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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?)
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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