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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.
You know, this brings to mind Romeo + Juliet, a film that uses the exact same dialogue as Shakespeare's play, but changes the characters and setting to one that is familiar to Americans.
Would it be unreasonable for a British person to complain about this for the same reason? It's not inconceivable, the movie is partly a cultural and national swap in the same way Aragorn was race swapped - the original most certainly did not conceive of the character(s) this way. I say "partly" because they kept the same dialogue, and language is an important part of placing a culture.
And yet, I suspect most Americans don't mind this, perhaps because it was a swap in their favor, but probably because Shakespeare just isn't as big a culture war topic. Are the British upset about it? I doubt that as well, but maybe I'm wrong. I don't follow their media critics.
@problem_redditor says precisely what I suspect is the real belief of many here - that there is nothing illegitimate about X-swapping, only with the intentions behind it.
Mostly we're used to directors arsing around with new! unique! daring! Shakespeare interpretations, same with operas. Setting it in Miami isn't the worst the movie could have done, and he did keep the plot, the characters, and the language.
What the cards have done is the equivalent of the modern show where Anne Boleyn is black, but everything else historically is the same (and her daughter, Elizabeth, is the white-skinned, strawberry-blonde baby she should be, instead of the same colour as her mother). So Anne is black, her brother is black, but her daughter is white and so on. The only reason for this is not "we cast the best actress" because why not race swap the entire cast, then? It's for cheap novelty and attention. Jodie Turner-Smith is a decent actress, but casting her is just more Girlboss Inclusive Revisionism, and of course the quotes at the end of this trailer are not at all the kind of thing the real Anne said at the end.
Right, so why can't we say something like "Making the characters look like a sampling of New York City's elite isn't the worst thing, they still kept the plot, characterizations, and language" for LOTR?
Why can't it be the view that race is irrelevant to character? That a black Anne Boleyn is the same in a fundamental sense as a white one?
And before someone tells me that progressives are hypocrites because they don't tolerate the whitewashing of a character, recognize that they, like all people, are more than capable of compartmentalizing their beliefs. That they do this in no way suggests that they also don't actually believe it.
I mean, if they set it in NYC, as an updated cyberpunk LotR, where the "Ring" is a USB with StuxNet or something... that might be pretty awesome.
Sure, I'd love if they at least tried something like that. But the harshest complaint here is consistently that this is down out of intentional malice, and that's what I don't agree with.
I can agree with that. My gut instinct is that a lot of people don't like white men, but that's a far cry from "let's change the race of characters just to make them mad."
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