretty explicitly anti-meritocratic. E.g. a woman should be hired over a man, or a black should be accepted to university instead of an Asian, not because they’re more skilled or have greater potential, but to address historical grievances and/or ensure proportional percentage-wise representation.

Equity has much lower stakes. It’s about the ability (opportunity) for each person to live the best life they can, free from oppression. It’s not necessary to rule over other people to do that.

Equity and meritocracy share similar challenges in that a social order already exists, and therefore the determination of merit is currently being determined by specific people. So it’s not objective.

Equity is a goal that is very hard to reach. What you’re complaining about are some admittedly blunt tactics to try to get there. But they’re not in themselves the goal.

Even if you don’t like those tactics, it’s a bad look to say that the goal of equity is “deeply evil.” It’s like saying “everyone getting a fair chance is deeply evil.”

Edit to add: an example of a relatively uncontroversial tactic to improve equity is accessibility engineering for websites. Being visually impaired doesn’t stop a person from thinking, so we have made social rules that websites should be constructed in a certain way so that visually impaired people can interact with them.

Which isn't what's happening lately. Asians and whites are discriminated in university admissions in preference to latinos/blacks. Men are discriminated against when hiring and doling out scholarships to the benefit of women. Openly racist policies are being proposed ("reparations") or even legislated [0] in the name of "anti-racism". Non-extreme-left viewpoints are being suppressed. People are being cancelled for making jokes, or for supporting biology (e.g. biological sex).

This isn't happening in the name of "meritocracy", or in the name of "equality". It's happening in the name of "equity". It's bullying, it's repression, it's discrimination, it's evil. You might mean good (hell, even Hitler just wanted to improve the world!), but if your way to justice requires massive injustice along the way, well, I hate to break it to you, you're just evil.

[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/03/us/oregon-cares-fund-laws...

This is religious dogma, because it's just not true. We are not the same, and you will always have differences in outcome in society.

If you cannot see this, you are trapped in religious level dogmatic thinking.

(PS: if you want to talk about equality, which we might perhaps call equality of opportunity, I'm all for it. But equity is certainly not that).

> This is religious dogma, because it's just not true. We are not the same, and you will always have differences in outcome in society.

> If you cannot see this, you are trapped in religious level dogmatic thinking.

Equity is something that societies create, not an assertion about people's innate abilities or a statement of fact about the universe.

For example, we make buildings handicapped accessible rather than simply declaring that all people are able to walk.

> (PS: if you want to talk about equality, which we might perhaps call equality of opportunity, I'm all for it. But equity is certainly not that).

Perhaps it would be illustrative to show that you could actually make the exact same rhetorical sleight of hand about "equality of opportunity":

"Equity of opportunity means you believe every person is equal in their opportunity. This is religious dogma, because it's just not true. We are not the same, and you will always have differences in opportunity in society."

This is clearly silly because "equality of opportunity" is a goal you are aspiring to rather than a statement of fact about current society, but the same applies to "equity."

You could also say the same thing about "justice" or any other concept that's not actually a statement of fact about society.

I'm actually not sure where the idea that "equity" is an assertion that outcomes are equal as a matter of fact comes from. It doesn't seem to be a definition that is used anywhere except when people are trying to make this argument that "equity" is obviously absurd and therefore we should abandon it and focus on "equality of opportunity."

Note that this is completely separate from any argument about to what degree we should attempt to achieve "equity" versus "equality of opportunity"; it is simply an issue with this argument using a dubious definition of "equity" to show that "equity" is obviously absurd being a bad argument.

"Everyone will be working highest paid jobs" vs "Everyone can have highest paid jobs (if they put effort)"

You can't make people go for highest paid jobs, but you can definitely let them decide if they're interested in trying to get them.

Of course the people in favour also say what you just said, which just shows how completely conflicting their views are.

For example there were huge controversies in the fourth century over homoousion (“same in essence”) vs homoiousios (“similar essence”).

Reminds me of equity vs equality.

Amazon literally make (made? not sure is it still going) a TV drama about Nazis. I think they can cope.