What's the justification for the belief that representation has any impact on the real world? Asian actors and athletes have been almost invisible in popular culture for years--Asian incomes are the highest in the country. By contrast blacks have a much larger cultural cachet and the lowest income/wealth of any racial group.
How can representation not have an impact? In the real world Indian Americans have been earning more than anybody else for years, followed by Filipino Americans. Who are the role models for those two groups? Apu from the Simpson and ...? In the meantime if there was any correlation between representation and economic well being why are blacks as a group so poor?
Claiming territory in the culture war, if you really want to get cynical about it.
It's the same reason why removing statues of Confederates and renaming high schools named after them is so important to the identarian left (and why keeping them is so important to some other people). As long as those statues stay up and those high schools are still named after Jeff Davis and Robert E. Lee, those communities are Red Tribe Territory. (Note whose statue got torn down once the US "won" the second gulf war.) At some point it stops being about the thing and purely becomes "I want X to happen because Other Tribe *doesn't* want it to happen".
Casting Ariel as Black in a Little Mermaid remake is clearly planting a big Blue Tribe flag right in the middle of disputed cultural territory and daring anybody to come out and try and tear it down. They'll be easy targets.
If The Rings of Power was cast with famous rappers and featured a bunch of hip hop then viewers would say "We get it, it's supposed to be a rap interpretation of Tolkien" and there would be no issue. As it is the casting just feels lazy and slipshod and when that's descriptive of the show in general it's just one more straw.
One is well written and one isn't. One has good casting and and doesn't. One uses more real sets and the other uses more CGI.
Oh, and one respects the fans and one doesn't. Both shows are focused on female empowerment (in part) but only one is doing it in a way that doesn't feel like pandering.
I am enjoying it so far. It feels like the first 4 seasons of GoT. And it is so much better when compared to RoP.
I tried watching the first two episodes of RoP and kept turning it off every 10 minutes. It just wasn't well done or well written or well cast. I didn't care one bit about the non Tolkien race swapping. I have tried to turn on episode 3 but keep getting a sense of revulsion that prevents me.
It seems like RoP is already on the road to being WoT, which was a complete mess and I hope Amazon will just stop with season 2 of that and sell the rights to someone else.
I watched the first two episodes of Rings back to back and by the end of it I had no interest in the third.
My wife, who admittedly isn't really into this fantasy and Sci-Fi stuff, fell asleep midway through the first episode, woke up early into the second, and fixed me with a look of pure disgust that it was still going.
Though I could be wrong here, one subtext I got from Freddie's piece is that indirectly legitimizing "you're just racist" as the kneejerk clapback to critiques of diverse shows is ultimately harmful regardless of whether the diverse show in question is a DEI wet dream or an actually good show.
She-Hulk seems to be the Marvel version of the 1960s Batman TV series--in other words, deliberately campy. I would call it a bad show in some ways, but they're doing it on purpose (as opposed to other bad Marvel stuff that was completely earnest) and that does make it a little more interesting.
The big part you’re missing here is that diversity casting (and crew) now allows for multiple waves of marketing through accusing anyone critiquing the product as bigots/racists. Disney pioneered it and Amazon is embracing it.
I think it’s worth noting that it has gone from being an implicit act of self-righteousness by the creators to an explicit act of commodification by the corporations.
I wish with all my heart that it did. But no. Somehow it recognized "Bilbo" but made the second sentence look like I was having a stroke while writing it.
My own personal suspicions dovetail with Freddie's- at some point, the symbolic wins of diverse casting became such low-hanging fruit to the point of solipsism, and the thrill of winning skirmishes in the war of pop culture engagement and triggering the cons became the high fructose corn syrup to the vegetables of closing the black white wealth and education gaps.
At the risk of being ungenerous to people I've never met on the internet, I almost suspect that if given the choice between a world in which the racial wealth gap quietly vanished and a world in which the next 30 Marvel movies had no white male actors, a lot of people would choose the latter because a world with no racial wealth gap wouldn't get engagement and trigger republicans on twitter.
I think that Hollywood sees this as a way to close doors to the industry. If all diversity means is putting the kids of Lenny Kravitz, Denzel Washington, etc. in movies then that's perfect for their endgame. Speaking as a (gulp) white male writer who's had multiple execs at networks, multiple agents, and multiple showrunners tell me that they'd like to hire/rep me but couldn't because I happen to not have fashionable physical traits, it's a little frustrating to watch. I have writer friends going through the same thing, and it's of course not an issue for the children of celebrities or the kids of agents. A fun game to play is every time you watch something, see who the actor is related to or figure out what extraordinary privilege did they come from. My partner is an exec at a network and she tells me horror stories about having to buy stuff because someone is the kid of the right person, or they have to cast a certain celebrity's kid in a role per the directive of the higher ups. She's also now getting material submitted with headshots, because how one looks is the most important trait in a writer. The same people who beg for "diverse voices!" fist pump when they get Judd Apatow's kid in for a pitch.
The result of all this is that people who come from working class backgrounds have little shot vs. creatives like Chloe Zhao, whose father was an exec at a state-owned Chinese steel company before going into real estate. She has likely benefited directly more from slavery than anyone in America, but... that's okay because of some vague reasons? Again, she can be very talented, but once you start trying to find the logic anywhere, it makes you go nuts.
This may sound like sour grapes, but it honestly comes from genuine concern for the industry as a whole. The only people making out (for the most part) are the very wealthy and connected, while the Guilds piss on their membership in favor of ineffective diversity programs that churn through the lower levels. Actual, meaningful changes that would open up the pipeline (why in the world of zoom does anyone need to be based in LA anymore? Why do creatives need agents for anything at all when they can hire a lawyer to read a contract?) are ignored in favor of empty gestures, ensuring that everything stays the same while giving off the glow of being different. It sucks, it's non-competitive and it shows in the art and people's engagement with it.
How long before we get a good indie film about a white male writer who has to hire a black person to feign authorship of his brilliant screenplay about a black writer in the 1950s who could not get his work on screen because he was a black writer, until he got a white guy to feign authorship?
There is one way we could fix this which no one seems brave enough to advocate for: total and complete destruction of the data centers that host social media servers. There would be a withdrawal. But eventually like any addiction slowly people's brains might come back to normal.
I wouldn't worry about that one too much honestly states can just do things. No way it would cause worse problems then social media causes now. Biden could just order the military to seize the data centers
I'm not endorsing terrorism but given how popular eco-terrorism was in the 90s I do find myself surprised that there's no comparable anti-internet movement
the network effects that make social media what it is take long enough to kick in that, by the time any one website became dominant you would be able to destroy the data centers again fairly quickly.
I don't care what anyone does or doesn't write, just that we destroy the serves that host social media. the problem isn't the sites, it's the network effects that mean everyone is on the same website and the algorithms that control our minds. Best to just destroy the servers. it's not an arms race if the equilibrium is a bunch of fractured and obscure sites. the issue isn't the content it's the fact that everyone is on the same site having that content beamed into their brain.
I don't think you understand what I'm saying. i couldn't care less about social media if there are thousands of sites. once everyone is on the same 4 sites due to network effects then those 4 are easy to destroy. "sites popping up" is completely irrelevant. I couldn't give less of a shit if there are 400 social media sites and everyone is on a different one. But network effects mean that over time once a given site gets a critical mass everyone will migrate to that site. once that happens it's very easy to destroy the website and then it takes another 4 or 5 years until a new site is able to get that crticial mass. the pace is slow enough that it's actually very easy to keep up with destorying them as needed.
This doesn't exactly defeat your (excellent) point, but since you hold it up as evidence: the Peggy Olson gif comes from S7, E12 "Lost Horizon," in which Peggy is moving into McCann for good—you're conflating this with the storyline where she moves to Cutler, Gleason, and Chaough for a few episodes before CGC merges with Sterling Cooper.
But also: "It's definitely something that has taken on a life of its own that I feel slightly removed from, but I'm proud of," Moss added.
Cathartic as always, sir. It's become painfully obvious to me in recent years that major studios are totally leveraging the culture war so that we don't notice things like the death of mainstream entertainment for, you know, actual adults. Who can read. And who don't give a shit about comic books.
Emma, do you remember what action movies were like before the Marvel machine? I remember that back in the 80s and 90s "summer movie" was a synonym for "stupid movie." "Men in Black" was treated as totally amazing because it was an action movie that wasn't completely idiotic.
I can understand not liking Marvel movies if you don't like action/adventure/escapist movies in general. But I hate how people are acting like the Marvel movies are displacing award-winning Oscar bait movies, when what they are actually doing is displacing dumb action movies with somewhat smarter ones.
In the 90s most action movies were like "Suburban Commando," "Wild Wild West," "3 Ninjas," and "Mortal Kombat." Movies like "Men In Black" were rarities. Action movies today are a lot smarter and have stronger characterization than they did in the past and Marvel is a big part of that.
Good Marvel movies are terrific, easily as good as the classic action movies of any other era. Bad ones are garbage, but significantly better than the garbage from earlier eras (or even the garbage of today, even the worst Marvel movies are better than the "Transformers" movies).
You are of course, right that every time period has produced really great action movies. But I would say the the ratio of good to bad has increased lately. The worst Marvel movies are significantly better than the worst action movies of earlier time periods. I would say that the worst Marvel movies are at least as good as a mediocre action movie from the 80s or 90s and better than a bad one. I would rather watch a bad Marvel movie than a generic bad action movie from back then.
I'm really struggling to think of an MCU movie I'd put on the same level as, say, Terminator 2, Aliens, Die Hard, Men in Black, hell even the non-MCU Marvel movies have produced better than almost all of the MCU (Spider -Man 2, X-Men: Days of Future Past). I guess the Guardians movies, maybe?
MCU is just license plate factory mediocrity. They're stamped out on an assembly line.
I think the best MCU movie is probably "Captain America, the Winter Soldier," and I would put it on the same level as the other movies you mentioned. It has a really strong plot with some weighty themes and good twists. It also has great action sequences that rely less on CGI than a lot of the other MCU movies do. I would also put "Thor Ragnarok" up as one of the great action-comedies. I might also put "Iron Man," "Guardians 2," and "Homecoming" up there as great action films.
I think "Infinity War" and "Endgame" had some flaws, but in general really admired a lot of the risks they were willing to take. "Infinity War" was willing to have a downer ending and was willing to follow a huge cast of characters. It felt like someone had finally managed to make a movie that equaled the grandeur of a superhero crossover event comic with dozens of tie-in issues (I have read a number of these and the good ones are truly glorious pieces of collaborative storytelling). I really admired that "Endgame" was willing to allow the effects of the movie to have a large-scale geopolitical impact on the world that wasn't totally undone at the end. They are really remarkable films and there isn't anything really like them.
"Spider-Man No Way Home" is one of the greatest sequels of all time, as it manages to serve as a sequel to three different movies at once. And it wasn't just focused on reminding you of the existence of those earlier movies. It was a character-driven movie where the goals and motivations of the characters greatly affected the outcome of the plot. Each returning character from each part of the franchise was different and contributed something.
Also, while it did have some plot issues, I really enjoyed how anti-woke "Black Panther" was. The entire message of the movie was "All those people who talk about revolution and the need for violent social change are actually immature bloodthirsty maniacs. Gradual, peaceful change is the way adults get things done." I honestly couldn't believe a movie with a message like that could get made in this day and age.
Cliche? These movies can be about literally anything. There's tremendous variation even within the MCU movies, even within the same character's series of movies. The first Captain America is a WW2 period piece, the second is an espionage thriller, the third is an epic tragedy.
There's so many cliches they avoid that it's refreshing. I remember the first time I watched Captain America 2 I kept expecting him and Black Widow to end up together because that's what the main guy and girl did in every action movie from when I was a kid. But not only did they not, they just remained friends and professionals the whole time! During Endgame I expected them to just go back in time and completely erase the events of the last movie, but instead they allowed the consequences of the five-year time-skip to persist and affect the future movies.
When I was a kid in the 90s people complained that superhero movies were stupid and cliche. And they had a point, for every "Batman" or "Mask of Zorro" there was a "Steel" or a "Batman and Robin." But then superhero movies really upped their game over the past two decades. But weirdly, their critics didn't. They repeat all the same criticisms of them, even though they aren't true anymore.
The difference is that those movies were fun to watch and didn't take themselves seriously. Marvel movies act extremely self-important are visually uncomfortable to watch because everything's either oversaturated or the cameras spinning a mile a minute and you can't hear any dialogue. Dumb popcorn is fine I just wish that it was fun to watch still
Are you sure you aren't confusing them with the DC movies or Transformer movies? What you wrote seems like a pretty apt description of "Man of Steel" "Batman v Superman," or "Transformers 3." Most of the Marvel movies have a self-deflating sense of humor (except "Eternals," which was terrible). And they have definitely got more fun and goofy recently, not less (probably because of the success of "Guardians," which was basically a comedy). Compare the first and second "Thor" movies to the third and fourth.
I wouldn't say Marvel content has a "self-deflating" sense of humor. To me the movies and shows are chock full of sarcastic barbs to avoid sincerity. They're not really all that funny or relational to the story (like funny situations), it's just typically sarcastic bickering between characters that will end on a "Really?" or a "seriously?" because originality is not a strong suit of these releases.
Interesting point. One slight complication is that MCU come out at all times of year, as opposed to just the summer. They are also, possibly, displacing more (ahem) interesting/adult fare due to their astounding budgets and the cultural esteem they are held in/air they take up.
Just as an aside, I do like action/adventure/escapist movies but consider the source material of MCU/DC to be a bit wanting. More movies based on books instead of comic books!
Marvel movies have absolutely decimated the film industry--tons has been written on this. Every studio chasing Feige's Marvel model has sucked the industry dry of money that used to in part go to the midbudget movie made for adults, which has essentially disappeared.
95% of movies made now are either microbudget or huge bloated CGI messes. The only people that can get anything else made are directors like Rian Johnson or Christopher Nolan, and that's because they did the time making the CGI slop (I think their CGI slop is better than par, but that's neither here nor there for the point I'm making.)
I make a point of watching movies from the '70s and '80s a lot of the time--for instance, I just watched Ridley Scott's middling Black Rain which had a budget in 1989 of $30 million. Can you imagine any studio giving anybody the equivalent in 2022 dollars of $70 million to go shoot an original screenplay in Tokyo? I sure can't.
The early 90s were the pinnacle of action films, peaking with the one-two punch of The Fugitive (Harrison Ford) and In the Line of Fire (Clint Eastwood). It also had Terminator 2, which I think is overrated but still has a hell of an opening and finish. Even in the falloff, it had Independence Day, which for all its many sins is a shit-ton better than any of the crap you listed--without ID, ain't no MiB or Will Smith outside of TV. Total Recall, True Lies, Fifth Element? Beginning of the MI franchise? Starship Troopers, harmed by the breastjob with a brain cell, but still an interesting satire that's better regarded today than it was then. Oh, and perhaps you've heard of The Matrix? Jurassic Park? Oh, hey yeah, fucking SPEED?
Hey, at least the "main themes" for WWW and Mortal Kombat are great party music that lived on far beyond the lifespan of the original films. (Finish him!) I can't say the same about Marvel movies' music.
It's also nice to remember these days that Will Smith had a respectable career, once upon a time.
Also, as long as the movie frame defines you according to your position on the putative (non)existence of an a-pre-historical dwarf of colour, nobody is noticing that Lenny Henry is still a really shit actor.
I do have to say, I do have an issue with the sort of lazy multicultural casting choices we see in a lot of modern fantasy shows...like for example Amazon's new Rings of Power show.
I have no problem with the idea of black dwarves, black elves, black hobbits, etc. It's great. But I do have a major issue with just sprinkling actors of various races down randomly with no thought as to what it means for worldbuilding.
For example, on the new LOTR show, there's a hobbit analogue (the Harfoots) who seem to have a nomadic gathering society - a tribe of 150 people or so. There are black Harfoots and white Harfoots, but oddly not really many racially ambiguous ones. This...makes no sense at all...because in a race-blind society that small everyone would blend together within a few generations even if there was some original differences. At first I thought maybe the casting choices were supposed to be ignored by the audience (like when family members have different accents), but the show explicitly told us the black mother of the white lead Harfoot is a stepmother, so we're clearly not supposed to think that.
The thing is, they could have done representation just fine by making all the Harfoots black. There's even some basis for this within Tolkien, because by the time of LOTR the Harfoots are a hobbit clan noted for darker skin than the rest. So they could have had representational casting, realistic worldbuilding, and maybe used the casting to make some sort of statement regarding indigenous peoples.
Other examples abound too. Like the humans from the Southland are shown as a mix of white/black. Why not make them all POC, since it's explicitly noted within the show they were under elven occupation for centuries, and it's a way to reference real-world colonialism visually? They could have made all of the dwarves black and added some real-world representation while making the traditional distrust between elves and dwarves have more real-world heft. By just sprinkling people of color everywhere, they completely ignore the power that casting choices can make, and it's very frustating.
My headcanon here is that we're treating skin color as being kinda like hair color - different populations might have different skews, but blending the genes together doesn't blend everyone into having the same skin color, and instead produces a distribution where some in each generation are dark-skinned and others are light-skinned.
For me it works pretty well, though also I'm the sort that might not have really noticed it at all if it weren't for online discourse. YMMV, and I don't hold too much of a grudge against folks who find it immersion-breaking.
In general I just wish we'd tell more stories (both in fantasy and historical drama) that are actually built around nonwhite characters, rather than just casting nonwhite people in European-focused stories, but whatever.
Though it's problematic in its own way, as out of all the African countries to pick, they chose Dahomey, which was entirely built around being a willing participant in the Atlantic slave trade.
Yeah, they set it near the twilight of the slave trade (in the 1820s) and turned the female soldiers into the "good guys" opposing slavery, but still, there were more heroic stories to tell in West Africa, and I'm worried it may whitewash history a bit too much.
The mythology used in most bog-standard fantasy series is based upon some mixture of English, Norse, German, and Greco-Roman folkore. It's pretty explicitly a retelling of mostly European-based mythology, even though some authors try to put a unique 'spin" on it. Not to mention the use of historic European titles of nobility, knighthood, etc. So just like most historical drama retells the same stories about Europe, most of the more popular fantasy series retell stories originally told within Europe.
I mean, that could be fun if it was done consciously as a real attempt at recontextualization! Hamilton is great because it's not merely a musical about the Founding Fathers which happens to cast all the Americans as POC, but because it manages to draw parallels between the lives of people in the late 18th century (who it's now popular to dismiss entirely) and those in the present day.
The key though is it needs to be deliberate and thought out, not just throwing representation points against a wall to see what sticks.
I sort of agree! For historical drama, I 100% agree and think we should see more stuff about non-white cultures.
In fantasy, that can be complicated, because "white" is a historically constructed concept, not just a skin tone. So in a fantasy world with a different culture and different history, it is entirely probable that the concept of "white" wouldn't really have much useful meaning, or could mean something totally different. This can lead to weirdness when it intersects with casting - for instance, almost certainly a harfoot thinks about skin color quite differently than we do, and it would be weird to force our own highly contingent racial constructs on to a fantasy world with a totally different history. But in the real world of TV production, we all know that casting black folks to play these characters probably required a certain amount of intentional push, and as a business decision both risked antagonizing some viewers but also served as useful marketing for other viewers.
I personally feel like, by casting people of different skin tones and portraying a culture with a very different relationship to race than our own, Rings of Power IS depicting a non-white society, in the sense that whiteness is really about a particular system of racial hierarchy rather than being specifically about skin color. That said, a sort of generic fantasy veneer lies over the whole thing that feels very "white," and it's going to be difficult to escape that when you're adapting someone like Tolkien.
Extra toughness here comes from the fact that fantasy is a relatively niche genre that nonetheless requires huge budgets to do well. So the works that get adapted are usually older and extremely popular, which means they skew very white. It would be awesome to see stories from more diverse writers get adapted, but my guess is there's a pipeline problem there - we need books from diverse authors to blow up and become popular so a decade later we get a screen adaptation.
That leads to my final thought though: there are lots of books written by nonwhite people that you can go read right now if you are so inclined! I personally revently enjoyed The Fifth Season by NK Jemisin, and a quick Google search is likely to turn up lots of other recommendations.
Not written by a person of color, but I'm a huge fan of Malazan Book of the Fallen, which was a series constructed from the ground up with no sexism and an array of nonwhite characters whose cultures get fleshed out (it's actually hard to identify any white people across most of the series, except for a few described as having red hair).
The Dandelion Dynasty series of novels by Ken Liu is a fantastic story set in a fantasy equivalent of ancient China. I would love to see it adapted for the screen!
There's a long history of this in genre fiction. Even Howard and other pulp authors of the 1920s imagined not-white people as having their own societies and culture (albeit most often in crude, racist terms). The better example is LeGuin's Earthsea, in which a pluralistic, multiracial world is part of the premise. Doing that compellingly requires hard writing work and imagination, neither of which the people who make TV shows and movies these days seem to possess.
I had a similar thought, that if you're going to race flip one dwarf or hobbit or whichever you'd better flip all of them. Because a not-exactly-subtle part of The Lord of the Rings is how insular and isolated each of these communities is, and how these different cultures coming together to fight the war of the Ring is a.) a big deal, and b.) tragic when they all fade away in the era of Man. You lose that if Middle Earth looks like a 21st century American metropolis.
I feel like you could make the cities of Men multiethnic no problem, but elves, dwarves, and hobbits need to be homogeneous within each group, regardless of which skin color you decide to go with.
I do wonder if there are other groups of Harfoots out there, with different predominant skin tones and appearances? If there are different nomadic groups that occasionally meet up and exchange people in marriage, then that would better explain the varieties we see in Nori's group.
But if this is all the hobbits/harfoots that there are, then yeah, all that variation would have already been smoothed out in a couple generations.
Yeah, it’s like somebody in the pipeline thought it should be Shakespeare style casting where a black actor can play a white character and somebody else half-cancelled that. Weird.
The most likely option is the showrunner/writer and the casting director didn't coordinate at all, and then once the show started getting shot they decided someone would have an issue with a black character being the mother of a white one.
Though I'm not sure why? I saw part of a YA series on Netflix with my daughter that had an Asian character (in Victorian London!) who had a white biological sister. I'd rather suspend disbelief regarding casting than worldbuilding.
But you see, that would be using skin color to try to say something specific and meaningful about racial politics. And that's very risky. That can go wrong real quick, regardless of your intentions. Imagine the tweetstorms: "Oh, so ALL black people love Sauron!?"
It's much safer to just sprinkle some multicultural actors in there, never address it in the story, and let The Discourse give you some free PR cycles. Keep it lightweight.
And even if not even the most imaginative Twitter grievance-monger can bend over backward to find some problematic implications of your statement about racial politics, they can always say you're not the right person to make that statement because you're white or the wrong shade of nonwhite.
It's like stock photo diversity, and it grates on me. You can just see the executives fussing over every scene to make sure each shot has the right balance of skin tones. That's not what real-world diversity looks like.
Had this issue with The Witcher series too, which also uses school play type casting. That first season you get whipped around from place to place a lot, and some real-world inspired diversity would have made it a lot easier to tell where we were. Game of Thrones got this right, but newer fantasy series not so much
It's arguably a bit more defensible in the world of The Witcher, as the backstory of the universe had all humans migrating to the world 1,500 years prior in an event called The Conjunction of the Spheres. That might not have been enough time for everyone to have mixed fully, and you could end up with local clusters of people in places they "don't belong."
Game of Thrones is an interesting case. Within the book series the only canonical Black nations are the Summer Islands (which are basically an advanced, isolationist, and peaceful utopia. Westerosi people are all white, as are those from the Free Cities, but it's never entirely clear what the background in the books are of people further east in Essos. The show explicitly made a few more characters black (like Grey Worm and Missandei) but it was still pilloried for not having enough POC, which I think is why we got to the point we now are in terms of fantasy casting. I mean, even House of the Dragon decided to make a black character play a noble of "full Valaryian blood" - but as I said, suspension of disbelief in casting is easier for me to swallow than worldbuilding.
I think there were multiple conjunctions? The elves were the indigenous race in the Witcher, and humans migrated from another world for sure.
The Dothraki are pretty explicitly not white in the books - modeled off the Mongols or Turks - but what exactly they were was left up to the imagination.
House of the Dragon turning that one noble family black actually has an important plot-related advantage; they'll be involved in a major paternity scandal later this season, and having the official and actual baby-daddies be different races will make the situation much clearer to viewers.
Eh, maybe. But Corlys Velyarion is black, and his kid only half black (played by a biracial actor as well). Lots of people only a quarter black don't really look it.
I mean, this is the same issue with black Vulcans and similar issues in SF and Fantasy. While it might be interesting to explore what race means for Vulcans or Elves or whatever, I don't think show runners are under any obligation to do so.
At this point in time, the only actors available to play roles in shows and movies are human beings and human beings come in different sizes, shapes and colors. You can play with that a bit when casting your aliens or fantasy beings, but you don't have to.
If the question is, "Why is this Elf black", the answer "We cast a black person to play them" is perfectly acceptable.
Just tell yourself it's just a show, you should really just relax.
To be fair, they're not saying actors races shouldn't matter, they're just saying shut up bigot, why do you hate Black people? And then dunking on a Twitter screenshot of some idiot hating the raceflip de hour while high-fiving each other.
I think that while most of that is just lazy writing, I honestly suspect part of it is due to looking at racial dynamics solely through a US-centric lense, compared to other racially diverse societies, particularly Latin America. Racial classifications of who = what are relatively more stringent in the US, and interracial marriages only became widely accepted relatively recently (https://news.gallup.com/poll/354638/approval-interracial-marriage-new-high.aspx).
In contrast, in most of Latin America, which like the US also has a rather long history of being diverse, interracial marriage was significantly more common. The whole classification of “Latino” is essentially referring to the result of centuries of mingling between Iberian White settlers/explorers, indigenous Native Americans and Black Africans originally brought in as slaves. This happened for a number of reasons (Spanish caste system effectively encouraging racial intermarriage as a means of socioeconomic advancement, relatively larger native populations, etc.) but the end result is that racial identity is relatively more “fluid” in LA. Probably the best example of this is the 2012 Bolivian census, where the percentage of the population identifying as indigenous dropped by over 20 percent from the last one (https://indiancountrytoday.com/.amp/archive/where-have-all-the-indigenous-gone-bolivia-sees-20-percent-drop), and even now researchers still aren’t sure why that happened.
Now, in recent times attitudes towards interracial relationships here have become way more open, and I think that will help loosen up the barriers in the long run, but for now the legacy of the one-drop rule is still rather prominent on both sides of the political aisle.
God bless you, Freddie. It's nice to be seen. If I didn't have young children, I wouldn't turn on the TV anymore. I'd certainly unsubscribe to Disney+. Jesus f-ing Christ, the utter political *schlock* masquerading as entertainment media. When the kids demand to watch this stuff, I sit there with my face half turned away, teeth on edge, just waiting for it. Turn on the propaganda hose, people, turn it on and take it full in the face.
Unsubscribe. Ask friends you trust what they think are actually good shows/books/games. You don't have to expose your kids to entertainment you think is bad just because it's ubiquitous.
What's the justification for the belief that representation has any impact on the real world? Asian actors and athletes have been almost invisible in popular culture for years--Asian incomes are the highest in the country. By contrast blacks have a much larger cultural cachet and the lowest income/wealth of any racial group.
How can representation not have an impact? In the real world Indian Americans have been earning more than anybody else for years, followed by Filipino Americans. Who are the role models for those two groups? Apu from the Simpson and ...? In the meantime if there was any correlation between representation and economic well being why are blacks as a group so poor?
If "representation" isn't there to erase racial disparities in wealth and achievement then what's the point?
Claiming territory in the culture war, if you really want to get cynical about it.
It's the same reason why removing statues of Confederates and renaming high schools named after them is so important to the identarian left (and why keeping them is so important to some other people). As long as those statues stay up and those high schools are still named after Jeff Davis and Robert E. Lee, those communities are Red Tribe Territory. (Note whose statue got torn down once the US "won" the second gulf war.) At some point it stops being about the thing and purely becomes "I want X to happen because Other Tribe *doesn't* want it to happen".
Casting Ariel as Black in a Little Mermaid remake is clearly planting a big Blue Tribe flag right in the middle of disputed cultural territory and daring anybody to come out and try and tear it down. They'll be easy targets.
I'm sure it's good for actors who are not white, if for nothing else.
All of that review bombing of RoP and the all female Ghostbusters is coming from somewhere.
I thought it was okay, but the ending didn't make sense.
If The Rings of Power was cast with famous rappers and featured a bunch of hip hop then viewers would say "We get it, it's supposed to be a rap interpretation of Tolkien" and there would be no issue. As it is the casting just feels lazy and slipshod and when that's descriptive of the show in general it's just one more straw.
You beat me to it.
This one also on point:
https://babylonbee.com/news/rings-of-power-review-game-of-thrones-meets-simcity-meets-glee-and-i-am-here-for-it/
I can't believe nobody has shared this:
https://youtu.be/twmojN_N90Y
The Bee has been on a roll:
https://babylonbee.com/news/king-charles-replaces-harry--meghan-with-two-corgis-in-line-of-succession
What is that squirrel doing at 0:08?
interspeciesality
Lunch.
Leave that squirrel alone.
Them's good eatin'.
Try nutria!
— Live from the bayou
And so far it's worked!
https://www.msn.com/en-in/money/technology/amazon-s-1-billion-lotr-rings-of-power-is-losing-the-ratings-and-viewer-battle-to-hbo-s-house-of-the-dragon/ar-AA11EEua?ocid=EMMX
One is well written and one isn't. One has good casting and and doesn't. One uses more real sets and the other uses more CGI.
Oh, and one respects the fans and one doesn't. Both shows are focused on female empowerment (in part) but only one is doing it in a way that doesn't feel like pandering.
I am enjoying it so far. It feels like the first 4 seasons of GoT. And it is so much better when compared to RoP.
I tried watching the first two episodes of RoP and kept turning it off every 10 minutes. It just wasn't well done or well written or well cast. I didn't care one bit about the non Tolkien race swapping. I have tried to turn on episode 3 but keep getting a sense of revulsion that prevents me.
It seems like RoP is already on the road to being WoT, which was a complete mess and I hope Amazon will just stop with season 2 of that and sell the rights to someone else.
I watched the first two episodes of Rings back to back and by the end of it I had no interest in the third.
My wife, who admittedly isn't really into this fantasy and Sci-Fi stuff, fell asleep midway through the first episode, woke up early into the second, and fixed me with a look of pure disgust that it was still going.
Shit's boring, yo.
Though I could be wrong here, one subtext I got from Freddie's piece is that indirectly legitimizing "you're just racist" as the kneejerk clapback to critiques of diverse shows is ultimately harmful regardless of whether the diverse show in question is a DEI wet dream or an actually good show.
She-Hulk seems to be the Marvel version of the 1960s Batman TV series--in other words, deliberately campy. I would call it a bad show in some ways, but they're doing it on purpose (as opposed to other bad Marvel stuff that was completely earnest) and that does make it a little more interesting.
Tokenism, how does it work?
The big part you’re missing here is that diversity casting (and crew) now allows for multiple waves of marketing through accusing anyone critiquing the product as bigots/racists. Disney pioneered it and Amazon is embracing it.
Uh, I wouldn't put it in those terms, but that's kind of the whole argument I'm making here?
I think it’s worth noting that it has gone from being an implicit act of self-righteousness by the creators to an explicit act of commodification by the corporations.
Or just cynicism.
But without it we wouldn’t be aware of the burgeoning number of Black neurosurgeons and financial advisors.
Haven’t reached peak diversity until Wakanda has a sizeable white population.
Oh come on, Bilbo Baggins lives there. He’d be worth at least ten white people.
Lol just edited that horrifically autocorrected comment
I wish with all my heart that it did. But no. Somehow it recognized "Bilbo" but made the second sentence look like I was having a stroke while writing it.
My own personal suspicions dovetail with Freddie's- at some point, the symbolic wins of diverse casting became such low-hanging fruit to the point of solipsism, and the thrill of winning skirmishes in the war of pop culture engagement and triggering the cons became the high fructose corn syrup to the vegetables of closing the black white wealth and education gaps.
At the risk of being ungenerous to people I've never met on the internet, I almost suspect that if given the choice between a world in which the racial wealth gap quietly vanished and a world in which the next 30 Marvel movies had no white male actors, a lot of people would choose the latter because a world with no racial wealth gap wouldn't get engagement and trigger republicans on twitter.
Your second sentence is a good bit, but yes, excessively ungenerous.
I think that Hollywood sees this as a way to close doors to the industry. If all diversity means is putting the kids of Lenny Kravitz, Denzel Washington, etc. in movies then that's perfect for their endgame. Speaking as a (gulp) white male writer who's had multiple execs at networks, multiple agents, and multiple showrunners tell me that they'd like to hire/rep me but couldn't because I happen to not have fashionable physical traits, it's a little frustrating to watch. I have writer friends going through the same thing, and it's of course not an issue for the children of celebrities or the kids of agents. A fun game to play is every time you watch something, see who the actor is related to or figure out what extraordinary privilege did they come from. My partner is an exec at a network and she tells me horror stories about having to buy stuff because someone is the kid of the right person, or they have to cast a certain celebrity's kid in a role per the directive of the higher ups. She's also now getting material submitted with headshots, because how one looks is the most important trait in a writer. The same people who beg for "diverse voices!" fist pump when they get Judd Apatow's kid in for a pitch.
This isn't to say that these people aren't talented - of course they are. It's just interesting to see the dichotomy in the media between how the abstract "white male writer" is treated while nepotism is often feted. Great example here - it's in the "bloodlines": https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/tv/tv-news/a-candid-conversation-father-son-tv-writers-nick-cuse-watchmen-carlton-cuse-locke-key-1301285/
The result of all this is that people who come from working class backgrounds have little shot vs. creatives like Chloe Zhao, whose father was an exec at a state-owned Chinese steel company before going into real estate. She has likely benefited directly more from slavery than anyone in America, but... that's okay because of some vague reasons? Again, she can be very talented, but once you start trying to find the logic anywhere, it makes you go nuts.
This may sound like sour grapes, but it honestly comes from genuine concern for the industry as a whole. The only people making out (for the most part) are the very wealthy and connected, while the Guilds piss on their membership in favor of ineffective diversity programs that churn through the lower levels. Actual, meaningful changes that would open up the pipeline (why in the world of zoom does anyone need to be based in LA anymore? Why do creatives need agents for anything at all when they can hire a lawyer to read a contract?) are ignored in favor of empty gestures, ensuring that everything stays the same while giving off the glow of being different. It sucks, it's non-competitive and it shows in the art and people's engagement with it.
How long before we get a good indie film about a white male writer who has to hire a black person to feign authorship of his brilliant screenplay about a black writer in the 1950s who could not get his work on screen because he was a black writer, until he got a white guy to feign authorship?
When companies cannot or will not offer concrete benefits, they offer symbolic gestures, such as grandiose-sounding titles or dress code relaxation.
There is one way we could fix this which no one seems brave enough to advocate for: total and complete destruction of the data centers that host social media servers. There would be a withdrawal. But eventually like any addiction slowly people's brains might come back to normal.
Why would this scare people. If anything I would anticipate that they would greet us as liberators.
Sorry what violence?
I wouldn't worry about that one too much honestly states can just do things. No way it would cause worse problems then social media causes now. Biden could just order the military to seize the data centers
Maybe we could just remake Fight Club and have Project Mayhem be an anti-social media terrorist campaign?
I'm not endorsing terrorism but given how popular eco-terrorism was in the 90s I do find myself surprised that there's no comparable anti-internet movement
doing god's work
the network effects that make social media what it is take long enough to kick in that, by the time any one website became dominant you would be able to destroy the data centers again fairly quickly.
I don't care what anyone does or doesn't write, just that we destroy the serves that host social media. the problem isn't the sites, it's the network effects that mean everyone is on the same website and the algorithms that control our minds. Best to just destroy the servers. it's not an arms race if the equilibrium is a bunch of fractured and obscure sites. the issue isn't the content it's the fact that everyone is on the same site having that content beamed into their brain.
?
I don't think you understand what I'm saying. i couldn't care less about social media if there are thousands of sites. once everyone is on the same 4 sites due to network effects then those 4 are easy to destroy. "sites popping up" is completely irrelevant. I couldn't give less of a shit if there are 400 social media sites and everyone is on a different one. But network effects mean that over time once a given site gets a critical mass everyone will migrate to that site. once that happens it's very easy to destroy the website and then it takes another 4 or 5 years until a new site is able to get that crticial mass. the pace is slow enough that it's actually very easy to keep up with destorying them as needed.
Ultra based and underrated comment
Ty ☺️
I'm voting for the presidential candidate who will nationalize social media only to shut it down permanently.
unfortunately very few are brave enough to call for this.
This doesn't exactly defeat your (excellent) point, but since you hold it up as evidence: the Peggy Olson gif comes from S7, E12 "Lost Horizon," in which Peggy is moving into McCann for good—you're conflating this with the storyline where she moves to Cutler, Gleason, and Chaough for a few episodes before CGC merges with Sterling Cooper.
But also: "It's definitely something that has taken on a life of its own that I feel slightly removed from, but I'm proud of," Moss added.
https://www.eonline.com/news/1047717/elisabeth-moss-on-her-mad-men-meme-i-m-proud-peggy-walks-has-taken-on-a-life-of-its-own
Cathartic as always, sir. It's become painfully obvious to me in recent years that major studios are totally leveraging the culture war so that we don't notice things like the death of mainstream entertainment for, you know, actual adults. Who can read. And who don't give a shit about comic books.
Everything Everywhere is a terrific movie, but I wouldn't call it mainstream. It's from the indie studio A24 after all.
Still, I'm glad it did well at the box office. We need a lot more original movies like it.
Emma, do you remember what action movies were like before the Marvel machine? I remember that back in the 80s and 90s "summer movie" was a synonym for "stupid movie." "Men in Black" was treated as totally amazing because it was an action movie that wasn't completely idiotic.
I can understand not liking Marvel movies if you don't like action/adventure/escapist movies in general. But I hate how people are acting like the Marvel movies are displacing award-winning Oscar bait movies, when what they are actually doing is displacing dumb action movies with somewhat smarter ones.
In the 90s most action movies were like "Suburban Commando," "Wild Wild West," "3 Ninjas," and "Mortal Kombat." Movies like "Men In Black" were rarities. Action movies today are a lot smarter and have stronger characterization than they did in the past and Marvel is a big part of that.
That's a good point.
So Marvel movies are still garbage, just slightly better garbage? What a ringing endorsement.
And not all action movies were uniformly terrible. Off the top of my head there's "Hunt for Red October", "Die Hard", "Star Wars", etc.
Good Marvel movies are terrific, easily as good as the classic action movies of any other era. Bad ones are garbage, but significantly better than the garbage from earlier eras (or even the garbage of today, even the worst Marvel movies are better than the "Transformers" movies).
You are of course, right that every time period has produced really great action movies. But I would say the the ratio of good to bad has increased lately. The worst Marvel movies are significantly better than the worst action movies of earlier time periods. I would say that the worst Marvel movies are at least as good as a mediocre action movie from the 80s or 90s and better than a bad one. I would rather watch a bad Marvel movie than a generic bad action movie from back then.
I'm really struggling to think of an MCU movie I'd put on the same level as, say, Terminator 2, Aliens, Die Hard, Men in Black, hell even the non-MCU Marvel movies have produced better than almost all of the MCU (Spider -Man 2, X-Men: Days of Future Past). I guess the Guardians movies, maybe?
MCU is just license plate factory mediocrity. They're stamped out on an assembly line.
I think the best MCU movie is probably "Captain America, the Winter Soldier," and I would put it on the same level as the other movies you mentioned. It has a really strong plot with some weighty themes and good twists. It also has great action sequences that rely less on CGI than a lot of the other MCU movies do. I would also put "Thor Ragnarok" up as one of the great action-comedies. I might also put "Iron Man," "Guardians 2," and "Homecoming" up there as great action films.
I think "Infinity War" and "Endgame" had some flaws, but in general really admired a lot of the risks they were willing to take. "Infinity War" was willing to have a downer ending and was willing to follow a huge cast of characters. It felt like someone had finally managed to make a movie that equaled the grandeur of a superhero crossover event comic with dozens of tie-in issues (I have read a number of these and the good ones are truly glorious pieces of collaborative storytelling). I really admired that "Endgame" was willing to allow the effects of the movie to have a large-scale geopolitical impact on the world that wasn't totally undone at the end. They are really remarkable films and there isn't anything really like them.
"Spider-Man No Way Home" is one of the greatest sequels of all time, as it manages to serve as a sequel to three different movies at once. And it wasn't just focused on reminding you of the existence of those earlier movies. It was a character-driven movie where the goals and motivations of the characters greatly affected the outcome of the plot. Each returning character from each part of the franchise was different and contributed something.
Also, while it did have some plot issues, I really enjoyed how anti-woke "Black Panther" was. The entire message of the movie was "All those people who talk about revolution and the need for violent social change are actually immature bloodthirsty maniacs. Gradual, peaceful change is the way adults get things done." I honestly couldn't believe a movie with a message like that could get made in this day and age.
They're just so stupid and cliché. I can't take superhero movies seriously because the writing is atrocious and lazy.
Cliche? These movies can be about literally anything. There's tremendous variation even within the MCU movies, even within the same character's series of movies. The first Captain America is a WW2 period piece, the second is an espionage thriller, the third is an epic tragedy.
There's so many cliches they avoid that it's refreshing. I remember the first time I watched Captain America 2 I kept expecting him and Black Widow to end up together because that's what the main guy and girl did in every action movie from when I was a kid. But not only did they not, they just remained friends and professionals the whole time! During Endgame I expected them to just go back in time and completely erase the events of the last movie, but instead they allowed the consequences of the five-year time-skip to persist and affect the future movies.
When I was a kid in the 90s people complained that superhero movies were stupid and cliche. And they had a point, for every "Batman" or "Mask of Zorro" there was a "Steel" or a "Batman and Robin." But then superhero movies really upped their game over the past two decades. But weirdly, their critics didn't. They repeat all the same criticisms of them, even though they aren't true anymore.
The difference is that those movies were fun to watch and didn't take themselves seriously. Marvel movies act extremely self-important are visually uncomfortable to watch because everything's either oversaturated or the cameras spinning a mile a minute and you can't hear any dialogue. Dumb popcorn is fine I just wish that it was fun to watch still
Are you sure you aren't confusing them with the DC movies or Transformer movies? What you wrote seems like a pretty apt description of "Man of Steel" "Batman v Superman," or "Transformers 3." Most of the Marvel movies have a self-deflating sense of humor (except "Eternals," which was terrible). And they have definitely got more fun and goofy recently, not less (probably because of the success of "Guardians," which was basically a comedy). Compare the first and second "Thor" movies to the third and fourth.
Yeah that was my take too watching them
I don't know maybe can't keep up with all that man
I wouldn't say Marvel content has a "self-deflating" sense of humor. To me the movies and shows are chock full of sarcastic barbs to avoid sincerity. They're not really all that funny or relational to the story (like funny situations), it's just typically sarcastic bickering between characters that will end on a "Really?" or a "seriously?" because originality is not a strong suit of these releases.
Interesting point. One slight complication is that MCU come out at all times of year, as opposed to just the summer. They are also, possibly, displacing more (ahem) interesting/adult fare due to their astounding budgets and the cultural esteem they are held in/air they take up.
Just as an aside, I do like action/adventure/escapist movies but consider the source material of MCU/DC to be a bit wanting. More movies based on books instead of comic books!
Marvel movies have absolutely decimated the film industry--tons has been written on this. Every studio chasing Feige's Marvel model has sucked the industry dry of money that used to in part go to the midbudget movie made for adults, which has essentially disappeared.
95% of movies made now are either microbudget or huge bloated CGI messes. The only people that can get anything else made are directors like Rian Johnson or Christopher Nolan, and that's because they did the time making the CGI slop (I think their CGI slop is better than par, but that's neither here nor there for the point I'm making.)
I make a point of watching movies from the '70s and '80s a lot of the time--for instance, I just watched Ridley Scott's middling Black Rain which had a budget in 1989 of $30 million. Can you imagine any studio giving anybody the equivalent in 2022 dollars of $70 million to go shoot an original screenplay in Tokyo? I sure can't.
The mid-budget R rated drama/thriller/romance that exists as a date night movie for adults is extinct at the multiplex.
Underrated point
The early 90s were the pinnacle of action films, peaking with the one-two punch of The Fugitive (Harrison Ford) and In the Line of Fire (Clint Eastwood). It also had Terminator 2, which I think is overrated but still has a hell of an opening and finish. Even in the falloff, it had Independence Day, which for all its many sins is a shit-ton better than any of the crap you listed--without ID, ain't no MiB or Will Smith outside of TV. Total Recall, True Lies, Fifth Element? Beginning of the MI franchise? Starship Troopers, harmed by the breastjob with a brain cell, but still an interesting satire that's better regarded today than it was then. Oh, and perhaps you've heard of The Matrix? Jurassic Park? Oh, hey yeah, fucking SPEED?
Try again.
Hey, at least the "main themes" for WWW and Mortal Kombat are great party music that lived on far beyond the lifespan of the original films. (Finish him!) I can't say the same about Marvel movies' music.
It's also nice to remember these days that Will Smith had a respectable career, once upon a time.
Everything Everywhere All At Once was sooooo good! (And a superhero movie, too, if you think about it.)
Also, as long as the movie frame defines you according to your position on the putative (non)existence of an a-pre-historical dwarf of colour, nobody is noticing that Lenny Henry is still a really shit actor.
Did somebody say Tolkienism?
You have taken the lead to win the comment thread.
I do have to say, I do have an issue with the sort of lazy multicultural casting choices we see in a lot of modern fantasy shows...like for example Amazon's new Rings of Power show.
I have no problem with the idea of black dwarves, black elves, black hobbits, etc. It's great. But I do have a major issue with just sprinkling actors of various races down randomly with no thought as to what it means for worldbuilding.
For example, on the new LOTR show, there's a hobbit analogue (the Harfoots) who seem to have a nomadic gathering society - a tribe of 150 people or so. There are black Harfoots and white Harfoots, but oddly not really many racially ambiguous ones. This...makes no sense at all...because in a race-blind society that small everyone would blend together within a few generations even if there was some original differences. At first I thought maybe the casting choices were supposed to be ignored by the audience (like when family members have different accents), but the show explicitly told us the black mother of the white lead Harfoot is a stepmother, so we're clearly not supposed to think that.
The thing is, they could have done representation just fine by making all the Harfoots black. There's even some basis for this within Tolkien, because by the time of LOTR the Harfoots are a hobbit clan noted for darker skin than the rest. So they could have had representational casting, realistic worldbuilding, and maybe used the casting to make some sort of statement regarding indigenous peoples.
Other examples abound too. Like the humans from the Southland are shown as a mix of white/black. Why not make them all POC, since it's explicitly noted within the show they were under elven occupation for centuries, and it's a way to reference real-world colonialism visually? They could have made all of the dwarves black and added some real-world representation while making the traditional distrust between elves and dwarves have more real-world heft. By just sprinkling people of color everywhere, they completely ignore the power that casting choices can make, and it's very frustating.
My headcanon here is that we're treating skin color as being kinda like hair color - different populations might have different skews, but blending the genes together doesn't blend everyone into having the same skin color, and instead produces a distribution where some in each generation are dark-skinned and others are light-skinned.
For me it works pretty well, though also I'm the sort that might not have really noticed it at all if it weren't for online discourse. YMMV, and I don't hold too much of a grudge against folks who find it immersion-breaking.
In general I just wish we'd tell more stories (both in fantasy and historical drama) that are actually built around nonwhite characters, rather than just casting nonwhite people in European-focused stories, but whatever.
Though it's problematic in its own way, as out of all the African countries to pick, they chose Dahomey, which was entirely built around being a willing participant in the Atlantic slave trade.
Yeah, they set it near the twilight of the slave trade (in the 1820s) and turned the female soldiers into the "good guys" opposing slavery, but still, there were more heroic stories to tell in West Africa, and I'm worried it may whitewash history a bit too much.
The mythology used in most bog-standard fantasy series is based upon some mixture of English, Norse, German, and Greco-Roman folkore. It's pretty explicitly a retelling of mostly European-based mythology, even though some authors try to put a unique 'spin" on it. Not to mention the use of historic European titles of nobility, knighthood, etc. So just like most historical drama retells the same stories about Europe, most of the more popular fantasy series retell stories originally told within Europe.
I mean, that could be fun if it was done consciously as a real attempt at recontextualization! Hamilton is great because it's not merely a musical about the Founding Fathers which happens to cast all the Americans as POC, but because it manages to draw parallels between the lives of people in the late 18th century (who it's now popular to dismiss entirely) and those in the present day.
The key though is it needs to be deliberate and thought out, not just throwing representation points against a wall to see what sticks.
I sort of agree! For historical drama, I 100% agree and think we should see more stuff about non-white cultures.
In fantasy, that can be complicated, because "white" is a historically constructed concept, not just a skin tone. So in a fantasy world with a different culture and different history, it is entirely probable that the concept of "white" wouldn't really have much useful meaning, or could mean something totally different. This can lead to weirdness when it intersects with casting - for instance, almost certainly a harfoot thinks about skin color quite differently than we do, and it would be weird to force our own highly contingent racial constructs on to a fantasy world with a totally different history. But in the real world of TV production, we all know that casting black folks to play these characters probably required a certain amount of intentional push, and as a business decision both risked antagonizing some viewers but also served as useful marketing for other viewers.
I personally feel like, by casting people of different skin tones and portraying a culture with a very different relationship to race than our own, Rings of Power IS depicting a non-white society, in the sense that whiteness is really about a particular system of racial hierarchy rather than being specifically about skin color. That said, a sort of generic fantasy veneer lies over the whole thing that feels very "white," and it's going to be difficult to escape that when you're adapting someone like Tolkien.
Extra toughness here comes from the fact that fantasy is a relatively niche genre that nonetheless requires huge budgets to do well. So the works that get adapted are usually older and extremely popular, which means they skew very white. It would be awesome to see stories from more diverse writers get adapted, but my guess is there's a pipeline problem there - we need books from diverse authors to blow up and become popular so a decade later we get a screen adaptation.
That leads to my final thought though: there are lots of books written by nonwhite people that you can go read right now if you are so inclined! I personally revently enjoyed The Fifth Season by NK Jemisin, and a quick Google search is likely to turn up lots of other recommendations.
Not written by a person of color, but I'm a huge fan of Malazan Book of the Fallen, which was a series constructed from the ground up with no sexism and an array of nonwhite characters whose cultures get fleshed out (it's actually hard to identify any white people across most of the series, except for a few described as having red hair).
The Dandelion Dynasty series of novels by Ken Liu is a fantastic story set in a fantasy equivalent of ancient China. I would love to see it adapted for the screen!
Grey Wizards tv show, anyone?
There's a long history of this in genre fiction. Even Howard and other pulp authors of the 1920s imagined not-white people as having their own societies and culture (albeit most often in crude, racist terms). The better example is LeGuin's Earthsea, in which a pluralistic, multiracial world is part of the premise. Doing that compellingly requires hard writing work and imagination, neither of which the people who make TV shows and movies these days seem to possess.
I had a similar thought, that if you're going to race flip one dwarf or hobbit or whichever you'd better flip all of them. Because a not-exactly-subtle part of The Lord of the Rings is how insular and isolated each of these communities is, and how these different cultures coming together to fight the war of the Ring is a.) a big deal, and b.) tragic when they all fade away in the era of Man. You lose that if Middle Earth looks like a 21st century American metropolis.
I feel like you could make the cities of Men multiethnic no problem, but elves, dwarves, and hobbits need to be homogeneous within each group, regardless of which skin color you decide to go with.
I do wonder if there are other groups of Harfoots out there, with different predominant skin tones and appearances? If there are different nomadic groups that occasionally meet up and exchange people in marriage, then that would better explain the varieties we see in Nori's group.
But if this is all the hobbits/harfoots that there are, then yeah, all that variation would have already been smoothed out in a couple generations.
Yeah, it’s like somebody in the pipeline thought it should be Shakespeare style casting where a black actor can play a white character and somebody else half-cancelled that. Weird.
The most likely option is the showrunner/writer and the casting director didn't coordinate at all, and then once the show started getting shot they decided someone would have an issue with a black character being the mother of a white one.
Though I'm not sure why? I saw part of a YA series on Netflix with my daughter that had an Asian character (in Victorian London!) who had a white biological sister. I'd rather suspend disbelief regarding casting than worldbuilding.
But you see, that would be using skin color to try to say something specific and meaningful about racial politics. And that's very risky. That can go wrong real quick, regardless of your intentions. Imagine the tweetstorms: "Oh, so ALL black people love Sauron!?"
It's much safer to just sprinkle some multicultural actors in there, never address it in the story, and let The Discourse give you some free PR cycles. Keep it lightweight.
And even if not even the most imaginative Twitter grievance-monger can bend over backward to find some problematic implications of your statement about racial politics, they can always say you're not the right person to make that statement because you're white or the wrong shade of nonwhite.
“let The Discourse give you some free PR cycles”
It’s like cold fusion
It's like stock photo diversity, and it grates on me. You can just see the executives fussing over every scene to make sure each shot has the right balance of skin tones. That's not what real-world diversity looks like.
Had this issue with The Witcher series too, which also uses school play type casting. That first season you get whipped around from place to place a lot, and some real-world inspired diversity would have made it a lot easier to tell where we were. Game of Thrones got this right, but newer fantasy series not so much
It's arguably a bit more defensible in the world of The Witcher, as the backstory of the universe had all humans migrating to the world 1,500 years prior in an event called The Conjunction of the Spheres. That might not have been enough time for everyone to have mixed fully, and you could end up with local clusters of people in places they "don't belong."
Game of Thrones is an interesting case. Within the book series the only canonical Black nations are the Summer Islands (which are basically an advanced, isolationist, and peaceful utopia. Westerosi people are all white, as are those from the Free Cities, but it's never entirely clear what the background in the books are of people further east in Essos. The show explicitly made a few more characters black (like Grey Worm and Missandei) but it was still pilloried for not having enough POC, which I think is why we got to the point we now are in terms of fantasy casting. I mean, even House of the Dragon decided to make a black character play a noble of "full Valaryian blood" - but as I said, suspension of disbelief in casting is easier for me to swallow than worldbuilding.
I think there were multiple conjunctions? The elves were the indigenous race in the Witcher, and humans migrated from another world for sure.
The Dothraki are pretty explicitly not white in the books - modeled off the Mongols or Turks - but what exactly they were was left up to the imagination.
House of the Dragon turning that one noble family black actually has an important plot-related advantage; they'll be involved in a major paternity scandal later this season, and having the official and actual baby-daddies be different races will make the situation much clearer to viewers.
Eh, maybe. But Corlys Velyarion is black, and his kid only half black (played by a biracial actor as well). Lots of people only a quarter black don't really look it.
I mean, this is the same issue with black Vulcans and similar issues in SF and Fantasy. While it might be interesting to explore what race means for Vulcans or Elves or whatever, I don't think show runners are under any obligation to do so.
At this point in time, the only actors available to play roles in shows and movies are human beings and human beings come in different sizes, shapes and colors. You can play with that a bit when casting your aliens or fantasy beings, but you don't have to.
If the question is, "Why is this Elf black", the answer "We cast a black person to play them" is perfectly acceptable.
Just tell yourself it's just a show, you should really just relax.
To be fair, they're not saying actors races shouldn't matter, they're just saying shut up bigot, why do you hate Black people? And then dunking on a Twitter screenshot of some idiot hating the raceflip de hour while high-fiving each other.
So what if all the orcs and goblins are cast with black actors while the elves and humans are white? Still okay?
Steve Sailer, is that you?
It's just fantasy, right? Who cares if there are black orcs and goblins?
Of course that's bullshit. The point is precisely how these racial minorities are portrayed.
I think that while most of that is just lazy writing, I honestly suspect part of it is due to looking at racial dynamics solely through a US-centric lense, compared to other racially diverse societies, particularly Latin America. Racial classifications of who = what are relatively more stringent in the US, and interracial marriages only became widely accepted relatively recently (https://news.gallup.com/poll/354638/approval-interracial-marriage-new-high.aspx).
In contrast, in most of Latin America, which like the US also has a rather long history of being diverse, interracial marriage was significantly more common. The whole classification of “Latino” is essentially referring to the result of centuries of mingling between Iberian White settlers/explorers, indigenous Native Americans and Black Africans originally brought in as slaves. This happened for a number of reasons (Spanish caste system effectively encouraging racial intermarriage as a means of socioeconomic advancement, relatively larger native populations, etc.) but the end result is that racial identity is relatively more “fluid” in LA. Probably the best example of this is the 2012 Bolivian census, where the percentage of the population identifying as indigenous dropped by over 20 percent from the last one (https://indiancountrytoday.com/.amp/archive/where-have-all-the-indigenous-gone-bolivia-sees-20-percent-drop), and even now researchers still aren’t sure why that happened.
Now, in recent times attitudes towards interracial relationships here have become way more open, and I think that will help loosen up the barriers in the long run, but for now the legacy of the one-drop rule is still rather prominent on both sides of the political aisle.
Why was there an American Hobbit? It's nuts, but it was already nuts.
Well it actually may help the “black/ white wealth gap” discrepancy refers to the top 10% of black and white earner’s
In essence WE👏🏾 NEED 👏🏾MORE 👏🏾BLACK 👏🏾BILLIONAIRES👏🏾
God bless you, Freddie. It's nice to be seen. If I didn't have young children, I wouldn't turn on the TV anymore. I'd certainly unsubscribe to Disney+. Jesus f-ing Christ, the utter political *schlock* masquerading as entertainment media. When the kids demand to watch this stuff, I sit there with my face half turned away, teeth on edge, just waiting for it. Turn on the propaganda hose, people, turn it on and take it full in the face.
Unsubscribe. Ask friends you trust what they think are actually good shows/books/games. You don't have to expose your kids to entertainment you think is bad just because it's ubiquitous.