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I don't mind there being Elves of Color or humans of color in the Amazon series. Elves came out of the far East before being drawn West? And then some elves stayed behind while others went on over the sea. If there was a consistent racial difference between the elves that came over the sea and those that had stayed behind, I'd be ok with it.
Numenor was a massive empire centered around what would now be the Mediterranean and the crown was based on the Egyptian crown. So there's a lot of room for a cosmopolitan society there. (Though there is a rule that only a man can inherit the crown, and the show breaks that.)
What bothers me is when people's ethnicity just does not make sense considering the historical context.
Like isolated Hobbit village. If they want to argue that hobbits used to all be darker but got lighter over thousands of years by the time of LOTR, I'd accept that. But if they have hobbit precursors that look like they are from every corner of the globe in a small isolated community that hasn't had any intermarriage for hundreds of years... that makes no sense. Same with dwarves. If they want to say that elves who have been in the same geographic regions and marriage stock for thousands of years have distinct ethnicities, that seems impossible too.
This is all to say, what will really bother me at the end of the day is a show that doesn't give the same consideration to history, language, and time that Tolkien imbued on his universe. If there isn't an explanation for everything that goes back tens of thousands of years, they did it wrong. If everyone acts like a modern American, with modern American values and motivations, they did it wrong.
Well, Númenor did hold by the law that men only could inherit the throne, so that the eldest child of the fourth king, who was a daughter, was passed over. She became the ancestress of the line of Elendil, which is how they are related to the royal family.
By the time of Tar-Aldarion, he only had one child who was a daughter, so he changed the law to permit her to become ruling Queen. The next ruling queen was the tenth monarch, and the third and last ruling queen was the sixteenth monarch. Then we come to Tar-Míriel who should have been queen, but her throne and crown was usurped by her husband and cousin, Ar-Pharazon.
Making her queen-regent is the show breaking the lore, but they probably needed another Strong Woman or something. After all, Galadriel (despite her best efforts to piss off every single person in Middle-earth) does need allies to fight Sauron, and she makes an alliance with Tar-Míriel who can provide her with ships and Númenorean cavalry (finally an explanation for why she's charging around on horseback at the head of Númenorean forces, we have now seen how much she loves horsey-rides!)
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Right, okay, that does sound annoying. I immediately thought this sounds like how American movies give "foreign" characters in a movie British accent instead of subtitling them. Except worse. Much worse than that.
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