Discussion about the Discussion about RoP

For discussion of Amazon's new television show "The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power"
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Re: Discussion about the Discussion about RoP

Post by Alatar »

I get where you're coming from Aravar. Its absolutely possible to have huge problems with TROP and not be a racist troll. The problem is that its been completely hijacked bu those with an agenda, and its not limited to Tolkien. The same thing happened to She-Hulk, Miss Marvel, Star Wars, Sandman and Little Bloody Mermaid, notably every time the lead is a Person of Colour or Female. The pattern is getting crazy. And the weirdest thing about it is that it has very little to do with the fandom. Its an orchestrated effort to drive people to the Right politically. Its outright pandering to those who fear that "Real America" is being erased. THe genuine fans with genuine issues are drowning in a sea of orchestrated outrage.
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Re: Discussion about the Discussion about RoP

Post by Aravar »

Alatar wrote: Fri Sep 23, 2022 11:03 am I get where you're coming from Aravar. Its absolutely possible to have huge problems with TROP and not be a racist troll. The problem is that its been completely hijacked bu those with an agenda, and its not limited to Tolkien. The same thing happened to She-Hulk, Miss Marvel, Star Wars, Sandman and Little Bloody Mermaid, notably every time the lead is a Person of Colour or Female. The pattern is getting crazy. And the weirdest thing about it is that it has very little to do with the fandom. Its an orchestrated effort to drive people to the Right politically. Its outright pandering to those who fear that "Real America" is being erased. THe genuine fans with genuine issues are drowning in a sea of orchestrated outrage.
But equally there are those on the right who would say that popular properties are being used in an orchestrated effort to drive people left politically, to pursue a globalist agenda. It works both ways. It is, I think, naive to say that the right is "orchestrating" campaigns when Disney or Amazon are media companies which have huge marketing departments themselves.

With Star Wars similar smears were made against critics, racism etc. This was despite Disney itself reducing the size of John Boyega's image on the posters for the Chinese market, which to my mind is actual racism.

That the Sequel Trilogy (unlike Rogue One) was flawed, and IMO rubbish, was ignored. These companies can be quite ruthless. I remember at the time of the H2G2 film one fan site shut itself down because it felt it was begin targeted for criticising the film.
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Re: Discussion about the Discussion about RoP

Post by Anduril »

Stranger Wings wrote: Mon Sep 12, 2022 10:03 am
Anduril wrote:Image
I’d be curious to get your response to my post above. Spent a lot of time on it, and all I get is a Christopher Lambert gif?! :)


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Oh that wasn't for you, that was for the AV Club article which immediately dismissed all fan critics as trolls.
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Re: Discussion about the Discussion about RoP

Post by Smaug's voice »

It's a false equivalence imo. There's clearly an effort to drive people to the right given the clear pattern established between giving mere casting opportunities and the inevitable knee-jerk, vitriolic reaction to the same which eventually gets co-adapted by entire fandoms.
Who is doing that for the left? If Disney and other multi-million conglomerates are the best examples of that, then I don't understand the definition of "left".

"Fans" review-bombing unreleased episodes, sending death-threats and harassing and abusing actors on social media to the point of suicide for the simple fact of their skin-colour is as real a type of racism as Disney's compromise in China's posters. They aren't mutually exclusive.
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Re: Discussion about the Discussion about RoP

Post by elengil »

Aravar wrote: Fri Sep 23, 2022 12:46 pm
But equally there are those on the right who would say that popular properties are being used in an orchestrated effort to drive people left politically, to pursue a globalist agenda. It works both ways. It is, I think, naive to say that the right is "orchestrating" campaigns when Disney or Amazon are media companies which have huge marketing departments themselves.

With Star Wars similar smears were made against critics, racism etc. This was despite Disney itself reducing the size of John Boyega's image on the posters for the Chinese market, which to my mind is actual racism.

That the Sequel Trilogy (unlike Rogue One) was flawed, and IMO rubbish, was ignored. These companies can be quite ruthless. I remember at the time of the H2G2 film one fan site shut itself down because it felt it was begin targeted for criticising the film.

Corporations are largely not liberal by any measure. They're capitalist. They are very much orchestrating things, yes, but to the end of their own profits, nothing more. They have no interest in pushing any political agenda, they have an interest in bringing in money. To the degree that they believe "diversity" will sell, they will exploit it. (and certainly not in pursuit of any 'globalist left' agenda)

In terms of holding actual political opinions, I'm sure they rather lean quite right, for they don't want real diversity (only enough to be profitable), they don't want unions, they don't want equal pay, they don't want to have their business practices regulated or held to any kind of standard - they just want to make money.

That is why they will happily bow to pressure (whether racial pressures or political pressures or what) in other markets so long as they can still access those markets by doing so.

But again, they aren't pushing a 'left' agenda. They're pushing for profits.

That makes things like the backlash against Ismael Cruz Córdova particularly nasty - he's stuck between a segment of the population that actively hates that he exists (in the context of the show, or otherwise) while being put in a position of tokenism by the company, while he himself is having to be the very best elf that ever there was in an attempt to forestall as many complaints as possible in a society where there is literally nothing he can do to prevent complaints from a certain segment.
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"Does anyone ever think about Denethor, the guy driven to madness by staying up late into the night alone in the dark staring at a flickering device he believed revealed unvarnished truth about the outside word, but which in fact showed mostly manipulated media created by a hostile power committed to portraying nothing but bad news framed in the worst possible way in order to sap hope, courage, and the will to go on? Seems like he's someone we should think about." - Dave_LF
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Re: Discussion about the Discussion about RoP

Post by Anduril »

Stranger Wings wrote: Fri Aug 05, 2022 1:04 am
Anduril wrote: Fri Aug 05, 2022 12:24 amThere's nothing wrong with making or keeping the European-derived mythological creatures and humans of the setting European-looking. If the goal is to portray the setting as less Eurocentric (as/though Eurocentrism is fundamentally baked into it), it's one thing to, say, downplay or remove the bit of "Eastern" aspects imposed on the goblins which were never there before, and another thing to just impose your own ideas on concepts which didn't contain them before either, throwing verisimilitude, the sense of real history etc. out of whack. A better approach than superficial casting decisions would be to show more truly diverse point of views, in this context focusing on the Men of the East and South, as I've said over and over. All they're doing with their casting decisions is ignoring the actual elements of the world and its storyline that the author himself put in, the angles they could have explored. Expand, not change.
I don't think this is well-justified, however. Númenor, as written by Tolkien, had clear Mediterranean elements in it, and such societies in both ancient and dark age times were not lily white. Arabs ruled Sicily and much of Spain for many years, ancient Rome was a multi-cultural hub whose culture was hugely influenced by Eastern and African culture and religion, Byzantium was quite diverse, Eastern Mediterranean Greek, Arab and Semitic societies were full of brown people, and North Africa had Phoenicians, Carthaginians, Berbers, Arabs, Greeks, etc, during these periods of time that very generally correspond to Tolkien's mindscape. In this context, Míriel's racial characteristics make perfect sense to me.
Except that his worldbuilding is clear about what Numenoreans would have looked like physically and how they treated other humans. Even if you factor in the late revision of some Beorians being "swarthy", consider that the "brown" Southrons are the ones called the "Swarthy Men" by the Gondorians, and since they're from "Near Harad" as opposed to "Far", the truly "black" humans as we would understand it today are from further away and just glimpsed. So why couldn't a swarthy Beorian be more of Mediterranean mold. Still doesn't make them "brown" or "black" i.e. "non-white" as we would understand it today. Those would be the First Age Easterlings. The demarcation of the worldbuilding is consistently clear that it's West and East, later West and East and South, so in a certain sense it's Europe, Asia, Africa.
The same with the dwarves, who all migrated from the far East. Disa is a perfectly plausible character as is.
Except that being "white" is simply treated as the default, because if you're not, it's pointed out. Everyone migrated from the far East before there was an equator.
As for Arondir? I don't see why elves of the far south might not have developed dark skin. If the far south generally corresponds to southern Italy or North Africa in Tolkien's imagination, then I can see Silvan elves in that region being darker.
Except that it's ruled out by the worldbuilding and themes again.
My problem is that a lot of fans have a cartoon, oddly homogenized understanding of what Europeans looked like during the dark ages and early medieval period. Europe is a wide, diverse subcontinent, and has been since ancient times.
Then why not show true interactions between different cultures and regions instead of the modernized melting pot take of the show? Like did HBO's Rome feel compelled to make some senators etc. Carthaginian or Gaulish, let alone Numidian or Nubian? Or just never mind labels and just "cast color-blindly"? No, that's rewriting history, they were covering a specific time frame and stuff like Libyan emperors didn't happen yet, they ended with the first emperor taking power. It's historical fiction for sure, but depending on your approach there are lines that mustn't be crossed, you keep coloring within the lines. Then why is a fictional history fair game for rewriting even up to its fundamentals? Why is it not accorded the same default respect? Even in LOTR itself not all Gondorians are of Númenórean descent. Is the show building that and the Third Age in general up with the interactions of Númenor and the various men of Middle-earth?
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Re: Discussion about the Discussion about RoP

Post by Eldy »

Aravar wrote: Fri Sep 23, 2022 10:53 amI'm afraid, given the absurdities that the NYT has been writing about the Queen in the past few weeks I trust it about as much as you would trust an article in the Daily Mail.
The co-opting of The Lord of the Rings by Italian neofascists has been a known thing for decades. It was not invented by the NYT.
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Re: Discussion about the Discussion about RoP

Post by elengil »

Anduril wrote: Fri Sep 23, 2022 4:00 pm
The same with the dwarves, who all migrated from the far East. Disa is a perfectly plausible character as is.
Except that being "white" is simply treated as the default, because if you're not, it's pointed out. Everyone migrated from the far East before there was an equator.
By that logic, it proves everyone by default is brown since the very rare times skin color is mentioned is to say the character is white. Ergo, that is the notable exception.
The dumbest thing I've ever bought
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"Does anyone ever think about Denethor, the guy driven to madness by staying up late into the night alone in the dark staring at a flickering device he believed revealed unvarnished truth about the outside word, but which in fact showed mostly manipulated media created by a hostile power committed to portraying nothing but bad news framed in the worst possible way in order to sap hope, courage, and the will to go on? Seems like he's someone we should think about." - Dave_LF
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Re: Discussion about the Discussion about RoP

Post by Frelga »

elengil wrote: Sat Sep 24, 2022 1:32 am
Anduril wrote: Fri Sep 23, 2022 4:00 pm
The same with the dwarves, who all migrated from the far East. Disa is a perfectly plausible character as is.
Except that being "white" is simply treated as the default, because if you're not, it's pointed out. Everyone migrated from the far East before there was an equator.
By that logic, it proves everyone by default is brown since the very rare times skin color is mentioned is to say the character is white. Ergo, that is the notable exception.
In fact, the hobbit minority of Fallohides is explicitly described as having paler skin, while the Harfoot majority has browner skin. Unless you assume that it means "we are pale but dang those dudes are pasty."

Tolkien -.more woke than you think.
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Re: Discussion about the Discussion about RoP

Post by Anduril »

Sigh, language is so imprecise. I mean being "a white person" (i.e. akin to European, or that outdated/inaccurate term "Caucasian", not Asian or African or anywhere else) is treated as the default. What else could I have meant? When Tolkien used white or brown or black in relation to skin tone, the didn't necessarily mean it to have the correlation to ethnic groups the way we understand them today, but there are clear patterns and contexts.

Harfoots being browner of skin compared to Stoors and especially Fallohides (who are lighter of skin, vice versa) doesn't make them not part of the "European" and especially "English" part of the worldbuilding. They're in the north-west region of the map, explicitly Northwestern Europe in LOTR's "Concerning Hobbits". North-West of the Old World, east of the Sea. The brown men of (Near) Harad live far away, near/around the equator, but the hobbits know of them in ancient lore as the "Swertings" from the "Sunlands". This corresponds exactly to the term "Swarthy Men" from Gondor, so the hobbits may have picked up the lore through them, probably filtered through the Rohirrim's ancestors whom they had contact with because of the language. So the browner hobbits weren't as brown as those faraway men nor did they live in regions as warm/hot.

If people like Aragorn are described as pale not because they're necessarily "white people" but because they stick out, this would be true even if everyone in the scene was a "white person". And the context is clear from many many things that Aragorn and these others were akin to "white people", so the descriptors just reinforce that. So yes, most people in the West need not be as milky white as Elijah Wood and I never said they had to be in the first place, but they would still look like "white people" in relation to the men of the South and East.

If "being a white person" is treated as the default for the peoples of the West it's because the peoples of the East and the South, and Orcs, are described differently in many ways so it's clear they're not "Western". Then in The Hobbit Bilbo, Gandalf, the dwarves and elves and men aren't described as "Western" or "white people" because they don't need to be, it's assumed by default. Is skin color for them and the goblins even mentioned at all? Well Gollum is "dark" but he was just a weird spooky creature, not a fellow hobbit yet when first created, and LOTR "corrected" this to bone-white skin. The only hint that goblins are "exotic", might not be "Western" etc. is the mention of "scimitars".
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Re: Discussion about the Discussion about RoP

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I knew what you meant.

Men (i.e. Humans) can be somewhat stratified by color, sure. No reason to assume modern racial categories apply in middle-earth, but sure, let's assume that. There is zero reason to assume Elves and Dwarves must also be, especially since they did not spread out as Men did, that I can find.

Elves were largely gathered to Valinor early on - some of all three kindreds came, with the smallest number remaining behind - but no indication that these divisions had anything to do with skin color. Dwarves were sprinkled around a bit more but it doesn't sound as if any of the Dwarven kingdoms existed in far-flung and unknown lands, just around Middle-earth as we know it, so any and all Dwarves are potentially to be found in the known lands.

Same with Hobbits - they seem to be largely confined to one of two places, not scattered all over the world.

People come in different colors.

Dwarves are people
Elves are people
Hobbits are people

There is zero reason - and I mean zero reason, Tolkien's "intention" included - to exclude darker skin tones from any of these invented groups of people. There is also zero reason to assume that any of their skin tones must default to the modern understanding of 'white European'.

Dwarves, especially, being made entirely by Aulë and in the darkness of the earth - why on earth would they be expected to be white? I'd rather expect Dwarves to be all the colors of earth and stone, rather. That would make sense from a world building standpoint.

Likewise, we have three groups of Elves, why any of them - let alone all of them - need to be white?

This is not a discussion of what we do or don't like in the show, this is a discussion about the way the show is discussed. And honestly I don't understand why a bare handful of characters not conforming to a white European aesthetic - in a world that literally has actual different races in it - is even something to be discussed (outside of it being unusual). That should the bare minimum of being a fully developed world.

Some changes don't work - you can't just swap out a Dwarf for an Elf for a Human - there are fundamental differences between them.

There are zero fundamental differences between Elves with white skin and elves with black skin, or Hobbits with brown skin and Hobbits with less brown skin, or Dwarves that are white vs Dwarves that are the color of earth. Those aren't *differences* that matter in terms of the story that is being told.

No part of Tolkien's world hinges on the color of a character's skin.

It's not the same as, say, height. That actually is given *meaning* in the context of Tolkien's world. Skin color never is.
The dumbest thing I've ever bought
was a 2020 planner.

"Does anyone ever think about Denethor, the guy driven to madness by staying up late into the night alone in the dark staring at a flickering device he believed revealed unvarnished truth about the outside word, but which in fact showed mostly manipulated media created by a hostile power committed to portraying nothing but bad news framed in the worst possible way in order to sap hope, courage, and the will to go on? Seems like he's someone we should think about." - Dave_LF
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Re: Discussion about the Discussion about RoP

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[quote]Then why is a fictional history fair game for rewriting even up to its fundamentals? Why is it not accorded the same default respect? [/quote]

Because it is not fictional history. It is fictional mythology. It does not work on a realistic social and economic level, and it is not intended to. It is intended not to.

I don't mean dragons, I mean the Shire is impossible. It's a place where Tolkien decided to keep all the nice things about a society a bit older than his own and throw away all the nasty industrial stuff and social tensions that made the nice things possible. Rohan doesn't act like a nomadic horse-centric society. And so on.

Religious movements, scientific discovery, great human migrations, conflicts, trade routes, even geography - all the things that shaped nations and defined what people look like today - none of them happened the same way in Middle-earth, because Tolkien didn't want it to.

So it doesn't seem logical to pretend that any part of Middle-earth is intended to reflect Western Europe, let alone a specific portion of it, with any degree of accuracy. The mortal population of Middle-earth probably wouldn't look anything like any of the modern humans anyway. So I am happy to take Tolkien at his word and assume that brown is brown.
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Re: Discussion about the Discussion about RoP

Post by Aravar »

Frelga wrote: Sat Sep 24, 2022 9:22 am
Then why is a fictional history fair game for rewriting even up to its fundamentals? Why is it not accorded the same default respect?


So it doesn't seem logical to pretend that any part of Middle-earth is intended to reflect Western Europe, let alone a specific portion of it, with any degree of accuracy. The mortal population of Middle-earth probably wouldn't look anything like any of the modern humans anyway. So I am happy to take Tolkien at his word and assume that brown is brown.
Except for the fact that Tolkien himself said that Middle-Earth is Europe. Let's take him at his word

I think Tolkien did mean "we are pale but those dudes are pasty". There's a stereotype in the UK of the Pale Ginger freckled Scot.

Tolkien was an Englishman writing in the England of the 1940s, not the 2020s let alone the US of the 2020s.

To use a different example. Imagine we are remaking Crouching Tiger still set in the mythical ages of China. Casting Idris Elba, Indira Varma and Daisy Ridley to play the three main characters would IMO be absurd.
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Re: Discussion about the Discussion about RoP

Post by elengil »

Aravar wrote: Sat Sep 24, 2022 1:54 pm
To use a different example. Imagine we are remaking Crouching Tiger still set in the mythical ages of China. Casting Idris Elba, Indira Varma and Daisy Ridley to play the three main characters would IMO be absurd.
Something Hollywood has been doing for as long as it's been making movies - except all the actors would have been white. It once again feels like the only thing that is ever upsetting is that fantasy Elves and Dwarves and Hobbits aren't white, which is again something that in no way is dictated by the source material (which again is largely silent on the subject, and all claims of "default" and "intent" are only assumptions on *our* part) nor in any way integral to the story being told.

No part of Tolkien's world hinges on nor is altered by any of his invented races being some other skin color.

Even if we go with "Middle earth wasn't just 'intended' to be pre-history Europe, it *is* pre-history Europe" then pre-historic Europeans were not white, either.

You can't want to be accurate to a claim of 'real' lore of an ancient history of Europe while only wanting that accuracy to extend to *modern* looking ethnic northern Europeans. I will remind that plenty of modern Europeans today are also not white.
The dumbest thing I've ever bought
was a 2020 planner.

"Does anyone ever think about Denethor, the guy driven to madness by staying up late into the night alone in the dark staring at a flickering device he believed revealed unvarnished truth about the outside word, but which in fact showed mostly manipulated media created by a hostile power committed to portraying nothing but bad news framed in the worst possible way in order to sap hope, courage, and the will to go on? Seems like he's someone we should think about." - Dave_LF
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Re: Discussion about the Discussion about RoP

Post by Frelga »

Mary Robinette Kowal wrote:It's not about adding diversity for the sake of diversity, it's about subtracting homogeneity for the sake of realism.
Imagine we are remaking Crouching Tiger still set in the mythical ages of China. Casting Idris Elba, Indira Varma and Daisy Ridley to play the three main characters would IMO be absurd.
Imagine we are remaking Seven Samurai except they are cowboys. Actually, imagine making lots of movies about cowboys and they are all white protestant men. Real history has been whitewashed over and over.

On the other hand, what kind of woke degenerate would write a Black general into 1600s Venice?

Would any self-respecting author write series about Victorian England and put in an Indian student, Black boxer, several Latin American women, an interracial couple, and a bunch of Chinese? I think I'm missing a few characters, but you know who I mean.

On another board, someone said once, "Imagine having a black actor in a movie about Samurai" and it took me 30 seconds to find out about Yasuke.

The world is, and always has been, a diverse place where people mixed a lot.

ROP cast is more solidly white than the real world population would have been at any point of history that is covered by a fictional legendarium.
There's a stereotype in the UK of the Pale Ginger freckled Scot.
And are the English described as browner?
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Re: Discussion about the Discussion about RoP

Post by Voronwë the Faithful »

elengil wrote: Sat Sep 24, 2022 3:49 pmNo part of Tolkien's world hinges on nor is altered by any of his invented races being some other skin color.
Period. End of story.
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Re: Discussion about the Discussion about RoP

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Oh sure, V, make every point of my lengthy post in four words :D
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Re: Discussion about the Discussion about RoP

Post by Voronwë the Faithful »

elengil already said it. I was just emphasizing her point.
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Re: Discussion about the Discussion about RoP

Post by Aravar »

Frelga wrote: Sat Sep 24, 2022 4:51 pm
Imagine we are remaking Seven Samurai except they are cowboys. Actually, imagine making lots of movies about cowboys and they are all white protestant men. Real history has been whitewashed over and over.
False analogy. I specifically said setting it in the mythic ages of China. Redo in the 18th Century west, or in space and you can do what you like.
On the other hand, what kind of woke degenerate would write a Black general into 1600s Venice?
But the point is he's the only one. The BBC did a good adaptation in the 80s setting it in the ACW with Willard White and Ian Mckellen to emphasise that aspect.
Would any self-respecting author write series about Victorian England and put in an Indian student, Black boxer, several Latin American women, an interracial couple, and a bunch of Chinese? I think I'm missing a few characters, but you know who I mean.


Again do not think for a moment that I think that something set in say 1800s London would be an all white English affair. You seem to be insinuating that because I am on not on your side of this argument that I don't want non white actors or characters in anything. This is precisely what I was complaining about upthread.

I personally have no problem with Arondir. However the fact that the small group of no more than 100 harfoots seem to have representative from every ethnic group on earth is a little odd to me.
ROP cast is more solidly white than the real world population would have been at any point of history that is covered by a fictional legendarium.
What does that even mean. In any event Middle Earth is a small part of that world. It is not only described as Europe, but North Western Europe at that.
And are the English described as browner?


The point is that JRRT is stating that the three strains of hobbit have different shades of complexions. The Fallohides are palest, then the Stoors and the Harfoots browner. That is not a statement that Harfoots have brown skins.
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Re: Discussion about the Discussion about RoP

Post by Frelga »

The Harfoot diversity have been explained as a group of survivors from different tribes. Which also would explain why many years later they would gel into a more uniformly looking group, probably something like medium brown.

And point of record, the Sherlock Holmes stories range far from London, and non-white characters are not confined to it.
It is not only described as Europe, but North Western Europe at that.
Tolkien's own notes placed Gondor around Italy, as I believe has been mentioned upthread.

Also what do you mean, it is described as Europe? The fictional map looks nothing like Europe. The fictional history is completely at odds with anything that happened in actual history to the extent that there is absolutely no way to get from one to another.

This is by contrast to mythical histories that have some tinge of plausibility, like the Arthurian myth, or Robin Hood, or the bogatyrs of the Kiyiv Rus. You can root them to a time and place, and subtract wizards and dragons. Middle-earth is not that, and it's not intended to be.

Is this really so important to you?
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