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To be maybe controversial... 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 g

To be maybe controversial... 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.

cush 4y ago
The only thing that pulls people out is garbage writing and acting
UnpossibleJim 4y ago
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.
- Maursault 4y ago
  > 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.
  - wsgeorge 4y ago
    > Unsupportable 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...
    - Maursault 4y ago
      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.
    - astrange 4y ago
      If it's an English mythology it should be fine to have English actors in it, like Idris Elba, John Boyega, and Roadman Shaq.
- sudosysgen 4y ago
  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.
ratsmack 4y ago
>European fantasy stories 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.
- 3nd0rph1n 4y ago
  > 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.
  - ryantgtg 4y ago
    What about the dumb harfoot moms who aren’t white? I think you’re seeing what you want to see.
- hn92726819 4y ago
  > 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.
- andrepd 4y ago
  > European history should be portrayed accurately Yes, it's important that the Second Age is portrayed in historically accurate fashion.
hn92726819 4y ago
> 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.
satyrnein 4y ago
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.
- dudul 4y ago
  Can you name 10? I'm actually asking in good faith because I can't recall any "to white" race swapping in the past few years. All the ones I can think of were Ann Boleyn, the little mermaid, the coming beauty and the beast, the recent terrible resident evil, etc.
  - DeathMetal3000 4y ago
    Jesus?
    - irrational 4y ago
      What color skin did his father have?
  - atvcatole 4y ago
    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.
  - School-Cotton 4y ago
    The Ghost in the Shell reboot with Scarlett Johansson
incanus77 4y ago
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.
scarmig 4y ago
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.
- hammock 4y ago
  >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 Not really, unless you consider (as most did in the first half of last century) Irish and Italians to be non-white. The south side is larger and more diverse than you seem to believe
- CharlesW 4y ago
  > 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. https://www.npr.org/2021/05/06/994325620/going-medieval-on-white-supremacists https://www.npr.org/2021/05/06/994325620/going-medieval-on-w... https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/5-myths-about-the-middle-ages/2016/09/22/e56c4150-7f50-11e6-9070-5c4905bf40dc_story.html https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/5-myths-about-the-mi...
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - scarmig 4y ago
    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).
onepunchedman 4y ago
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?
- pvaldes 4y ago
  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.
  - tegeril 4y ago
    Tolkien also named and described the Harfoots, so why would they be any differently copyrighted?
  - Tagbert 4y ago
    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.
zephrx1111 4y ago
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.
VoodooJuJu 4y ago
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.
- Broken_Hippo 4y ago
  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.
thedonkeycometh 4y ago
dgoodell 4y ago
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.
jgerrish 4y ago
> 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.
gsk14 4y ago
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.
- CapricornNoble 4y ago
  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).
rich_sasha 4y ago
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.
- benpxu 4y ago
  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). It's been showing a lack of the first two so far.
Beltalowda 4y ago
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. [1]: https://theconversation.com/how-hollywoods-alien-and-predator-movies-reinforce-anti-black-racism-127088 https://theconversation.com/how-hollywoods-alien-and-predato...
- amalcon 4y ago
  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.
- user_named 4y ago
benpxu 4y ago
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.
ComplexSystems 4y ago
Did Game of Thrones bother you in this way?
darthrupert 4y ago
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.
soueuls 4y ago
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.
- 8note 4y ago
  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
  - docmars 4y ago
    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.
momento 4y ago
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. The mind boggles.
- deleted 4y ago
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- szmb1e 4y ago
- SirZimzim 4y ago
  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.
saghm 4y ago
> 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.
bergenty 4y ago
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.
8note 4y ago
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.
tsian2 4y ago
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.
DanBC 4y ago
You not knowing history is a you problem. Genuinely weird to see people proud of their ignorance. Black people have been in Europe for many centuries. https://twitter.com/erik_kaars/status/1418911714175750147?s=20&t=yaOHnl30YD1aL6e0RiTUhg https://twitter.com/erik_kaars/status/1418911714175750147?s=...
suzumer 4y ago
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.
_8j50 4y ago
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...
stjohnswarts 4y ago
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.
mrcheesebreeze 4y ago
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.
fennecfoxy 4y ago
I hear you. 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.

cush 4y ago

The only thing that pulls people out is garbage writing and acting

UnpossibleJim 4y ago

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.

Maursault 4y ago
> 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.
- wsgeorge 4y ago
  > Unsupportable 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...
  - Maursault 4y ago
    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.
  - astrange 4y ago
    If it's an English mythology it should be fine to have English actors in it, like Idris Elba, John Boyega, and Roadman Shaq.
sudosysgen 4y ago
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.

ratsmack 4y ago

>European fantasy stories 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.

3nd0rph1n 4y ago
> 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.
- ryantgtg 4y ago
  What about the dumb harfoot moms who aren’t white? I think you’re seeing what you want to see.
hn92726819 4y ago
> 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.
andrepd 4y ago
> European history should be portrayed accurately Yes, it's important that the Second Age is portrayed in historically accurate fashion.

hn92726819 4y ago

> 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.

satyrnein 4y ago

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.

dudul 4y ago
Can you name 10? I'm actually asking in good faith because I can't recall any "to white" race swapping in the past few years. All the ones I can think of were Ann Boleyn, the little mermaid, the coming beauty and the beast, the recent terrible resident evil, etc.
- DeathMetal3000 4y ago
  Jesus?
  - irrational 4y ago
    What color skin did his father have?
- atvcatole 4y ago
  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.
- School-Cotton 4y ago
  The Ghost in the Shell reboot with Scarlett Johansson

incanus77 4y ago

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.

scarmig 4y ago

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.

hammock 4y ago
>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 Not really, unless you consider (as most did in the first half of last century) Irish and Italians to be non-white. The south side is larger and more diverse than you seem to believe
CharlesW 4y ago
> 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. https://www.npr.org/2021/05/06/994325620/going-medieval-on-white-supremacists https://www.npr.org/2021/05/06/994325620/going-medieval-on-w... https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/5-myths-about-the-middle-ages/2016/09/22/e56c4150-7f50-11e6-9070-5c4905bf40dc_story.html https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/5-myths-about-the-mi...
- deleted 4y ago
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- scarmig 4y ago
  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).

onepunchedman 4y ago

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?

pvaldes 4y ago
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.
- tegeril 4y ago
  Tolkien also named and described the Harfoots, so why would they be any differently copyrighted?
- Tagbert 4y ago
  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.

zephrx1111 4y ago

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.

VoodooJuJu 4y ago

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.

Broken_Hippo 4y ago
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.

thedonkeycometh 4y ago

dgoodell 4y ago

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.

jgerrish 4y ago

> 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.

gsk14 4y ago

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.

CapricornNoble 4y ago
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).

rich_sasha 4y ago

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.

benpxu 4y ago
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). It's been showing a lack of the first two so far.

Beltalowda 4y ago

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. [1]: https://theconversation.com/how-hollywoods-alien-and-predator-movies-reinforce-anti-black-racism-127088 https://theconversation.com/how-hollywoods-alien-and-predato...

amalcon 4y ago
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.
user_named 4y ago

benpxu 4y ago

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.

ComplexSystems 4y ago

Did Game of Thrones bother you in this way?

darthrupert 4y ago

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.

soueuls 4y ago

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.

8note 4y ago
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
- docmars 4y ago
  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.

momento 4y ago

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. The mind boggles.

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szmb1e 4y ago
SirZimzim 4y ago
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.

saghm 4y ago

> 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.

bergenty 4y ago

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.

8note 4y ago

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.

tsian2 4y ago

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.

DanBC 4y ago

You not knowing history is a you problem. Genuinely weird to see people proud of their ignorance. Black people have been in Europe for many centuries. https://twitter.com/erik_kaars/status/1418911714175750147?s=20&t=yaOHnl30YD1aL6e0RiTUhg https://twitter.com/erik_kaars/status/1418911714175750147?s=...

suzumer 4y ago

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.

_8j50 4y ago

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...

stjohnswarts 4y ago

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.

mrcheesebreeze 4y ago

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.

fennecfoxy 4y ago

I hear you. 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.