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Comment by rglullis | Hacker News Reader

Oh, please... no one is complaining about having minorities. The point is retconning a different type of "diversity" into a story just for the purpose of marketing for the current consumer base and its cultural sensitivities.

Taking a cultural landmark and just repackaging it (new version with 20% more "minorities"!) where the race of the actors does not change anything for the story being told is just cheap tokenism.

By all means, I'd love to see new stories and new characters, and these stories could benefit greatly from a diverse cast. You can use the diversity then to show how different people value different things, how conflict can come up due to these differences, how conflict can be solved despite these differences, and so on... let's just not pretend that this crap that Hollywood wants to shove down our throats is any good just because it ticks the right woke checkboxes.

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> where the race of the actors does not change anything for the story being told

So what's the problem with casting someone of a different race then? There are plenty of talented non-white actors in Hollywood that get passed over for roles because the "canonical" race of so many classic characters is "white". I agree that the motivation at the corporate level is sometimes to check a "diversity" check box - but for the actors this means getting work and getting paid as opposed to not.

The issue is not with the casting.

The issue is with the lack of new stories and the idea that just putting some color on "stories where the classic characters is white" is enough.

Diversity is something to be cherished. But if all we do is to, e.g, take Mozart pieces and give to conductors of different races and backgrounds, are we really promoting diversity or are we just putting a corporate spin in institutionalized racism, and implicitly perpetuating the idea that "classical" (or better, "erudite") music can only be valued if it comes from dead white people?

I haven't been watching much TV or movies lately, and one of the main reasons is that it seems that most of things come out are just re-heated servings of old stuff. The one exception that I can think of is Atlanta, which deserves praise exactly because it is more focused in telling a story and taking risks than in merely following a certain formula to please the audiences.

So, to repeat: the story of LoTR has been told already. It has its context and its place. To get diversity now, I rather see these talented people telling new stories, with their own voices and their own perspectives, not just put on some kind of display by the studios and used to manufacture fake virtue.

Oh please... a subthread which the GP started by retconning Tolkien as "what passes for white supremacy these days" to argue it was being ruined by casting (with digressions into Marxism spoiling beauty) now itself gets retconned as "nobody complaining about having minorities"

Every film makes hundreds of decisions to appeal to different sections of movie audiences and live up to expectations of modern movies from casting unusually attractive people to typecasting English accents in a non-English world to cutting half the original scenes in a book and shoehorning an implied love interest in there, yet somehow all this pandering to consumers' cultural sensitivities that actually change established storylines get less hostility than the decision to cast a black woman in a fantasy series whose entirely new [for licensing and lack of material reasons] plot lines aren't even known yet. If people consider Tolkien's world not having segregated casting to being "crap Hollywood wants to shove down our throats", it's hard to believe they're doing so more out of concern diverse issues aren't being represented properly and less out of hostility to the idea that white people might not always be the default.

the irony is of course that whilst being far from woke, Tolkien thought white supremacist ethnography utterly risible, included a Legolas/Gimli subplot as heavy-handed as any Hollywood antiracism parable, wasn't especially bothered about describing skin tones or appearance, and to the extent he did, made it clear that Middle Earth as a precursor to the modern world included darker skinned people.

There is a long history in theatre of casting people in roles who aren’t the same as the character. Notably men would often be cast in female roles. Maybe, just maybe, if seeing a brown elf ruins a show for you the problem isn’t with the show.

"Fun" fact: men would play women because acting was considered a very low class activity, and women that acted were seen as prostitutes.

Anyway, you just missed the point and I am not in the mood of arguing with someone who can't understand nuance in thought. Have a good day.

Yeah, the guy who can enjoy a show with a brown person playing an elf is the one who can’t understand nuance in thought.

Precisely. The same guy who thinks that parroting their self-righteousness is a virtue. The same guy who can not understand the difference between diversity and tokenism. That's the guy who can not understand nuance in thought.

Your cognitive disconnect is ridiculous. Pointing out that you finding that a show is worse because they cast brown people as elves is not a fault of the show has nothing to do with my self-righteousness, though you're happy to spread your own self-righteousness throughout this thread while talking about how butthurt you are that they'd dare destroy your favorite show by casting brown people in a traditional white role. I care little about e-cred. You also aren't the guy that gets to decide what the difference between diversity and tokenism is.

> Pointing out that you finding that a show is worse because they cast brown people as elves

Go ahead and tell me where I am saying anything about my personal opinion about this particular show. (Hint, I didn't!) Also, please tell me why you chose to ignore everything I wrote in the third paragraph of the top comment.

You are passing a value judgement over what you think you read instead of what was actually written, and you continue to try to push that as an argument.

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