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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.
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.
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