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My facebook has been ablaze with the War of the Rings of Power, and by that I mean Amazon putting out tons of propaganda to indicate that everyone is racist for not liking the the Rings of Power, followed by half of the people saying no that doesn't make us racist, and the other half saying they just don't like it because it's a bad show. A similar thing is going on for the Little Mermaid, too. Alas, that these evil days should be mine.
The thing that strikes me is that no one is saying the obvious. To me, and I'll guess to many others, I really don't mind diversification of media. Or, that is to say, I wouldn't mind it, if it weren't for the fact that it's now the norm, it's practically mandatory for any show that doesn't want to be cancelled by internet SJWs, it's crammed down my throat everywhere, and it's turned into a major moral issue where half the audience browbeats the other. I feel like I'm being subjected to someone else's religion.
But that woke audience always comes back to "Why are you against black people playing roles? What are you, racist?" Well, no, I honestly don't think I'm racist. But in the position I'm put in, I get that I am taking actions that a racist would. The only difference is that a true racist would be against black people being cast no matter what, and I am only against it being mandatory and moralized. But since we live in this world, where it is mandatory and moralized, does that mean that there's nothing that would really satisfy me short of black people not being cast?
I don't quite think so. Another point that the woke audience comes to is "They clearly just thought that Halle Berry was the best person to play Ariel". And really, I think the answer to that is, no, they clearly prioritize diversity casting. She is black and they want to cast lots of black people because it scores them points with the woke crowd (and possibly also because it drums up controversy, which may be good for business). And then on top of that, they thought she'd be fine for the part. I don't know how I can prove that, but it just seems evident to me that diversity casting for its own sake is something that is being given high priority. In some limited cases, it's possible to prove it, such as with Ryan Condal, the showrunner for House of the Dragon who indicated that they cast black people to play Valerians explicitly for the purpose of diversity-washing. However, I'm guessing that Condal regrets saying that outright, because it's not a good look. It gives the other side ammo and also casts doubt as to whether the people hired really would have earned the spot on merit alone.
At this point. I don't really know what it would take to convince me that most castings of black people are not just to fill a quota. But this puts me in a tough spot, because I don't really want to be racist in action, even if I know I'm not in thought.
Why can't the production studio be looking at the demographics of the customer base and decide that hey some %age of our customers are black, and so they may relate to the story better and spend money on it if we include more/any black characters?
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?
I agree a lot of productions feel like they're bending over backwards to include more races and it comes off as cheap and woke fearing (see: children's books), but the more basic business case seems valid too.
EDIT: I've not seen the show nor have I read the books and I mostly watched the original movies with 'drinking game' style interest, so pardon my ignorance. I see from the responses that the sprinkling of racial diversity is done in a clearly cheap and ham-fisted way. Thank you to everyone who took my question seriously.
The problem is that most people understand both a) how different phenotypes happen (non-interbreeding populations subject to different sexual and evolutionary selection) and b) what happens when different phenotypes live together (mixing). To have things like the dwarf dude with his unremarked on black dwarf girlfriend, your world needs to have a bunch of historical migration from far away that was either very recent, or else post-migration there were (and perhaps still are) social barriers to intermarriage.
In the former case, it's interesting and notable - dwarf dude with a distant foreigner wife. In the latter case it's also interesting and notable - why were there social barriers to intermarriage? Do they still exist, or is dwarf dude defying convention? Whatever this backstory is, it's not Tolkien. It's not even any flavor of British that existed while Tolkien was alive.
Yes. There are black people in Tolkien. They come from far away, ride oliphants and their nation allied with Sauron in LOTR. They did not migrate to Gondor en masse several hundred years ago.
Probably a few of them did visit on occasion. But when foreigners visit in medieval times it's not a "ok it's a black guy, so what?" kind of event. The backstory of the world influences things. Consider the travelogues of Ahmad ibn Fadlan or Ahmad Ibn Rustah: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ahmad_ibn_Fadlan https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ahmad_ibn_Rustah
A visit to the Volga Bulgars results in much complaining about how they pray incorrectly (most of ibn Fadlan's book). A visit to the Rus involves all kinds of remarks on their poor hygiene and what perfect physical specimens these tall blonde people are. This is quite literally a vital part of LOTR. The hobbit characters, coming from a region coded as the English countryside, witness how big and strange the rest of the world is and have reactions quite similar to Fadlan or Rustah.
Imagine that instead of globohomo - which is likely familiar to you - we actually had a very different flavor of cultural imperialism. Suppose at some point, with no real explanation, Elrond and Galadriel start praying the Salah. Then on some journey perhaps some hobbit characters are starving but still refuse to eat pork offered by the dwarves, protesting that it is not halal. Then Celebrian starts explaining Islam to the dwarves, being generally awesome, and the first season ends with the dwarves saying "La ilaha illa Allah, Muhammad rasoolu Allah."
That would be...weird, right? It would probably be for people to complain that whatever this is, it's some very strange bastardization of Tolkien that's about nothing more than spreading Islam.
Religion is categorically different from what we got in RoP.
It'd be just as weird if you replaced all your Islamic hypotheticals with Christian ones, even though they're more familiar to Americans and much more closely aligned to Tolkien's actual setting.
A better comparison would be...I dunno, Enlightenment democracy. Imagine every time anyone makes a decision in the show, it's a vote. Travelers, merchants, soldiers, it's just the default. When Aragorn meets the hobbits they demonstrate "consent of the governed" and at the end he renounces kingship for a new government.
That'd be a change that spits on Tolkien's original themes. (I'm pretty sure it's also what happened in the last episode of Game of Thrones?) It'd suck, but in a different sort of way than importing religious terminology and rituals from our world. I think this is more in line with the characterization and plotting messes from RoP.
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