IMDB deleted all negative user reviews for The Rings of Power
old.reddit.com
old.reddit.com
https://www.rottentomatoes.com/tv/the_lord_of_the_rings_the_...
In my opinion, Steam does the best job of handling this tricky problem by leaving all reviews up and transparently letting the user pick whether or not to include periods of "unusual activity".
If not, this is real slimy.
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt7631058/ratings/?ref_=tt_ov_rt
I think the reviews are being flooded by two extreme opinions
If you look at the ratings from the top 1000 raters, you get a more normal distribution.
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt7631058/ratings?demo=top_1000_v...
But it's really hard to trust anything about these numbers now we know Amazon has been deleting user written reviews that are negative.
The high reviews praise the set, setting, and production value.
The low reviews also like the set, but claim they spent too much on production value, and nothing on writing.
Note that in the above I haven't said anything about faithfulness to the lore, which I'm not particularly attached to. To me the show can't stand even on its own, much less as part of a larger whole.
When it comes to stylisation, with Elves, at one point I felt as if I was watching Vulcans from Star Trek rather than Elves from LoTR. They obliterated all their features except the ears, and most of them look ridiculous (what's with the haircuts?).
So: I'm not angry (since they didn't break anything I cared about). But I am completely unamused be the show. I won't continue watching it.
[1]: I didn't dislike LoTR, but neither is it something I care all that much for.
It seems like a generic high-production-value fantasy show, not being particularly reliant on source material (and thus not really benefiting from being associated with Tolkien).
The acting is pretty average so far, and the storylines are too early to judge, but seem to gravitate to generic 'Good vs Big Great Evil' narrative. The pacing is also fairly slow to accommodate the TV series format.
Not sure why this elicits such a strong reaction? Is it because of how Amazon is treating its warehouse/delivery workforce?
Now we know why their LotR consultant left early
Makes sense to me. For the most part, a review is going to be either "it rocks" or "it sucks".
Why don't they use the median instead (or maybe they do?)
I'm still thinking about it, but I do wonder if diverse casting works in European fantasy stories. The problem I have is that it generally pulls me out of the experience/ makes it less immersive. I welcome diverse castings in modern shows (though we don't need every show to follow a template 'diverse' casting). A common counter argument is, well you can suspend your disbelief and imagine a dragon, so why is a diverse community in a small village not ok? It just feels less immersive. Yes, I can go along with it - but I'm not sure it works. It feels like the modern world superimposed in a fantasy setting. I'd prefer to be sent to an alien world.
It is problematic, as years of discrimination in the real world for women/ethnic minorities were wrong and we should encourage equality in the corporate world. However the entertainment industry I wonder should in some ways be exempt. Maybe. One area where there isnt a discussion on 'diversity' is music and also novels. This is because there are tons of tons of novels and music bands to listen to. No one cares if a particular band is 'diverse'. So I wonder if the only solution out of all of this, is to have more shows - yes, make diverse inclusive European fantasy shows, but also make traditional european fantasy shows too etc. What I think will happen is that in such a scenario most European fantasy fans will choose traditional like shows. Because the story is more immersive and you are brought more into this old world. Maybe. Like I say, I'm still undecided. For modern/futuristic films I find diverse castings just as immersive.
The modern world is just that, modern. A medieval fantasy world has to play by those rules, in its own sort of ways. They're still walking and riding on horses, and magic is exceedingly rare in Tolkien's world. People don't just travel about.
Unsupportable. Tolkien was only concerned with giving England a distinct history. He probably didn't care about Europe and hated everything French.
Almost everyone assumes Middle-Earth is Europe. Try holding Tolkien's famous map of Middle-Earth up to a mirror to see that it is really strikingly similar to North America, too similar to be a coincidence. In fact, he got a lot of his Hobbit surnames from actual family surnames in, iirc, Kentucky; Baggins included.
I'd say it's more of a nitpick. You're right, he was more concerned about an English mythology rather than a European one. But I'm not sure where you're going by bringing up North America...
The same goes for early europe. Plenty of people from either. There were Roman emperors who were indigenous to (Northern) Africa.
https://www.heritagedaily.com/2016/05/ancient-dna-study-find...
North Africans are and always were the same people genetically. The North African emperors I am referring to specifically had Berber, not Punic or Phoenician ancestry. Which is still the dominant ancestry in North Africa today, and the Berber culture and language still lives on today.
Unfortunately it seems you are not knowledgeable of the history either of late Rome, of Carthage or of (North) Africa in general, and the authors of that website either did an incredibly poor job at it or are as well.
They were decedents of Roman people living there and not sub Saharan Africans.
The Roman people living there being ethically Berber, that is, African. The name Africa itself probably coming from the Afri Berber tribe. They were both Roman people and also ethnically African.
And Berber tribes despite not being from subsaharan Africa did, through thousands of years of contact, have significant ethnic and cultural admixture with various subsaharan African peoples. Not that North Africa is less African than subsaharan Africa.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macrinus
> Macrinus was born in Caesarea (modern Cherchell, Algeria) in the Roman province of Mauretania Caesariensis to an equestrian family of Berber origins. According to David Potter, his family traced its origins to the Berber tribes of the region and his pierced ear was an indication of his Berber heritage.
Many of the top people in large empires aren't the same race or culture of the original people.
The caliphates had many groups not from the ruling elite's ethnic groups gaining high positions.
The romans had warriors and leaders of many different origins.
The mongol empire had and frequently used different ethnic groups in their armies and their leaders race-mixed with the locals.
Empires tend to be more colorful in order to control more land, its a natural effect of owning a lot of land.
European history should be portrayed accurately, be it fantasy or reality. It seems that those that shout loudest about cultural appropriation are the first to glorify cultural appropriation when it suites their world view.
This so much. Mixed skin color withing the same race in a fantasy world makes little to no sense to me. Also the fact that dumb characters (say the hobbit girls for example) are always depicted as white to avoid cheap woke backlash is so much of a clear sign of woke appeasement. At least give African mythology a chance and bring it to our screens, that'd make a lot of sense and would also bring a breath of fresh air to the fantasy world. Wokewashing a LoTR series adaptation gives me vibes of forced and lazy inclusivity.
Hard disagree. Fantasy and SciFi can be fun because they don't look like the real world. So many works are based on alternate histories that it's mind boggling to read this statement. Should the enitre genre of historical fantasy not exist?
As a fan of hard science fiction, having a believable history is important, but doesn't have to match today's history. Sounds like maybe you just don't like that genre? But to say it should always be portrayed accurately is not correct.
Yes, it's important that the Second Age is portrayed in historically accurate fashion.
I know exactly what you mean and I think bridgerton does a great job of it feeling just natural and normal. Acting seems normal in an alternate universe, this feels like what history could have looked like. So it definitely can be done well, but I think it's so much easier to have shows just ignore details and just take you out of it.
Somehow nobody complains about loss of immersion when characters are changed to white, which happens 100x more often.
I'm actually asking in good faith because I can't recall any "to white" race swapping in the past few years.
All the ones I can think of were Ann Boleyn, the little mermaid, the coming beauty and the beast, the recent terrible resident evil, etc.
Anyway, here's the ones I can think of right away:
Ancient One in the Marvel movies to Tilda Swinton, although the comic character is kind of a racist stereotype, and would have issues in China, so they had good arguments for doing that change.
Staying in the comic universe, Bane and Ra's al Ghul in Batman movies.
Related to the first one; Benedict Cumberbatch plays Khan in the new Star Trek.
But there are plenty of others, if you search for "whitewashing in movies" you can find lists.
The issue with the Rings of Power and similar things isn't the anachronistic racial composition of the cast. It's just that they're badly written and badly acted shows. And, more perniciously, the show's media team likes to draw all attention to the criticisms based on race to make it seem like the main criticisms are all about race to deflect attention from actual, fundamental flaws.
Note that it's a myth that everyone in pre-modern Europe was white. This is a white supremacist trope easily proven wrong by, say, digging into the representation of POC in medieval European art.
https://www.npr.org/2021/05/06/994325620/going-medieval-on-w...
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/5-myths-about-the-mi...
That said, yes, people we'd currently code as black existed in Europe, though disproportionately in entrepots in the Mediterranean. If you proceed to e.g. Elizabethan England, most people wouldn't have been confused by the sight of a black person (cf Othello), though they'd likely be something of a curiousity (though still not considered black in the contemporary sense).
But there definitely were.[1]
Also, the idiots complaining about black elves are racist morons. There were, in fact, black elves in Tolkien's world. Though never depicted as such by artists, Eöl the Dark Elf (who was not Moriquendë, i.e. not a member of the Moriquendi or the Elves of Darkness) probably wasn't white. In The Silmarillion, Tolkien goes out of his way to describe Eöl's son as having white skin. There's no reason to do that unless his son was notably distinct in this way from his father.
Race and racial ideology were developed in Europe, but it was in tandem with the modern era, not before it. Think 17th-19th centuries. It served a concrete purpose: to explain and justify how the leading European nations interacted with their colonial subjects. But there was no reason for race before colonialism, so it never developed because it would have served no purpose then.
Though the word "race" was probably coined in tandem with British Imperialism, Black slavery and the modern era, race, in fact, does not exist. Race is entirely a social construction, and regardless of the words used in antiquity, the same concepts were used to discriminate against, stereotype, repress and enslave peoples from the very dawn of civilization.
Why would the British man go out of his way to identify himself with those bloody red-haired potato-fetishizing Irishmen? Or the pompous Frenchmen who cover their pervasive stench in perfumes and jam lard into anything they can find in some depraved vision of “high couture”? Or the barbarians and savages of the east, who can’t tell the difference between a puff of wind and God? The 12th century African man hardly runs around thinking “we’re all black, so we’re all the same so nothing to fight about” — they just choose a different division and massacre one another on that basis
You would only bother with white vs black racism when there’s enough blacks to identify against and vice versa; otherwise you choose different boundaries and compete on that. Religion, country, skin color, geography (eg mountain men vs hicks vs cityfolk); there’s more than enough choices to go around. And hell, there’s something stopping you from applying multiple boundaries simultaneously
Your 16th century farming peasant in the corner of England doesn’t see enough Africans or Middle Easterns or Asians to wield race as an effective identity. Your Roman’s could have, but they also had quite the diverse array of colors and folks through varying conquest — race probably played a role in internal conflict (Roman vs roman) but even then religion was clearly the far stronger identifier and a much stronger motivator for their slaughters.
Perhaps the most absurd assertion I've seen this year, in a year characterized by bizarre assertions.
[1] https://www.britannica.com/topic/race-human/The-history-of-t... [2] https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2014/01/05/260006815...
Not really, unless you consider (as most did in the first half of last century) Irish and Italians to be non-white.
The south side is larger and more diverse than you seem to believe
If the argument is that Middle Earth should reflect a proto-European history, should we just accept that everyone from the east are pictured as orcs; mindless, ugly, uncivilized brutes? Is everyone from Africa part of the Haradrim or the Easterlings? The comparison to a proto-Europe only works as long as you wilfully neglect the horribly racist parts of the comparison. Or are you okay with those parts too? If the addition of a black Harfoot, black elves, or Durin's wife being black is your critique of the show, then you should reflect on why you feel that way and why you're able to so easily excuse the clear racism in favor of defending "authenticity".
It's legit WILD to read some of the remarks about the show on reddit and IMDb. It's horribly racist rhetoric disguised as a defence of authenticity and staying true to Tolkien's work. If portraying the racist parts of Tolkien's work is * that * important, maybe we shouldn't make media based upon it?
It sounds like a fart. Definitely lacking the talent of Tolkien to find the surgically precise word for each term, but I can understand the legal aspects of the need-for-control part.
"Middle Earth" was an old phrase used to refer to Western Europe in several Scandinavian languages. Tolkien, being a linguist, would have known this and chosen that turn of phrase deliberately.
PS: read "you" as in the collective you, not you specifically.
The problem with line of thought is that Lossarnach which mustered to Minas Tirith during the seige of Gondor were described as swarthy (i.e. dark skinned).
Also, the Easterlings were poignantly humanized by Sam.
"It was Sam's first view of a battle of Men against Men, and he did not like it much. He was glad that he could not see the dead face. He wondered what the man's name was and where he came from; and if he was really evil of heart, or what lies or threats had led him on the long march from his home; and if he would not really rather have stayed there in peace all in a flash of thought which was quickly driven from his mind."
All of this is a far cry from the stark dark people bad racism you've posted about a couple of times now.
Finally, the orcs also had slanted eyes, did Tolkien also hate Asians? Are Orcs supposed to be African or Asian? Pegging orcs as "dark people" simply doesn't fit as orcs don't closely match any ethnic group in particular. Orcs aren't even a single race for that matter. In any case, dark skinned=bad sounds a lot like allegory, which Tolkien finds distasteful. It is my theory that due to the time we all live in, you are (subconsciously most likely) hammering a square racism peg in a round hold.
He drew heavily from the European sources he knew, but I don't recall any implication that it was meant to be Britain or Europe only.
""" In his 2004 chapter "A Mythology for Anglo-Saxon England", Michael Drout states that Tolkien never used the actual phrase, though commentators have found it appropriate as a description of much of his approach in creating Middle-earth. """
So this is critical interpretation and not something he literally said he intended. His quotes (also in the article) suggest he was drawing from English and Norse mythology, of course, but not that the cosmology of Middle Earth is solely English.
> I don't recall any implication that it was meant to be Britain or Europe only.
LOTR has a few clear mentions to America but is about the feelings of an English literature professor and ex-soldier seeing the good old times, gorgeous nature and European mythology that he loved, being replaced and crushed by industrial development and world war.
The themes are universal, could be adapted to other places and other mythologies, but would lose part of its charm in the process.
Under a disguise of epic fantasy the book is basically a metaphor of twenty century Europe in war times, and is filled with details token directly from his real war experiences and depicted metaphorically or directly. The kind of details that you can't invent or wouldn't notice, unless you had experienced it first. Details like describing how the infantry traveling long distances by foot towards the battle field, get out of the path and start walking into the fresh grass bordering the road to alleviate their sore foot pain.
That experience, plus his obsession to consistence, religious background (christian humanism) and expertise in European myths, old languages and literature, blends all together in a complex history that conveys an incredible sense of realism and immersion rarely achieved by other epic fantasy books.
Tolkien don't needs to be lectured about including strong woman characters in his work, or about the need to talk more about ecology, compassion or racism. Those themes are exquisitely treated in the book yet that is filled with a sense of adventure and a sublime love for nature (to the extent to mention how the raising sun in a foggy day illuminates the spiderwebs in the path).
About racism. This is not "uncle tom's cabin" by Peter Jacksons sake!. Most of the book describes different races allying to fight against the evil and befriending each other while accepting organically that they have other cultures and interests. So... Europe in the war. The book is as anti-racist as you can have
Tolkien didn't deserved that but, most of all, didn't needed to be "improved" like that
Not for nothing, Europe is a continent. Whether you believe Tolkien based his works on or in Europe, both are false on their face. It doesn't even make sense, so please try to better articulate what you mean. Because you literally have argued that Tolkien based the continent of Middle-Earth on the continent of Europe, then you have waffled and changed your argument from in to on. Either way is nonsense. What you must have meant was Tolkien based his stories, not the element of his story setting, Middle-Earth, but the stories themselves, on history and mythology of the various peoples of Europe.
But, in fact, other than Scandinavian epics and myths, and specifically Finnish and Norse epics and myths, that is false.
If you can support your claim, you'd be more convincing. An example of some very similar non-Scandinavian European story found in Tolkien's work would drive your point home. But I am unaware of any example of, say, Italian or Romanian or Polish or Swiss or Danish folk stories or myths being borrowed by Tolkien. And we need not be so vague. Europe was never a single culture, but always many. And Tolkien was not writing to give Europe a history and mythology; that purpose was only for England.
Inexplicably, you chose to be incredibly vague. Just because France is in Europe does not make Europe representative of France. You can say the Eiffel Tower is in the Milky Way, but this is overly broad and imprecise; it makes far more sense to say it is in France.
Similarly, Tolkien borrowed from very specific Scandinavian sources, and that is borrowed; his works are not based upon these sources nor upon ancient Scandinavian culture. To conflate Scandinavia with Europe is the same mistake as conflating France with the Milky Way.
Your claim that Tolkien based his works on Europe is incongruous because it is overly general and imprecise, and it is also a pretty good example of the vagueness fallacy.
He was a gifted linguist, influenced by Germanic, Celtic, Finnish, Slavic, and Greek language and mythology.[1]
Yes, indeed, as the wiki you've drawn from states, Tolkien, the man, was influenced by his studies of various ancient cultures. But to create his fiction he drew from his own life, his Christianity, his experiences during WWI, and Norse and Finnish mythology. Tolkien did not draw on the entirety of the catalog of European mythos to build his world. If you can show me, say, how one of his characters draws from characteristics of a specific Greek hero or god, or likewise for any Germanic, Celtic, or Slavic stories, I'd really be genuinely interested.
I have already named the specific Finnish source that Tolkien borrowed from, and provided a specific example of Tolkien borrowing from Norse sagas, namely, using characteristics of Odin for a few of his characters. Please provide any specific example of Germanic, Greek, Celtic or Slavic influence in Tolkien's work, and name the source. Just one will do, so please take your pick.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._R._R._Tolkien%27s_influence...
I can’t understand what you mean by this at all and it sounds like an absurd thing to say. Can you please explain?
If I'm watching a story about a Japanese Fantasy story - it will feel less immersive if you introduce a blonde character. Likewise with an Indian, or African story. Everyone would think this reasonable. What some people get upset about, is if we also say this about European fantasy stories. And I don't agree with this (the point that a tiny tiny fraction of people living in Europe may have been nonwhite in the 1400s and below I find mute quite frankly). I also find it... Not considerate to call someone racist for making this point. And quite frankly its a great example of where we are right now. Film and TV studios terrified in their casting decisions and feeling like they have to please the media etc. Nor am I convinced that global audiences want to see themselves in European fantasy stories. I don't want to see a blonde white guy (or black or Indian guy) in a Japanese Fantasy story etc. etc.
I do feel that including a multicultural diverse population in a European fantasy story does have a large risk of less immersion and I don't agree thats 'racist'. You can do it, but it's a different world and a different experience. What I'm arguing again, is fine do that. But not everything fantasy driven needs to be like that.
The lord of the rings trilogy was not diverse and quite frankly was astounding. Game of thrones was not diverse, and was astounding up to the final season.
The latter was savegly attacked by woke groups for not being diverse and I just so disagree with that view point.
Let's have diverse stories and let's have traditional too. There are lots of good fantasy stories by Western authors that do include diversity (fifth season, and Ursula la guin Wizard of the sea story etc.)
We're starting to see more people display courage and stand up to wokeness. It gives me hope.
Most fantasy shows that are in English use British accents. It’s what we expect. But why not use a heavy southern U.S. accent? If you van accept this world with dragons and magic why can’t you accept a southern accent?
If it deviates too far from our expectations then it just seems like a bit.
Hmm, I haven't seen Rings of Power, but your statement seems to be a not-so-subtle for a Think Bigger call for revolutionary new fantasy story settings.
Not just stories, not even worlds, but complete mythical ecosystems.
I've read a few fantasy stories lately by non-white non-male authors that were good, even great, like The Fith Season. Others that I was too dismissive of, with my own ugly biased offhand remarks, like Binti.
Ironically, I'd rather roll up a character in the Binti universe. Which seems like one interesting Litmus test for a "Kuhnian Paradigm" shift in fictional work.
Could I imagine sitting around with friends in a campaign in this world?
We'll always have the classic fantasy setting. It uses metaphor effectively to tackle capitalism and war and minority issues. But you can ironically escape that now. I think others saw that before me too.
But then, when stories are told and retold, it's not quite the same story each time. Jackson's LoTR follows the books closely, but is not the same. Some plots, like Tom Bombadil, are taken out. Some are modified, like the rivalry between Rohan and Gondor.
Partly it's cinematic but also partly it is about what story the reteller wants to tell. When the Orcs attack Rohan and civilians suffer and run away, it feels like Jackson wants to emphasize the suffering of "normal" people, which gets less attention in the books.
If the reteller has an angle to the story which introduced actors who don't fit the "Nordic white people" angle, it's up to them. It might not be a good angle to take for other reasons, but nothing wrong with having your own slant.
For me, my conclusion is that fantasy really is inclusive. If we had black Romans then why not black Elves? Maybe you can use that to say so etching interesting about race, in a context that mimics normal life but isn't bound by its constraints.
Or maybe it's just woke. I haven't seen the series yet.
It's been showing a lack of the first two so far.
Star Trek: Voyager first aired in 1995, so it's been a while. I can't really come up with any meaningful differences between the two cases.
Certainly my reading of "Tolkien's Elves" has always been that they're a very light-skinned (dwarves are more ambiguous). I don't overly care if Elves are black- or white-skinned, just as I don't really care about the skin colour of Vulcans in Star Trek.
Yet at the same time, it somehow feels a bit different. I'm having a hard time to articulate why, but I think a big part of the reason is that it feels more forced with all the rhetoric of the last decade or so where everything and everyone is part of "white supremacist culture" and whatnot over what seem extremely minor issues to me.
Tim Russ was hired to play Tuvok presumably because his audition went well in a kind of "colourblind" hiring that is now, apparently, racist (I have a lot of criticisms of Voyager as a series, but Tim Russ' portrayal of Tuvok is not one of them).
I think what people resent isn't the fact that there are black elves, it's the forcing of it, and that everything is scrutinized at a microscopic level for alleged "racism" (e.g. [1]), and that not going out of your way to be "anti-racist" is racist in itself (as if lots of people don't already have enough problems on their own). I suspect that if the LotR movies had black elves – 20 years ago and in a different time – few people would have raised a ruckus over it.
Fights like this are like argueing over the dishes as a couple: it's not really about the dishes; it's a silly outlet of general dissatisfaction.
[1]: https://theconversation.com/how-hollywoods-alien-and-predato...
Who exactly _forced_ Amazon to do this? That article is just another opinion on the internet. If this is the thought police I think Amazon's gonna be OK no matter how they cast the elves.
What's funny to me is the in-advance-defensiveness when people wanna complain about "woke" casting. Witness the ridiculous discussion about Pinocchio in this discussion driven by the anti-woke complainers, because nobody otherwise cares about a stupid Disney movie for kids. Getting offended at how Pinocchio is portrayed, and they call minorities sensitive LOL
To be clear, fully agree. If you include a person who doesn't fit the time and style of where they exist, you need to give me a reason or I won't believe it. Reality is very often unbelievable, and good fiction/immersion requires believability, not reality. (Sidenote: this usually has nothing to do with race and more often how they act.)
For music and literature though, I think it's mostly that the mediums are not visual and so defies our culture of memes or quick messages. Hard to point at a screenshot of text and get likes unless it's under a sentence long. Also, good readers know good writing, and reading is dense enough that the general public won't read. So there's no real reason to go after books.
Rings of Power, as far as I can tell after watching a single episode, wouldn't be good even if every single detail was exactly as Tolkien imagined it. Because the quality is just not there.
I'll be watching it to the end though, it's not impossible that it might become good.
The result is thus disappointing. And it does not create anything of value.
Because unsurprisingly, people are not paying to the the "first black elf". Nobody care. So it's just alienating the core fanbase because they are fed up seeing their favorite franchise being ruined by quotas, and racial war, especially when all other aspects are lacking (scenario, dialogues, poor yet expensive CGI, etc)
I just wish most of this company get broke and we start to see smaller studio producing interesting stuff around diversity.
As you can tell I have no fetish for diversity as it's a criteria I found useless in a workplace or in my entertainment. But from time to time, I would happily watch a high budget and original production about some fantasy world happening in Africa (like Game of Thrones is for England) or in Thailand or whatever with all the folklore around it.
Rather than seeing divisive comment about :
"Amazing, we finally have some diversity among LoR's elf, take that racist Tolkien"
or
"Disgusting, they put some black elf".
As usual, I really feel this modern world is not for me, it's ruining most franchises one after the other, yet it's not creating any new interesting franchises.
They're doing something cool by having the diverse cast, but the writing doesn't adjust to make a story that feels like it has a diverse cast
This makes for a more interesting story and lore; it gets people thinking: "Whoa cool, another nation with different people, I wonder what they're all about!"
Whereas in this show, and many like it (Wheel of Time), all nations have been forced together to form a single uninteresting soup where few have any cultural significance or quirks whatsoever, so as to avoid offending anyone with stereotypes, which could lead to (GASP!) mild and harmless racial jesting, stupidly redefined as violence against an oppressed minority group by vocal activists who live and breathe dismantling Western/European culture.
We can easily add in lore friendly blacks and do it in a way that makes less spoken about factions more interesting.
Why do low effort tokenism when you can do something interesting and still diverse?
All it takes is a bit of effort.
The poor, and sometimes forced and contrived execution of an LGBT or female or a non-white character does really seem unnecessary. To me as an indian, sometimes it looks like the white man's guilt is showing when they even rewrite historical characters and insert such characters doing things that they would never have been able to do (e.g. the enjoyable but oh so historically inaccurate heroine of Miss Scarlet and the Duke - in her period, she would have probably been committed to a mental institute for the things she does in the show. Or the deliberate ignorance of "victorian" values in British society in some recent "historical" dramas, just to show some character doing things that would be really out of character for them in their period - Indeed, one wonders why such obvious white-washing of history in such a crude manner?).
As a someone who is not an American but enjoys American tv, sometimes I feel that the reason such characters are deliberately shown poorly (with lousy acting or writing), is because even show makers resent being forced to include such character. Obviously this doesn't help.
If a story requires an LGBT character go for it. If it requires a person of colour, great. But they do need to get a good actor and make sure the writing and the direction all add value to that character in the show without any blatant sermonising (show, not tell, at least on shows for grownups). It's not as if the American media doesn't know how to do this - there have been so many good characters, even main characters from such vulnerable group portrayed beautifully in past TV shows.
(Or perhaps, I am wrong - all this has nothing to do with inclusive politics and is just a way to manufacture outrage and keep the American public distracted from the real political issues).
Old things are going to be a product of their times and there's an easy solution to all of this: Write new material.
It does remind me of when Resident Evil 5 came out; it had the usual characters but because it was set in Africa and therefore most of the zombies were African, cries of racism were abound.
If it's a historical retelling, then it should be as accurate as much as possible, within reason. If it's fiction/myth/fantasy etc then it doesn't really matter; who cares if Hansel & Gretel is a German fairytale, cast someone who's whatever non-white to play one of them in a new retelling of it. But tbh I think people just get antsy because Hollywood/West is literally the only industry having fingers pointed at for this. I don't think Bollywood, for example, has to worry about diversity/non-Indian representation at all.
Isn't it an interesting perspective from a writer? Inspiration and creativity comes from such moments, and tomorrow if this writer creates a gay character for some story, you can feel the author will do a good job of characterisation and making such character feel real. When the writing is good, an actor feels connected to it and the director and show-maker too are inspired to do justice it. Right now it doesn't often feel like that. sometimes when I see some of the awful effort of some of these LGBT / person of colour (PoC) / powerful women scenes, out of boredom I often find myself imagining how such a scene was shot - someone at the production unit suddenly remembers, "Ok, who is playing the token LGBT / PoC / Women? Let's get on with it. What's the scene about - Is it about them facing humiliation 'cos of their identity, showing them being accepted, a sex scene with them, or them finding their own voice or power?" ... (And later in the editing room some director instructing some intern) "OK, trim these hour long footage of the LGBT / PoC / woman character into 1 to 5 minutes snippets and insert it somewhere in episode 1, 5, 7 and wrap it up!" ...
As for every story requiring an LGBT character because they "exist everywhere", can't many other vulnerable / minority group too lay a claim on that? For example, I am sure there are more muslims in the USA than there are LGBTs - should every American TV show now start including muslim, Hindus, Jews, Sikhs, Indian-American, Chinese-Americans characters etc., etc? Obviously, you realistically can't. (And note that all these groups too face bigotry and hatred just because of who they are).
As a non-american, I prefer the previous format of American television where good story didn't have such contrived caricaturisation and only relevant characters that added to the stories. Will and Grace or Modern Family come to mind when I think of how LGBT characters were relevant, well integrated and portrayed well in the story. Recently I finished watching Atlanta and really love the show, especially due to the insights on black culture (in the US) it offered. Shows like "The Good Wife" and "The Good Fight" show women empowerment so naturally and elegantly that you don't even notice it while enjoying the drama. I feel such dramas do more justice to an LGBT / PoC / woman character than some token characters inserted forcefully.
No, and it's not even close. An estimated 20 million Americans identify as LGBT [1], compared to ~3.5M Muslims [2].
I wonder what might make someone underestimate the number of LGBT people in the US. Maybe... a lack of representation in popular media?
[1] https://thehill.com/changing-america/respect/diversity-inclu...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islam_in_the_United_States
This is, indeed, not something everyone enjoys. But it is the more or less inevitable direction of the future.
When I see a dwarf in a fantasy TV show, I don’t see the colour of the dwarfs skin - I see a dwarf. The fact that people are uncomfortable by brown dwarves is ridiculous. What a strange hill to die on.
I am flabbergasted that this is even a topic of such heated debate at the moment. It would appear we, as a species, are not quite as far along as I would have thought.
The mind boggles.
I think it might be worth thinking about whether this is actually "European fantasty" or just "fantasy" that you're used to as thinking of European. For a thought experiment, imagine a young adult today who has never consumed any sort of fictional media (novels, movies, etc.), but otherwise has the same education in terms of non-fictional things (math, science, history, etc.) that you might expect. If you showed them two portrayals of a Lord of the Rings setting that were identical except for one using only fair-skinned, European-ancestry actors, and the other with the type of "diverse" casting that you're describing, would the latter seem somehow less believable? I'm not convinced that someone who hadn't already been primed to expect fair skinned, European-ancestry actors in fantasy due to having already consumed decades of content with that sort of casting would somehow find that more "accurate" in a world full of elves and dwarves and orcs and other fictional races alongside humans. In a vacuum, I don't think there's really any sort of tension between elements of traditional "European fantasy" (dragons, wizards, sword fights, etc.) and diversity when set somewhere that pretty clearly is not supposed to be set in medieval Europe (or really at anywhere at all in the history of Earth); insisting that some small subset of the lore happening to resemble European fantasy somehow implies that the entire fictional world has to demographically resemble medieval Europe seems like much more of an imposition of external cultural expectations than casting diverse actors is.
Diverse communities within those races is a jarring juxtaposition - they're both super racist and super not racist at the same time.
https://twitter.com/erik_kaars/status/1418911714175750147?s=...
The problem a lot of people have is when they read LOTR for example they presume everything is supposed to be relatable only to people of european ancestry. Other than Tolkein being influenced by a european background there is little you can reasonably say it requires europeans for adequately portraying the character.
Stories are meant to be told and if you want to tell a fantasy story to an audience you don't go out of your way to explicitly exclude anyone resembling your audience. That isn't being woke, that is just capitalism. I wouldn't like Abe Lincoln or Hery VIII to be portrayed by a black person but LoTR, Narnia and other stories that are european-inspired but not set in europe don't need such restriction.
I mean where was all this outrage when Cleopatra was portrayed by a white woman for example?
If the actors are good it makes no difference other than the initial phase of "I didn't imagine this character to look this way" but the same goes for hair color, height, stature, etc...
Making characters and nations with real substance is far more fun than just going back and changing something for political reasons.
I would rather see an introduction of african type regions in allegory for empires like The malian empire, Abyssinian Empire, Ajuuran Sultanate, or others rather than throw blacks into european type settings.
Even if we wanted to add blacks into europe type settings we could at least add lore reasons.
Many blacks were in spain under muslim rule and even at times the rulers of muslim areas of spain were black.
Just say that part of the continent was invaded, bam you can add in non-whites in a european setting.
We can do these things tastefully and add interesting lore.
As a black man I find it insulting to be given token characters of no substance, I would rather no inclusion than low effort shoe-ins.
I want more diversity myself, especially more representation of normal gay characters (problem is is even gay writers always write camp/fem gay characters). And gay characters that aren't old/single/don't show love/get killed off.
But ethnic representation, which is a more visual/cultural representation, is a tough topic. On one hand I want more people of all kinds in everything, on the other I sometimes wonder why non-western countries like China/Japan/India etc aren't being pushed in the same way.
Some really excellent TV series have taken more than a whole 26-episode season before they find their rhythm and get properly good. ST:TNG is a classic example, but I'm pretty sure you can come up with others. And some people are claiming that a new series totally worthless, not based on the first series, but based on the first episode? Are you kidding me?
I mean, is it OK if the first episode of a series is unevenly paced, and contains too much exposition, and clunky "tell, don't show" dialogue about who the main characters are and what their deal is? No, no it isn't. We should ask that writers do better, and trust audiences to have the patience to learn who characters are through action over the course of a few episodes.
But just because they don't do those things, is it really worth writing off the next 5 (or however many) seasons of a show, based on one episode? Who does that? What does anyone gain from that?
OK, there's a lot of prestige serialised TV out there now, and you probably can't watch all of it even if you wanted to, so some culling is probably necessary at some stage. But does anyone really have to write something off quite so soon? You can't even give it half a season to try and get up to speed?
I don't get it.
It may not be fair, but I have more important things to do with my time than give mind share to mega corp projects which are poorly executed.
These aren't some small teams labours of love which I'm willing to give the benefit of the doubt to.
Anyway, IMDb ratings are getting totally unreliable to me. I wasted hours of my life that won't come back, watching some show called The Terminal List that scored a solid eight. Carnage of Asimov's Foundation is 7.4 and that... thing, The Wheel of Time 7.1.
I wonder if there's a way to see evolution of rating, for me Star Trek Discovery seasons are nine, seven, two, pass... but it's holding at 7 right now.
The show is not faithful to the book but it has good production value, a fairly interesting story and is overall very watchable. The passing is sometimes questionable but 7.4 seems like a fair rating to me.
What does feel painful though is the wasted opportunity: chances are that Foundation will never get its Peter Jackson.
It wouldn’t work on traditional TV but this is streaming on AppleTV. Budget was not a barrier AND ‘ratings’ don’t really matter for Apple either. That was the best opportunity during the period of PeakTV to just do what works artistically best for the adaptation with no constraints…
If I were the producer I would have spent Apple’s money on actors instead of special effects. Every episode ~60 mins to 90 minutes~ would end on a Seldon Crisis. Hari Seldon, the mayor, the trader, the Mule, etc would be played by the biggest movie stars (Tom Cruise, Brad Pitt, Chris Evans, Will Smith… or Meryl Streep, Angelina Jolie, Halle Berry etc) and that’s your hook for the mainstream audience. You offer the actors movie scale pay checks for limited season requirements and thats how you attract them. That’s an easy hit.
Or hire David Simon to make ‘The Wire in space’. Update Asimov’s theory of empire evolution to acknowledge newer works like Guns, Germs and Steel. Easy Prestige TV adaptation.
Instead we got this abomination of an adaptation where it’s clear this only exists because they shopped around for IP to make an action series to fight the streaming wars
I like this
> The ideas are very interesting but that was mostly kept.
I disagree that the ideas were kept. For example the focus on the cloned emperor is the opposite of the ideas of the book (although Lee Pace was fun to watch)
The "good guys" on the other hand...
There are some differences in tone. But there are some coherent ideas. Religion is seen as bad, a tool for control. There are mental powers, but that's not magic, just advanced humans. Science is mostly presented as a good thing, with serious dangers that must be sorted, but there's a general techno-optimism that inspired several generations of readers.
In the books we side with robots' nearly human condition. In tv show there's a question if cloned humans have souls. Religion is powerful and sometimes shown in a positive light. Humans can predict the future, not with science but with magical powers. All the dome thing is not science but a deception. A confident merchant character like Mallow, is now police with a tormented mind and now a personal tragedy.
If you have the money and the inventive to create a big budget show like that, do it from scratch. Don't mutilate others's work just for the name.
There are only eight episodes, so if two first two suck then that's a quarter of the series/seasons that sucks.
The first two episodes are also 90 minutes long, so we're three hours into the story. That's as long as the extended edition of The Fellowship of the Ring movie: how much of a story were they able to tell in that? How much have they told in TRoP?
Contrast with with House of the Dragon which has also released two episodes (out of ten). What are people saying about that?
Yes, the series can be 'saved' in the remaining six episodes, but it just seems… wasteful? (of time, effort, money) … to do what they did.
The ironic thing here is that most of the reviews from critics of this show have been positive. Not necessarily wild raves, but, you know, pretty positive.
It's possible that the Critics Just Don't Get It, Man, or whatever trope people will pull out to explain why professional critics should be summarily dismissed and only the users reviews are real opinions that we should listen to, but I'd argue that it's also possible that fandom in general has become entitled to the point of toxicity over the last couple of decades. After decades of good "genre" movies being few and far between and good genre television, especially fantasy and superhero, being even more vanishingly rare, now we've got it coming out of our ears and we are, apparently, really fucking pissed off that what we get doesn't match the unattainably perfect shows in our heads or something. And this isn't even getting into the way today's politics have crept in, but it's extremely hard not to notice that a substantial subset of fans angry with The Rings of Power or Ms. Marvel or The Sandman or whatever are specifically calling out changes that they have to preface with "I'm not racist, but...". I suspect if they'd made a TV version of The Sandman 20 years ago, before any and all attempts at diverse casting would be met with outrage by a loud minority, and cast a black actress as Death, the predominant reaction would have been: "Huh. Weird, but maybe she'll be pretty good in the part, let's see."
I haven't seen The Rings of Power yet, and I don't know if I will, but based on most of the reviews from people who aren't in the Angry Angry Fan Brigade, I expect it to look really good, have solid casting, have somewhat pedestrian plotting, and suffer from somewhat clunky dialogue. I also expect it to feel unnecessary in the grand scheme of adaptations. But I don't expect to be some kind of affront to Tolkien fans everywhere, and I think the AAFB just needs to chill out about this, like they need to about so many other things. (For context, I feel Jackson's LotR adaptation looked really good, had solid casting, and had somewhat pedestrian direction, most notably in Jackson's inability to let any moment anywhere remain small and quiet.)
Yep. That's what enables Prime Video's X-Ray where you can see details about the actors and music of a particular scene while watching, and what also makes it impossible for competitors such as Netflix to have a similar feature. If IMDB were separate, the data would probably be accessible to anyone.
I also think that minute to minute music and actor info is not sourced from IMDb. And I’d be surprised if Netflix couldn’t at least to it for their own properties.
I think there is a fundamental difference in how the two services go about things. On Netflix it can be quite the challenge to even see cast and director and it is difficult to browse by such categories. Netflix sees themselves as the purveyor of advanced recommendations.
It would be entirely possible for Netflix to build a similar dataset, and Amazon Prime Video doesn't have any significant advantage here by its association to IMDB (as would be the case if e.g. all production companies would be required to deposit X-Ray data themselves to IMDB to be eligible for major awards).
Given that Prime Video seems to base its user-facing catalog organisation on IMDB, and that that one is probably the most convoluted of all the streaming providers, I'd argue the are even shooting themselves in the foot by being too closely aligned.
I've been downloading those dumps for years. Long before Amazon bought them. And their usage policy has always been incredibly restrictive.
Now maybe if Amazon dodn't buy them IMDb would be more willing to sell that data somehow. But, they have always been very very stingy with it. So it's not just Amazon coming in and locking things down.
(Shortly after Amazon bought IMDb, they retired their old whacky dump format and converted to CSV instead. Of which I am thankful.)
The first two episodes of TRoP are 90 minutes each, for a total run time of three hours.
Three hours is about the run time of the first LoTR movie (Fellowship): how much story were they able to tell in those three hours?
Further, the other epic fantasy series, House of Dragons, also has released two episodes: how much story have they been able to tell? What are the reviews of that franchise?
The TRoP series may not end up sucking after the first eight episodes, but having the first two (allegedly: haven't seen it myself) suck seems to be a waste of everyone's time/effort/money.
I have watched both Rings of Power and The House of the Dragon, and both are essentially setting up the story in the first two episodes. There is plot in those episodes of course, but a lot is setting up characters and places and the world in general.
>> but having the first two (allegedly: haven't seen it myself)
Not watching something that you critique, and instead basing it on what you saw on Reddit, HN or YouTube, seems de rigueur these days.
I did watch it. Enjoyed it. And will hold my final opinion until I've seen the last episode.
Movie and television reviews have been around for decades. There are only so many hours in a day/week, and everyone has to decide how to spend their finite amount of time, so "pre-judging" a show by early episodes is nothing new. But if you want to try to watch everything as a completionist, start to finish, go right ahead.
But as the GP of this sub-thread, I'm was not so much "critiquing" and simply observing that there's a lot ways for people to spend their time, so if a show "wastes" 2 out of 8 episodes with a lot of what folks consider non-plot, then why should I spend my time watching it?
Again, I haven't watched it, and I'll wait until the season is over and see what the consensus is after the full season. But even if it does turn out to be good as whole, why did the show runners seemingly not do much with the plot for a quarter of the season?
The Expanse took about four episodes to really 'set' the universe, but even the first two episodes had quite a bit that happened ("Remember the Cant!").
How does a show producer worth their salt not know that you have to give juicy bits early in a show's run?
Since BBSs and Usenet there has been plenty of commentary of ongoing series.
But the difference now seems to be people having an opinion, sharing that opinion... and then calling out that they haven't even watched the part of the show that is out.
Which boggles my mind.
I probably wouldn't opine publicly on Sidney Poitier or Katharine Hepburn as actors if I'd never seen anything they were in...
But of course, there are many interesting narratives that don't involve the apocalypse. The Wire has a great one. Bladerunner is superb. The recent Black Bird was captivating, too.
Dragons though? Just boring.
Irma Vep (2022): https://www.imdb.com/title/tt13649314
But, to your point, it's not that dissimilar from other quest for power dramas. I told a friend the new GoT is a bit like Succession with dragons. The quest for power is part of the human condition, which is why I think so many enjoy the stories in whatever form they are told.
Have you watched The Expanse? If you like faction-y stuff, it's worth checking out.
If it's too early to review, then scrap all reviews including the good ones, and if reviews are expected, then selective deletion is just creating false advertising.
I am never going to watch the series because the movies were bad enough, and I find it cringe-inducing how people talk about "the lore" and act as though adaptation can occur 1:1 from books to video, but I have found people seem to be spreading and repeating a lot of misinformation apparently in an attempt to make the show look better, which will inevitably be repugnant to Tolkien regardless.
Which is the reason I'm not watching it. I don't believe in watching a series that would deeply hurt and grieve the author had he lived to see its production.
[1] > Even after the merciless assault upon the Teleri and the rape of their ships, though she fought fiercely against Fĕanor in defence of her mother's kin, she did not turn back.
[2] > Galadriel was the greatest of the Noldor, except Fĕ'anor maybe, though she was wiser than he, and her wisdom increased with the long years. [...] From her earliest years she had a marvellous gift of insight into the minds of others, but judged them with mercy and understanding, and she withheld her goodwill from none save only Fĕanor.
If you didn’t like the films, you won’t like the show. I’m ok with it so far, it’s exceeded my initially very low expectations, and as fantasy fan fic it’s fine IMHO.
In just two episodes? Yeah there won’t be.
Nobody thinks you owe the authors anything - of course you don’t have to watch it at all.
But if you wanted to try it how few episodes or chapters are you will to give a creative work time to reach a character development?
What's the point of a character development in the first couple of episodes or chapters? That's just churn - they aren't genuinely developing in that time because you won't have given them any time to establish something to develop from. And where do they go from there? Just keep having major developments every episode? That'd be exhausting.
I dont care whether a white character in a book or comic is played by a black/brown person, or the other way round really.
But I am baffled by the reactions they get. You always get the same reaction, people with the same coloured skin as the fictional character complain while the people of the same coloured skin as the actor don't see a problem.
But it does only seem to be racist for white people to complain about white fictional characters not being played by white actors, and racist for white actors to play non-white fictional characters. (I'm not talking about stuff like blackface here)
Admittedly I have limited knowledge about why this is the case, and obviously risk being labelled a racist for stating these observations. But genuinely I'm confused by it all.
I do recall seeing a lot of one star reviews on Amazon having to do with what the actors looked like, and I observe the same thing in the reviews for Tom Clancy's Without Remorse, which I also enjoyed.
Are Amazon productions perfect, on the level of other established studios? No, they're still finding their stride I think, but there is a definite trend of review bombing and I think that's why people are probably assuming it's happening here.
they compressed 3 thousands years in a ~10 years story "so the mortal characters didn't have to die" (writers' words)
So no, there's not much time to cover.
He told me today it’s not bad but the main characters are just kinda boring.
I’m still on sandman so I’ll do ring next. But it seems people do are actually watching it are not too bothered by it.
Sandman sucks. I liked the comics. Had high hopes for the show. But sucks.
Rings of Power. Haven't seen it. Probably sucks. Movies were gaudy but shallow.
It's a fresh story, acted super well, laid out with suspense and mystery, eliciting emotions from laughter to existential dread and depression...
... it's the height of what a TV show can be in 2022.
I couldn’t continue wheel of time after 3 episodes.
Its a contradiction in terms - you cannot be a spiritual scold or schoolmarm and mold a set of likable characters from this essence.
Not to mention the hate Harper Lee got for Go Set a Watchman showing what happened to the characters 20 years later.
Act 1 is rabbit cop overcoming assumptions that she cannot be a cop because she is a rabbit.
Act 2 is they catch a savage predator and then, when prompted on the news, rabbit cop suggests it may be due to predators having savage behaviors "in their genetics"
Act 3 is realizing that this was an unwarranted bias, working together, and finding the real culprit.
It's a great progressive film because one of the big racial conflict moments is the rabbit cop, a kind and well intentioned protagonist, grappling with her own subconscious biases.
That makes it more noble. The Rabbit is not just getting over a silly uninformed prejudice, but is willing to intellectually set aside the ongoing murder of her ancestors to fully analyze a case. "Sure, they are naturally violent and we all know that, but is that enough to account for ..." She's a real investigator who refuses to be distracted.
It's at best on par with prejudice towards people from a country that previously invaded your own.
While amusingly also showing that stereotypes are mostly accurate.
It has a a couple of strong female leads fighting the system and taking down the man.
I feel like a lot of Disney movies aren’t exactly subtle in their messaging these days, but even by that measure this one was about as hamfisted of an effort as they’ve ever made.
- Over-representations or inappropriate representations of minorities
- Main lead is usually some minority (e.g., woman, black, trans, etc.)
- Said minority characters are usually high on the power scale and rarely encounter any challenges, often at the detriment to the story
- Said minority usually espouse some overly blunt progressive message.
It's a mix between progressive propaganda and a fan-fic.
There are plenty of movies out there that have been criticised for being too ”liberal leaning”. “Woke” is a rather recent term.
Django unchained and Black Panther are two relatively recent movies accused of being “woke”. Both were resounding successes.
I sense though that most people who parrot the "go woke go broke" narrative, focus only on those that have done badly in the box office.
The story could easily have been written by venture capitalists, trying to convince potential employers to sign on to risky entrepreneurial ventures in exchange for a share in the future rewards.
And obviously, animals don’t form cross species coalitions to manufacture baked goods. So it’s Better for us to disregard the story entirely.
Edit: lol, sorry for questioning the bad-faith 1-star reviews, keep down voting
The more diverse you make your cast, the more immune you are to criticism when your product flops.
If the show was less diverse and flopped they couldn’t play the racism card to wipe reviews and churn up sympathetic media.
And I think no, there wouldn't have been as much. It still wouldn't be rocking a 9/10, but I don't believe it would have gotten as much review bombed.
I feel the truth is a bit in the middle, people are more critical and harsh on shows that also have more diversity, there's a lot more scrutiny on them. That doesn't mean the show can't be bad, but it does make the criticism a lot more difficult to navigate.
The issue is that it was forced/selected, and the cast members who championed diversity in their interviews made it extremely clear this was the case through their remarks around self-proclaimed activism, which lends itself to the poor reviews.
People are tired of identity politics influencing their entertainment, which they are trying to use to avoid said politics. Naturally, viewers are rubbed the wrong way when a show presents itself as a medium for subtle activism in a time when racial tensions and identity politics are at the forefront because racial differences are being forcefully minimized in favor of a singular prescribed globalist posture, while some groups are being verbally abused and humiliated on public television, late night comedy shows, in our elected offices, and on well-funded talk shows on the regular -- as all of these establishments laugh together while they publicly dehumanize white folks (and brown folks who see through their BS).
This is what we have on our hands, and it's unwelcome.
…nah.
You mean three books, right?
The difference here is that Aragorn was written by Tolkien, this show wasn't and has completely betrayed the original material.
Race or gender swaps are not a big issue, but they become one if the purpose is the swap for the swap just for marketing purpose.
Elves are almost eugenetically born all the same, want to add some diversity? Go for humans.
Wanna piss off the audience so that the debate will create more engagement? do exactly what shouldn't be done, because it's out of character.
Another example is the new Disney's Pinocchio, were the Blue Fairy is portrait by a black woman. The problem is not that she is black of course. but that the original story is set in Italy, Tuscany, mid 1800, were no black woman was ever seen and she is also described as "il viso bianco come un'immagine di cera" that translates to "her face as white as a wax image".
It becomes clear that the black blue fairy was put there to check a box and not because she serves some need to modernize the story, which is exactly the same that Collodi wrote 140 years ago.
EDIT
it's the same reason why people cricized film directors that casted Scarlett Johansson for every role or the god awful Ghost in the shell live action where, not only the story was orribly mutilated, but the setup was very very far from the original Japanese one, completely ruining the experience.
It's not about the colour of the skin or the gender of the actors, of course, it's about expectations. I expect Black Panther to be black, Thor to be white and blonde, Ghost in the shell to be set in futuristic Japan etc.
29 July 1954 (The Fellowship of the Ring)
11 November 1954 (The Two Towers)
20 October 1955 (The Return of the King)
Point taken. My goal was to contrast the unsuccessful show with another adaptation that was successful imo.
And there's literally zero reason to insist that Collodi's description is the only way a fairy character can be portrayed in a staged version of his book.
The real problem is getting upset over the skin color of the actors and actresses playing fairies (or stormtroopers or elves or angels or for that matter any fantastical role, which is rooted in escapism and alternate realities.)
I mean, why can't we have a viking Black Panther and put Wakanda near Iceland?
> The real problem is getting upset over the skin color of the actors and actresses playing fairies
No one is upset for that, I, as Italian, am upset that some writer thinks that Collodi's story needed to be changed in ways that add nothing to it and also betray what he clearly wrote with his own hands.
The pale white skin is a well known proxy for ethereal/angelic beings, they are not white people, they are otherworldly magical creatures, made like that.
There were a lot more places where they could have added diversity, they decided to go for the most obviously controversial one.
In European and European derived culture...
But Disney is not making culture, they are making entertainment for making money.
Tolkien is culture, Amazon's rings of power is not.
EDIT: sorry, misread your comment, no, not only in European cultures, it's consistent across the cultures throughout history.
White is the light, first men loved light and hated dark, in darkness lure grave dangers.
For example in African mythologies fairies are white too, pearl white to be precise.
Funny. Culture is almost everything. If we like it or not, if it's high or low culture, that's a huge discussion. But for sure the TV series is culture.
* * *
Cool link! True, the association with light is strong, universally.
Actually, there was also the social class factor in any culture where tanning is highly visible: aristocrats vs everyone else, who had to work outside. No tan = upper class.
Fair enough, point taken.
I should have phrased it better.
Let's put it this way: Tolkien was an intellectual and a Linguistic Professor, his works have cultural relevance, he was trying to write the new British mythology from the POV of a scholar, he wasn't thinking about writing a best seller to get rich.
Conversely, I love the Terminator, but Terminator has no cultural relevance, it is popular culture or pop culture, it lives among us, yes, but the reason why it exists is entertaining people that go to the movies.
What did you intend this statement to contribute?
So watching a Disney movie, I’m not watching an Italian movie featuring an Italian story, just watching Disney.
I’m watching a common fable. And in that case, I really don’t see why everyone HAS to be white.
Not asking to change the original Italian book here. But the reality of Disney as a global storyteller is that it became a lot more than an Italian story.
I love the contrast between being woke ("Be inclusive and represent all people") and being woke ("Taking another cultures history and erasing the cultural aspects of it, making it all white, is bad") on display here.
Yep, that is the problem.
USA is both pushing diversity and inclusiveness everywhere they can, while also using other cultures because "they don't know where things come from"
Which is cultural appropriation according to modern standards and it's neither inclusive nor helps diversity, it actually crushes it and make all the debates about recognizing the cultural differences as they exists look like white people complaining over minutia, or, even worse, racists that do not want women of color in movies or shows.
When It's actually the opposite, I want to see black people stories, not just black people participating in white people stories where they are not originally mentioned.
I don't know why this fixation with the colour of the skin.
I was merely pointing out that they changed a character, one that was very distinctly described, that obviously would be at the center of flamed debates and cause uproar.
My understanding is that the more people talk about the movie, the less Disney need to spend in marketing it.
Of course best actor for the role, but the studio never put it that way, so they are to blame IMO.
Also, I mean, the blue fairy is called blue (it's actually turquoise in Italian) because she has long turquoise hair.
The new fairy is bald.
Kinda provocative, does it make for a more compelling story or is it for attention grab?
We'll see when the movie comes out.
This works so well because theatre is a practice. Any play, even if it's performed once by one company (surely the mode for plays) is of the ages. Merry is black in your stage adaptation of the Fellowship, you say? Of course he is, everyone knew Isaac was going to get that role, he's a natural for it.
Cinema is a product, not a practice or a process. Like it or not, it makes a single, definitive statement about a story. It's fair to dislike it when those choices differ dramatically from those made by the author, including in matters of appearance.
If you think rabid fans won't be put off by 'trivial' things like an eye color mismatch, think again. You singling out skin color is your special pleading, reflecting your interests. I reject it. It is one of many aspects of casting in film which differs from the stage, for good reason.
It's the intentional woke fuckery, just so the studio can talk about racist manbabies or whatever, that is toxic. They're trying to start this very review-brigading as an excuse for however bad the show turns out. If it tanks they blame the ratings, not the material.
Obviously for RoP, Amazon is hoping to avoid the WoT review mess.
It's not just about "best" in acting abilities alone (as if those can be taken in abstract regardless of the story), but best in fitting the character and the role.
So you're kind of making the parent's point.
https://effectiviology.com/principle-of-charity/
https://www.lesswrong.com/tag/steelmanning
I'd rather not assume people are card carrying KKK racists, if nothing they said necessitates that...
Isn't part of the problem that there are no such stories for those who were stolen from their culture and made to work by force, kept uneducated on purpose, and weren't given the opportunity to build stories of their own?
A lot of Afro American don't speak their original language anymore, they don't know the folklore, the religions, the customs, might not even know where they came from, it's all been forgotten and erased, they're raised American now.
I feel this is where inclusivity matters, if you're raised American, but aren't, and all movies and stories exclude you, it just reminds you that you're still treated differently.
I'm definitely not very educated on Afro American stories, so maybe I'm wrong here, I just thought this is possible, it can be easy for colonized nations and enslaved people to lose their culture as they are forcefully assimilated, so decades later of this it's hard for them to make movies about what maybe is forgotten even to them.
Absolutely, I recognize I might just be unaware, and that's probably because they're not made into big budget movies and very much should be. I'd also love to see that. And to be clear, I'm in 100% agreement that I want to see and think there should be a lot more of their stories represented and made into big productions.
What I wonder though is how much those stories are a part of the average Afro American active culture. Do they grow up reading those books too, or they do so reading Tolkien instead?
If the experience of an Afro American child is Marvel Comics, Disney movies, and Tolkien stories, and you continue to exclude them from the characters, it just seems wrong.
I also wonder if there are a lot that aren't slave stories or racial tension stories.
And finally I wonder if the stories would always be diverse, logically they'd all include white people, since Afro American heritage now is American life, a life in a place of diverse people from many race.
And maybe this is my point as well, if you write fantasy, but your experience is American, why wouldn't you include people of all color in your story? But if you did, you'd one hundred percent get some folks come out and say that fantasy stories are European inspired and should only have white people in them. That if a person has an Irish accent they can't be of black skin, and what does that make of black people in Ireland right now?
Btw this is an interesting read: https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.theguardian.com/books/2021/...
I read Tolkien, because my mother was a nerd, and shared her love of sci-fi/fantasy with me. I presume she got her exposure to sci-fi/fantasy at university (graduated 1973), despite attending an HBCU. I really do wonder who introduced her to Tolkien.... I can't say I've ever consumed any "high fantasy"-like stories of African origin.
>>>If the experience of an Afro American child is Marvel Comics, Disney movies, and Tolkien stories, and you continue to exclude them from the characters, it just seems wrong.
This is a bizarre line of thought that has really only emerged in the past ~15 years or so, IMO. Growing up, I never once looked at Sean Connery as James Bond and thought "I can't relate to this guy because his skin is too light." My favorite Marvel character in the early 90s wasn't Blade or Black Panther, it was Cable.
All of this cultural squabbling is the fault of a loud demographic of predominantly-young, emotionally-immature, college-brainwashed intersectionalists, deep in a the Hollyweird bubble. We have members of the black community who are critical of this nonsense, but they are often marginalized by the mainstream. JustSomeGuy on YouTube (a black guy from Chicago) shits all over the "woke" LOTR community: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zy089HU5Ksc
Also Eric D. July ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jhFvd5vkB8o ) who calls out modern "diversity" characters as "tokenized": they're not actually black/minority characters, they're just the exact same white characters with a lazy skin-color/sexual orientation change. That's why Eric July went and created his own entirely-new comic book universe, which pre-sold $3M+ dollars of comics in just a few weeks. Almost no coverage from mainstream comic websites, and discussion of his success is banned on the major comic sub-Reddits.
>>>And maybe this is my point as well, if you write fantasy, but your experience is American, why wouldn't you include people of all color in your story? But if you did, you'd one hundred percent get some folks come out and say that fantasy stories are European inspired and should only have white people in them.
I think this is a strawman. I've never heard such criticism for Game of Thrones. My understanding is Westeros is based on the War of the Roses period in England, but the world is still built with other regions and non-white cultures (Dothraki = obvious not-Mongolians, etc...). But if they had cast Wesley Snipes as Eddard Stark, there would be a rightful uproar.
You are undoubtedly better qualified to have an opinion on such matters than I am, but the article I linked to above suggests your view is not shared by all with strong ties to their African heritage.
I've got some follow up questions if you don't mind.
I understand you don't have issues with stories where there are no black characters. And I totally get that, I don't mind stories where there are no white characters, so the reverse seems true as well.
But my question is, do you mind if there were simply no big budget movies or TV shows to ever be centered around black American characters, or portray black American culture in any way?
Do you feel it's okay to have a large ethnic population and continue to exclusively produce content with only white people and historically white culture in them?
I think those are strange questions, because they aren't the situation we have in America. We have plenty of entertainment content focused on the black experience. Friday franchise, Shaft franchise, Undercover Brother, Black Dynamite, all those terrible Tyler Perry movies, even some of the classic blaxploitation films such as Coffy (Pam Grier in her prime, 1973) are solid entertainment. So I wouldn't prefer that this stuff not exist.
>>>Do you feel it's okay to have a large ethnic population and continue to exclusively produce content with only white people and historically white culture in them?
Why deprive all the non-white people of their agency? If a non-white culture wants content that better communicates their lived experience, they should produce it themselves. Japan does it. India does it. Those cultures rightly recognize that they don't need some goofy Americans with gender studies degrees to write their stories for them. Stop outsourcing your culture to people who hate you ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rt9MKUsKqHk ).
The amazing thing we are seeing lately is the decentralization of content production; people are realizing that they don't have to rely on the weirdos in Hollywood to produce culture for them.
This means the content created by independents needs to stand on its own merits though, it can't coast to success on established star power or well-refined CGI content mills: it needs genuinely good storytelling, compelling characters, innovative but affordable visuals, etc.... And this is where a TON of the current-generation BIPOC/LGBT/whatever content falls flat on its face: it fucking sucks. You have mediocre creators trying to separate the buying public from their money by brow-beating people with "if you don't buy my product you're a racist!". The backlash to such tactics was predictable and IMO well-deserved.
We might be better off looking at African storytellers to write uniquely-"black" scifi: http://theblerdgurl.com/comics/the-rise-of-african-comics/
Historically, in the US, they were not allowed to produce it themselves. So many decades went by where they were in fact deprived of their agency.
Not only that, but they were deprived of political, financial and economic agency as well, which means today, they are generally less wealthy, since they missed on decades of opportunities for wealth accumulation.
So in order to produce it themselves today, capital is required, especially if we're talking about big budget production.
The woke argument is that, it seems that some effort from white investors should be made to invest some of their capital to non-white artists, as retribution for all those years where they had their agency taken away.
That's different than the corporatist take, which is simply to appear progressive by checking some diversity boxes in order to get more sales, or protect their brand from backlash or bad press. I reckon that, and it's possible LOTR is of this kind of attempt.
So my question is, do you feel this retribution maybe actually comes with a hidden price? White capital somehow can compromise the work and have clauses that hurt the creative output and maybe ends up making the content worse. Do you feel it isn't necessary? Or do you feel it's a good thing that should help support and kickstart better quality non-white content?
By the way, as I understand, this capital doesn't need to come straight up as budget for a movie production, though it can, but I think it can also be as scholarship, financial aid, talent programs, etc. which can all focus more on non-white artists. It can also be done simply by opening up more roles for non-white artists, which does imply that some characters which maybe were meant to be white or which had non-specified gender/race needs to be made non-white, in order to create more job opportunities for non-white actors for example.
> And this is where a TON of the current-generation BIPOC/LGBT/whatever content falls flat on its face: it fucking sucks.
Does it suck any more/less than similar non BIPOC/LGBT content though? I personally don't feel like it does. I feel there's a similar likelihood of content sucking, no matter if it's trying for diversity, is promoting or made by BIPOC/LGBT or if it isn't. The only difference is there's simply more non-BIPOC/LGBT content being made, so it ends up there's more good content that make it past all the crap.
If for any 10 movies, only 1 is actually good, you'd need a lot more attempt at BIPOC/LGPT movies to get some good ones no?
Currently white capital availability is gatekept by socio-political ideology. If you aren't toeing the party line, your endeavors will not be subsidized. So definitely the type of content produced/amplified will be compromised as a consequence.
>>>but I think it can also be as scholarship, financial aid, talent programs, etc. which can all focus more on non-white artists.
The reality is that this subsidizes mediocrity, and we all suffer as a consequence. Blind meritocracy is preferred, IMO. I'll admit this is much harder to get correct with a subjective field such as creative works/art, compared to something like the military or engineering.
>>> in order to create more job opportunities for non-white actors for example
To what end? Is the objective for the labor ratio of content creators to match the demographic breakdown (i.e. black people should be 15% of comic writers and movie creators)? Why aren't we putting as much effort into balancing other career fields, for example, addressing the massive gender disparity in coal mining (~96% males)? We're not equalizing the parts of the economy that are unpleasant, only the prestigious ones (cultural and economic influence). Why?
>>>Does it suck any more/less than similar non BIPOC/LGBT content though? I personally don't feel like it does.
"90% of everything is crap". IMO the difference is that garbage-tier content from straight white men doesn't get signal-boosted the same way. Perfect example, Bruce Willis movies: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cd1eNS9HtXo . This crap gets shipped overseas for a profit, but almost nobody in the US knows or cares about this low-budget trash, despite the formerly A-List star involved.
https://bleedingcool.com/comics/how-do-you-do-fellow-kids-me...
https://boundingintocomics.com/2020/11/30/dc-comics-introduc...
^If these were crowdfunded from the LGBT community, that might make some sense. But they are showcased content from titans in their industry. Why are businesses greenlighting content like this and expecting a positive ROI? Who is doing their market analysis, because this content doesn't move units. And if they aren't expecting to make money on these product lines, then what is their real goal?
>>>If for any 10 movies, only 1 is actually good, you'd need a lot more attempt at BIPOC/LGPT movies to get some good ones no?
I mean....sure. All I'm saying is that it should grow organically, from within the relevant community, with no external subsidy, funding, handouts, or signal-boosting. The 2nd and 3rd order effects of such are worse than doing nothing, IMO. Good discussion and valid thought-provoking questions, I'm gonna peace out.
To not target a performance with accent, race, mores, values, language would be most dull indeed. And no human tales would spread past a homogeneous population.
I haven't seen "Hamilton", but from what I've read it has little or no mention of slavery. When you don't have slavery in a story set in that era the character's race usually isn't important for the role so the actor's race doesn't matter.
Regardless, the criteria above about actors needing to match their characters in every detail is risibly ahistorical and unmoored from any principle of film or theater; it's pure applesauce, rationalization pretending at erudition.
It's a bit more complicated than that.
In most of the paintings you'll find Jesus has a darker skin tone (and hair)
Then in 1940 Warner Sallman’s created the popular light-eyed, light-haired Christ [1], Sallman worked for advertising and marketed the picture worldwide.
[1] https://images.theconversation.com/files/346421/original/fil...
Presumably also Ira Aldridge as King Lear.
What's especially funny about this is that your criteria disqualifies Shakespearean theater in the time of Shakespeare.
"In film and television, the audition is called a screen test, and it is filmed so that the casting director or director can see how the actor appears on screen."
> disqualifies Shakespearean theater in the time of Shakespeare
Ira Aldridge was born a couple centuries later than Shakespeare's King Lear.
Theater and movies are different media, if you wanna put up a play about Matrix you need actors that are able to act and to fight like in the movie, which I guess are not that many.
If you're shooting a movie, you simply hire stunt doubles.
Cinema is a fiction, it's not a live performance.
Most of the times main actors are there because they are popular and help the movie promotion.
It’s quite clear that that is YOUR problem. It’s funny when people like yourself claim “I’m not X” while then clear laying the case.
And for the récord, i hope you open up a geography book. There’s been black people in Italy for pretty much all it’s history. You may want to also read a few history books. (Black moors, Alessandro de' Medici, etc )
Also, can people just chill with this racist crap. It’s freaking art, up to interpretation. An actor can be of any race or gender. Get over it.
if you don't see a problem in changing someone else's literature and culture (I am Italian and have read Pinocchio since I was a kid) than you probably don't know what respect for different cultures is.
I would never think of a movie were Kunta Kinte is Dutch and is portrait by Chris Hemsworth.
Would you?
Also: my favourite roman emperor is
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Septimius_Severus
He was black.
But in the small village in Tuscany of 1800 depicted in Pinocchio there were no black people, I can assure you.
Oh brother…
I was not born in Italy, but I am of Italian descent btw. Not sure why that matters, but it probably does to you :-/
Also, I guess you mean only true northern Italians can play the character lol why don’t you phrase it like that as well. See how absurd it sounds?
So you're not aware that Pinocchio is a metaphorical book about Italian society and the need for free, universal, public schools in Italy?
> only true northern Italians
"true northern Italians" do not exist.
They are like any other Italian.
It is absurd to think the contrary.
Probably even "Italian" as a distinct ethnicity doesn't exist.
Collodi is part of our culture, the blue fairy is part of our culture, we don't identify with her because she's white, but because she's good.
Is a Corsican person Italian? Is an Italian-American? Is Mario Balotelli (for example)? Why does any of this matter?
And, sure, anti-Black racism might be his prime motivation. But, just assuming it's so, when someone questions American appropriation of his own culture's literary traditions is ... it's frankly imperialist.
"Americans agree: Italian who questions American depictions of Italian cultural traditions is just a bigot"
Have a bit more charity.
Have a hypothesis and then do your best to falsify that. Give him all of the charity he needs to refute your guess that he's a bigot.
"So you say that there is a convention in Italian literature of depicting other-worldly beings as having freakishly white skin. Would you be ok with the Pinocchio reboot if the same African-descended actress portrayed the fairy, but were instead made up with freakishly white skin?"
If he doesn't refute your generous chances, then guess what? You found a bigot. Congratulations.
If everyone were more parsimonious about it, calling someone a racist or white supremacist or a Nazi would actually have some meaning again. At this point it's just coming to mean "This person disagrees with me and I don't like it".
Remember, these depictions are intended to be immersive. If some element reminds the watcher that they are watching a story, and they find it difficult to suspend their disbelief, they're not going to like it. That could mean an actor with clearly incorrect ancestry for the role.
For example, in the real world, a rural village of people whose ancestors have been in the same region for hundreds or thousands of years are going to look a lot alike. This is why Finns do not look like Khoisan. Everyone knows this. No one has a problem with this.
If your fantasy setting has human beings (or humanoid beings) living for generations together in a small rural village, and you just throw a bunch of different real-world ancestries in there, a Khoisan burgher and a Finnish tavern keeper, that's going to need some kind of explanation. Highlighting that as a problem isn't automagically racist. Maybe it's "magic world" and people there just have that kind of reproductive variability. Cool. Whatever it is, it needs a reason. But without that, it comes off as immersion-disrupting tokenism.
So, no, I don't think "focusing on race" is an automatic signifier of racism.
> So, no, I don't think "focusing on race" is an automatic signifier of racism.
It sounds like you're saying "if he acts like a bigot, but he says he's not a bigot, then give him the benefit of the doubt."
It's a difficult concept, rhetorical charity, especially in today's climate of flinging the most reprehensible accusation in our repertoire at the slightest provocation.
As I said before, a lot of the excesses of "wokeness" is projected overcompensation for private shame about bigoted feelings.
Including the word "freakishly" is deliberately setting up the expectation that nobody would think that was acceptable. But I'd like to think we should be able to live in a world where if being literally white-coloured was a key component of a character, then yes, a black actor should be able to play the character wearing whatever costume/makeup or using whatever special effects are necessary to pull off the part. Unfortunately I'm not sure we are in that world yet - the most well-known case of a black public figure appearing "white" still gets accused of betraying his racial background, even if it's almost certain it was entirely due to a skin condition (Vitiligo, a diagnosis confirmed on autopsy).
In another post, GP discussed how "wax-like, otherworldly" white skin is a signifier of supernatural goodness. My brain translated that into "freakish". If he had said "ruddy, tends to tan in the sun" or no adjective qualifier, I'd have just in turn said "white" without qualifier.
Am I?
Are you sure?
Can you quote me on that please?
The blue fairy is an important part of my culture, at least for me.
If someones rewrites it using all the power of a conglomerate like Disney, that puts at risk our shared culture and heritage.
For me she's gonna be a woman with blue air, for someone younger it will be a bald black woman, that has no direct representation in the society where I live.
I don't care who the actress is or what the color of her skin is, it's just not the "Fata Turchina", it's another character.
Simple as that.
Try doing that with Sherlock Holmes and see what happens.
What would happen if a Chinese company made a movie where Martin Luther King is an Albanian immigrant who came to Italy with the Vlora ship in 1991 to become a supporter of immigrants rights and got killed by a mobster in a fight over a pool game?
Weird that you spend more time complaining about her skin color than her hair.
> Try doing that with Sherlock Holmes and see what happens.
Shit yeah, sign me up.
> What would happen if a Chinese company made a movie where Martin Luther King is an Albanian immigrant who came to Italy with the Vlora ship in 1991 to become a supporter of immigrants rights and got killed by a mobster in a fight over a pool game?
They might well do that. But it’s different when it’s a real person than an imaginary fairy. And also when you change his appearance versus when you change what he stands for.
Collodi often used the Italian Tuscan dialect in his book. The name Pinocchio is a combination of the Italian words pino (pine), and occhio (eye); Pino is also an abbreviation of Giuseppino, the diminutive for Giuseppe (the Italian form of Joseph); one of the men who greatly influenced Collodi in his youth was Giuseppe Aiazzi, a prominent Italian manuscript specialist who supervised Collodi at the Libreria Piatti bookshop in Florence. Geppetto, the name of Pinocchio's creator and “father,” is the diminutive for Geppo, the Tuscan pronunciation of ceppo, meaning a log, stump, block, stock or stub.
It seems to me there's a lot of cultural references here that are elided for non-Tuscan audiences. I imagine that could be frustrating. I think it would not be easy for Americans to be sympathetic to this kind of thing.
Hey, this is a cool song. It's a bit how Europeans can feel about American hegemonic cultural dominance: https://youtu.be/Rr8ljRgcJNM
You're not very good at arguing your case. I see where you're trying to go with this, but that analogy sucks.
Look, Disney just ruins everything. I grew up with the A.A. Milne books for Winnie the Pooh. As a child, I had a picture in my mind for all of the characters, appearance, voice, manner. Disney's Winnie the Pooh is not it, and they have such cultural dominance that their vision can seem to overwrite the original.
I've had to just learn to not sweat it. Blade Runner 2049? Excellent movie, but I do not consider it canon. The original had a sense of humor and hopefulness that 2049 just absolutely lacked.
My Disney+ shows that I'll have access to Pinocchio on September 8th. Not sure if you have already seen it, but if not, give it a watch with an open mind. You might like it.
Look, if having the blue fairy's character being reinterpreted in such a way is simply something you'd prefer not to watch, that's cool. Maybe it bothers you that a generation of new viewers will absorb a different version of a story for which the orginal has a particular place in your heart, but that's just how culture works - for most of human existence stories weren't written down and changed on each retelling anyway. It doesn't lessen their importance or impact.
Having said all that - I've yet to hear many examples of modern adaptations of music in classical tradition written 100s of years ago that I can accept as any sort of improvement. I can't quite put my finger on why there's such a difference.
Probably not many English speakers either.
A quick search shows results saying his ancestors were all from northern Africa and the Middle East. He doesn't even look black in various busts/statues depicting him. He definitely looks north African. I'm pretty into Roman history, and this is the first time I've ever encountered someone suggesting there was a "black" (in the modern sense of the word) emperor.
Similarly, “African” is for some reason taken to exclusively mean “sub-Saharan” even though as you note most people would not identify most North African ethnic groups as black.
Kunta Kinte was a slave in a story that heavily dealt with slavery, set in a time and setting where slavery was race-based, for an audience somewhat familiar with the history of that time and setting.
If you made him Dutch and portrayed by Chris Hemsworth you'd have to include in your movie all kinds of extra exposition and world building to set the background for the story.
Most of the race changes people have mentioned so far did not involve characters where their race was either important to the story or to reducing the amount of exposition and world building you need to convey the story's context to the audience.
I think the appearances of a character is quite important if the author took the time to describe it, don't you think?
Would a Little women adaptation where the three women are two trans gender people, one Black, one Asian and one South American person that identifies as woman, be a good idea?
We all know what "Little women" is about, we all expect that, not something else completely unrelated to the original IP.
Why isn't Jay Gatsby black in the movies and only black people in the book are also black in the movie?
Want my opinion?
People are making a big fuss about the ethnicity of actors, but I'm more inclined to think that Disney's worried about another failure like Tim Burton's Dumbo (the original Dumbo is considered unacceptable by today's standards and people staid away from the new one) and is playing it safe with a story (Pinocchio) that has no such bad legacy attached. it's so safe that there's even a "project Pinocchio" in my country against racism in schools.
> If you made him Dutch and portrayed by Chris Hemsworth you'd have to include in your movie all kinds of extra exposition and world building to set the background for the story.
That's exactly my point.
A black fairy is not an issue because she is black, but because it's a plot hole that the original story don't have.
And if any children read this, let me tell you that either you run to ask money to your parents and go to itchy and scratchy land, or you are a bunch of little racists. You are warned. Gimme money.
> That's exactly my point.
> A black fairy is not an issue because she is black, but because it's a plot hole that the original story don't have.
I just watched a couple trailers for the new Pinocchio movie and they included a scene with the fairy.
She's dressed in glowing white sparkly clothes, has translucent sparkly wings, a wand with a star on the end that is clearly a magic wand, is surrounded by sparkles, transfigured Pinocchio, and it looks like she travels in some sort of amorphous flowing light blob.
The amount of extra exposition and world building needed to let the audience know that the character is a fairy is zero.
Here's a photo [1].
[1] https://www.instyle.com/news/cynthia-erivo-blue-fairy-live-a...
I hate this argument because it's disingenuous. It's in great part a lie and undermines the push for diversity.
Just because there were 1-2-5-100, in major cities, in countries with populations of millions, didn't make them common and frankly more than a curiosity people would gawk at everywhere except for their immediate residential area.
The vast majority of people until 1900 or so lived and died within 100km from where they were born, most likely a village.
The average Congolese in 1700 died without ever seeing a European or a Chinese person.
The average Chinese in 1700 died without ever seeing an African or European.
The average European in 1700 died without ever seeing an African or Chinese person.
Heck, even today, go to poorer and less developed countries and tell me how many outsiders from far away you see. Moldova, Belarus, Tadjikistan, etc.
Ultimately, nobody really, genuinely holds the opinion that an actor can be of any appearance for any role. There will always be exceptions that will break their immersion, because unlike with theatre there is the expectation that the movie is WYSIWYG.
To give an extreme example, would you be completely undisturbed if the main character in 12 years a Slave was portrayed by John Malkovich? Or if a Jewish camp inmate in Schindler's list was portrayed as a black person? I don't think either example would sit well with the vast majority of people, no matter how racist or not racist they might be.
That's why pointing out that black people did exist in Italy is correct but beaide the point. The real debate is around the acceptability of certain expectations, and what determines the criteria for this acceptability.
Why would you be disturbed in the slightest? Hitler hated blacks, and yes, some WERE actually in concentration camps:
"Although no exact figures exist, it is known that a significant number of black people were detained in concentration camps and forced labour camps during the Nazi reign, and that many were murdered. Nonetheless, there seems to be little interest in Hitler’s black victims. Their plight is not talked about enough. This is partly because unlike Jews, Roma and Sinti, black people were not marked for destruction. But they were denied their human rights, sterilised, persecuted, experimented upon and murdered in camps."
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/jan/27/black-...
Taking the example even further, what about a specific Jewish inmate whose appearance is solidly documented an in the popular imagination, such as Anne Frank?
Ultimately, some expectations are seen as socially acceptable, others are not. But there are always expectations.
To test your belief, it would make more sense to picture a "serious" historical movie where the actors portraying the founding fathers don't look much at all like the faces on the dollar bills.
I've always hated this disingenuous line of arguing. Yes, technically there were some black people in Italy, but these types of arguments always frame it in such a way that it seems like it was a common thing to witness for the average citizen. The large, large majority of Italians (we're talking in the past obviously) have never seen anything other than other Italians, and those few foreign black people were very much a rarity.
Hell, go to places like Serbia today as a black man and you'll be gawked at like you're an alien, even in the capital Belgrade, yet alone in the smaller cities. Or do the flipside, go to a remote part of a country like Indonesia as a white man, like a random village in Papua or even a city like Jogja (and it's not exactly a small or unpopular city either), and you'll similarly be gawked at.
I'm a Serb (so corpse-white when I don't tan) but lived in Indonesia my whole life, I can't tell you the number of times I've been in situations where people have looked at me in fascination because of my white skin, even in places where tourists are common. If you go to Borobudur as a white person, you're going to be asked to have your picture taken by a dozen curious Indonesians who have never in their lives seen a white person in real life, and this is a massively popular tourist spot in a pretty massive city with plenty of foreigners coming and going.
So sure, there were some black people in Italy, but let's not pretend like that was anywhere near the norm or something you could expect to see every day in 1700s Italy as an average Italian.
But don't you agree this is something we should be trying to improve, and we could do so by ensuring that movie casting better reflects the more racially diverse situation we enjoy in the developed world (who produce much content exported to less diverse parts of the world)?
I also don't see what exactly you're improving here either. Most people outside of the West that I've met don't care about diversity, at least not in the way American leftists seem to portray it. In my eyes, that Hollywood cast of elites making millions off of acting are all the same type of person regardless of their gender, skin color or any of the other superficial traits people usually judge diversity by, and I can relate to them as much as I can relate to a mosquito. Likewise, I might be Serbian by blood, but I feel about as Serbian as you probably do, considering I was born and have grown up in Indonesia. I relate more to Indonesians and stories revolving around Indonesia than I do anything coming out of the West (the influence of the Internet notwithstanding), yet by all superficial standards I definitely wouldn't be considered "diverse" enough for a lot of things considering I'm just another corpse-white dude.
I guess my point is that the US, and especially the Liberal/Hollywood idea of diversity isn't anything like what my friends and I would consider diverse at all, and I suspect a lot of people in the real world feel very similarly, though that's obviously hopeful conjecture on my part. I'll take my friend group consisting of every nationality that exists (and a lot of them are dual nationalities as well!) who have white skin color over the same number of Americans of every shade of the rainbow any day of the week if you ask me to make the most diverse crowd of people possible.
The movie is in English, using exclusively non-Italian actors , which in itself is checking a box. What difference does it make if they cast another non-Italian actor to play a role?
Who said anything about being Italian?
I've only quoted the author words (Collodi)
The fairy is pale white not because she is a white person, but because she's pure.
Pale white skin is not an Italian trait, so I don't understand what Italianness has to do with anything.
If anything, the fact that she is pale white makes her obviously non-italian, because she's better than all the other characters that try to deceive and corrupt Pinocchio.
EDIT: fixed wording
Curious equivocation there.
It's a trope that's carried on into sci-fi (particularly Star Trek, where the more animalistic or violent races also tend to be darker - see the Klingons who get portrayed as darker-skinned and more aggressive with each iteration) and related high-fantasy properties like D&D.
it's the oldest metaphor in the world
it's light vs darkness, like white magic and black magic.
Heaven is light, hell is darkness.
Nobody sees "the dark at the end of the tunnel".
The idea that black people mean evil and white people mean virtue is a stretch of the modern thinking, by the same people that believe that blacklist comes from black people.
> where the more animalistic or violent races also tend to be darker
Not true.
Borgs, arguably the most dangerous species in the series, are white
Romulans are pale white.
Cardadsians are pale white too.
All the Dominion races were white, more or less. The Changelings have a whole meta commentary going for them.
You seem to have confused "the world" for "Christian Europe." There are plenty of cultures in which these metaphors are reversed, or don't exist at all.
And the only referent that is relevant to this specific conversation is that of Tolkien, who himself described orcs thusly:
squat, broad, flat-nosed, sallow-skinned, with wide mouths and slant eyes: in fact degraded and repulsive versions of the (to Europeans) least lovely Mongol-types."
>Borgs, arguably the most dangerous species in the series, are white
I wasn't talking about simply being dangerous, since in context even the Pakleds are dangerous (speaking of problamatic portrayals) so much as presenting depictions of animistic or "savage" behavior that hearkens to outdated racialist stereotypes of non-white cultures. The Borg are essentially a force of nature, so not relevant in that regard.
Fair point about the Romulans and Cardassians, although they're clearly metaphors for Colonial Europeans and Nazis respectively, and both are presented as clearly "civilized" in their behavior. Klingons drink blood wine, Cardassians drink kanar. The implications are still there.
Not really
Yumboes are supernatural beings in the mythology of the Wolof people (most likely Lebou) of Senegal, West Africa. They closely resemble European fairies. Their alternatively used name Bakhna Rakhna literally means good people, an interesting parallel to the Scottish fairies called Good Neighbours. Yumboes are the spirits of the dead and, like many supernatural beings in African beliefs, they are completely of a pearly-white colour. They are sometimes said to have silver hair.
Chinese mythology has white foxes and white tigers.
There are similar examples in all the mythologies.
> He's clearly not drawing entirely from "universal" metaphors of "light" and "darkness." And even if he were, mapping that to race is still ignorant and worth calling out.
Tolkien was a well known anti-modern, Roman Catholic orthodox conservative.
But mongol-typed are not actually dark skinned, they were in fact often very pale in the past, and tbf he also wrote "degraded and repulsive versions of".
Same way I could say, as Italian, that "Jersey Shore" protagonists are a degraded and repulsive versions of Italians.
True, but Star Trek's treatment of the original Klingons was much the same, based on a vague archetype of "swarthy" Eastern "barbarians" like the Khanate or stereotypes of the Japanese during WW2. We're talking about broad-brush stereotypes here. There was no non-racist reason to make the Klingons dark-skinned to begin with. As has been mentioned, the Romulans were also a villain species and they were white (as a plot point, they looked exactly like Vulcans because they were the same species. The Klingons were dark-skinned because in Western culture dark skin is visual shorthand for "savage."
And portraying "degraded and repulsive" versions of a specific human race is the literal definition of a racist caricature. Especially if the point is to make them evil.
>Same way I could say, as Italian, that "Jersey Shore" protagonists are a degraded and repulsive versions of Italians.
... if literally every Italian in the show was portrayed that way, and was canonically in the Mafia. And the protagonists were all non-Italians. And when people were corrupted by evil, they turned more Italian.
Just keep rolling with basically racist concepts because we like the other aspects of the mythology? Or explicitly overturn the racist parts, and keep the rest?
I like the second one, but apparently many other commenters are perfectly comfortable with "white=good".
Of course we're still left with the archetype of race mapping to moral alignment in general which is gross, but at least it's something.
And of course every single time anyone tries to decolonize (I'm going to use that word specifically because it irks certain people) fantasy and sci-fi, there's a controversy like the one we're in the middle of now. Some people have to be dragged kicking and screaming into the twentieth century.
[0]https://www.thegamer.com/dungeons-dragons-spelljammer-advent...
Sorry, but that's like saying that nobody cares about Gandalf the white in LOTR, and you can cast whoever you like for the role and make his robe rainbow colored.
In fact Amazon didn't do that, the actor playing Gandalf in Rings of power is a white man. For obvious reasons, that have nothing to do with being against diversity.
The blue fairy has a central role in Pinocchio and she has long blue hair.
They knew that casting a shaved woman would be much more than simply adapting a story. it's like if in a Nausicaa in the valley of the winds adaption Nausicaa is a black disabled boy. It would simply not be the right choice, casting as a job is exactly that, choosing the more apt person for the role, which includes appearances.
Of course the colour of the skin is not a fundamental trait, unless it is in the story.
A white Apollo Creed would be highly controversial, like a black Abraham Lincoln, an Asian Sitting Bull or an Italian Malcolm X that only eats spaghetti and says "mamamia" with the hands.
We in the West allowed foreigners and people of colour into our culture. We deal with it by being inclusive in 2022. Deal with it, simple as that. You don't like it, you don't watch it.
I live in a country where a bunch of people have decided to hang their flags upside down. I don't like that and if I see a business doing such, I don't do business with them. Simple as that as well.
But would be completely wrong in the role of Django.
And Samuel L Jackson would make for a not so good Magneto.
> you don't watch it.
I hope I can still comment on the matter...
It appears you believe skin color isn't compatible with a role, but I don't care about it; I only care about the actor's performance, and if the actor's skin is incompatible with the script we make it compatible. Either we change the skin color, or the script.
Right, because of all of parts of the story that have been changed, _this_ is the part that must be kept - using white skin to equate to purity.
Do you agree that in our modern diverse society a black woman can be used to represent "purity"? Because if you do, then surly we can keep the author's original intent without tying it to skin color like he did in 1883.
And maybe the blue hair too, given she's named after her blue hair.
> Do you agree that in our modern diverse society a black woman can be used to represent "purity"?
Do you agree that for white here we mean white the colour, not the pink skin tone, which is inhuman? I am not white like Swedish people are, certainly not like the blue fairy.
It's mythology, it's not literal, you are taking it literally, only zealots do that.
Do you know that in African mythology fairies are white too?
Yumboes (they resemble European fairies) are the spirits of the dead and, like many supernatural beings in African beliefs, they are completely of a pearly-white colour
Did it ever occured to you that western mythology was made by westerners and it is silly to try to bend it to reflect USA of today, while they could use non western mythologies and finally show other cultures respect, but probably American studios can't do that, because they wanna make money and not really respect diversity?
Why take an 1883 Italian book to show a black fairy?
> And maybe the blue hair too, given she's named after her blue hair.
So then... you agree? White skin representing purity is an aspect that _has_ to be kept, even when so many parts of the actual story have been changed and we've had ~140 years of society in-between?
> Do you agree that for white here we mean white the colour, not the pink skin tone, which is inhuman?
Ok, so is the portrayal in the 1940's Disney Pinocchio equally as outlandish considering she's just a white woman with blond hair? Would you be reacting the same way if they cast a white woman in the role?
And to that point, isn't the new movie intended as a remake of the Disney version, not the original, in which case the blue fairy already didn't have blue hair?
> Why take an 1883 Italian book to show a black fairy?
Because people like the Disney version of the story?
it is not.
I do think that a black woman can represent purity.
It simply doesn't fit the story as it has been written in the case of Pinocchio.
If you have to explain why things are the way they are, you're probably overthinking them.
Let's explore why the "representation era" is a smokescreen, shall we?
Imagine a no brainer: a black Tarzan.
There would be nothing strange about it, he's living in the jungle in Africa.
Except now you have to rewrite all his back story, because Tarzan is the son of a white British lord and his white British wife.
You can rewrite them too, as a black British lord and his black British wife.
Except now you also have to explain why in an all white community, the British lords, there is this odd couple.
Where do they come from?
How do they made it to becoming lords?
Are they black people living as white people or do they help the black community?
etc.
What's the problem?
The problem is that Tarzan was written by an American author of British Puritan ancestry, supporter of eugenics and scientific racism, beliefs that he used extensively in his books.
No matter how many black people they put in the story, they'll never be able to fix it.
They shouldn't adapt the story, they should write a new story or adapt a story where black people are already protagonists of the story.
That would actually mean something, but it wouldn't generate much attention I guess...
Less attention = less money (or a loss)
If Disney things that Pinocchio needs "fixing" they better leave it alone, because Pinocchio is a story from 150 years ago and it is not adherent to contemporary American standards in many ways.
Including the presence of a human eating monster fish.
See, simply putting "black person" in the cast doesn't add anything to any story,it doesn't improve representation, people don't actually feel more engaged, it's simple easy selling identity, but, tbf, it generate a lot of buzz, and buzz is all studios need right now, they won't admit they are remaking for the nth time an old story because are incapable of writing new ones, so they are distracting the audience with this silliness, hoping it will work.
Even Pixar is stagnating dramatically, take their Luca, directed by an Italian, set in Italy, I should feel oh so represented, but exactly because it plays with my culture trying to sell it to people who don't know it very well, I found it embarrassing.
The moral of this story is, I guess, that representation is overrated and there is much more to a movie than simply watching someone who looks like me for the sake of watching someone that vaguely looks like me.
> Ok, so is the portrayal in the 1940's Disney Pinocchio equally as outlandish considering she's just a white woman with blond hair? Would you be reacting the same way if they cast a white woman in the role?
Do you realize it is the same Disney both times, do you?
Two wrongs don't make a right.
> in which case the blue fairy already didn't have blue hair?
Yep.
Disney, being wrong since 1940s.
I wasn't born back then and we had no internet, but yeah, I prefer the Italian adaptation of Pinocchio with the blue fairy having blue hair.
> Because people like the Disney version of the story?
so there are times when cultural appropriation is actually OK?
As a member of the culture that story comes from, do I have a say or should I bow to the Disney overlords?
I don’t understand this position. If they add more diversity to appeal to wider audiences, that’s bad. If they make everyone white skinned, even if Tolkien himself didn’t describe most races as such, that’s fine?
why not come up with new stories then, instead of trying to make them fit in something written decades if not centuries ago?
> Nothing woke about greater non white representation.
the World is full of non white mythology, I would love to see something inspired by African.mythologies for example.
why they keep using white (western to be precise) mythology to represent non western cultures?
It's like making a new Rambo movie were everything is the same except Rambo is Vietnamese.
Elves are fictive and have a long literary history--mostly publicized by white Europeans. Originally, they were described as evil creatures who infected people with diseases. Tolkien stepped into the folklore at a particular time and place and offered his interpretation. Sticking to a tradition in which they're all genetically similar--and white--is also just an interpretation. My point is that there's no elf manual that everyone needs to stick to.
You point out a good detail with Pinocchio. But again, Collodi offered his interpretation of a folk tale. In Collodi's text [1], the fish that swallowed Pinocchio is described as "Pesce-cane grosso come una casa di cinque piani e con un treno della strada ferrata in bocca" -- "huge shark [technically 'dog-fish'] like a five-story house and train on a railroad in its mouth." It was subsequent interpretations, like Disney's first version, that portrayed the fish as a whale.
So I don't think it's woke, or too liberal or whatever, to portray elves as different skin colors. We shouldn't keep them white just to avoid pissing off certain audiences.
1: https://www.gutenberg.org/files/52484/52484-h/52484-h.htm
There is when the reference material is from Tolkien. If they had made this show without any reference to LoTR then you'd be right, but they didn't.
When adapting Tolkien, I think it helps a lot to have a manual written by Tolkien himself.
> It was subsequent interpretations, like Disney's first version, that portrayed the fish as a whale.
Don't let me even start on that.
I believe the reasoning at the time was that a whale was already as big as a five story building.
Ironically today it would be unacceptable to use a whale with shark teeths [1] as a human eating monster-fish.
Animal rights activists would complain a lot most of all because wales are not even fish!!
[1] https://pbs.twimg.com/media/D5SHMnaUIAA_GZ7?format=jpg&name=...
A black woman in Italy: Impossible! Unbelievable!
You're being overly dramatic.
But if you want stories with black women in them, why are you adapting a book where there is none?
I think that's because Pinocchio is a very good story and they know it, people.know it, and also is in the public domain.
Disney "modernizing" Italian literature for free to feed their money making machine? OK!
Disney adapting an African story about black women and black mythology?
Impossible! Unbelievable!
Which one is more probable, that Disney wants to use Pinocchio IP while also riding the inclusiveness-washing activism wave, or that Disney really actually cares about black women and their culture?
sometimes people priorities really surprise me...
Maybe they lived among people, who knows?
See star wars where when people like a character with a black actor (Finn) it's ignored but when people dislike a character with a Korean actor (Rose) the studio/media line is that people are racist and hate asians.
If these adaptations were better their PR staff wouldn't need to blow up a few comments about race swapping by being the only thing they acknowledge, all to justify deleting the "racist criticisms" which they say are all that is plaguing their score. This is the tip of the criticism iceberg but it's all they're willing to engage with.
Yeah, right. Clearly you've not heard about Othello, a Shakespearean play from the 1400s set in Italy with a black man as the titular character.
We study at the age of 6 that the Roman empire had black emperors, African born (see: Septimius Severus), but no, where Pinocchio is set and among the people he is living with, nobody knew about Othello or Septimius Severus, nobody could even read, for sure not Pinocchio, that is in fact turned into a donkey for being so ignorant and certainly there were no black fairy women.
Sorry.
yep... but there a thing called the sea between them
> Africans were part of the Roman Empire
1400 years before Pinocchio times
> Othello was based on an Italian story
In Venice, set 400 years before Pinocchio.
Where Pinocchio lived and where Collodi set the story there were no black people in ~1850s
Not that some black person couldn't be found in Florence, but Pinocchio is set in a small village where people knew each other and didn't travel far from home.
People mostly lived a self segregated life.
There's a reason why there aren't many popular Italian books of the time including black people, they were not a numerous presence.
I Promessi Sposi (The Betrothed from Manzoni) it's probably the most popular Italian novel ever, it was written around the same time of Pinocchio and is set in Milan in 1630s during the plague and the Spanish rule.
There isn't a single black person mentioned in the ~600 pages that make the book.
I hear people say things like this a lot, and it's always jarring to me to think where they get that impression, because it's quite ahistorical. Going back actually all the way to antiquity (Romans, Vikings), there was far more visible diversity across Europe than what you typically see in cinematic portrayals. The homogenous image people have is a product of Hollywood, not a reflection of what the time period was actually like.
Anyway, your statement is objectively incorrect, even beyond the obvious hyperbole. There were plenty of Black people in Italy in that time period, enough that it's really not shocking to imagine one as a magical character in a literal fairy tale.
True heroes as you describe them exist only in your imagination and in fairy tales.
It's not at all unreasonable for her portrayal in the movies based on the LotR books to be...based on her portrayal in the LotR books, and not attempting to incorporate largely irrelevant details of her backstory from Tolkien's other writings.
Basically, anyone with a personality built for command, taking up the Ring, would become a tyrant of some sort. That's part of why it was so important that it came not just to hobbits, but to these hobbits, whose strongest desires were about protecting, and gardening, and living their hobbity lives. (I imagine if Lobelia Sackville-Baggins had gotten her hands on it, she wouldn't have fared so well. Not a Dark Queen by any means, but still something much more dark and dangerous than what became of Bilbo, Frodo and Sam.)
The Silmarillion was his unfinished writings. I don't recall whether he had any intention to ever publish it, but certainly, he did not make strong efforts to do so. His son Christopher had to make a monumental effort to take the various disparate scraps and versions of stories to put them together into what appears to be a coherent whole.
To say that Tolkien "intended" for Galadriel to present, in Lord of the Rings, any of the traits one would associate with a kinslaying ruthless warleader is to completely ignore the context and the manner in which he wrote those two different aspects of her.
For the record, I'm not in this camp. I think it's fair to debate whether Galadriel participated and/or was culpable in that (as other threads have).
I'm just arguing (perhaps specifically in Tolkien's case) that LotR sits inside the "legendarium" and can't be properly interpreted in a void. I don't feel that the Silmarillion stories were so unfinished that they don't reveal truths about the characters, that Tolkien must have already held when writing LotR.
But now in retrospect, I'm probably glorifying Tolkien a bit too much. It's normal for authors to change their minds about their characters, and it's normal for people reinterpreting those works to sometimes ignore those changes of mind. (It's also normal for fans to dislike those reinterpretations when it clashes with their understanding of the characters).
> Galadriel, the only woman of the Noldor to stand that day tall and valiant among the contending princes, was eager to be gone. No oaths she swore, but the words of Fëanor concerning Middle-earth had kindled in her heart, for she yearned to see the wide unguarded lands and to rule there a realm at her own will.
Which doesn't say she was part in the kinslaying (though it doesn't say she wasn't, but its hard to interpret "Standing tall" as "participated in slaying her mother's kin").
In another version
> Even after the merciless assault upon the Teleri and the rape of their ships, though she fought fiercely against Fëanor in defence of her mother’s kin, she did not turn back. Her pride was unwilling to return, a defeated suppliant for pardon; but now she burned with desire to follow Fëanor with her anger to whatever lands he might come, and to thwart him in all ways that she could.
Which sounds like she participated _against Fëanor_, as in: she defended those being attacked.
In another unfinished version she left Valinor on her own separate from the rest of the Noldor.
In any case, she seems to be motivated by a desire to rule her own realm and a strong dislike of Fëanor.
Also, I am fairly certain that Tolkien was writing a fairy tale when we wrote about Galadriel and co. :)
I'm afraid, this argument is both wrong (maybe you just haven't been lucky with people around you), and inapplicable (the talk is imaginarium).
This seems to be a recurring problem in a lot of media these days. Protagonists who are just self-righteous jerks who both lecture others about how they need to act and pretend they're above any rules themselves. If this was the start of a character arc, fine, but a lot of the times these shows act as if these characters are right and that others should appreciate their toxic personalities.
A much better story is where smart, cunning characters vie against one another. There’s eb and flow, give and take, maybe a few pivotal movements that set the characters down a path they’ll resist but ultimately succumb too. Where when they reach the end despite their best efforts looking back they made the (mostly) same choices but still failed. Early Game of Thrones was a masterpiece in this regard.
The philosophy behind the so called works IS to create a new type of hero, one that isn’t someone who takes responsibility, sacrifices, works hard and fails a lot.
That type of hero is purposefully removed from fiction because it contradicts what wokeness is about.
The actual quality of the show, on the other hand, almost ends up being irrelevant. Personally I usually wait about two seasons before judging a TV show.
The craft of lying is the oldest. Somebody should write a book.
Some like deep mythology.
Some like having their politics stroked.
The problem is that they’re more focused on tying the series to Peter Jackson’s work and ensuring that children can watch it. The original stories were better.
We have an old and well-established culture of writers and system for rating those writers. You'd think they'd consult that.
I had to sidestep that landmine very fast.
It’s in this context that I believe every artist sends their creations out into the world. Having a vision of what it means to them and what it may mean to others. A world of the imagination is conveyed that can never be fully reproduced and for which we are left to fill the gaps. It is from these gaps, from our own imaginations, that the story continues. I appreciate that this is a story that will continue to be told, a universe that will continue to grow, through the imaginations of others.
I’ve enjoyed the storytelling and pacing so far, I believe there is time for the characters to become more developed and “likable”. Galadriel, however, was never a “hero”. She was an imperialist with a desire to rule her own realm. She was a self righteous dickhead who proudly refused forgiveness. So far the new series isn’t too far left field. Still, even if it was, I would watch it and judge it on its own merits. I want to see more of this type of content, just like I want to see more Star Wars content. I want to see the future continue to be inspired by, and inspire new additions to the story.
In the end we will collectively and individually determine what is and isn’t canon.
Deleting reviews to “guarantee” success is just sad.
Amazon boxes is premium real estate and it costs them nothing to advertise. Its helping drive awareness, as you recalled the ad and specifically where you saw it, which is a strong signal for advertisers that want to infiltrate your mind.
Honestly, just watch the first scene. It's hilariously soulless.
(This is all my opinion. Others are entitled to feel differently)
You want to make a release like this “a cultural event”. The latest Jurassic Park was everywhere. They even partnered with Walmart and decorated the outside of their buildings with giant posters of dinosaurs. I’m also remembering one of the Pirates of the Caribbean films: posters, buses, soda drinks, commercials, and even the snack Pirates Booty we’re all for a limited time only covered in the film logo.
And deleting negative reviews by bigots at least would be more defensible than deleting negative reviews from fans of Tolkien who take issue with the treatment of the work they love.
EDIT: I still haven't seen the show yet and I originally thought the issue with review bombing was similar to people like me hating the show foundation on Apple TV... I see now that people claim that a lot of negative reviews were due to the race of characters and people claiming the "show is too woke". In that case, it's actually more of a similar situation to Lightyear. Still, it's very interesting to see the differing treatment of Lightyear, a pixar property compared to this, an Amazon show.
That said, it's not a bad show if you watch it not having read the books. There are some decent original ideas, I liked the idea of the genetic dynasty. But, it's not Asimov's foundation, it's so different that it can hardly be said to be inspired by it. So, I wouldn't be complaining about it if it had a different name. Taking a series of well beloved books and deciding to so loosely adapt them that the end results has almost no relationship to the books feels disrespectful to me though.
The book has an interesting philosophical idea (psychohistory), but just doesn't work as a story. It feels too much like a disjointed sequence of deus ex machinas. (To be fair, I've read some other stuff from Asimov's Foundation series that did work as a story.)
The TV series tells a pretty compelling story and mostly does so quite well. Of course, by far the best aspect (the genetic dynasty) isn't even part of the book at all. So yeah, it's not a faithful adaptation, but it is a better story. The only thing I'm doubtful of is whether they can keep it up. Spanning millenia in this format feels sort of impossible (except perhaps as an anthology series). How often is somebody just going to cryo-sleep for centuries and ending up in just the right place without it getting the same feeling of contrived deus ex machina as in the original book?
(To be sure, I doubt that an Amazon Prime series can reach the quality of "the" LotR adaption, ever. But the hysterical screaming about the series is just childish.)
It's bigotry when someone disagrees?
1. https://www.thewrap.com/imdb-shut-troll-infested-message-boa...
Instead, go read a full review written by a trusted curator.
That's the point, trusted curators have been drifting further and further from what the majority of people find good for a long time.
What critics find good and what the target audience finds good are not the same: https://youtu.be/eFRWDZBH8Dc?t=745
I find the easiest way to do that is to generally read reviews, and when you go see the thing/buy the thing that got reviewed, think back to which reviewers closest aligned to your reaction, then read more of them, and eventually you'll find a small group of reviewers who you trust.
I admit that I haven't found "my" TV reviewer yet, since it seems the world of TV critics is afraid to offer any significant criticism of the shows they're reviewing. I'm not sure if that's an industry thing or if I've just been looking in the wrong places.
Unfortunately the 'tech' industry loves these type of aggregator websites because of the advertising and affiliate link opportunities. So our public perception of things beccomes more skewed over time due to the Rotten Tomatoes' and Yelps of the world.
Reading reviews just biases taste anyway. My plan is to watch the series, recommend it to my friends if I like it, and continue ignoring everything written on the Internet.
There are excellent shows that are woke / inclusive (Arcane) and they are universally liked by much of the same audiences.
Then there are medicore shows that are woke / inclusive (Foundation) and they get mixed reviews again from similar audiences.
According to this action by IMDB which is owned by Amazon, if you rated the show below a 5 then you are automatically a bigot. Which seems heavy handed, and like a big conflict of interest to say the least.
And that is clearly happening here
The fact LOTR was boring and uneventful makes the other flaws more glaring.
It's not like humans randomly became black or white, skin color is a result of thousands of years of evolution because of our surroundings. If you're going to apply the real world here, then you have to admit that black skinned dwarves make no sense from a biological point of view, since as we can see in the real world things tend to get paler and paler the less UV they're exposed to.
I don't know enough about Tolkien elves to comment on there being no black elves though
This is EXACTLY my issue with the show. This kind of forced diversity fuccs up the lore and detaches me from the depicted universe. At least make them all of the same skin color so it is coherent.
In the real world, skin didn't get paler simply because there wasn't enough UV. It got paler because less sunlight meant that darker skin couldn't absorb enough light for synthesis. If this wasn't case, our skins would still be dark.
So there is absolutely 1000% no reason at all why their skin would be any specific color. Dark or white, all are justifiable.
This literally in every show. The question is legitimate. How about a show about slavery where the slaves are mixed, with some white some black?
(Btw if the slavers were Muslim this would actually be historically accurate. Would that be allowed today as a show?)
Of course that would be silly, and we both know why. Tolkien’s work is explicitly based on Norse myth and the peoples of Northern Europe, who were and are quite real. He wrote about these intentions and influences at length.
There’s no need for writers to rely on European culture as a crutch. I’d personally love to see more epics set in the Mali Empire, Ghana Empire, or Kingdom of Dahomey. Sub-Saharan Africa has lots of its own rich mythology, too. It seems bizarre that besides Black Panther, the most I’ve seen these stories represented on TV is still the 1990s PBS series “Wishbone”.
No, I wouldn't mind. To get hopping mad about this kind of thing you have to be thinking a bit more about race than ... normal people do
I think you're kind of revealing a bit more about own feelings on race than you realise.
The new criticism isn't them "pivoting", it is a completely new set of people who dislike the show for entirely different reasons.
You're making the common error of assuming everyone you disagree with is part of some homogenous club.
She-hulk got review-bombed before the first episode came out. After watching it and enjoying it, my frustration at the fact that it's tough to criticize it without feeling lumped together with sexists wasn't at the "woke" crowd, but rather at the people who'd buried it in negative reviews before it even aired simply because they hate anything with a wiff of liberal politics.
The narrative is really awful - it feels like the characters are reading verbatim from a book, rather than reciting a screenplay adaption. The acting and behaviour of characters is very wooden, stiff, amateurish and unrealistic - maybe that's just what happens when actors have to recite such "formal" narrative, or maybe it's the actors' ability. The narrative and acting are totally unconvincing.
Thus far, the set, lighting CGI have been pretty disappointing too - I don't really understand why everything has to look like it's straight out of a cartoon, with eye-popping saturation levels. Or why all the CGI looks too "smooth" and strangely lit to look authentic. Or why so many of the buildings etc just look so... improbable.
All the characters look like they just came out of a salon - obviously brand new, pristine clothing, make up absolutely plastered on with a trowel, not a hair out of place etc. It looks very silly, and adds to the overall amateurish vibe.
And what on earth was that nonsense with the elves all standing in formation, perfectly upright and perfectly still, on the deck of a small boat sailing across an ocean?!
Overall, I felt like I was watching a theatre play, rather than a TV series. I think I read Amazon spent half a billion dollars on it, which is true sounds basically fraudulent.
I also want to add that I've been using IMDB for something like 20 years, and have rated over 1,000 movies and TV shows - what Amazon have done here is totally destroy my trust in IMDB ratings :(
In my experience, people directing anger the other way frequently end up declaring that they are now, in some capacity, on the side of the irrational crowd in question, with a "YOU made me do this" rationalization, which is pretty highly transparent.
Note that this is not to say there is no such thing as people doing the unfair lumping-in you describe on an individual basis, which is indeed its own problem.
But also note that, if you frequent the places where people feel more free to be openly anti-woke, you will find that those who would like to make irrational anti-woke criticisms also exaggerate the more acceptable criticisms you describe. This is because the show or movie is beyond merely "badly written" for them and has triggered their "hate" feelings. So, some amount of reviews critical of non-political/racial/etc things like pacing end up being magnified anyway by the hate the reviewer has underneath.
I much prefer the critics' scores - and right now they're 84% on RT [2] and 71 on Metacritics [3]. Which are reasonable numbers.
[1] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt7631058/ratings/?ref_=tt_ov_rt [2] https://www.rottentomatoes.com/tv/the_lord_of_the_rings_the_... [3] https://www.metacritic.com/tv/the-lord-of-the-rings-the-ring...
Yes, RT scores are binary, but that's not the same as saying that "rotten" means 1/10 and "fresh" means 10/10.
So it's better for me, as I value known critics more than random people.
A fanatic, while crazy, has skin in the game. Their time and money.
I'll take a fanatics POV over an experts everyday of the week and Sundays too.
But that's not the real world: here people are declaring a whole season of a show either a 10 or 1, after _maybe_ seeing 25% of it.
In other words, this data is too noisy and so not trustworthy.
Fans have nothing to gain, not prestige, not fame, not even a fattening bank account. All they ask for is to be entertained. Peter Jackson and hos team may be to blame for leaving such a high bar to clear, but censorship will never be the answer.
I am simply ignoring users ratings as I deem them unhelpful.
They have something else to gain: the validation of their worldview.
But I still got a reminder that this show was available when I asked what time it was the other day.
Shame the amount of engineering effort that went into that system, only for it to be destroyed by absurd business strategy. I’m sure a couple PMs got a “level 2 to level 3” promotion out of it or something.
(It may also be true that some percentage of those who cancel Prime for this reason may rejoin Prime a couple of months from now when the Prime retention machine sends them a 'We miss you!' email trigger offering free trials of Prime for x months to get them back back).
It more seems like internet trolls are complaining they see a darker skinned person on their TV and the news media is happy to run with that story.
Like making a rainbow flag logo, or promoting based on race. Minorities first of course.
The thing that's got me interested is the entrance of Gandalf (I presume.) Dropped in from the heavens like an alien, found in a smoldering crater, clearly baffled by up-close Arda, can't speak "the" language, mystified by corporeal-ness, almost simian. The writers had enough of a clue to see the opportunity in making Gandalf's backstory a meaningful subplot, so they're developing it with some care, and that's pretty cool.
Also, the Elves aren't perfect, one dimensional beings it total harmony with all things. You've got politics, cowardice, rebellion and other stuff there. Morfydd Clark's Galadriel is ok. Reserving the benefit of the doubt there because there is a long way to go and it's a huge part for any actor.
Finally, Owain Arthur's Durin in Khazad-dûm was well acted (if not entirely well written at points.) Very memorable.
I think people are expecting a life changing experience from TRoP and aren't getting it, or something. It's just more streaming TV, and far from the worst of that. House of the Dragon is ok too, but one nice thing with TRoP is the absence of soft porn and disturbing torture scenes. That stuff is fine for HotD but it's also good to see story telling that won't resort to that.
Aside from that I agree, so far TRoP has been close to or better than expected. I'm not sure what people expected here but at any rate it's too early. You would't want to judge LotR based only on the initial chapter either.
Sincerely sorry. And yet...
> Didn't know that was Gandalf.
My point, exactly.
Steam gets the scale this right by only having up or down reviews, and collecting reacts to the review to sort out what people think of the review.
They shouldn’t have removed all negative reviews, and it earned its 3/10. But having a tighter scale removes the 1/10s outsized drag on the average.
However, I'm going to complain that people quick to accuse any criticism of racism/sexism/anythingism might just end up willing whatever blame they put on people they dislike into existence, to their own detriment.
Personally, I get it. The LoTR trilogy is a timeless classic. Of course, nothing can compare.
1.) I wrote a review with 5 stars and tried to submit it. There was a red error message saying the text would be below 600 characters so I couldn't submit it.
2.) I copied a lengthy random text into the submission field so it was 1000 characters++ - still the same error message
3.) I switched to a 6 star rating. Suddenly the error message magically disappeared and I could submit it.
4.) I toggled back and forth between 4, 5, 6 and 7 stars. After a few tries I could submit the review with 5/10 on Sept 5th.
5.) I even got a confirmation email with a link where I can track my contribution. Text said "Thank you for your contribution - this item is awaiting processing by our data editors. Estimated processing date - 6 September 2022"
6.) You can guess yourself if my review has been processed... Like all other reviews below 6/10, it doesn't show up on the review page. 6/10 is still the lowest reviews available: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt7631058/reviews?sort=userRating... =>>> Try by yourselves if you experience the same stuff. We've had reports of deleted reviews, too. I guess it's clear that they're manipulating on a large scale. I wouldn't be surprised if the 6.7 overall rating is manipulated, too.
The Rings of Power - 6.2 stars (42K ratings)
House of the Dragon - 8.8 stars (75K ratings)
RoP IMO is quite a lot better. I enjoyed the first episode.
The most popular subreddit for game of thrones content is based around hating the source material: https://old.reddit.com/r/freefolk/
Then again, maybe that's why - the GoT fans are pleasantly surprised that HotD isn't a disaster, whereas the LoTR fans are upset that it's not as good as they'd expect.
I watched the show with two other people, of very different interests and ages. We all enjoyed it immensely.
- The sets, costumes, and cinematography are fantastic and at times breath-taking. The level of detail in the costumes is amazing, and I can't really imagine them being better. - The acting is first-rate. IMO it's better overall than the acting in LoTR, or at least as good, and better than in most shows you'll watch. I did not see an actor that was not all-in for their role, and the many accents are beautifully done. This is the most important quality of any show for me. - The language in the script is elevated, and there are some beautiful lines. Scenes are allowed to develop, without the need for the rapid cuts many shows feature/rely on. - Plot is fine! I have not seen where it will go yet, but there are some big plot points, and subtle tensions developing. I had no problem here.
I love LoTR, but am not a dedicated Tolkien fan with rules about how things must be. I am fine with spin-offs, re-imaginings, alternate worlds, whatever! IMO the goal here is to entertain, to capture the imagination, and to do work that shows dedication to the craft and I think the show easily succeeds in all of those. I would probably watch a full season just for the production value alone.
Also, the whole race thing: What? To me it's a complete red herring and everyone in the show belongs there. This is not just gate-keeping, but racism plain and simple. If countering that racism is your only reason to watch the show, that's a good enough reason.
While the style of the characters clothing is there, it all looks brand new, totally pristine. Just like the characters themselves, all of whom are plastered with impeccable make up. I found it looked silly and amateurish.
On the narrative, I found it overly formal, like it was being recited word for word from Shakespeare or something - it doesn't feel at all like a screenplay, more like actors reading from a book. And I think this impacts terribly on the acting, which I found to be wooden, stiff and unrealistic.
This is not a "owned by amazon fuck bezos" comment. All review sites are bogus. All review numbers are bogus. YouTube like/dislike ratios, reddit vote counts, it's all bogus. You can't rely on anyone else telling you whether you should like something or not. That shortcut is gone forever. People will game it in an effort to game your life.
I went through the top 10 movies from every year for the past 22 years, and this is what I found.“
In the DVD era most people didn't buy expensive DVDs - they rented them from Blockbuster (then later Netflix) just as they had done before on VHS.
In the post-DVD era there is still plenty of money coming after the theatrical release in the form of money from streaming services. How does this source of revenue compare to that of the DVD era, and, if it's significantly different, then why?
One thing that's different nowadays is how quickly movies go from theatre to streaming, but that's under control of the movie studio - presumably they expect to make more money this way.
Perhaps the real problem is the cost of producing, and marketing, these Hollywood movies in the first place, making it necessary for everything to be a mega-hit to be successful.
If the studio makes more money from ticket sale revenue sharing, than from streaming (or previously DVD rental), then why are they now rushing to streaming so quickly?
To speculate:
Blockbuster used to be utterly dominant in the VHS/DVD rental era, and there would be prominently displayed in-store advertising of what in-theatre movies were coming to DVD/Rental soon, as well as the new releases getting their own section in the store. Perhaps in-store DVD rental therefore created it's own marketing and extended shelf life, as opposed to online streaming rental where the customer likely already knows what they are looking for a opposed to being influenced by "coming-soon and newly-released" in-store marketing.
The lack of variety of movies in the US, to which Damon is responding, is also at least in part because there is, for whatever reason, no culture of arts cinemas here. The whole industry is geared up for the economics of large budget movies and the de-risking that involves.
It's not like we went from theaters + DVDs to just threaters.
[1] https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/t he-story-behind-the-worst-movie-on-imdb/
This show didn’t have the source material to pull dialogue from and so they come up with these ridiculous boat and rock analogies that are laughably stupid. Aside from that, most of the show is boring. The entire second episode for Galadriel was pointless. The hobbits are annoying, the soap opera romance between the Persian girl and the black elf is excruciating, really the dwarves are the only fun and well acted part of the episode.
The elves have no majesty. In LOTR, the elves were always this demigod-like beings who move and act with supernatural grace but in this they just seem like rich people.
It just isn’t LOTR
https://web.archive.org/web/20220903104125/https://www.imdb....
https://web.archive.org/web/20220903104126/https://www.imdb....
https://web.archive.org/web/20220903104131/https://www.imdb....
https://web.archive.org/web/20220903104824/https://www.imdb....
indeed all show zero results.
Anything higher than a 5, does show results:
https://web.archive.org/web/20220903104206/https://www.imdb....
https://web.archive.org/web/20220903104208/https://www.imdb....
https://web.archive.org/web/20220903104210/https://www.imdb....
https://web.archive.org/web/20220903104822/https://www.imdb....
https://web.archive.org/web/20220903104818/https://www.imdb....
Now, one can have lots of opinions about 0/10 reviews, but they surely have just the same right to exist as similarly extreme 10/10 reviews.
<< As a REAL Tolkien fan, I couldn't have asked for any better. Anyone who complains otherwise isn't a Tolkien fan, but a Peter Jackson fan, and can't accept someone new showing their creative vision for the lore.
<< They STORY is ALSO EXCELLENT IF you LISTEN! (Abhorrently, that seems so infinitely difficult for some to do). TRUE, that there is a much longer than necessary scene 2/3's of the way through which almost put me to sleep (and it is the reason I am not giving this a 10)
<< As said above, I will not deny there is some mediocrity, but I cannot fathom why/how a massive 30% of all the ratings are 1 stars... does not seem genuine to me.
<< This is honestly already on par or better than game of thrones
<< Listen...we know it is not book accurate. Much of The Lord of The Rings and Hobbit movies (modern era non cartoon versions) weren't either. NO length of television show or movie could capture what Tolkien put on pages. So GET OVER IT.
I agree they should have kept at least few 1s for pretends.
I’m writing this while wearing a Lord of the Rings t-shirt. I love Lord of the Rings, but I’ve leaned my lesson. I’m going to trust the reviews and not waste my time watching this show.
As for the show itself I can't comment since I haven't seen it.
Why would they erode trust in their platform like this...
This kind of shit makes me want to never watch the show in spite.
And also, prequel/sequel stuff that was not originally mapped out by the author is usually crap.
That much money (as well as being tied to a big name like Amazon) attracts the antithesis of creativity, where everything becomes ‘plastic’ (someone above called it a ‘wax museum’ which is a good way to put it) and means anything remotely controversial or original will be killed dead.
I think that's the complaint.
Is review bombing somehow illegitimate? If so, what separates a "bomb" review from a legitimate review?
Even on Steam the reviews are biased to people that bought the game and are interested in the genre. It's not an objective score by the majority of people.
Review bombing goes both ways, somehow we always only hear about one side.
https://babylonbee.com/news/rings-of-power-review-game-of-th...
but the trailer did make it seem compelling
https://babylonbee.com/news/exclusive-scene-from-the-rings-o...
They have kept their data open and downloadable https://m.imdb.com/interfaces/
They did shutdown the forums. But moderating is every companies nightmare these days.
Their reviews and ratings are world class and very accurate
(There are known issues like nationalism in certain countries, but it's easy to cope)
This is disappointing. But no other company would ever rate their own streaming with accurate ratings like Amazon do.
It must be be disappointing to spend over half a billion $ and end up with the mess they have. They do delete brigadeing like when people downvoted Godfather to get The Dark Knight to 1.
Maybe wait and see?
It’s not Shakespeare, but it’s nowhere near as dire as the anti-hype suggests. If it had come out without any connection to Tolkien, or the truly cringeworthy marketing, I think it would be doing fine.
Back to your statement: where did you get that people "are upset not because the show is bad but because it's not as bad as they expected"? Are there really that many people with the desperate desire to mock it? OTOH, nearly 40% rated it a 10. Where does that come from, then?
I suppose that a few people with bots could also be an explanation.
Yes, the most thumbed down trailer of all-time and a big meme culture based on how bad it was going to be, how they ruined Tolkien completely etc. Now when the show is not the 1/10 trainwreck they expected all those memes become invalidated and this infuriates the mob.
Some reviews also mentioned other things they don't like, like costumes not being good or fights being cinematic instead of subdued or characters appearing where they shouldn't be if you take Silmarillion into accord ... but I have not read even one review that didn't include some version of "I hate it because it has black people in it" - whether calling it political, woke, "not true to source with regards to casting" or whatever.
I am not overstating it - literally one hundred percent of reviews I have seen were about people not liking it because there are non-white people in it.
Some people travelled a lot. The Saxons sent emissaries to what’s now Sri Lanka, while an Armenian Christian monk born in Beijing met the pope and Edward I. In Middle Earth the Numenorians had extensive colonies in the far south of the continent. This obsession with racial segregation is absurd and utterly ahistorical.
I can tell you that the first time people saw black people in my very small hometown in the French countryside during the Second World War, they stopped to ask questions and at least one photo was taken. It’s not racism. It was just completely out of the ordinary which is exactly how I imagine seeing black people in the middle of a tavern would happen in medieval Europe.
Adventure fiction is often centred on unusual characters with exceptional back stories or circumstances, and people like that did exist.
No, because they would have died from the novel diseases the village would have had. There's a reason why when Europeans went anywhere they died by the boat load and pretty much everyone they brought back to Europe also died.
It's always fun to remember that Pocahontas died in England after being there less than a year.
In Middle Earth the Numenorians had extensive colonies in the far south, and also had contact with the Elves and their ancestral homelands in the northern regions. Again, just not an issue.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romans_in_Sub-Saharan_Africa
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timbuktu#History
The Egyptians sponsored a Phoenician expedition that circumnavigated Africa. Finds at the ruins at Great Zimbabwe include items from as far away as China.
Check out this mural of the Roman emperor Severus and his wife from the 2nd century, and tell me again how there were no black people in Europe as long ago as Medieval times.
https://www.history.co.uk/article/severus-rome’s-first-afric...
And again, we know for a fact from Tolkien that the Numenorians ranged from the north all the way to the far southern continent, and the oceans of the Far East.
Somewhere between 10% to 30% of Europeans that moved to West Africa died each year.
To put that in context the black death on average killed between 30% to 60% of the population _once a generation_.
That said, 'historical fictions' are usually much more fiction than historical.
You both seem in agreement actually.
It ruins the whole viewing experience, because you stop buying what you see. Characters are just very obviously not believable anymore. People in present times still react strongly to people of different skin color if they are not used to seeing them. And I am supposed to just let it slide, that a group of illiterate people, whose access to media consists only of some paintings in church to illustrate the Latin sermon they cannot even understand, just did not react whatsoever to some obvious foreigner, who - by definition, not because of the skin color - could very likely have robbed and killed them?
For everyone except East Asian males. They are generally not allowed into the diversity club unless they're playing a martial arts expert.
East Asian women get casted because, well, at least they're women. Maybe they can find themselves a nice non-East Asian boyfriend in the movie. East Asian men can go and screw themselves.
God forbid if they included a conservative older white male who isn't portrayed as a heinous villain.
You have to remember that the woke writers are not striving for real diversity, they are striving to placate the cultural elite on Twitter and look good in front of their woke friends. It is a status contest.
I think this is all part of the reason why "woke" shows get canned so hard. It is so obviously contrived and not reflective of real life. They are not making timeless content.
It removes the entire concept of having different nations with different people who are proud of their culture and ways of being, each with something unique to bring to the table, say in scenarios of war, uniting together against something evil, trade, customs, and everything else that isolated groups represent on their own.
Globalism isn't even realistic in a setting like Lord of the Rings, yet here we are.
That's not my issue. I dislike the concept of nations and national culture and borders, and I despise nationalism and ethnonationalism. I just want non-contrived diversity. That means sitcoms that have an actual diverse cast (including political conservatives, Asian and Middle Eastern men, redheads, ugly people, autistic people who aren't there as a gag, guys with small dicks, butch women, and so on) which represents the real world and doesn't alienate and shaft parts of the population for no artistic reasons. And that means a LoTR series that doesn't have diversity where it doesn't belong and where it doesn't make artistic sense.
Are there any black guys mentioned in those books? If not, not sticking to script is a valid complaint ( see how annoyed people were with Game of Thrones departure -- it is not a question of race; it is a question of movie not matching image in your head ). If yes, its downvoting for the sake of a different political ( anti-woke ) agenda.
There is not a lot of room to introduce Asian or African characters in that history and they can distract easily from the immersion. Is not different that seeing white actors posing as American natives in old films with a ridiculous hairpiece and make up. Nobody expects forcing an African character in Chinese mythology, or imposing a white character in each African film, and this is perfectly Ok. Why shouldn't be ok?
The current trend to flood histories with stereotypes to please every single possible viewer is frankly annoying. I'm fearing the appearance of the bullied gay dwarf at any moment.
The characters a bland enough that there is plenty to complain about that does not include their race or sexual orientation. Does "race" even apply considering there is literal other races?
This depends entirely on your knowledge. There are people who won't notice a 1970s car in a movie set in 1950s because they don't know anything about cars, and then there are those to whom it's utterly immersion-breaking because the anachronistic car is associated with much later things for them and the mismatch sticks out like a sore thumb.
If you cast diverse actors, you are less precise, but are making the world a (slightly) better place for underrepresented and disadvantaged people. If you don't, you are more precise and are making the world a (slightly) worse place for underrepresented and disadvantaged people.
What of these is more important?
The crux should be the writing, immersion, and ability to be invested in a story with these things.
You put me in a difficult position. I don't really watch movies anymore ( Joaquin's Joker was ok ). I rarely get into shows ( I was amused by Boys ). I still read a little. That said, I can absolutely guarantee you that never have I ever in my entire existence on this planet read something and thought to myself "If only Geralt was black, or at least a gypsy, the world would be a better place" for several different yet related reasons:
1. It is supposed to be my entertainment and not a social project ( or more accurately, it can be both, but entertainment should be the primary consideration; after all, if I pay, I expect some value )
2. I do not accept the assertion that it does make better place for underrepresented and disadvantaged people. Right now, it is actually making it worse. You may not be seeing it, but counter-culture is rejecting it pretty hard and that is with all the internet censorship in full swing ( granted, currently for corporate reasons, but censorship is censorship is censorship ). If anything, this hamfisted approach creates a whole new generation of actual racists.. I do not think that makes for a better place for "underrepresented and disadvantaged people".
I don't buy the binary framing either. To me, neither is important.
We can't make more Tolkien, Shakespeare, or Homer. We can just put our own spin on the stories they told, retell or reinterpret them as we see fit. The "most faithful" adaptation of their stories to the screen is still an adaptation.
If you enjoy the original works ... enjoy the original works.
Until some years ago, I‘d just have a glance at the score/stars and make my decision.
By now, if something is rated low but my gut feeling tells me that it could be off, I always do a quick check of reviews, and 90% of the time I go „Okay, it’s the racists again“.
Also: „high critics score, low audience score on Rotten Tomatoes == racist and/or LGBTQ-haters being racist and/or LGBTQ-hating“ is a frighteningly precise heuristic.
Social (in)justice took the world by storm almost instantly as governments, corporations, and other large entities flocked to using controversy to fuel their greed while they haphazardly feign a set of supposed virtues that only a tiny, fractional minority care about -- and among them, even many of them abhor what is happening with wokeness.
It is but a temporary fad/trend that will eventually die, and the world will finally go back to normal again when people get bored of it all, and thank God for it.