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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 think about this a fair bit. Here's a minddump of theories I've heard. (Yours is 3a-1)
Intentionally creating controversy
as a marketing device
as a hedge against criticism
Purity spirals in the writer's room
because an oversupply of creatives is making creatives snipe at each other
because "wokes" drove "non-wokes" out and cancer naturally gets cancer and dies
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
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
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.
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.
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