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