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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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