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://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.