7 ms·

I have not seen it myself, but every criticism I've read so far was complaining about "mandatory woke". Some reviews also mentioned other things they don't lik

by glogla 4y ago

I have not seen it myself, but every criticism I've read so far was complaining about "mandatory woke". Some reviews also mentioned other things they don't like, like costumes not being good or fights being cinematic instead of subdued or characters appearing where they shouldn't be if you take Silmarillion into accord ... but I have not read even one review that didn't include some version of "I hate it because it has black people in it" - whether calling it political, woke, "not true to source with regards to casting" or whatever. I am not overstating it - literally one hundred percent of reviews I have seen were about people not liking it because there are non-white people in it.

WastingMyTime89 4y ago
I don’t think all critics of “mandatory woke” can be boiled down to “I hate it because it has black people in it”. I mean I wouldn’t personally use the world woke because it looks mostly devoid of meaning but as a European, the mandatory diversity in American production has reached a point where it sometimes gets very funny. I don’t really mind it because it doesn’t affect the narrative structure of what you are watching most of the time but I must confess that I did roll my eyes at black characters acting normally in the middle of a tavern in medieval Europe recently.
- simonh 4y ago
  There were black peoples, or at least Middle Eastern, all over Medieval Europe. The Arthurian cycle has moorish knights. When Eleanor of Aquitaine married the English king, part of her dowry was a North African city. Are we to believe none of them travelled to England? Berber pirates raided Iceland for slaves so there were whites people in Africa, why not black people in Europe? Some people travelled a lot. The Saxons sent emissaries to what’s now Sri Lanka, while an Armenian Christian monk born in Beijing met the pope and Edward I. In Middle Earth the Numenorians had extensive colonies in the far south of the continent. This obsession with racial segregation is absurd and utterly ahistorical.
  - WastingMyTime89 4y ago
    There is no obsession about racial segregation and I don’t care at all about the fictional universe of Tolkien. I can tell you that the first time people saw black people in my very small hometown in the French countryside during the Second World War, they stopped to ask questions and at least one photo was taken. It’s not racism. It was just completely out of the ordinary which is exactly how I imagine seeing black people in the middle of a tavern would happen in medieval Europe.
    - simonh 4y ago
      I think it very much depends on the tavern. In many places sure, it would be unknown. Could a random village have a black resident, maybe a sailor or member of a trade expedition that happened to settle there? Absolutely. Adventure fiction is often centred on unusual characters with exceptional back stories or circumstances, and people like that did exist.
      - thrown_22 4y ago
        > Could a random village have a black resident, maybe a sailor or member of a trade expedition that happened to settle there? Absolutely. No, because they would have died from the novel diseases the village would have had. There's a reason why when Europeans went anywhere they died by the boat load and pretty much everyone they brought back to Europe also died. It's always fun to remember that Pocahontas died in England after being there less than a year.
        simonh 4y ago
        The Middle East and North Africa had frequent contact with Europe. When thousands of Europeans went on crusade to the Middle East they didn’t all drop dead. The Romans went everywhere. Berber pirates even raided for slaves as far north as Iceland. This is simply not an issue. The Americas was a different situation, they’d been isolated from Eurasia for tens of thousands of years. In Middle Earth the Numenorians had extensive colonies in the far south, and also had contact with the Elves and their ancestral homelands in the northern regions. Again, just not an issue.
- allendoerfer 4y ago
  > I must confess that I did roll my eyes at black characters acting normally in the middle of a tavern in medieval Europe recently. It ruins the whole viewing experience, because you stop buying what you see. Characters are just very obviously not believable anymore. People in present times still react strongly to people of different skin color if they are not used to seeing them. And I am supposed to just let it slide, that a group of illiterate people, whose access to media consists only of some paintings in church to illustrate the Latin sermon they cannot even understand, just did not react whatsoever to some obvious foreigner, who - by definition, not because of the skin color - could very likely have robbed and killed them?
  - docmars 4y ago
    Today, anything that could possibly incite violence or impart "otheredness" towards an "oppressed" people group will not do in film, the risk is too high (albeit manufactured from nothing), lest they experience the total condemnation of Twitter for not following the latest narrative and appealing to this very small group of radical activists who are almost singlehandedly dictating what modern multimedia is allowed to portray.
- hackerlight 4y ago
  > mandatory diversity For everyone except East Asian males. They are generally not allowed into the diversity club unless they're playing a martial arts expert. East Asian women get casted because, well, at least they're women. Maybe they can find themselves a nice non-East Asian boyfriend in the movie. East Asian men can go and screw themselves. God forbid if they included a conservative older white male who isn't portrayed as a heinous villain. You have to remember that the woke writers are not striving for real diversity, they are striving to placate the cultural elite on Twitter and look good in front of their woke friends. It is a status contest. I think this is all part of the reason why "woke" shows get canned so hard. It is so obviously contrived and not reflective of real life. They are not making timeless content.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - docmars 4y ago
    A melting pot devoid of individual culture or expression. It's ridiculous. They forced as many races as they possibly could into the same scenes, representing the "same" peoples to check a box for representation (cheaply) in the most homogeneous way possible, which is half the reason this show is so uninteresting. It removes the entire concept of having different nations with different people who are proud of their culture and ways of being, each with something unique to bring to the table, say in scenarios of war, uniting together against something evil, trade, customs, and everything else that isolated groups represent on their own. Globalism isn't even realistic in a setting like Lord of the Rings, yet here we are.
    - hackerlight 4y ago
      > It removes the entire concept of having different nations with different people who are proud of their culture That's not my issue. I dislike the concept of nations and national culture and borders, and I despise nationalism and ethnonationalism. I just want non-contrived diversity. That means sitcoms that have an actual diverse cast (including political conservatives, Asian and Middle Eastern men, redheads, ugly people, autistic people who aren't there as a gag, guys with small dicks, butch women, and so on) which represents the real world and doesn't alienate and shaft parts of the population for no artistic reasons. And that means a LoTR series that doesn't have diversity where it doesn't belong and where it doesn't make artistic sense.
simonh 4y ago
And a strong female lead. One who according to Tolkien was called “Man Maiden” by her mother, ‘fought’ in several wars, and was identified by Sauron as his principal rival in the Second Age. But having her actually do anything about that on screen is too woke for these people to bear.
A4ET8a8uTh0 4y ago
I am going to rock the boat a little. I am admittedly not a big Tolkien fan ( I think tried reading one book once and, to me, it was worse experience than Ulysses ). I can easily plead ignorance here. Are there any black guys mentioned in those books? If not, not sticking to script is a valid complaint ( see how annoyed people were with Game of Thrones departure -- it is not a question of race; it is a question of movie not matching image in your head ). If yes, its downvoting for the sake of a different political ( anti-woke ) agenda.
- ManuelKiessling 4y ago
  I‘m pretty sure there also aren’t that many US Americans mentioned in those books.
- pvaldes 4y ago
  Minor roles only as southerners "middelearth-terranean" pirates. LOT mimicks the Tolkien World, that was European and catholic, and roots deep in European mythology and about experiencing World War. There is not a lot of room to introduce Asian or African characters in that history and they can distract easily from the immersion. Is not different that seeing white actors posing as American natives in old films with a ridiculous hairpiece and make up. Nobody expects forcing an African character in Chinese mythology, or imposing a white character in each African film, and this is perfectly Ok. Why shouldn't be ok? The current trend to flood histories with stereotypes to please every single possible viewer is frankly annoying. I'm fearing the appearance of the bullied gay dwarf at any moment.
  - sunsunsunsun 4y ago
    I must admit, the sight of a black man entering a tavern full of white people did not urk me in the slightest. In fact, the thought that it might be odd never even entered my mind and never broke my immersion. The characters a bland enough that there is plenty to complain about that does not include their race or sexual orientation. Does "race" even apply considering there is literal other races?
    - 4y ago
beepbooptheory 4y ago
Its so funny people would care about this for a fantasy world where there are actual different races of humans and elves and little guys.
- ManuelKiessling 4y ago
  - glogla 4y ago
    As video gamers have it - there's only two races: white and "political", only two genders: male and "political" and don't forget the only two sexual orientations: straight and "political".
    - docmars 4y ago
      No, the two modes of being are: 1) A natural fit with strongly intuitive significance, or 2) a forced fit where representation is the highest goal at the expense of feeling distracting and nonsensical, even to those being represented.
  - pvaldes 4y ago
    This is not about race, is about culture. You can have any black character in middle earth, --any--, as long as is Southern. Nobody would bat an eye. You can made this character as heroic and positive as you want. Having a black elf is a miscast, because most races in LOTR depict real groups of people or real cultures in Europe. Elves are tall and blonde and represent the Germanic and Scandinavian traditions that Tolkien loved. They are strongly linked to Alpine mountains and European forests. Their language is based in how Nordic languages sound. An Asian actor could fit in the role as long as is tall and thin but a credible African elf is much more complex to construct. Can easily feel out of place and as miscasted as would be seeing a black actor in the role of a german nazi soldier. Harry Potter has black actors, but all of them are from UK (very smart move JK) and share a common culture. Their interactions feel much more realistic and cohesive by that.
ManuelKiessling 4y ago
This. I‘m guilty of relying quite heavily on reviews/star-ratings when deciding what to watch, and avoid low-rated movies/shows. Until some years ago, I‘d just have a glance at the score/stars and make my decision. By now, if something is rated low but my gut feeling tells me that it could be off, I always do a quick check of reviews, and 90% of the time I go „Okay, it’s the racists again“. Also: „high critics score, low audience score on Rotten Tomatoes == racist and/or LGBTQ-haters being racist and/or LGBTQ-hating“ is a frighteningly precise heuristic.
- docmars 4y ago
  Perhaps it's telling of a highly problematic and sudden shift in society's values that the majority have rejected wholesale, and for good reason. Social (in)justice took the world by storm almost instantly as governments, corporations, and other large entities flocked to using controversy to fuel their greed while they haphazardly feign a set of supposed virtues that only a tiny, fractional minority care about -- and among them, even many of them abhor what is happening with wokeness. It is but a temporary fad/trend that will eventually die, and the world will finally go back to normal again when people get bored of it all, and thank God for it.
Macha 4y ago
It's so "mandatory woke" that the hobbits are rowdy drunkards with Oirish accents
pjc50 4y ago
This is also a problem on Steam reviews.

by glogla 4y ago

WastingMyTime89 4y ago

I don’t think all critics of “mandatory woke” can be boiled down to “I hate it because it has black people in it”. I mean I wouldn’t personally use the world woke because it looks mostly devoid of meaning but as a European, the mandatory diversity in American production has reached a point where it sometimes gets very funny. I don’t really mind it because it doesn’t affect the narrative structure of what you are watching most of the time but I must confess that I did roll my eyes at black characters acting normally in the middle of a tavern in medieval Europe recently.

simonh 4y ago
There were black peoples, or at least Middle Eastern, all over Medieval Europe. The Arthurian cycle has moorish knights. When Eleanor of Aquitaine married the English king, part of her dowry was a North African city. Are we to believe none of them travelled to England? Berber pirates raided Iceland for slaves so there were whites people in Africa, why not black people in Europe? Some people travelled a lot. The Saxons sent emissaries to what’s now Sri Lanka, while an Armenian Christian monk born in Beijing met the pope and Edward I. In Middle Earth the Numenorians had extensive colonies in the far south of the continent. This obsession with racial segregation is absurd and utterly ahistorical.
- WastingMyTime89 4y ago
  There is no obsession about racial segregation and I don’t care at all about the fictional universe of Tolkien. I can tell you that the first time people saw black people in my very small hometown in the French countryside during the Second World War, they stopped to ask questions and at least one photo was taken. It’s not racism. It was just completely out of the ordinary which is exactly how I imagine seeing black people in the middle of a tavern would happen in medieval Europe.
  - simonh 4y ago
    I think it very much depends on the tavern. In many places sure, it would be unknown. Could a random village have a black resident, maybe a sailor or member of a trade expedition that happened to settle there? Absolutely. Adventure fiction is often centred on unusual characters with exceptional back stories or circumstances, and people like that did exist.
    - thrown_22 4y ago
      > Could a random village have a black resident, maybe a sailor or member of a trade expedition that happened to settle there? Absolutely. No, because they would have died from the novel diseases the village would have had. There's a reason why when Europeans went anywhere they died by the boat load and pretty much everyone they brought back to Europe also died. It's always fun to remember that Pocahontas died in England after being there less than a year.
      - simonh 4y ago
        The Middle East and North Africa had frequent contact with Europe. When thousands of Europeans went on crusade to the Middle East they didn’t all drop dead. The Romans went everywhere. Berber pirates even raided for slaves as far north as Iceland. This is simply not an issue. The Americas was a different situation, they’d been isolated from Eurasia for tens of thousands of years. In Middle Earth the Numenorians had extensive colonies in the far south, and also had contact with the Elves and their ancestral homelands in the northern regions. Again, just not an issue.
allendoerfer 4y ago
> I must confess that I did roll my eyes at black characters acting normally in the middle of a tavern in medieval Europe recently. It ruins the whole viewing experience, because you stop buying what you see. Characters are just very obviously not believable anymore. People in present times still react strongly to people of different skin color if they are not used to seeing them. And I am supposed to just let it slide, that a group of illiterate people, whose access to media consists only of some paintings in church to illustrate the Latin sermon they cannot even understand, just did not react whatsoever to some obvious foreigner, who - by definition, not because of the skin color - could very likely have robbed and killed them?
- docmars 4y ago
  Today, anything that could possibly incite violence or impart "otheredness" towards an "oppressed" people group will not do in film, the risk is too high (albeit manufactured from nothing), lest they experience the total condemnation of Twitter for not following the latest narrative and appealing to this very small group of radical activists who are almost singlehandedly dictating what modern multimedia is allowed to portray.
hackerlight 4y ago
> mandatory diversity For everyone except East Asian males. They are generally not allowed into the diversity club unless they're playing a martial arts expert. East Asian women get casted because, well, at least they're women. Maybe they can find themselves a nice non-East Asian boyfriend in the movie. East Asian men can go and screw themselves. God forbid if they included a conservative older white male who isn't portrayed as a heinous villain. You have to remember that the woke writers are not striving for real diversity, they are striving to placate the cultural elite on Twitter and look good in front of their woke friends. It is a status contest. I think this is all part of the reason why "woke" shows get canned so hard. It is so obviously contrived and not reflective of real life. They are not making timeless content.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- docmars 4y ago
  A melting pot devoid of individual culture or expression. It's ridiculous. They forced as many races as they possibly could into the same scenes, representing the "same" peoples to check a box for representation (cheaply) in the most homogeneous way possible, which is half the reason this show is so uninteresting. It removes the entire concept of having different nations with different people who are proud of their culture and ways of being, each with something unique to bring to the table, say in scenarios of war, uniting together against something evil, trade, customs, and everything else that isolated groups represent on their own. Globalism isn't even realistic in a setting like Lord of the Rings, yet here we are.
  - hackerlight 4y ago
    > It removes the entire concept of having different nations with different people who are proud of their culture That's not my issue. I dislike the concept of nations and national culture and borders, and I despise nationalism and ethnonationalism. I just want non-contrived diversity. That means sitcoms that have an actual diverse cast (including political conservatives, Asian and Middle Eastern men, redheads, ugly people, autistic people who aren't there as a gag, guys with small dicks, butch women, and so on) which represents the real world and doesn't alienate and shaft parts of the population for no artistic reasons. And that means a LoTR series that doesn't have diversity where it doesn't belong and where it doesn't make artistic sense.

simonh 4y ago

And a strong female lead. One who according to Tolkien was called “Man Maiden” by her mother, ‘fought’ in several wars, and was identified by Sauron as his principal rival in the Second Age. But having her actually do anything about that on screen is too woke for these people to bear.

A4ET8a8uTh0 4y ago

I am going to rock the boat a little. I am admittedly not a big Tolkien fan ( I think tried reading one book once and, to me, it was worse experience than Ulysses ). I can easily plead ignorance here. Are there any black guys mentioned in those books? If not, not sticking to script is a valid complaint ( see how annoyed people were with Game of Thrones departure -- it is not a question of race; it is a question of movie not matching image in your head ). If yes, its downvoting for the sake of a different political ( anti-woke ) agenda.

ManuelKiessling 4y ago
I‘m pretty sure there also aren’t that many US Americans mentioned in those books.
pvaldes 4y ago
Minor roles only as southerners "middelearth-terranean" pirates. LOT mimicks the Tolkien World, that was European and catholic, and roots deep in European mythology and about experiencing World War. There is not a lot of room to introduce Asian or African characters in that history and they can distract easily from the immersion. Is not different that seeing white actors posing as American natives in old films with a ridiculous hairpiece and make up. Nobody expects forcing an African character in Chinese mythology, or imposing a white character in each African film, and this is perfectly Ok. Why shouldn't be ok? The current trend to flood histories with stereotypes to please every single possible viewer is frankly annoying. I'm fearing the appearance of the bullied gay dwarf at any moment.
- sunsunsunsun 4y ago
  I must admit, the sight of a black man entering a tavern full of white people did not urk me in the slightest. In fact, the thought that it might be odd never even entered my mind and never broke my immersion. The characters a bland enough that there is plenty to complain about that does not include their race or sexual orientation. Does "race" even apply considering there is literal other races?
  - 4y ago

beepbooptheory 4y ago

Its so funny people would care about this for a fantasy world where there are actual different races of humans and elves and little guys.

ManuelKiessling 4y ago
- glogla 4y ago
  As video gamers have it - there's only two races: white and "political", only two genders: male and "political" and don't forget the only two sexual orientations: straight and "political".
  - docmars 4y ago
    No, the two modes of being are: 1) A natural fit with strongly intuitive significance, or 2) a forced fit where representation is the highest goal at the expense of feeling distracting and nonsensical, even to those being represented.
- pvaldes 4y ago
  This is not about race, is about culture. You can have any black character in middle earth, --any--, as long as is Southern. Nobody would bat an eye. You can made this character as heroic and positive as you want. Having a black elf is a miscast, because most races in LOTR depict real groups of people or real cultures in Europe. Elves are tall and blonde and represent the Germanic and Scandinavian traditions that Tolkien loved. They are strongly linked to Alpine mountains and European forests. Their language is based in how Nordic languages sound. An Asian actor could fit in the role as long as is tall and thin but a credible African elf is much more complex to construct. Can easily feel out of place and as miscasted as would be seeing a black actor in the role of a german nazi soldier. Harry Potter has black actors, but all of them are from UK (very smart move JK) and share a common culture. Their interactions feel much more realistic and cohesive by that.

ManuelKiessling 4y ago

This. I‘m guilty of relying quite heavily on reviews/star-ratings when deciding what to watch, and avoid low-rated movies/shows. Until some years ago, I‘d just have a glance at the score/stars and make my decision. By now, if something is rated low but my gut feeling tells me that it could be off, I always do a quick check of reviews, and 90% of the time I go „Okay, it’s the racists again“. Also: „high critics score, low audience score on Rotten Tomatoes == racist and/or LGBTQ-haters being racist and/or LGBTQ-hating“ is a frighteningly precise heuristic.

docmars 4y ago
Perhaps it's telling of a highly problematic and sudden shift in society's values that the majority have rejected wholesale, and for good reason. Social (in)justice took the world by storm almost instantly as governments, corporations, and other large entities flocked to using controversy to fuel their greed while they haphazardly feign a set of supposed virtues that only a tiny, fractional minority care about -- and among them, even many of them abhor what is happening with wokeness. It is but a temporary fad/trend that will eventually die, and the world will finally go back to normal again when people get bored of it all, and thank God for it.

Macha 4y ago

It's so "mandatory woke" that the hobbits are rowdy drunkards with Oirish accents

pjc50 4y ago

This is also a problem on Steam reviews.