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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.
So what's wrong with this anyways? If Amazon wants to cast more black / POC actors and actresses that's neutral if not good. I don't get the problem.
Because it takes you out of the world of the show you're trying to watch. When a black elf appears in LOTR I'm suddenly very aware that I'm not a fly on the wall in this fantasy world and that I am, in fact, just sitting on my couch watching something some people at Amazon decided to write and some actors acted out. Same with The Little Mermaid, I've seen the original and I'm used to white Ariel, when she turns up as black I'm suddenly made aware that I'm not watching Ariel, I'm just watching some actress pretend to be a mermaid by saying the lines she's told to. It's disillusioning and ruins the experience.
This seems a bit of an issue, we know Tom Cruise isn't a fighter pilot or a spy or a 6 foot 2 bruiser, so any famous actor should also pull you out. Or James Bond, played by different actors, with different accents and different hair colours and of different ages.
The original Little Mermaid was a cartoon, but the fact she is animated didn't wreck your immersion? Or the fact that she is a mythical sea creature with a talking singing crab et al? Why particularly is skin color the thing that breaks your immersion? This isn't a gotcha, I find it legitimately perplexing.
As an aside, I do have an amusing vision of a marine biologist complaining about how the Little Mermaid breaks his immersion because crabs don't sing like that, or a Greek classicist complaining about the fact that mermaids should really be bird women not fish women.
Animation is the choice of medium -- that always has to be taken for granted to establish suspension of disbelief for all fiction.
The other two points are either the setting in essence or an ordinary extension of the setting's logic (why wouldn't there be talking fish in a world with magical sea creatures?)
The casting is unlike the first two because, just like ROP, its point is to make you conscious of topics outside the setting's context. That sort of commentary isn't always bad -- but it is bad when the commentary takes the form of the fiction's existence itself and its execution doesn't involve playing a part in the story. Noticing that the Little Mermaid is black now happens entirely apart from the actual story of the Little Mermaid, and it comes off as the blatant coattail-riding it really is.
And if you knew that it wasn't coattail riding but that this specific actress was cast due to being the best at audition? Would that change your perception?
If we knew that, sure, but we know she's not, as diversity has been an explicit, loudly-opined goal of the bloc supporting her. While it's possible she's the best candidate, it's so unlikely as to beggar belief, and I know you don't really think she was. You get what you optimize for, and they're not optimizing for the best person.
Careful with consensus building. You may heavily suspect she is not, but you don't (unless you have access to more information about the casting decisionmaker's internal state)absolutely know. Which you then admit in your next sentence in fact. The director's statement:
"After an extensive search, it was abundantly clear that Halle possesses that rare combination of spirit, heart, youth, innocence, and substance — plus a glorious singing voice — all intrinsic qualities necessary to play this iconic role,” Marshall said in a statement."
Now he might be a liar here. But your own statements contradict yourself. If you KNOW she's not the best choice, then it isn't POSSIBLE she is. You can heavily suspect, your priors might heavily point that way, but if you admit there is a possibility she was chosen because she was the best, then I don't think you can also state you KNOW she wasn't!
But anyway, that is all besides the point. We're operating in the hypothetical where you do know she was picked because she was the best. Given that, would that impact how you felt about it? Or would you still think they shouldn't pick a black actress even if she was the best in audition?
No, I'm quite comfortable saying that when you optimize for X you're going to get X, not Y. If you want to pretend these people are meritocratic, they need to start optimizing for meritocracy, not diversity, very, very loudly.
As for the what-if, my answer is "I reject the hypothetical". If things were different they'd be different. That's not useful.
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Interrogating what does or does not break my suspension of disbelief is a lot like accusing my libido of hypocrisy.
What? You can crank one out to a big titted redhead with visible implant scars, but not a big titted blonde with a slightly lazy eye? Hypocrisy!
I mean first off, is this even the type of work that asks for your suspension of disbelief? One of my favorite movies is Shoot Em Up. It's fantastically stupid. No part of it is believable in even the remotest sense. I'm not sure where to place James Bond in this category. The Daniel Craig ones appeared to be asking for your suspension of disbelief. Moonraker a lot less so. That series of movies has had changes, and it would be hard to fault anyone for preferring some over others. Or outright dismissing swathes of them as not being "true" Bonds. As the age old debates of who played Bond best proves. There are some real Sean Connery die hards out there.
Second, my suspension of disbelief can bend. Personally, I can stretch my disbelief that Tony Ja, who looks approximately 90 lb and 4'5" (I kid, I kid) can defeat 7' viking DNA giants in The Protector. It is literally impossible for me to believe no matter how hard I try that a waifish and menopausal looking Uma Thurman can do the same. Lucky for Tarantino he doesn't ask for my suspension of disbelief (see rule #1). The point I'm trying to make is, if I'm supposed to take your action movie "seriously", in the style of a Gladiator or a Rocky 1, at least look the part.
Third, if world building is remotely important to this work, have it make at least plausible sense. And this is where all the race-swapping in pre-built fantasy worlds gets me. These are worlds that already have established phenotypes for it's inhabitants. Already have, and frequently center in the oral history told to the character, the movements of those peoples. They take place in a worlds with very little globalization. Don't fucking portray them as some sort of post-racial globalized society! They can plausibly get away with a little diversity if the setting is an empire and they are in the trade capital. But none of this "3 out of 4 main and background characters are non-natives, as well as most of the important people in assorted hierarchies". No country except in the last 30 years was that eager to cuck their native population, except the conquered.
Except they are not the same version as the original. As mentioned above Ultimates Nick Fury is different than 616 Fury (originally at least). In this version of the LoTR history there are black dwarves. They can change the background so in that universe it is not regarded as "cucking their population" or whatever. Now the Doylist reason for that is increasing diversity representation or etc., and that is a reasonable position to oppose. But from a Watsonian perspective your pre-knowledge about how there would only be black characters because of post-racial globalization no longer holds. You can dislike the change, but you seem to be saying that it HAS to have the same background as our world. That black dwarves came from some Africa equivalent, rather than being a magical mutation, or any other reason under the sun. Perhaps when Aule created the seven fathers of the dwarfs, they were different shades and Valar magic means one seventh of the population will always be black. Your assumption seems to be that there can only be black characters in this version if they come from some far off place, and in Tolkien's original that may be the case. But this is not that. It is an adaption.
Tolkiens novel's may have had established phenotypes, but the adaptions may or may not. The black dwarf can be a native, so can a white dwarf (Grombrindal aside perhaps). Plausible world building does not require that it matches our own world's history. To me, Tolkien's histories don't even make internal sense in the first place, so adding some extra features that also don't make sense is barely an issue. I might raise an eyebrow if they revealed Middle-Earth was on the back of a turtle, but I would at least be looking forward to seeing the Patrician in action.
The fact there are magical god-Wizards and the earth was flat until it became round and there wasn't a sun but the world was lit by trees, already shows that the history can depart radically from our own. In this version, it is altered more such that there are black dwarves or hobbits or whatever. To me the latter seems a much smaller departure than the former. Since I accept the former as part of the world, I can also accept the latter.
Now if you don't suspend your belief for either, then that is a different and quite reasonable objection. If you're like the aforementioned biologist complaining that dragons that big could never fly with those wings, or that clearly the elven stories about the world having once been flat and lit by trees are clear nonsense, then complaining about phenotypes also makes sense, you're grounding the world in our reality and finding it lacking. But that isn't the objection I mostly seem to see.
Original Nick Fury was of Irish descent, Fury/Furey is an Irish surname. They can change white Nick to black Nick because the Watsonian explanation is in-universe it is a multiverse. The Doylist explanation is that (a) they thought it would be cool to have Samuel Jackson in the part and (b) comics ret-con stories all the time.
That's not the case here. If you could argue convincingly that Middle-earth is in a multiverse situation, then fine, black Dwarves and Chinese hobbits and whatever else you like. But Middle-earth, although a fictional creation, is not meant to be some imaginary world out there in the vast universe, it is supposed to be our world in the very, very remote past.
You can't argue that "Okay now these North-Western Europeans from the dawn of history who are all deliberately created for Tolkien's view of a native English mythology are non-white, just because". There is no "in this version", there is compliant with canon or their own invention.
And they are going for their own invention, but they skipped making Galadriel black because they knew there was no possible way to get away with that, and arguing about "but in this version" wouldn't cut it. They didn't want black Galadriel or black Elrond or black Dain, because they wanted to draw in people with the lure of the original movies.
Of course Aule could have created black Dwarves, and if the showrunners spent two minutes crafting some coherent explanation for how come Dísa is a black Dwarf, then yeah I'd accept the "only racists are objecting" argument. But they didn't, and the show relies on "we're doing this, and the only reason you're objecting is because you are a racist".
What is much, much worse than one (1) black Elf amongst all the white Elves and one (1) black Dwarf amongst all the white Dwarves is the terrible writing, the leaden fake-profound dialogue, and changing the character of Galadriel to be some 90s Grrl Power bratty teenager. I don't even care about the whole "Galadriel was never a warrior" argument, because I think she had some experience of battle and fighting, but Tolkien's point again and again and again is that running around killing things is not the way to live:
For Tolkien, the show's version of Galadriel is not a heroine, but someone profoundly damaged and in need of healing. The showrunners can burble on about their own updated to reflect the modern world version all they like, but they cannot claim this is Tolkien's world. They cannot eat their cake and have it, too.
In the books Glorfindel drives back the Nazgul. In the movies it is Arwen. Two different versions of the same story. Each is a separate contained universe. One is the original and the other is an altered adaption. You don't need an (internal to the story) multiverse for that. It's an issue that already exists. The 80's animation, the books, the movies, the extended version of the movies.
And if they pay the licensing fee to Tolkiens estate they absolutely can claim that. They bought it fair and square. With caveats of what they could and could not do. Art can be bought and sold.
They replaced Glorfindel with Arwen, and while I hate this choice, I understand it.
They did not replace Glorfindel with a single mother brown Human healer from an invented village in the far South populated by the descendants of the Men who fought in Morgoth's armies, and had Jackson even tried doing that, the first movie would have sunk like a stone that looks down into the darkness which is why it does not float like a ship that looks up at the light.
They did not have Japanese Elrond or Hispanic Legolas.
Think about what you are saying, because what you are saying is "Amazon are making their own version of a fantasy world and just calling it Middle-earth", which is in agreement with what the rest of us are arguing about.
If a Chinese studio wanted to do a version of LOTR and cast every single part with Chinese actors - it would be feckin' glorious because they know how to do epic fantasy and ethereally beautiful people of fairy descent. I would not say a single word about it.
I would, however, squawk like a goose if they decided that Gondor was in fact the Qin Dynasty and Númenor had been Korea, and cast accordingly with the rest of the parts being White European as per the book.
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There are no "versions". There are just things that are Lord of the Rings, and things that are not Lord of the Rings. This is not Lord of the Rings. It's a bastardized cash grab pushed out by cultural vandals who hate and disdain everything the original represented.
I'm not a fan of any "living document" interpretations.
Ahh, well, that is where we differ I think. The books, the 80's movie, the Jackson Trilogies, and the new series have fundamental incompatibilities. Jackson replaces Glorfindel with Arwen. for example. That doesn't stop his trilogy being Lord of the Rings. It isn't the original version. But it also isn't something entirely new.
It's a bastardized cash grab ** -agreed-** pushed out by cultural vandals who hate and disdain everything the original represented. - I disagree here, they may have a different view of things, but reading some interviews with the writers it certainly does not appear that they "hate and disdain" everything. They have different views than they do, of course but that isn't the same thing.
Is Glorfindel an Elf? Is Arwen an Elf? Or is Arwen a Sassy Black Girl?
Because one of these things is not like the other.
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No, but Maverick was a new character and so when watching the original Top Gun I had no priors as to what he should look like. In an alternate universe where Maverick were originally black I don't think there would be any immersion-breaking; if the new Top Gun movie had a black guy play Maverick after Tom Cruise already had in the original then it would be immersion-breaking.
Things have to be internally consistent. I have the same issue with fantasy settings where something happens that doesn't make sense in the setting but people try to tell me "bro it's all make-believe, they're time travelling anyways who cares if that character suddenly can do something with no explanation that would have been helpful before". I accept the premises of the world upon starting a show and am fine so long as the conclusions follow from those premises even if they don't follow the premises of real life; if the show starts creating contradictions with its own premises then that is a problem and I can no longer believe anything it tells me.
I feel like Dwight from the "Asian Jim" bit on The Office: https://youtube.com/watch?v=cLNyF1Zw5tg
That is fair, but if in the new rebooted universe there are black mermaids then that can be internally consistent. It doesn't need to be internally consistent with the previous version necessarily. Like 616 Nick Fury was white and Ultimates Universe Nick Fury was black. If Ultimates Fury was shown having white parents then if it wasn't explained that would be strange, but he doesn't have to be consistent with 616 Fury's white ancestry.
In our example, it wouldn't be white Jim becoming Asian Jim, it would be a rebooted version of the Office where (in that new universe) Jim was always asian. Internal consistency is internal to the reboot, not to the previous version. Otherwise actors would have to be the same as well.
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Imagine a new Top Gun movie where originally black Maverick was replaced by Cruise, or whatever white actor is the Hot New Action Star.
Yeah, I think we all agree that right now in this current climate, this is not a world where that can happen, and anyone trying the "this is a different version of the original world, so it's copacetic to have a black character played by a white guy" argument would be flayed alive.
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If they feel little need to stick with the source material when it comes to character depictions then why would we expect them to stick with source material in other, perhaps more significant elements?
Its more just a signal that their priorities lie somewhere other than producing a quality product. Staying true to the source is usually easy to do, so a deliberate decision to change it indicates some other underlying logic at work.
A pretty reliable signal, at this point. Are people not allowed to wonder why certain changes were made, and how this might impact the quality?
Ok, but why does it matter to you? I'm not going to prevent you from caring or say you're not allowed to care. But I don't get why you care about race specifically. Criticize them for making a bad series, not for using some black actors.
If I enjoy a particular series, I tend to want it to maintain a decent level of quality, and to stay true to the elements that led me to enjoy it. If I've devoted some substantial amount of time and money to it, I would like to think said time and money was well spent.
I don't have many ways to influence the quality of a given series other than voicing opinions and spending or not spending money on it. For extremely popular series, the influence of my input is probably close to nil.
It really doesn't matter to me in any way that influences my life, but I'd really prefer if we had more good media and less mediocre media, and I think I'm allowed to set my expectations accordingly.
I do criticize bad series, there's just so many of them. And the point was that they're using minority actors as a shield to deflect criticism by pretending that racism is the driving cause of the critiques. Which is patently and obviously false! They (a billion dollar conglomerate) are essentially claiming victimhood on behalf of the actors they intentionally cast!
And thus, I'm not criticizing them for using black actors. I'm criticizing them for deflecting honest complaints with a blatantly misleading, dishonest tactic. They're the ones intentionally using the tactic, and pointing out the tactic seems justifiable.
If they would just cast characters based on what makes sense for the work in question and not center all the marketing on how diverse and progressive their casting choices are then perhaps we'd see improvements in quality and thus a reduction in complaints/critiques.
Top Gun: Maverick pulled this off. Added in female, hispanic, black characters, didn't make it a big deal, made a fun movie, and people absolutely fucking loved it.
Just a thought.
I think Top Gun proves my argument because nobody was distracted from the "authenticity" by minority and black casting. People say they're just bothered by LoTR being a bad show but they keep talking about the black actors. Nobody cared about it with Top Gun when Top Gun did exactly what people say they don't like by taking an existing franchise and including black people.
People keep saying that criticism of LoTR has nothing to do with diversity, but then they keep criticizing diversity.
I mean, do you not see how the settings of these two works might cause 'diversity' to be less distracting and noticeable in one, compared to the other?
Especially when, again, the creators center marketing around it and make it out like they're doing something brave and special... and show that they're not prioritizing the source material.
If Maverick were set in, say, WWII and there were female fighter pilots added in, you think that might stick out a bit and cause some dissonance?
And even then, there are certainly ways they could do it effectively! But it helps to not intentionally stir the controversy and then play the victim.
Again, RoP's creators made the deliberate choice on casting as they did, and further deliberate choice to emphasize said casting. Why did they do it? What creative process led to this outcome, and how much of it was related to the quality of the series?
I could ask Maverick's creators why they did cast the way they did and maybe they can give answers that relate to increasing the strength of the story. Or they can say "well we literally just chose the best actors we could find because the characters' racial and gender identities doesn't effect the plot." I don't know if they would, but they have that out.
They especially have that out because they made a great movie from start to finish.
Can RoP's creators do the same? It just seems obvious that the choice is made specifically for the controversy and not to serve the story.
And indeed, it may have led to the story being less good.
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I'm biting my tongue very hard here to keep from swearing. Top Gun: Maverick is explicitly set in our current day world, where yeah, minority and BIPOC and even female women of the feminine persuasion exist and join the armed forces. You are trying to make it parallel that someone saying "Why is there a black Elf in Rings of Power?" is on the same level as someone saying "Oh my stars and garters, why is there a coloured person who is not a servant in that movie set in 2016, and what is more, they allow him to be on terms of equality with his white betters?"
Given that there have been black soldiers in the American military since the Revolutionary War, that would indeed be a thinly-veiled racist question. But imagine a movie set in a world where there had never been any black soldiers at all, and this new movie had one (1) black soldier or pilot amongst an otherwise all-white cast. I think that there could legitimately be asked "who is this guy and what is he doing here and where did he come from?" without it being racist. Is he from a country where they always had black soldiers? Is he meant to be the first black soldier? Is this a propaganda movie trying to get black people to enlist in the army?
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Or take the Fast and the Furious movies. It's almost certainly the most racially diverse film franchise in Hollywood, yet I've never heard a single complaint about their diverse casting. Turns out it's not the diversity per se that bothers people, it's the feeling that they're being lectured or pandered to that they don't like.
This seems like such a self-evident conclusion it should take active, extensive effort to somehow ignore it. I can't even steelman the case that audiences aren't tolerant of 'diversity' (in AMERICA, globally it may be different) because the counterexamples are just too plentiful.
If it weren't for the culture war background to all of this, I'd be baffled as to how Hollywood manages to make it into an actual issue.
I also feel like growing up in the 90's making movies and films with diverse casts was the standard. Like Captain Planet, they'd have a 'token' member of various races and only occasionally would this be remarked upon or milked for drama.
You can certainly make an argument for why tokenization is not ideal and could contribute to stereotyping, but holy cow there's just no argument that audiences raised on 90's media are somehow mad about diversity in their entertainment. NONE.
I have yet to see a decent argument for why our current setup, where diversity is treated as the entire point of the exercise and excoriating anyone who protests is actually better for anyone.
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Is there anyone who doesn't think this scene in Aliens II is fabulous? Whatever your opinion about women in the military or realism or anything?
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Yeah, that's the thing. If his garrison were all mixed, it would be less of a problem (yes, some people would still complain, but you wouldn't have him sticking out as so Obviously Different).
Of course, the show can't even bother to put in the time to develop the other Elves, so when they all get slaughtered by the Orcs and the Warg, it's very hard to get worked up over "Oh no, it is Arondir's best pal, Whosis, dying in his arms!" and then "Double oh no, his commander What's his face has been Boromired!"
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Amazon can create their own new original fantasy/SF/whatever show stuffed to the gills with BIPOC actors and good luck to them, I don't care if they do, that's no skin off my nose. In fact, write a good new show with Dev Patel in a lead role and I will be "You interest me strangely, pray continue".
Even if they went the whole hog of casting every single character in Rings of Power as BIPOC, I would say "That's non-canonical but by Aule's ever-creative hammer I have to admire your balls".
The fact is, they didn't. They (Bezos) wanted a Big Hit Show comparable to Game of Thrones to really sell Prime streaming service subscriptions. You not alone want to watch this show, you need to watch this show to be au courant with what all your friends, family, and work colleagues are talking about. And for that, you need a Prime subscription.
So they needed A Really Big Name production, with a built-in guaranteed fan base audience and casual viewership appeal. Who is the Really Big Name in fantasy? Sorry George, still not you, it's the guy you joked about "but what was the tax base of his realm?" They snaffled the rights to LOTR and the Appendices, with Warner Studios breathing down their necks about "you can't remake the movies". Hence "Rings of Power" - it's got Galadriel! Elrond! And as many other LOTR characters as we think we can fit in without breaching legal terms!
Why they picked two nobodies to write this, I have no idea. Treating Tolkien's work as a cash cow licence to print money that means nothing to anyone involved (Bezos' dead-eyed boiled frog 'I really really love what's his name's work' appearances being the cherry on top) invoked its own curse, or Doom of the Noldor. They couldn't remake the movies, they weren't talented enough or experienced enough to be able to take the skeleton outline of the Second Age from the Appendices and make it into a coherent plot, so they fell back on common tropes (Strong Woman done down by the Patriarchy is the only one who is right about every single thing, on quest of vengeance, to take down the world-threatening evil, women and minorities most affected) and Generic Fantasy TV Show plots, and gave us this mess where the actress playing Galadriel has about two expressions, both of them like a bulldog licking piss off a nettle, and the character of a two thousand year old noble Elf lady is a whiny teenage rebel (Elendil's verbal smackdown of her as being the same as his two clueless kids is just one more reason he's one of the few likeable characters in this entire show).
They're trying to cover up their blatant lack of quality with "if you criticise this show, it's because you're a racist".
I don't think you're racist if you criticize LoTR, but I think it's pretty racist if you care that Amazon hired black actors for this. If the show sucks why do you need to bring the black actors into this at all? Everybody is saying the black actors are there so you can't criticize the show, and instead of criticizing the show you're criticizing the black actors.
Galadriel is too much for me but that doesnt have anything to do with Amazon hiring black actors.
This comment, and this one, are really uncharitable. In particular, the idea that it is "racist" to "care that Amazon hired black actors" requires a great deal more discussion (an in particular, a clear definition of "racist") given that race was not at all the focus of the comment to which you replied. Rather, the criticism was that people are using accusations of racism to defend the show; you've dispensed with the defending of the show, but kept the unproven accusation of racism.
Don't do that.
How is this uncharitable?
Someone said that black casting in LoTR is unnatural. How else am i supposed to disagree with it?
A lot of people are criticizing LoTR for casting black and minority actors while saying that Amazon only did this so they couldn't criticize the show at all. But then instead of attacking the show people are attacking the casting. Why does the casting matter if both sides say it doesn't matter?
I think calling the casting unnatural is racist and there's no other way to put it. That's my honest opinion. But I don't think anyone wants to explain what else they could mean, so now I'm the bad guy for pointing it out.
Literally no one said that but you.
One person (not the one you replied to here, but in the other link I mentioned) referred to certain casting choices as "natural," which (charitably) seems like an obvious reference to fitting the lore Tolkien wrote. There are races in the original Middle Earth; different people from different regions are described as having varied skin tones etc. Just like in the real world. Nobody said it was unnatural to cast black people, unless you uncharitably modify the words they used in a separate context.
In roles where it doesn't make sense--not unlike casting a black child as the natural offspring of a Norse father and a Japanese mother. Maybe these people are wrong or mistaken or even racist, but if you're going to make that argument, you have to actually argue against what their real position is--not the naked one you (or Amazon) invented for maximum pearl-clutching.
Sure, I'd be surprised if this was Amazon's reason for casting that way (I assume they're just on the "maximum skintone diversity" train like everyone else in the movie business outside of Bollywood). But if people think Amazon does seem to be responding to real criticism by deflecting to "you're racist," that's an argument that seems plausible, too, and it's not racist to point that out.
Er... you were just telling me about people on both sides of the casting issue who think the casting matters, so I don't understand this question.
Then don't call it unnatural, as you're, again, literally the only one who has done so. But even if that's the only way to put it, you still have to actually explain yourself. Why is it racist to think that characters shouldn't be skin-tone-swapped from their author's visions in film adaptations? Like, if the next Black Panther movie had the king of Wakanda played by Tom Hanks, I assume some people would be upset--would they have a point? I've seen tons of people get annoyed at originally-Asian characters being played by white actors, so it seems to me that movie watchers are pretty consistent about being annoyed by this, and Hollywood is pretty consistent about telling them to fuck off, since they're gonna buy the movie tickets anyway.
Calling people "racist" is a serious accusation, certainly an inflammatory one, and so if you're going to do it you have to do it with lots of evidence and clear reasoning. You can't just be like "y'all racist" without putting in some work. Define your terms, or better yet, taboo your words. If you literally can't explain your problem without using the word "racist," then you don't actually understand your own problem.
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Sweet Eru Iluvatar. If some studio were making a new movie - hang on a mo, I just thought of the perfect example.
Now, suppose the studio thought "We really need an A-list actress in the lead role to make this a sure-fire blockbuster", and they cast, lemme see, Scarlett Johansson as General Nanisca. Would you say that was "naturally cast" or rather that casting black actresses, be they African-American or other black ethnic mix, was the "natural casting"?
One argument would be "they should only cast native Dahomeans in the parts". That's not the argument we're making.
The second argument would be "wait a minute, that's completely the wrong actress to cast in the part, it doesn't matter if she's really good".
You are trying to make the equivalent of "Why not cast Scarlett Johansson?" and telling the rest of us we are racists if we say "That's not the proper casting for this character". If they have (and they probably do) white European slave purchasers in this movie, or white European generals etc. then casting Scarlett as Lady Brassnobs is fine and appropriate. But casting Scarlett as part of the Dahomean Amazon army, and the only white Amazon, is going to make people go "What the hey, movie studio, this is not the correct thing to do even if white people do exist in this world and the Dahomeans are in contact with them".
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Amazon thinks I should care. They put out a zillion publicity puff pieces about how I and everyone else should care. They made this video to sell it to people about how they should care.
Personally, I find the actor playing Arondir rather wooden (like his cuirass) but others, even those critical, have found him one of the few good actors. Whatever, opinions differ.
I would be very happy to see this actor playing a character in Middle-earth - say, a human inhabitant of the village of Tirharad (invented for the show) which is populated by descendants of the Men who fought under Morgoth and are being watched (over) by the Elves. Tirharad is a canon-compliant notion for being all black and brown actors, and having white Elves as an occupying force would reinforce the show's parables about colonialism and blaming people for the sins of their ancestors and so forth. Oddly enough, Tirharad is very white; Bronwyn and Theo are the only brown humans I've seen, and we got a nice scene of White Guy Racist To Black Elf in the tavern.
If they gave literally two minutes establishing who is Princess Dísa (e.g. she is from the royal house of the Blacklocks, one of the two Dwarven strongholds in the East), then that would avoid all the "who is this one, single, solitary black Dwarf in Khazad-dum among all the other white Scottish Dwarves?" questions.
I don't care that Tar-Míriel is played by a black actress. At least she's a human playing a human who looks like a queen should look. And you can find some way that her ancestry would be not contradictory with canon if you go into the history of the Three Houses of the Edain and their allies. No quibbles there.
Do you want to call me "pretty ageist" because I think the actor cast as Celebrimbor is too old for the part, and the character should be younger? Go right ahead, fill out the entire bingo card while you're at it.
Why do you care that Amazon cares?
If my brother tries to piss me off by, like, wearing a blue shirt, why would that bother me? Casting black people doesn't bother me, so it doesn't bother me when Amazon casts black people even if they're trying to be twats while they do it.
It sounds like you have a lot of problems with the script and I agree they could have done a lot of things better. I get that and I agree that Disa is not a good character. Isn't that a problem with the script though? What does it have to do with the casting?
Like, basically, if you only have problems with thr script, that makes sense. If you think Amazon is trying to attack you I can understand being annoyed. But there's nothing wrong with using black actors so being annoyed that Amazon is doing it makes it seem a lot more racist.
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I think I explained this in my post. The why and when of what I dislike about this sort of casting decision is what my post is primarily about.
Even if Amazon is using diversity to "antagonize" you why does it bother you? If my brother wore a blue shirt to piss me off I wouldn't get pissed off, I'd think, "so what, there's nothing wrong with wearing a blue shirt." I'm not trying to dismiss you but I don't get why this is something you care about at all.
What if it was gradually becoming only acceptable to wear blue shirts? And if you make a comment about your brother wearing a blue shirt, saying that maybe it'd be nice if he wore a different color, then you'd be called out as a bigot? What if you really like wearing other color shirts, in addition to blue?
But people all really think that all existing shirts should be dyed blue, because if they don't, then it's perpetuating a "harmful culture where blue shirts are underrepresented". But then, later when only blue shirts are produced, due to the years of preexisting social pressure, people who were blue-shirt advocates start saying, "Well what's your problem with it? They're clearly making blue shirts just because people like blue shirts, so they sell better." The metaphor might be a little tortured, but I hope you get my idea.
There are lots of movies out there that will cater to you if you don't want minorities in your movie.
Once again, I think you've missed the point entirely.
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Thank you for making your position clear about what you think we are saying.
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This wasn't how the mainstream media perceived the OK sign or "It's OK to be white" campaign: in both cases the plain meaning was ignored, in favour of what the they thought the intended meaning was. Which was white supremacy.
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If they wanted to just cast non-white actors, there a plenty of existing IPs that could be adapted to the screen which allow for this to be naturally cast.
Someone needs to do Malazan Book of the Fallen - most of the major characters are POC.
I think you're saying black people in LoTR are not natural. What else are you trying to say? Tolkein didn't have a problem with black people.
As much as I appreciate someone actually taking up the gauntlet of arguing the "woke" position here, your responses are drifting into low-effort and uncharitable insinuations. This entire thread is full of people who "don't have a problem" with black people but have nonetheless articulated why black elves and dwarves in LotR bothers them. You can think their arguments are bad and you can think their arguments are racist, but make that case and avoid this kind of when-did-you-stop-beating-your-wife? question.
Armlegx218 said in their comment that LoTR was not naturally cast, which implies that there is something unnatural with Amazon's using black people for their show. What does that have to do with other people in this thread? It sounds pretty racist to me honestly and other people saying non-racist things in the same discussion doesn't change that.
natural, in this context, just means 'fitting', 'easily', or 'well'. And OP is arguing that race-fitting actors would have worked well for a show that's a parallel for ... historical england, just like black actors work for a show set in africa. If that's wrong, then argue that, but "natural" is just a vague term.
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I pointed to the rest of the thread because these arguments about race-based casting are not new, and rather than engage with them, you just implied that Armleg218 has a problem with black people.
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Its not neutral, or good, its bad, because it is world-breaking. Sure, if you are writing a story set in the fantasy equivalent of Constantinople, a bustling trade hub for merchants and people of all places, and the capitol of a diverse empire, go ham with diversity. If your setting is a remote Finnish town, or a insular group of hunter gatherers that seem to have shunned all outsiders for hundreds of generations, then diversity is just idiotic and results in confusion.
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There are three problems:
Thematic: The explicit purpose of casting non-white actors was to "better represent" the modern world; so that people will think or feel in different ways about others (or those like themselves). This is nonsensical because including constant reminders of "the world today" is inherently contrary to immersing the audience in a fantasy setting. Nobody watches Middle-Earth to think about New York. Whatever case you might have for such casting decisions on *other *grounds, this specific angle made it artistically destructive. It's especially bizarre where the elves and dwarves are concerned, because neither of them are supposed to be human, yet they both have exact analogues for human racial variation.
Political: Tolkien was an English author who created Middle-Earth to substitute a lack of extant Anglo-Saxon mythology. Removing this for "inclusion reasons" not only denies the value of people developing specific histories or cultural works, but declares it an active problem, and posits that only universal stories are legitimate. It's especially tasteless because one of the strongest themes in Tolkien's writing is the tragedy of peoples' decline and disappearance -- the Ents are doomed to extinction, the Elves will leave the land, the Dwarves are a shadow of their former selves, and Numenor is entirely destroyed.
In-universe: Even if we ignore 1 and 2, ROP does not involve races in a way that makes sense in its type of setting. Humans live in kingdoms or villages, and the modern mass transportation that creates diverse cities today isn't the norm. Why so many unlike people live in the same place could be explained within the story, but it would make significant demands of the setting and plot. In LOTR, for example, Easternlings appear in Middle-Earth because they were recruited for the War of the Ring -- ROP has no such situation. It's taken for granted that this can happen because such situations are normal in (parts of) the modern (largely urban, Western) world, -- they're not normal in a world dominated by the horse and cart, and ROP was clearly more invested in thinking about the former than the latter.
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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 thing is, despite all the chat about "representation", they're not doing it for a black audience. Does anyone doubt that if they thought that dropping Arondir and Dísa made it more appealing to China, they'd do it in a heartbeat?
And if they are doing it for representation and a global audience, they better fit in some Indian, Chinese, Filipino, and as many South American actors in new roles as they can get for the next episodes and seasons. I mean, how can people watch a show if they can't see faces like their own in it, and right now if they're not white, they've got a couple of black actors and some ambiguously brown ones? If they're not black, who is representing them? There are trailers etc. in Hindi - do you mean that Indians can watch a show that doesn't have Indian actors in it in main parts to be Representative? I am shocked, shocked I tell you!
It's for easy publicity: we are making a Big Deal of Diversity, aren't we wonderful, please buy a subscription to our streaming service to watch our very expensive show.
Ah ha ha ha ha ha. Excuse me a moment while I wipe away tears of laughter, and no, I'm not laughing at you.
Is blackness a critical part of the story for Black Panther? Wouldn't it be just as good if we had our fictional magic science African kingdom with diverse actors, e.g. some Chinese, Hispanic, Pacific Islanders, etc. in supporting parts on-screen so people could have Representation and See Someone Who Looks Like Me?
After all, if we are supposed to accept magical meteors and special metal and mystic herbs and all the rest of it that made Wakanda super-advanced, why are we objecting to seeing Asian faces there? Wakanda isn't real, vibranium isn't real, the heart-shaped herb isn't real. It's all fantasy and made-up, not real history, right? So objecting to Asian and Latinx Wakandans is motivated solely by racism.
When Tolkien invented his universe, first it was for the languages to have a proper setting. Secondly, it was to make "a mythology for England". Everywhere else was having cultural renaissances, from the Celtic Revival to various European countries (see for example composers going back to and being influenced by native folk music of their respective lands). But what did England - not Britain, but England - have? Not the Arthurian legend, see here from a letter of 1951:
1937:
1938:
1943:
1944:
1954:
1956:
Another letter of 1956, where he was getting stuck into a Dutch translator who took it upon himself to put his own interpretations on everything (very pertinent for our Amazon showrunners):
1959, for a Polish translator:
Now, if Middle-earth was just Generic Invented Fantasy World, then it wouldn't matter. Cast black, white, red, yellow, brown, purple, green and indigo actors in the parts! But Tolkien was very clear that Middle-earth was not an invented world, it was meant to be our own world as we have it right now, just that the tales were set in a very distant, mythological past. So the English parts are meant to be English, and that does mean white. The peoples of the North-West are, by and large, white. The Elves are white (and, as an aside, the black-haired grey-eyed ideal of beauty for them is based on his wife Edith, there's your romance element).
"Hamilton" pulled it off by making all the cast (except King George and I think one or two of the Schuyler sisters?) non-white. If you're going to change up LOTR or the Rings of Power, then the least mendacious way to do it is cast everyone as non-white, that way you can claim with a straight face that you are casting the best actors not casting on skin tone alone. Not alone one black elf, all the Elves, including Galadriel and Elrond, are black/Hispanic/whatever.
Great post.
This is what I'd zero in on. I think I would inherently respect it more if they were to say "we decided to make an all-black cast for this adaptation to lend a completely new perspective to the story and give audiences an actually novel experience."
There's such slight of hand going on because oh, turns out they want everyone's money, so they can't take such a massive, ballsy risk in that has an obvious failure mode, so they half-ass it and try to get points for being unique but ultimately keep everything familiar enough to trigger nostalgia.
That's (kinda) what they did with Ghostbusters, no? Those people have only ended up remembered because of their infamy.
I didn't mind the idea of a remake of Ghostbusters with an all-female cast, but I ended up not watching it for two reasons:
(1) All the guff about sexism - the same tired attack that if you dare criticise this idea, it is because you are an -ist or a -phobe
(2) It really wasn't necessary. The original movie is not perfect by any means, but it's fondly remembered and it works. Hollywood has an awful habit of doing remakes that add nothing to the original. 'What would the Ghostbusters be like if they were all women of a different era and with different characters?' is not a bad idea, but it would have been better if they made them a new branch or set up in a different city, not a straight remake of the original NY Ghostbusters.
The movie ended up being completely awful due to other reasons. They just let the women prattle on and improvise for hours like it was a Judd Apatow movie, and a significant amount of that made it into the final cut. That just does not work in this sort of movie.
That's part of why I didn't watch it. The Holtzmann character was played by some actress who I believe is a comedienne? And the clips I saw were about as funny as my last dental appointment, so it put me right off.
The idea itself wasn't bad, but "let's remake the original only gender-swapped" instead of a new original Ghostbusters movie was the usual Hollywood poverty of imagination, and the execution was awful (unfunny actress didn't help at all).
I really like this review, if you've got an hour to spare: https://youtube.com/watch?v=AHUV8QLpEAc
It really probes into what went so wrong with the movie.
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On that note, I looked up the other actors for the new Little Mermaid. King Triton is played by Spanish actor Javier Bardem, and Prince Eric is played by white Londoner Jonah Hauer-King. Ursula is also white. They cast a black woman to be Ariel's mother (presumably), to have some cover for this, but that shouldn't be necessary.
I am not really the target audience for this, and it's probably reflecting someone's preferences that the father and love interest of the protagonist are white, while her comic animal side kick is played by a black man. Maybe? Disney is usually good at reflecting what people want to see. I don't like it -- it accentuates the pandering in comparison to an entire underwater kingdom of black merpeople.
I'm keeping out of this, since I never saw the original animated movie and I know nothing about this new actress/singer or whatever she is. The only thing that struck me in the trailer was that they kept the red hair. So it doesn't matter that Ariel has switched from white to black, but the hair colour is the absolutely vital thing about her? Not that she's a mermaid? Why not simply let the character/actress have her normal black hair? That's the dumb part of it for me. "Ariel's skin colour doesn't matter, it has nothing to do with the character, but she must have red hair because how else are the kids going to recognise her as the mermaid princess?"
Now I am (unironically) waiting for the live-action Javanese remake of Brave. I want to see King Fergus dressed like this while still speaking in a broad Scots accent. Go on you cowards, I dare you!
Maybe to attempt to "address" a relatively common trope about Black actors/actresses in roles where the character was traditionally white?
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And it's not like Disney wasn't capable of such moves, they've put out a slew of culturally appropriate and unique(ish) films with fully ethnically matched casts!
Hell, The Princess and the Frog was made within living memory!
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Doesn't that mean that, the interpretations today, absolutely should have black dwarves et al? Our world is very different from his, from a skin tone perspective. An American interpretation should cast more black people and so on. That from your explanation seems very much in keeping to his perspective. Todays stories told in the mythological past. Like it or not America's story is intertwined with it's relationship with slavery and the fall out thereof.
An interpretation today set in today's world should have. An interpretation today set in the distant mythological past should not, because those characters were not known then. Dwarves are not Americans, nor slaves, so having black Dwarves because slavery makes no sense. He wasn't telling "today's story", he was telling the story of that time.
If you want to depict modern-day Bree, then yes of course you can have black and brown actors, because of immigration and so forth meaning that black and brown people now live in modern day UK as ordinary citizens. In Frodo's time, due to people fleeing from Orc attacks, there were migrants moving into Bree from the South (probably Dunlendings). At least one of them was a spy, and maybe a Half-Orc. So you can have new influx of strange people moving in, but they are not native to the place as yet.
Well you said he was telling tales of our world now, just SET in the distant past no? If Tolkien was an author today he would be writing stories about the places, peoples and situations of today but mythologized into the past. If he were writing today, I suspect some of the issues around today would have been in his work, just set in his created mythology. That's what an adaption is, it takes a product, re-envisages it as if it were written today (with varying degrees of success). Alternate universe Tolkien writing today where Birmingham has significant Pakistani and Caribbean populations would plausibly have written a very different book.
This is such a bold misdefinition that I'm surprised you thought you could get away with it. ONE way of adapting a "product" (yeuch!) is to do that. For example, you can do Shakespeare in modern dress. To say that that's what an adaptation IS is like saying that carbohydrates are just what food IS.
No that's fair, I didn't really explain myself properly there. What I mean is that, no matter what the adaptor's plan, it will be filtered through their own lense. Even if they set out to make an authentic adaption it will be filtered through their own viewpoint and biases.
It's impossible to adapt something as Tolkien would have done if he were a television writer now. And if Tolkien had been writing LoTR today it would have been a different book, because he would have been a different person with different upbringing and set of experiences.
Does that make more sense?
It makes more sense, though I don't agree. For example, The Northman is very close to the movie I'd expect an actual Viking to make. Tolkien is far closer to modern viewpoints.
It's true that every adaptation is made through an adaptor's viewpoint, but they can be more or less faithful. And I'm not presupposing that more faithful is good. Stanley Kubrick adapted material in an unfaithful way in The Shining and it was better than a faithful adaptation, like the TV miniseries.
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Very possibly. But that isn't for an adaptation to do. An adaptation is not supposed to update the work for a modern era, it's supposed to stick to the original. If the writers on this show want to do their own thing, great! But then don't claim you're doing Tolkien. Either respect what the man actually wrote, or don't use his brand to prop up your original work.
Let me paste my reply above, because I didn't do a good job before:
"No that's fair, I didn't really explain myself properly there. What I mean is that, no matter what the adaptor's plan, it will be filtered through their own lense. Even if they set out to make an authentic adaption it will be filtered through their own viewpoint and biases.
It's impossible to adapt something as Tolkien would have done if he were a television writer now. And if Tolkien had been writing LoTR today it would have been a different book, because he would have been a different person with different upbringing and set of experiences.
Does that make more sense?"
My view is that whether you set out to update an adaption or not, by the very nature that the people adapting it will be from a very different society and viewpoint, that it will be filtered through their lense no matter what. Jackson's adaptions bumped up the importance of battles and romance because that is what his viewpoint of a big budget action movie was (mixed with what the financiers thought of course).
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Hm? No, I don't think that's what's meant. Our world and his world have the same past, after all, and in the premise of Tolkien's Legendarium, that's taken as Middle-Earth. The present diversifying more wouldn't retroactively change the distant past, whether that's pre-Roman Britain or Middle-Earth.
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Yes, the principle of having more socially-progressive versions of a work for Western audiences compared to versions with those cut out for other parts of the world has made me suspect, uncharitably, that the allocation of focus meant it was not so much about standing up for the oppressed but more about sticking it to the domestic outgroup. At the very least, the domestic focus didn't seem very EA ("Effective Activism?")-
-But fortunately for my sense of charity, I do not get the sense that this is happening as much as I once felt it was, with examples like Lightyear showing that Disney is willing to stick to its guns in the face of sanctions from countries that disapprove. I should not be quick to presume hypocrisy.
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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.
I love this illustration of your point.
And with that in mind, if your fictional example shows a LotR bastardized to spread Islam, what is the current bastardization hoping to spread? It's part of the push to completely remove any notion of a white nation from our culture, history, and public consciousness. They don't want you to even be capable of imagining it.
The history of our nations is being rewritten. All our cultural cannon is being discarded or "reimagined". All new art needs to be meticulously assessed and retooled by our new cultural overlords in the DEI industrial complex before it's released for consumption.
We are moving through a true "year zero" event. Preserve anything you care about from the before times. Preferably hard copies, in your home.
Don't you think you're being a bit hyperbolic?
Last I checked, the Second Age wasn't a big part of American history. Casting a set of fictional characters poorly (?) is not culture erasure. Literally nothing has been changed about the existing 20+ hours of Tolkien movies, or the books, or the impact on public consciousness. The biggest harm is that a bunch of people are sitting through a shitty TV show.
As best as I can tell, there's not even any evangelizing like OP's example! The diverse casting is aggressively not important to any plot events. Galadriel isn't teaching the benighted folks of Middle-Earth about inclusivity, she's teaching them not to rely on boats if they want to make someone the Valar’s problem.
This is a far cry from the thought policing about which you are wringing your hands.
I don't think I'm being hyperbolic at all. Also
It was required reading for me in English class, way back as a freshman in highschool. Lord of the Rings is every bit a part of the western cannon as many classics. And it probably had a larger cultural impact than many as well.
But back to the defense of my hyperbole. Look, even a year ago I'd agree with you. Then a bunch of Dr Seuss books got unpublished more thoroughly than I thought possible. Ebay wouldn't let people "profit off racism" and delisted them. Amazon did the same. Libraries pulled them. They will never be printed again, and are blacklisted from all the largest markets.
Knowing this can be done, I fear what happens next. Because at this point it's impossible to believe all this censoring isn't a slippery slope. Cloudflare banned The Daily Stormer and promised to never do it again. Then they did it again with 8Chan. Then they promised they absolutely wouldn't do it again with Kiwifarms, and in fact regretted doing it with Stormer and 8Chan. Then they did it again with Kiwifarms.
It's basically a given all but the most milquetoast, middle of the road republicans will be banned from Facebook, Twitter and Youtube. And even the Ben Shapiro's of the world are on notice.
Blizzard straight up took away people's original versions of Warcraft III and replaced them with a far shittier version. That was the first time a "remaster" straight up replaced the original in your digital game library. I believe Eidos followed suit, then chickened out when people complained. But the day where that is the norm is coming.
It's completely impossible to get a legitimate, good copy of the original Star Wars Trilogy, and that was just Lucasfilm, and now Disney, straight up giving zero fucks and only feeling like publishing the adulterated version, which seems to continue to be adulterated with every release.
Disney permanently memory holed the Michael Jackson episode of The Simpsons from streaming, syndication and even DVD box sets.
I have zero faith that any of this will suddenly halt and reverse course. I believe absolutely that this will continue, and probably accelerate in pure spite if Republicans start winning offices in numbers again. I believe many works risk being lost forever, or becoming so extremely marginalized they are like Song of the South, or the Star Wars Christmas Special. Or the lost episodes of Dr Who. Or all the silent films which were lost when studios decided to just chuck em. Supposedly Cleopatra from 1917 was an amazing film. It's lost forever.
All this has happened before, and it can happen again. I used to believe "The internet never forgets". But as I actually attempted to find things I assumed had to be out there somewhere I found myself coming up empty. And that was, I assume, completely without this ascendant force of digital monopolist and cultural vandals purposely attempting to memory hole things.
Alas, the pirates will probably be the ones to keep such things alive.
Maybe! But how long until the open and neutral infrastructure of the internet turns against them? How long until DNS, ISPs and even VPNs decide pirates are engaging in "spreading hate" and more aggressively hunting them.
What you say? Surely not VPNs! Their whole advertising pitch is keeping you safe from the watchful eyes of your ISP. Why the hell not? Google's motto used to be "Don't be evil". What a difference time makes.
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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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Insofar as I have a problem with it, it's that the Lord of the Rings was a substitute for the loss of Anglo-Saxon mythology. Unlike the Greeks, Vikings, or Romans, we (I'm half Anglo-Saxon) don't have a surviving corpus of cool sagas/myths, but Tolkien did an amazing job of filling in that gap in Anglo-Saxon culture.
But there was nothing particularly Anglo-Saxon about the Peter Jackson films (e.g. Aragorn wasn't played by an Anglo-Saxon actor, a lot of the music was Celtic...) so this isn't a new problem.
Similarly, the fact that the race-swapping etc. is so forced is off-putting, but I also didn't like how Arwen's character was changed to fit with modern sensibilities in the Fellowship of the Ring film. Off-putting, but not the end of the world.
My personal case for not watching it is that I found The Hobbit films that I saw (Hobbit I and Hobbit III) painful to watch, and I didn't like the Lord of the Rings films that much anyway. I enjoyed all the Tolkien I've read a lot, but just like they can't make a Madeline L'Engle film to match her brilliance, I have accepted that Tolkien will never be great on screen. The closest that match the awe-inspiring images I have in my head as I read Tolkien was a few moments in the 1978 Lord of the Rings and in the original Peter Jackson trilogy. The rest is meh at best.
Same with Dune, except that I thought the most recent Dune film was at least worth my time watching, unlike anything done with Tolkien's works for nearly 20 years...
Mortensen is Danish, so it's very plausible he's a direct descendant of the Angles.
Didn't know that. Somehow, I was caught by the first name and assumed he was Italian (basically an African, really...).
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Or Jutes
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For me at least there are two reasons why this sort of thing bothers me.
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.
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!
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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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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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The different races in LOTR roughly correspond to different European nationalities. Hobbits are British. Elves are either Finnish or they represent Christian clergymen. Dwarves are Jewish. Men of Rohan are German. Men of Gondor are Italian. Orcs are Hunnic, Hungarian or Turkic.
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Much has been said on that in the past. Me recently on exploiting the story to convey a different message, Pageau making basically the same point exactly 25 months ago, my first post here on the purpose of storytelling (and other discussions around those posts of course), that's just what's comes to mind on the spot.
What I want to know is, do black people even like this sort of diversity&representation?
Pandering to black people (and other minorities) is a legitimate tactic. There's over a billion of them globally, more than whites in fact, and over 40 million in the US. If they act like a classical self-interested minority with Talebian skin in the game, i.e. sleep on a yet another movie with a pretty white girl MC, whereas white people won't boycott black Ariel (white people are, as often shown, the only group with an almost-nonexistent general ingroup preference and have no skin in the game), then it's only prudent to give them what they want.
Do they want it? Clearly they were crazy about Black Panther. Black Panther is, aside from being a better-than-average and more imaginative capeshit title, a coherent movie inherently valorizing black people. Not something with random canonically white characters that got race-swapped to make a political point. I don't expect any mass demographic to have discerning tastes, but surely they ought to feel somewhat more connection to a story about their people than to a story featuring their phenotypes.
Same for other demographics. The Chinese were, if memory serves, turned off by Shang Chi and thought it's stereotyping them as ugly, and not too happy with Mulan either. On the other hand, there was some angry noise about Scarlett Johansson and whitewashing in that unfortunate GiTS adaptation, but maybe that was just woke journalists. Did «Pacific Islanders» appreciate Jason Momoa in Aquaman? (For what it's worth, I did. A superhero movie, it seems, can only be interesting when it's unapologetic silly kitsch on steroids, or a deconstruction/an almost classical movie loosely inspired by source franchise, like Nolan stuff or Joker.)
Did «Hispanics» love Alita? Did South Asians appreciate Raya?
I will strongly dispute the idea that Black Panther is coherent. Various pieces from the movie: (spoiler warning!)
As we have seen in real life, being a semi-hereditary monarchy on top of natural resources leads to a nation skilled in science and technology.
Villain: "Ok Mohammed Bin Salman, you've defeated me in this battle to rule our Kingdom and I'm about to die. Here's a historical reference to stuff that happened in Brazil 150 years ago."
The central conflict of the movie is about Trumpian isolationism vs Clintonian internationalism. Black Panther starts the movie rescuing some Congolese women from child soldiers wishing to (presumably sexually) enslave them. But he's unmoved and still wants to build the wall. Then he changes his mind after hearing what life was like in Oakland 1992 (not, you know, Rwanda 1994, one country over from Wakanda) and becomes an interventionist.
It purports to be take place in a foreign country, but the entire country is nothing but vague ideas that American writers saw on the History Channel. For example, it's Africa and they watched a documentary about the Maasai in 1850, so modern soldiers should look like this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Panther_(film)#/media/File:Dora_Milaje_in_film.jpg Also they watched Animal planet, thought Rhinos were cool and noticed they live in Kenya, so unobtanium doesn't just power technologies like clean energy and lasers but also improved animal husbandry.
This is not a coherent movie. It purports to tell a story about Wakanda, but every single plot line is driven by characters caring more about Americans of the same race as them than their own corner of the world. (And by "same race", I mean US Govt defined race as opposed to Bantu/Nilotic/Pygmy/etc. )
...Do you have a better idea of Wakanda? I haven't availed myself of relevant comics. And your criticisms are really wild for a popular movie; they're, uh, not supposed to have worldbuilding, at best some cool imagery and a plotline that's not fully schizophrenic, and in this case, pandering to a racial group with things they know and care about.
If the last three years have taught me anything, it's that this is a realistic thought process for a well-meaning politician.
Originally iirc it was a country that advanced rapidly by selling off tiny amounts of vibranium and using the money to educate its populace who were sent abroad to learn. Then they leveraged their natural resource (which is ludicrously versatile and useful, as comic meta-materials can be) to really jump ahead of others.
But this wasn't seen as Afro-triumphalist enough (it seems important to some that they have a nation that never went through colonialism) so that changed to them being more advanced for centuries or more.
I mean, that is what Iraq and Iran and Saudi Arabia tried to do but with oil during the last 50 years, and they don't have forcefields or whatever the hell Black Panther's annoying little sister was supposed to be.
They had oil, which has to make sense. Vibranium...doesn't.
Regardless, if you're expecting realistic technological and economic development in Marvel comics you're kinda setting yourself up for failure. The series have a lot of unrealistic beliefs about how technology works - e.g. the Great Man theory of technological advancement - that Wakanda's success is probably downstream of.
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You can make a Marvel movie that happens in a foreign country but is reasonably coherent.
I know this for certain because this movie exists. In this movie the Canadian lead gets into fights with a particular flavor of local gangsters who - importantly - look quite different from 1850's gangsters because the culture of this country has not stood still since 1850. Among other things it had three separate political regimes since then and has developed all kinds of new things and contributed significantly to (and borrowed from) global culture.
Even when motifs from the 1850's are borrowed - as in this scene involving a guy using literal 1850's military gear - it's inescapable that time didn't stop for this country.
Much like in Black Panther, the Canadian gets involved in a succession dispute. He interacts with foreign country's high levels of technology and cultural artifacts, which - critically - are not just random images from documentaries rendered in unobtanium. Foreign country has a this kind of place which isn't just a geisha house but modernized. Foreign country also has this kind of organization which isn't just this kind but with robots. The architecture isn't 1850's functional buildings (e.g thatched huts) used as ornamental motifs on top of modern "green" design.
Finally, the characters in this movie are not motivated by random things that happened years ago in America. The villain had some negative interactions in 1945 with America, positive interactions with the Canadian, but that shit was 80 years ago and he lived a pretty full life since then. He has conversations and battles with the Canadian about things he wants out of life, these interact with the Canadian's personal motivations, and none of them have any reason to talk about the Chinese Exclusion Act or other injustices perpetrated on Americans with the same (American) racial category as him.
After the villain's death, his successor becomes Chairman of the board of directors of a modern corporation. She does not appear to have any interest in starting a foundation for the descendants of indigenous Canadians who survived residential schools.
It's a realistic thought process for an American politician. Do you think Narendra Modi thinks this way?
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Despite being harsh on Black Panther for other reasons, I decided to revisit this comment to at least defend the film on this specific point:
I don't think this is a fair take on what happened.
T'Challa wasn't unmoved. His girlfriend (who he was rescuing, not slaves - they were a byproduct) was constantly pushing him to intervene. He seemed ambivalent but didn't want to break with tradition and refugees would be a big break.
He specifically raises the issue with another high-ranking Wakandan (if he was unmoved why do so?) long before he changes his mind, and he defaults to the status quo only when he decides he doesn't like either option (either humanitarian aid/refugees who don't fit Wakandan tradition or "benevolent" imperialism, which doesn't either). Either way, events overtake him and he doesn't do anything. It's quite possible he would have done something eventually but the plot happened.
Then everything goes to shit and he discovers that his father - who he idolized - basically killed his own brother and abandoned his nephew to a harsh life in Oakland to maintain secrecy. This undercuts the moral authority of his ancestors as he sees it, and he's not willing to make the same harsh sacrifices - he is even noted by his father to be a
bleeding heartgood man and would therefore find it hard to rule so this character trait predates the events of the climax.Then the side of Wakanda that favored imperialism supported a coup and was totally discredited, so the only remaining voice pushing for intervening was the humanitarian one, and that voice also happened to be in the King's bed. Guess what happened.
It's laughable that he first intervenes in Oakland but the rest is far less tortured than you imply.
I think this interpretation - Black Panther as Prince Harry - definitely qualifies as revisionism (of a form I'm sympathetic to). But it's also quite different from the story the movie wants to tell, I think, which is Black Panther being influenced by Killmonger talking about random historical events in America.
I mean, I don't disagree that Black Panther's tipping point in the films was the revelations about Killmonger. But my second-to-last paragraph is arguing that it's reductive to sum it up as "Killmonger talking about random historical events in America"
Black Panther doesn't take action when he first learned about Killmonger. Or when he first speaks to Killmonger. Instead he dismisses his claim of pan-Africanism. By the time they fight again he's already made up his mind to change. And he does so at the meeting where his father confirms what he did. That is about Killmonger, but it's not about "random historical events in America".
TBH the whole "Killmonger was right" is sort of a self-perpetuating meme , for reasons I think I've laid out (and some that are obvious - of course Killmonger's plan is absolute nonsense*)
T'Challa was being pulled and pushed in multiple directions and was ambivalent, Killmonger's entry was the catalyst for major change. But he didn't get a powerpoint of Black History and suddenly decide to go fix the world. His girlfriend made the argument more consistently and rationally than Killmonger did (and she was actually helping Africans, unlike anyone else in this movie). And what he ends up doing is closer to her plan than Killmonger's (besides the Oakland thing, which could be argued to be familial guilt)
Ironically: your criticism applies better to another character in the film...Killmonger's father. Who goes to America, learns a bit about how hard others have it (not even that hard relative to his neighbors in Africa) and decides to betray his country and family to help them (again: not his neighbors in Africa)
* Why go to Hong Kong first? Seriously...What was the thinking here?
Chinese money probably.
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Before we call it incoherent, we should also ask how much of that is a reflection of the comic books. It's not something unique to the MCU, Wakanda is an existing nation in the comics they're pulling from. And if you're telling a story with the emphasis on narrative and themes, it can be forgivable to not have a coherent world.
None of the comics, taken as a whole, are coherent. The comics eventually tried to retcon this by having a bunch of parallel universes and the MCU is doing the same.
If you read my comment again, you'll notice that I take very explicit issue with the narrative and themes, specifically the theme that the most important thing to a bunch of isolated foreigners is American culture and politics.
That isn't the theme they're going for, though. The entire conflict is centered on the American question of whether Foundational black Americans should try reform vs. violent resistance against the white people in power. It's about transcending class boundaries to create a pan-black community that helps itself.
To that end, yes, it involves American characters, in particular as it makes the villain more understandable. I won't say they're exceptional writers/directors or whatever, but they at least understand that the more Americans they insert, the more relatable it gets to the audience.
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The ending beat of the movie where Wakanda puts resources into fucking Compton after casually ignoring centuries of African issues in Africa is high comedy, though.
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That's cause Africa isn't a real place to most African-Americans. It's a mythical, vague "Old Country" they project their desire for continuity on.
All Americans who came over more than a few generations ago have this problem, but this is worse for American blacks for obvious reasons.
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It has nothing to do with pandering to Africans, who are disproportionately poor and, frankly, have a variety of cultures very different from Americans. When Black Panther was released the international premier was in Korea (vastly richer) not anywhere in Africa.
It is all about pandering to black people and "allied" whites especially, who are themselves a large bloc who want to signal progressive views on race via media consumption.
Actual African culture can be pretty incredible. For example, there's a huge country and bluegrass scene in anglophone Subsaharan Africa (sorry about the paywall: https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/whats-behind-africas-love-affair-with-country-music). Other western musical genres have caught on too in odd places; there's a death metal scene in Angola, for example.
Yeah, that was too strong and even contradicts my more ambivalent take on the relationship here
I think it's fair to say that Africans consume American culture like most people in the world, even if, on certain matters, they are very opposed to progressive American mores. But, just as Disney still sells movies to Arab nations cause people will watch it if these things aren't rubbed in their face, Africans will also watch.
But they're still a relatively very small market and, imo, don't really influence Disney and co. that much besides being a place to be mined. IMO you can see this throughout Black Panther; the themes, the casting, even facts about Wakanda (e.g. religion based on ancient Egypt which seems to be more about African-American fascinations with that country rather than the actual religions Africans follow) all give priority to African-American concerns.
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I just thought it was painfully just under average. Painfully, because everyone acted like it was the absolutely most original and marvelous thing in the world... and it wasn't. The applause for the movie reminded me of the infamous Stalin clapping fiasco (I think from The Gulag Archipelago)
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Whatever Amazon is doing, they're doing something right. I cannot escape hearing about this fucking show from every possible outlet, social media site, and of course this culture war chessboard.
They got you good. They got them good. They somehow got everyone to talk about this show like it's some sort of important cultural event even though half the people are just saying they not gonna watch it. It's like the old prairie home companion line: 'even the Atheist were Lutheran; it's a Lutheran God they don't believe in.
There were already nine hours of LOTR director's cut plus special features and what, an entire prequel trilogy? Did people really want more LOTR? Can you really remember the beginning by the time you finished the end? If I needed more LOTR in my life I'd just rewatch the Jackson trilogy but I don't because I already watched those films. I don't see major gaps in the story that needed to he filled.
Amazon must be laughing all the way to the bank with this one, and it's all but assured that such casting decisions will be made in the future because of the sheer amount of free publicity!
I agree, this fanbaiting was adopted by big studios at least since Ghostbusters 2016 with all female cast. The overall phenomenon of critics and showruners vs fanbase dates back to Gamergate if not even farther in the past. And while it may not be the best long-term strategy for the corporations, I think it is the best strategy for people inside those organizations: C-level executives, directors, writers and actors. Even critics are now part of the game - with the Zeitgeist being what it is, they cannot afford standing out too much if they like their career. As an example there is an upcoming The Woman King movie about African Amazonians from historical kingdom of Dahomey fighting white colonialists and slave traders. Predictably it sits at 100% on Rotten Tomatoes with 36 reviews so far, which should make it one of the best movies of all times on par if not better than movies like Citizen Kane (99% out of 127 reviews) or The Godfather (97% out of 149 reviews) and of course Black Panther which has 96% out of whooping 529 reviews.
I agree with you, there is a utility in all these controversies: it is free marketing and a very good shield against constructive criticism of the content.
Wait a minute, weren't Dahomey fighting the French to keep their slave trade?
According to the BBC review that is at least addressed in the movie:
"These woman are warriors, not saints. Historically, Dahomey flourished by taking captives and selling them, and the film doesn't ignore that complicity. Instead, it enhances Nanisca's role as heroine by making her the king's conscience, telling him more than once that slavery is unnecessary and immoral, even if he is not trading his own people. "
That's fucking hysterical, since almost the entirety of the Dahomeyan Royal Court's food came from slave-worked plantations. And this movie's posters (which are extremely common in LA) have the damn temerity to say "based on a true story"
It's literal "we wuz kangz" historical inversion.
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Yes they did, which makes it ahistorical and hilarious. Although I do not necessarily have an issue with that, for instance I liked the movie 300 and also laughed when Leonidas had the speech about age of freedom - yeah, freedom to perpetuate slave society with arguably the highest ratio of slaves to citizens in history.
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Maybe it's an "Eats, Shoots and Leaves" situation:
"African Amazonians from historical kingdom of Dahomey: (a) fighting white colonialists and (b) slave traders."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dahomey_Amazons#Conflict_with_neighbouring_kingdoms
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The media is run by trolls explores the media's role in this, and explicitly uses Ghostbusters 2016 as the turning point.
It points out a particularly diabolical element: the media actually seems to amplify some of these claims in order to use them as fodder for their articles about racist fans.
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Yes, absolutely! People really, really want more LotR. It's the quintessential fantasy book, and fantasy is a pretty popular genre. I'm sure there are plenty of great high fantasy stories out there, but LotR is the big brand name from which people will expect excellence and big budgets. If I want to watch a good war between orcs and elves and humans then that's where I'll go.
I would put it, more accurately, as people wanting more Tolkien.
We can't talk about his corpus like it was a one-and-done thing with LOTR. It is a huge, deep thing that can be mined for years by more respectful and talented writers.
RoP has the Lord of the Rings tag for obvious marketing and rights reasons but it doesn't involve the series proper. It is its own part of the universe (which Amazon only has limited access to) like say...how there's multiple different books and sagas within the Dune or the Shannara world..
One wouldn't say "do we need more Dune?" if someone decided to adapt Children of Dune, as if the source material has been squeezed dry and now the writers are just making things up. (Though one might say: "I don't think Children of Dune is adaptable)
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Money. Money is what they are doing right.
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Yes, for example myself. Though given apparent quality I am not bothering with this one.
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Yeah I suspect that this outrage viral marketing will now become standard.
It reminds me of that Erin Moriarty from The Boys "fan misogyny" blowup. I didn't think there was a large scale hatred of her acting at all. The outrage was created from the actions of a small handful of Twitter trolls. It really struck me as a good way to keep the show in the news between seasons.
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I have to wonder if this is really how people think about it. I see it asserted, but it feels...convenient? I encountered this idea via hbomberguy, who asserted like you are that this is being done as it drums up attention via outrage. However, that means we never ask the question "Is this is just another requirement the show creators feel is necessary in the same way as they would insist on a protagonist and antagonist?"
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They spent half a billion dollars on this show. That's enough money to make good television that would get people talking about it because of how good it is. And it turns out that internet ideologues are not a massive market, whereas randos who barely use social media are. Those people are more likely to hear about a show from their friends talking about how good it is.
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Yeah, when I pay attention it usually bugs me that they're openly using this tactic to deflect negative press even when the overwhelming amount of criticism is leveled at the work's basic quality.
The Critical Drinker hit on a salient point:
https://youtube.com/watch?v=ngqO9Hp19_4
Its like they hate their audience, or at least know that pissing off the audience is just as good a way, maybe better, to grab attention as pleasing them. And if you go in knowing you'll probably never please them...
The part that is most insufferable is when they blatantly race-swap an existing character (with weird tendency for targeting redheads), especially when their race is arguably a salient part of said character's identity, then kafkatrap anyone who dares notice it into either agreeing that its an improvement or outing themselves as a closet racist.
They will mock you for asking honest questions like "doesn't this contradict the lore?" or "what else did you change about the story?" or "couldn't you have written an entirely new character just as easily?"
Further, they'll act as though the race-swap is de-facto normal and expected and the person questioning it is the one who must justify themselves.
"Why does their race matter? You seem to care an awful lot about something minor like the character's skin color." Well I dunno, YOU seemed to care enough to make the decision to swap out the races in the first place, and clearly made a deliberate, calculated decision as to which skin color to swap to, so I conclude that it matters enough to you to set aside concerns like staying true to the source material or selecting the "best" actor for the part, so I'm just curious as to the logic that went into the decision.
And if your logic doesn't seem to advance the quality of the work itself, I believe I'm allowed to use this as reason to be skeptical of the end product's quality.
And yet, if any series were to race-swap a minority character, especially if to replace them with a white character, this would presumably be seen as blatant erasure and grounds to protest and boycott whatever media company did it.
Like hey, why can't the new Black Panther be white? Or Asian? Since we're saying the rules are all made up and the points don't matter, there's no reason we shouldn't be symmetrical about this.
Oddly enough, I think Starship Troopers is the only IP where not one, but at least two adaptations (the Verhoeven movie and the Sunrise anime) got away with making Johnny Rico white-skinned, despite him being at least part-Filipino (granted, as someone who is half-Filipino and is pretty white-skinned, maybe this isn't too unrealistic).
TBH if the woke have any strong point, it's that this stuff used to be common in the other direction too
The movie 21 about a real life card counting Harvard ring whitewashed almost the entire crew of (you guessed it) Asians into whites.(Can you imagine the reaction today?)
IIRC the most famous Native American actor at the time, Iron Eyes Cody, was an Italian.
John Wayne played Genghis Khan for God's sake.
but aren't Asians honorary whites at this point? I would imagine that we are approaching the reality of Asians being as white as Italians or Irish.
I really don’t think that’s a common perception.
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They're honorary whites when their interests cut against other minorities (e.g. slots in exclusive schools) but people of color when their interests clash with whites (e.g. in whitewashing controversies)
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At least Wayne regretted The Conqueror (and probably not just because it possibly gave him lung cancer).
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For some reason you can get away with having originally East Asian and SE Asian characters played white actors; you couldn't possibly do it with black characters. This is blatant double-standards, and I feel it especially acutely as the father of two half-pinoy kids.
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As genuine fan of Heinlein, that is the grand irony...
For all the ire that progressives level at him I wish an adaptation would play it straight. Rico is supposed to be a Philopino, Zim is supposed to be a Maori, and Flores is supposed to be from Buenos Ares. Don't even get me started on The Moon is a Harsh Mistress where in the US arresting the lunar ambassador for being in an interracial relationship, and the lunar government's subsequent decision to drop an asteroid on the Cheyenne Mountain Complex is a significant plot point.
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He's also from Buenos Aires, which is insanely pale for a "latin american" place...
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Well, you don't need a media company to do that anymore, just a GPU cluster. But that might still be grounds to get your Twitter account suspended? I'd like to hope that Twitter doesn't actually have a "making the Little Mermaid a redhead is evil" policy, rather that people who gloat over a redhead Little Mermaid are just also likely to commit violations of some serious policy as well ... but I'm not optimistic.
Saw that, and honestly its the funniest possible way to respond to this clusterfudge.
"Well we think it was silly to swap the character's race, so we are going to use this magical computer program to change her appearance and make this version available to anyone who might prefer it."
̶"̶"̶R̶E̶E̶E̶E̶E̶E̶E̶E̶E̶E̶E̶E̶E̶E̶E̶E̶E̶E̶E̶E̶E̶E̶E̶E̶E̶E̶"̶"̶
instabanned
KINDA similar to that Mod that removed the pride flags from the Spiderman Game. Why does people choosing to modify the content they consume in the privacy of their own home warrant such a visceral overreaction?
As a boo, this is obnoxious.
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A very annoying progressive tactic I now see everywhere I would like to know the genesis of. Is there a handbook somewhere teaching people this stuff?
You see it in trans discourse too: "why do you care so much about people's genitals?" Laughably hypocritical given the activists' fixations.
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There was a parable I heard once. I think it was supposed to be one of those "Wise King Solomon" stories.
Basically, two authors came before a judge. Both claimed to have written a novel, and wanted the other to cease publishing it. The judge ordered both authors to write a sequel, believing only the true author would be capable.
I think about that all the time. When Star Wars went to shit. When The Hobbit movies went to shit. When Star Trek went to shit. Which is not to say creative works can't successfully outlive their authors. They seem to be able to... for a time. Often with the help of people who may have known the original author, and care deeply about the themes and ethos he wove into them.
The ghouls in charge of most of America's cultural legacy seem to actively hate all the American's who came before them. They don't have the mental capacity to contemplate the themes of the original works, much less engage with them or continue them. I wrote off all my favorite franchises years ago at this point. I need to secure more of them on DVD before they get memory holed. I no longer trust the rights holders to not adulterate them, or just quietly stop publishing them to force you to consume whatever slop they are serving up now.
A lot of people think that Star Wars went to shit at the prequels, and at that point it was still under the control of George Lucas.
Two very very different kinds of shit. One was "What the fuck was that guy trying to do? Does he even know his own material's appeal at all? Is he completely talentless and just got lucky before?"
The other was, "What the fuck was that corporation doing? Did they have no plan whatsoever?"
The latter is more typical of "the ghouls in charge of most of America's cultural legacy". The former was much more rare, I can't think of many other situations where someone ruined their own legacy like that.
Chester Gould introduced life on the moon to the Dick Tracy comic strip.
Of course I did have to go back some years to get an example that's well known enough.
Jack Kirby also created a lot of stinkers in his later years, ending his career with Captain Victory.
Before she was unpersoned, JK Rowling was notorious on Twitter and other places for all kinds of silly retcons that no one asked for. (That trivia tweet was sourced from her own supplemental writing.)
Most people ate up her retcons, though, even if those people also thought they were a bit on the silly side. But a lot of her retcons played into the social justice narrative, so people were championing them.
She had the incredible good timing to create a record-shattering children's book which celebrated witchcraft and poked conservative Christians at the exact moment to perfectly puncture and deflate the resurgent American Christian monoculture when it was poised to retake America.
She also had the hilarious bad timing to be on the wrong side of the same culture war she inflamed, in such a way that her children's movie about sexual tension and ideological war between gay pagan former lovers Dumbledore and Grindelwald played by Jude Law and Mads Mikkelsen totally failed to make any cultural impact.
Oh gosh, is nobody familiar with British school stories and British fantasy for kids? Whatever Americans may have made of it (and it wasn't about "celebrating witchcraft"), in the British children's fiction context it was simply another example of an established genre (see Alan Garner, The Worst Witch, and many others, including C.S. Lewis and Narnia). That it became explosively popular was astounding and yes, probably a matter of luck, but it had nothing to do with "deflating resurgent American Christian culture" or whatever.
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The problem with Lucas is he used to have people who would tell him "no". Also he didn't direct most of the original trilogy. He's a great idea man, so long as someone filters through his ideas. He definitely gave the original trilogy it's heart. But when it was 100% Lucas, his short comings were amplified enormously.
Even the prequel trilogy looks good compared to The Last Jedi and Rise of Skywalker. The acting wasn't as good. The CG has not aged well. But it at least has a more coherent story from beginning to end. Not coherent in absolute terms. Just more coherent compared to the new trilogy. While hard to quantify, I also think it has more heart. There is still a sense of Lucas' creative voice coming through.
I think Lucas suffered from a bit of just losing his edge with age and success. He wrote Star Wars when he was young and hungry. He wrote the sequels when he was middle aged and had kids. Much the same happened with Stephen King and The Dark Tower. The first book is amazing, sharp, and very dark. By the end its silly as all hell. He wrote them over a span of decades, with a sizeable gap between the first and second in which the writing style changed a great deal.
To me, the difference between the prequels and sequels is kind of like the difference between The Room and Sharknado. They're both bad, but one is at least bad in an interesting way, being the bizarre fever dream of a single man, and the other is bad in a lazy corporate way with no particular vision (this is also why the Last Jedi is the best of the sequels: it may be a mess, but at least it's an ambitious mess).
I've gotten dozens of hours of entertainment over the years discussing all of George Lucas's strange choices and obvious missteps with friends. If nothing else, it is really fun to try to figure out what in God's name this man was thinking. On the other hand, I barely remember Rise of Skywalker and will probably never see it again, because "rushed production with a last minute replacement writer/director who clearly didn't want to be there" isn't an interesting enough reason for being bad to occupy any of my attention.
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I think it's pretty common for creators to have inconsistent output or to not understand what makes their own work good. A few other examples that come to mind:
Jane Austen thought Pride and Prejudice was her worst book
Paul McCartney believe his more recent work is much better than The Beatles
The Wachowskis have made a few fantastic movies (The Matrix is my favorite movie of all time) but most of their movies are crap
But I have no clue what allows some creators to consistently produce good work, and others to be occasionally genius but inconsistent.
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I complained loudly and often about The Hobbit movies, but by God, Amazon have made me fall on my knees weeping "I am so, so sorry, Peter Jackson! I didn't know when I had it good!"
The Kili/Tauriel romance may be entirely ridiculous, but by comparison with Bronwyn/Arondir it is on the scale of grandeur of Tristan and Isolde. I thought having Bifur go around with an axe in his head was the dumbest thing I'd seen. I had no idea that Harfoots were in my future. Thranduil's elk was excessive? Slo-mo blue-eyed horsey!
Speaking of Thranduil, Jackson cast Lee Pace in the role. I shudder to think what Amazon would have done with the character.
I've wondered if that was a pun on "Bifurcation."
Here, take this upvote for your wit!
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50% "[I don't like it, and] I'm not a racist."
50% "I don't like it, and it's a bad show."
0% "I like it."
I could easily be misreading you here, but I haven't seen anything indicating that it's a good show and wouldn't be surprised if you hadn't either. Sure, I haven't been checking reviews or deliberately browsing forums, but that hasn't stopped me from forming positive impressions of other media I haven't watched.
I don't know anybody in my circle of friends/aquaintances who has spoken out in favour of it, and I know people who loudly proclaimed their appreciation of Ghostbusters 2016.
I actually find the hate-watchers tedious at this point too. Is there anything shocking in Current Year about a once-respected intellectual property being driven into the ground to promote the careers of mediocre creators, who put in woke elements to either cover their asses, promote their careers, or further their socio-political agenda? It was interesting to tear that apart in 2016. In Current Year, I am happy to move on and enjoy classic entertainment from better times. You only have to go back to the Golden Age of television to enjoy countless hours of great television which are neither preachy not hamstrung by woke ideology, e.g. I don't even think about drug legislation when watching Breaking Bad, let alone Race, Class, Gender issues.
Then let me be the first. I am cautiously optimistic about how they’re telling these stories intertwining, and haven’t seen anything besides the necessarily-woke casting which has me worried. It fits the Peter Jackson / Weta interpretation of Middle Earth, and is, to me and my parents, as fun as The Hobbit Extended Edition was.
TBH, saying "it's as good as the Hobbit movies" is a pretty damning criticism imo. Those movies were just bad. LOTR wasn't a great adaptation of Tolkien, but they were at least great movies. The Hobbit movies were a bad adaptation and they were bad movies in their own right.
Oh, make no mistake, the deviations from canon were thoroughly derided by my family and despised. We really enjoyed the Bread and Butter cut, a Reddit fancut which only kept what actually happened in the books, and rearranged the third film to be at least somewhat reasonably canon-compliant. No dwarf/elf romance, no barrel dancing.
The Hobbit Extended Editions, however, (through their sheer volume of additional Appendix lore) are a unique delight. The bad of executive producer meddling is drowned out by extra crunchy, deep-fried lore that somehow alchemically turns shit into gold — or at least silver.
That’s how I feel about this series: it’s a theme-park romp through Appendix lore, a Cliff Notes expansion of the backstory of LOTR.
Interesting. I admit, I didn't watch the extended editions. After seeing the theatrical versions, I thought that they already were bloated with too much filler (a consequence of stretching a short book into a trilogy). So the last thing I wanted was to have versions that were even longer. Perhaps I was in error on that score.
I could easily watch one DVD (half of one movie) each day of both Extended Editions, and feel fully satisfied with the binge. The Bread and Butter cut, coming in around 4 hours, is a great treat on its own.
Other fan cuts I want to see (but haven’t) are the Passengers cut which starts with her story, not his, and the Finding Nemo “Memento” cut: only the Dory scenes, backwards. The Outside-In cut of Inside Out is an amazing dramatic short all on its own.
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The first half of the first movie was good, as was the first bits in the planky-town with scenery-chewing villainous Stephen Fry, because they correctly adapted the source material's fundamental silliness. The Hobbit series should have been wholly pitched to the sensibilities of 7-year-olds, because that's what the book originally was - a bedtime story for little kids
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Lindsay Ellis's three part analysis of the The Hobbit movies is pretty good as a whole, but the end of the first part she points out just how lazy and bad from a production stand point they are. Reusing the Ring Wraith leitmotif for a movie original scene where Thorin charges an Orc.
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That's some grade-A Poe's Law right there.
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Audiences appear 2 to want shows with characters that look like them. If this is true, which data suggests, then the inclusion of diverse characters necessarily makes shows less enjoyable for the majority. There are obvious exceptions to this rule like Squid Game, which many people found enjoyable despite featuring mostly mono-ethnic protagonists (and stereotypical, poorly written white villains who appear for ~20 minutes). There’s also K-Dramas, which many white women adore.
In general racial groups express ingroup preference, with one major exception.
I can give you an uncharitable reading of that chart where there's a straightforward connection to how they react to any casting decision that is "whitewashed" compared to any casting decision that removes white people. Even comes complete with the requisite "good ones" who are okay as long as they don't step out of line a la Gina Carano or Chris Pratt, but I don't believe that is an accurate summary of the situation. We know these people and we see how they express their opinions.
Their ingroup preference is for cosmopolitanism. They genuinely loved Hamilton. It's not that they think a black actress playing Anne Boleyn was a sensible casting decision. They cheer it because they want to live in a world where Meghan Markle can be the Queen of England and where the Obama's being King and Queen of America was very important. This is where they depart from the agnostics and the people who used to argue for colorblind casting decisions and why enjoying Bollywood or Korean media or anime doesn't track the same - those latter examples can be enjoyed by anyone who doesn't rate extremely in the negative in openness to experience. Those are expressions and a product of a different society, not ours.
This is explicitly about seeing the world they want ours to be, which is why it doesn't actually track America's current demographics and even why that link has "Latinx" in it. The political discourse in America is very black and white and as a reflection of their values they want an overrepresentation of black people in casting for the same reason I want Ana de Armas in casting.
I think this is where you see the overreaches that are causing this friction, too. Most of these shows are bad and the existence of this type of casting is almost like a shit test that people, myself included, will use to tell us if the showrunner respects the work. Was Wheel of Time bad because they rainbow casted a remote village in the countryside? Not exclusively, even if I thought the actor for Perrin was terrible. It was bad because they made a bunch of nonsensical choices and that one was the most obvious tell before watching it. But The Witcher Season 1 wasn't bad, it was mediocre. How did it achieve this with the casting of Triss being much worse than Perrin? Henry Cavill actually cared about it.
And that's where it's awry. These shows would work if the people making them cared about the artwork more than the art as a representation of their politics. The people making whatever Gina Carano is doing now have the same problem.
You can go back and see how this worked before. Here's Killswitch Engage covering Dio's fantasy setting video of Holy Diver where they added a dude in a dress and some diversity. Why did this work? Because it was reflective of the people making it who clearly loved and respected the source material and had joy in what they were doing. The big new anime in Japan right baits a lesbian relationship between its two main characters and an important story element involves one of their gay dads' interracial relationship. This sounds like an enormous red flag of a descriptor for something new out of Hollywood but no one really cares even in the places on the English side of the internet where you might expect they would because that's not the entire point of the show.
Au contraire the problem is when the show baits but doesn't deliver, like with the Euphonium anime. It even has a name as it has become a trope: "Yuri Baiting".
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Interesting. If that were strictly true, I'd think the opposite conclusion, unless the data suggests that people want shows with ONLY characters that look like them. Basically, by putting in black people along with white people, then everyone gets characters that look like them.
However, my instinct says that that effect is overstated, anyway, and likely overshadowed by another effect: people don't like being preached to, and people can sniff that out a mile away.
The data suggests that diverse castings reduce majority audience viewership, whether you’re looking at the bachelorette or WWE vs AEW. Although I can’t find data on which shows have the highest percent white viewership, my guess is that it would be modern family and Big Bang theory. Most watched by black audience is Tyler Perry’s tv show at 88% Black, likely a huge chunk of the 12% are spouses
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I think people want characters who are believable and correspond with the real world.
Racists Targaryen’s for good cause (maintain special abilities) aren’t going to have a black side family. Black men playing leading men in some movies I’ve liked Man on Fire, Training Day, origional Matrix, The Wire I’ve all liked. Silicon Valley with Indian D’Nesh made sense. If they made Wall St 3 and substituted in an all black women cast I wouldn’t find it believable. If they remade the Wire and made all the cops black and all the drug dealers white I would find it stupid because the urban white ghetto doesn’t exists.
Also feels like Woke writing is upset with having the proper balance instead of telling the proper story. And there’s something about woke trying to create characters they want them to be that then loses the characters humanity. Which might be the bigger issue because being woke means you can’t show actual human emotions and flaws and characters become comic book characters.
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I wish we could diversify media by telling some of the stories from other cultures great oral traditions, rather than taking a few stories from a small group of similar cultures and sticking other cultural people in them.
I also would be fine with completely race blind casting, but that means you've got to be credible with Othello and Black Panther getting the same casting. Until then, I'll oppose swapping characters.
And I'm really getting tired of marketing by fan-baiting.
Tiredness is definitely my impression of the whole Rings of Power stuff. The old media hype, the production, the casting, the hate-videos on Youtube... There's nothing new or creative in any of it. I don't see an ounce of creative passion anywhere in the whole thing. It's like someone secretly upgraded Stable Diffusion to create a whole media circus based on past glories of hype, e.g. Ghostbusters 2016 or Gamergate.
Good observation-even the hate for it feels rehashed.
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I would absolutely love a Princess and the Frog sequel in which Tiana’s mother (and aunties?) and Prince Naveen take turns telling each other their favorite animal fables; hers being Br’er Rabbit tales passed down from her enslaved ancestors, and his being Anansi stories from his homeland.
It would be a great way to finally show off the stories which got young Walt into imaginative storytelling, in a cultural context which allows them.
That would be amazing, I've always like Anansi tales.
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I feel like I don't care too much about the actor's races, as long as the actors are good. I've watched live plays where men play women and women play men. Or where one actor plays multiple characters. Idk, its all make believe and I have an easy time suspending my disbelief and filling in the gaps. I think the casting in hollywood is pretty competitive these days and its not hard to get good actors of any race.
Having said all that ... I still don't want to watch any of these shows. As others have said there is a whole marketing strategy with stoking these racial animosity stories, and I really don't want to support that sort of marketing strategy, and nor do I think its a good signal of quality. If the show is still considered huge and important in five years I'll start watching it then. Otherwise I'll just read a plot summary/spark notes at some point to understand any cultural references.
Back when they cast Idris Elba to play Heimdall, I had about two seconds of "But Heimdall is Norse..." before I went "Feck it, Elba's a good actor, this will be fantastic!"
I did not feel that way about Arondir and Dísa. I don't know who these actors are, or if they're any good. I admit my memory is shaky but I don't recall back when casting Elba that there was all this guff about "Well ackshully Asgard is populated by many different races" and representation etc. Hogun was played by a Japanese actor, but the canon comics had Hogun being vaguely Asian, and the in-universe explanation is that he is Vanir, not Aesir. There you go, no problems with contradicting the source material (which is comic books and not pure Norse mythology). However, they still cast Chris Hemsworth and not Dwayne Johnson as Thor.
Black Dísa? Tell us that she is from one of the Eastern houses of the Dwarves, it's intermarriage between two royal lines. Don't beat us over the head with "That's racist!" when asking how come she is the only black Dwarf in the place. Give us a reason in-universe for this, instead of a parade of news media interviews about "I'm the first black/female/Dwarf ever!" (which people have pointed out is not true; there have been female dwarves and black dwarves in other shows and movies before).
Also, the Thor comic books only have a passing familiarity with the actual fables/myths. If someone was actually trying to dramatize the Poetic Edda, transracial casting would be a bigger deal.
There's no pretense that they're adapting the actual Norse myths, everyone knows it's the comics. So that at least is honest.
And if they were trying to do the myths, they'd have to have Loki transforming into a mare and giving birth to the eight-legged horse that Odin then rides, as well as Thor cross-dressing to be a giant's bride in order to get his stolen hammer back. Real mythology is way wilder than a few feeble attempts at "we are thoroughly modern Millie".
Even this show chickened out of showing the First Kinslaying, so we get the comic scene of the Elf-fleet sailing after Morgoth to Middle-earth For Great Justice (if you believe the voice-over in the prologue) with nary a word about all the Elf-on-Elf murder and theft. I know in large part it's because they don't have the rights to the material, but they shouldn't have touched any First Age stuff at all then. They have the simple plot-line of Elves Good, Sauron Bad and they're sticking to it desperately.
This is the real bone of contention. There is material there to do a Second Age story, but first they don't have rights to the source material so they're stuck with what is in the Appendices and second, they don't really want to do the story as it is in canon. They want their Generic Epic Fantasy Game Of Thrones Rip-off, just with names like Galadriel and Elrond pasted on the characters.
I could accept the compressed timeline and having Galadriel and Tar-Míriel and all the other characters interacting, because I realise that's necessary for the adaptation to television. I can't accept Bitchy Galadriel and Warrior Queen Regent.
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I don't know what they have officially said or not said about the actors being black. I just got a bunch of articles about how so and so actor was flooded with hate for their role in the rings of power. I don't want to waste any time researching what was said back and forth by the creators (unless this turns out to be a popular show 5 years from now). Condemning them without knowing what they said seems premature, so I'll mostly withhold judgement. All I've seen so far is the advertising campaign, and that is what I'm judging.
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My view is the SJWs should try creating their own cultural products and see what response they get instead of expropriating and ruining the works of others.
Someone posted a video here recently that had a theory that this is done deliberately. Not because they can't create new products or think they improve them, but because the subversion of the tools of the hegemon is how the revolutionaries fight. They just don't know when to stop and repeat this after becoming the hegemon.
Why am I not surprised.
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That would require movies that aren't sequels to be made which, of course, appears to be impossible.
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There was the Arkh Project, but, uh...that may have fallen apart. It could just be that truly original efforts from progressives suffer a higher attrition rate without such creators being implanted into legacy media institutions who can keep them on task.
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Agree with this take. A few quick additional reflections -
(1) I have no issue with diverse casts where it's actually thematically appropriate. In a show like The Expanse, for example, where people from all over the world have gone to space and made babies, it's entirely appropriate to have a cast of diverse (and often racially ambiguous) actors. My favourite show of all time is The Wire, which has a predominantly black cast because it's actually trying to reflect the makeup of Baltimore. Same with Hamilton - there was a specific artistic purpose there in using non-white actors to play revolutionaries (namely, to emphasise the fact that these people were in some ways outsiders). But in a show like Rings of Power or House of the Dragon, giving seemingly random roles to black actors without any attempt to address their race in the actual story just feels like bad world building motivated by petty politics.
(2) Also, why is diversity casting so overwhelmingly focused on black actors rather than e.g., South Asians, East Asians, or indigenous peoples? This is true even for a lot of British productions, and our South Asian population is a lot bigger than our black population. The obvious answer it seems to me is that white American elites have a weird quasi-fetishistic relation with blackness, and as cultural imperialists, they end up importing their own psychodramas to the rest of the Western world. And that's something I strongly resent.
(3) As OP notes, the issue is definitely not that productions with racially diverse casts are now more common, it's that it's becoming increasingly difficult to justify shows that don't exemplify racial diversity. This forces a dilemma on anyone looking to tell historical stories situated in Europe's past. Do they risk the wrath of the media-activist complex ("yet another show about white people"), or do they find ways to include non-white actors even at the cost of verisimilitude (as in, e.g., Vikings or Bridgerton)? Verisimilitude isn't the be-all and end-all, but it's not nothing either.
(4) Finally - and this is a much broader rant - it frustrates me yet again how narrow the lens of contemporary "diversity" actually is, and how focused it is on the most visible forms of difference. Linguistic diversity, for example, remains the exception rather than the norm in most shows, with everyone talking in English. What about class diversity, or neurodiversity, or regional diversity, or faith diversity? My academic workplace is 'diverse' in terms of gender and race, but everyone is from a fairly elite background and there's not a single openly Christian person among the thirty or so academics I interact with on a monthly basis. That seems like a striking failure of diversity, at least if one were naive enough to think that the concept was genuinely about encouraging heterogeneous representation rather than political point-scoring.
British productions, AFAIK, get skewed a lot by the 'London is the whole of the UK' attitude you frequently see from the BBC so it's far more representative of the % of London with African backgrounds than any sort of a reasonable breakdown of the whole country. Combine that with imported American idpol and it explains why every historical show is so skewed.
I prefer the term American idpol colonialism.
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My attention has been brought to this article by the Irish Times, about how "Rings of Power: The new hobbits are filthy, hungry simpletons with stage-Irish accents. That’s $1bn well spent".
It points out that the fake-Irish Harfoots align fairly well with the kind of 19th century British caricatures of the Irish:
The best sting in the tail is this conclusion:
They also managed to score an interview with Payne and McKay, the showrunners, about "Why are the harfoots hungry simpletons with stage-Irish accents? We ask the showrunners" but it's behind a paywall, so I'll excerpt some plums where our heroes manage to offend a hefty chunk of the entire British Isles because yes, they are that dumb, no they didn't do it on purpose, which makes it even funnier.
First, they pull the classic 'plastic paddy' defence: sure and begorrah, didn't my own family come from the Ould Country?
Next, why the walking, talking stereotypes of the Scottish Jock type are not really Scottish, even though we made them sound Scottish and gave them red hair and a love of drinking, fighting, and money:
Having the not unreasonable question of "if you describe stereotypes, isn't that a problem?" put to them, they manage to keep digging that hole even deeper as they characterise what their version of Manchester is like:
Clearly they are unaware of the - shall we say - more problematic elements of talking about a travelling community in connection with barefoot, dirty, stage-Irish types. Maybe it's because I'm not on the same level of intellect as our two stars here, but I don't quite get what the subtle difference is between "So we're basing it on Manchester but it's not meant to be Manchester but our reference point was Manchester".
In conclusion, the reporter comes down on the side of "Watch House of the Dragon instead":
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Is that really the case though ?
I would expect that if someone put out a show with an all-white cast (someone downthread mentioned TheNorthman), they wouldn't get a backlash strong enough to actually hurt their bottom line (as long as they don't go aggressively market their product as all-white/anti-woke etc.).
Some theories:
True Believers: A lot of the people involved in media production care more about diversity than about being faithful to history / the original work
Cowards: A lot of those people are in a disproportionally woke-leaning social environment, so even if the backlash doesn't hurt the movie's bottom line, it might still make their friends angry at them or make them open to careerist back-stabbing
Profit maximizers: I'm mistaken and actually the backlash would be hard enough to hurt the bottom line
No such thing as bad publicity: the problem isn't the backlash, it's that putting woke characters is good for the bottom line either directly (by marketing to minorities / the woke) or indirectly (because marketers can cherry pick (or fabricate) "racist" comments on the internet, make up a fake controversy, and get everybody to talk about their movie)
I actually suspect that the wrath of the media-activist complex could be good for the bottom line, if exploited in a similar way: find (or fabricate) the dumbest comments, blow it out of proportion, reap the free publicity. Though that only works if you don't care about your reputation in lefty circles, which tends to be important in the media world.
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Just as a point of clarification, it's Halle Bailey who's playing Ariel in The Little Mermaid, not Halle Berry. The latter is 56; casting her to play a character who's canonically 16, and whose teenage naivety and rebelliousness are her main personality traits, would provoke a whole different culture war fracas. (Bailey is 22, and 22 playing 16 isn't unusual by Hollywood standards.)
What I'm curious to see is what they're going to do with the plot. The prince falling in love with a mute Ariel on the basis of her physical appearance and friendly, accommodating behavior, seems deeply problematic by present woke standards.
Haha, whoops! It did cross my mind that Halle Berry is a little old to play Ariel, though I didn't realize Berry was quite over 50, and I figured that, y'know, black people age very very gracefully. And like maybe mermaids in this universe stay young and naive longer or something.
Edit: Also, CGI magic is real, that's another thought that crossed my mind, despite the fact that upon reflection, it'd be ridiculous for Disney not to cast someone who's actually young.
That flub made me realize that Halle Berry would have been a much better Tinkerbell than Julia Roberts.
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Very magical. But we are told to beware of those who wield magic for evil ends. They must be banished.
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No, I think that that's hyperbole. If someone put out a movie with an all-white cast, there might be some grumbling on Twitter or whatnot, but no serious consequences.
But that seems to be true anytime there's a big show with a big publicity push. I remember when Game of Thrones was crammed down our throats everywhere too. That's just mass-marketing; I just avoid ads and places with ads as much as possible.
See The Northman. As I recall, an all-white cast (or close enough) and it flew under the woke radar almost completely. Sadly, not a lot of people watched it in general, because it was very good.
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I wouldn’t watch any of these media franchises even if they were good and nonwoke. But even though their casting decisions don’t matter at all per se, they aren’t happening in a vacuum. The media considers it racist minority erasure if a white actor is cast for a nonwhite character. But if a nonwhite actor is cast for a white role and you complain about it, you’re a horrible racist too. This is a racist double standard. We are being conditioned to accept a racist double standard. I refuse to accept that, even for something that doesn’t matter per se. Because a society that embraces racist double standards in ways that don’t really matter will embrace them in ways that do matter, too.
Yes. And it really bothers me that it's become so much the normal, such that woke folk consistently say "Wow, I can't believe you care so much about race that it bothers you if a character is cast as black. You're crazy!"
It's evident that the woke were the ones who were crazy and cared about whether a character was black in the first place. We said they were crazy, and now that conditions have shifted in this mostly unspoken way, they are throwing that logic back at us. But it's not that we care if a character is black, it's that we care that others care so much, such that it has become institutionalized.
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Is that Shireposting you're thinking of? I left Shireposting because it got too political back in 2020.
Better yet, just stop checking facebook in general. The advertising is obnoxious.
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The critical drinker has a fantastic video (14 mins) about this very subject where he essentially says that media companies are intentionally riling up their fan bases through race-bait-and-switch tactics in order to drum up controversy. I've personally suspected this very thing, which is why it was so unsurprising to me that ROP started out with this exact marketing ploy.
To be clear, I was uninterested in ROP when I learned they didn't actually have the rights to the stories that interested me from the Silmarillion or other lore companions to LOTR. I couldn't care less if female dwarves are black and beardless so long as the story is good and true to tolkein's vision, but leading with "guh, racists will hate this!1!" Is pretty transparent.
And to be fair, it makes business sense. The media landscape is replete with incredible content, more than any one person could possibly consume in a lifetime. Somehow, your "most expensive show ever" needs to generate clicks in a way more desperate than ever (especially considering the price tag). As the saying goes, all press is good press, and if you are at the center of the culture-war media hate-hurricane then you are going to get much larger volume clicks than you would by advertising towards the dozen or so nerds who actually read the Silmarillion.
Anyway, in true TLP style, if you are seeing it then the message was intended for you. Elvis sold hundreds of thousands of "I Hate Elvis" merchandise, media companies get more volume through constant controversy, and our obsession with it all is what keeps the machine churning. Participation is approval, which is why I'll be rereading The Children of Húrin in silent bliss. Perhaps I'll start a little book club here in protest, where we all enjoy esoteric tolkein; I would just rather talk about anything other than race-baiting sycophants desperately clawing at my wallet.
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At this point I'm cynical enough to believe that Hollywood goes through the following thought process when it comes to "diverse" casting:
A franchise has a dedicated-enough following that its fans will watch anything with the franchise's name on it.
The fanbase is also fickle and their standards will never be met; every attempt at a reboot is almost certain to be at best, a disappointment, and, at worst, a betrayal.
The studio wants to do a reboot/sequel, etc. but knows there is no way to meet the audience's expectations unless they can really knock it out of the park.
The studio knows that the chances of knocking it out of the park are slim. Once the franchise has been ossified, anything that deviates from the existing formula is out of character for the franchise, while anything that conforms to it is merely a rehash. There's a narrow window where the studio can please everyone, and it knows it's unlikely to hit it.
There is pressure from people outside the fanbase but with influence in the industry (mostly journalists) who want to see more minorities in big roles.
The studio knows that there is one group they are guaranteed to satisfy regardless of the movie they make.
The studio casts a bunch of minorities and spends the rest of the budget on special effects so it doesn't look cheap. Little thought is given to the story, dialogue, editing, etc.
Everyone who was a fan of the movie announces their disappointment with the product. A few point to the unbelievability of all the minorities in the case.
The studio blames the complaints on the racism of the audience.
The journalists agree with the studio about the racism and go the extra mile to insist that it actually was a good movie.
The product is, by any measure, a success. It did well commercially, because the fanbase will watch anything associated with the franchise. Journalists liked it. The studio made money without too much thought.
When the studio wants to make another franchise film they point to the success of the last sequel and the bank gives them the money to do it.
If Star Wars fans had been logical and given up on the franchise after Episode I, Episode II would have bombed and everyone would have been saved decades upon decades of mediocre films. But instead, it was one of the most successful movies of the year (and Episode 3 made even more money), so they will be making these films till the end of time. If the franchise isn't big enough to coast like this, though, they have to resort to minority casting as a safeguard. As a side note, this only seems to happen to franchises people grew up with as children. Had Coppola turned The Godfather into a never-ending franchise I doubt it would have stuck. Eventually these things turn into Death Wish IX: Michael Winner's Revenge and whatnot. But when it comes to children's films all reason is lost. I'm glad I never got too into any of them.
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All of the above issues would not be issues if the writing were not so intolerable.
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It's less diversification of media and more appropriating of already existing works. Cultural Imperialism if you will.
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Manufactured hype/conflict, similar to all the talk about Andrew Tate , who also blew up. Marketers figured out rather rather than buying billboards and ad spots, which are easily ignored, you somehow entice 'influencers' to talk about your product, even negatively. You plant seeds of debate, not sales pitches, on all sorts of communities, like reddit and on twitter, like "What do you think of X?" or "X is so bad/racist...let's talk about it!!". Generally, for this you want to target smarter communities, because of positive correlation between IQ and social status and the size of one's social network. Negative press is always better than no press (unless it's rap3 or ped0plheia or something), and negative press is also more likely to be viral because people are more receptive to bad news than good news. The key though is making sure the product is actually good, then the bad press is replaced by good, viral/organic word of mouth.
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I don't care. The people making these forms of media openly hate people that look like me and I've accepted it. I do not support them or pay any attention to them. If a coworker or friend brings up some new thing, I say I've never heard of it and it sounds boring. Stop supporting bad art - our culture is lacking in decent art and you'd do well to seek it out and support it vehemently. Don't waste brain cells debating about some reimagining of a classic by people who hate it.
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In high school there were people who would rile up the mentally-challenged kids, get them to say "fuck" or go into a physical rage, which would obviously get the mentally-challenged kid in trouble with the bureaucracy. It was very funny to do and if you were bored it was funny to watch. (Some of these kids found it such a cheat code to positive attention that they failed to develop any other personality.)
Disney casting a black person to play the whitest of white characters seems to me just riling up the mentally-challenged people in order to see what they do. Kind of lame for a party who is supposed to be the master of content.
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