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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   34380 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 13, 2023

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Well, Wizards of the Coast is making Aragorn Black.

This doesn't even make sense storyline wise. What with Aragorn being descended from the kings of Numenor, it's not as if he could be from some distant land. I suppose there is still the possibility that all the Numenoreans are black, but, Arwen's white in the same picture, and she, being the daughter of Elrond, is closely related to the line of the Numenorean kings.

It's clearly for the sake of diversity, but couldn't they just do things in their own intellectual property instead of messing with what belongs to others? There'd be no harm in making up a ton of new Magic characters who just happen to be black, instead of changing already beloved characters from who they are.

But at least, could they have gone with someone who it would not mess with the backstory, like Gandalf, who has no national origin? I suppose that would make the moniker of "The White" a little ironic, but that's still better than the current state, to me, at least.

This significantly decreased the chance that I get cards from that set. I play, (but I don't spend very much on it), but if this is supposed to appeal to a fanbase, whether to get them to start playing, or get them to spend more, it would probably be wise not to alienate them. Why not put your diversity where it won't hurt your bottom line?

Rings of Power had some questionable things racewise (and a whole lot more unquestionably bad things in other domains), but at least it wasn't doing this.

The interesting thing to me is, there was a black Boromir at one point, and there was zero controversy. I'm assuming that's because a) it was a musical, so it was simply the best actor who auditioned, b) it was done in good faith - that is to say, it wasn't "Let's make Boromir black," it was "Who's the best actor who auditioned?" and c) there wasn't an issue with verisimilitude.

Wha...why? How?

If I try to play devil's advocate, first reflex is that it's a Hermione situation. "Nuh-uh, he never said Aragorn wasn't black!" Yeah, that's not true at all. Second attempt: maybe they're desperate to divorce from the Viggo Mortensen portrayal? I'm sure Arwen Undomiel looks nothing like Liv Tyler...oh. Third: nope, I'm out of ideas.

Apparently this isn't new. It is, however, explicitly ideological.

Of the first goal, Styborski explained, “The Lord of the Rings is about the different peoples of Middle-earth coming together to fight Sauron, finding strength in their diversity. We want to make this appealing story fresh and relevant to an even wider audience.”

It's just so petty.

WotC hates white people.. They aren't even being subtle about it.

“This is not the face of the hobby anymore,” Brink said, “and I think there’s been mistakes made in years past where people assumed that D&D players were all, you know, white dudes in a basement. Which has been a faulty assumption for a lot of years and gets more and more false every day. And so in my viewpoint, guys like me can’t leave soon enough.”

"I'm never writing another white main character and that's on period"

"White men. I mean, really. Where to begin."

"I remind myself of this every time doubt or imposter syndrome begins to creep in. I'll be damned if I sit there waffling while some mediocre white dude who thinks he's the shit swoops in and steals the opportunity. Take the chance. Do the thing."

"When did mohawks become the hair style of choice for white trash kids?"

Imagine if any other group of people was the subject of these tweets.

The Dungeons & Dragons Movie Intentionally Emasculates Its Leading Men

While speaking with Variety, Daley and Goldstein discussed how Michelle Rodriguez's Holga the Barbarian and Sophia Lillis' Doric the Druid tend to engage in the frontlines of battle compared to their male party members. "That was not an attempt at wokeness on our part," Goldstein said. Daley elaborated, saying, "Swear to God, it wasn't. We liked that Holga is the bruiser that does the dirty work for Edgin, and he doesn't like to get his hands dirty. We also love emasculating leading men."

WotC has a full blown culture of hating white men, and wanting to see them miserable. They must be denied anything they enjoy, and all the things they used to enjoy must be ruined. They love watching white men suffering and miserable. They literally could not be any more clear about this.

Stop giving money to people who hate you. They aren't even hiding it anymore.

We liked that Holga is the bruiser that does the dirty work for Edgin, and he doesn't like to get his hands dirty. We also love emasculating leading men."

The thing is... it didn't have to be this way. Bards (from at least 3E onwards, I can't recall if AD&D 2E was where they were badass or not) are inherently funny. You're down there in a dungeon, playing a whistle or something, while everyone else is stabbing things! You don't have to make it "haha men".

Also, isn't there a male paladin in the upcoming movie? I'm pretty sure they're frontliners (except, you know, for Paladins of Murlynd, but I'm pretty sure WotC doesn't really care about Greyhawk anymore).

We like our male heroes to be challenged and not simply heroic," Goldstein explained

That... implies that female heroines shouldn't be challenged, which is just bad writing. Even the pulpiest of pulp heroes, such as Solomon Kane or John Carter of Mars, are challenged. All the damn time! Even Aragorn, who's already completed his character arc, is challenged during the events of the Lord of the Rings!

That... implies that female heroines shouldn't be challenged, which is just bad writing. Even the pulpiest of pulp heroes, such as Solomon Kane or John Carter of Mars, are challenged. All the damn time! Even Aragorn, who's already completed his character arc, is challenged during the events of the Lord of the Rings!

These people live in a world where white males never earn anything. Merit is a myth. Everything is just handed to them. It's privilege the whole way down. It doesn't reconcile with the heroes journey as we know it. I think it's why they write their minority characters which "fix" things the way the imagine white males have it. Arrogant, obnoxious, handed everything, and not challenged in the slightest. They think it's some sort of role reversal. It just shows their bigotry.

This mindset was well-embodied by Mr. Chavez (Todd's Latino adopted father) in BoJack Horseman when he was explaining his harsh parenting style, which had failed to straighten Todd out:

I know I was hard on you when you were growing up, but I was trying to protect you. Nothing came easy for me. It took hard work, focus, discipline to get me where I am today. Things didn't just work out. But I should have realized: you're white.

I'm surprised you didn't connect the dots here and claim they're projecting, because I can imagine they resemble this caricature of privileged white guys more than they realize.

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You know how sometimes some Robin DiAngelo type will ignorantly claim "White people have no culture"? When in reality, they are just totally oblivious, in all the worst ways, to the absolute cornucopia of white culture around them? That all the books written by white people are white culture? And all the movies. And all the music. And all the games. And all the architecture. If it was made by a white person, with whatever magic sauce every person's unique cultural heritage brings to the table, then it's white culture. But to a subset of people, this simply does not exist. How they can not see it is beyond me. But lately I notice people cognitively mutilated in ways Orwell wouldn't have thought up in his wildest dreams. So it is what it is.

Or worse, they view the existence of white culture, or anything at all that white men can enjoy and see themselves represented in and valorized in, as innately harmful to everyone else. And it must be destroyed. I'm sorry, I mean "fixed".

This hypothetical ur-racist is the exact sort of person utterly incapable of perceiving wokeness. It's just normal to them. "Being a decent person". No amount of pointing out their hatreds will make a remote impact on them. It's only wrong to hate people, and white men aren't people. They demonstrate how they've dehumanized white men every time they open their mouth. It's compulsive.

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I still wonder incredulously about how this happened. How an ideology swept seemingly everybody and nobody noticed, and anyone who believes it refuses even to name it, to recognize it is a concrete set of views that can be evaluated, and affirmed or rejected.

Like arjin_ferman wrote, we noticed, and there were plenty of fairly high profile fights around it. Possibly the most famous of which is the affair of reproductibly viable worker ants, aka Gamergate, which still gets referenced to this day 9 years later to be blamed for the rise of Trump and the alt-right and fascism and whatnot.

But in terms of how "wokism" became the force it is today, being so ubiquitous and invisible as to be water to a fish by many people (one could also make the analogy to white privilege to white people if one wants to be meta about it), I think one significant factor is the education system being infused with this stuff, and infused for several generations. It's fairly well known that much/all of the academic basis of what we call "wokism" started at least 50 years ago. The famous and influential paper White Privilage: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack was published in 1989, and from what I understand, this wasn't breaking particularly new ground in the "field."

In that half a century plus of this ideology being developed and taught, teachers have been taught to teach this stuff to kids, who in turn have grown up to be teachers who teach more of this stuff to kids. When you're taught only this as the only correct ideology as a kid, then as a teacher you're simply going to be unable to teach the next generation of kids to consider anything else as possibly correct. This process is leaky and imperfect, but at some point it reached critical mass. It also has some very strong defense mechanisms; it hijacks the common youthful impulse to rebel by always positioning itself as the ideology of the weak underdog against the powerful man, and it also has its own explicitly anti-rational/anti-empirical methods of epistemology that places barriers in people's ability even to study other ideologies, much less adopt them.

I think there are other extrinsic forces at play that helped it along as well, such as the fact that this time period was very closely after the US civil rights movement which is generally agreed upon as having been righteous and heroic, but which inevitably left fewer battles to win for people who wanted to follow their heroes. If you're a progressive, you have to progress beyond the prior generations' progressive victories, in order to find any meaning as a progressive. Thus compelling people to create new and improved versions of racial justice, leading to things like denigrating colorblindness in favor of explicit racial profiling. I also think the well known echo chamber effect in social media in the past 15 years played a factor on all sides, but with "wokeness" in particular, the aforementioned anti-rational thinking made its effect even stronger (I would guess similar things happened in traditional religious circles and other conspiracy theory circles, though I would also guess that the former group there wasn't as influenced by social media just due to not using it as much).

All this (and more, I'm sure), and we're seeing the results play out. It was clear to me as early as 2015 that we were seeing a new religion in action, one whose great innovation, in this unusually secular era, was convincing its adherents that it wasn't a faith-based religion at all. I think this is somewhat analogous to Christians (and likely followers of other religions, though Christians are the only ones I've personally encountered) who say that Christianity isn't a religion, unlike those other things like Judaism, Buddhism, or even atheism.

How an ideology swept seemingly everybody and nobody noticed , and anyone who believes it refuses even to name

Of course they noticed, there were several massive ideological fights about it. People tried warning against it, and organized to oppose it.

This is one of the things that opened me to conspiracism. You wouldn't get so many people pretending nothing happened, if this was just a new ideology becoming popular.

The noted reluctance of social justice advocates to name themselves (and here's a new article from de Boer on the subject, even!) does remind me a little of something like the Mortal Name from Unsong, or how, in Warhammer Fantasy, actually saying the name of any of the Chaos Gods as a Chaos worshipper can get you turned into a mutant, but I suspect the real reason why is something more complex: to admit the boundaries of the group or category you belong to may actually be to surrender the ability to set those boundaries yourself.

Granted, social justice advocates more tend to position themselves as being in the moral spotlight, but I think there is a similar phenomenon here, where they can't let themselves be pigeonholed as being a distinct subset of the left wing. After all, if they organized into their own political party, they'd have to actually fight in elections and such--too risky, perhaps.

I mean, SJ names itself all the time. It's just that the words it uses are words which already mean other things - "moral", "decent", "compassionate", "sane".

I think they've grasped something that even Blair missed; if you don't even have a word for "Ingsoc" separate from the word for "good", it becomes impossible to even utter the crudest of blasphemies "Ingsoc is ungood" in a comprehensible fashion. All you can say is the meaningless "Good is ungood". Yudkowsky, though, did not miss it:

I don't think you could twist them far enough around to believe that eating babies was not a babyeating thing.

Any nerd hobbies that you're aware of that haven't succumbed to this? I really liked Magic as a kid and was thinking of trying to get back into it, but after reading that... maybe not.

Any nerd hobbies that you're aware of that haven't succumbed to this?

No. I thought Battletech was immune... and then things got weird there too. Battletech by HBS basically extirpated white people from the region under the reasoning that a millennia of multiculturalism basically fucked the ethnicities we have today out of existence. It'd be fine for another setting, but 4 decades of lore for Battletech really push back against that retcon. It was very much a universe of monocultural colonies, with a few multicultural imperial capitals. Or sometimes worlds with one monoculture of colonist and then a more recent monoculture of colonist from a few hundred years later. They don't get along.

Lately things got so bad Catalyst Game Labs fired a fiction and source book author they've worked with for 30 years for wrong-think. Because the usual people with obvious personality disorders (and pronouns in their twitter bios, but I repeat myself) were crying crocodile tears about his hidden... I honestly can't even keep it straight. Some sort of cryptic lost causism or nazism he was hiding inside the Battletech fiction?

I've found myself retreating to retro PC games and woodworking. They are still very white, and very male, and lack any and all of the senseless, hateful, often self loathing compulsory white male bashing you see in other hobbies. But I'm afraid to get too attached. I feel like I'll blink and suddenly "Woodworking so white" will be a nationally trending hashtag, and suddenly every youtuber I've been watching the last year will have some sort of come to Jesus upload where they make all the politically required mouth sounds about how evil white people are, and how the hobby needs to "change" to become more "diverse and welcoming". And that will establish the new baseline, and every upload I see from then on will have preambles and postambles repeating the new politically required slogans. When all I fucking want is to watch an instructional video about how to assemble the apron, legs and surface of a table. Preferably with mortise and tenon joinery, and with some advice or tips about how to account for wood movement so the whole thing doesn't crack viciously after a few seasons.

I think BattleTech isn't completely lost. Tex of the Black Pants Legion is the closest thing to the face of the current BT fandom, and between him and the rest of the Legion, there's still a contingent of the fandom that leans right-of-left. When the Blaine Lee Pardoe thing went down, Hutz Fandango, one of Tex's editors, went so far as to try reaching out in the comments section of Razorfist's YouTube interview with Pardoe (I can't link this, though, it seems to be privated now).

The HBS game thing is news to me, as someone who played through the main campaign. Like, yes, a lot of characters in that story are dark-skinned, but the Aurigan Reach is also a Periphery nation, AKA literally the boonies as far as the colonized galaxy goes. You still get cameos from notable characters from the lore, and two in particular are still white guys. I haven't tried the more free-form career mode yet, but I'm willing to bet I'll at least find some white guys if I were to journey out to Steiner or Davion space.

I think a novel from the 80's/90's did mention the "great Inner Sphere genetic melting pot" or something like that. There is precedent for multiculturalism, but it can be quite weirder than modern progressives might expect.

Tex of the Black Pants Legion is the closest thing to the face of the current BT fandom, and between him and the rest of the Legion, there's still a contingent of the fandom that leans right-of-left. When the Blaine Lee Pardoe thing went down, Hutz Fandango, one of Tex's editors, went so far as to try reaching out in the comments section of Razorfist's YouTube interview with Pardoe (I can't link this, though, it seems to be privated now).

Tex is a gift and a gentleman. But he's also chronically depressed and easily bullied. He's been pressured into disavowing other wrong-thinking Battletech content creators before. He likely will again. He'll likely either convert fully, or be bullied out of the fandom.

I dunno, there was that thing from when he talked with Arch. I doubt that made him friendlier to the woke.

There are lots of RPGs besides D&D. If you still have nostalgia for D&D, the Old School Revolution is a broad community that has produced a ton of retro-clones based on various versions of the original game. (There is some wokeness in the OSR community, but being mostly made up of aging white dudes who played D&D when they were 12, it is, as you might expect, much less pronounced.)

Didn't the knives come out for OSR a few weeks/months ago?

Old School Renaissance, or OSR, is a gaming movement whose players claim they are “against outside politics permeating their game space,” said Dashiell. These players support the use of traditional fantasy tropes in game design, such as the existence of “good” and “evil” races with no nuance. OSR gamers are often seen as the old guard of tabletop gaming and tend to idealize the past, which “defaults to a white, masculine worldview,” Trammell said.

There are lots of RPGs besides D&D.

There are, but the RPG "community" increasing has the uber progressive as default, everyone else is a child devouring witch problem. There are open racist on one side... and open racist of a different valence on the other. The extremes have eaten the middle. You must decide if you hate white people, or hate brown people. Choosing not to choose is like thinking you can not join a gang in prison. You're just gonna get corn holed by both sides.

Choosing not to choose is like thinking you can not join a gang in prison. You're just gonna get corn holed by both sides.

You know you can get by in prison by being otherwise useful? A friend got by by making snacks rather than joining a gang.

Why not put your diversity where it won't hurt your bottom line?

That would be tokenism, by their calculus. Tokenism is meant to get the first foot in the door in anticipation of forcing their way in, not to be permanently wedged in the door.

Most of Disney’s “first ever canon gays” have been designed explicitly to be able to be cut from foreign editions where theaters risk violence for showing homosexuality. That’s now as offensive as no representation at all.

Black Aragorn and White Arwen is silly, since they are both descended from the twins Elrond and Elros. We can take it that Elrond, as Arwen's father, is still white, so are we to believe that Elros was black? Or that Aragorn's ancestors have been marrying black spouses since (a) the foundation of Númenor (b) the foundation of Gondor and Arnor (c) Gilraen, Aragorn's mother, was black?

This is just to whip up publicity, and by now the DEIB lot should be getting suspicious of how companies are using Diversity and If You Object, You're Racist in order to get strong reactions for the sake of sales. It's like corporate Pride month - they don't care about BIPOC, they're just going along with what's in vogue and making money off you!

As for the beards, though I've soured a little on "The Nature of Middle-earth" as edited by Carl Hostetter (mostly due to the "well ackshully" quoting of it in regards to 'do Dwarven women have beards?' in regard to Dísa in The Rings of Power), you are correct as to what it says re: beards and Aragorn:

When I came to think of it, in my own imagination, beards were not found among Hobbits (as stated in text); nor among the Eldar (not stated). All male Dwarves had them. The wizards had them, though Radagast (not stated) had only short, curling, light brown hair on his chin. Men normally had them when full-grown, hence Eomer, Theoden and all others named. But not Denethor, Boromir, Faramir, Aragorn, Isildur, or other Númenórean chieftains.

Book Aragorn is definitely not black, how racist of Tolkien!

Suddenly Frodo noticed that a strange-looking weather-beaten man, sitting in the shadows near the wall, was also listening intently to the hobbit-talk. He had a tall tankard in front of him, and was smoking a long-stemmed pipe curiously carved. His legs were stretched out before him, showing high boots of supple leather that fitted him well, but had seen much wear and were now caked with mud. A travel-stained cloak of heavy dark-green cloth was drawn close about him, and in spite of the heat of the room he wore a hood that overshadowed his face; but the gleam of his eyes could be seen as he watched the hobbits…

…As Frodo drew near be threw back his hood, showing a shaggy head of dark hair flecked with grey, and in a pale stern face a pair of keen grey eyes.

I now look forward to WoTC producing a Magic deck showing Shaka Zulu as Chinese. Because we're doing things for a modern audience, representing the modern world, right? And having people be all one race as per traditional sources is racist and bigoted, right?

There's a significant character that breaks the overwhelming trend of "Eldar are beardless"--Cirdan the Shipwright!

Though Denethor, Boromir, and Faramir should all be beardless, as I believe they had recent half-elven ancestry via Dol Amroth.

Círdan is the one exception and is unique in that regard. But now that all bets are off because this is the Modern World, I want Afro-Caribbean Mulan, Hispanic Anansi, Javanese Pocahontas and so forth. What's sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander!

Does WotC attribute the creation of cards (artist, idea, mechanics, whatever) to individuals? Who actually made this card?

You can see the artist at the bottom (Magali Villeneuve), but that doesn't mean that the artist didn't have orders from above.

Also he has a beard, which is pretty clearly not canon (although the movies are probably to blame for that one)

There'd be no harm in making up a ton of new Magic characters who just happen to be black, instead of changing already beloved characters from who they are.

"Mirage" was an MTG set from the early 2000s that was heavily african-inspired; most of the humans on the cards were black, and the ones who weren't were swarthy north-africans. Teferi originated in this set, a good-hearted trickster wizard.

Jammura (the africa-analogue continent on the main plane, Dominaria) has been almost completely untouched since then, apart from the small, unbeloved expansion Prophecy and a few random mentions, and characters like Kaervek getting timeshifted cards. Oh, and in the set where they go to the Egypt plane, lots of people were very black, because Kangs and Sheit.

Instead of making anything resembling a fantasy Africa plane or doing a nostalgia-trip or re-make of mirage (like Coldsnap for Ice Age or the Brother's War flashback set) they've just been throwing in random black vikings and froofy-haired planeswalkers like Kaya.

Honestly seeing that card makes me glad I quit playing Magic entirely five years ago, and it has little to do with making Aragorn black (which is stupid and jarring exactly because it makes no sense for reasons already outlined). The card's art is bad (nothing new for Magic, but at least the bad art used to be kind of quirky), the card name is stupid, the flavor makes no sense (the war is basically over when they get married, and they don't fight together), the mechanics are completely uninspired and have little sensible connection to the flavor, and the whole "let's make a boring cash-grab set based on random other fantasy IP" ...ugh. About the only thing that makes sense about the card is the color.

In Middle-Earth there's very little to do with (ordinary human) races. The humans, elves, hobbits, dwarves (and, of course, the orcs and various monsters) are all quite different, but they don't at all map onto race-as-we-know-it, and it would be, uh, pretty racist to try to make them match human races. You might be able to pull a Brandon Sanderson and make the elves be East-Asian but extra tall, but even that is questionable. (You could just race-swap the whole setting en masse and have everyone be the same non-white race, and that would be better, but it still misses that the setting is a fundamentally European mythology.) The problem is that while race (as it actually exists) is a non-issue*, genealogy is definitely not (as you point out), so you can't just have random people be random races.

*There's the well-known exception that the Haradrim are called "swarthy" at one point. But this definitely doesn't make them black and doesn't seem to have much to do with mapping to race-as-it-exists; they're just darker-skinned since they live in sunnier climes further south. If anything, the picture is of North Africans: the Haradrim invading with their Mumakil are probably intended to evoke the Carthaginians under Hannibal, and the Corsairs of Umbar, the Barbary Pirates. And going a bit further afield, the shrunken Gondor holding out against Mordor has shades of the Eastern Roman Empire against the Turks. But again, using race to represent this is a bad idea, not least because these resemblances are just evocative, not allegorical and definitely not intended to reflect on real-world races!

Oh boy, if some adaptation had the balls to do Punic Haradrim*, that would be great. If I had any hopes for Rings of Power and their diversity crap, I'd hope there, but the pair of typewriter-bashing monkeys in charge as showrunners have the imagination of a soggy brown paper bag and couldn't even envisage "Not... Californian? How work?"

You could even have black Haradrim because why the fuck not, let some sub-Saharans be part of the glorious empire! Far Harad! Rhun could encompass Central to All The Way East Asia, why the hell not again? Gimme some Golden Horde up in the mix, bro! If they wanted to put in "something approaching our world" race-mixing, there's room in canon, but it's not open to "let's have some random black Elves and Dwarves for no reason ever given while all the main named characters remain white".

*Would Tolkien object? Well, remember that Monica is a Punic name 😁

Yeah, as Dovetailing said, at some point, Hasbro/WOTC decided to start making crossover releases with the Secret Lair and all that. There's been Walking Dead, MLP, Transformers, probably Stranger Things, and so on.

"Fantasy" used broadly, not only in the sense of Tolkien, D&D and suchlike. IPs which are as alien to this style as My Little Pony, Godzilla, The Walking Dead, or Street Fighter now have official MTG cards.

Because Hasbro decided that they could make lots of money by having standalone card sets based on random other fantasy IP. The main "multiverse" is still its own setting with no crossover, AFAIK.

They even released Nerf and Transformers themed cards a few years ago. I only know this because I have a coworker who hardcore collected MTG cards (he owns multiple Black Lotus cards) and he paid me to order a pack because Hasbro was limiting the amount of packs an individual could order for the set.

Wow, that's even worse than I thought. It makes me even more glad I'm not involved anymore.

Honestly the best way to experience the game you're nostalgic for is to proxy a vintage cube and play those until you tire of them.

The game changed dramatically recently as hasbro figured out how to up power levels enough to make all formats rotation formats without blowing them up too often.

The fact that they kept Arwen white made the blowback a lot worse in some wignat circles on twitter. Although the reverse wouldn't have calmed the backlash to a significant extent either, I think.

This feels to me a like a sort of post I don't like seeing others make. It's criticizing our common outgroup (generally speaking), progressives, and is kind of just irritated. It doesn't provide too much more value or insight than "hey, bad thing happened over there." I agree with it, of course, being its author, but I want to do better. Any thoughts about how I could talk about the same topic, while holding the same view, in a better way? Or is the answer just find other things to bring up?

There's non-stupid ways to do this, and stupid ways. They picked the stupid way. And I strongly suspect that was on purpose, to generate controversy and be able to present themselves as Bold Heroes Outfacing Bigotry and Racism or something, when in actuality it's about generating income - LOTR is a big property, yet another variation on Middle-earth will get some people wanting to buy this crap.

Good higher-order thinking.

I suppose you could wonder about why they are doing this. My own pet theory, which I'm not sure about, is that Going Woke is a way to handle creative bankrupcy: if you have nothing else to say, raceswap. It's similar to saying that your film is "about family" when it's just a mesh of committee-approved special effects and kewl moments. Rings of Power was just a notable example of this failing, but it still probably helped them ceteris paribus, because they had literally nothing else to do.

There'd be no harm in making up a ton of new Magic characters who just happen to be black, instead of changing already beloved characters from who they are.

But even fewer people would care. I am a fantasy fan and I didn't even know that WoC had any LoTR franchising rights until I saw your comment, mainly because I have zoned out of any new LoTR stuff for nearly 2 decades, because it's boring, committee-driven, and safer than a child whose parents make him wear a crash helmet before he goes on a climbing frame. Why focus such greyness when, with the magic of the internet, I can enjoy insane 1980s fantasy works or batshit mythology from all over the world?

I don't see what is creatively bankrupt about race swapping a character. And I don't see how or why doing so would indicate that they are out of ideas.

Aragorn, especially after the movies, is an icon and he is white. People who ingroup blacks as morally superior see positions of power and feel an emotional need to elevate blacks to those positions. People who outgroup whites as morally inferior feel an emotional need to lower whites from those positions.

Amazon, WotC and all the 'woke' engaging companies are not creatively bankrupt. They are not 'out of ideas'. They are simply exploring a vision, chasing a dream, following ideology, walking certain priors to their logical conclusion. It's not about writing an original story that no one cares about. It's about representing truth and justice. Black people are better than white people. They are morally superior. They have been standing up against the racist injustices of America and the Western world for centuries. They have been oppressed throughout that time yet have persevered through all of it. There is no good reason for the iconography of the modern era being white. There is no reason why it shouldn't be black.

If you don't care about race there is no reason to care about Aragorn being black any more than that there is reason for you to care that the hero is destined to become king. If you do care about race, whether you consciously recognize it or not, there are two extremely predictable emotional responses to this sort of thing. You either like it or you don't. You feel an emotional resonance with the fact that something of value was changed to elevate one over the other. You feel an emotional resonance with someone expressing group allegiance to one over the other.

All in all, this isn't a problem of creativity. It's a problem of people wanting to hold on to the whiteness of the world without any institutional power to back it up. Sorry, you can't.

I don't see what is creatively bankrupt about race swapping a character.

Take the Little Mermaid live-action adaptation. Exact same character, down to the red hair and blue costume and name and pets/companions and love story and general story arc, except now she's black. Yay! That's trying to eat your cake and have it - the established IP of the Little Mermaid, just rejigged in a way that won't be too different.

Nothing stopping Disney creating a new mermaid character who is black and has her own story to go alongside Ariel, but that's too much work and expense. This is the lazy way to do it. It's not creative because literally the only thing they have done is change the skin colour.

All in all, this isn't a problem of creativity. It's a problem of people wanting to hold on to the whiteness of the world without any institutional power to back it up. Sorry, you can't.

How can the US be both a White supremicist society, and a society where whiteness doesn't have any institutional power?

"My enemies are both strong and weak" is a noted logical inconsistency of the ideologically-motivated.

The vision of the moral superiority of black people and the moral inferiority of white people is in itself repugnant, especially and particularly if you don't care about race. I can't quite tell if you're trolling or shit-stir-ing or devil's advocating.

Recognizing the moral superiority of the slave and his fight for freedom versus the moral inferiority of the slaveowner who fights to own human beings as livestock is not repugnant to any neutral observer.

Recognizing the moral superiority of the civil rights activist that protests against a violent racist police state versus the inferiority of the racist segregationist that wants black people ostracized from society is not repugnant for any neutral observer.

The one who suffers rubber bullets, batons and fire hoses in the fight towards racial harmony is not the moral equal of the one who employes them in the fight for racial hatred.

This is not an opinion or an ordained prophesy. It's a fact. People who learn about the history of righteous racial struggle fought by black people against the evil racist empire of white America come away believing the obvious. That blacks acted, consistently, superior to whites. It's impossible to look at over a century of struggle and come away believing both sides were equally virtuous. I think you can very easily say and/or believe, as most people in the west do, that blacks in America are morally superior to whites. You can't swipe history under the rug when it makes you look bad.

  • -12

Recognizing the moral superiority of the slave and his fight for freedom versus the moral inferiority of the slaveowner who fights to own human beings as livestock is not repugnant to any neutral observer.

And then you open a history book and realize that slavery wasn't an exclusive white institution and that one of it's MANY points of origins were african kingdoms.

You mentioned icons; let's talk about actual icons. Specifically, Christian iconography.

When Christianity spreads to another culture (as it has been continuously doing since the beginning), it faces a problem: how do you represent the major figures, including Christ and the saints? You can take two different approaches here:

  1. Icons are representative, not realistic. So you can (and should) adapt iconography to the ethnic and cultural makeup of the people using them in order to make them more relatable and less foreign. Hence you have black, white, Chinese, etc. icons of Jesus, Mary, and so on.

  2. Icons are representations of real people, so they should picture them as they actually are (as best as we can tell). This entails that Jesus, Mary, the apostles, and so on look eastern-Mediterranean, since that's how they actually looked; if people want icons that look like them, well, there are plenty of saints actually from their ethnicity, or will be soon enough.

Both perspectives are defensible, but if you have perspective (1) you'd be wrong to say that people with perspective (2) are just being racist or ethnocentric.

Now, of course, neither Aragorn nor any other character in Lord of the Rings is a real person. But people frequently have perspective (2) about source material that they are attached to, and I don't think they're entirely wrong!

PS: What amounts to good iconography, especially as it relates to these two perspectives, is apparently a great way to get some scissor statements in Orthodox Christian communities. Is this picture a valid/good icon, or not? Context for those who aren't familiar: this picture is a classic Orthodox icon design, with the Theotokos (Mary) and infant Jesus (the angels are Michael on the left and Gabriel on the right). It's also got all the iconographic writing which is necessary to make something an icon: the "ΜΡ ΘΥ" (which stands for the first and last letters in the Greek for "Mother of God") above her halo, and "ΙC ΧC" (the C's are lunate sigmas; it stands for "Jesus Christ") near the Christ child, and even the "ο ων" (Greek ""He who is", referring to the name for God) on his halo. The problem? It's in a cutesy anime style. (The artist did get the colors wrong; usually Mary has a red outer garment (for holiness) and a blue inner one (for humanity). But it's possible it's imitating a non-standard icon, since those rules are not quite universal.)

(The artist did get the colors wrong; usually Mary has a red outer garment (for holiness) and a blue inner one (for humanity).

They may be copying the Catholic version of this, known as Our Lady of Perpetual Succour (or Help, in the modern version) where the inner robe is red (humanity) and the outer robe blue (heavenly). Same way the Sacred Heart images have red outer robe and white inner robe.

Though the Wikipedia article says:

The Blessed Virgin Mary — wearing a dress of dark red, in Byzantine iconography the color of the Empress.

The style is - hmmm. It's done sincerely, but in a 'cutesy' style as you say, that is not associated with 'serious' depictions. Is the artist trying to do an emotionally appealing picture? Just copying images in their preferred style to show they can? What is the intent here? I don't think it's malicious, but it may not be devotional, either.

Saucenao.com is generally a good way to find the source for art, particularly anime-style art. Using it finds the artist's Pixiv account. Though apparently unlike most Pixiv users he is not Japanese, but lives in Australia and was born in Vietnam. As you guessed, the image is titled "Our Lady of Perpetual Help". The image posted prior to the Mary one (a few months before) is of Madoka (from the excellent anime Puella Magi Madoka Magica) done in a similar iconographic style, though without as many details. Also, checking the artists DeviantArt account finds a photograph of the Madoka art framed and set up as part of a Madoka shrine. So I'm guessing he did a bit of research for the sake of doing the Madoka one, which inspired him to do the Mary one. Other content that people might find objectionable for Christian reasons includes some drawings of yuri and a drawing of incestual yuri between the sisters from Frozen. Of course, most Christians do all sorts of things that some people might find objectionable for Christian reasons, so this doesn't mean much. And indeed, checking the comments for the upload on Deviantart finds him saying that he is Catholic:

Yes I am. I was inspired by Eastern Orthodox iconography when I made this piece though.

Though being a Christian doesn't necessarily mean he made the work for reasons related to Christianity.

Sounds like we can give him a pass on any bad intent, it sounds like he likes the anime art style, does work in it, and this was just an offshoot of wanting to do some anime figures as icons.

Reverent treatment in an inappropriate style is way down the list of "shit artists have pulled when dealing with Christian iconography", often literal shit.

Yep, I just saw @urquan's post with the same thing, and I think you are right that they are copying that icon. It seems that interpretations of the symbolism differ, which possibly accounts for the difference in red-over-blue (the majority of Orthodox icons) vs blue-over-red (the majority of Catholic icons (?), plus a handful of Orthodox ones).

I have no idea what the artist was thinking.

deleted

Ah, good catch there -- it does seem to be an exact imitation of that icon.

In the East, the liturgical color for Marian feasts is blue, and it's definitely the color most associated with her. I'm not enough of an expert to speculate on the history, but while the red-over-blue in icons of Mary is standard in the East, it is not universal (I think the Hagia Sophia famously has some icons which just use blue -- and indeed the source icon is Byzantine) so I guess I was wrong on that being the artist's error. There's some relation with the fact that Christ is generally depicted with a blue outer garment and red inner garment. I was just now trying to verify about the symbolism and found that there's some... disagreement... on exactly what symbolizes what.

This is a great elucidation.

To tie it to the contention I brought up:

Should we sacrifice our preferred racial representation of Aragorn in the name of racial justice in America?

Considering that Aragorn is not real and considering the high stakes for real marginalized people in America, I'd argue you need a very good reason to maintain the preference for approach 2. And I'd argue that if you would elevate your racial preference in fantasy over the realities of the marginalized minorities in America, you are, at the very least, implicitly racist.

  • -16

The thing is that the author gave us a description of Aragorn, and a setting, and that's not "21st century cosmopolitan multi-racial America".

It's like depicting George Washington as black - yeah, Hamilton got away with that, race-swapping the Founding Fathers, but in the end that was a gimmick and we all know that. Nobody believes Washington was really black. And if we depict Washington as black for one "real marginalized people", what about (Indian) Indians? Chinese? Hispanics? Where does it stop?

The better approach is to find real heroes, cultural or historical, from the marginalised peoples and elevate those.

And if saying "Fionn Mac Cúmhail was not born in Harlem as the descendant of West African slaves" makes me a racist, well then I'm a racist now, Father!

Making Aragorn black does not advance racial justice, but rather erodes it. Racial Justice is not advanced by convincing everyone that race is very, very important and should be a major consideration in every decision. If you manage to convince people of this, they will center race in their decision-making, and you will have more racism, not less.

Benign neglect is the only workable option available here. If people actually start caring about race, Blacks are fucked, because their community-average behavior is so goddamn bad that no amount of propaganda will help.

Aragorn is real as a part of culture and this is basically cultural appropriation. Except since Aragorn is copyrighted, the implication of cultural appropriayion is worse.

Icons are representative, not realistic. So you can (and should) adapt iconography to the ethnic and cultural makeup of the people using them in order to make them more relatable and less foreign. Hence you have black, white, Chinese, etc. icons of Jesus, Mary, and so on

This was overwhelming consensus of historical Christianity. No one had a problem painting ancient Israelite kings as contemporary rulers in appropriate royal dress and regalia, ancient Israelite warriors as contemporary armored knights, because they were kings and knights and should be recognized as ones.

"Realism" was not an issue.

I mean, that perspective is certainly important and present. There are lots of icons like that (and always have been; I think there are icons of Jesus looking like a Roman in the catacombs)! But I'm not convinced it was an overwhelming consensus across time and space (we're talking about probably more than 1900 years of practice over vast swaths of territory, not just medieval Europe).

My general sense is that people who hold to perspective (2) don't think that these icons are not real icons, just that they aren't ideal. This often applies to other aspects of iconography too; there's a lot of formal and informal rules about how icons are "supposed" to be painted in various Orthodox traditions, for instance, and a lot of people are somewhat uneasy with the "realistic" (western) style of many post-Peter-the-Great Russian icons.

Icons are interesting because they combine the symbolic and the representational; they depict people or events, but usually in a way that is symbolic and does not literally represent what happened. So "the icon is not a photograph, it is supposed to convey certain truths and should be painted in whatever way does that best" and "these are real people, you can't just make them look however you like" are both highly defensible, and have been defended. I'm inclined to the first one myself: we don't always have a good idea what the subjects looked like anyway, recognizability is more important than accuracy, and symbolism in e.g. clothing is uncontroversially more important than realism anyway.

My general sense is that people who hold to perspective (2) don't think that these icons are not real icons, just that they aren't ideal.

It has been a problem in Western art, too. You had Renaissance artists painting big, elaborate scenes allegedly based on Biblical sources but, uh, really not. Art historians tend to plump down on the side of "freedom of expression and developing one's art" rather than "this was supposed to be a Last Supper, not a rave at Studio 54":

The Feast in the House of Levi (1573) by Paolo Veronese was investigated by the Roman Inquisition, who asked, "Does it seem suitable to you, in the Last Supper of our Lord, to represent buffoons, drunken Germans, dwarfs, and other such absurdities?" and gave him three months to make changes. Veronese simply retitled it The Feast in the House of Levi.

We see this a lot with Caravaggio and the controversies over his naturalistic style when applied to religious subjects:

Caravaggio was known for painting very realistically, using models instead of standard convention and idealization.He made his figures lifelike and relatable, as opposed to portraying unrealistic or phony poses. In this instance, however, the patrons wanted an idealization of the beloved Saint, someone who its viewers could admire and strain to be like. They did not want a bumbling peasant who looked as if he just walked in off the street. With the angel sweeping down and the Saint's stool teetering in movement, it is arguably one of Caravaggio's earliest examples of his dynamic style. It was a much more exciting composition than the first. Even though Caravaggio changed the composition to suit the desires of the patron, you can still see his own style under the more refined subject of Saint Matthew.

...Caravaggio depicted the Saint as an unlearned peasant, gaping in the presence of the angel. The church rejected Caravaggio's irreverent presentation of the saint, and Caravaggio replaced it with a more glorifying image, The Inspiration of Saint Matthew, which remains in the Chapel today.

...The lost painting showed Saint Matthew as poorly groomed, with dirty feet. Although this was the style of Caravaggio, the church leaders thought it was too crude and did not want to have what looked like a peasant hanging in their sacred altarpiece.

Maybe I am misunderstanding your point, but couldn’t you try to be race neutral and therefore find people who believe in black supremacy repugnant? Maybe bring race neutral is “caring” about race but it seems categorically different.

In context I see it more as a bunch of white people proclaiming race neutrality whilst living in and perpetuating a profoundly racist society that marginalizes people who aren't white. With that in mind I'd say that these proclamations of neutrality are at best a cheap PR trick for the people that maintain and reap the benefits of said racist society whilst not wanting to own any culpability for doing so.

I'm not talking about 'black supremacy' as some ideology that says black people ought to be X because black people think so. I am saying that as a matter of historical fact black people have acted in a morally superior way to white people. None of the advances in civil rights and liberties would have come about if it had not been for the black struggle against white supremacy. The bedrock of moral progress in America has always been its black soul.

  • -22

To quote the television show Mad Men, “I don’t think about you at all.” The idea that the plight of black America is somehow the heart and soul of this country is laughable to most white Americans. To say nothing of Asian or Indian immigrants who make up an ever increasing share of our elite.

The idea that the plight of black America is somehow the heart and soul of this country is laughable to most white Americans

That isn't what they said. They said: "The bedrock of moral progress in America has always been its black soul." Your paraphrase is not even close.

How could it be the bedrock of moral progress if we don’t even think about them? That’s my point we’ve been doing our own thing and their existence is an after thought. It’s as ridiculous to think the moral universe revolves around black Americans as it is to think the Sun revolves around the Earth.

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I don't see what is creatively bankrupt about race swapping a character. And I don't see how or why doing so would indicate that they are out of ideas.

You misunderstand. I didn't say that it is creatively bankrupt, I said that it is a substitute for having something creative to say.

It indicates that they are out of ideas because this is an explanation of the "Go Woke, Get Broke" phenomenon. I don't think it's that woke content repels people, I think it's that media corporations etc. double-down on wokeness when they have nothing else to say. That's my pet theory (not well-evinced) for things like Ghostbuster 2016, the Ring of Power series, the Walking Dead after about Season 4, and so on. When you have no creative animus, then "simply exploring a vision, chasing a dream, following ideology, walking certain priors to their logical conclusion" in accordance with the prevailing norms and myths can substitute for that spirit.

They are not 'out of ideas'.

I see no evidence for that.

All in all, this isn't a problem of creativity. It's a problem of people wanting to hold on to the whiteness of the world without any institutional power to back it up. Sorry, you can't.

I think that this unhelpfully oversimplifying a complex phenomenon. There are many motivations involved and most people are concerned with their own cultural bubbles, rather than "the world". I prefer it when your reasoning on here attains higher levels of precision and insight.

If you don't care about race there is no reason to care about Aragorn being black any more than that there is reason for you to care that the hero is destined to become king.

It's a problem of people wanting to hold on to the whiteness of the world without any institutional power to back it up. Sorry, you can't.

You're being a little too glib in dismissing "we just don't want the character changed" and "we want verisimilitude in a medieval western european setting" as motivations. For the first, I'd love a test case where hollywood whitewashes an iconic black character (say, Morpheus) to see if it inspires the same indignation in me. Hollywood has yet to indulge.

As for the second.... it's a turnoff to me that modern fantasy depicts societies where the ethnic makeup makes no goddamn sense. A well-realized setting is the draw of the genre. I want fantasy settings where the creator has designed the entire history of their world, far past what could possibly be useful, and then writes a plot set in that world. Back in the day Morrowind had relatively few white people, and none in the uncolonized bedouin interior, and I loved it; everything in the world was carefully considered. Modern studio fantasy writers, though, don't write like this. They reason backwards from the requirements of their story. Aragon must be black, not because the creator thought of the migration patterns of the Numenoreans coming from the tropics of whatever, but because... he's just black, okay? End of story.

The fact they don't care about the internal logic of the setting bleeds into everything else in worldbuilding. Rings of Power was not shit because Harfoots were racially diverse; it was shit because the writers were the sort of people who didn't care why the Harfoots would be racially diverse.

Right, it would have been much better if they or the Rings of Power people had done it in a way that they could justify. Caring deeply about the internal consistency of Tolkien's world is important, and if they are going to make changes (which, of course, is not preferable), it would be best if they cared enough about what they're doing to do it in a way that makes sense and that they can defend.

I'm not dismissing them for nothing. I'm asking you to make a value judgement. What matters more, fiction or reality? Aragorn must be black because we are in the throes of transforming a living breathing hateful society that exists all around us into something loving and caring that is open for everyone, not just white people. It's a real battle between good and evil. Not a fictional representation of it where somehow all the good guys happen to have white skin and the bad guys don't, discounting the 'traitors'.

If every single character in LoTR was made black, so the ethnic makeup makes sense, you would not take issue with it? Pardon my prejudice but I feel like you would be more than able to reason why that's not an acceptable circumstance either.

I am sure you can entertain the novelty of white fantasy with fictional races that represent white peculiarity. Be that green skinned orcs or blue skinned elves. I am not sure you can enjoy a fantasy that is no longer white. With real races that represent the reality of a hateful world that white people have lorded over for centuries.

  • -19

In the case of race-swapping everyone, I would still probably mind, but I think I would mind less, since it's shows more respect for the overall world, I think, by keeping things working in a relatively consistent manner. Maybe it would be a less egregious, but more far-reaching change.

I do realise you are pulling our legs, but there are real people with views not a million miles away from this - somehow, by turning white characters black or non-white, this is Representation and it will magically cure racism.

That's not going to happen. Give me race-swapped characters from other cultures, and see how that flies.

It is amusing watching you play this straight and leaving all the people unfamiliar with your history aghast, but I am familiar with your history and we do not like trolling, however well-crafted a test of Poe's Law it may be. So speak plainly and stop trying to see how many people you can lure in with a gotcha.

It's more a steelman than a troll, I would argue. But for clarification, I'm rather confused watching people get dragged from one IP to another bemoaning 'just what the woke are doing' when these very same people buy into every single prior that the woke base their arguments on. Slavery, Jim Crow, Civil Rights. The virtuous nature of blacks implied by the mainstream historical narrative on those events. The proposition that race in America is a social problem with social causes and social solutions. (Not saying everyone I replied to fits that bill, but it's certainly very rare to find people who reject those things outside of 'extremist' circles.)

So how does one draw the line at race swapping Aragorn when one also wants to change society? It seems like an advanced form of having ones cake and eating it to. Or to be less charitable, a sort of NIMBY-ism. Where we look at the airbrushed history of black racial struggle, say it was good and just, and say it's consequences were more good than bad but then can't bring ourselves to let go of our fantasy books and popcorn flicks. Considering the sacrifices and conditions imposed on the white people of the past in the name of racial equality, the position seems absurd.

So how does one draw the line at race swapping Aragorn when one also wants to change society?

The progression of society has been done through historic changes up until now: changes where the prior existing state has been transformed into a better state. That’s why Black History Month is a thing: things were bad, then Lincoln, then better. Things were bad, then Rosa Parks, then better. Things were bad, then MLK, then better.

Without history, that is without accurate and unchanging history, there is no progression, but instead a time-traveling now-blob which sucks up everything it touches and erases the very history of the movement it’s trying to be a part of. It’s like the absurdity of recasting statues instead of tearing them down, so that Robert E. Lee is now a Black man.

And that icono-osmotic ethic carries across to fantasy fiction, which usually hails back to a time when your family history was written in the color of your skin and the shape of your face. Race was legible history. Cosmopolitanism was how people of different family histories mingled, so somewhere there’s whole tribes of melanized Dwarves and Elves, and their presence in the area between Gondor and the Shire means at some point someone moved or married.

Maybe the dark-as-soil tribes were there first and the light-as-sand tribes moved in and outcompeted them racially? Maybe whiteness is a dominant gene in elves? But telling any of those stories doesn’t fit the quota-driven rootless cosmopolitanism of now-blob progressivism, so they won’t be told. They can’t be told.

And that's fine as a stand-alone argument. Just make that argument. Then maybe someone will address your theory that you cannot simultaneously be in favor of desegregation and opposed to blackfacing white characters, instead of just getting wound up at your poe-faced devil's advocacy. This whole stunt is bad for discourse, and if people engaged in this routinely, then no argument could be taken at face value. This is supposed to be a place where you can make arguments and have them taken at face value.

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On the one hand, I agree that @hannikrummihundursvin is not speaking plainly, insofar as he is not accurately articulating his own personal beliefs. However, I think that what he’s doing here straddles the line between trolling and steelmanning in a really interesting way. The fact that so many people are interpreting his stated viewpoints as genuine is a testament to how convincingly and effectively he is representing a sincere and widespread progressive belief.

I see him as trying to take away a convenient off-ramp normally available to conservatives/“classical liberals” by forcing them to actually grapple with a far more persuasively-worded presentation of the progressive worldview than what is normally presented in this sub. This is especially effective because, as a right-winger, he understands what particular moral sentiments can be targeted in order to make a certain flavor of conservative susceptible to progressive arguments. (This is a strategy at which actual progressives have proven surprisingly adept, which is why 21st-century “conservatives” have thoroughly imbibed the basic worldview of 20th-century radical progressives.)

Sure, in order to speak more plainly, he should have prefaced each of his posts with “if I were a progressive I would say…” but I think that would actually detract from what he’s trying to do, because it would reintroduce that “off-ramp” and allow his interlocutors to not have to fully engage with the content of the arguments he’s making.

allow his interlocutors to not have to fully engage with the content of the arguments he’s making.

I hope that we're still allowed to do that, even with those who "straddle" trolling.

It's probably because I share a similar perspective, but this post wasn't meant to be sarcastic. There are two competing perspectives, one of which is the conservative who might say something like "Race doesn't matter, I just don't want the character to change or my immersion to be ruined because the creators are out of ideas."

But the other perspective is that race does matter, and the trend to deracialize heroes in Western canon is a powerful idea to perpetuate hostility towards white people. Of course it's rationalized in good/evil, oppressor/oppressed dynamics. But fiction matters, and representation in myth matters. If you are hostile to a group of people, changing that people's body of myth so it no longer represents the people embodied in the myth would be a very clever idea to engage in hostility towards said people, especially if you could do so while claiming the mantle of social justice.

It's not "being out of ideas", it's a very good idea for engaging in ethnic hostility with plausible deniability. Myth matters, and changing a people's body of myth has an intended psychological impact. Conservatives claiming it's only about verisimilitude in a medieval setting are once again missing the point.

Yes, I understand the perspective he is illustrating. But he's doing in a disingenuous way by pretending this is actually his perspective and not woke roleplaying, and he's allowing people to believe he's actually an anti-white partisan.

If a leftist played this game, steelmanning a right-wing viewpoint to its logical extreme and pretending to actually believe what he was arguing, when everyone familiar with his post history knew otherwise, the reports would be fast and furious.

The requirement to speak plainly is so you can engage with people in good faith and not have to guess what their true position is or if they are trying to pull a gotcha.

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I’m having a hard time telling if sarcasm. The very idea that white people are bad and therefore we need to race swap to achieve a good culture engenders an obvious concern for people who are white. Not all that different to say blood libel and Jews (one could argue whites were majorities so different experiences but if whites won’t be the majority and even now the theme is white = evil the concern holds).

It's not that white people are innately bad. It's that they, currently, perpetuate a bad society. A bad civilization. The racial transformation of Aragorn is a step in dismantling that. Like I mention in another comment to you, the history of America demonstrates the moral inferiority of white people compared to blacks. That doesn't mean we can't change that. We can better white people. But that's a societal change that needs to be fought for like every other change leading up to this point. White people need to learn that they are not in charge by default. In order to do that they need to learn to see other people as leaders. What better way to do that than through the fictional worlds they hold so dear?

  • -10

the history of America demonstrates the moral inferiority of white people compared to blacks

I think you need to separate "African-Americans" from "Africans", then. Unless youre saying it's more moral to take (by violence) slaves and sell them than it is to buy them?

If you want to argue that the losers in African conflicts remained virtuous while the rest of the world was morally inferior (except perhaps the Irish and the Slavs, i guess), then belay my last and carry on.

Based on post history, I would recommend not engaging with this comment as if it's in good faith. I'm not sure what's going on with it, but I would stay well clear of possible bait held by trolls (green, blue, or otherwise).

He's just presenting opponent's views on their own terms imo. I agree this is what they believe. They are not 'creatively bankrupt', or 'out of ideas', they don't care about creativity, and they definitely have ideas. Art from the past wasn't of good quality or poor quality, it was just propaganda from the other side. The only doubt I have is whether he suggests actually taking control of the institutions to make people white, give them heroic roles etc (ie, his worldview is just a mirror of the woke worldview) or a critique of that worldview.

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Nah he's not a troll. I think he's adopting a "woke is more correct than the mainstream" view that we do actually care about keeping whites on top of the totem pole, and should stop deluding ourselves and pretending like our objections are colorblind. I don't agree, but I'm not sure I want to counter his deductions because it seems like a convo where I'll be psychoanalyzed at every step.

EDIT Or maybe I spoke too soon...

I suppose you could wonder about why they are doing this.

I think about this a fair bit. Here's a minddump of theories I've heard. (Yours is 3a-1)

  1. Intentionally creating controversy

    • as a marketing device

    • as a hedge against criticism

  2. Purity spirals in the writer's room

  3. Wanting to overwrite the classics

    • because they can't create anything good of their own

      • due to remakes being safe and lucrative, and raceswapping justifies remakes.

      • due to a religious zealot/political commissar's mindset inhibiting creativity

    • because they want to merge minorities into the western cultural tradition

      • for the minorities, who feel no connection to our medieval, victorian, or western stories because they were slaves/tribesmen.

      • for whites, who might otherize minorities if they're not present in popular classics.

    • because they want to propagandize The Great Replacement, etc

  4. They hate you

    • because creatives are blue tribe, and pissing you off pleases them.

    • because they see certain genres as watering holes where undesirables gather and want to colonize and disrupt those spaces

Why focus such greyness when, with the magic of the internet, I can enjoy insane 1980s fantasy works or batshit mythology from all over the world?

Eventually, cultural differences between CurrentYear and the 1980s will grow too great for most to enjoy its media. How many books do you read from before 1920? If social justice envelops the institutions that produce popular culture, their values will become difficult to escape. In the past few years I've seen even novelists, who should be most insulated from institutional takeover, kowtow. And I've heard grumblings about something needing to be done about media from Japan, etc.

How many books do you read from before 1920?

The older I get, the more I see how the books from before 1920 are very relevant today. I understand that may be survivor bias - the ones that were not worthy just perished, and the one I find are those that withstood the test of time - but I am very willing to benefit from this process. In fact, almost all of the fiction that I read currently is pre-2000, though some of it is post-1920.

I think I'm not easily seeing a way to categorize it into your categories if they just think that representation of minorities is good, and care about that more than faithfulness to the source material. People can do bad things in a non-selfish, non-vindictive way. And that's at least a possibility of what's going on here behind the scenes.

That's explanation 3b-1.

How many books do you read from before 1920?

I'm the wrong person to ask, because insofar as I read fiction, it's mostly from before 1914, and all of it in recent years has been from before 2001. World War I and 9/11 mark important (though not overwhelming) points of decline in Western culture in my view.

However, I agree on your basic point. A certain minimum curiousity is required to explore beyond one's culture, and e.g. the Victorians are effectively an alien culture for people in the West today. However, it is reassuring that those few who have curiousity can often still read and enjoy e.g. Jane Austen or George Elliott, even when they are very woke.

Whenever I feel downhearted about it all, I remember the heroic Irish monks who worked so hard to preserve the glories of Antiquity, despite their inability to produce anything of equivalent value. If we can get through the next few centuries of self-imposed Darkness while preserving the glories of the past, I would consider that a great achievement, even if European civilization and its American/Oceanic offspring never produce a Dante's Inferno, Middlemarch, Pride and Prejudice, Macbeth, or The Brothers Karamazov again. The greatest challenge in such a Dark Age, apart from the swordpoints of barbarians, is convincing the next generation that such ideas are worth preserving. So many great works of the human race have been avoidably lost, because their value was not seen.

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