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PaperclipPerfector  11mo ago (text post)   38175 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 5, 2023

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I'd posted a while back about how Wizards of the Coast was making Aragorn black in the soon-to-be released Lord of the Rings Magic set.

Since then most of the new cards have been released.

There were several more race swaps—see, for example Theóden, along with many other Rohirrim, was made black, but not Éomer. If they had made them all black, this would have been closer to my original suggestion—that they change races, if they really must, do so in ways that make sense in the world. But they did not do that for some reason, and keeping Éomer white makes no sense, if you're changing the rest of the Rohirrim.

Nevertheless, I was surprised at how good the set was, if you ignore the race changes in the art, for fans of Lord of the Rings. They referenced all sorts of relatively obscure things, had cards that had thematic abilities, (for an especially fun example, see how Merry+his blade or Eowyn can defeat the Witch King, who is ordinarily rather invulnerable), or just had fun flavor text quoting from the book, or nice art. And was faithful to the lore in another respect where Rings of Power was not, although I don't remember such a character actually existing…

Ignoring the race issue, I was very impressed overall. I think it's interesting that they were willing to put so much effort into it, while at the same time having unnecessary race changes. I suppose it's not entirely the same people making the various decisions. But I had read it as first as "we don't care that much about Lord of the Rings," which now seems to be false. They must have cared both about signaling leftist politics and about making a good product, and so this was the result.

I might be willing to overlook the problems, because Tolkien is dearer to my heart.

On the other hand, this is the perfect multinational, multicultural experience 😁

I looked at the cards and am I crazy or does Eowyn look black? So I guess Theodwyn was black like her brother!

Also the card with her and Faramir is wrong - Faramir's hair is way too short:

“And so they stood on the walls of the City of Gondor, and a great wind rose and blew, and their hair, raven and golden, streamed out mingling in the air.”

I will give them this, though; at least they have Lobelia with the teaspoons.

I take this, among countless other examples of woke values being shoehorned into popular geekdom and fandom subcultural iconography, as textbook syncretism.

The trick is, while syncretic content is often extremely transparent and obnoxious to adherents of the old faith, there's nothing keeping it from being perfectly good on its own merits. (beyond 'being based on something good' seeming to not help with Sturgeon's law in the slightest) Often you get a 'Last Jedi' that takes off like a lead balloon, but sometimes you get a 'Santa Claus' that wildly eclipses the cultural impact of the original inspirations.

For better or for worse, Woke really wants to absorb and convert Fandom, and is going to keep trying until it sticks or they lose the cultural dominance neccessary to credibly continue. As annoying as it is, it could be worse, and the harder fandom holds out for reasonable quality syncretism, the more their values get baked into Woke rather than vice versa. (As it's necessarily a two-way street)

I'm thinking of the Arthurian mythology, where the mediaeval romances were happy to have black/brown knights (like Sir Palamedes) and I think doing characters like that is a perfectly okay way to insert your DEI into works.

I'd love to see something about Bór the Faithful Easterling! I could accept Easterling/Haradrim characters who had gone over to the side of Gondor. And even if I think the Druédain card is schlocky, well okay. Female Dwarven smith? That's in line with canon, can't object there.

But being faithful to obscure points of lore just makes the likes of this worse, not better and not acceptable. I would much rather if the entire set threw canon out the window altogether and was a rainbow coalition of all sorts of BIPOC folx, than to take certain characters of a particular description and change them to a different ethnicity.

Imagine doing this with other works. Imagine claiming this was a Vulcan: "Yeah, they're a four foot tall hermaphrodite who lays eggs and has three tails and hooves instead of feet. What do you mean, Vulcans don't look like that? This is my version of a Vulcan and it's just as valid as whatever was created by some long-dead white guy!" Insert your own characters from your own examples here. Say that this is The Last Unicorn, and Peter Beagle can go chase himself if he doesn't like it.

I was surprised at how good the set was, if you ignore the race changes in the art

I was surprised how well the raspberry tart turned out, if you ignore that the recipe was completely changed to be a fish pie.

This kind of dropping in lore is nothing but a fig leaf, same as Rings of Power. The main problem is the huge changes. As you say, if they're going to make Aragorn black and Theoden black, then go the whole way and make everyone black. Taking character A and character D and race swapping, but not character C and character E, is senseless. It has no interior logic: how is Aragorn black? Is that via his mother, or did the change come further back in the line of the Dúnedain of the North? How is Theoden black? We know who his parents were ("Théoden was the only son of Thengel, the heir of king Fengel of Rohan, and Morwen of Lossarnach, a descendant of a former prince of the fief of Belfalas"), so unless we're now making it that Eomer's mother wasn't Theoden's sister, how is he black and Eomer is not? Did Thengel have a side chick from Far Harad? A second wife so that Theodwyn is white and thus her kids are, too?

If a particular artist goes "I think X is really cool and I'd love to draw him as black/brown/yellow/red like me", fine, knock yourself out, nobody objects to fan art (too much). But issuing a commercial property that is this half-assed? I don't get it.

EDIT: I forgot a possibility! Theoden could have been adopted, a foundling raised like their own!

It's definitely not Rings of Power, since Rings of Power messed up the lore in all sorts of non-racial ways, while this has turned out to be mostly racial things.

Yes, the racial things make no sense. My point was that, contrary to my expectations, they did a really good job with most other things, including faithfulness in non-racial matters to what's in The Lord of the Rings, which was not at all true of Rings of Power.

faithfulness in non-racial matters to what's in The Lord of the Rings

Making Aragorn black is a pretty big chunk of change to the canon. If it were "random Hobbit" like this card, I'd grouse about it but agree. But when it's a major character like that, then "oh but they got the name of the third Breelander mentioned in the inn right!" is not something to boast about.

The Lord of the Rings cards could exist in a world where skin colour can have a wide variance from one's family based on exactly which genes someone gets and nutrition and what not. Like how a short mother can have a tall daughter, a dark skinned father can have a pale son. It's a bit ridiculous and personally I don't like it, but it's Or maybe genes don't exist there and people physical traits are personally determined by Eru when they're in the womb. It's silly and I don't like it, but it's ultimately one change to the world: skin colour isn't genetic like how it is in our world(unless they release other materials indicating that in their set Eomer is actually adopted or something, which would bring back to being really upset).

Problem is, it's meant to be our world; from one of the selected letters, where he's tearing into a proposed script for LOTR:

The Lord of the Rings may be a 'fairy-story', but it takes place in the Northern hemisphere of this earth: miles are miles, days are days, and weather is weather.

And genetics are genetics and skin colour is skin colour. There may well be some fiddling around so that the Noldorin tend to all have black hair and gray eyes, but that's because Edith Tolkien had black hair and grey eyes and he decided that the most beautiful people in his created world would look like her (original conception of Luthien was to make her blonde with blue eyes but he changed that for his fiancée/wife).

I'm also not too happy with some of the other cards, e.g. the one for the Woses - that looks like someone's bad version of pseudo-Celt/Pict instead of one of the Druédain.

Like how a short mother can have a tall daughter, a dark skinned father can have a pale son.

Sure, if the father is tall, or there are tall people in the family on both sides so the genes come through. Same with the lighter-skinned children of dark-skinned parent, if one parent is light-skinned (see Meghan Markle) or both parents have mixed ancestry. But if you're going to do a Disney movie adaptation where mom is black, dad is white, and the son is Filipino - we're not in Tolkien-verse anymore, why even bother?

I looked up Edith Tolkien and JRR had good taste.

From a letter to Christopher Tolkien in 1972:

I have at last got busy about Mummy's grave. .... The inscription I should like is:

EDITH MARY TOLKIEN

1889-1971

Lúthien

: brief and jejune, except for Lúthien, which says for me more than a multitude of words: for she was (and knew she was) my Lúthien.

July 13. Say what you feel, without reservation, about this addition. I began this under the stress of great emotion & regret – and in any case I am afflicted from time to time (increasingly) with an overwhelming sense of bereavement. I need advice. Yet I hope none of my children will feel that the use of this name is a sentimental fancy. It is at any rate not comparable to the quoting of pet names in obituaries. I never called Edith Lúthien – but she was the source of the story that in time became the chief part of the Silmarillion. It was first conceived in a small woodland glade filled with hemlocks at Roos in Yorkshire (where I was for a brief time in command of an outpost of the Humber Garrison in 1917, and she was able to live with me for a while). In those days her hair was raven, her skin clear, her eyes brighter than you have seen them, and she could sing – and dance. But the story has gone crooked, & I am left, and I cannot plead before the inexorable Mandos.

I will say no more now. But I should like ere long to have a long talk with you. For if as seems probable I shall never write any ordered biography – it is against my nature, which expresses itself about things deepest felt in tales and myths — someone close in heart to me should know something about things that records do not record: the dreadful sufferings of our childhoods, from which we rescued one another, but could not wholly heal the wounds that later often proved disabling; the sufferings that we endured after our love began – all of which (over and above our personal weaknesses) might help to make pardonable, or understandable, the lapses and darknesses which at times marred our lives — and to explain how these never touched our depths nor dimmed our memories of our youthful love. For ever (especially when alone) we still met in the woodland glade, and went hand in hand many times to escape the shadow of imminent death before our last parting.

You know, this brings to mind Romeo + Juliet, a film that uses the exact same dialogue as Shakespeare's play, but changes the characters and setting to one that is familiar to Americans.

Would it be unreasonable for a British person to complain about this for the same reason? It's not inconceivable, the movie is partly a cultural and national swap in the same way Aragorn was race swapped - the original most certainly did not conceive of the character(s) this way. I say "partly" because they kept the same dialogue, and language is an important part of placing a culture.

And yet, I suspect most Americans don't mind this, perhaps because it was a swap in their favor, but probably because Shakespeare just isn't as big a culture war topic. Are the British upset about it? I doubt that as well, but maybe I'm wrong. I don't follow their media critics.

@problem_redditor says precisely what I suspect is the real belief of many here - that there is nothing illegitimate about X-swapping, only with the intentions behind it.

Back in the 90s, people in the UK used to get really upset about America taking English stories and setting them in America. For example The Seeker is an adaptation of The Dark is Rising, a fantasy set in Buckinghamshire and deeply intertwined with English history and Celtic mythology... but Hollywood set it in suburban America because they figured otherwise Americans wouldn't watch it. They tried to do the same with Harry Potter and Discworld - one of the reasons why it took so long to get adaptations of the latter.

Theatre is a bit different because there's a long-standing tradition of swapping the settings around. You have to physically put on the same show again and again, and to keep in interesting they like to set Macbeth in North Korea or Romeo and Juliet in New York (West Side Story). In theory this is done to keep the audience engaged but I think it's more for the producers and actors to have a little variety. (EDIT: @raggedy_anthem said it first, sorry).

That's why certain adaptations work and others don't. Romeo and Juliet is young love and feuding families, you can put that on anywhere (that's why he was able to have an Italian setting for an English production, after all). But something that is very much rooted in a particular place and mythology, like The Dark is Rising, you can't just dig it up and plant it in different soil. Maybe you can put it into the American backwoods where there are comparable local legends of their own, but you can't just plop it down into "suburban America" because it doesn't work there. And it really won't work if you cut off the roots before you stuff it into a new plant pot.

Your example is a wholesale, cohesive reimagining of a setting. That's really common with Shakespeare's stuff, as opposed to WotC using a dartboard to decide what characters to swap.

Romeo and Juliet is not that cohesive, imo. Language is informed by many things, you can't expect people from modern America to talk like Shakespeare's characters. If anything, it should bother people just as much that the language was not updated to reflect modern American English.

It's internally cohesive. Everyone in it talks like Shakespeare characters. Nobody actually talked like they do in Deadwood, it's anachronistic in many ways in that regard but it's internally cohesive because everyone talks that way in the show. This kind of nitpicking is like when people call Joss Whedon or Tarantino dialogue bad because it's unrealistic. Maybe it's bad but not because it's unrealistic. You have to allow for style in dialogue at some point or else everything is going to be an Altman/Mumblecore soup.

First of all, I absolutely love that movie. I think it works because the schtick of “Famous story but told differently” is acknowledged and core to the work.

If somebody made Lord of the Rings, but did it in a modern setting, with a diverse cast, and it took place in New York City, I think people would accept it (mostly). Similarly if you did lord of the rings, but it took place in the Congo, I think people would like that (I would).

I think the setting may be more important to Lord of the Rings than it is to Romeo and Juliet, maybe?

What do you mean by setting? I doubt you mean the actual geography.

Mostly we're used to directors arsing around with new! unique! daring! Shakespeare interpretations, same with operas. Setting it in Miami isn't the worst the movie could have done, and he did keep the plot, the characters, and the language.

What the cards have done is the equivalent of the modern show where Anne Boleyn is black, but everything else historically is the same (and her daughter, Elizabeth, is the white-skinned, strawberry-blonde baby she should be, instead of the same colour as her mother). So Anne is black, her brother is black, but her daughter is white and so on. The only reason for this is not "we cast the best actress" because why not race swap the entire cast, then? It's for cheap novelty and attention. Jodie Turner-Smith is a decent actress, but casting her is just more Girlboss Inclusive Revisionism, and of course the quotes at the end of this trailer are not at all the kind of thing the real Anne said at the end.

Setting it in Miami isn't the worst the movie could have done, and he did keep the plot, the characters, and the language.

Right, so why can't we say something like "Making the characters look like a sampling of New York City's elite isn't the worst thing, they still kept the plot, characterizations, and language" for LOTR?

It's for cheap novelty and attention.

Why can't it be the view that race is irrelevant to character? That a black Anne Boleyn is the same in a fundamental sense as a white one?

And before someone tells me that progressives are hypocrites because they don't tolerate the whitewashing of a character, recognize that they, like all people, are more than capable of compartmentalizing their beliefs. That they do this in no way suggests that they also don't actually believe it.

Right, so why can't we say something like "Making the characters look like a sampling of New York City's elite isn't the worst thing, they still kept the plot, characterizations, and language" for LOTR?

I mean, if they set it in NYC, as an updated cyberpunk LotR, where the "Ring" is a USB with StuxNet or something... that might be pretty awesome.

Sure, I'd love if they at least tried something like that. But the harshest complaint here is consistently that this is down out of intentional malice, and that's what I don't agree with.

I can agree with that. My gut instinct is that a lot of people don't like white men, but that's a far cry from "let's change the race of characters just to make them mad."

That a black Anne Boleyn is the same in a fundamental sense as a white one?

Sure, if the entire production were colour-blind in that way. But when they're going all-out on "We cast a BLACK actress" then it's not about "this is the best actress for the role", it's about a different set of values. Most probably "this will be great publicity and get us loads of viewers!", because when it comes down to it, TV stations and movie studios are businesses that need to make money, but it's not about "we are now a multi-racial society, let's consider everyone for the part".

Anne Boleyn was not black. Neither was she American, Spanish, or Australian Indigenous. That matters when it's a historical character in the real world. The day when these productions cast a white actor as Genghis Khan alongside a black actress as Cleopatra alongside a Pacific Islander actor as Mansa Musa, then it'll be "race is irrelevant to character".

But when they're going all-out on "We cast a BLACK actress" then it's not about "this is the best actress for the role", it's about a different set of values.

Yes, as I said, progressives are de facto hypocritical on this topic. But this selective raceblindness can and probably is still out of a genuinely-held if compartmentalized belief that race doesn't matter to the character, so there's a free lunch to be had in also promoting an IRL social goal.

People keep asserting maliciousness, that's what I don't like.

Part of the issue is that Shakespeare is public domain so anyone can do whatever they want with it.

Tolkien products are all licensed. These race swapped cards mean that fans will never get a card game with a book accurate Aragorn.

Additionally activists tend to see these swaps as permanent and will demand black Aragorn in all future adaptations.

Additionally activists tend to see these swaps as permanent and will demand black Aragorn in all future adaptations.

Sorry, where's the proof for that?

It's common in theatre for roles to be seen as belonging to a specific group due to modern adaptation trends. Mercutio must always be gay. Esmeralda was a white girl raised by gypsies in the book, but in modern productions she must always be a person of color. There were a bunch of angry articles written a while back after a college production of Hunchback cast a white girl as Esmeralda.

After Samuel L Jackson got cast as Nick Fury they made the comic book version black. But no one is actually upset about that one. Comic fans view it as an opportunity to create even more distance from the David Hasselhoff Nick Fury movie.

If Peter Jackson had gone with a black Aragorn then that would be seen as the default going forward. I'll admit it's not really the case here since MTG cards will never be seen as a definitive adaptation.

If the life action Little Mermaid had been a big success there would have been a lot of pressure to make the animated version black as well going forward.

I'd be shocked if a Magic the Gathering set became the baseline for determining the race of people, rather than the widely popular movies, or books written by Tolkien himself.

This is true of some sorts of adaptations, though.

After Samuel L Jackson got cast as Nick Fury they made the comic book version black.

the comics made him black first, in 2002. They used Samuel L Jackson's likeness without his permission.

Esmeralda was a white girl raised by gypsies in the book, but in modern productions she must always be a person of color. There were a bunch of angry articles written a while back after a college production of Hunchback cast a white girl as Esmeralda.

Sorry, which college production? When I search for this, I find a case of this happening in a high school. Moreover, how many people have even read Hunchback compared to seen the Disney film, in which Esmeralda was decidedly not white? In contrast, the Peter Jackson films are still the way most if not all people have engaged with LOTR at a first pass.

I actually think that is most people’s gripe. They know something is wrong but have trouble sorting it out so they latch onto things like “not historically accurate” or “ruins the immersion” when in reality it is that the creator of this new work hates you the white consumer and therefore wishes to vandalize works you love with vulgar political displays.

Maybe at its most base level that is the case, but there is really far more to it than that. Say the film retained its original setting but introduced a single modern American as Romeo. This would ruin the story to a much greater extent than a full retelling does for numerous reasons.

In the Wheel of Time show, canonically anyone can and does have children from any race. They literally changed the rules of reality for diversity, despite the fact that the main character is a different race from the rest of his hometown, which is a major plot point.

Fantasy nations should mostly be somewhat racially homogenous, maybe with exceptions for big cities. I would much prefer a fantasy movie starring 100% black people made by people who hate me to one starring an unnaturally diverse cast made by people who don't hate me. At the end of the day I just care about my own suspension of disbelief and I think a lot of other people do too.

I would much prefer a fantasy movie starring 100% black people made by people who hate me to one starring an unnaturally diverse cast made by people who don't hate me.

An adaptation of a Shakespeare play that had an all-black cast could be great. Peter Brook's version of the Mahabharata - 9 hour stage play then 6 hour TV mini-series then 3 hour movie - had that kind of unnaturally diverse cast because he felt it was a universal story, not just one applicable to India (I don't know how Indian people felt about this, I'd understand not being too gruntled about having Asian, African and white actors play historically Indian characters). It was a good effort, but it was definitely not the original.

You could make a version of the Three Musketeers that was all-Asian (in fact, there was a Korean TV series that did just this but was dropped after the first season). It'd be odd, but it would work way better than having the traditional version except now d'Artagnan is Korean but he's also still from Gascony.

That being said, casting a black Porthos for the 2014 BBC version of the Three Musketeers worked extremely well, but they were careful to give him a back-story to explain this. They didn't just drop in black Porthos and nobody blinks an eye.

Original African or Caribbean legends/myths with appropriate character art, or shows, or movies, would be great. Taking white characters and race swapping them isn't for anybody's benefit in the long run.

An adaptation of a Shakespeare play that had an all-black cast could be great.

Like this one

Oooh, that could work really well. Orson Welles had imagination and theatrical vision to spare. Caribbean island (cough Haiti cough) as the place where a warlord believed the promise of witches about becoming king? Translates over with little difficulty!

That sounds like a Russel conjugation. "I show reality as it is, you show a vulgar political display." Hardly that convincing, nor do I think it requires a hatred of white consumers.

Race matters in Tolkein in a way that white progressives, by virtue of their white upbringings, simply cannot grasp. Ignorance is not malice.

The difference matters a great deal.

Firstly, it keeps our worst impulses in check. It is too easy for people to assume the worst of others and also generalize off of that assumption. So "some progressives hate white people" becomes "progressives hate white people".

If we're here to culture war, by all means, go ahead and engage in this kind of generalization. If we're not, then it's actively harmful to the effort.

For a close to home example, I don't think anyone at The Schism "hates" white people in the way, say, Hannah Nikole-Jones or Tema Okun does, but I think many of them would engage in a lot of hemming, hawing, and sanewashing why those attitudes make sense in context, or why they should be tolerated (but the opposite equivalent wouldn't be, a la the fiasco last month with Impassionata- I strongly doubt the mods would've tolerated a right-wing rant half as long), etc etc. Or why slurs are so much worse at certain targets, but basically don't matter towards others.

Do you have any evidence to support these claims? I find that the mods there are very hesitant to give out bans at all or even warnings for that matter, and as @drmanhattan16 notes, there's been plenty of right-wing or at least anti-progressive ranting in the sub over its lifetime. I vaguely recall @gemmaem discussing this hesitancy in a comment early on, though I'm having trouble finding a link to it with the reddit api fiasco making searching for old comments a bit troublesome at the moment.

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But attributing it to ignorance gives it too much credit and is pretty uncharitable in its own right.

Ignorance isn't exactly the word I'd use either, I think you're right that it paints too rosy a picture. I think progressives, like all groups, are guilty of having Crystalized Metaphysical Heuristics, and they aren't completely unaware of what they do, but they are only as good as any other human group at updating beliefs. It's made worse by the fact that they don't optimize for truth for its own sake.

"Some progressive hate white people" -> "other progressives provide cover for, tolerance for, ignore, and generally let such bigotry spread; their beliefs cause them to be indifferent to such complaints" -> "to an outsider, there is little discernable difference between progressives that do or do not hate white people because the results are likely similar."

I concur! But I think it can and should inform the response when engaging in intertribal dialogue. "Progressives hate white people" gets no traction, "progressives are indifferent to white people, and indifference is an insidious thing" has a chance to go somewhere.

(but the opposite equivalent wouldn't be, a la the fiasco last month with Impassionata- I strongly doubt the mods would've tolerated a right-wing rant half as long), etc etc.

There was a rant only a few months ago in which the poster effectively called the concept of privilege, but more importantly its public practictioners, idiots. It's not particularly "right-wing", but it's far more hostilely-written than one would except for a forum characterized as "for lefties who may have some issues with social justice". That person is not banned and the discussion went on for a while.

But it really isn’t just Toilken. It’s The Little Mermaid. It’s Star Wars. See other examples in this thread.

The Little Mermaid is another example of what I'm talking about. I don't know what the Star Wars example is.

Let me make your white male heroes of yesterday a dead beat dad and a bitter old loser while the real heroes are a woman, a black man, a rebellion lead by women, and a Hispanic dude. Oh yeah and the villains are all white too.

One of those women was an important character in the original trilogy, I hope you're not forgetting that. She was an important leader then and it's certainly not implausible she would be leader of the rebellion by that point.

But that's beside the point. Ignorance has yet to be ruled out.

Yes but the natural place for her would be in the new government (and that might be more interesting).

But yes you can always hide behind “they don’t actually mean anything; sure they keep doing the same thing over and over again but it could be ignorance.”

But I think for example you could find evidence in statements like:

https://bleedingcool.com/movies/diversity-behind-camera-star-wars/

Nobody was upset about "Romeo and Juliet in Harlem" either (though possibly nobody noticed it). But these types of adaptations aren't the same as woke replacements. American versions of Romeo and Juliet aren't essentially insisting that the original Shakespeare characters were American (whether black, white, or Puerto Rican). Copyright issues make it difficult to make such an adaptation of more recent works.

Nobody was upset about "Romeo and Juliet in Harlem" either (though possibly nobody noticed it).

Or The Wiz because they race swapped the entire cast and changed the plot enough to explain all this. Hell, West Side Story is the race swapped American version of Romeo and Juliet, but again it works because they put in the work to make it credible.

"Here's Aragorn and Arwen and she's still a white Elf but now he's black despite being the descendant of her uncle, her father's twin brother" with no explanation as to "oh yeah, this is how that works" is not remotely the same thing.

Now imagine you take Shaka Zulu but make him Scottish. Complete ginger Jock stereotype all the way. You think there wouldn't be any objections to that? You think "oh but it's diversity and representation for a modern audience" would fly there?

(Though I have to admit, I'd love to see someone try that. The Zulu impi lines up before battle, then out strolls the king, Shaka McZulu, in his traditional clan tartan kilt. "Right, lads, set yer assegais to malky!")

What kind of "woke replacement" do you think insists the original character was the new version?

I would understand if they did changed something but insisted it was historically accurate. But that is about a fraction of the complaints about "woke replacement"

Rome in the BBC, Aragorn here, and Hermione in Harry Potter all come to mind.

What is the BBC media you are referring to? A cursory search does not tell me.

As for fictional characters, I don't think it has been conclusively shown that there is any obligation for them to claim they aren't adhering to the original depictions.

Google "history is a whitewash"

But this discussion has happened before, and will happen again. And people will pretend not to remember to score points.

Fair enough, that example does seem to be a case of social commentary, in which case, I would agree that there is an obligation to get things right. But not all media is trying to do social commentary.

In cases where characters are raceswapped, it seems like most of it these days is trying social commentary, even if on a meta level. To my eyes, at least.

Turning a character that was long considered white in the original text and all of its adaptations may not have have anything in-universe turn on it. But you can just go ahead and read the press release or the creator's Twitter page to figure out why this is happening. They may even say something like "I only did this because I thought this was novel and interesting!", but then quickly reveal that what makes it novel/interesting is pushing back against white male patriarchy or whatever.

It's also based on a play, and reimaginings of plays in different settings/aesthetics/cultures is a time-honored tradition... as is (sometimes) colorblind casting.

Maybe related: nobody had an issue with Boromir being black in the LotR musical.

as is (sometimes) colorblind casting.

Except the motte is "colorblind casting" and the bailey is "no white people please LOL". When's a production of Shaka Zulu going to star a white guy?

I feel like the real bailey is closer to "Aragorn was always black". It certainly was with the Black Romans episode, which had people insisting that the Roman Empire was about as diverse as modern London.

Similarly to @BurdensomeCount , I couldn't care less about Tolkien's racial canon. It's the same thing as always happens, too. Sure, it's funny how we used to do blackface for historical accuracy – and now fantasy peoples, some outright inhuman and extraterrestial or extradimensional, ought to possess diverse ethnic identity signifiers of the population of United states. It might also break immersion for fans who are serious about history and deep lore of fantasy settings; I can respect their plight… to roughly the same extent as I respect artists annoyed by the deluge of AI-generated kitsch. Literally First World Problems. Tiny violin. Etc.

But. You know, little things like that do more than break immersion in a specific media piece. They break the whole illusion, jerk me awake. They redpill me (speaking of which: Wachowskis may believe they were making Gnostic allusions to the trans condition, but of course it's the other way around, they came within an inch of understanding Gnosticism through their sexual turmoil).

These little things remind me that I am an adult, a boring mature specimen of a murderous ape in the world of murderous, lying, boring and terribly clever apes, and not a neotenic Eloi in some enchanted Consumerland beholding le epic stories of adventure. Little things together form a pattern, the conspicuous and unalterable watermark of tropes that The Greater American Empire leaves on assimilated «IPs» and «franchises», on myths forging souls of those eternal children in the Pure Land of the West and beyond. Those tropes teach you to complete sentences.

Ultimate, irredeemable scumbags and punching bags are… white men.

All happy families or relationships are… either colored or mixed-race.

The one good white father figure, if he exists… dies a martyr, willingly, to make way for hot-blooded folx of color, often his adopted children ushering in a new era. He is not to have any white heirs of his own, certainly not decent male ones (it's okay to leave a daughter though).

The colored girl is… brilliant and self-assured, sassy yet competent.

The monsters are… gentle victims of exploitation and harassment (by elite whites).

And a bunch of other similar edifying pieces on what a Decent Person ought to expect, diligently repeated.

(Yes, I've watched Black Adam and a few Foundation episodes. Big mistake. Alita also comes to mind. And The Good Place. And even that Puss in Boots 2. I suppose the overhyped Spiderman is of the same mold, given his creator's stated beliefs).

You cannot escape. This pattern is to American movies (and games and cards and fan wikis and whatever) what the text of the Roman Missal is to Requiem by Mozart or Verdi or whoever else – the spirit and the essence, the Truth that is to be learned even as fanciful capeshit and fantasy plots change by the season. White and black, black and white, and then all colors of the extended Pride flag, the drill is spinning-spinning-spinning and it makes me sick for I cannot stop seeing the shape these colors carve into reality, even as low-effort rubbery CGI and glossy illustrations and clever game mechanics and inane bastardized narratives dance on its edges. When exposed to this absurd vision, I am not being entertained; I am being lectured through a tedious post-Hajnali quasi-religious morality play, and a sloppy one at that, boilerplate written by humorless Cathedralites who expect – for sound reasons – to elicit childish excitement with their mass-produced baubles sweetening the pill.

I'm either too old for this shit to be distracted by baubles or too wretched to appreciate the profundity of its moral lessons. But I'm just right for manga, somehow. Now as dozen years ago, I find chapter 88 of Medaka Box quite profound. More so now in fact, given that it talks of a similar disillusion I hadn't been keenly aware of back then.

They'll lobotomize the Japanese too, won't they? The process is well underway. In another dozen years, odds are we'll have all the creative means we could imagine, and nary a creator. Only sermonists.

I suppose the overhyped Spiderman is of the same mold, given his creator's stated beliefs

Brian Michael Bendis is a real piece of work. He’s hated among the Marvel and DC fandoms for being the anti-Stan Lee, reinventing classic characters to new motivations and messages drawn from the bleeding edge of the Culture War.

Bendis did some compelling true crime comics, and has a few good ideas here and there. Miles Morales, young Black/Puerto Rican Spider-Man, is an interesting character with an important story arc, as distilled in the Spider-Verse movies. In my opinion Miles, middle-class bilingual son of a Black American cop, takes a similar place in culture to the original Spider-Man, post-WWII Jewish orphan nerd Peter Parker rubbing elbows with Harry Osbourn, scion of a titan of industry. It’s the kind of odd circle of friends and cultures that just happens in big New York City.

How much of that setting-appropriateness is the editors reining in Bendis’ activism? I don’t know, but I suspect it’s more than one bit; Bendis with full creative control is full lecture mode, and one reason I rarely buy comics anymore.

Ant-Man and the Wasp

Seriously?

I admit it's a bit of an exaggeration. But even Requiem could drop some parts of liturgy.

(to be clear, I didn't mean monsters in the moral sense, that'd be incoherent. I meant actual dragons/sea beasts/other supernatural creatures that are portrayed as default targets of human hatred in the setting where they are present).

Ignoring the race issue, I was very impressed overall.

Was it just that ?

Goldberry in the books:

"slender as a willow-wand"

"while Goldberry busied herself about the table; and their eyes followed her, for the slender grace of her movement filled them with quiet delight."

"‘He is,’ said Goldberry, staying her swift movements and smiling."

Meanwhile, the included image shows her card from the new set.

my practiced eye clocks her at 250-300 lbs if she were of average height for a woman, which is class III obesity, formerly known as 'morbid obesity'. Oh well. Apparently, this is because the artist is fat herself.]

/images/16864016024458919.webp

Oh man. I clicked on the artist's Twitter and now I'm glad I did, because that led on to this gem.

Glorfindel, ladies and gentlemen and those of you what ain't too sure.

Well, I suppose if you've been burninated by a Balrog, you might come back a bit crispy round the edges 🤣

I can't even be mad, it's just too dumb.

I'm a Person Of Amplitude myself, and I think that's dumb. I don't feel "represented" when I see fat women in art (sorry Rubens, not even you!), I just think "yeah, we chonkers could stand to lose a few stone". There may be the state of "pleasantly plump" but that ain't it.

I suppose, all things considered, we should be thankful Goldberry is not they/them trans non-binary BIPOC (yet).

Yeah. 'pleasantly plump' is somewhere around US average female weight. May not be any noticeable health effects if someone's slightly careful and active, not an overly big hindrance on daily activities. If the woman is lucky and has an hourglass figure, a non-depressing amount of men (~30%) will still be interested.

This is 100 lbs over that.

Okay, you're right on this point. I'm sure there were other errors here or there.

Wondering how much of that is policy and how much was up to the illustrators.

https://csr.hasbro.com/en-us/esg-reports

Note that in the books we see her in September. Perhaps, being associated with a river, she becomes wider in the spring.

Who gives a shit what color Tolkien's world was or wasn't. It could have been purple with green spots and the myth he created would be just as great (yes I know he wanted to create a new mythology for England, at that time populated by white people, but characters in myth need not resemble the people who created it, pray tell which Germans resembled the dragon Fafnir?)

  • -25

You are getting flak here, but I agree and I sympathise with your core principle in that I, too, don't really care about the race of the people in an adaptation. Why these decisions were made is more my concern, and I don't think there's any possible way to separate the work itself from the larger social and political context that these decisions were made in.

I think one of the best windows into this is to look at historical fiction and how it is portrayed. As a case study let's look at the film Mary Queen of Scots. It casts Lord Thomas Randolph, who was an English ambassador, as a black man. He was not. He was Caucasian. Meanwhile, David Rizzio - Mary’s Italian secretary, who in real life was of white Mediterranean ethnicity, is portrayed by a Puerto Rican actor. So why did they portray it this way? Is it because they simply thought the actors could pull off the role? No: "Defending her adaptational decisions, the film’s director Josie Rourke acknowledged “we know that the characters that Gemma and Adria and Ismael Cruz Cordova [play] were white” and hence “those are people of color playing those who were historically not people of color.” However, Rourke, claiming influence from her theater background, asserted she demanded at the outset of studio discussions that she would not “direct an all-white period drama”. Instead, in justifying her choices Rourke contended her work was “a restorative piece” and that through her casting decisions “the past becomes the present”." Another example of this occurring is in Vikings, where Jarl Haakon, Norway's de facto ruler from 975 to 995, is portrayed as a strong, independent black woman.

Of course the woke will argue that criticisms of these decisions have nothing to do with a desire for seeing historical accuracy. I will give them this: They're correct about that. The historical inaccuracy of these adaptations isn't in and of itself what makes people angry. But they're wrong that the critics are motivated by bigotry and just not wanting to see black people in their films. What makes people angry (generally speaking) is the fact that the decision was an attempt to promote their personal political agenda at the expense of accuracy and integrity, and that it is considered taboo to speak about this even when the creators openly admit to it in public. And of course, this is not just the case in historical fiction but also completely fictional settings where people will often fill the cast to the brim with PoC and women and gay people regardless of how realistic it is for that setting, and regardless of how true it is to the original work if they're adapting an existing IP.

These were ideologically motivated decisions, not ones made in the interest of doing the work justice. As another user here noted (I think this was on the old place?) the point of these kinds of adaptations are "not to make changes out of respect to the source material, but to vandalise the original property to the point where the adaptation is unmistakable political graffiti, with the subconscious intent of proving that they are able to exact their political will anywhere and everywhere without being challenged". And when fans of the IPs point out the clear insincerity, they get lambasted for being horrible racists and sexists and homophobes who Just Don't Like Women And Minorities.

This is why they can't just make new IPs - it's not just nostalgia-baiting. It's more that nothing from the predecessor culture can be allowed to survive untainted. They openly admit to having those intentions, too, only in nicer language. We need a new, updated version of Cinderella with a feminist narrative, a gatekeeping gaslighting girlboss protagonist and a black, "genderless", drag queen-looking creature that is supposed to be a Fairy Godmother, and where the evil stepmother is only the way she is because a man victimised her. All your beloved idols, your myths, your practices will be perverted to serve the successor ideology, and you will remain quiet while we co-opt everything.

Who gives a shit what color Tolkien's world was or wasn't.

This is not how we engage with disagreement here.

Combined with your horrible posting history, banned for a week.

The implication (cue Dennis) is that whites aren’t good or are inferior. We have race swaps and are told “that is good” but it is always whites being replaced. Indeed, if non whites are replaced there is a hue and cry.

Selfishly, I don’t like the implication because eventually that leads to really terrible outcomes for people that look like me.

I started looking through the list. First, a lot of examples were from earlier times and some of them were wrong (eg the article suggests Cleopatra might’ve had African roots which just ain’t so). Second, some of them did result in our rage (Depp). Some of them retroactively amounted to outrage (Oliver as Othello).

Note that both of your examples are prior to 2016, ie pre woke.

And yes, maybe appropriation by white actors is bad, depending on your philosophy, but it wasn’t self-aware. It was the natural consequences of films being made by a mostly white film industry in a mostly white country for a mostly white audience. What makes my blood boil is when all the same people who came up with concept of appropriation and wrote articles like the above turn around and carefully, deliberately do exactly the same thing. And now it’s okay because it’s the right people being erased.

What makes my blood boil is when all the same people who came up with concept of appropriation and wrote articles like the above turn around and carefully, deliberately do exactly the same thing. And now it’s okay because it’s the right people being erased.

For instance, suppose they made a set of Marvel tie-in MtG cards, and Nick Fury (notably played by Samuel L Jackson) was white. I have a hunch there'd be a ton of outrage... despite my understanding being that there's precedent for Nick Fury to be white.

That's a good example. I was dubious when they switched Nick Furey (Irish-heritage surname) to being a black guy, but I could understand that they wanted to cast Samuel L. Jackson and it worked as a casting decision, he has made the role his own.

Marvel also has a history of retcons, multiple dimensions, parallel universes, and variants of the same characters. So there is indeed a world out there in the MCU where Furey is white, is black, is a woman, etc. and that means there is in-canon rationale for such a switch. I was the same for making Heimdall black, but two seconds later I went "It's Idris Elba, he'll be great" and I don't mind that switch, either.

But imagine if Furey had been black all along. Are you going to tell me that the same people would be accepting if he was switched to be a white guy? Even on the grounds "We wanted to cast Joe Bigname in the part"?

The really stupid race swapping was Abrams' reboot Star Trek where they made Khan Noonien Singh a white guy because mumblemumbleIslamophobiamumblemumble. Then they had to do a fix-it in the comic book versions where they explained how original South Asian Khan (played by Spanish-Mexican Ricardo Montalban) was now a white guy because of, uh, plastic surgery. Yeah, that's why! Cumberbatch is a reasonable actor but he was totally wrong for the part. He would have been better as the cover story rogue Starfleet operative John Harrison, and get a proper Desi actor for the role (or heck, anyone of the vague background - Persian, Arabic, you name it).

(still is?)

As I understand it, after the movies they introduced a character who conveniently looks a lot more like Sam Jackson to the main universe as well, old Nick's long lost son, who can now conveniently be called Nick Fury Jr.

So I think he has been replaced in a sense, but in a way that's pretty standard for these soap opera wrestling funnybooks, with identities constantly being passed around, old characters being sent to The Offscreen Zone etc.

Who gives a shit what color Tolkien's world was or wasn't.

Me. I do. This is a conscious effort to erase me and people who look like me. This is a conscious effort to dispossess us of our heritage, to plant a flag in our birthright and say "this isn't yours anymore." This doesn't end at fiction, we've seen history blackwashed (black English queens on Netflix and black Romans on the BBC) into propaganda, with the explicit aim of erasing the historical truth that England was once a much whiter (and much nicer) country.

What point in time would you say it was nicer, aside from (appropriately enough) Tolkien-style longing for the countryside? I'd assume England, like the US, has been generally improving in quality of life and various crime metrics.

Beginning of the Blair years before he revealed his huge throbbing hardon for mass migration.

Who gives a shit what color Tolkien's world was or wasn't.

The authors of the set obviously cared a lot to go against almost a century of lore and thousand of years of history and mythology from which this lore was inspired.

It could have been purple with green spots and the myth he created would be just as great (yes I know he wanted to create a new mythology for England, at that time populated by white people, but characters in myth need not resemble the people who created it, pray tell which Germans resembled the dragon Fafnir?)

Why refute your own point? It very much matters a lot because yes the mythology of a people has to involve the people and put them in a particular place in the world. That's kinda the whole point of having a mythology in the first place.

And before we get into arguments about dragons and BMWs, tell me, what is the name of the chap that killed Fafnir? What did he look like? What was his culture?

Indeed, what sort of dragon was Fafnir in the first place, where did the concept of that particular beast even come from?

To claim myths are just random collections of plot points that can be altered at will and not tapestries of important cultural signifiers is simply to ignore what myth is.

And if it wasn't so important to alter those cultural signifiers, why do people care to do so in the first place?

LOTR is an English tale of the English, and to adapt it to another culture/aesthetic requires a degree of care and cultural understanding of both the source and the target that the mean vandalism we see here doesn't even pretend to exhibit.

what is the name of the chap that killed Fafnir? What did he look like? What was his culture?

Seigfried killed Fafnir. He was described as tall and fair, but that is not the same as "white", plenty of Indians can be said to be fair as well. He almost certainly (if he had existed) was white though. His culture was Norse.

Fafnir was a Germanic flightless dragon, as you can probably tell, the concept came from Norse/Frankish tales.

I am not denying that Tolkien wrote LOTR to be a tale of the British Isles, however the culture he wrote it for is long dead now, modern white people are vestigial hangers on who have perverted the thing that Tolkien wanted to embellish and preserve until it became a crude mockery of itself. Modern whites can't claim that the butchering that has been going on affects them any more than it affects black people, and if they are complaining about the old culture itself being desecrated then we can safely say their own actions have caused far far more lasting and irreparable damage to it than any number of race swaps ever will.

  • -17

the culture he wrote it for is long dead

Spoken like someone who has never left a city. Believe me, Anglos are real. They still exist despite the best attempts of the modernists you are desperately trying to conflate them with.

But even if I didn't have my lying eyes, "let us dance on the grave of the English" doesn't exactly strike me as a moral position. And as a Frenchman this is a more costly position to take for me than you may imagine.

Vandalism and spite are, as Tolkien is so keen to teach, attributes of evil. Why destroy even if all that care are long dead? Why destroy?

modern white people are vestigial hangers on who have perverted the thing that Tolkien wanted to embellish and preserve until it became a crude mockery of itself

If 'modern white people' are perverting so many things, why are you laying into them for trying to at least leave Tolkien unmolested ?

If, in your view, for once they're trying to do something good (assuming conserving being the opposite of perverting), yet you still attack them.

I have a hard time understanding your motives here.

Do you really believe critical theory is essentially white and was willed into existence collectively, and that it wasn't a deliberate, radical move designed to subvert the western bourgeois culture and customs ?

whites can't claim that the butchering that has been going on affects them any more than it affects black people,

Can you provide any example of 'black culture' that has been re-written or remade to be palatable for modern sensibilities ? I honestly have a hard time thinking of any black writer apart from Octavia Butler.

Ok, well, it's the last I want to hear about cultural appropriation then.

Who, whom?

Sure, I'm fine with that. Cultural appropriation as an idea is absolute BS, it's only use is getting self hating whites to pay us gibs. All whites have to do to stop it is give up on the idea themselves completely, but instead they prefer to use it as a weapon in intra-white people conflicts, and we merely collect the fees that it generates every time the idea is invoked and heeded to.

If anything, I've found cultural appropriation has been used a stick to prevent cultural transmission and enforce hedgemony at home.

"Don't wear the Aisan dress 2nd gen immigrant, wear the American one. Wouldn't want to appropriate now would we?"

I actually disagree, and think some concept of appropriation is necessary to prevent globohomo, but your rules fairly and all that.

Reject modernity, embrace Wood Elemental.

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