Lord of the Rings TV Series Purchased by Amazon

[Sialina]

Today I learned that non-white people existing in a fictional setting is as fantastical as surviving a superhero action stunt. The lengths people go to to justify their bullshit is breathtaking.

Explain 2 things to me then, 1. Why don't we have mixed races all over the earth? 2. How would you go about walking to China from Europe 1000 years ago? Think about needing to survive the winter, you need food for the trip, you don't know where water is, you can't speak any of the languages along the map, you don't have complete maps.
3. Explain why you would go on this trip several times in your life?
4. Explain why people don't have any problems with this whatsoever in a modern setting where you can travel quickly via Airplane.
Go on

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I never said Galdrial's personality didn't matter, I said the character's are similar enough in their portrayal that the differences feel authentic while maintaining an arch of continuity. And that's a lot of big talk for "black people can't be in lord of the rings". It's fantasy - there are no rules. The trends and behaviors we see in the modern world (and even in antiquity) do not have to apply here. Now of course, there are rules and then there are rules - it is still Tolkien's universe after all. But there is nothing that precludes non-white characters in that universe, so it's a bit of a stretch to call it immersion breaking. Comparing seeing black people to shooting fireballs out of your palms is a bit ridiculous.

Go ahead and explain what is wrong with using the easterlings and the people of Rhun or some other established people of color instead of token characters?
There are rules if you want your series to get more than 6.2 on IMDB, house of the dragon and game of thrones both had plenty of diverse actors, all in fitting roles, and the sit way higher on IMDB

[s_bushido]

Why don't we have mixed races all over the earth?

Fun fact: Humans are all the same "race."

[Sialina]

Fun fact: Humans are all the same "race."

Oh, cool, then there can't be racism right? Or racial supremacists? Didn't think this through very much before trying to be smug did you?

[Rennadrel]

Explain 2 things to me then, 1. Why don't we have mixed races all over the earth? 2. How would you go about walking to China from Europe 1000 years ago? Think about needing to survive the winter, you need food for the trip, you don't know where water is, you can't speak any of the languages along the map, you don't have complete maps.
3. Explain why you would go on this trip several times in your life?
4. Explain why people don't have any problems with this whatsoever in a modern setting where you can travel quickly via Airplane.
Go on

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Go ahead and explain what is wrong with using the easterlings and the people of Rhun or some other established people of color instead of token characters?
There are rules if you want your series to get more than 6.2 on IMDB, house of the dragon and game of thrones both had plenty of diverse actors, all in fitting roles, and the sit way higher on IMDB

House of Dragons having black actors representing a family in a series that takes place before GoT just makes people question what happened to them all in the lead up to the start of the GoT story. It's the only real issue with the series but it is also too early to tell.

[Gumble]

We have 2 shows that have popped up recently to compare. LOTR and House of the Dragon. Both have had diversity injected into them where it wasn't. LOTR is getting a ton of flack for this, and House of the Dragon isn't.

So what is the difference? Why doesn't House of the Dragon have nearly 200 pages discussing why HBO is doing with black Valyerians (sp)? I'm sure a few people have mentioned it, but nearly all of the discussion I've seen of that show is "wow so much better than I could have hoped for.... please don't screw it up like S8"


The issue boils down to HBO injecting diversity but focusing on making a good show, where Amazon focused on the diversity without bothering to make a good show. It shows where the focus was. For Amazon it wasn't on the story. For HBO, it was.

When the people behind the show spend that much time telling you that their focus wasn't on making a good story, nobody is shocked that shows turn out like this.

The problem isn't with the actors playing parts in the show, but rather the people running the show who picked those actors because they were less concerned with making a good show than they should have been. Its like when actors are given a horrible script. They were set up to fail.

Amazon turned off comments and ratings for the show, guess they are really worried how its turning out. I hope everyone in here supporting it is watching, because I don't know a single person IRL that has bothered.

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House of Dragons having black actors representing a family in a series that takes place before GoT just makes people question what happened to them all in the lead up to the start of the GoT story. It's the only real issue with the series but it is also too early to tell.

I mean, that entire family dies except for a brother and sister, so the answer is "they all die".

HoD is a well made show though (so far...) so nobody cares that one of the white haired family married a black guy and has mixed children. The story is good, the actors are acting well, so nobody cares about the diversity....

imagine that

[Adamas102]

What does it say about me? Go on, I'll let you know that I'm a "PoC" before you step in something you shouldn't step in. But I've been to Africa, I've lived most of my life in Asia, I've been to the middle east. Once you go 100km outside of an international airport it is VERY rare to see someone of a different race in those places. Fantasy does not make this different, fantasy needs to be grounded or the writers hand will show, and as soon as the writers hand is apparent, immersion can not be had.

Do you think when early humans migrated north they just all turned white as they passed a certain latitude? Do you think the mutations that led to skin lightening in the early peoples of Europe popped up across the continent all at once?

If you knew anything about these things you’d realize that it took thousands of years of migrations and passing on genetic mutations to get to what YOU seem to think is required for a “grounded” fantasy setting.

Tolkien set Middle-earth in a prehistoric time, and his peoples didn’t evolve or migrate the way actual Homo sapiens did. The idea that for it to be “realistic” the setting must mirror a relatively modern, highly segregated version of our world is simply your own prejudices talking.

[Biomega]

Explain 2 things to me then, 1. Why don't we have mixed races all over the earth?

We technically do. Some people just decide to ignore every difference except a few particular ones, like very strongly diverging skin tones. There is no such thing as a strict, distinct "white race", or "black race" scientifically speaking. There's just very large catalogs of certain gene markers, a lot of which can be WILDLY different even within families, while other may be similar even across global distances. Humans just pick out some traits and say "these are important!" for no real reason other than that they want that to be the case. Race is a construct, not because "herp derp the left is trying to tell us skin color isn't real don't they have eyes", but because you choose certain criteria and make them more important than others based on nothing but cultural and traditional biases.

None of that matters for a world where evolution wasn't a thing anyway, because the canon lore is that some gods just came along and went "hocus pocus, let there be dwarves/elves/humans/whatever".

But to get back to the actual show instead of more derailing...

You also say that Galadriels personality doesn't matter because there is a timeskip, so if the original lore doesn't matter, personality doesn't matter, and race doesn't matter, why are we calling this Lord of the Rings?

The problem is, Tolkien's source material is in itself very diverse. There's cohesive titles like the Hobbit or the Lord of the Rings, but even something like the Silmarillion is more of a collection of things. And then there's the myriad other short snippets, drafts, appendices, letters, and whatnot through which Tolkien developed his world over long periods of time. Very often changing things as time went by, sometimes quite substantially.

Galadriel is such an example. He said himself in his letters that his goal was to make her a very different character, much more of a woman-warrior type than the composed ruler figure we see in LotR. And she always had sass - one of her most famous appearances in the Simarillion has her give the metaphorical finger to THE greatest elf who ever lived. Three times. She was a rebel. She joined with the Noldor in their resistance against the Valar. It's not against her character at all to be going against Gil-galad in the show, and having her own, stubborn way of things. ESPECIALLY considering the plans Tolkien had for her that he simply didn't get around to realizing before his death (but did speak about in his letters).

Her holding a grudge for a bunch of centuries is similarly entirely in line with elves of the First and Second Age. The whole reason so many of them left Aman was exactly that: an unquenchable grudge that drove them to rampaging and often self-destructive violence. That's a core tenet of the entire narrative of elves in Middle Earth, and it makes perfect sense that Galadriel in the show would embody that.

That's not to say there isn't any avenue for criticism here. If anything, my problem, personally, lies not with Galadriel's motivation or role in the narrative, but with the way her actress puts it on the screen. It's what creates the "bitchy" image in people's heads, because she doesn't quite manage to properly convey the depth of emotion that the character has to contest with inside herself: her desire to be of service to her people, while at the same time unable to let go of the grudge against her brother's killers (which is effectively a stand-in for the Oath of Fëanor from the Silmarillion that they're not allowed to touch in the show). The problem, to me, is that this emotional ambiguity needs to be tempered by the fact that unlike her actress, Galadriel isn't in her 30s. She's THOUSANDS of years old. She has internalized those emotions for longer than most of the human race has been alive. That requires and creates a complexity of character you can't just brush over with the same strokes you use to portray a random 30-something in a generic, non-fantasy drama. It makes her come across as immature and obstinate, when that is absolutely NOT what Galadriel is about. And that's the fault of the director and the actress both. It's their job to plumb such particulars when it comes to a complicated role like that, and work on making that kind of portrayal convincing. Instead, it seems they were trying to go for some kind of pseudo-Daenerys to please executives, and that is just so, so, so not the way to go.

[Sialina]

Do you think when early humans migrated north they just all turned white as they passed a certain latitude? Do you think the mutations that led to skin lightening in the early peoples of Europe popped up across the continent all at once?

If you knew anything about these things you’d realize that it took thousands of years of migrations and passing on genetic mutations to get to what YOU seem to think is required for a “grounded” fantasy setting.

Tolkien set Middle-earth in a prehistoric time, and his peoples didn’t evolve or migrate the way actual Homo sapiens did. The idea that for it to be “realistic” the setting must mirror a relatively modern, highly segregated version of our world is simply your own prejudices talking.

You are the one talking about prejudice here, you said it yourself, it took thousands of years slowly migrating north, a gradient over the continent. Which is why if you landed at any one place, the people there would be homogenous. You are making my point, not the opposite.

We have 2 shows that have popped up recently to compare. LOTR and House of the Dragon. Both have had diversity injected into them where it wasn't. LOTR is getting a ton of flack for this, and House of the Dragon isn't.

So what is the difference? Why doesn't House of the Dragon have nearly 200 pages discussing why HBO is doing with black Valyerians (sp)? I'm sure a few people have mentioned it, but nearly all of the discussion I've seen of that show is "wow so much better than I could have hoped for.... please don't screw it up like S8"


The issue boils down to HBO injecting diversity but focusing on making a good show, where Amazon focused on the diversity without bothering to make a good show. It shows where the focus was. For Amazon it wasn't on the story. For HBO, it was.

When the people behind the show spend that much time telling you that their focus wasn't on making a good story, nobody is shocked that shows turn out like this.

The problem isn't with the actors playing parts in the show, but rather the people running the show who picked those actors because they were less concerned with making a good show than they should have been. Its like when actors are given a horrible script. They were set up to fail.

Amazon turned off comments and ratings for the show, guess they are really worried how its turning out. I hope everyone in here supporting it is watching, because I don't know a single person IRL that has bothered.

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imagine that

This is all very true, people in here calling everyone racist seem to have trouble explaining why most like house of the dragon but dislike LOTR, the characters of color in house of the dragon also come from the sea, it would make total sense for a character with a powerful fleet to marry into the Targaryen family, and the children are clearly mixed race.

[Adamas102]

You are the one talking about prejudice here, you said it yourself, it took thousands of years slowly migrating north, a gradient over the continent. Which is why if you landed at any one place, the people there would be homogenous. You are making my point, not the opposite.

Nope. That’s not what I said, and the reality was quite the opposite. Humans lived in the European continent for thousands of years before the genetic mutation that contributes to European white skin existed, and it took thousands of years of European peoples traveling and mixing for that genetic mutation to become so widespread (yes, light skinned and dark skinned Europeans interacting together). They didn’t just become more and more pale as a gradient moving north. That’s not how skin works.

And again, you missed the most important point which was that without the exact pattern of migration, mutation, and evolution, there’s no stipulation for a fantasy world to adhere to ours. Especially not to such a modern perspective of ethnic segregation like the one you’re espousing. If different eye and hair color exists and is accepted without thought, then different skin color can as well.

[Lorgar Aurelian]

Go read some reviews about the Matrix, there isn't anyone talking about forced diversity there, because in that universe it makes perfect sense, and it's one of the most popular movies ever, please explain that to me, how come everyone is ok with it when it makes sense, but people are not okay with it when it doesn't make sense? If they wanted to make entire villages of darker skinned people, or continents, it would make so much more sense than what they did.

Other then Mabye hobbits the darker members of each race don’t break common sense at all.

If the god of LoTR just made the races fully formed with various Colours it could take many generations to fully eliminate any colour, something you wouldn’t see in the elfs given that they are immortal, and something you likely wouldn’t see in the dwarfs as they are also longer lived and seemingly breed slowly. The human town is also all people related to humans who joined Morgoth which could easily be any number of different races and cultures of middle earth jammed together at Morgoths fall which could take hundreds of years to end up a single skin tone.

The only real way for it to break common sense would be to say that god just can’t/won’t make blacks elf's or dwarfs.

[Sialina]

Nope. That’s not what I said, and the reality was quite the opposite. Humans lived in the European continent for thousands of years before the genetic mutation that contributes to European white skin existed, and it took thousands of years of European peoples traveling and mixing for that genetic mutation to become so widespread (yes, light skinned and dark skinned Europeans interacting together). They didn’t just become more and more pale as a gradient moving north. That’s not how skin works.

And again, you missed the most important point which was that without the exact pattern of migration, mutation, and evolution, there’s no stipulation for a fantasy world to adhere to ours. Especially not to such a modern perspective of ethnic segregation like the one you’re espousing.

I'm espousing ethnic segregation? How about you never talk to me again? My husband is not the same ethnicity as me. Stop your disgusting mansplaining, you make me sick.

Other then Mabye hobbits the darker members of each race don’t break common sense at all.

If the god of LoTR just made the races fully formed with various Colours it could take many generations to fully eliminate any colour, something you wouldn’t see in the elfs given that they are immortal, and something you likely wouldn’t see in the dwarfs as they are also longer lived and seemingly breed slowly. The human town is also all people related to humans who joined Morgoth which could easily be any number of different races and cultures of middle earth jammed together at Morgoths fall which could take hundreds of years to end up a single skin tone.

The only real way for it to break common sense would be to say that god just can’t/won’t make blacks elf's or dwarfs.

That would be perfectly fine, but elves were all created fair skinned and starbound, the dwarves could potentially be read to have more variation, but again it would be more interesting and cooler to simply have a grouping of darker dwarves, with their own distinct culture, architecture and quirks. If they took the time to set them up properly, it could be very cool! Most people are not opposed to differing skintones, they think it's strange that out of 2000 dwarves living rather isolated under ground for generations, that they would be different skin colors from each other.

Infracted.

[Lorgar Aurelian]

That would be perfectly fine, but elves were all created fair skinned and starbound, the dwarves could potentially be read to have more variation, but again it would be more interesting and cooler to simply have a grouping of darker dwarves, with their own distinct culture, architecture and quirks. If they took the time to set them up properly, it could be very cool! Most people are not opposed to differing skintones, they think it's strange that out of 2000 dwarves living rather isolated under ground for generations, that they would be different skin colors from each other.

Sure the elf's created that way when Tolkien wrote the books, but them being created that way doesn't actually add any thing at all to there concepts nothing changes if you just have god make them varied in skin tone and even if you applied real world evaluation them being varied skin tones wouldn't ever change with how elfs work.

and of course it just doesn't apply to humans/dwarfs at all given the dwarf's lack of skin tone given and the humans (of the show) being a more or less set up ghetto of unknow cultures.

[eschatological]

We have 2 shows that have popped up recently to compare. LOTR and House of the Dragon. Both have had diversity injected into them where it wasn't. LOTR is getting a ton of flack for this, and House of the Dragon isn't.

So what is the difference? Why doesn't House of the Dragon have nearly 200 pages discussing why HBO is doing with black Valyerians (sp)? I'm sure a few people have mentioned it, but nearly all of the discussion I've seen of that show is "wow so much better than I could have hoped for.... please don't screw it up like S8"

I can tell you as the moderator of this subforum, when the first stills came out of House of the Dragon and there were black people in it, there was certainly a whole bunch of furor from posters just like you.

It was all based on nothing, btw.

[Skulltaker]

- Of course they did travel, the show did just cut the boring stuff out because nothing happened during their travels. Keep in mind Middle-Earth is free of Morgoth and Sauron right now and Orcs, Goblins and Dragons aren't everywhere.
- Elrond did tell Celebrimbor that they would met again in their elven city. Celebrimbor just went home again.
- I would have done the same as Galadriel in that moment tbh.
- I also hope it's a blue wizard.

For your last point, it's 99% mithril. They already showed it in the trailers and it makes sense as they need it to craft the front door we saw in FotR. Also mithril was the reason they awoke the Balrog.

People ask „why does it matter“.

Why it’s important?

Well seems like it’s important for People. You can’t tell me if Racial and Culture conflict isn’t a thing since Humanity exists.

Forced Diversity is a failed attempt to tamper with nature.

Put a Muslim with a White Christian and a Black Person + Asian in a box.

What you will see is that those groups will naturally oppose each other.

Their culture
Their thinking

It’s simply not compatible.

Why is this so hard to accept?

It’s a simple truth. When no, explain why people since beginning of humanity had allways racial and cultural wars and brawls.

It’s simply not natural.

And when it doesn’t would matter

Why everyone everywhere is talking only about this?

Grow up and accept a simple truth that skin color and ethnicity matters and you cant force them to accept each other

So you made another account just to keep spouting your racist bigoted bullshit. Just imagine how failed an existence you have to be to expend the effort. Jesus I feel sad for you.

[Specialka]

If there is variety in hair and eye color then variation in skin color is perfectly reasonable. It’s all the same thing at it’s core. Being so fixated in skin color as a differentiating factor says a lot more about your narrow world view than about the fantasy world itself.

Yeah, not really. It just shows your ignorance how this all works.

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Today I learned that non-white people existing in a fictional setting is as fantastical as surviving a superhero action stunt. The lengths people go to to justify their bullshit is breathtaking.

Theb you have learn nothing as it was not what was said. The length you go to misrepresent what you read is breathtaking.

[RevolverLynx]

Was so hyped for this series but once i saw the bad imdb ratings i wont even give it a chance. I wont watch anything below 8.5 rating.

[jonnysensible]

this blatantly racist Demonic-inessa is what i see when i read any of you other posters talk about this shit. They just don't try and dress it up like the rest of you racist pigs.

[s_bushido]

For your last point, it's 99% mithril. They already showed it in the trailers and it makes sense as they need it to craft the front door we saw in FotR. Also mithril was the reason they awoke the Balrog.

They way they were talking, the fact that they were intentionally hiding it from the elves, and the way it was glowing...it's probably going to be a Silmaril. They may have awoken the balrog with their mining, but I'm not sure if that metal alone is enough to justify their shady behavior. /shrug

[Lady Atia]

They way they were talking, the fact that they were intentionally hiding it from the elves, and the way it was glowing...it's probably going to be a Silmaril. They may have awoken the balrog with their mining, but I'm not sure if that metal alone is enough to justify their shady behavior. /shrug

But that's their whole story in the books - they found mithril, they got too greedy, they mined too deep, they got Durin's baned.

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So you made another account just to keep spouting your racist bigoted bullshit. Just imagine how failed an existence you have to be to expend the effort. Jesus I feel sad for you.

No clue why you are quoting me here though? And yeah, just report that right wing troll.

[s_bushido]

But that's their whole story in the books - they found mithril, they got too greedy, they mined too deep, they got Durin's baned.

Yeah, I know. It being a Silmaril was just the first thing I thought of. It could very well turn out to just be mithril, though. That would definitely be a lot less contentious...both from a story standpoint, and from a fan perspective.

Mithril shined/glowed in the trailer, but I don't think it was that bright. Which is why I thought that wasn't what's in the box: