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ZorbaTHut  1yr ago (text post)   Edited 1yr ago   38240 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 12, 2022

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I've barely read LOTR but unless whiteness was a critical part of the story it seems fine to change skin color. It's a movie about, like, whole different species of humanoids right? Different skin colors should be well within bounds?

For me at least there are two reasons why this sort of thing bothers me.

  1. If a character is described a certain way in the book, they should be cast that way. Period. It doesn't matter if it's important to the story, what matters is that is the way the source material was written and that should be respected.

  2. Even if I didn't have a problem with it otherwise (which I do, like I said), I still don't like it when creative decisions are made for ideological reasons. If someone wants to cast a minority actor who happens to be the best actor for the role, that's one thing. But like @haroldbkny I have zero belief at this point that that's what they are doing. I know damn well that these casting decisions are made with the skin color of the actors in mind as the first and foremost thing, and everything else is just a fig leaf justification. And just as I would be angry at "we can't have all these black people, cast some white folks" in a production, I am also angry at "we can't have all these white people, cast some black folks".

What they should have done is cast Gwendoline Christie in the part of Galadriel. She is the correct colouring and more importantly, the right height. Elendil should be something under eight feet tall, and the rest of the Númenoreans are correspondingly big. Why this discrimination based on height?

Instead, we get pallid little Morfydd Clark wandering around as a badass. Even less believable than black Dwarven princesses and Afro-Hispanic Elves!

If a character is described a certain way in the book, they should be cast that way. Period. It doesn't matter if it's important to the story, what matters is that is the way the source material was written and that should be respected.

Or if you're diverging substantially from the character description, you should be able to defend/explain it as changing something that clearly didn't work in the source material (or did, but wouldn't translate to screen well) and so is intended as an improvement.

But yes, loyalty to the source should be the baseline expectation. If you're so desperate to add some diversity, then write up a new character and do the work to integrate them into the world. If they're well-received, now you've actually added something to the series!

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