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Notes -
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?)
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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