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.