The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power (Amazon Prime)

Interested at the lack of comment on the fact not a single Scandinavian actor played a dwarf in the films, then. They're all Brits (Scots, for the most part), I'm sorry to inform you, but for some rason I can't quite put my finger into people only care about that when they're black. Itself a very funny turnaround after so much talk of "Tolkien is escapism". Apparently, the Dwarves being portrayed by actors of multiple ethnicity is...too much realism...?

Edited by Gaon on Feb 14th 2022 at 11:02:46 AM

D&D first featured the Drow or dark elves in adventure modules in 1978. That's probably the first appearance of Tolkienesque Elves with explicitly darker skin colors, and they've been pretty popular ever since.

@Gaon, do you have a point with this prattle? I’m not talking about the actors, I’m talking about Tolkien’s inspiration. You said it yourself that we don’t know what they looked like since Tolkien apparently never described their skin color. Yet, you keep claiming it’s possible they were black in the Legendarium, despite having no evidence. In fact, you’re the one who keeps bringing it up.

Let’s look past the skin color you’re so fixated upon and see the other issue.

Does she have a beard? No.

Is she wearing copious amounts of jewelry to showcase her wealth and status like all dwarves do? No.

Does she wear armor and clothing that doesn’t distinguish her from the men? No.

The show runners didn’t get anything right about female dwarves, or dwarves in general from this.

Stop defending a show that isn’t out yet. You have no idea if she’ll even be a good character. So, why keep defending it when the show may do her justice on its own?

Why are you criticizing the show? It isn't out yet.

The later BBC adaption of Around the World in 80 days had an interesting situation like this happen. It was the first adaptation to cast a French actor for Passepartout, but they cast a black French actor and got a fair bit of online flack for casting a black person.

@afrovenator I haven’t said whether this show will be good or bad. I’ve only listed my issues with it. Something not really done here, as most of you commenters are here to complain about everyone who isn’t excited for this.

We've had only a single photo of her so far. It may very well be that for some of her actual screen time she does indeed end up wearing armour/copious amounts of ostentatious wealth in a non gendered outfit.

It's a very harsh criticism to be making when it's still 8 months until we even see the show.

I have no idea what the Hell we're even talking about anyway

I seem to remember Tolkien's descriptions of elves as being a lot more nature adjacent than modern depictions. I definitely recall them being described with ears the shape not leaves rather than pointy ears, and I think I remember elf skin being compared to tree bark in hue. 's been a while since I tried to read the books.

Right. It hit half-past three in the morning (why do I stay up so long?) where I am while this was up and loads of people probably responded and the conversation's probably moved on so I'm just going to hit the hay now and dearly hope that nothing else will transpire over the night. Or at the very least, it'll be quieter.

I will say (though it's probably not going to sound very coherent) that the idea of wanting for more characters that are outside the narrow box of being white (or a man or hetrosexual or cisgender), characters that better reflect the world because, as Gaon said, "film adaptations are filmed in the real world, to tell stories to real people", is "stating you can't connect with a character because they're not your skin color" is very questionable to me.

It's an argument that's sort of...self-serving? In the sense that it has the connotations of "why try to fix what isn't broken", keeping the status quo as is, as though it’s not a problem because it doesn't bother you.

I remember in Yahtzee of Zero Punctuation's review of Dishonored 2, he started off the video talking about how you could play as Corvo, the previous protagonist, or as Emily, the Empress who was a walking McGuffin child in the last game and, well, I'm paraphrasing from what little snippets of memory of that video can be seen clearly from the fog of sleepiness and the passage of time, his argument went "who cares about what's between your protagonist's legs, what matters is the art, the ability to have a character you care about". Or something close to that, it's been a long while since I saw it. I mostly try to see him as a funny-man and not take his word on most other things.

I didn't feel comfortable with it back then and that was before I even found these forums in 2016. I had leftish feelings back then but they weren't very well defined: an exasperation with fanservice and a vague "I don't think there's much of a problem with more diversity. It seems pretty harmless, all things considered. Gets people more jobs that they may not have gotten normally, some variety in appearance and character types. It seems like a O.K thing." Even now, I'm only sure that I'm leftward but not wholly sure how much or even if I cut from that direction in certain places, being socially progressive while being economically conservative is a thing, I've learned. Humans can be complex, yo.

Ultimately, yes, people can relate with characters of any type, if done well- so why not have more characters that are different from the usual? Why not offer other minorities characters they can relate better to? It isn't being shallow or "unhealthy". The above argument isn't actually an argument against wanting representation, despite how it's conveyed. It's not a contradiction to think about the narrative and think about how you can give better representation for other people, the two co-exist for a good reason because stories don't exist for their own sake, they exist to be read, watched, consumed by others. (Let's not try to say that I'm trying to say that writers should only write what other people want, that's just a silly strawman.) It took a few years on this website for me to finally get that idea but representation does matter.

An ideal world would be one where nobody cares about “diversity” or “representation” because everybody already has plenty of characters with plenty of different personalities and character roles they can relate more fully to.

...And I'm sure somebody could go on a long talk about the importance of representation to people (if not just wondering why the state of affairs is stacked like this and what making changes can do) as the benefits of having a variety of people does have scientific basis backing it up but. Yanno.

Sleep. Must.

Zzzzzzzzzzzzzz.

Edit: Here's a thread if you're curious and want to get started, Richard.

Edit^2: And ya’ll be glad I’m too tired to tackle trying to equivocate the diversity argument with “if you can relate with an elf or dwarf...” because, WOW. That’s a new false equivalency.

Edited by fredhot16 on Feb 15th 2022 at 1:54:38 AM

This whole discussion started because of you making an argument (erroneously) invoking biological evolution to defend reactions from people opposed to casting black actors as dwarves. It's not exactly a great look to barge in on a thread where people are condemning the racist backlash some casting decisions have gotten with that sort of argument.

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I don't have a lot to say about the trailer itself other than I can smell all the money Amazon is burning on this all the way from here. I hope for their sake the show is at least decent.

Edited by Draghinazzo on Feb 15th 2022 at 8:36:43 AM

I think this show is in part a passion project and they're looking more for the prestige of it than a profit.

Jeff Bezos is seemingly donating money to the budget simply because he's a Tolkien nerd.

I don't think the usual game of numbers is going to apply to this show like it usually does.

Once again, no difference.

Still racist to complain about black dwarves. Sounds like its own kind of unhealthy obsession right there.

I don't think it's even relevant if it's an escapist fantasy or a power fantasy.

If people want their escapist fantasies to only contain white people, you find yourself asking what aspects of reality they are fantasising about escaping from.

And likewise, if people want their power fantasies to ony contain white people you find yourself asking what kind of power they're fantasising about having.

Why are we still entertaining a racist troll here? Holler a mod and kick him out.

And the history of the drow is pretty real-world racist. Not only were they Always Chaotic Evil until Drizz't, but for a good chunk in the middle there they were often portrayed with explicitly African hairstyles. Nowadays they're more often portrayed as having inhuman skin and hair colors (and not Always Chaotic Evil), dodging that problem more.

I've read some things claiming that Tolkien's elves were supposed to be more inhumanly beautiful, too, more like a fey race than just pretty humans with pointy ears. Which might explain how everyone instantly recognizes elves on sight.

Well the pointy ears ARE a dead giveaway.

Although muddying the question of recognising elves is that—if I recall correctly—it was noted that Gandalf was sometimes taken for an elf!

... That said, I forget by whom he was so taken; perhaps it was by people who knew little about elves!

On a related note, there's a shot in the teaser that struck me: a young girl is with someone else—I think perhaps at the sea—who pulls up her hair on one side as though to check her ear, indeed revealing it to be pointed. I do wonder what the context is of such an "are you an elf?"-check?

1) Good casting at some level has to involve casting someone who looks the part (or can be reasonably made to look the part). For well-established characters casting someone who is very different from past actors who have played the part can work sometimes, but the actor often has an uphill battle ahead of him or her.

There also has to be some logic involved in who the characters are and how the story is supposed to work. You can have a black woman playing Hamlet, but if Claudio, Gertrude, and the ghost of Hamlet Sr. are all white actors then the audience is going to start wondering at the implications of the casting rather than enjoying the performance. Since Gertrude's relationship with Hamlet Sr. is a pretty important part of the play it's not something that could be ignored.

It's all well and good to say "any actor should be able to play any character" but in practice there are limits, and not really because of "racism". If Gandalf eventually turns up in this series, it probably would not be a good idea to have him played by, say, Zendaya.

2) Often there appears to be a double standard at work. The very same people who are most vocal in saying "why not let a black woman play Hamlet?" will turn on a dime and say "I feel there is something very wrong with letting Johnny Depp play Tonto," or "Disney is doing an animated film set in Colombia? If they don't make sure every voice actor is Latino I will refuse to see the movie." (For the record Alan Tudyk is in the Encanto voice cast. He played a toucan).

If it really doesn't matter who plays a white character then it really shouldn't matter who plays a non-white character either, should it?

That said, I have no problem with the new series including racially diverse Elves and Dwarves. Like I said earlier, there's nothing in Tolkien that really rules it out. I'm much more worried whether the series will be any good.

Edited by Bense on Feb 15th 2022 at 10:28:45 AM

That’s because of proportion. Actors of color getting to play any character is not so common. White actors getting to play any character regardless of race has been the standard for generations and even nowadays is slow to change. So naturally actors of color are protective of the few seemingly guaranteed opportunities to play characters of their own race and are annoyed when even that gets handled to white actors.

Edited by Tuckerscreator on Feb 15th 2022 at 8:47:46 AM

@ArsThaumaturgis Funnily enough, Gandalf's name basically means "Staff-Elf". As for who called him that:

I have to say, walking in this thread to bang on the idea Tolkien made some authoritative statement Elves and Dwarves can only be the purest lily white and then flipping the table with "you're the real racists!" when you're corrected is comical. Last not

Nowhere did Tolkien said all Dwarves are 24/7 decked out in insane amounts of jewelry. And beyond that, the character (Disa) is in fact decked out head-to-toe in pure gold so I don't even know what's this complaint about.

@Ars Thaumaturgis: Funny thing is that in-canon Elves and Men can get easily mistaken for each other. Tuor's story in the Silmarillion runs on the tidbit that he can pass for an Elf with practically no one noticing. In visual interpretations they addded the pointy ears more clearly (something that Tolkien doesn't actually talk about that much in the books) as a tell-tale sign.

I think the shot in the trailer is Halbrand (a new character who is seen stuck in a raft) with Galadriel. By the ambiguous point the show is set elves are seen with distrust in Númenor, so the check is going to presumably be a "oh shit, it's an actual elf".

Halbrand himself is a bit of a cypher here. He's described as "Galadriel's mysterious companion running from his past" I have an inkling that he may in fact end up being Sauron in disguise, but that's just a feeling.

Edited by Gaon on Feb 15th 2022 at 9:33:53 AM

If memory serves it was mentioned in the essay on the Istari in Unfinished Tales that some men started to think they must be elves, and it was because of their seeming immortality and because they hung around elves a lot, not because they looked much like elves. They looked like old men when they first appeared in Middle-earth.

@Gaon - First, a lot of props to you for your arguments in this thread.

Also, yeah, it does seem to be a requirement that the show has to do Two Aliases, One Character with Sauron.

I do have to say I am wondering if the "Actually Sauron" person is the guy mentioned in the plotline with the Harfoots in which they "encounter a mysterious lost man whose origin promises to be one of the show’s most enticing enigmas."

If so, that would probably anger a lot of people, because Sauron canonically basically didn't know or care that hobbits existed until he found out about Gollum.

So hopefully the mysterious lost man is like Gandalf or Tom Bombadil or something.

That being said, The character descriptions in the Wiki page here indicates that Joseph Mawle's antagonist character is the Mouth of Sauron (literally and figuratively) but might be Sauron himself.

Edited by Hodor2 on Feb 15th 2022 at 11:32:00 AM