The result is thus disappointing. And it does not create anything of value.
Because unsurprisingly, people are not paying to the the "first black elf". Nobody care. So it's just alienating the core fanbase because they are fed up seeing their favorite franchise being ruined by quotas, and racial war, especially when all other aspects are lacking (scenario, dialogues, poor yet expensive CGI, etc)
I just wish most of this company get broke and we start to see smaller studio producing interesting stuff around diversity.
As you can tell I have no fetish for diversity as it's a criteria I found useless in a workplace or in my entertainment. But from time to time, I would happily watch a high budget and original production about some fantasy world happening in Africa (like Game of Thrones is for England) or in Thailand or whatever with all the folklore around it.
Rather than seeing divisive comment about :
"Amazing, we finally have some diversity among LoR's elf, take that racist Tolkien"
or
"Disgusting, they put some black elf".
As usual, I really feel this modern world is not for me, it's ruining most franchises one after the other, yet it's not creating any new interesting franchises.
The poor, and sometimes forced and contrived execution of an LGBT or female or a non-white character does really seem unnecessary. To me as an indian, sometimes it looks like the white man's guilt is showing when they even rewrite historical characters and insert such characters doing things that they would never have been able to do (e.g. the enjoyable but oh so historically inaccurate heroine of Miss Scarlet and the Duke - in her period, she would have probably been committed to a mental institute for the things she does in the show. Or the deliberate ignorance of "victorian" values in British society in some recent "historical" dramas, just to show some character doing things that would be really out of character for them in their period - Indeed, one wonders why such obvious white-washing of history in such a crude manner?).
As a someone who is not an American but enjoys American tv, sometimes I feel that the reason such characters are deliberately shown poorly (with lousy acting or writing), is because even show makers resent being forced to include such character. Obviously this doesn't help.
If a story requires an LGBT character go for it. If it requires a person of colour, great. But they do need to get a good actor and make sure the writing and the direction all add value to that character in the show without any blatant sermonising (show, not tell, at least on shows for grownups). It's not as if the American media doesn't know how to do this - there have been so many good characters, even main characters from such vulnerable group portrayed beautifully in past TV shows.
(Or perhaps, I am wrong - all this has nothing to do with inclusive politics and is just a way to manufacture outrage and keep the American public distracted from the real political issues).
It does remind me of when Resident Evil 5 came out; it had the usual characters but because it was set in Africa and therefore most of the zombies were African, cries of racism were abound.
If it's a historical retelling, then it should be as accurate as much as possible, within reason. If it's fiction/myth/fantasy etc then it doesn't really matter; who cares if Hansel & Gretel is a German fairytale, cast someone who's whatever non-white to play one of them in a new retelling of it. But tbh I think people just get antsy because Hollywood/West is literally the only industry having fingers pointed at for this. I don't think Bollywood, for example, has to worry about diversity/non-Indian representation at all.
Isn't it an interesting perspective from a writer? Inspiration and creativity comes from such moments, and tomorrow if this writer creates a gay character for some story, you can feel the author will do a good job of characterisation and making such character feel real. When the writing is good, an actor feels connected to it and the director and show-maker too are inspired to do justice it. Right now it doesn't often feel like that. sometimes when I see some of the awful effort of some of these LGBT / person of colour (PoC) / powerful women scenes, out of boredom I often find myself imagining how such a scene was shot - someone at the production unit suddenly remembers, "Ok, who is playing the token LGBT / PoC / Women? Let's get on with it. What's the scene about - Is it about them facing humiliation 'cos of their identity, showing them being accepted, a sex scene with them, or them finding their own voice or power?" ... (And later in the editing room some director instructing some intern) "OK, trim these hour long footage of the LGBT / PoC / woman character into 1 to 5 minutes snippets and insert it somewhere in episode 1, 5, 7 and wrap it up!" ...
As for every story requiring an LGBT character because they "exist everywhere", can't many other vulnerable / minority group too lay a claim on that? For example, I am sure there are more muslims in the USA than there are LGBTs - should every American TV show now start including muslim, Hindus, Jews, Sikhs, Indian-American, Chinese-Americans characters etc., etc? Obviously, you realistically can't. (And note that all these groups too face bigotry and hatred just because of who they are).
As a non-american, I prefer the previous format of American television where good story didn't have such contrived caricaturisation and only relevant characters that added to the stories. Will and Grace or Modern Family come to mind when I think of how LGBT characters were relevant, well integrated and portrayed well in the story. Recently I finished watching Atlanta and really love the show, especially due to the insights on black culture (in the US) it offered. Shows like "The Good Wife" and "The Good Fight" show women empowerment so naturally and elegantly that you don't even notice it while enjoying the drama. I feel such dramas do more justice to an LGBT / PoC / woman character than some token characters inserted forcefully.
No, and it's not even close. An estimated 20 million Americans identify as LGBT [1], compared to ~3.5M Muslims [2].
I wonder what might make someone underestimate the number of LGBT people in the US. Maybe... a lack of representation in popular media?
[1] https://thehill.com/changing-america/respect/diversity-inclu...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islam_in_the_United_States
Old things are going to be a product of their times and there's an easy solution to all of this: Write new material.
They're doing something cool by having the diverse cast, but the writing doesn't adjust to make a story that feels like it has a diverse cast
This makes for a more interesting story and lore; it gets people thinking: "Whoa cool, another nation with different people, I wonder what they're all about!"
Whereas in this show, and many like it (Wheel of Time), all nations have been forced together to form a single uninteresting soup where few have any cultural significance or quirks whatsoever, so as to avoid offending anyone with stereotypes, which could lead to (GASP!) mild and harmless racial jesting, stupidly redefined as violence against an oppressed minority group by vocal activists who live and breathe dismantling Western/European culture.
We can easily add in lore friendly blacks and do it in a way that makes less spoken about factions more interesting.
Why do low effort tokenism when you can do something interesting and still diverse?
All it takes is a bit of effort.
This is, indeed, not something everyone enjoys. But it is the more or less inevitable direction of the future.
The modern world is just that, modern. A medieval fantasy world has to play by those rules, in its own sort of ways. They're still walking and riding on horses, and magic is exceedingly rare in Tolkien's world. People don't just travel about.
Unsupportable. Tolkien was only concerned with giving England a distinct history. He probably didn't care about Europe and hated everything French.
Almost everyone assumes Middle-Earth is Europe. Try holding Tolkien's famous map of Middle-Earth up to a mirror to see that it is really strikingly similar to North America, too similar to be a coincidence. In fact, he got a lot of his Hobbit surnames from actual family surnames in, iirc, Kentucky; Baggins included.
I'd say it's more of a nitpick. You're right, he was more concerned about an English mythology rather than a European one. But I'm not sure where you're going by bringing up North America...
The same goes for early europe. Plenty of people from either. There were Roman emperors who were indigenous to (Northern) Africa.
They were decedents of Roman people living there and not sub Saharan Africans.
The Roman people living there being ethically Berber, that is, African. The name Africa itself probably coming from the Afri Berber tribe. They were both Roman people and also ethnically African.
And Berber tribes despite not being from subsaharan Africa did, through thousands of years of contact, have significant ethnic and cultural admixture with various subsaharan African peoples. Not that North Africa is less African than subsaharan Africa.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macrinus
> Macrinus was born in Caesarea (modern Cherchell, Algeria) in the Roman province of Mauretania Caesariensis to an equestrian family of Berber origins. According to David Potter, his family traced its origins to the Berber tribes of the region and his pierced ear was an indication of his Berber heritage.
Many of the top people in large empires aren't the same race or culture of the original people.
The caliphates had many groups not from the ruling elite's ethnic groups gaining high positions.
The romans had warriors and leaders of many different origins.
The mongol empire had and frequently used different ethnic groups in their armies and their leaders race-mixed with the locals.
Empires tend to be more colorful in order to control more land, its a natural effect of owning a lot of land.
https://www.heritagedaily.com/2016/05/ancient-dna-study-find...
North Africans are and always were the same people genetically. The North African emperors I am referring to specifically had Berber, not Punic or Phoenician ancestry. Which is still the dominant ancestry in North Africa today, and the Berber culture and language still lives on today.
Unfortunately it seems you are not knowledgeable of the history either of late Rome, of Carthage or of (North) Africa in general, and the authors of that website either did an incredibly poor job at it or are as well.
If the argument is that Middle Earth should reflect a proto-European history, should we just accept that everyone from the east are pictured as orcs; mindless, ugly, uncivilized brutes? Is everyone from Africa part of the Haradrim or the Easterlings? The comparison to a proto-Europe only works as long as you wilfully neglect the horribly racist parts of the comparison. Or are you okay with those parts too? If the addition of a black Harfoot, black elves, or Durin's wife being black is your critique of the show, then you should reflect on why you feel that way and why you're able to so easily excuse the clear racism in favor of defending "authenticity".
It's legit WILD to read some of the remarks about the show on reddit and IMDb. It's horribly racist rhetoric disguised as a defence of authenticity and staying true to Tolkien's work. If portraying the racist parts of Tolkien's work is * that * important, maybe we shouldn't make media based upon it?
"Middle Earth" was an old phrase used to refer to Western Europe in several Scandinavian languages. Tolkien, being a linguist, would have known this and chosen that turn of phrase deliberately.
PS: read "you" as in the collective you, not you specifically.
The problem with line of thought is that Lossarnach which mustered to Minas Tirith during the seige of Gondor were described as swarthy (i.e. dark skinned).
Also, the Easterlings were poignantly humanized by Sam.
"It was Sam's first view of a battle of Men against Men, and he did not like it much. He was glad that he could not see the dead face. He wondered what the man's name was and where he came from; and if he was really evil of heart, or what lies or threats had led him on the long march from his home; and if he would not really rather have stayed there in peace all in a flash of thought which was quickly driven from his mind."
All of this is a far cry from the stark dark people bad racism you've posted about a couple of times now.
Finally, the orcs also had slanted eyes, did Tolkien also hate Asians? Are Orcs supposed to be African or Asian? Pegging orcs as "dark people" simply doesn't fit as orcs don't closely match any ethnic group in particular. Orcs aren't even a single race for that matter. In any case, dark skinned=bad sounds a lot like allegory, which Tolkien finds distasteful. It is my theory that due to the time we all live in, you are (subconsciously most likely) hammering a square racism peg in a round hold.
If I'm watching a story about a Japanese Fantasy story - it will feel less immersive if you introduce a blonde character. Likewise with an Indian, or African story. Everyone would think this reasonable. What some people get upset about, is if we also say this about European fantasy stories. And I don't agree with this (the point that a tiny tiny fraction of people living in Europe may have been nonwhite in the 1400s and below I find mute quite frankly). I also find it... Not considerate to call someone racist for making this point. And quite frankly its a great example of where we are right now. Film and TV studios terrified in their casting decisions and feeling like they have to please the media etc. Nor am I convinced that global audiences want to see themselves in European fantasy stories. I don't want to see a blonde white guy (or black or Indian guy) in a Japanese Fantasy story etc. etc.
I do feel that including a multicultural diverse population in a European fantasy story does have a large risk of less immersion and I don't agree thats 'racist'. You can do it, but it's a different world and a different experience. What I'm arguing again, is fine do that. But not everything fantasy driven needs to be like that.
The lord of the rings trilogy was not diverse and quite frankly was astounding. Game of thrones was not diverse, and was astounding up to the final season.
The latter was savegly attacked by woke groups for not being diverse and I just so disagree with that view point.
Let's have diverse stories and let's have traditional too. There are lots of good fantasy stories by Western authors that do include diversity (fifth season, and Ursula la guin Wizard of the sea story etc.)
It sounds like a fart. Definitely lacking the talent of Tolkien to find the surgically precise word for each term, but I can understand the legal aspects of the need-for-control part.
Not for nothing, Europe is a continent. Whether you believe Tolkien based his works on or in Europe, both are false on their face. It doesn't even make sense, so please try to better articulate what you mean. Because you literally have argued that Tolkien based the continent of Middle-Earth on the continent of Europe, then you have waffled and changed your argument from in to on. Either way is nonsense. What you must have meant was Tolkien based his stories, not the element of his story setting, Middle-Earth, but the stories themselves, on history and mythology of the various peoples of Europe.
But, in fact, other than Scandinavian epics and myths, and specifically Finnish and Norse epics and myths, that is false.
If you can support your claim, you'd be more convincing. An example of some very similar non-Scandinavian European story found in Tolkien's work would drive your point home. But I am unaware of any example of, say, Italian or Romanian or Polish or Swiss or Danish folk stories or myths being borrowed by Tolkien. And we need not be so vague. Europe was never a single culture, but always many. And Tolkien was not writing to give Europe a history and mythology; that purpose was only for England.
Inexplicably, you chose to be incredibly vague. Just because France is in Europe does not make Europe representative of France. You can say the Eiffel Tower is in the Milky Way, but this is overly broad and imprecise; it makes far more sense to say it is in France.
Similarly, Tolkien borrowed from very specific Scandinavian sources, and that is borrowed; his works are not based upon these sources nor upon ancient Scandinavian culture. To conflate Scandinavia with Europe is the same mistake as conflating France with the Milky Way.
Your claim that Tolkien based his works on Europe is incongruous because it is overly general and imprecise, and it is also a pretty good example of the vagueness fallacy.
He was a gifted linguist, influenced by Germanic, Celtic, Finnish, Slavic, and Greek language and mythology.[1]
Yes, indeed, as the wiki you've drawn from states, Tolkien, the man, was influenced by his studies of various ancient cultures. But to create his fiction he drew from his own life, his Christianity, his experiences during WWI, and Norse and Finnish mythology. Tolkien did not draw on the entirety of the catalog of European mythos to build his world. If you can show me, say, how one of his characters draws from characteristics of a specific Greek hero or god, or likewise for any Germanic, Celtic, or Slavic stories, I'd really be genuinely interested.
I have already named the specific Finnish source that Tolkien borrowed from, and provided a specific example of Tolkien borrowing from Norse sagas, namely, using characteristics of Odin for a few of his characters. Please provide any specific example of Germanic, Greek, Celtic or Slavic influence in Tolkien's work, and name the source. Just one will do, so please take your pick.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._R._R._Tolkien%27s_influence...
I can’t understand what you mean by this at all and it sounds like an absurd thing to say. Can you please explain?
He drew heavily from the European sources he knew, but I don't recall any implication that it was meant to be Britain or Europe only.
""" In his 2004 chapter "A Mythology for Anglo-Saxon England", Michael Drout states that Tolkien never used the actual phrase, though commentators have found it appropriate as a description of much of his approach in creating Middle-earth. """
So this is critical interpretation and not something he literally said he intended. His quotes (also in the article) suggest he was drawing from English and Norse mythology, of course, but not that the cosmology of Middle Earth is solely English.
> I don't recall any implication that it was meant to be Britain or Europe only.
LOTR has a few clear mentions to America but is about the feelings of an English literature professor and ex-soldier seeing the good old times, gorgeous nature and European mythology that he loved, being replaced and crushed by industrial development and world war.
The themes are universal, could be adapted to other places and other mythologies, but would lose part of its charm in the process.
Under a disguise of epic fantasy the book is basically a metaphor of twenty century Europe in war times, and is filled with details token directly from his real war experiences and depicted metaphorically or directly. The kind of details that you can't invent or wouldn't notice, unless you had experienced it first. Details like describing how the infantry traveling long distances by foot towards the battle field, get out of the path and start walking into the fresh grass bordering the road to alleviate their sore foot pain.
That experience, plus his obsession to consistence, religious background (christian humanism) and expertise in European myths, old languages and literature, blends all together in a complex history that conveys an incredible sense of realism and immersion rarely achieved by other epic fantasy books.
Tolkien don't needs to be lectured about including strong woman characters in his work, or about the need to talk more about ecology, compassion or racism. Those themes are exquisitely treated in the book yet that is filled with a sense of adventure and a sublime love for nature (to the extent to mention how the raising sun in a foggy day illuminates the spiderwebs in the path).
About racism. This is not "uncle tom's cabin" by Peter Jacksons sake!. Most of the book describes different races allying to fight against the evil and befriending each other while accepting organically that they have other cultures and interests. So... Europe in the war. The book is as anti-racist as you can have
Tolkien didn't deserved that but, most of all, didn't needed to be "improved" like that
The issue with the Rings of Power and similar things isn't the anachronistic racial composition of the cast. It's just that they're badly written and badly acted shows. And, more perniciously, the show's media team likes to draw all attention to the criticisms based on race to make it seem like the main criticisms are all about race to deflect attention from actual, fundamental flaws.
Note that it's a myth that everyone in pre-modern Europe was white. This is a white supremacist trope easily proven wrong by, say, digging into the representation of POC in medieval European art.
https://www.npr.org/2021/05/06/994325620/going-medieval-on-w...
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/5-myths-about-the-mi...
That said, yes, people we'd currently code as black existed in Europe, though disproportionately in entrepots in the Mediterranean. If you proceed to e.g. Elizabethan England, most people wouldn't have been confused by the sight of a black person (cf Othello), though they'd likely be something of a curiousity (though still not considered black in the contemporary sense).
But there definitely were.[1]
Also, the idiots complaining about black elves are racist morons. There were, in fact, black elves in Tolkien's world. Though never depicted as such by artists, Eöl the Dark Elf (who was not Moriquendë, i.e. not a member of the Moriquendi or the Elves of Darkness) probably wasn't white. In The Silmarillion, Tolkien goes out of his way to describe Eöl's son as having white skin. There's no reason to do that unless his son was notably distinct in this way from his father.
Why would the British man go out of his way to identify himself with those bloody red-haired potato-fetishizing Irishmen? Or the pompous Frenchmen who cover their pervasive stench in perfumes and jam lard into anything they can find in some depraved vision of “high couture”? Or the barbarians and savages of the east, who can’t tell the difference between a puff of wind and God? The 12th century African man hardly runs around thinking “we’re all black, so we’re all the same so nothing to fight about” — they just choose a different division and massacre one another on that basis
You would only bother with white vs black racism when there’s enough blacks to identify against and vice versa; otherwise you choose different boundaries and compete on that. Religion, country, skin color, geography (eg mountain men vs hicks vs cityfolk); there’s more than enough choices to go around. And hell, there’s something stopping you from applying multiple boundaries simultaneously
Your 16th century farming peasant in the corner of England doesn’t see enough Africans or Middle Easterns or Asians to wield race as an effective identity. Your Roman’s could have, but they also had quite the diverse array of colors and folks through varying conquest — race probably played a role in internal conflict (Roman vs roman) but even then religion was clearly the far stronger identifier and a much stronger motivator for their slaughters.
Race and racial ideology were developed in Europe, but it was in tandem with the modern era, not before it. Think 17th-19th centuries. It served a concrete purpose: to explain and justify how the leading European nations interacted with their colonial subjects. But there was no reason for race before colonialism, so it never developed because it would have served no purpose then.
Though the word "race" was probably coined in tandem with British Imperialism, Black slavery and the modern era, race, in fact, does not exist. Race is entirely a social construction, and regardless of the words used in antiquity, the same concepts were used to discriminate against, stereotype, repress and enslave peoples from the very dawn of civilization.
Perhaps the most absurd assertion I've seen this year, in a year characterized by bizarre assertions.
[1] https://www.britannica.com/topic/race-human/The-history-of-t... [2] https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2014/01/05/260006815...
Not really, unless you consider (as most did in the first half of last century) Irish and Italians to be non-white.
The south side is larger and more diverse than you seem to believe
But then, when stories are told and retold, it's not quite the same story each time. Jackson's LoTR follows the books closely, but is not the same. Some plots, like Tom Bombadil, are taken out. Some are modified, like the rivalry between Rohan and Gondor.
Partly it's cinematic but also partly it is about what story the reteller wants to tell. When the Orcs attack Rohan and civilians suffer and run away, it feels like Jackson wants to emphasize the suffering of "normal" people, which gets less attention in the books.
If the reteller has an angle to the story which introduced actors who don't fit the "Nordic white people" angle, it's up to them. It might not be a good angle to take for other reasons, but nothing wrong with having your own slant.
For me, my conclusion is that fantasy really is inclusive. If we had black Romans then why not black Elves? Maybe you can use that to say so etching interesting about race, in a context that mimics normal life but isn't bound by its constraints.
Or maybe it's just woke. I haven't seen the series yet.
It's been showing a lack of the first two so far.
Star Trek: Voyager first aired in 1995, so it's been a while. I can't really come up with any meaningful differences between the two cases.
Certainly my reading of "Tolkien's Elves" has always been that they're a very light-skinned (dwarves are more ambiguous). I don't overly care if Elves are black- or white-skinned, just as I don't really care about the skin colour of Vulcans in Star Trek.
Yet at the same time, it somehow feels a bit different. I'm having a hard time to articulate why, but I think a big part of the reason is that it feels more forced with all the rhetoric of the last decade or so where everything and everyone is part of "white supremacist culture" and whatnot over what seem extremely minor issues to me.
Tim Russ was hired to play Tuvok presumably because his audition went well in a kind of "colourblind" hiring that is now, apparently, racist (I have a lot of criticisms of Voyager as a series, but Tim Russ' portrayal of Tuvok is not one of them).
I think what people resent isn't the fact that there are black elves, it's the forcing of it, and that everything is scrutinized at a microscopic level for alleged "racism" (e.g. [1]), and that not going out of your way to be "anti-racist" is racist in itself (as if lots of people don't already have enough problems on their own). I suspect that if the LotR movies had black elves – 20 years ago and in a different time – few people would have raised a ruckus over it.
Fights like this are like argueing over the dishes as a couple: it's not really about the dishes; it's a silly outlet of general dissatisfaction.
[1]: https://theconversation.com/how-hollywoods-alien-and-predato...
Who exactly _forced_ Amazon to do this? That article is just another opinion on the internet. If this is the thought police I think Amazon's gonna be OK no matter how they cast the elves.
What's funny to me is the in-advance-defensiveness when people wanna complain about "woke" casting. Witness the ridiculous discussion about Pinocchio in this discussion driven by the anti-woke complainers, because nobody otherwise cares about a stupid Disney movie for kids. Getting offended at how Pinocchio is portrayed, and they call minorities sensitive LOL
I know exactly what you mean and I think bridgerton does a great job of it feeling just natural and normal. Acting seems normal in an alternate universe, this feels like what history could have looked like. So it definitely can be done well, but I think it's so much easier to have shows just ignore details and just take you out of it.
When I see a dwarf in a fantasy TV show, I don’t see the colour of the dwarfs skin - I see a dwarf. The fact that people are uncomfortable by brown dwarves is ridiculous. What a strange hill to die on.
I am flabbergasted that this is even a topic of such heated debate at the moment. It would appear we, as a species, are not quite as far along as I would have thought.
The mind boggles.
European history should be portrayed accurately, be it fantasy or reality. It seems that those that shout loudest about cultural appropriation are the first to glorify cultural appropriation when it suites their world view.
Hard disagree. Fantasy and SciFi can be fun because they don't look like the real world. So many works are based on alternate histories that it's mind boggling to read this statement. Should the enitre genre of historical fantasy not exist?
As a fan of hard science fiction, having a believable history is important, but doesn't have to match today's history. Sounds like maybe you just don't like that genre? But to say it should always be portrayed accurately is not correct.
Yes, it's important that the Second Age is portrayed in historically accurate fashion.
This so much. Mixed skin color withing the same race in a fantasy world makes little to no sense to me. Also the fact that dumb characters (say the hobbit girls for example) are always depicted as white to avoid cheap woke backlash is so much of a clear sign of woke appeasement. At least give African mythology a chance and bring it to our screens, that'd make a lot of sense and would also bring a breath of fresh air to the fantasy world. Wokewashing a LoTR series adaptation gives me vibes of forced and lazy inclusivity.
Somehow nobody complains about loss of immersion when characters are changed to white, which happens 100x more often.
I'm actually asking in good faith because I can't recall any "to white" race swapping in the past few years.
All the ones I can think of were Ann Boleyn, the little mermaid, the coming beauty and the beast, the recent terrible resident evil, etc.
But there are plenty of others, if you search for "whitewashing in movies" you can find lists.
Anyway, here's the ones I can think of right away:
Ancient One in the Marvel movies to Tilda Swinton, although the comic character is kind of a racist stereotype, and would have issues in China, so they had good arguments for doing that change.
Staying in the comic universe, Bane and Ra's al Ghul in Batman movies.
Related to the first one; Benedict Cumberbatch plays Khan in the new Star Trek.
Making characters and nations with real substance is far more fun than just going back and changing something for political reasons.
I would rather see an introduction of african type regions in allegory for empires like The malian empire, Abyssinian Empire, Ajuuran Sultanate, or others rather than throw blacks into european type settings.
Even if we wanted to add blacks into europe type settings we could at least add lore reasons.
Many blacks were in spain under muslim rule and even at times the rulers of muslim areas of spain were black.
Just say that part of the continent was invaded, bam you can add in non-whites in a european setting.
We can do these things tastefully and add interesting lore.
As a black man I find it insulting to be given token characters of no substance, I would rather no inclusion than low effort shoe-ins.
I think it might be worth thinking about whether this is actually "European fantasty" or just "fantasy" that you're used to as thinking of European. For a thought experiment, imagine a young adult today who has never consumed any sort of fictional media (novels, movies, etc.), but otherwise has the same education in terms of non-fictional things (math, science, history, etc.) that you might expect. If you showed them two portrayals of a Lord of the Rings setting that were identical except for one using only fair-skinned, European-ancestry actors, and the other with the type of "diverse" casting that you're describing, would the latter seem somehow less believable? I'm not convinced that someone who hadn't already been primed to expect fair skinned, European-ancestry actors in fantasy due to having already consumed decades of content with that sort of casting would somehow find that more "accurate" in a world full of elves and dwarves and orcs and other fictional races alongside humans. In a vacuum, I don't think there's really any sort of tension between elements of traditional "European fantasy" (dragons, wizards, sword fights, etc.) and diversity when set somewhere that pretty clearly is not supposed to be set in medieval Europe (or really at anywhere at all in the history of Earth); insisting that some small subset of the lore happening to resemble European fantasy somehow implies that the entire fictional world has to demographically resemble medieval Europe seems like much more of an imposition of external cultural expectations than casting diverse actors is.
Most fantasy shows that are in English use British accents. It’s what we expect. But why not use a heavy southern U.S. accent? If you van accept this world with dragons and magic why can’t you accept a southern accent?
If it deviates too far from our expectations then it just seems like a bit.
Rings of Power, as far as I can tell after watching a single episode, wouldn't be good even if every single detail was exactly as Tolkien imagined it. Because the quality is just not there.
I'll be watching it to the end though, it's not impossible that it might become good.
Diverse communities within those races is a jarring juxtaposition - they're both super racist and super not racist at the same time.
The problem a lot of people have is when they read LOTR for example they presume everything is supposed to be relatable only to people of european ancestry. Other than Tolkein being influenced by a european background there is little you can reasonably say it requires europeans for adequately portraying the character.
Stories are meant to be told and if you want to tell a fantasy story to an audience you don't go out of your way to explicitly exclude anyone resembling your audience. That isn't being woke, that is just capitalism. I wouldn't like Abe Lincoln or Hery VIII to be portrayed by a black person but LoTR, Narnia and other stories that are european-inspired but not set in europe don't need such restriction.
I mean where was all this outrage when Cleopatra was portrayed by a white woman for example?
If the actors are good it makes no difference other than the initial phase of "I didn't imagine this character to look this way" but the same goes for hair color, height, stature, etc...
https://twitter.com/erik_kaars/status/1418911714175750147?s=...
We're starting to see more people display courage and stand up to wokeness. It gives me hope.
To be clear, fully agree. If you include a person who doesn't fit the time and style of where they exist, you need to give me a reason or I won't believe it. Reality is very often unbelievable, and good fiction/immersion requires believability, not reality. (Sidenote: this usually has nothing to do with race and more often how they act.)
For music and literature though, I think it's mostly that the mediums are not visual and so defies our culture of memes or quick messages. Hard to point at a screenshot of text and get likes unless it's under a sentence long. Also, good readers know good writing, and reading is dense enough that the general public won't read. So there's no real reason to go after books.
I want more diversity myself, especially more representation of normal gay characters (problem is is even gay writers always write camp/fem gay characters). And gay characters that aren't old/single/don't show love/get killed off.
But ethnic representation, which is a more visual/cultural representation, is a tough topic. On one hand I want more people of all kinds in everything, on the other I sometimes wonder why non-western countries like China/Japan/India etc aren't being pushed in the same way.
Hmm, I haven't seen Rings of Power, but your statement seems to be a not-so-subtle for a Think Bigger call for revolutionary new fantasy story settings.
Not just stories, not even worlds, but complete mythical ecosystems.
I've read a few fantasy stories lately by non-white non-male authors that were good, even great, like The Fith Season. Others that I was too dismissive of, with my own ugly biased offhand remarks, like Binti.
Ironically, I'd rather roll up a character in the Binti universe. Which seems like one interesting Litmus test for a "Kuhnian Paradigm" shift in fictional work.
Could I imagine sitting around with friends in a campaign in this world?
We'll always have the classic fantasy setting. It uses metaphor effectively to tackle capitalism and war and minority issues. But you can ironically escape that now. I think others saw that before me too.
I'm still thinking about it, but I do wonder if diverse casting works in European fantasy stories. The problem I have is that it generally pulls me out of the experience/ makes it less immersive. I welcome diverse castings in modern shows (though we don't need every show to follow a template 'diverse' casting). A common counter argument is, well you can suspend your disbelief and imagine a dragon, so why is a diverse community in a small village not ok? It just feels less immersive. Yes, I can go along with it - but I'm not sure it works. It feels like the modern world superimposed in a fantasy setting. I'd prefer to be sent to an alien world.
It is problematic, as years of discrimination in the real world for women/ethnic minorities were wrong and we should encourage equality in the corporate world. However the entertainment industry I wonder should in some ways be exempt. Maybe. One area where there isnt a discussion on 'diversity' is music and also novels. This is because there are tons of tons of novels and music bands to listen to. No one cares if a particular band is 'diverse'. So I wonder if the only solution out of all of this, is to have more shows - yes, make diverse inclusive European fantasy shows, but also make traditional european fantasy shows too etc. What I think will happen is that in such a scenario most European fantasy fans will choose traditional like shows. Because the story is more immersive and you are brought more into this old world. Maybe. Like I say, I'm still undecided. For modern/futuristic films I find diverse castings just as immersive.