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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.
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?)
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.
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This is not how we engage with disagreement here.
Combined with your horrible posting history, banned for a week.
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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).
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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.
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).
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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.
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?
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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 ?
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.
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Ok, well, it's the last I want to hear about cultural appropriation then.
Who, whom?
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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?"
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I actually disagree, and think some concept of appropriation is necessary to prevent globohomo, but your rules fairly and all that.
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