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ZorbaTHut  1yr ago (text post)   Edited 1yr ago   38188 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 12, 2022

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Reposting on request from Zorba:

The discussion of defensive gun usage in a major survey in the CW thread got me thinking about an experience I had some years back. I thought I'd tell the story to illustrate the sorts of things that can happen around violent or potentially violent situations. For what it's worth, I'm not sure if I classify this as a defensive gun use or not, but it qualifies under the terminology of the survey. It was very much a memorable night, and made me rethink the way I carry guns and the sorts of scenarios I prepare for.

First thing: I was drunk. Dancing-in-public drunk. My girlfriend and I had attended a wedding of some friends, someone else was the DD, so I took full advantage. At the time, my girlfriend lived with another single girl in a house outside town. Isolated, quiet. Cornfields and scattered houses. The housemate had been on a date, and the two of them were back at the house when we got dropped off. We said hello and left them to do whatever people on dates do on darkened living room couches while we went upstairs to bed. I passed out almost immediately.

The GF woke me up a short time later, there was a commotion downstairs. A strange man had arrived and was banging on the main door of the house, loudly demanding to speak to the housemate's date. I went downstairs, the date said he knew the man, that it was his pastor. He said he'd handle it, so I went back upstairs. As a precaution, I retrieved my carry gun and kept it close to hand. At this point, I was regretting the drinking. Waste of a good drunk.

Outside, the date had gone out onto the porch to talk to the guy, we could hear muffle conversation, then escalating in volume. There was a series of loud crashes, and the housemate started screaming that she was calling the police. Fuck me running. I remember clearly getting out of bed the second time, gun in hand, wearing basketball shorts, dress socks and nothing else. An ironic thought occurred to me: "so this is why people look like this on 'Cops'". Not the sort of situation I had envisioned when I started carrying a firearm.

I got downstairs and the date was bleeding from his face, apparently his pastor had assaulted him. The housemate had called the police, but it would be over twenty minutes before they arrived (given where we were, that was probably a fast time). Meanwhile, the pastor had discovered a hatchet that had been left out of the shed and started walking around the house, hitting the siding with the hatchet and shouting for the date to come back out and talk to him. Needless to say, that dude didn't seem enthused about the proposition. The crashing I'd heard had been the date falling into and through the screen door on the porch after the guy decked him.

The GF was curious, but I sent her back upstairs, told the housemate to lock the door behind me, and went out onto the porch. I might be tanked, but it was not my first rodeo. I leaned against the wall of the house (casually, I hoped) both to stay steady on my feet and to conceal the pistol I was now holding behind my leg. The situation was fairly simple: The man would have to make a 90-degree turn to come up the steps to the porch, after which I'd be within arms reach. I set my line at the bottom of the steps. If he tried to come up onto the porch, I would shoot him.

For a lunatic who was banging a hatchet on the side of a random house at 2AM in the middle of a cornfield, the pastor sounded lucid. He just wanted to talk, he felt bad, the whole thing had gotten out of hand etc. etc. Whole time he had the hatchet in his hand. In my hazy state, I decided to go with simplicity. "Put down the ax, go back to your car, and drive away". He'd try to argue something, and I'd just repeat it. This went on for maybe ten minutes. I was feeling like a broken record, but finally, finally he walked away. He dropped the hatchet, got into his car, and drove away. Shortly thereafter, the police showed up.

I went back to bed.

The coda is that the date didn't press charges, turns out the "pastor" was a self-proclaimed one with a long history of mental illness, sort of a street-preacher type. The housemate had to pay for the siding repair herself. The police were little help, and the prosecutor's office wasn't interested in dealing with a mental patient over property damage.

So that's the story. It's weird, but in my very limited experience it looks a lot more like the median "DGU" than a shootout in a pawn shop. These are the sorts of stories that do not generally make the papers or the police reports, but happen on a daily basis, many many times.

Well, that explains why the study below used such an expansive definition of DGU. This is obviously in the broader category, and it also is a clear example where having the gun changed the dynamic entirely.

The alternative was something like locking the doors, trying to talk the guy down through a wall or window, and waiting for the police. I think there’s a valid argument for letting them do their job. For those inclined to grand theories, it sets up a tidy dichotomy between (cowardly/responsible) collectivism and (responsible/vigilante) individualism.

More practically, it illustrates that not knowing is a big part of the problem.

The “right” decision changes if the cops are 2 minutes out vs. 20, if the pastor is confused or murderous or intoxicated, if he realizes the barriers of the porch or the door. Without some sort of weapon, your options collapse down into “confront unarmed” or “hunker down.” Without perfect information, those are awfully unappealing. Your weapon (and level-headedness) enabled a more proactive stance and, perhaps, the best outcome.

And it's all subject to power laws.

The spread of possible outcomes ranges from "he leaves in peace and nobody is harmed" and "he charges me and bashes my head in with a hatchet."

There are important reasons you might want to clip the risk of those worse outcomes, even if they are comparatively unlikely.

So just to be clear, the gun was never actually used except to make you secure in the knowledge that you could use it?

If you've been in a situation like this, the difference in that "secure knowledge" of having a gun vs not having one is.... significant.

Having the gun enabled JTarrou to confidently approach the "Pastor" and verbally talk them down. Having a use-of-force upper hand that allows you to de-escalate a situation is using it.

Of course, but if we're going to count 'defensive gun use' as 'any time a gun made its owner feel safe' we're getting dangerously close to making policy based on feelings. Should we count every time the presence of a gun made someone feel unsafe as an offensive gun use? I don't think police departments would support that sort of standard.

As I said at the beginning of the story, I'm a bit on the fence on the classification of that night myself. If you're criticizing the methodology of the survey, that's fair enough so long as you recognize that most of the time when a gun is present in a dangerous situation, it is not fired, and sometimes not even brandished. Maybe there needs to be an intermediate category, but the point is, this is why people want guns, and because the situation resolved peacefully, that can be lost as a data point. We should not take the moral restraint of legal gun owners as an argument to disarm them.

Bottom line for me is, I was going out on that porch with or without a gun. Having the gun gave me a better plan than bringing a knife to a hatchet fight with a guy who outweighed me by a hundred pounds.

If you're criticizing the methodology of the survey, that's fair enough

Thanks, I was.

We should not take the moral restraint of legal gun owners as an argument to disarm them.

Perish the thought.

Should we count every time the presence of a gun made someone feel unsafe as an offensive gun use?

We already do that. What do you think "brandishing" is?

I meant merely glancing and seeing someone open carrying in a non-threatening manner.

Would you count every single traffic stop ever as a 'gun use?'

I meant merely glancing and seeing someone open carrying in a non-threatening manner.

At some point you have to stop counting the crazies, otherwise Paranoid Pete has 7.9 billion defensive gun uses per hour since "everyone's out to get him". I think we've drawn the line in a decent spot, where it has to substantially affect your behaviour before it gets counted.

Would you count every single traffic stop ever as a 'gun use?'

Let's ignore all of the ones done by unarmed officers.

No, I wouldn't. I'd only call it a gun use if the officer would have otherwise called for backup (or taken some other protective measure). Furthermore, I'm not sure about counting on-duty police officers in defensive gun use statistics, since they can also initiate force instead of just responding to it.

The law does support that kind of standard, so long as the fear is reasonable and provoking fear is intentional.

Assault: ["intentionally place an alleged “victim” in reasonable apprehension of great bodily harm."](

https://www.shouselaw.com/ca/blog/what-is-assault-with-a-deadly-weapon/)

Brandish: " For purposes of this subsection, the term “brandish” means, with respect to a firearm, to display all or part of the firearm, or otherwise make the presence of the firearm known to another person, in order to intimidate that person, regardless of whether the firearm is directly visible to that person." (emphasis mine)

If it's done subtly it can be hard to know how to score it, let alone prove it in a court of law, but that doesn't make it any less real or game changing. There's a very real chance that the "pastor" was able to correctly infer that JTarrou was armed from his behavior, and that otherwise he wouldn't have backed down so peacefully. I've been in a similar situation, where out of place confidence clued me in that the people threatening me were almost certainly armed, and that I couldn't afford to risk trying to de-escalate the way I otherwise would. My inference happened to be proven correct, but the presence of weapons changed things on both sides well before they came out.

In much the same way that having a tire jack, air compressor, and spare tire in your trunk might make you feel secure enough to embark on a long drive through relatively rough conditions where assistance might take a long time to arrive.

That is, if you didn't have these tools available you might not take a particular course of action.

And if they become necessary, you thank your respective Gods for having them.

Russia never dropped a nuke, yet other countries thinking it is capable of doing so, enables Russia greater leeway in foreign policy; notably invading Ukraine.

Thus not even possesion is required, merely convincing others of it is.

That's all well and good but I wouldn't go on to describe every foreign policy move this enabled as a 'use' of nukes.

To my knowledge, the guy never saw the gun. I did not display it, I did not mention it. I don't think the housemate or her date saw it either, though as I said, I was on the liquor a bit and not really dressed for concealment.

While this would certainly qualify as a defensive gun use, this is the kind of use that makes me highly suspect of the actual utility of it. Yes, from the story you tell it sounds like you would have had a clear case of self-defense, but I (and presumably anyone else reading this) is going to be biased toward your side of the story. The police, however, are not necessarily going to share this natural bias. Suppose you shoot and kill the guy; what then? Your story makes a good case for self-defense: The guy had already assaulted the housmeate's date and was brandishing a dangerous implement, which he was already using to vandalize the house. He refused to leave when asked to, and approached you with the hatchet in a presumably threatening manner.

There's another side to this, though. You were drunk. The guy didn't enter the house. You didn't know the guy and weren't involved in the initial altercation. You deliberately left the safety of the house and went outside with a gun looking to confront the man. I'm not trying to say that your actions were unreasonable given the circumstances, just that the cops don't know what happened and they aren't going to just take the word of the guy in basketball shorts and dress socks who has a pretty good reason to tell stories.

Unless you're incredibly stupid, you aren't saying anything without a lawyer present, and given that it's 2 am on a Sunday morning and you're drunk, you can pretty much guarantee that you'll be spending the rest of the night in a police holding cell. Best case scenario you can raise a lawyer the next morning, the police buy your story, and they let you go right away without pressing charges. All it cost you was at least $500 in attorney's fees (put probably more like a thousand) and the worst night of your life.

More likely, though is that the police do an investigation that lasts months. This is a homicide, after all, and it isn't a clear-cut case of self-defense like a home invasion or attempted robbery. the victim's family could pressure the police. The story you give might not match up with ballistics. The investigators could simply not believe you. The police are going to interview everyone who was in the house last night, and who there can corroborate your story? Your girlfriend was upstairs the whole time and probably can't do anything but testify to the banging and yelling. The housemate might be able to provide a little more detail about the altercation, but probably not too much. The date can provide the most information, but given that he didn't want to press charges against the guy (and he presumably looks to him for spiritual support) there's a good chance he downplays the whole incident and makes it look like your actions were unjustified. Now you're looking at months of hell and thousands in attorney's fees, even if it all ends with the DA declining to press charges.

There was a case in Western PA last winter where a guy at a hunting camp was shot after erratically firing an AK-47 and forcing the other people at the camp to stay at gunpoint. The incident happened in December but the investigation dragged on until the middle of March before the DA announced that they couldn't overcome their burden of proof in a self-defense case. This was in a rural area that is generally pro-gun. Alternatively, had you stayed inside, ordered the others upstairs, and waited with the gun in case the shit hit the fan, the police probably would have arrived before he was able to break in (if that was even his intention), and if you had to shoot him, the self-defense case in much clearer.

All this reads as "Anti-self-defense people have managed to rig the system so completely against self-defense that even someone who shoots someone dead for good reasons will be made to seriously regret it". Except, of course, there's that other counterfactual. The one where nobody has a gun and the "pastor" kills one or more people with that hatchet. That one still seems worse than months of hell and thousands in attorney's fees.

This is all true, and it's why I didn't make a statement to the police at all. I'm fairly sure I was on firm self-defense territory, but I'm glad we never got to find out. You never know when you're going to fall into a media scandal, or an overzealous prosecutor, or just a bad cop. At the time, my thought was that with the hatchet, he could break the sliding glass door on the other side of the house and be inside in seconds. It is also the case that staying on the porch was on purpose, as it is legally part of the house (or curtilage).

Of all of it, the intoxication thing got to me the most. Prior to that night, it never occurred to me that just because I don't carry a gun to the bar doesn't mean I might not have to use a gun while drunk. There's no straightforward solution except to not have guns or not drink, and neither option appeals to me. I drink less now, and the lessons of that night are one reason.

There was a case in Western PA last winter where a guy at a hunting camp was shot after erratically firing an AK-47 and forcing the other people at the camp to stay at gunpoint. The incident happened in December but the investigation dragged on until the middle of March before the DA announced that they couldn't overcome their burden of proof in a self-defense case. This was in a rural area that is generally pro-gun.

Would that be this case? It's a little interesting, but this summary seems to be skipping over a couple details, especially given that the out-of-state interest in the matter driven by reporting certain it was a hate crime, which was so severe and widespread that today, months after the conclusion of the investigation, the Venango DA's website still has a brightly-highlighted statement emphasizing that he's taking a "complete and thorough investigation".

If this is the case you're referencing, "couldn't overcome their burden of proof" does not seem an accurate summary where the DA explicitly called it justified self-defense.

And, yes, more broadly, this seems like a central example of the_nybbler's "Anti-self-defense people have managed to rig the system so completely against self-defense that even someone who shoots someone dead for good reasons will be made to seriously regret it". This says a lot about a lot, but not about self-defense itself.

I actually deliberately left that information out in the hope that an enterprising individual such as yourself would track down the story and find out that there was a bit more to it than a straightforward case of self-defense. The point I'm trying to make is that the way I presented it is the way it looked to the shooter at the time: Guy on shrooms waving a gun around, acting crazy and refusing to let them leave. Then once the deed is done more complications come out of the woodwork. There's a bias investigation because the guy was black. There's the fact that the guy never made any direct threats. There's the fact that he was shot nine times in all parts of his body. When you're the one in fear of your life all these things seem like pointless details that you don't even remember. But the police aren't in your shoes. The victim's family isn't in your shoes. The police can't just take your word for what happened, no matter how reasonable it may seem to you. That's why statements like "Anti-self-defense people have managed to rig the system so completely against self-defense that even someone who shoots someone dead for good reasons will be made to seriously regret it" don't quite make sense to me. I mean, yeah, it's certainly possible that that's true at least in some places, but it doesn't really say much about what I'm getting at. If someone is shot dead the police have to investigate. If they were simply to take every self-defense claim at face value then we'd effectively have legalized murder, especially in gangland situations. Unless you can prove that the other guy didn't shoot first, you can't arrest anyone. And if you're taking the guy at his word that the victim did shoot first, then there's not much else to do. As soon as you agree that an investigation needs to be completed, and it's not going to be some half-assed investigation meant to corroborate the shooter's claim of self-defense, then the shooter needs to get an attorney. And the more inconsistencies and complications that investigation uncovers, the worse it's going to be. It's not a question of whether the legal system is unfairly biased against self-defense claims, it's a question of what needs to occur to have a functioning legal system at all.

There's the fact that the guy never made any direct threats.

uh:

"Spencer then became extremely angry that the others refused to follow his instructions to gather wood and started swearing at the Mercer man and pointing the AK-47 into his face, according to the report. Investigators wrote that Spencer also started demanding to know where the female in the group had gone, according to the report. The Mercer man said he tried to calm Spencer, but Spencer repeatedly demanded to know where the girl was and stated he would "shoot up the place if (he) needed to," according to the report."

I think that's kinda gonna count.

There's the fact that he was shot nine times in all parts of his body.

uh:

The autopsy report revealed that Spencer was struck nine times. There were two entry wounds to the front torso and upper right chest (exiting the back), one entry wound to the face (non-lethal, through the lower lip exiting side of neck), two closely-grouped entry wounds to the side under the right arm, two entry wounds to the back (superficial, grazing wounds), and two closely-grouped entry wounds in the buttocks.

The family's attorneys have found a forensic pathologist who disputed the self-defense claims, but that focused on which direction the shots went, with Wecht holding that most of the wounds on Spencer's back were entry wounds, and the state's forensics department saying they were exit wounds. There are professionalism arguments in favor of not magdumping. This shot list does not, on its own, raise serious questions about the self-defense claim. It is, charitably, a bit of a stretch to call the head, torso, and buttocks "all parts of his body".

If someone is shot dead the police have to investigate. If they were simply to take every self-defense claim at face value then we'd effectively have legalized murder, especially in gangland situations.

There's been people making similar arguments over the Rittenhouse, and the Gardner cases, and a good few others.

In one sense, it's true! Someone claiming "they were coming right for us!" alone isn't reason for the police to pack it up and go home! In one sense, yes, there's a reason self-defense experts like Masaad Ayoob recommend having a lawyer on retainer.

((I mean, not actually, descriptively true, but that's more because there's a number of police departments that are garbage.))

But for this specific case, day one had every witness at the scene says that the shot guy was threatening to shoot up the place and was trying to block their escape, his pockets are filled with their keys and one of their cell phones, and there's a bunch of recently-used shell cases matching the shot guy's gun, and tons of gunpowder residue up and down shot guy's arms. Nothing to contradict the self-defense claim comes up. And then on day two, the post-mortem tox report lights up like a Christmas tree in ways that support the suspect's claims, and completely unaffiliated witnesses from the camp owners -- who the suspect might not even have know were there -- give testimony about the shot pattern that matches. Still nothing to contradict the claim.

((And that's ignoring the stuff probably not admissible in court and shouldn't be considered by prosecutors but often is, like the rifle with an obliterated serial number and the already-active ATF investigation.))

Notably, unlike your hypothetical, no one was arrested or detained overnight. Now, this isn't the clearest-cut case of self-defense, since there was no video evidence. But I'm exceptionally skeptical that an honest and impartial prosecutor, not having the force of the state attorney general, the state police hate crimes side, national media coverage, international media coverage, so on, hits your parade of horribles.

And, what a coincidence! The same group is all, every single one, conveniently also opposed to civilian gun ownership and self-defense.

As soon as you agree that an investigation needs to be completed, and it's not going to be some half-assed investigation meant to corroborate the shooter's claim of self-defense, then the shooter needs to get an attorney.

Yes, tradeoffs exist. But the opening framework was not whether an investigation could occur, but that "this is the kind of use that makes me highly suspect of the actual utility of it." The scale of the tradeoffs matter. 1K USD and a bad night is not actually that bad compared to axe wounds and/or tens of thousands of dollars in property damage. There's a lot of things people will deal with for even a moderate reduction in the chance them and three of their friends of getting shot in the head by someone hopped up on shrooms, demanding that they sprawl out and call him a good, and confiscating their keys and cellphone.

What do you mean by "it" in:

this is the kind of use that makes me highly suspect of the actual utility of it.

Sometimes I wonder if maybe nothing in the culture has really changed at all and it just feels different to me because I'm older now and paying attention to politics more than I used to. Then I'm confronted with strong evidence that no, it's not all in my head, something important really has changed in recent years.

The most recent such thing: Cyberchase. Cyberchase is a children's show that airs on PBS Kids that premiered in 2002. I have fond memories of it and it was probably the only PBS show that I was still willing to watch as a child even after I figured out how TV remotes worked and discovered Nickelodeon.

Cyberchase is focused on exposing children to mathematical concepts in a way that is entertaining enough to hold their attention and presented at a level they can grasp. The way each episode works is that the villain, Hacker, tries to hack the Motherboard (the AI that controls the computers that run "Cyberspace", i.e. the Internet) in some way every episode and three kids, Matt, Jackie, and Inez (ages 9-11) have to thwart him. Along the way, they learn about some mathematical concept that helps them stop Hacker.

My favorite episode is Season 2 episode 10, "Raising the Bar," which is about bar graphs. It has stuck in my memory all this time because it blew my child mind when I saw it the first time, and also because I think its lesson is one of the most important for everyone to know. Hacker impersonates an exterminator and releases bugs in a cyberspace library instead of killing them. The children suspect this when they discover an unusual number of bugs in one section of the library, and they create a bar graph to show the library administrator. But Hacker presents his own bar graph that suggests the bug problem is minimal in every section, which calms the administrator. The kids are stumped until they realize that Hacker had changed the scale on the Y-Axis and deliberately left off the labels in order to make all the bars look small. They point this out to the library administrator, finally convince her, and save the day. To this day, I still think of this Cyberchase episode when I see a misleading data visualization.

One thing I love about Cyberchase is its faith in young children's ability to grasp complex concepts if they're presented well. It airs on PBS Kids, which has a target audience of children ages 2-8 but sometimes addresses concepts that are not taught to average students until high school. The list of topics goes beyond more basic concepts like multiplication and fractions and includes algebra, growth by doubling (i.e. exponential growth), data prediction, probability, symmetry, and 3D geometry. In its most ambitious episodes, the show targeted at 8-year-olds introduces game theory by having the kids find a solution for Nim, and introduces mathematical proofs by having them prove that it's not possible to make a triangle out of any three rods.

In a children's programming landscape dominated by shows that only prioritize entertainment and in a country whose school system often stunts and demoralizes its most curious and motivated students, Cyberchase is a gem. It introduces complex concepts to children at a level they can understand, and it does so while remaining genuinely entertaining and funny. Probably it has sparked a curiosity in many children that their basic arithmetic lessons couldn't, and helped them to grasp complex concepts more quickly when they encountered them years later in school. Probably it has played a role in encouraging more people to enter STEM fields and help us build the future. I know it did for me. In short, it's a great kids show, in my opinion one of the best ever.

...Well, it was, anyway. The focus of Cyberchase has shifted since its inception in 2002. All of the episodes I've listed so far have been from the show's first 5 seasons, which aired from 2002-2007 and were the ones most focused on math lessons. In seasons 6-8 (2007-10), many of the episodes focused on uses of math in real-world contexts like sports and weather, still a very worthy topic IMO but less rigorous than the concept-heavy topics in the earlier seasons. After season 8 ended in 2010, the series when on a three year hiatus and returned with a new director (J. Meeka Stuart replaced Brandon Lloyd) for season 9 in 2013. This is where the focus of the series really shifted. In the first episode, "An Urchin Matter," the kids save a kelp-bed ecosystem by releasing the sea otters that Hacker has captured because the sea otters are a keystone species that keeps the ecosystem balanced by eating sea urchins. In the second episode, they build a bunch of solar panels to light a skate park after Hacker's minions sabotage the power plant. In the third, they need to clear a giant trash heap that threatens to break through a certain cybersite's dome.

I'm sure you've noticed the pattern. The goal of the new Cyberchase, under the direction of Stuart, is no longer primarily to teach kids math. Its goal is to teach kids to be environmentalists. You can look at all the episode titles on the list and see that from season 9 onward every episode is about environmentalism.

There's still some math content. The solar panel episode, for example, has several moments where the kids multiply two numbers together to decide how many solar panels they need. Here's the first such moment, and the second. But in the first scene, one of the characters just says the answer, and in the second, one of them literally uses a calculator. There's no explanation of how to multiply numbers together, and no deeper exploration of the topic. One could argue that the focus of this episode is multiplication, but it sure feels like a shoehorned-in afterthought to me. Compare that scene to this one from Season 1 episode 19 that actually explains how to multiply.

I watched other episodes of season 9 while researching this post and everything I saw is like this. They use some kind of math concept somewhere but don't really explain, and they quickly move on to get back to the environmentalism. It feels like the sort of thing you would do if you wanted to make a show about environmentalism but you were hired to make a show about math.

Later episodes seem to have gotten even lighter on the math. I watched all of season 11 episode 5 and there weren't even any moments like that, it was all about the kids building a wind mill.

A lot of the focus of new Cyberchase seems like relatively uncontroversial stuff about how recycling is good or invasive species are bad, and some of it is scientifically educational. Remarkably, I couldn't find any references to climate change or global warming. I don't agree with all of the messages, in particular I think its treatment of solar and wind energy is biased. But setting all that aside, my argument is not that environmentalism is bad or that kids shows about environmentalism are bad. My argument is that environmentalism is not what Cyberchase was supposed to be about. I would feel the same way if it was turned in a show dedicated to pushing a message I 100% agreed with. There's no denying that when the show restarted in 2013, it was a different show what it was in 2010. Probably it will still encourage some kids to enter STEM fields, especially biology and environmental science. But what it won't do is teach them math concepts in a way that will help them actually succeed in those fields, especially the math-heavier ones like physics. It also probably won't be as effective at creating intellectual curiosity in kids like me, who was fascinated with logic puzzles like Nim, but wouldn't have been as interested in a story about building a wind mill.

Some might say that after 8 years of teaching math, Cyberchase was out of math topics and needed to pivot to something else. I completely disagree. It might have exhausted the purest math topics, but there's loads of math-adjacent topics it has never touched on. They could have had age-appropriate episodes about programming, logic gates, electricity, opinion surveys, genetics (despite the show's recent focus on biology, it never touches on genetics), space, optics, magnets, the law of supply and demand, airplanes, and so many more things. The new show is focused almost entirely on environmental science and a little biology and ignores physics, chemistry, computer science, astronomy, economics, and statistics. You might say that doing all of those things would be too much and it had to pick one subject, but the show seems to have exhausted all of the topics in environmental science a while ago and become repetitive. There are three different episodes about building gardens, for example (s10e3, s12e4, s13e10), and three about trash (s9e3, s12e1, s13e7). Also, I don't think repeating math topics would have been that bad. Approaching the same topic from a slightly different angle might help some kids grasp it better than they did the first time. This doesn't really apply to the message "trash is bad," which everyone can pretty much get the first time.

I guess that’s all I have to say. Cyberchase was amazing and now it’s just okay, and I’m sad.

We go to the library a lot for children's books and come home with a good pile. One of those books looked innocent enough on the cover, but turned out to be about a boy who wanted to dress up as a princess. So he goes dress shopping with his mother until he finds the perfect dress, and ends by giving a lesson to his friends on how it's ok for a boy to dress as a princess. Obviously I stopped reading it aloud on the second page when I could see where this was going. But after reflection, it was the first book in the house that was actually about the princess archetype.

They are subverting these archetypes before kids even learn them. The author was some gender identity activist. The culture has definitely changed.

It was definitely a "if it can happen to me it can happen to anyone" moment. Yes, they are going after the children. You have to take active measures if you don't want them exposed to it, and even then, it's pretty hopeless once the school system gets them in the classroom.

One strategy I am increasingly considering for myself is "avoid any media made after some cut-off date." The upside is that you don't end up dropped into a roiling cauldron of active culture-war fighting, and you can generally get the best of the past, since you know what's passed the sieve of time, but the downside is you're not up-to-date with what others are talking about.

The latter probably matters even (much) more to people who are not so much of hermits as I am, though.

What is objectionable about that book? A boy dressing up as a princess doesn't seem any worse than other make-believe that children engage in.

One one level, it’s objectionable because the protagonist of the book, the viewpoint character for the audience, is explicitly trying to normalize cross-dressing play. The implicit heroism of the character’s role in the story implies what he’s saying is truth and any who question or mock him are antagonists. In other words, it’s textbook propaganda designed to make the audience believe that any other viewpoint would be shamed by a hero.

On another level, it’s not even androgynous clothing the hero’s promoting, it’s princess-trope clothing, the girliest possible costume. Princess tropes not only include flowing dresses, there’s also “waiting for my prince to come,” and “prettier than the rest,” which, being the girl’s/passive side of relationship tropes, are textbook entryways to being groomed for a pedophilic relationship. A little boy who’s trained to equate his princess-play with wanting smooches can be talked into being molested.

Whether you agree with these or not, or find more objectionable forms of make-believe play as counter-examples, I’ve listed two categories of objection to the book-as-activism.

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It seems like Americans have given up on improving things, especially for our children. We used to be concerned about how our test scores stacked up against China and Sweden, but we aren't any more.

Test scores are too easy to associate with racism.

tired: standardized testing is on the chopping block because it has disparate impact against blacks and hispanics

wired: standardized testing is unpopular because the white upper class is losing out to Asians, but they can't say this so they use discrimination against blacks as an excuse.

inspired: standardized testing is unpopular because the head girl types who now control our politics are still mad about the class male nerd who blew off all his homework but still beat her on the tests.

expired: the majority being jealous of smart people is just the world historical normal that we are reverting back to, the era of promoting people based on objective academic achievement is the anomaly

wired: standardized testing is unpopular because the white upper class is losing out to Asians, but they can't say this so they use discrimination against blacks as an excuse.

i think it's this one. good insight

I happen to overall disagree with this assessment, though I can certainly understand how the world might be better if Issac Newton had given up on Biblical numerology and instead focused even more on math and physics.

This seems contradictory. On what grounds do you disagree with the assessment of your atheist acquaintances?

Even politically, I think much of the vitriol and energy is about how evil the opposing tribe is rather than any sense that one's own tribe has a chance of making things good.

...defeating evil is not considered good?

There's a big difference between "here are our solutions to the world's problems" and "$OTHER_TRIBE's solutions won't work and we oppose them!"

I don't follow. Both tribes will say both of those things.

Yeah, that's why I said $OTHER_TRIBE and not red tribe. OP was talking about how pessimistic the US seems to be getting and I'm backing him/her up. Being against the opposing tribe is much more pessimistic than being for your own proposals.

A lot of the focus of new Cyberchase seems like relatively uncontroversial stuff about how recycling is good

Sorry to zoom in on an inconsequential part of an otherwise solid effortpost.

But there's actually quite a bit of controversy about whether recycling is 'good.' On a basic level, there's a question as to whether, for certain types of materials, it is more energy-efficient to recycle vs. manufacture new. And the fact that many times materials put in recycling bins are just sent to the dump. It isn't clear that recycling is any more environmentally friendly than putting stuff in a landfill.

But this arguably gets towards exactly why teaching more neutral concepts about how to properly analyze data and identify flaws in it's presentation or reasoning is important!

If we just say "RECYCLING GOOD" (which I got a LOT OF messaging on growing up) and don't explain how to examine the information used to make that determination, we end up with things that people take for granted as obviously true simply because they have never seen it questioned and haven't thought to question it themselves.

Can you imagine a children's show doing an episode where they ultimately conclude that it isn't sensible to recycle plastics and it is in fact more environmentally friendly to send them to the dump? Even if the conclusion is correct it would just seem so dissonant. Maybe the Tuttle Twins would do it.

Very good post. I remembered watching Cyberchase as a kid but didn't remember it being so good... until you said that it was only the first 5 seasons or so. I had probably watched the later seasons (I remember an episode with the crux being reading the nutrition labels so the kids avoid drinking some harmful drink devised by Hacker, or something like that). How do I nominate a post for AAQC on this new site?

Report and say actually a quality contribution.

Square One was also quite good. It was kind of a math variety show with lots of parodies and homages. The main feature was mathnet a 5 part episode of a police procedural involving math crimes.

I wonder if math shows for kids are memorable because they're made by people who are good at verbal and math or because the topic is unexplored so the shows are bits of water in a desert for their fans.

Square One TV was my first exposure to Weird Al, police procedurals, and many, many math concepts. Whenever I remember that fractions are just division problems stacked vertically, I visualize the street scene from the skit I learned it from.

It was the dorkiest possible show in every respect, but I still love it. I need to data-hoard the rips before PBS takes them all down via copystrike.

I still think of that country song about 9s when I do multiplication and division using 9s, even though I already had my 9s memorized before I heard the song.

Right now, you all are probably sick to the back teeth of the discussion about Amazon's "Rings of Power", but I have to talk about this or I'll explode.

I haven't seen episode four yet, it's upcoming over here but it has aired in the US. I looked up some reviews (to see what is safe to skip if I watch this, because there's a lot of filler and not much plot in the episodes as yet) and I couldn't believe what the first one said, so I looked for a second one and yep, it's true.

The scriptwriters for episode four (apparently it's Stephany Folsom and J. D. Payne & Patrick McKay, yes our boys again) are introducing the reasons the Númenoreans don't like Elves. And - wait for it - it's because "they're going to take our jobs!". No, I swear, this is actually it.

Yes, ladies, gentlemen, and those of you who aren't too sure, a direct immigration reference. So I suppose I should take it that Pharazon is Donald Trump surfing to power on a wave of Númenorean populism which is racist and fascists, and Tar-Míriel is Hillary Clinton who is the true Queen from whom he usurps her power.

This episode, by the bye, is called "The Great Wave" because of the nightmare Tar-Míriel has about the great wave coming in to destroy Númenor, and by now it can't come fast enough for me. Excuse me while I run around screaming as though my hair is on fire, because I feel like it.

These - look, I don't want to be insulting about Mormons, but good Lord is it very, very hard to resist dropping one of the "m"s there - blond denizens of the Mountain West have not got one scrap of imagination above the banal. They cannot grapple with the deeper themes of death and immortality that Tolkien wrote into his work. Everything has to be something snatched from American political slogans. The Númenoreans don't envy and hate the Elves for the immortality they cannot have for themselves, it's because dey took er jerbs.

Let's go back to the source, shall we? From a very long and detailed letter of 1951:

The Downfall is partly the result of an inner weakness in Men – consequent, if you will, upon the first Fall (unrecorded in these tales), repented but not finally healed. Reward on earth is more dangerous for men than punishment! The Fall is achieved by the cunning of Sauron in exploiting this weakness. Its central theme is (inevitably, I think, in a story of Men) a Ban, or Prohibition.

The Númenóreans dwell within far sight of the easternmost 'immortal' land, Eressea; and as the only men to speak an Elvish tongue (learned in the days of their Alliance) they are in constant communication with their ancient friends and allies, either in the bliss of Eressea, or in the kingdom of Gilgalad on the shores of Middle-earth. They became thus in appearance, and even in powers of mind, hardly distinguishable from the Elves – but they remained mortal, even though rewarded by a triple, or more than a triple, span of years. Their reward is their undoing – or the means of their temptation. Their long life aids their achievements in art and wisdom, but breeds a possessive attitude to these things, and desire awakes for more time for their enjoyment. Foreseeing this in part, the gods laid a Ban on the Númenóreans from the beginning: they must never sail to Eressëa, nor westward out of sight of their own land. In all other directions they could go as they would. They must not set foot on 'immortal' lands, and so become enamoured of an immortality (within the world), which was against their law, the special doom or gift of Ilúvatar (God), and which their nature could not in fact endure.

There are three phases in their fall from grace. First acquiescence, obedience that is free and willing, though without complete understanding. Then for long they obey unwillingly, murmuring more and more openly. Finally they rebel – and a rift appears between the King's men and rebels, and the small minority of persecuted Faithful.

...In the second stage, the days of Pride and Glory and grudging of the Ban, they begin to seek wealth rather than bliss. The desire to escape death produced a cult of the dead, and they lavished wealth and art on tombs and memorials. They now made settlements on the west-shores, but these became rather strongholds and 'factories' of lords seeking wealth, and the Númenóreans became tax-gatherers carrying off over the sea ever more and more goods in their great ships. The Númenóreans began the forging of arms and engines.

From a letter of 1956:

The real theme for me is about something much more permanent and difficult: Death and Immortality: the mystery of the love of the world in the hearts of a race 'doomed' to leave and seemingly lose it; the anguish in the hearts of a race 'doomed' not to leave it, until its whole evil-aroused story is complete.

I don't know if swearing is allowed in our new realm of liberty and justice for all, but how the fuck do you, self-proclaimed huge Tolkien fans, read the above and come away with "Got it, the rebellion in Númenor was all about demagogues stoking fear of immigrant labour taking native jobs"????

These - look, I don't want to be insulting about Mormons, but good Lord is it very, very hard to resist dropping one of the "m"s there - blond denizens of the Mountain West have not got one scrap of imagination above the banal.

...yeah, I'm going to have to second @RaiderOfALostTusken here. There are many things Mormons can be accused of, but having no sci-fi/fantasy chops just isn't one of them. Orson Scott Card is one of the sci-fi greats; Brandon Sanderson is one of the most successful and imaginative fantasy writers around. Twilight has a bad reputation, but I'll cop to thoroughly enjoying Stephanie Meyer's The Host. I've never paid much attention to Battlestar Galactica, but it seems close to the core of space-faring sci-fi classics. The list of successful, popular LDS sci-fi/fantasy writers drags on: Tracy Hickman, Shannon Hale, Brandon Mull, James Dashner, so forth. None of these rely on tired American political slogans to define their work.

I have no interest in or particular knowledge of Rings of Power, but I see very little to suggest Mormonism is the cause of its triteness. You'll have to look elsewhere for that.

In The Expanse, the mormons are the ones to fund and launch a generation ship.

Wasn't Sandy Petersen, designer for Doom 2 and Quake, also a Mormon?

Yes, he is. Also the designer of the original Call of Cthulhu RPG.

Ooops, Brandon Sanderson is one of the writers I dislike, because of his style. It's very - functional prose, I suppose is the best way I can describe it. Same with Orson Scott Card, whose work I was never able to get into - to this day, I haven't read "Ender's Game", though I have read some other things by him.

Sanderson's problem, for me, or if you prefer the problem I have with his writing, is the "baseball stats" problem. So much work going into creating the magic system down to the last decimal point, and then once that is done, the writing doesn't rise above it.

I haven't read "Twilight" or anything of that series, nor seen the movies, but I did enjoy the suggestion that the Italian vampires are meant to be the Catholic Church or that Meyer is writing a Mormon version of vampirism in distinction to the previously Catholicism-influenced version.

As for the other writers you cite, I haven't heard of them.

To be more serious, I do think that fundamentally, Tolkien did have Catholic understanding of the world he created, and that as Mormons Payne and McKay do not share this or understand it, so they can't 'translate' the work. They can take the surface elements, but so far I think they're going on the movie versions (so we get Elrond and Dain as copies of Legolas and Gimli, complete with excruciating 'banter'), and where the movies can't cover them (as with 'why are Númenoreans pissed off with Elves?') going for the weaker, secular, political understanding - and of course, being Americans, they go with the American political situation.

I wonder if there isn't a vault full of scripts somewhere entitled things like "High Fantasy Series #3" or "Sci-Fi Series #91" that are wheeled out whenever a big studio acquires the rights to a famous name, and the plot and characters of that script are retroactively wrangled to fit that script. It would explain whatever paramount did their rendition of Halo, in which the Arbiter is not an alien prophet but instead John Halo's human love interest and a heaping of necessary space politics so vast it puts the Phantom Menace to shame.

That's what happened with Starship Troopers. They had a generic sci Fi action script that nobody wanted to make so they bought the rights to the book and changed a few details to match.

All I wanted from that was 90 minutes of hot actors shooting bugs while high tempo grunge played on, and I got an insane satire of a book I later found I really liked.

I would like to actually read this vault of stories, or at least the summaries. Kinda wish it actually existed.

Definitely happens in one off scenarios. District 9 was originally gonna be a halo movie. The giant robot spider in wild wild west has an amusing story behind it of one of the director types being desperate for a giant spider in his next movie (it was originally gonna be a super hero movie I think). Kevin James tells the story on a panel at a con.

The giant mechanical spider in Wild Wild West was a calling card of producer Jon Peters, and was called to appear in not one, but two comic book adaptations that fell through. The first was the mythical "Superman Lives" which was set to star Nicholas Cage as Superman and Christopher Walken as Brainiac, culminating in Superman fighting a giant spider. That was in the early 90s. Then in the early 2000s, he attempted to produce a legendarily bad adaptation of The Sandman, that collapsed when Neil Gaiman leaked the proposed script online and it was ridiculed into oblivion.

The first was the mythical "Superman Lives" which was set to star Nicholas Cage as Superman and Christopher Walken as Brainiac, culminating in Superman fighting a giant spider.

That we didn't get that is an absolute crime, I say.

No lie, I'd watch Christopher Walken as Brainiac, but Cage as Superman? I can't believe that man ever saw so much as a lawn, let alone that he was raised as a farmer's son in Nowheresville. He's pure Big City. Now, as a gender-swapped Lois Lane, that I could believe.

Cage was well cast in The Family Man for just that reason, IMO.

It does make one think, doesn't it?

I'm leaning towards "in the absence of a visionary, Sturgeon's law takes over." The big-budget default isn't carefully adapting themes and stylistic choices; it's regurgitating a bunch of stuff the writers once saw on TV, then filtering the resulting slurry through some focus groups.

I saw the idea floated, possibly here, that they had just repackaged work done on a Dragon Age series.

Ok I have no knowledge of this show, but you mentioned my people - are these people members? They don't have wikipedia pages. If they're putting woke stuff in shows, it may be possible that like many a show-biz member, they've fully been subsumed into the successor ideology and calling them "mormon" is a stretch.

I only quibble (just a bit!), because my tradition has produced the Battlestar Galactica guy, Orson Scott Card, Brandon Sanderson (is he good? Feels like people like him). I'll admit to having little knowledge of fantasy or sci fi literature but at least my impression was that we typically punched decently well above our weight class, perhaps not so

If they're putting woke stuff in shows, it may be possible that like many a show-biz member, they've fully been subsumed into the successor ideology and calling them "mormon" is a stretch.

It seems far more likely to me that their personal beliefs had little to do with it and they wrote in whatever Amazon's audience analysis told them they needed to.

I think you're right except it was more likely an analysis of Amazon's executives than their audience.

I'm trying very hard to avoid religious controversy here, but there has been an amount of publicity around Payne and McKay as Mormons. I read one article about Payne, and Googling brings this one up about Payne and his wife, in what looks like an official Mormon website.

There's nothing about McKay, so he is either lapsed or isn't a Mormon.

Their writing so far for the show has been pedestrian, and when they try to go profound and meaningful, or copy what they think is Tolkien's high style, it comes out like a lead balloon. The difference between stones and ships? Fermenting wine? Dogs and the moon?

It's tushery, as in this extract from a letter of Tolkien; they're trying to copy, without really understanding, a particular style:

The proper use of 'tushery' is to apply it to the kind of bogus 'medieval' stuff which attempts (without knowledge) to give a supposed temporal colour with expletives, such as tush, pish, zounds, marry, and the like. But a real archaic English is far more terse than modern; also many of things said could not be said in our slack and often frivolous idiom.

...I am sorry to find you affected by the extraordinary 20th.C. delusion that its usages per se and simply as 'contemporary' – irrespective of whether they are terser, more vivid (or even nobler!) – have some peculiar validity, above those of all other times, so that not to use them (even when quite unsuitable in tone) is a solecism, a gaffe, a thing at which one's friends shudder or feel hot in the collar. Shake yourself out of this parochialism of time! Also (not to be too donnish) learn to discriminate between the bogus and genuine antique – as you would if you hoped not to be cheated by a dealer!

Twilight author is Mormon too.

Damn it.

This is making me feel guilt for defending the show as apolitical tripe instead of political tripe.

Well, you couldn't have known they were going to pull this. Nobody could have known. I was wondering how they were going to introduce the King's Men and Pharazon, and I never expected this level of nonsense.

Pharazon, via his mouthpiece, is stirring up the populace to hate and fear the Elves - because the Elves are going to undercut their wages and replace them in not alone skilled but semi-skilled work. The Elves are not going to come in as their lords and masters (which at least would make some sort of sense as an accusation, given the entitled, patronising and bitchy attitude Galadriel has shown so far, making demands and throwing around orders and threats to the queen herself), they are going to come in as smiths and cooks and house servants. Your son won't be able to get a job swabbing the decks because an Elf will be doing it! Your daughter can't apprentice as a pastry-chef because an Elf will get there first!

What in the unfathomable depths of Utumno is this meant to be????? Are Payne and McKay really high-fiving each other about what a brilliant, subtle, Aaron Sorkin-style political commentary script they wrote?

Well, you couldn't have known they were going to pull this. Nobody could have known.

I dunno, man. I can think of a lot of people who knew Rings of Power was going to be trash and said so quite clearly.

Wow, even Brannon Braga was able to make this dynamic mostly work in Star Trek Enterprise between the humans and Vulcans (though proceeding on the opposite narrative arc ). Where are they finding these writers?

Do not mention the abhorred name of Braga to these ears. I hated what they did with the Vulcans in "Enterprise". Sucks to be me, because I never seem to sufficiently lower my expectations. I thought they couldn't go worse than "Enterprise" , and then they gave me Disco.

I thought this was going to be dumb, but basic dumb. Not this kind of "this is so dumb, it reduced my IQ by 50 points because this is like saying sheep are carnivores and strychnine is a healthy diet drink".

I love the idea of thousandyear old elves doing menial manual labor for low wages for the purpose of...sending the wages back to Valinor??

It makes absolutely no effin' sense at all. This rabble-rouser (who the show sets up is probably in cahoots with Pharazon to push a populist agenda and oust the Queen, and honestly that's about the most subtle and developed the show gets in how it does it - just shows Pharazon and Rabble-rouser exchanging Significant Glances after Pharazon takes the opportunity to come in and calm things down with a 'reassuring' speech about "Númenor belongs only to Men and we'll keep it that way", then calls for drinks all round and servants with trays of drinks come out and hand around glasses of wine to everyone, so clearly this was all set up in advance) was one of the blacksmiths' guild who got into a punch-up with Halbrand (currently languishing in jail) because Halbrand wanted to starting smithing something, was told he couldn't get into a forge without the guild badge, and stole the badge from Rabble-rouser, hence the punch-up.

So it would make more sense for Rabble-rouser to try and stir up the people of Armenelos about "bringing in Men from Middle-earth to replace us skilled workers" and recount the story of how Halbrand tried to set up as a smith and stole the guild badge, but no. The showrunners (and since they co-wrote the script, if not the greater part of it, I am laying the blame squarely on Payne and McKay) remembered the bit about the King's Men falling out with the Elves, but couldn't work out how to simply transcribe what Tolkien wrote. So they take something out of 2016 presidential election (and maybe, with all the Democrat speechifying still obsessing over Trump, what is current) and give us "Pharazon is setting himself up as head of a populist movement which is racist fascist anti-immigrant just like Donald Trump and MAGA".

Somebody in a comment on Youtube said they expected Pharazon to wear a red hat next, and that is what made me notice that in Pharazon's speech about "Númenor for Númenoreans", he is wearing a red cloak around his blue robes. Subtle!

It is So. Goddamn. Stupid. I'm not quite at the point of clawing at my face, but it's a near thing. As you say - why the hell are Elves going to come in and do this kind of "dey took er jerbs" work? If they want, they can trade with Númenor for high-quality products. If the Elves want, they can push on and colonise all of Middle-earth, because the Men still remaining there are in no position to resist them. There is no reason for them to try and migrate to Númenor to take over as cheap labour.

It's like the only thing the showrunners can understand is "King's Men = populist movement, populist movement = MAGA". I don't know if it's Hollywood Liberal brain rot or what, but it is NOT TOLKIEN.

The Númenoreans were long-lived, prosperous, and as time went by, they wanted to live longer and longer to enjoy their fortunate lives. They saw that Elves were immortal, and gradually they envied them, and fell out of friendship with them, and turned in on themselves and starting tyrannising the lesser Men of Middle-earth, setting up a mini-empire there. Their greatest point of power and achievement was also the point of greatest decadence, and they were seduced and betrayed by Sauron due to their pride, envy, and arrogance.

They did not try to invade Valinor because they were afraid of hordes of tireless, unsleeping Elves who could work day and night manufacturing products to undercut Númenorean wages.

Stupid, stupid, stupid. This is replacing mithril with cheap chrome plate that peels off in no time, the way they are replacing the themes Tolkien set out with their own themes. Bezos got taken for a ride with this production and while I don't regret him getting bilked out of a fortune, I do bitterly regret what they are doing to the work.

They managed to confuse Tolkien's Elves with Santa's Elves.

So not alone will they take the Númenorean jobs, they will then go on to do the most evil of all evil actions....

UNIONISE!!!!! 🤣

They don't come away with that, they're wearing Tolkien as a skinsuit prancing around demanding respect.

It was killed and gut long before this.

blond denizens of the Mountain West have not got one scrap of imagination above the banal.

But boy do they make good FBI agents.

I suppose the only thing I can say is that of course they are pets and protegés of J.J. Abrams, who got them the job. Of course they are. Is there nothing J.J. cannot tarnish with his reverse Midas touch?

I managed to make it to the troll fight the first time I tried watching it which made me cringe so hard I turned it off. I gave it another go and got a few episodes in, but sits firmly in the 'wavers from making me cringe to making me bored' territory.

I think part of the disappointment with Rings of Power is... well, take me. I read Lord of the Rings, which is a fantastic series of books. I actually read it when staying on a friend's property, so far out in the bush they only ran the generator for part of the day. I had a lantern in a bedroom I lit with a match and I read the Lord of the Rings by the light of that lantern, staying up later than I had before in my eight years of life to devour these novels. Absolutely enthralling stuff, and just a really good series of books. I reread them at twenty, and then at thirty-one. They're still great.

Then I watched the movies, which were by no means perfect adaptions but were just amazing movies. The sorts that you look back on and quote and talk about again and again. They hold up to the test of time well (crazy that Fellowship is now over twenty years old!), and even if you weren't a Lord of the Rings fan, the movies were just superb. At eleven I complained about them because they didn't seem to emphasise what the books did, but I think as a production designed to capture the magic of the books and make an entertaining spectacle to watch on-screen they hit the mark as well as was actually possible.

The Rings of Powers just aren't very good. Part of the problem with grand, sweeping declarations and weird philosophy and so on is that there's not a huge amount of middle ground. If these things aren't good, they're cringe. Mediocre fantasy is just cringe fantasy. You can have mediocre comedy where the occasional good joke saves the boring ones, mediocre action films where the gunfights save the awful dialogue, but mediocre fantasy is in the same unfortunately realm as mediocre sci-fi. You're not just trying to sell a story, you're trying to sell a world, and if you can't do that the story falls apart. If you fuck it up enough the whole world falls apart and you're done. It's weird and stupid and feels like someone's 16-year old fanfic. It's cringe.

Conversely, if my friends drag me out to see the latest Marvelman movie, the premise is I'm here to see some explosions, some witty one-liners, some scenes that just look amazing on the big screen, and if I happen to miss or just not care about what's actually happening I'm not going to be too disadvantaged. You can fuck those up some, deliver a mediocre product and it's still fine. It's not great, but eh. It's not particularly good, but I can chew on my popcorn, see the explosions and the punches, snooze through the exposition and still have a fine dinner afterwards where I mention how cool the fire god fighting the evil prison lady was at the end.

It's not great, but I don't feel the need to cringe away from it. Rings of Power (and Wheel of Time as a side note) is cringe. The 'rock or boat', the troll fight, the 'tek our jerbs' moments, it's just a bad TV show. Sure, it does the standard 'wheel out the five most racist trolls, imply these are representative of the entire criticism of the show and then suppress any thoughts that you might be making a hunk of crap with the sweet knowledge that only bigots hate you' move every sub-par show does nowadays, but this is just people who can't make a good show shoehorning their politics in clumsily which annoys people, but people always want to put their worldview in their creations. It's just these people are making bad television to begun with, so why would you expect them to be good at adding in politics subtly?

I don't doubt the showrunners/writers/etc are huge Tolkien fans. Nothing about the Rings of Powers says 'we hate Tolkien and want to make him spin in his grave', it just says 'we're not very good at making television and so we keep fucking it up and creating cringeworthy moment after cringeworthy moment'.

I mean, look at the difference between what is in original Tolkien is giving us and what the showrunners are doing:

Tolkien: There is no God, that is only a fiction by the greedy Lords of the West. We, the Men of Númenor, are so great, so powerful, and so daring that we deserve immortality. Come, let us set sail to seize by the might of our arms the lands of ambrosia and eternal bliss, and pull down those false godlings so that we may take our rightful place as the true gods of Man!

Showrunners: They're taking our jobs!

Just saw it, and I was covering my head in embarassment.

The worst thing is that every "normie" aound me is acclaiming this episode as "the best"

Unreal, am I living in a different world?

I don't watch the show but I saw a scene from this episode posted:

https://twitter.com/ZeroTwoMexicana/status/1570873687603281924

This is embarrassingly bad on every level.

The dialogue is horrible from a writing perspective, besides sounding unnatural. "Elf-lover" is the best they could come up with? It's not even a proper slur.

Acting is stupidly wooden, nobody seems actually engaged in this scene, not even the extras. The crowd starts chanting inexplicably but without an ounce of actual enthusiasm.

I have to assume this was a brief establishing scene that they crammed in there to make it clear who the bad guys are.

The set and costumes even seem like a fucking afterthought. These are tradesmen... all wearing spotless clothes without a single streak of dirt, grime, or paint to be seen?

And of course, WHO THE FUCK WATCHES HIGH FANTASY WANTING HAM-HANDED PLOTS ABOUT IMMIGRATION? Or is it about automation? Workers that don't tire, don't sleep, and don't age? The only real-world parallel to that is robots.

I think, I honestly do think, the "Elf-lover" chant is meant to evoke both the slur of "n-word lover" and "Lock Her Up".

I have no idea if Payne and McKay (whom from now on out I will refer to as The Ormons) decided on this all on their very ownsome, or if Bezos is meddling from on high asking for particular themes.

They may as well have a scene of a march for "Harris 2024" while they're at it. Indeed, I wonder if The Ormons have cast a black woman as Tar-Míriel for that very reason - ooh, what Strong Woman should we vote for as First Female Ever, can anyone give us a clue? I didn't think before that there was any political reason behind her casting, but I'm starting to think that now.

Is it really, really, really so hard to write Númenor as rich, powerful, gifted - and decadent? That it enters into the battle against Sauron for its own interests and not out of any alliance with the Men and Elves of Middle-earth? Or do The Ormons think of Númenor and their own Hollywood bubble as one and the same - the pinnacle of human achievement and creativity, so they can't be the bad guys in any way at all, and so the baddies come from outside, the redneck flyover states?

I don't want to start reading politics into this show. But it's getting harder and harder to assume good faith on their part.

FWIW I think "elf-lover" is more evocative of "jew-lover".

Fully repurposable slur. Insert your oppressed minority of choice in place of "elf".

It's the best of the four, because (1) no Harfoots (2) something actually happens for once and (3) the visual effects of Tar-Míriel's dream really are impressive.

The Adar character might even be faintly intriguing. I had a wild thought that it might be Maeglin, who in canon has been killed, but this lot have already shown they don't care for canon. But I don't trust these bozos to be able to do anything right, so I think they'll just waste the opportunity.

So by comparison with the other episodes, it's the best. That doesn't mean much, just that it's fresh garbage instead of week-old garbage.

Are Mormons bad at scriptwriting, or just good at conscientiously following a script? Who makes decisions about the particulars of the ideological slant, really? Ultimately the power over the show lies with Amazon Prime execs I guess.

Can we talk about Sandman instead? Anyone watching that?

Or how about Cobra Kai? Though that one I admit is a bit dimwitted and downscale.

only watched a couple episodes of cobra kai season 5, but its seems to have continued the trend of going totally off the rails. there are plenty of crappy teen high school drama shows, it was much better when it focused on johnny, miguel, and robby.

Haven't started season 5 but I've mostly enjoyed the rest minus season 2. Johnny and Daniel are both surprisingly positive portrayals of men that you don't see much of these days so I give it a lot of credit for that.

Yea. Everything is such an ensemble cast now. To tie this into politics, sure there's more minority representation but no given minority feels particularly represented. Everyone's getting drowned out by too many egos in the pot.

I thought Sandman was good, but a lot of the style has been pretty inevitably lost since there are not rotating artists like in the comics. I don't think the series truly starts transcending until things get nuts in the second half of the comics series, but they certainly pulled off the Corinthian climax and entire convention very well.

For the culture war adjacent points, I thought recasting of race and gender was a mixed bag. Death was fine; she was a 90s goth girl in the 90s, but the show is no longer in the 90s. Lucifer... I am not sure I really buy and will have to see if they pull off in later seasons; Lucifer in the show Lucifer (initially, heavily inspired by Sandman) was very well done, imo. I don't love that actress from Orange is the New Black in general, so I don't like that casting but don't think it was badly miscast. Overall, however, I would say that all Dream denizens (Cain, Abel, Matthew, etc.) lacked personality and depth.

Cobra Kai is fun, not brainless, and sincere, and moreover it has competent storytelling and characterisation, which is an absolute breath of fresh air by the standards of a lot of current "rebooted" franchises.

Sandman was about as good as a TV adaptation could be, race-casting notwithstanding.

I enjoyed Cobra Kai at first for its unabashed 80s cheese, but after five seasons the cheese is starting to stink.

Cobra Kai fine but it said 95% of what it needed to say in the first season.

The scriptwriters for episode four (apparently it's Stephany Folsom and J. D. Payne & Patrick McKay, yes our boys again) are introducing the reasons the Númenoreans don't like Elves. And - wait for it - it's because "they're going to take our jobs!". No, I swear, this is actually it.

I just watched it and had a different reading. That line about jobs was one part of the speech, but the broader polemic was much more racialized. The Númenoreans are depicted as racially jealous of the Elves, and this jealously has inspired disloyalty to and suspicion the elves. Furthermore it is heavily foreshadowed that disloyalty to the elves is displeasing to the gods (Valar) and is going to lead to the downfall of the Númenoreans.

I don't think you're giving the writers enough credit, they are smarter than you think. The general theme seems to be anti-racist, but anti-racist in a way that is fairly close to Tolkein's interpretation of his work as you described it. That theme is "racial jealously leads to non-cooperation with more gifted races, which leads to the downfall of the ethnocentric empire." That could be read in multiple ways.

Númenór is Hellenized in the show. Its downfall could harken to the downfall of Old Europe, which was destroyed in Tolkein's day because of its suspicion of the "gifted people" as Tolkein called them. It could also be a warning against anti-racism itself, for drumming up struggle against those more gifted in a way that's self-destructive. In any case, the messaging is more esoteric than criticisms of rote populism.

The general theme seems to be anti-racist

No, it's the Hollywood Liberal Woke Oscars notion of anti-racist. EDIT: I will give them this, they had a nicely multi-cultural all skin tones Númenorean crowd chanting a racist epithet. Progress!

Of course the Númenoreans are jealous of the Elves, that's part of the story. But a line about "The Elves are coming to take our trades"? Elf workers who don't age, sleep or tire? That's a dumb line to include, even if it's all a set-up to let Pharazon slide in with his "Númenor for Númenoreans" speech.

If Taemar (that seems to be the guy's name) is going to rile the crowd up over 'coming over here for our jobs', then he's got Halbrand as his A1 example: a Southlander, a Low Man (and did they swipe that out of Stephen King?) who is right now in jail for stealing Taemar's guild badge in an effort to get into a forge so he could do smithcraft. If he wants to rile them up about the Elves, he's got Galadriel and her "everyone jump when I say so" attitude. The Elves coming over to influence the Queen-Regent, acting as though they are the natural lords and masters of Númenor (and Galadriel didn't help when she said that line in the court about how the Númenoreans owe their island to the Elves) and persuading her to import cheap labour from the Men of Middle-earth - yeah, you could do that.

But Elves as cheap labour replacing the honest working men and women of Númenor? That's not anything at all in Tolkien, and it's not anti-racist in the sense you want it to mean, since Galadriel and every other Elf is white (except Arondir, and he's got white guys being racist to him back at home so that's covered). The writers aren't smart, this is just "hur hur see what we did there, this is MAGA country". Even favourable reviews think the dialogue is clunky.

Tolkein's interpretation of his work as you described it. That theme is "racial jealousy leads to non-cooperation with more gifted races, which leads to the downfall of the ethnocentric empire."

No, Tolkien's theme as he explicitly stated it was:

But they 'fell' again – because of a Ban or prohibition, inevitably. They were forbidden to sail west beyond their own land because they were not allowed to be or try to be 'immortal'; and in this myth the Blessed Realm is represented as still having an actual physical existence as a region of the real world, one which they could have reached by ship, being very great mariners. While obedient, people from the Blessed Realm often visited them, and so their knowledge and arts reached almost an Elvish height.

But the proximity of the Blessed Realm, the very length of their life-span given as a reward, and the increasing delight of life, made them begin to hanker after 'immortality'. They did not break the ban but they begrudged it. And forced east they turned from beneficence in their appearances on the coasts of Middle-earth, to pride, desire of power and wealth. So they came into conflict with Sauron, the lieutenant of the Prime Dark Lord, who had fallen back into evil and was claiming both kingship and godship over Men of Middle-earth. It was on the kingship question that Ar-pharazôn the 13th and mightiest King of Númenor challenged him primarily. His armada that took haven at Umbar was so great, and the Númenóreans at their height so terrible and resplendent, that Sauron's servants deserted him.

So Sauron had recourse to guile. He submitted, and was carried off to Númenor as a prisoner-hostage. But he was of course a 'divine' person (in the terms of this mythology; a lesser member of the race of Valar) and thus far too powerful to be controlled in this way. He steadily got Arpharazôn's mind under his own control, and in the event corrupted many of the Númenóreans, destroyed the conception of Eru, now represented as a mere figment of the Valar or Lords of the West (a fictitious sanction to which they appealed if anyone questioned their rulings), and substituted a Satanist religion with a large temple, the worship of the dispossessed eldest of the Valar (the rebellious Dark Lord of the First Age). He finally induces Arpharazôn, frightened by the approach of old age, to make the greatest of all armadas, and go up with war against the Blessed Realm itself, and wrest it and its 'immortality' into his own hands.

The Valar had no real answer to this monstrous rebellion — for the Children of God were not under their ultimate jurisdiction: they were not allowed to destroy them, or coerce them with any 'divine' display of the powers they held over the physical world. They appealed to God; and a catastrophic 'change of plan' occurred. At the moment that Arpharazôn set foot on the forbidden shore, a rift appeared: Númenor foundered and was utterly overwhelmed; the armada was swallowed up; and the Blessed Realm removed for ever from the circles of the physical world. Thereafter one could sail right round the world and never find it.

This is not anything as simple as "racial jealousy" and not having learned to play nicely together, this is an attempt to change by force the very nature of Mankind which they cannot do, since it is impossible, but the pride and arrogance of Númenor is now so great, and the minds of its people so corrupted by Sauron, that they think they can seize the land of the gods and become gods themselves.

Kadô Zigûrun zabathân unakkha

Êruhînim dubdam ugru-dalad

Ar-Pharazônun azaggara Avalôiyada

Bârim an-Adûn yurahtam dâira sâibêth-mâ Êruvô

azrîya du-phursâ akhâsada...

Anadûnê zîrân hikallaba...

Bawîba dulgî...

balîk hazad an-Nimruzîr azûlada

Agannâlô burôda nênud ...

zâira nênud

adûn izindi batân tâidô ayadda: îdô kâtha batîna lôkhî

Êphalak îdôn Yôzâyan

Êphal êphalak îdôn hi-Akallabêth

The writers aren't smart, this is just "hur hur see what we did there, this is MAGA country".

...

He steadily got Arpharazôn's mind under his own control, and in the event corrupted many of the Númenóreans, destroyed the conception of Eru, now represented as a mere figment of the Valar or Lords of the West (a fictitious sanction to which they appealed if anyone questioned their rulings), and substituted a Satanist religion with a large temple, the worship of the dispossessed eldest of the Valar (the rebellious Dark Lord of the First Age). He finally induces Arpharazôn, frightened by the approach of old age, to make the greatest of all armadas, and go up with war against the Blessed Realm itself, and wrest it and its 'immortality' into his own hands.

Does this mean that Sauron will be Steve Bannon?

This is probably too "boo outgroup", but given the direct relation I felt it was probably worth sharing.

Our once and former (?) moderator TracingWoodgrains has been called out as "a sociopathic troll" who exists to create anti-transgender drama. This is according to transgendermap.com, a pro-trans website which has built a list of communities toxic to the transgender movement.

The focus on Trace comes from their look at Blocked and Reported, and includes a list of ideologically affiliated subreddits, including:

“Rationalist”/libertarian:

CultureWarRoundUp

theschism

TheMotte

slatestarcodex

It seems that the move came at the right time, since if we weren't particularly noticeable before, we likely are now.

Yeah, so that's neat.

It's hard to be frank on this topic without sounding conspiratorial. The reality is that there is a small but obsessive cadre of 'activists', mostly a distinct subset of Extremely Online trans women, who hate my bosses with every fiber of their being. I knew that coming into the B&R job, of course. It was priced in, and the question was not "will they hate me once they notice me?" but "when will they notice me?".

The answer seems to be approximately when the podcast decided to cover the recent Keffals/Kiwifarms kerfuffle with care and in detail rather than jumping on the "Kiwifarms must go" train (link). They don't care at all about me qua me. I'm a nobody still, some random with a tiny platform who mostly just bloviates on obscure forums. But they do care about my bosses, very much, and in the recent scuffle it seems they've finally identified me as another angle of attack.

This can mostly be attributed to everyone's favorite AgainstHateSubreddits moderator, who has a personal and longstanding feud with rdrama. She spammed Jesse's replies and her own Twitter account with six-degrees-of-Kevin-Bacon links between rdrama and Kiwifarms, using my prank as an excuse to link Jesse to Kiwifarms to try to discredit his reporting. See: Exhibit A and Exhibit B as the most relevant—per her, I carried out "fascist terrorism" in league with Kiwifarms and Libs of TikTok, working with them to terrorize trans people and push teachers out of their jobs. This is now Established Fact on a certain corner of the internet. One obsessive in particular who has a long history of spreading particularly unhinged malicious rumors about my bosses (eg baselessly accusing Jesse of assaulting trans women) has tried to amplify it further (see here), having cracked the code that I am a "right wing monster" who is "laughing at the thought of his contributions to queer people and school teachers facing armed violence", indicated in part by my dogwhistling username reference to Known Bigot Orson Scott Card.

Any amount of engagement with this set encourages them, of course. Responding to out-of-the-blue false accusations from people I've never met gets morphed into "screenshotting the posts of trans people who have them blocked to try and rile mobs up" (see here) and becomes more evidence that I am a "creep" connected to a "dangerous stalker".

Andrea James is part and parcel with this group, and has a long history of genuinely unhinged harassment in this domain. She was discussed in Alice Dreger's Galileo's Middle Finger (1, 2, 3): in 1998, for recommending Blanchard's book and commenting on her own autogynephilia; in 2003, for posting images of J. Michael Bailey's children with lewd captions parodying his book, and later in her own interactions when James referred to her kids as her "precious womb turds", among other things. My bosses have been stalked by her for a while on this front—see here.

Inasmuch as I have an official statement on the matter, it can be found on my Twitter over here. I knew this sort of thing was inevitable, and while it's definitely an irritation, it's just chatter from people who were going to hate me no matter what I did, looking to wield me to undermine reporting they'd rather my bosses not do. Quite frankly, in the circles I travel in and care to travel in, having that sort of enemy is more likely to help than it is to hurt. In candor, it felt much worse to be called a Weapon Of The Cathedral in league with Taylor Lorenz by people I'd been chatting with on good terms for years (eg here). This, in contrast, is just Business As Usual. It's frankly not even worth correcting the explicit factual errors on the page, since nobody who is likely to like or respect me in any capacity is particularly likely to trust James, Oaken, or the rest. I'll just take note and move on.

My only disappointment is that she didn't commission a caricature of my character like she did for my bosses (here).

I worried the move here was premature, but am surprised by how much a breath of fresh air it is being able to read a comment which can just speak plainly and link plainly.

No "[ Removed by Reddit ]" like Exhibit B causes, no codewords for kiwifarms, or cryptic hints followed by a cryptic reply seeking some cryptic clarification, the comment even links rdrama (directly!) for book excerpts. And no wondering about whether it'll get your account banned.

I found the railway wording funny, but that's just me.

A rich new culture of Soviet humor and Straussian reading of comments could have developed. Homophone slang rising above automoderation, perhaps culminating later with rhyming slang.

Alas it was uprooted before having the chance to blossom.

I was extremely salty at you for the LoTT thing, I can barely stand Jesse Singal, none of what is happening is surprising, and you seem to be taking it well... and somehow I find all of this very sad. If this is what you get for being associated with Jesse Singal and Katie Herzog, is there even a chance for any form of sanity being restored?

Well, yes. I think so.

If you look at the specific people who do this sort of thing, they tend to be older loners with few close friends on- or offline who spend much of their time shouting mostly into the void on social media. Inasmuch as they have influence, it's usually mediated via a few more predictable figures who amplify everything that might advance their causes, or overly credulous/careless institutions that don't look closely at people who ostensibly align with causes they want to be seen supporting. It's real influence, mind. There are spheres where people will absolutely trust their word over mine. The broader leftist culture they take advantage of is dominant on social media and in several influential domains.

But the other thing I get for being associated with them is a general circle of Sanity around me, with people who have more reach and influence than any of those watching, already very familiar with this song and dance. If I examine the set of people who share and believe that sort of thing, they're all people with politics far from mine in domains far from mine who would have no interest in what I have to say in the best of circumstances. I'd rather they not take notice of me, but they just don't have enough proximity to me to really matter, y'know?

I'm not interested in being defined by a struggle with a few fringe lunatics, but to be blunt, I'm confident in my odds in an Optics Battle in the eye of the broader popcorn gallery if it ever comes to something like that. They're the sort of people even their allies tend to tolerate at best, and you can only cry wolf so many times before most people start tuning you out. Like—Jesse can still have pitches accepted at the New York Times. Blocked & Reported can cover things in peace most of the time, with only occasional storms when people bother to notice. Materially, it's unlikely that these guys could close doors to me without raising my profile enough to open more and better doors. They're annoying, but at least in my position, that's about all they are.

This is the very last place I thought I'd hear about Jake Alley aka SecretGamerGrrl after the death of Kiwifarms. My condolences. I would link to KF to explain for those not in the know, but there's really not that much. Jake has the distinction of being one of the few non-retarded cows with fewer skills and accomplishments than Chris-chan, the high point of his life being involved with gamergate's CON. He is now blocked by most of his former associates in anti-gamergate/trans twitter, but that hasn't stopped him from vaguetweeting about them for years after the fact. He maintains that he is both undoxed (not true) and that he has had to move due to threats of neonazi violence at his home multiple times (impossible unless the first claim is false).

SGG's bete noire is Jesse. If Jesse were to die tonight, heaven forbid, SGG wouldn't know what to do with their life.

You should clarify that your bosses are Jesse Singal and Katie Herzog. I finally figured that out but only after reading your entire post and following several links.

Since the article linked in the OP mentions it, I figured emphasizing it more would be redundant.

dogwhistling username reference to Known Bigot Orson Scott Card

What's the reference?

Ugh, this is one of the things that most alienates me from many transgender activist communities. It's pure BPD black-and-white thinking. Anyone who isn't a perfect ally is a sworn enemy. This also contributes to the movement eating its own (e.g. the truscum controversy).

It's pure BPD black-and-white thinking.

Every now and again, someone in the gaming space goes complete insane. Maybe it's a "company" like Digital Homicide. And often times the gaming press lambasts their outlandish and deranged behavior, as is deserved. Especially once the lawsuits start getting flung around, and the unhinged threats begin.

But every so often, the press covers these events with sympathy. And proclaims that the person going off the rails, suing everyone, and telling people they will come to their house and murder them, actually needs sympathy. They never say so in the article, but 100% of the time this happens, that person is trans.

Nearly 100% of my exposure to trans individuals, is having direct or proximate exposure to people who are obviously mentally ill. I get the TRA talking point is that being trans is hard. And also that academic studies show no higher rates of mental illness in trans individuals than non. Because all the best talking points go "Feel sorry for me and also that's a lie." But from the outside looking in, I just see one more obvious mental illness, often on top of a stack of other mental illnesses.

It's entirely possible I'm wrong, and being trans truly was the root cause of all those people's mental illnesses. But my gut says SRS is going down in history a lot like lobotomies and shock therapy. A procedure that may have some limited utility in very extreme cases, that somehow against all science and reason became the first line of treatment for an overly broad range of mental problems.

I'm beginning to form an opinion that there are a minority of these people who aren't trans, not really, but they've got such a list of mental problems that there is no way they can fit into normal society and be functional, so they look for a group that they can fit into. And the trans movement is one such, especially with the very open welcoming stance around medical gate-keeping etc. that 'you're trans if you say you're trans, nothing more needed'.

So this gives them an avenue to explain what is going on: I'm not weird/crazy, I'm trans and I'm being persecuted! And they don't have to engage with changing their behaviour or facing up to the fact that no, you're got mental problems that need to be treated. They're trans and everything that goes wrong is because of cis scum and transphobes persecuting them, and that is why they are depressed and anxious and so forth. And now they have licence to make demands that would never be countenanced otherwise, and to claim the protection of being part of a persecuted minority.

I'm beginning to form an opinion that there are a minority of these people who aren't trans

That's charitable. I'm pretty sure they are the majority given how the numbers of people identifying as trans have exploded by orders of magnitude.

A lot of the people identifying as trans seem to be deluded teenaged girls with no mental issues beyond depression and anxiety(that is, a severe case of ‘being a teenaged girl’) that isn’t helped by meddling in their hormones.

I’ve said before that I genuinely don’t know if trans activists are the majority of trans people, and I stand beside my claim that I don’t think anybody knows.

I mean, I do think a lot of the people making demands are just nutballs looking for an identity to cry oppression, and that not recognizing nutballs as nutballs is a very bad thing. But I’d shy away from saying that’s the majority of trans people.

I might get exiled for this, but I don't believe anyone is "trans." Some people are genuinely delusional and deserving of pity while others mimic delusion to gain social power.

I think there's a lot of selection bias on both sides of this matter: if you aren't in Blue Tribe communities you're mostly going to see the highest-heat-over-light nutpicking show up, and conversely I don't think the Fez guy transitioned.

I won't pretend the Quilt Minecraft discord isn't full of drama, but it's no worse than Fabric or Forge. You don't have to be a little nuts for dedicated games development, but it helps, and once you've got a box full of off-kilter people, some of them are going to end up being unproductively nutty.

I feel like even trans people and activists today probably fucking hated Phil Fish back then too. He's just a hard guy to like.

It is simply pure Conflict Theory.

The transgender movement is, at heart, a radical leftist ideology, and so they work to identify enemies, isolate and smear them, promising to be tolerant, and then smashing them.

The transgender movement is, at heart, a radical leftist ideology, and so they work to identify enemies, isolate and smear them, promising to be tolerant, and then smashing them.

As you said.

Some other people might say that transgender movement is radical capitalist ideology financed by billionaires and big pharma that works to achive final frontier of commodification - turning even your own body into consumer product of choice.

https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/billionaire-family-pushing-synthetic-sex-identities-ssi-pritzkers

https://archive.ph/XH5v5

https://wikispooks.com/wiki/Pritzker_family

In capitalism, I can choose my food, my clothing, my place of dwelling, my job, my hobbies etc... why cannot I pick and select my gender identity?

YMMV.

edit: link fixed

You could even posit some offshoot of Marxism that applies Marx's conflict-heavy take on the economic drivers of society and applies it to the cultural ones; thus becoming completely orthogonal to the economic left-right compass.

There must be some pithy name for this; it's on the tip of my tongue.

I chuckled, but I'm going to defend Tru Marxism on this one.

Progressive movements often use non-economic-class analysis to shield themselves from criticism, but there is another class of arguments that is more neoliberalish: Anything goes between consenting adults, people have a right to the pursuit of happiness, and if someone wants to embark on a journey through the Garden of Earthly Delights all the way to the man-made horrors beyond your comprehension, who are you to stop them?

This is the logic of dating sites, OnlyFans, and, at least to some extent, trans issues as well. In my opinion it has a distinctly capitalist feel to it.

I know you're not directly claiming that the "transgender movement is [a] radical capitalist ideology financed by billionaires and big pharma" merely saying that "[s]ome other people might say" that, but I do want to reply to the archived Medium article you linked.

It questions whether a group that has support from billionaires can really be an oppressed, marginalized minority.

But it ignores that even during the 1960's civil rights movement, there were millionaires supporting certain figures in the movement like Martin Luther King Jr. (someone had to keep bailing him out of prison!) and Malcolm X even criticized this form of selling out in his Message to the Grassroots speech. Other posters may disagree, but I do think that black people during the 1960's civil rights era were a marginalized minority with legitimate grievances, and I don't think the fact that MLK Jr. was funded by white millionaires undermines his sincerity or authenticity, or paints him as a form of astroturfing.

Scott Alexander's libertarian defense of billionaires (here and here) is partially based on the fact that having a class of billionaires in society reduces the concentration of power in any one person or institution, instead creating a multipolar system where projects that aren't supported by (or even opposed by) current power structures can still get off the ground.

The fact that Jennifer Pritzker, a transwoman and heir to one of the ten wealthiest families in America, is donating money to pro-trans causes isn't suspicious or "astroturfing." This is a multipolar power system working as intended. The Right gets the Koch Brothers, and the Left gets George Soros and the Pritzker family - with plenty more examples on all sides of politics.

Now personally, I'll admit to having some misgivings over the "multipolar power" defense of billionaires, but the MLK Jr. example makes me think that sometimes this can be a legitimate argument. If the combination of a genuine grassroots, plus the money of rich people is what is necessary to end segregation, then so be it.

I think this is where the distinction of socialism/capitalism breaks, given that in the original Marxist literature socialism and ultimately communism was supposed as an ideal against the reality of "capitalism".

In practice basically all radical left regimes collapsed into some form of what is called "state capitalism" - basically bigshots with political power call the shots and various corporations do their bidding. Of course there is also an incest with different "czars" of different parts of economy or bureaucracy using their influence or even direct ownership for political power struggle. But the state and politics have primacy, if powers at be decide to run "anticorruption" raid against your corporation or they decide to cut the corporations out of financial markets or regulate it to oblivion that is their prerogative.

The key understanding is that radicals do not have a positive plan, they have revolutionary zeal and faith that it pays off in the end. If corporations "wokewash" their revolution, that only means that "true revolution was never tried" and repeat. Filthy reactionaries won again, but only temporarily. To evaluate radical leftism by an outcome like "capitalism strong vs communism enacted" means adopting their own irrational logic. To many people with experience in such a situation across the world it is clear that these ideologies are unworkable and that having a new crop of cynical power brokers like nomenklatura is inevitable. Corrupt Chinese multibilionaires tied to political clans such as those of Xi Jinping or Jiang Zemin are a feature and inevitable result of Maoist revolution, not a bug.

In that sense rich and powerful using the new radicalism to get ahead and get wealth or power is nothing new.

I mean, in a world where socialism realism is dead and planned economy is deader then ever and a failure, we can expect to see an infusion of leftism with capitalist values.

Not to be too cute, but isn't that the same energy as:

That is why I absolutely despise centrists coalitions: Because they will negotiate with the Left, receiving something inconsequential on the long run (like a lesser tax on something useless) and giving to the leftist part something that cement their coalition (immigration, genderification, more cultural egemony)

There's plenty of Catastrophizing outside of trans activist communities too. I see it most in gun threads.

Gun threads actually involve rules that if violated can get you sent to prison.

Yeah, poor Trace (it's doubly hilarious in the light of the furry trolling of LibsofTikTok that he did; karma is a bitch or something?)

Also that Blocked and Reported is a fascist site, or Jesse is a fascist, or whatever along those lines. Including TheSchism in the list of terribad awful sites is even funnier, because this was the split-off site for the left-leaning, from liberal to progressive, who were getting dogpiled by all us unrepentant right-wingers over on TheMotte, so if any place is not going to be anti-trans, it's them.

This is just more grains of sand in the pile that the trans activists are barking mad. Unless you completely agree 100% with every tiny detail of a whole laundry list created by one specific person that caters to their own neuroses and applies to nobody else, then you are transphobic genocider sociopath fascist.

Well, it seems like they are implicitly admitting that open, uncensored discussion of the transgender movement with the possibility to criticize it is toxic to the transgender movement.

Shame, then, because I'm trans and found this space perfectly welcoming.

Well, it seems like they are implicitly admitting that open, uncensored discussion of the transgender movement with the possibility to criticize it is toxic to the transgender movement.

I mean, this isn't unique or even unusual to the transgender "movement" within the broader left/"progressive"/SocJus movement sphere. I'd even call this standard operating procedure at this point. It's just the inevitable result of grouping emotional harm with physical harm so as to attach the negativity of the latter to the former and of categorizing "disagrees with me in this issue" as causing emotional harm. It creates a chain of "logic" that allows the activist to say that someone who disagrees with them is being literally violent towards them, and so it follows that any environment in which people are free to disagree with them is one that is toxic to them.

It doesn't even need to be criticism. Simply having gender dysphoria and and saying "this is not the place for me" because the narratives don't line up with your own personal experiences is also apparently toxic to the movement in the eyes of at least some of its members.

slatestarcodex

Scott's attempts to clean his name were entirely for nothing.

That's just the subreddit though. ACX isn't mentioned anywhere, though I'm sure that the open threads contain plenty of things that could be deemed objectionable

I don't think it matters at this point what Scott names his communities, the NYT article established him the minds of everyone who matters as deplorable or deplorable adjacent.

Wait, wait, wait, /r/politics is considered toxic? Isn't that place basically a left-wing-dominated subreddit? How does that figure?

/r/TwoXChromesomes

That sub is mostly trans posters. If a place isn't a total hug box it's "toxic." I guess this is how all pressure groups operate though.

not enough radical left? :shrug:

includes a list of ideologically affiliated subreddits

You missed a chance to list SneerClub (it made it on the diagram). I suppose this gives us license to tell them to Do Better when we see them around? (/s)

Reading Sneerclub is a guilty pleasure of mine.

No good deed goes unpunished, it seems. After attempting to delegitimize an anti-grooming activist (LoTT), thus reducing scrutiny TRAs face when interacting with children, they are now deemed to harm the trans cause.

But perhaps this is a good thing, that the ideology of "no bad tactics, only bad targets" will be forsworn by TRAs and with it harrassment of political opponents.

If Trace did the deed against LoTT in order to "build up credits" or something, it was a complete loss.

But they really just seem to think that getting a journalist (or person who thinks they are a journalist) to clown themselves is its own reward.

But they really just seem to think that getting a journalist (or person who thinks they are a journalist) to clown themselves is its own reward.

This is about the sum of it, yeah. It is!

Not one worth the cost, mind. But it really was a lot of fun—definitely captured the 'heist' feeling in a way I'd never experienced. I got wholly caught up in the moment, for better or (ultimately, mostly) for worse.

They also single our reply all podcast, which seems weirdly unfair.

But if they're trying to inform online trans people of what communities to steer clear from to avoid being tired out, I think that list is fair-ish.

I think they based this on user overlap rather than the content of the subs.

The big list of communities to avoid include a lot of things that aren't even explicitly carved-out as anti-trans--in fact, a lot of them are active culture war battlegrounds.

Some individuals might not want to be on a culture war field where they're the football. It's easy for me to engage with these rationally because it's not my ass on the line.

Where exactly is the list of idealogically affiliated subreddits? I couldnt find that list anywhere on the links you posted.

first link, scroll down the page.

Thanks! I erroneously thought the first link went to the website's homepage, and so didn't directly click it.

You just need to scroll down on the first link, it's at the bottom

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.

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.

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")

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.

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 Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power (Prime Video, streaming from Friday, September 2nd) takes place centuries before the original Lord of the Rings, and the harfoots are ancestors of the hobbits. If they don’t quite keep livestock in the livingroom, they are otherwise a laundry list of 19th-century Hibernophobic caricatures.

The accents embark on a wild journey from Donegal to Kerry and then stop off in inner-city Dublin. The harfoots themselves are twee and guileless and say things like: “Put yer backs into it, lads.” One is portrayed by Lenny Henry, a great comedian and actor who deserves better than having to deliver lines such as “De both of ye, dis does not bode will” (in an appalling Irish accent). Scouring the internet, there is no evidence of any Irish actors having been involved.

Why do these primitive itinerant hobbits sound like something from the dodgy-Irish-builders episode of Fawlty Towers? According to the show’s Australian dialect coach, the accents are intended to be “familiar but different” – and the harfoots are meant to have an “Irish base to their accent”, but they do not speak as though they’ve walked out of a “particular cross street in Dublin”.

The portrayal of “Irish” characters as pre-industrial and childlike – simpletons, really – threads neatly into the Anglosphere’s rich tapestry of disdain for Celtic peoples. It brings us all the way back to the 70s – the 1870s. There’s an early scene in which we see the harfoots, wearing filthy rags, scrabble in the ground for food. What is this, Famine cosplay?

The best sting in the tail is this conclusion:

Still, if you desperately want to return to Middle-earth, then, yes, the showrunners have done a fantastic job combining the grandeur of Tolkien with the grit of Game of Thrones. If anything, it feels more like vintage Thrones than the new Westeros prequel, House of the Dragon, as we cut between multiple characters across Middle-earth – each alerted, in varying ways, to the return of the villainous Sauron.

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?

“My gosh — I hope not,” says McKay. “My family is from Ireland. I’ve been there many times. My wife has family from Donegal. I feel such strong roots there. And love it there so much. Part of the joy of imagining this world was trying to come up with regional accents across the different worlds.

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:

“We adopted a version of the Scottish burr for the dwarfs. That’s certainly not intended to reference Scottish people. It is literally just trying to take a particular dialect and hopefully do our Middle-earth spin on it."

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:

But if you give the harfoots stage-Irish accents and portray them as filthy and dressed in rags — particularly if you then give officer-class English accents to the series’ noble elves — what else can it be but stereotyping?

“That’s really not where we’re coming from,” says Payne. “There is another world, the Southlands, where we’re doing a version of a northern-England accent, like Manchester. The way they live — in medieval huts in some cases, with mud and grime and chickens in the yard — is in no way meant to reference real people, certainly not the folks in Manchester. The same with the harfoots and a travelling community. We were inspired by Tolkien’s imagination and are not in any way attempting to capture the Irish people.”

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":

For an Irish person, particularly an Irish Tolkien fan, watching The Rings of Power can be like riding a very wonky roller coaster. You want to applaud the casting and luxuriate in the thrill of returning to Middle-earth. But then along come the harfoots, like escapees from Darby O’Gill and the Little People or that episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation featuring “Irish”-like aliens, and suddenly everything is flipped and we’re dangling upside down, the object of the joke. Are we to grin and bear it? Or perhaps just watch House of the Dragon instead? Forget about the whereabouts of the Dark Lord Sauron or the forging of the One Ring. This is the conundrum that Irish Tolkien devotees must wrestle with in the weeks ahead.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

"REEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE"

As a boo, this is obnoxious.

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).

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.

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.

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)

I really don’t think that’s a common perception.

At least Wayne regretted The Conqueror (and probably not just because it possibly gave him lung cancer).

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.

He's also from Buenos Aires, which is insanely pale for a "latin american" place...

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.

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 thought having Bifur go around with an axe in his head was the dumbest thing I'd seen.

I've wondered if that was a pun on "Bifurcation."

Here, take this upvote for your wit!

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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:

  1. Jane Austen thought Pride and Prejudice was her worst book

  2. Paul McCartney believe his more recent work is much better than The Beatles

  3. 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.

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.

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.

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.)

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.

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.

Very magical. But we are told to beware of those who wield magic for evil ends. They must be banished.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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. )

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.

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.

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.

...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.

Black Panther starts the movie rescuing some Congolese women from (presumably sexual) slavery and decides not to kill a child soldier. 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

If the last three years have taught me anything, it's that this is a realistic thought process for a well-meaning politician.

Do you have a better idea of Wakanda? I haven't availed myself of relevant comics

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.

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.

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.

If the last three years have taught me anything, it's that this is a realistic thought process for a well-meaning politician.

It's a realistic thought process for an American politician. Do you think Narendra Modi thinks this way?

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:

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.

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 heart good 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.

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.

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?

Why go to Hong Kong first? Seriously...What was the thinking here?

Chinese money probably.

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.

Black Panther is, aside from being a better-than-average

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)

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

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.

It has nothing to do with pandering to Africans, who are disproportionately poor and, frankly, have a variety of cultures very different from Americans.

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.

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.

That would require movies that aren't sequels to be made which, of course, appears to be impossible.

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.

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.

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!

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.

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.

The Woman King movie about African Amazonians from historical kingdom of Dahomey fighting white colonialists and slave traders

Wait a minute, weren't Dahomey fighting the French to keep their slave trade?

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.

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

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.

I agree, this fanbaiting was adopted by big studios at least since Ghostbusters 2016 with all female cast.

The media is run by trolls explores the media's role in this, and explicitly uses Ghostbusters 2016 as the turning point.

as did a massive controversy over the new, all-female Ghostbusters reboot. Liking this movie — even just liking the idea of it — meant you were one of the good guys. Disliking it, on the other hand, marked you as not just a critic, but a Bad Person.

But this was 2015, which was followed by the year in which progressives abandoned all pretence of being culture war noncombatants and went all-in on sneering contempt. The purest form of this shift is Molly Fitzpatrick’s article, “Angry baby-men hate the new Ghostbusters trailer”.

In hindsight, the “baby-men” article marked a point of no return. The ossified smugness of it, the right-side-of-history certainty, the way that books and movies and television and music now sorted automatically on political grounds into things one ought to be either for or against.

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.

None of this is to say that racist Star Wars fans do not exist. They do; the question is whether they are emboldened, even incentivised, by this continued, bizarre symbiosis with an outrage-driven media that relies on them for content. Consider one of the top citations in these stories, a YouTube video titled “Obi-Wan Series Is Going To Be AWFUL Because It’s Hiding Behind Diversity AGAIN!”, apparently made in response to Ingram’s 22 May comments in the Independent. The video is objectively offensive (the word “darkies” appears in the thumbnail), and the creator, an account named MechaRandom42, seems to specialise in intentionally inflammatory content with an anti-woke bent. But it is content that people mostly don’t watch: within the past month, she has posted multiple videos per week, most of which have paltry view counts in the 1,000-2,000 range.

The official Obi Wan Kenobi trailer posted a month ago by Disney has been viewed 11 million times. The “hiding behind diversity” video, on the other hand, has 13,000 views — the bulk of which came after journalists started citing it in their coverage of the controversy.

Who benefits from this? The trolls do, of course. They’re getting exactly what they want, their status and influence growing with every indignant squawk, every angry celebrity video response. But they’re not the only ones. A media class that makes its living on outrage gets a story that does numbers. Moses Ingram gets an outpouring of support and waves of positive press coverage. The studio execs behind Obi Wan Kenobi get the warm, fuzzy feeling that comes from persuading a bunch of impressionable people that the best way to signal their moral correctness is by putting more money in Disney’s pocket. Everybody wins.

Did people really want more LOTR?

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.

Yes, absolutely! People really, really want more LotR.

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)

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.

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!

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.

Whatever Amazon is doing, they're doing something right.

Money. Money is what they are doing right.

Did people really want more LOTR?

Yes, for example myself. Though given apparent quality I am not bothering with this one.

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?"

At this point I'm cynical enough to believe that Hollywood goes through the following thought process when it comes to "diverse" casting:

  1. A franchise has a dedicated-enough following that its fans will watch anything with the franchise's name on it.

  2. 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.

  3. 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.

  4. 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.

  5. 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.

  6. The studio knows that there is one group they are guaranteed to satisfy regardless of the movie they make.

  7. 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.

  8. 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.

  9. The studio blames the complaints on the racism of the audience.

  10. The journalists agree with the studio about the racism and go the extra mile to insist that it actually was a good movie.

  11. 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.

  12. 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.

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.

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.

it's practically mandatory for any show that doesn't want to be cancelled by internet SJWs

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.

it's crammed down my throat everywhere

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.

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.

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.

All of the above issues would not be issues if the writing were not so intolerable.

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.

It's less diversification of media and more appropriating of already existing works. Cultural Imperialism if you will.

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.

  • 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.

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.

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

as fun as The Hobbit Extended Edition was.

That's some grade-A Poe's Law right there.

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.

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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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.

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.

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".

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

unless whiteness was a critical part of the story

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:

Also – and here I hope I shall not sound absurd – I was from early days grieved by the poverty of my own beloved country: it had no stories of its own (bound up with its tongue and soil), not of the quality that I sought, and found (as an ingredient) in legends of other lands. There was Greek, and Celtic, and Romance, Germanic, Scandinavian, and Finnish (which greatly affected me); but nothing English, save impoverished chap-book stuff. Of course there was and is all the Arthurian world, but powerful as it is, it is imperfectly naturalized, associated with the soil of Britain but not with English; and does not replace what I felt to be missing. For one thing its 'faerie' is too lavish, and fantastical, incoherent and repetitive. For another and more important thing: it is involved in, and explicitly contains the Christian religion.

Do not laugh! But once upon a time (my crest has long since fallen) I had a mind to make a body of more or less connected legend, ranging from the large and cosmogonic, to the level of romantic fairy-story-the larger founded on the lesser in contact with the earth, the lesser drawing splendour from the vast backcloths – which I could dedicate simply to: to England; to my country. It should possess the tone and quality that I desired, somewhat cool and clear, be redolent of our 'air' (the clime and soil of the North West, meaning Britain and the hither parts of Europe: not Italy or the Aegean, still less the East), and, while possessing (if I could achieve it) the fair elusive beauty that some call Celtic (though it is rarely found in genuine ancient Celtic things), it should be 'high', purged of the gross, and fit for the more adult mind of a land long now steeped in poetry.

1937:

Do you think Tom Bombadil, the spirit of the (vanishing) Oxford and Berkshire countryside, could be made into the hero of a story?

1938:

The language of hobbits was remarkably like English, as one would expect: they only lived on the borders of The Wild, and were mostly unaware of it. Their family names remain for the most part as well known and justly respected in this island as they were in Hobbiton and Bywater.

1943:

For I love England (not Great Britain and certainly not the British Commonwealth (grr!)),

1944:

As to Sam Gamgee. I quite agree with what you say, and I wouldn't dream of altering his name without your approval; but the object of the alteration was precisely to bring out the comicness, peasantry, and if you will the Englishry of this jewel among the hobbits. Had I thought it out at the beginning, I should have given all the hobbits very English names to match the shire.

1954:

Middle-earth is just archaic English for ἡοἰκονμένη, the inhabited world of men. It lay then as it does. In fact just as it does, round and inescapable. That is partly the point. The new situation, established at the beginning of the Third Age, leads on eventually and inevitably to ordinary History, and we here see the process culminating. If you or I or any of the mortal men (or hobbits) of Frodo's day had set out over sea, west, we should, as now, eventually have come back (as now) to our starting point. Gone was the 'mythological' time when Valinor (or Valimar), the Land of the Valar (gods if you will) existed physically in the Uttermost West, or the Eldaic (Elvish) immortal Isle of Eressëa; or the Great Isle of Westernesse (Númenor-Atlantis). After the Downfall of Númenor, and its destruction, all this was removed from the 'physical' world, and not reachable by material means. Only the Eldar (or High-Elves) could still sail thither, forsaking time and mortality, but never returning.

1956:

There is no special reference to England in the 'Shire' – except of course that as an Englishman brought up in an 'almost rural' village of Warwickshire on the edge of the prosperous bourgeoisie of Birmingham (about the time of the Diamond Jubilee!) I take my models like anyone else – from such 'life' as I know.

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):

But, of course, if we drop the 'fiction' of long ago, 'The Shire' is based on rural England and not any other country in the world – least perhaps of any in Europe on Holland, which is topographically wholly dissimilar. (In fact so different is it, that in spite of the affinity of its language, and in many respects of its idiom, which should ease some part of the translator's labour, its toponymy is specially unsuitable for the purpose.) The toponymy of The Shire, to take the first list, is a 'parody' of that of rural England, in much the same sense as are its inhabitants: they go together and are meant to. After all the book is English, and by an Englishman, and presumably even those who wish its narrative and dialogue turned into an idiom that they understand, will not ask of a translator that he should deliberately attempt to destroy the local colour.

1959, for a Polish translator:

As a general principle for her guidance, my preference is for as little translation or alteration of any names as possible. As she perceives, this is an English book and its Englishry should not be eradicated.

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.

"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.

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.

"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."

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!

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?"

Maybe to attempt to "address" a relatively common trope about Black actors/actresses in roles where the character was traditionally white?

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!

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

  • -14

Doesn't that mean that, the interpretations today, absolutely should have black dwarves et al?

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.

That's what an adaption is, it takes a product, re-envisages it as if it were written today

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.

Alternate universe Tolkien writing today where Birmingham has significant Pakistani and Caribbean populations would plausibly have written a very different book.

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).

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.

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?

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.

Different skin colors should be well within bounds?

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.

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.

  • -12

Don't you think you're being a bit hyperbolic?

I don't think I'm being hyperbolic at all. Also

Last I checked, the Second Age wasn't a big part of American history.

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.

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.

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.

(Though there is a rule that only a man can inherit the crown, and the show breaks that.)

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!)

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.

I've barely read LOTR but unless whiteness was a critical part of the story it seems fine to change skin color.

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...

(e.g. Aragorn wasn't played by an Anglo-Saxon actor, a lot of the music was Celtic...)

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...).

Or Jutes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

  • -24

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.

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.

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.

  • -17

we know Tom Cruise isn't a fighter pilot

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.

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?

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.

Why particularly is skin color the thing that breaks your immersion?

I feel like Dwight from the "Asian Jim" bit on The Office: https://youtube.com/watch?v=cLNyF1Zw5tg

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.

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.

Things have to be internally consistent.

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.

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.

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.

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.

  • -11

Except they are not the same version as the original.

In this version of the LoTR history...

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.

Jackson replaces Glorfindel with Arwen. for example

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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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.

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:

From Laws and Customs Among The Eldar

For instance, the arts of healing, and all that touches on the care of the body, are among all the Eldar most practiced by the nissi[Elven women]; whereas it was the elven-men who bore arms at need. And the Eldar deemed that the dealing of death, even when lawful or under necessity, diminished the power of healing, and that the virtue of the nissi in this matter was due rather to their abstaining from hunting or war than to any special power that went with their womanhood. Indeed in dire straits or in desperate defence, the nissi fought valiantly, and there was less difference in strength and speed between elven-men and elven-women that had not borne child than is seen among mortals. On the other hand many elven-men were great healers and skilled in the lore of living bodies, though such men abstained from hunting, and went not to war until the last need.

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.

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.

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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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.

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.

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.

but we know she's not,

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?

Careful with consensus building.

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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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?

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.

  • -18

Ok, but why does it matter to you?

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.

Criticize them for making a bad series, not for using some black actors.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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!"

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".

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.

  • -12

I think it's pretty racist if you care that Amazon hired black actors for this.

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.

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.

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.

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.

  • -10

Someone said that black casting in LoTR is unnatural. How else am i supposed to disagree with it?

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.

A lot of people are criticizing LoTR for casting black and minority actors

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.

saying that Amazon only did this so they couldn't criticize the show at all

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.

Why does the casting matter if both sides say it doesn't matter?

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.

I think calling the casting unnatural is racist and there's no other way to put it.

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.

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".

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.

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.

  • -20

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.

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?

There are lots of movies out there that will cater to you if you don't want minorities in your movie.

  • -12

Once again, I think you've missed the point entirely.

if you don't want minorities in your movie

Thank you for making your position clear about what you think we are saying.

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."

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.

I don't get the problem.

There are three problems:

  1. 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.

  2. 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.

  3. 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.

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.

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.

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.

  • -15

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.

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.

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.

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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