I'm still thinking about it, but I do wonder if diverse casting works in European fantasy stories. The problem I have is that it generally pulls me out of the experience/ makes it less immersive. I welcome diverse castings in modern shows (though we don't need every show to follow a template 'diverse' casting).
A common counter argument is, well you can suspend your disbelief and imagine a dragon, so why is a diverse community in a small village not ok? It just feels less immersive. Yes, I can go along with it - but I'm not sure it works. It feels like the modern world superimposed in a fantasy setting. I'd prefer to be sent to an alien world.
It is problematic, as years of discrimination in the real world for women/ethnic minorities were wrong and we should encourage equality in the corporate world. However the entertainment industry I wonder should in some ways be exempt. Maybe. One area where there isnt a discussion on 'diversity' is music and also novels. This is because there are tons of tons of novels and music bands to listen to. No one cares if a particular band is 'diverse'.
So I wonder if the only solution out of all of this, is to have more shows - yes, make diverse inclusive European fantasy shows, but also make traditional european fantasy shows too etc. What I think will happen is that in such a scenario most European fantasy fans will choose traditional like shows. Because the story is more immersive and you are brought more into this old world. Maybe. Like I say, I'm still undecided. For modern/futuristic films I find diverse castings just as immersive.
The main problem with diversity, is that most of the time it's a performance. And it's often done with bad actors, who will spend hours and hours on talk shows, describing how they are proud to be the first X to have played in this role.
The result is thus disappointing. And it does not create anything of value.
Because unsurprisingly, people are not paying to the the "first black elf". Nobody care. So it's just alienating the core fanbase because they are fed up seeing their favorite franchise being ruined by quotas, and racial war, especially when all other aspects are lacking (scenario, dialogues, poor yet expensive CGI, etc)
I just wish most of this company get broke and we start to see smaller studio producing interesting stuff around diversity.
As you can tell I have no fetish for diversity as it's a criteria I found useless in a workplace or in my entertainment. But from time to time, I would happily watch a high budget and original production about some fantasy world happening in Africa (like Game of Thrones is for England) or in Thailand or whatever with all the folklore around it.
Rather than seeing divisive comment about :
"Amazing, we finally have some diversity among LoR's elf, take that racist Tolkien"
or
"Disgusting, they put some black elf".
As usual, I really feel this modern world is not for me, it's ruining most franchises one after the other, yet it's not creating any new interesting franchises.
As an indian, I find this politically fascinating. As Noam Chomsky's Manufactured Consent pointed out, the US has always used its media to influence politics and culture both in its own country and outside. It appears the US now believes that it can "mainstream" the acceptance of certain vulnerable group by showing them more on TV and movies. (I do think this will work with the next generation in a decade or so). However, the way it is being done forcefully, and in a poorly executed fashion while ignoring the backlash being generated, I fear it will only lead to "tolerance" and not their acceptance in society. And I wonder if this is deliberate too?
The poor, and sometimes forced and contrived execution of an LGBT or female or a non-white character does really seem unnecessary. To me as an indian, sometimes it looks like the white man's guilt is showing when they even rewrite historical characters and insert such characters doing things that they would never have been able to do (e.g. the enjoyable but oh so historically inaccurate heroine of Miss Scarlet and the Duke - in her period, she would have probably been committed to a mental institute for the things she does in the show. Or the deliberate ignorance of "victorian" values in British society in some recent "historical" dramas, just to show some character doing things that would be really out of character for them in their period - Indeed, one wonders why such obvious white-washing of history in such a crude manner?).
As a someone who is not an American but enjoys American tv, sometimes I feel that the reason such characters are deliberately shown poorly (with lousy acting or writing), is because even show makers resent being forced to include such character. Obviously this doesn't help.
If a story requires an LGBT character go for it. If it requires a person of colour, great. But they do need to get a good actor and make sure the writing and the direction all add value to that character in the show without any blatant sermonising (show, not tell, at least on shows for grownups). It's not as if the American media doesn't know how to do this - there have been so many good characters, even main characters from such vulnerable group portrayed beautifully in past TV shows.
(Or perhaps, I am wrong - all this has nothing to do with inclusive politics and is just a way to manufacture outrage and keep the American public distracted from the real political issues).
"If a story requires an LGBT character go for it." every story requires one then, because we exist everywhere. Stories never necessarily require certain traits like that (sometimes) but I'd say it's more that a story requires a character with certain personality traits/backstory and that character can also happen to be a man/woman, gay/straight, any ethnicity as long as it relates to the time period/area.
It does remind me of when Resident Evil 5 came out; it had the usual characters but because it was set in Africa and therefore most of the zombies were African, cries of racism were abound.
If it's a historical retelling, then it should be as accurate as much as possible, within reason. If it's fiction/myth/fantasy etc then it doesn't really matter; who cares if Hansel & Gretel is a German fairytale, cast someone who's whatever non-white to play one of them in a new retelling of it. But tbh I think people just get antsy because Hollywood/West is literally the only industry having fingers pointed at for this. I don't think Bollywood, for example, has to worry about diversity/non-Indian representation at all.
Coincidentally came across a comment by Neil Gaiman today, related to this topic on Reddit: I don't write much about gay sex, as people who have read my book would know. But oddly, I don't read tweet like this and feel to convert. Instead I read it and vaguely wish I'd actually written more about gay sex. (Source: https://old.reddit.com/r/me_irlgbt/comments/x79303/me_irlgbt... ).
Isn't it an interesting perspective from a writer? Inspiration and creativity comes from such moments, and tomorrow if this writer creates a gay character for some story, you can feel the author will do a good job of characterisation and making such character feel real. When the writing is good, an actor feels connected to it and the director and show-maker too are inspired to do justice it. Right now it doesn't often feel like that. sometimes when I see some of the awful effort of some of these LGBT / person of colour (PoC) / powerful women scenes, out of boredom I often find myself imagining how such a scene was shot - someone at the production unit suddenly remembers, "Ok, who is playing the token LGBT / PoC / Women? Let's get on with it. What's the scene about - Is it about them facing humiliation 'cos of their identity, showing them being accepted, a sex scene with them, or them finding their own voice or power?" ... (And later in the editing room some director instructing some intern) "OK, trim these hour long footage of the LGBT / PoC / woman character into 1 to 5 minutes snippets and insert it somewhere in episode 1, 5, 7 and wrap it up!" ...
As for every story requiring an LGBT character because they "exist everywhere", can't many other vulnerable / minority group too lay a claim on that? For example, I am sure there are more muslims in the USA than there are LGBTs - should every American TV show now start including muslim, Hindus, Jews, Sikhs, Indian-American, Chinese-Americans characters etc., etc? Obviously, you realistically can't. (And note that all these groups too face bigotry and hatred just because of who they are).
As a non-american, I prefer the previous format of American television where good story didn't have such contrived caricaturisation and only relevant characters that added to the stories. Will and Grace or Modern Family come to mind when I think of how LGBT characters were relevant, well integrated and portrayed well in the story. Recently I finished watching Atlanta and really love the show, especially due to the insights on black culture (in the US) it offered. Shows like "The Good Wife" and "The Good Fight" show women empowerment so naturally and elegantly that you don't even notice it while enjoying the drama. I feel such dramas do more justice to an LGBT / PoC / woman character than some token characters inserted forcefully.
Point made. That was interesting - I wasn't aware that the US had so many people who identified as LGBT. Note though that media representation wouldn't have changed that erroneous view of mine because that is a common assumption made out of ignorance. The media showing more LBTQ characters is not going to suddenly enlighten many that there are so many of them.
I think one of the things that makes this contrived diversification poor, is that producers are hell bent on taking existing characters and stories and changing it up in a way that's somehow more permanent that just a simple reinterpretation. I'm sure there's plenty of productions of Shakespeare plays where they mixed up the casting.
Old things are going to be a product of their times and there's an easy solution to all of this: Write new material.
Yes, it looks like Hollywood has got an order from above that every TV show made henceforth must have one prominent LGBT / person of colour / empowered women character (preferably all 3) and this condition creates a creative hurdle for writers, especially with old popular tales. And they are left with no recourse but to convert one of the existing characters to meet this requirement. However, I feel that Hollywood also doesn't mind the outrage it creates, and even feeds it, to generate free publicity for its show (as an old PR adage states, "All publicity is good publicity" - https://www.businessinsider.com/there-2011-2?IR=T ).
Op here. I enjoyed your comment. This was the kind of discussion I was hoping to generate. There is a lot of nuance in this area, but is often filled with a lot of anger (from both sides) that makes discussion difficult.
Moreso with diversity, it's a diverse set of people playing a non-diverse set of characters. The characters are all written to be white, just with non-white people playing them.
They're doing something cool by having the diverse cast, but the writing doesn't adjust to make a story that feels like it has a diverse cast
This is because it's natural for people to view different races as coming from different backgrounds, especially in Medieval fantasy. It's more expected to see several mostly homogeneous nations with unique cultures and offerings to bring to the table, and in fantasy, using them to both unite together against a singular evil, and for some, ally with that evil.
This makes for a more interesting story and lore; it gets people thinking: "Whoa cool, another nation with different people, I wonder what they're all about!"
Whereas in this show, and many like it (Wheel of Time), all nations have been forced together to form a single uninteresting soup where few have any cultural significance or quirks whatsoever, so as to avoid offending anyone with stereotypes, which could lead to (GASP!) mild and harmless racial jesting, stupidly redefined as violence against an oppressed minority group by vocal activists who live and breathe dismantling Western/European culture.
Also these people seem to not read much about the works they mess with, there are plenty of non-white factions in lotr that have less set lore about them.
We can easily add in lore friendly blacks and do it in a way that makes less spoken about factions more interesting.
Why do low effort tokenism when you can do something interesting and still diverse?
The modern world's ubiquitous communication and transportation is increasingly moving people closer and closer to each other's front doorstep. As a result, everyone encounters more diverse people and opinions than they used to.
This is, indeed, not something everyone enjoys. But it is the more or less inevitable direction of the future.
Well, in Tolkien's case it was meant to be proto European mythology. It would also look out of place to place a lot of European or Asian characters in a proto African mythology story. I don't think it's racist to have a story set in a place where peoples of a particular race are all that habitate there.
The modern world is just that, modern. A medieval fantasy world has to play by those rules, in its own sort of ways. They're still walking and riding on horses, and magic is exceedingly rare in Tolkien's world. People don't just travel about.
> Well, in Tolkien's case it was meant to be proto European mythology.
Unsupportable. Tolkien was only concerned with giving England a distinct history. He probably didn't care about Europe and hated everything French.
Almost everyone assumes Middle-Earth is Europe. Try holding Tolkien's famous map of Middle-Earth up to a mirror to see that it is really strikingly similar to North America, too similar to be a coincidence. In fact, he got a lot of his Hobbit surnames from actual family surnames in, iirc, Kentucky; Baggins included.
I'd say it's more of a nitpick. You're right, he was more concerned about an English mythology rather than a European one. But I'm not sure where you're going by bringing up North America...
I thought OP was saying that Middle-Earth was Europe. Apparently, that wasn't his argument. But I wasn't going further than what I said: view Tolkien's map of Middle-Earth in a mirror and you will recognize the coastline and mountain ranges of North America. It is not exact, but it is too similar to be a coincidence. Tolkien did not randomly draw Middle-Earth in that shape, he used a mirror image of North America as a starting point to create the map of Middle-Earth.
Actually, European and Asian characters are definitely going to be relevant to a lot of African mythologies. The Middle East and Europe were right there and there was a lot of interactions.
The same goes for early europe. Plenty of people from either. There were Roman emperors who were indigenous to (Northern) Africa.
Rome was a multiethnic empire. I don't see what being Roman or not has to do with ethnicity.
The Roman people living there being ethically Berber, that is, African. The name Africa itself probably coming from the Afri Berber tribe. They were both Roman people and also ethnically African.
And Berber tribes despite not being from subsaharan Africa did, through thousands of years of contact, have significant ethnic and cultural admixture with various subsaharan African peoples. Not that North Africa is less African than subsaharan Africa.
By Roman I meant having Italic roots. It is a bit disingenuous to call them them indigenous or ethnically African. Especially because his father was of Punic origin and not a Berber as you are implying.
There were multiple Roman emperors born in North Africa. One had mixed Punic and Italic origins, one was a mix between Punic, Berber, and Syrian ancestry, and Caracalla had only Berber ancestry.
Caracalla could not possible be only of Berber ancestry, since neither of his parents were Berber. His father (Septimius Severus, the first "African emperor") was of Punic and Italic origins. Caracalla's mother (Julia Domna) was of Arab origins. The third Roman emperor was his brother Geta.
You are correct on that detail - I mixed up Caracalla and Macrinus, the second of which was of Berber origin and also a Roman emperor. Which is an ironic error from part since Macrinus conspired to kill Caracalla. My original point still stands, however, and I believe you are still mistaken in that.
> Macrinus was born in Caesarea (modern Cherchell, Algeria) in the Roman province of Mauretania Caesariensis to an equestrian family of Berber origins. According to David Potter, his family traced its origins to the Berber tribes of the region and his pierced ear was an indication of his Berber heritage.
You are right, I did forget about Macrinus (mixed Geta's timeline). Though I don't agree with your point still standing. Him being an emperor for a short time was more of a fluke rather than an indicator of something common. Rome was in possession of North Africa for 2 centuries or more by than. He is the only Emperor for who you could claim to be indigenous (as far as we know) North African. And he ruled for only 1 year.
A lot of Romans (i.e. inhabitants of Rome) did not have Italic roots. Most inhabitants of Rome came from conquered regions, either as slaves, as wives, or as traders.
The north africans of roman times have almost nothing in common with the modern arab north africans. The Carthaginians in north africa during roman times were more similar to modern Portuguese.
You are completely and utterly wrong. That DNA was sampled by a Phoenician settler into North Africa of the Phoenician ruling class or Carthage. The vast minority of North Africans at that time had predominant Phoenician ancestry or lived in Phoenician culture.
North Africans are and always were the same people genetically. The North African emperors I am referring to specifically had Berber, not Punic or Phoenician ancestry. Which is still the dominant ancestry in North Africa today, and the Berber culture and language still lives on today.
Unfortunately it seems you are not knowledgeable of the history either of late Rome, of Carthage or of (North) Africa in general, and the authors of that website either did an incredibly poor job at it or are as well.
When you say European, except for the fact that Tolkien wrote the story, what part of the show thus far has given you an explicit European feel? Did the Harfoots resemble British subjects, or do the race of men have to be from the European continent because of their skin color? Which city did Lindon look like? If we're already in a fantasy setting, why is there such a focus on relating the setting of the fantasy to our own European history, rather than telling a good fantasy story. Can you not relate to the story if it isn't explicitly describing a historically accurate proto-Europe?
If the argument is that Middle Earth should reflect a proto-European history, should we just accept that everyone from the east are pictured as orcs; mindless, ugly, uncivilized brutes? Is everyone from Africa part of the Haradrim or the Easterlings? The comparison to a proto-Europe only works as long as you wilfully neglect the horribly racist parts of the comparison. Or are you okay with those parts too? If the addition of a black Harfoot, black elves, or Durin's wife being black is your critique of the show, then you should reflect on why you feel that way and why you're able to so easily excuse the clear racism in favor of defending "authenticity".
It's legit WILD to read some of the remarks about the show on reddit and IMDb. It's horribly racist rhetoric disguised as a defence of authenticity and staying true to Tolkien's work. If portraying the racist parts of Tolkien's work is * that * important, maybe we shouldn't make media based upon it?
> When you say European, except for the fact that Tolkien wrote the story, what part of the show thus far has given you an explicit European feel?
"Middle Earth" was an old phrase used to refer to Western Europe in several Scandinavian languages. Tolkien, being a linguist, would have known this and chosen that turn of phrase deliberately.
You are missing my argument completely. What I'm saying is that yes, Tolkien may have envisioned Middle Earth as proto-European fantasy, but when you're arguing for "historical accuracy", you can't pick and choose. You're arguing about skin color as if a) no people of color lived in Europe at the time, and b) you're completely avoiding touching on the origin of Tolkien's evil races and nations, and in particular orcs. If hobbits, men, and elves need to be white, then orcs necessarily need to be black and brown people, no? They need to be uncivilised brutes who only want to destroy with no mind of their own? That is a simplified depiction of Tolkien's works, but do you think that those prejudices hold, or that they should be depicted in modern media? If yes, then you are a bigot and a racist, and if no, it's WEIRD how the inclusion of people of color is where you're putting your foot down.
PS: read "you" as in the collective you, not you specifically.
> You're arguing about skin color as if a) no people of color lived in Europe at the time, and b) you're completely avoiding touching on the origin of Tolkien's evil races and nations, and in particular orcs. If hobbits, men, and elves need to be white, then orcs necessarily need to be black and brown people, no?
The problem with line of thought is that Lossarnach which mustered to Minas Tirith during the seige of Gondor were described as swarthy (i.e. dark skinned).
Also, the Easterlings were poignantly humanized by Sam.
"It was Sam's first view of a battle of Men against Men, and he did not like it much. He was glad that he could not see the dead face. He wondered what the man's name was and where he came from; and if he was really evil of heart, or what lies or threats had led him on the long march from his home; and if he would not really rather have stayed there in peace all in a flash of thought which was quickly driven from his mind."
All of this is a far cry from the stark dark people bad racism you've posted about a couple of times now.
Finally, the orcs also had slanted eyes, did Tolkien also hate Asians? Are Orcs supposed to be African or Asian? Pegging orcs as "dark people" simply doesn't fit as orcs don't closely match any ethnic group in particular. Orcs aren't even a single race for that matter. In any case, dark skinned=bad sounds a lot like allegory, which Tolkien finds distasteful. It is my theory that due to the time we all live in, you are (subconsciously most likely) hammering a square racism peg in a round hold.
Would you mind explaining how - even in this fantasy world - people living in closed societies would get wildly different features? Somehow elves are different from human who are different from gnomes - it there are 2-3 afro elves or afro-hobbits? That’s what’s jarring about “per quota” insertion of minorities - because it contradicts our experience. One can make southerons look Persian or Indian, but having a token minority is just laughable. And throwing around virtue signaling is not helping your argument.
I'm pretty sure Shakespeare knew what a woman was, but they weren't cast in any of his plays. I doubt Tolkien would give a shit whether actors with dark skin played any of his characters.
Op here.
So my arguement is looking more at fantasy TV/movies in general rather than a particular focus on lord of the rings per se. But it is part of a wider discussion on representation in the European fantasy genre.
As you know, what I am arguing for is that, I think it would be good to continue to have some shows which are 'diverse' and other shows which follow a more tradional casting. Do both.
My concern is that there is political/media pressure to push always for diverse castings in all European fantasy shows. And this could go against good storytelling.
If I'm watching a story about a Japanese Fantasy story - it will feel less immersive if you introduce a blonde character. Likewise with an Indian, or African story. Everyone would think this reasonable.
What some people get upset about, is if we also say this about European fantasy stories. And I don't agree with this (the point that a tiny tiny fraction of people living in Europe may have been nonwhite in the 1400s and below I find mute quite frankly).
I also find it... Not considerate to call someone racist for making this point. And quite frankly its a great example of where we are right now. Film and TV studios terrified in their casting decisions and feeling like they have to please the media etc. Nor am I convinced that global audiences want to see themselves in European fantasy stories. I don't want to see a blonde white guy (or black or Indian guy) in a Japanese Fantasy story etc. etc.
I do feel that including a multicultural diverse population in a European fantasy story does have a large risk of less immersion and I don't agree thats 'racist'. You can do it, but it's a different world and a different experience. What I'm arguing again, is fine do that. But not everything fantasy driven needs to be like that.
The lord of the rings trilogy was not diverse and quite frankly was astounding. Game of thrones was not diverse, and was astounding up to the final season.
The latter was savegly attacked by woke groups for not being diverse and I just so disagree with that view point.
Let's have diverse stories and let's have traditional too. There are lots of good fantasy stories by Western authors that do include diversity (fifth season, and Ursula la guin Wizard of the sea story etc.)
My bet is that the only reason to have "harfoots" is avoiding to pay for the use of the copyrighted word "hobbits" in the near future.
It sounds like a fart. Definitely lacking the talent of Tolkien to find the surgically precise word for each term, but I can understand the legal aspects of the need-for-control part.
I thought it was interesting from a linguistic perspective. These events are 3000-6000 years earlier than those of the Lord of the Rings. The languages would have changed in all that time. I spent time wondering how Harfoot might have evolved into Hobbit or how Hobbit might have arisen and replaced Harfoot.
If you want to hear some strange sounding names, you can look up the actual Westron names of the hobbits - Frodo Baggins and the other Shire names being an "English translation" from the Red Book of Westmarch. Sam's name is actually "Banazîr Galbasi", so maybe he's Turkish.
Middle-Earth most definitely is not based on Europe and claiming such is unsupportable. The geography and map of Middle-Earth is absolutely nothing like Europe, no similarities whatsoever, and no geological process known could make it similar. On the other hand, Middle-Earth is strikingly similar to a mirror image of North America.
I didn't say based IN I said based ON. Those are similar sounding but completely different. The former implies it's actually based in the same country and lands as Europe. Whereas the later implies it's merely inspired by to some degree.
Tolkien borrowed quite heavily from Scandinavian mythology, especially the epic Väinämöinen from Finnish mythology, and seems to have been obsessed with Odin from Norse mythology. Is that what you mean? Because claiming he based his fictional myths and his fantasy fiction on European myths and history is so vague and technically inaccurate that is must be false. Though Italy is firmly in Europe, describing lasagna as European food is at best misleading and at worst false.
Not for nothing, Europe is a continent. Whether you believe Tolkien based his works on or in Europe, both are false on their face. It doesn't even make sense, so please try to better articulate what you mean. Because you literally have argued that Tolkien based the continent of Middle-Earth on the continent of Europe, then you have waffled and changed your argument from in to on. Either way is nonsense. What you must have meant was Tolkien based his stories, not the element of his story setting, Middle-Earth, but the stories themselves, on history and mythology of the various peoples of Europe.
But, in fact, other than Scandinavian epics and myths, and specifically Finnish and Norse epics and myths, that is false.
If you can support your claim, you'd be more convincing. An example of some very similar non-Scandinavian European story found in Tolkien's work would drive your point home. But I am unaware of any example of, say, Italian or Romanian or Polish or Swiss or Danish folk stories or myths being borrowed by Tolkien. And we need not be so vague. Europe was never a single culture, but always many. And Tolkien was not writing to give Europe a history and mythology; that purpose was only for England.
If you don't believe Italy, or the Nordic countries are European I will not be able to convince you. Our world view is simply too different to come to an understanding.
Why specify Europe? Why not just say the Solar System? Or the Western Spiral Arm of the Milky Way? Or the Local Group?
Inexplicably, you chose to be incredibly vague. Just because France is in Europe does not make Europe representative of France. You can say the Eiffel Tower is in the Milky Way, but this is overly broad and imprecise; it makes far more sense to say it is in France.
Similarly, Tolkien borrowed from very specific Scandinavian sources, and that is borrowed; his works are not based upon these sources nor upon ancient Scandinavian culture. To conflate Scandinavia with Europe is the same mistake as conflating France with the Milky Way.
Your claim that Tolkien based his works on Europe is incongruous because it is overly general and imprecise, and it is also a pretty good example of the vagueness fallacy.
It's quite simply because Tolkien's work shows Germanic, Finnish, Greek, Celtic and Slavic mythological influences. That spans almost the entirety of Europe. I don't feel you are arguing in good faith here. Either you are willingly ignoring it's European heritage or just haven't done the research on it.
> It's quite simply because Tolkien's work shows Germanic, Finnish, Greek, Celtic and Slavic mythological influences. That spans almost the entirety of Europe.
He was a gifted linguist, influenced by Germanic, Celtic, Finnish, Slavic, and Greek language and mythology.[1]
Yes, indeed, as the wiki you've drawn from states, Tolkien, the man, was influenced by his studies of various ancient cultures. But to create his fiction he drew from his own life, his Christianity, his experiences during WWI, and Norse and Finnish mythology. Tolkien did not draw on the entirety of the catalog of European mythos to build his world. If you can show me, say, how one of his characters draws from characteristics of a specific Greek hero or god, or likewise for any Germanic, Celtic, or Slavic stories, I'd really be genuinely interested.
I have already named the specific Finnish source that Tolkien borrowed from, and provided a specific example of Tolkien borrowing from Norse sagas, namely, using characteristics of Odin for a few of his characters. Please provide any specific example of Germanic, Greek, Celtic or Slavic influence in Tolkien's work, and name the source. Just one will do, so please take your pick.
Wasn’t the whole point of Lord of the Rings to provide a (made-up) mythology for Great Britain? Middle Earth is ancient Great Britain (or maybe ancient NW Europe) according to Tolkien.
"""
In his 2004 chapter "A Mythology for Anglo-Saxon England", Michael Drout states that Tolkien never used the actual phrase, though commentators have found it appropriate as a description of much of his approach in creating Middle-earth.
"""
So this is critical interpretation and not something he literally said he intended. His quotes (also in the article) suggest he was drawing from English and Norse mythology, of course, but not that the cosmology of Middle Earth is solely English.
>> Sorry, I can't wrap my head around how this comment relates to mine. Can you clarify?
> I don't recall any implication that it was meant to be Britain or Europe only.
LOTR has a few clear mentions to America but is about the feelings of an English literature professor and ex-soldier seeing the good old times, gorgeous nature and European mythology that he loved, being replaced and crushed by industrial development and world war.
The themes are universal, could be adapted to other places and other mythologies, but would lose part of its charm in the process.
Under a disguise of epic fantasy the book is basically a metaphor of twenty century Europe in war times, and is filled with details token directly from his real war experiences and depicted metaphorically or directly. The kind of details that you can't invent or wouldn't notice, unless you had experienced it first. Details like describing how the infantry traveling long distances by foot towards the battle field, get out of the path and start walking into the fresh grass bordering the road to alleviate their sore foot pain.
That experience, plus his obsession to consistence, religious background (christian humanism) and expertise in European myths, old languages and literature, blends all together in a complex history that conveys an incredible sense of realism and immersion rarely achieved by other epic fantasy books.
Tolkien don't needs to be lectured about including strong woman characters in his work, or about the need to talk more about ecology, compassion or racism. Those themes are exquisitely treated in the book yet that is filled with a sense of adventure and a sublime love for nature (to the extent to mention how the raising sun in a foggy day illuminates the spiderwebs in the path).
About racism. This is not "uncle tom's cabin" by Peter Jacksons sake!. Most of the book describes different races allying to fight against the evil and befriending each other while accepting organically that they have other cultures and interests. So... Europe in the war. The book is as anti-racist as you can have
Tolkien didn't deserved that but, most of all, didn't needed to be "improved" like that
I was watching Shameless the other day, and it's a drama-comedy about a dysfunctional poor family in the Chicago South Side. The family is white, and most of the main characters are white. This is really weird, if you've ever been to the South Side. But pretty much everyone quickly gets over that and ends up immersed in it.
The issue with the Rings of Power and similar things isn't the anachronistic racial composition of the cast. It's just that they're badly written and badly acted shows. And, more perniciously, the show's media team likes to draw all attention to the criticisms based on race to make it seem like the main criticisms are all about race to deflect attention from actual, fundamental flaws.
> The issue with the Rings of Power and similar things isn't the anachronistic racial composition of the cast.
Note that it's a myth that everyone in pre-modern Europe was white. This is a white supremacist trope easily proven wrong by, say, digging into the representation of POC in medieval European art.
That centers race a bit much. There weren't black people in medieval Europe, but nor were there white people. We're projecting contemporary racial categories onto a past where they didn't exist. The question of whether there were black people in Europe is akin to asking what did people there think of the USSR.
That said, yes, people we'd currently code as black existed in Europe, though disproportionately in entrepots in the Mediterranean. If you proceed to e.g. Elizabethan England, most people wouldn't have been confused by the sight of a black person (cf Othello), though they'd likely be something of a curiousity (though still not considered black in the contemporary sense).
Also, the idiots complaining about black elves are racist morons. There were, in fact, black elves in Tolkien's world. Though never depicted as such by artists, Eöl the Dark Elf (who was not Moriquendë, i.e. not a member of the Moriquendi or the Elves of Darkness) probably wasn't white. In The Silmarillion, Tolkien goes out of his way to describe Eöl's son as having white skin. There's no reason to do that unless his son was notably distinct in this way from his father.
You’re not understanding his argument. Medieval Europe didn’t have this internalized concept of race or skin color like we do - they categorized people more by religion (catholic, Protestant, Muslim) or origin.
Fair enough, but that still sounds absurdly idyllic and very hard to believe. I would expect it to be the opposite, that there was extreme racism even between different families within the same culture, and mostly only in Europe and not so much in the Middle and Far East. Europeans invented racism, and I would have expected it to have occurred around the fall of the Western Roman Empire. But this is all conjecture.
The in-groups and out-groups always exist, and will be at war perpetually. It’s naive to think such a division would begin and end at something so superficial as skin color; you can go much more specific.
Why would the British man go out of his way to identify himself with those bloody red-haired potato-fetishizing Irishmen? Or the pompous Frenchmen who cover their pervasive stench in perfumes and jam lard into anything they can find in some depraved vision of “high couture”? Or the barbarians and savages of the east, who can’t tell the difference between a puff of wind and God? The 12th century African man hardly runs around thinking “we’re all black, so we’re all the same so nothing to fight about” — they just choose a different division and massacre one another on that basis
You would only bother with white vs black racism when there’s enough blacks to identify against and vice versa; otherwise you choose different boundaries and compete on that. Religion, country, skin color, geography (eg mountain men vs hicks vs cityfolk); there’s more than enough choices to go around. And hell, there’s something stopping you from applying multiple boundaries simultaneously
Your 16th century farming peasant in the corner of England doesn’t see enough Africans or Middle Easterns or Asians to wield race as an effective identity. Your Roman’s could have, but they also had quite the diverse array of colors and folks through varying conquest — race probably played a role in internal conflict (Roman vs roman) but even then religion was clearly the far stronger identifier and a much stronger motivator for their slaughters.
It wasn't idyllic. The Holy Roman Empire suffered millions of civilian deaths during the 30 years war (on the order of a third of its population). It's just the categories people used were things like region or (especially) religion.
Race and racial ideology were developed in Europe, but it was in tandem with the modern era, not before it. Think 17th-19th centuries. It served a concrete purpose: to explain and justify how the leading European nations interacted with their colonial subjects. But there was no reason for race before colonialism, so it never developed because it would have served no purpose then.
This idea of racism being a modern invention is merely an academic theory. There is no doubt there were periodic exterminations of Jews in classical antiquity and atrocities perpetrated against Jews throughout the Middle Ages. Antisemitism is racism.
Though the word "race" was probably coined in tandem with British Imperialism, Black slavery and the modern era, race, in fact, does not exist. Race is entirely a social construction, and regardless of the words used in antiquity, the same concepts were used to discriminate against, stereotype, repress and enslave peoples from the very dawn of civilization.
Though conceptually, racism has existed since the dawn of civilization in pre-recorded history, with dominant peoples discriminating against, stereotyping, repressing and enslaving entire peoples (such as the Egyptian civilization enslaving the Jewish civilization, and including widespread antisemitism from antiquity into the modern era), the concept of race did not enter languages as a specific word until the 15th Century, with the word "race" itself being traced in English to the advent of British imperialism and in Spanish (la raza) to Spanish imperialism.[1] So only in a strictly literal sense did Europeans invent racism, though the English word "racism" itself did not enter language until the late 19th Century or very early 20th Century in America[2] as a reaction to that which had no word yet to describe it, but already existed for centuries in one sense, and for millennia in the wider conceptual sense.
Is it correct to interpret your view as non-Europeans did not view other groups as inferior? That the superiority of the in group is exclusive to Europe? If so, why do you think this only occurred in Europe? What made Europeans different from these other groups?
Moors are not black. Or maybe they are from an US point of view, but nobody in Europe would call them black. Africa is divided by the Sahara desert, and most black people come from Sub-Saharan Africa.
From the Middle Ages through to the 17th century, Europeans depicted Moors as being black,[1] and referred to them as such. Black Africans were also called Moors and "blackmoors" during the same periods. Ignorant European royalty, courtesans, craftsmen, and peasants did not discriminate between foreign cultures: they were racist against all of them.
To engage on this in good faith — I am a longtime Tolkien fan and my gut reaction is to sometimes agree when seeing such casting. But: I am white and have benefitted from a lifetime of seeing myself in entertainment and being the “default” race. When I was a kid, the images of people that I conjured in my head were all white. Which interestingly were confirmed by most Tolkien art. However, certain times I’d see art from non-white cultures (Tolkien is very widely translated) and for someone, at the very least the artist, these depictions rang true and were a source of inspiration and connection. I’m glad to see diversity in casting on a show that hopes for worldwide viewership.
I used to think that. I had a similar knee-jerk reaction when watching the Witcher.
But then, when stories are told and retold, it's not quite the same story each time. Jackson's LoTR follows the books closely, but is not the same. Some plots, like Tom Bombadil, are taken out. Some are modified, like the rivalry between Rohan and Gondor.
Partly it's cinematic but also partly it is about what story the reteller wants to tell. When the Orcs attack Rohan and civilians suffer and run away, it feels like Jackson wants to emphasize the suffering of "normal" people, which gets less attention in the books.
If the reteller has an angle to the story which introduced actors who don't fit the "Nordic white people" angle, it's up to them. It might not be a good angle to take for other reasons, but nothing wrong with having your own slant.
For me, my conclusion is that fantasy really is inclusive. If we had black Romans then why not black Elves? Maybe you can use that to say so etching interesting about race, in a context that mimics normal life but isn't bound by its constraints.
Or maybe it's just woke. I haven't seen the series yet.
All the talk about racial anything, is mostly just noise imo. The only thing that matters at the end of the day is good writing, good acting, good directing, and good cinematography (at least for shows).
Vulcans (and the related Romulans) on Star Trek were always very light-skinned; in the original series and TNG they always appeared with white make-up. Then Voyager had Tuvok (who is black) and no one seemed to mind of complained at the time as far as I can recall. I certainly didn't really take notice of it until today when I started thinking about this entire thing.
Star Trek: Voyager first aired in 1995, so it's been a while. I can't really come up with any meaningful differences between the two cases.
Certainly my reading of "Tolkien's Elves" has always been that they're a very light-skinned (dwarves are more ambiguous). I don't overly care if Elves are black- or white-skinned, just as I don't really care about the skin colour of Vulcans in Star Trek.
Yet at the same time, it somehow feels a bit different. I'm having a hard time to articulate why, but I think a big part of the reason is that it feels more forced with all the rhetoric of the last decade or so where everything and everyone is part of "white supremacist culture" and whatnot over what seem extremely minor issues to me.
Tim Russ was hired to play Tuvok presumably because his audition went well in a kind of "colourblind" hiring that is now, apparently, racist (I have a lot of criticisms of Voyager as a series, but Tim Russ' portrayal of Tuvok is not one of them).
I think what people resent isn't the fact that there are black elves, it's the forcing of it, and that everything is scrutinized at a microscopic level for alleged "racism" (e.g. [1]), and that not going out of your way to be "anti-racist" is racist in itself (as if lots of people don't already have enough problems on their own). I suspect that if the LotR movies had black elves – 20 years ago and in a different time – few people would have raised a ruckus over it.
Fights like this are like argueing over the dishes as a couple: it's not really about the dishes; it's a silly outlet of general dissatisfaction.
> I think what people resent isn't the fact that there are black elves, it's the forcing of it, and that everything is scrutinized at a microscopic level for alleged "racism" (e.g. [1])
Who exactly _forced_ Amazon to do this? That article is just another opinion on the internet. If this is the thought police I think Amazon's gonna be OK no matter how they cast the elves.
What's funny to me is the in-advance-defensiveness when people wanna complain about "woke" casting. Witness the ridiculous discussion about Pinocchio in this discussion driven by the anti-woke complainers, because nobody otherwise cares about a stupid Disney movie for kids. Getting offended at how Pinocchio is portrayed, and they call minorities sensitive LOL
Klingons (which in TOS were obviously supposed to be Soviets) might be an even better comparison: not only did TNG introduce a black Klingon (Worf), but they completely changed how Klingons looked. As far as I can tell, nobody cared -- probably because (past the first season or so) both the show and Michael Dorn were great.
> It feels like the modern world superimposed in a fantasy setting
I know exactly what you mean and I think bridgerton does a great job of it feeling just natural and normal. Acting seems normal in an alternate universe, this feels like what history could have looked like. So it definitely can be done well, but I think it's so much easier to have shows just ignore details and just take you out of it.
As a European, I find it absolutely absurd that peoples immersion is “being broken” by seeing non-white people in a fantasy show.
When I see a dwarf in a fantasy TV show, I don’t see the colour of the dwarfs skin - I see a dwarf. The fact that people are uncomfortable by brown dwarves is ridiculous. What a strange hill to die on.
I am flabbergasted that this is even a topic of such heated debate at the moment. It would appear we, as a species, are not quite as far along as I would have thought.
It's not about being comfortable it's about plausibility, the cultures depicted in fantasy lore tend to be highly homogeneous and isolated to small geographical areas. If the show was demonstrating something like the Roman Empire it's more plausible, kind of like Game of Thrones.
European history should be portrayed accurately, be it fantasy or reality. It seems that those that shout loudest about cultural appropriation are the first to glorify cultural appropriation when it suites their world view.
> European history should be portrayed accurately, be it fantasy or reality
Hard disagree. Fantasy and SciFi can be fun because they don't look like the real world. So many works are based on alternate histories that it's mind boggling to read this statement. Should the enitre genre of historical fantasy not exist?
As a fan of hard science fiction, having a believable history is important, but doesn't have to match today's history. Sounds like maybe you just don't like that genre? But to say it should always be portrayed accurately is not correct.
> European history should be portrayed accurately, be it fantasy or reality. It seems that those that shout loudest about cultural appropriation are the first to glorify cultural appropriation when it suites their world view.
This so much. Mixed skin color withing the same race in a fantasy world makes little to no sense to me. Also the fact that dumb characters (say the hobbit girls for example) are always depicted as white to avoid cheap woke backlash is so much of a clear sign of woke appeasement. At least give African mythology a chance and bring it to our screens, that'd make a lot of sense and would also bring a breath of fresh air to the fantasy world. Wokewashing a LoTR series adaptation gives me vibes of forced and lazy inclusivity.
Is this theoretical, or are you saying this actually happened? I haven't seen this latest show, but for example I had no problems with nonwhite characters in The Witcher. What is a European fantasy show anyway, it's not like they take place in literal Europe?
Somehow nobody complains about loss of immersion when characters are changed to white, which happens 100x more often.
I think it's more common when books are adapted to TV/movies, so it's not as obvious as when they change historical characters or characters from other or older visual media. Often they change the location to North America/Europe and change the characters "organically" as well.
Anyway, here's the ones I can think of right away:
Ancient One in the Marvel movies to Tilda Swinton, although the comic character is kind of a racist stereotype, and would have issues in China, so they had good arguments for doing that change.
Staying in the comic universe, Bane and Ra's al Ghul in Batman movies.
Related to the first one; Benedict Cumberbatch plays Khan in the new Star Trek.
I always find it strange that people take issue with having diversity. Toss all that, if you find "they aren't all white" takes you out of the scene you should do some soul searching I think. If you are taken out of the scene because they're shitty actors then you have a reasonable take.
I think diversity is best done by making it lore friendly and not just retconning things.
Making characters and nations with real substance is far more fun than just going back and changing something for political reasons.
I would rather see an introduction of african type regions in allegory for empires like The malian empire, Abyssinian Empire, Ajuuran Sultanate, or others rather than throw blacks into european type settings.
Even if we wanted to add blacks into europe type settings we could at least add lore reasons.
Many blacks were in spain under muslim rule and even at times the rulers of muslim areas of spain were black.
Just say that part of the continent was invaded, bam you can add in non-whites in a european setting.
We can do these things tastefully and add interesting lore.
As a black man I find it insulting to be given token characters of no substance, I would rather no inclusion than low effort shoe-ins.
I think the main problem is not the fact that they included divers cast. The main problem of modern shows is that they make it one of their main features. If the story and acting are good most people would not care of skin color. If diverse character are included organically into story - that is even better.
I think The Expanse is a good modern example of perfectly-executed diversity. I never felt like I was being beat over the head with racial quotas in that show, either directly in the show's dialogue, or in the mainstream marketing media (which I don't really consume anyway).
> A common counter argument is, well you can suspend your disbelief and imagine a dragon, so why is a diverse community in a small village not ok? It just feels less immersive. Yes, I can go along with it - but I'm not sure it works. It feels like the modern world superimposed in a fantasy setting. I'd prefer to be sent to an alien world.
I think it might be worth thinking about whether this is actually "European fantasty" or just "fantasy" that you're used to as thinking of European. For a thought experiment, imagine a young adult today who has never consumed any sort of fictional media (novels, movies, etc.), but otherwise has the same education in terms of non-fictional things (math, science, history, etc.) that you might expect. If you showed them two portrayals of a Lord of the Rings setting that were identical except for one using only fair-skinned, European-ancestry actors, and the other with the type of "diverse" casting that you're describing, would the latter seem somehow less believable? I'm not convinced that someone who hadn't already been primed to expect fair skinned, European-ancestry actors in fantasy due to having already consumed decades of content with that sort of casting would somehow find that more "accurate" in a world full of elves and dwarves and orcs and other fictional races alongside humans. In a vacuum, I don't think there's really any sort of tension between elements of traditional "European fantasy" (dragons, wizards, sword fights, etc.) and diversity when set somewhere that pretty clearly is not supposed to be set in medieval Europe (or really at anywhere at all in the history of Earth); insisting that some small subset of the lore happening to resemble European fantasy somehow implies that the entire fictional world has to demographically resemble medieval Europe seems like much more of an imposition of external cultural expectations than casting diverse actors is.
The argument that if you can suspend your disbelief for dragons and magic you can suspect your disbelief for a diverse cast is a dumb argument because you could use it for basically anything.
Most fantasy shows that are in English use British accents. It’s what we expect. But why not use a heavy southern U.S. accent? If you van accept this world with dragons and magic why can’t you accept a southern accent?
If it deviates too far from our expectations then it just seems like a bit.
My position, for what it's worth, is that it doesn't matter one inch what the actors are, if the quality in general is good. They could be cats and dogs and I would enjoy it if it was Good. That some of them are black is so irrelevant that it's, frankly, fucking absurd to even talk about it.
Rings of Power, as far as I can tell after watching a single episode, wouldn't be good even if every single detail was exactly as Tolkien imagined it. Because the quality is just not there.
I'll be watching it to the end though, it's not impossible that it might become good.
Middle earth, and lots of fantasy in general is dominated by race and racism. Everyone's personality and stature is decided by their birth, and the breakdown of that system should be a plot point in the story to make the last alliance, though even the final fight is going to be super racist with the good races killing all the bad ones.
Diverse communities within those races is a jarring juxtaposition - they're both super racist and super not racist at the same time.
While I agree that Tolkien likely viewed the races of men, elves, and dwarves to be white, and a show that seeks to adapt his mythology while having a diverse cast will stray from Tolkien's vision, we run into an interesting problem: a LOT of money is being spent on this show. Amazon reportedly spent 250 million to acquire the rights, and another 500 million on the first season. The US Bureau of Labor Statisitics says that there are 51,600 working actors, and they earn on average $23.48 an hour. Assuming 2000 hours a year, that's $2.4 billion spent on acting a year, putting Amazon's current budget of $750 million at roughly a fourth of all money spent on acting. With this in mind, if Amazon were to only hire white actors, in order to be equitable towards those of other races, we would need to guarantee that $250 million went to projects with actors of other races, and those projects would need to be entirely multi-racial. If said projects were in abundance, than I wouldn't be opposed to an all white Rings of Power, but considering that the highest budget project with a majority multi-racial cast I can think of is Nope with a budget of $50 million (and even then there are still white actors), if a company wants to make a nearly $1 billion show, it is necessary for there to be at least some actors of other races. If the show had half the budget, or if there were more projects written by and for a black audience, then I would prefer that it is acted by only white people, but as it stands now, it makes sense for there to be diversity.
If it is a historical story or even a fantasy story taking place in historical times, like say for example king arthur and merlin then I agree with you. But if the story does not take part in europe or a specific place or cultural background the why does it matter. So long as the actors actually a good fit in portraying the character who cares?
The problem a lot of people have is when they read LOTR for example they presume everything is supposed to be relatable only to people of european ancestry. Other than Tolkein being influenced by a european background there is little you can reasonably say it requires europeans for adequately portraying the character.
Stories are meant to be told and if you want to tell a fantasy story to an audience you don't go out of your way to explicitly exclude anyone resembling your audience. That isn't being woke, that is just capitalism. I wouldn't like Abe Lincoln or Hery VIII to be portrayed by a black person but LoTR, Narnia and other stories that are european-inspired but not set in europe don't need such restriction.
I mean where was all this outrage when Cleopatra was portrayed by a white woman for example?
If the actors are good it makes no difference other than the initial phase of "I didn't imagine this character to look this way" but the same goes for hair color, height, stature, etc...
I think a lot more people are thinking this than saying it because it's taboo to say, "You know, skin chroma quotas are not okay", especially the people who disclaim with things like, "I hate the show not because it's woke, but because of..."
We're starting to see more people display courage and stand up to wokeness. It gives me hope.
Hope that you'll no longer need to see diversity in entertainment or that gay folks live among you? Such a strange hope - to insulate yourself from folks that are different.
Being aware of... context? In this day and age of reactionary posts and total lack of empathy? What is that?
To be clear, fully agree. If you include a person who doesn't fit the time and style of where they exist, you need to give me a reason or I won't believe it. Reality is very often unbelievable, and good fiction/immersion requires believability, not reality. (Sidenote: this usually has nothing to do with race and more often how they act.)
For music and literature though, I think it's mostly that the mediums are not visual and so defies our culture of memes or quick messages. Hard to point at a screenshot of text and get likes unless it's under a sentence long. Also, good readers know good writing, and reading is dense enough that the general public won't read. So there's no real reason to go after books.
I want more diversity myself, especially more representation of normal gay characters (problem is is even gay writers always write camp/fem gay characters). And gay characters that aren't old/single/don't show love/get killed off.
But ethnic representation, which is a more visual/cultural representation, is a tough topic. On one hand I want more people of all kinds in everything, on the other I sometimes wonder why non-western countries like China/Japan/India etc aren't being pushed in the same way.
It's the heavy unrealistic looking make-up which breaks the immersion for me. It looks like they could be having a night out in the city rather than adventuring. No realistic looking mud or sweat. I also think the clutter in the environment is too orderly and the lighting too arbitrary. These things might be fine in a magical realm like Alice in Wonderland but I don't think they suit this setting.
I like the diverse casting, it fits the world in my opinion especially since Tolkien populated it with so many different races. What makes my blood boil is the pukeworthy feminist drivel hamfisted into everything. I couldn’t get past the first episode with Galadriel as some kind of warrior aping what should really be a man’s role.
> I'm still thinking about it, but I do wonder if diverse casting works in European fantasy stories.
Hmm, I haven't seen Rings of Power, but your statement seems to be a not-so-subtle for a Think Bigger call for revolutionary new fantasy story settings.
Not just stories, not even worlds, but complete mythical ecosystems.
I've read a few fantasy stories lately by non-white non-male authors that were good, even great, like The Fith Season. Others that I was too dismissive of, with my own ugly biased offhand remarks, like Binti.
Ironically, I'd rather roll up a character in the Binti universe. Which seems like one interesting Litmus test for a "Kuhnian Paradigm" shift in fictional work.
Could I imagine sitting around with friends in a campaign in this world?
We'll always have the classic fantasy setting. It uses metaphor effectively to tackle capitalism and war and minority issues. But you can ironically escape that now. I think others saw that before me too.
Political correctness is going too far in modern western society.
I can close my eyes and enjoy the music of Hamilton. But when I open my eyes and see Tamar Greene is casting George Washington, first words pop into my mind is political correctness. I have to convince myself it's just a music show and have 0 cent relating to politics, but who knows.
I'm still thinking about it, but I do wonder if diverse casting works in European fantasy stories. The problem I have is that it generally pulls me out of the experience/ makes it less immersive. I welcome diverse castings in modern shows (though we don't need every show to follow a template 'diverse' casting). A common counter argument is, well you can suspend your disbelief and imagine a dragon, so why is a diverse community in a small village not ok? It just feels less immersive. Yes, I can go along with it - but I'm not sure it works. It feels like the modern world superimposed in a fantasy setting. I'd prefer to be sent to an alien world.
It is problematic, as years of discrimination in the real world for women/ethnic minorities were wrong and we should encourage equality in the corporate world. However the entertainment industry I wonder should in some ways be exempt. Maybe. One area where there isnt a discussion on 'diversity' is music and also novels. This is because there are tons of tons of novels and music bands to listen to. No one cares if a particular band is 'diverse'. So I wonder if the only solution out of all of this, is to have more shows - yes, make diverse inclusive European fantasy shows, but also make traditional european fantasy shows too etc. What I think will happen is that in such a scenario most European fantasy fans will choose traditional like shows. Because the story is more immersive and you are brought more into this old world. Maybe. Like I say, I'm still undecided. For modern/futuristic films I find diverse castings just as immersive.