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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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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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.
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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.
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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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