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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.
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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.
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.
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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.
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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.
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.
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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.
It is a genuine position regardless of everything else.
And no, just stating the argument in the abstract is not the same as actually having the argument in earnest. When you cut the argument from context you remove all necessity and connection to reality. It just becomes a meaningless game of words where someone can, with no reservation, say that they will be having their cake and eating it to.
But you're not having the argument in earnest.
You are taking the position that progressives believe "whites=bad, blacks=good," and that making Aragorn black is a logical extension of that. (Yes, I know I'm simplifying your argument considerably, but that's the gist.) Fine and good, people can agree or disagree that this is what progressives believe, that they believe it in as totalizing a fashion as you've described, or that it's hypocritical to be in favor of racial equality while also being opposed to blackfacing white characters.
The problem is that by "pretending" to be a progressive who actually believes all those things, you may think you are forcing people to confront their beliefs or whatever, but you aren't actually doing so honestly. As you have seen, people are reacting mostly with outrage to "Blacks are virtuous and white civilization is bad" and they aren't actually engaging with your underlying point. When a steelman isn't presented as a steelman, it's just trolling. Is there a point at which you intended to take off the mask and explain what you were really doing, or just keep going and see how much you can get people wound around the axle?
If you go all the way back to his first post, it was clearly explaining-a-position rather than advancing-a-position. It might be interesting to have a discussion about how many rounds of back-and-forth it takes before people forget that it's a devil's advocate (empirically, the answer is too often "zero") and at what point one has a duty to remind one's interlocutor of the distinction (as opposed to the interlocutor's duty to actually read a post before responding to it and not impute a steelman to the author as an honest position, which presumably lapses after some nonzero amount of discourse without a reminder).
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I am making the argument in earnest. I don't need you to simplify the argument, there is no 'gist'. It exists in its totality. It can be read as presented. I don't make any claims about what progressives believe. I don't pretend to be one. I don't care what you think my underlying point is. I found the discussion engaging and worthwhile as it was and would have liked to continue it.
You are free to do so. What you are not free to do is adopt a persona and deceive people.
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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.
I hope that we're still allowed to do that, even with those who "straddle" trolling.
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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.
Speaking plainly also helps avoid people who are taken in updating on what their opponents believe based on a steelman/parody which may not represent them well.
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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?
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.
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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.
No, I think responding to "People could be doing X because of Y" by pretending to be someone who advocates for doing X because of Z is bad faith and not worth engaging with. It's Boo Outgroup + trolling. Fine on 4chan, but not on here.
Actually providing evidence that those people think Z would be a different sort of approach and one that's ok.
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Wait, is that what you believe or what you think "they" believe?
They
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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...
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