Jeff Bezos' new Lord of the Rings show is angering fans because it has Black dwarves

[dalton99a]

https://fortune.com/2022/02/19/jeff-bezos-lord-of-the-rings-show-diversity/

Jeff Bezos’ new Lord of the Rings show is angering fans because it has Black dwarves. Seriously.
By Christiaan Hetzner
February 19, 2022 6:00 AM CST

Amazon’s new big budget Lord of the Rings series may be months away from its streaming debut in September, yet a battle is already erupting over Middle-earth.

Coveting the phenomenal success of HBO’s Game of Thrones, Jeff Bezos is investing a fortune to grow Prime Video’s 200 million subscriber base by bringing J.R.R.’s Tolkien’s unparalleled fantasy world-building to life on the small, streaming screen.

However, when the first trailer for Prime's tentpole LOTR epic, dubbed The Rings of Power, dropped on Super Bowl Sunday, Amazon Studios sparked uproar after the all-white, heavily male casts from previous film depictions made way for a more inclusive Tolkien retelling.

Rather than the image of a slender Galadriel dressed in her ethereal gossamer gown that Peter Jackson chose for his Tolkien trilogies, the Lady of Lothlórien was instead portrayed charging a field atop her steed, clad in full armor. All new characters that never appeared in the author's works were introduced, including Arondir the elf, and the dwarven princess Disa, both portrayed by a Latinx and Black actor respectively.

[gratuitous]

1. Good heavens, people

There is no shortage of real things to get exercised about (not intended as a shot at dalton99a, who is merely the messenger).

[Budi]

2. K & R Because it's Bezos...

🙄

You'd think they'd look down the coastline to the mastermind behind the REAL destruction taking place in our REAL nation.
Peter Thiel & Silicon Valley.

Guess there's alway a 'don't look at us, look at him!" , boogeyman distracting from the dirty rumbling of their own well connected underground.

[uponit7771]

6. +1, the people angry are the privileged assholes

[Kid Berwyn]

3. Can't teach CRT...

Can’t cast fictional characters…

What is the color of a snowflake?

[Retired Engineer Bob]

4. More belly aching from the racist filth

The same eff-heads bitched about the Black Panther Marvel movie.

[meadowlander]

8. And female Ghostbusters.

[Dial H For Hero]

13. I was just annoyed that the female Ghostbusters film was lousy. As for the Rings of Power, I am

concerned that (among other things) it's my understanding that they're compressing the events of the Second Age by thousands of years to avoid bringing in a brand-new set of human characters each season as the centuries roll by. I don't mind taking some liberties, but that's huge.

[Demsrule86]

23. Actually, it wasn't lousy...I liked it very much...bunch sexist tried to take it down...

Seriously...

[Sympthsical]

26. It is a truly awful film

Here's the thing though - the problem isn't that it was all female or the actresses. Each of the actresses involved is incredibly talented, as we've seen in so much of their other work.

I blame Paul Feig. Entirely, completely, 100%. The writing was just terrible. The jokes aren't funny. It didn't fit with the kind of cynical, sardonic humor that made Ghostbusters. It was weird slapsticky, lowest denominator jokey, cringed the entire way through. I was on a plane with nothing better to do when I saw it, and I almost shut it off in favor of sitting there doing nothing. Not even on a plane.

If they had taken the same actresses and had just about anyone else write and direct, it could've turned out so much better.

And then when people pointed out how terrible it was, they got called sexist as a marketing strategy, which was weird. The main protagonist of the new Ghostbusters is a teenage girl. It's been pretty well-received.

Sometimes a bad movie really is a bad movie. And I love bad movies. But that wasn't good/bad. That was bad-bad. I wanted to turn it off on a plane. And I will watch nearly anything.

Someone allowed Paul Feig near the project, and that was that. I wonder what a movie with those same actresses and a competent writer/director would've looked like. I'd watch that movie.

Now I have to watch the CinemaSins video on it, just for balance.

[Amishman]

40. That might be the best explanation as to what went wrong with that movie

And I agree, it was poorly written with a comedy style out of sync with the originals

[jeffreyi]

5. Everybody knows dwarves and elves are pink.

[Mike Nelson]

7. Well...

... I'd need to know more before getting too upset... I'm wondering how this would be received in a re-make of Snow White?

[muriel_volestrangler]

18. They'd want it to look like this disaster from 1943

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coal_Black_and_de_Sebben_Dwarfs

"The film is an all-black parody of the Brothers Grimm fairy tale Snow White, known to its audience from the popular 1937 Walt Disney animated feature Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. The stylistic portrayal of the characters is an example of "darky" iconography, which was widely accepted in American society at the time. As such, it is one of the most controversial cartoons in the classic Warner Brothers library, being one of the Censored Eleven. The cartoon has been rarely seen on television, and has never been officially released on home video."

[Mike Nelson]

19. Yikes!

... don't think I'll look for that version.

[Hekate]

29. The kind of thing you hope will live in the archives so some bright grad student can research...

… the whole phenomenon some day. History - Film Studies - “Race Films” - Black Studies - Gender Studies. In the right hands, this and the rest of the Censored Eleven could be a valuable resource.

[cinematicdiversions]

24. The problem with the Snow White remake is the whole sex with miners thing

that was much more acceptable when the original cartoon came out.

[miyazaki]

9. Kinda looks like LOTR 90210

[GB_RN]

10. Jesus H. Christ On A Stick...

THIS is a reason to bitch about the show??🤦?♂️

FFS, these losers need to get a goddamned life, or crawl back under the rocks from which they came.

[Dr. Strange]

11. Female dwarves WITHOUT BEARDS!

Everyone knows that the female dwarves are supposed to have beards!
https://www.gamesradar.com/lord-of-the-rings-amazon-dwarves-beards/

We're supposed to be living in a society!

[Dial H For Hero]

14. Well...Tolkien did state explicitly that they did have them.

For the Naugrim (dwarves) have beards from the beginning of their lives, male and female alike; nor indeed can their womenkind be discerned by those of other race, be it in feature or in gait or in voice, nor in any wise save this: that they go not to war, and seldom save at direst need issue from their deep bowers and halls."

---J. R. R. Tolkien, The Silmarillion

[Diraven]

16. I think that was supposed to be funny

I always took the female beard thing to be Tolkien's attempt at humor. As for them never leaving their homes that was a convenient way to not have any in his stories.

[Dial H For Hero]

17. The Silmarillion isn't exactly a comedy.

[Hekate]

30. True dat

[getagrip_already]

21. well, she may have sideburns....

you can't tell from that picture. sideburns are facial hair, though not beards proper. But it's been a long time since dwarves roamed middle earth. Things can get lost in translation over the years.

[sakabatou]

12. O NOES! Not black dwarves!

[TheBlackAdder]

15. The funny thing is that even the 🍆 of the dwarves are bigger than Bezos's 🍆

[Mr. Sparkle]

20. Soon there will be no acting jobs left for dwarfs because studios wont want to go near them.

I hope thats not the case.

[cinematicdiversions]

25. So your saying the Studios won't hire a four foot Pole? NT

[getagrip_already]

22. where will this lead?

Next thing you know, they will have blacks portraying southern slaves and african tribes people. This is a slippery slope. Soon, we will have hispanics portraying puerto ricans, or actual east asians portraying those races!

What will happen to the poor, talented white actors?

[Samrob]

27. I really don't care. Do you? nt

[Withywindle]

28. I say this with love because it's my people but

SFF fandom has a real big racism problem. This isn't new. I remember the screaming and wailing when Black actors were cast to play Ford Prefect (Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy), Heimdall (Marvel, the Thor comics specifically), and Rue (The Hunger Games, even though the character is clearly described as having dark brown skin right there in the book). Happening again with a Black actress cast as Death in an upcoming adaptation of Neil Gaiman's Sandman comics.

I'm a big Tolkien nerd (see username, lol) and I'm cringing when the bigots quote chapter and verse to explain why there CAN'T be Black Elves or Dwarves or whatnot. Sure there can. This is not a big deal and race-blind casting has been a thing in theater for decades, get over it.

I'm more upset about an oligarch like Bezos having the rights to the story in the first place. Tolkien wasn't always progressive on everything, but he never had anything good to say about industrialists and polluters.

[Hekate]

31. Thank you for this post. All of it.

[HipChick]

32. Jeff Bezos stepped down some time ago..

Lazy baitclick writing...Andy Jassy is CEO and running things..

[Demovictory9]

33. yeah... been seeing them kvetch on youtube.

[Iggo]

34. Just like the Star Wars fanbois, they're determined to suck all the fun out of it.

And the woman haters and the racial purity brigade are more than happy to whip them into a frenzy.

[Quixote1818]

35. I am a huge fan and on a number of LOTR's Facebook pages. Several had to purge out a bunch of

racists.

[Withywindle]

37. There's always been white supremacy there

I see it in Paganism too, especially the Celtic and Norse strains - it's a constant battle, especially for the Nordic Heathens who have to contend with a legacy of their symbols being appropriated by the literal Nazis.

And there has always been resistance against it, so thankfully that tradition continues too, and I hope that resistance gets louder and bigger.

Unfortunately there are a lot of people very invested in the idea of a mythical European past that is wholly white (which never existed in reality and to me at least is not especially desirable in fantasy).

It's amazing how different people can read the same texts, and take completely different meanings from them. Applicability vs allegory, right?

Tolkien always valued applicability more, and I agree with that. In this historical moment, diverse casting sends an applicable message that is better and richer and deeper than all-white.

[Silent3]

36. I'm of the opinion that all of the mythology of popular culture should get a rewrite and update...

...every couple of generations or so. The originals will always be there too, for those who wish to study such things, but the broader stories will be both more entertaining and meaningful if they are updated to match the times.

I'm a big Star Trek fan, for instance, but the original series, seen today, is woefully outdated. Roddenberry might have been forward thinking in his day about race and nationalism, but the cast was still dominated by white males, and the portrayal of all but a few of his female characters was very sexist. LGBTQ issues weren't even touched upon.

If the world ever does get over its deep-seated prejudices on a large scale, even our most "woke" attempts at multi-racial and race-blind casting today will probably look clunky in the future. A truly unprejudiced humanity would, I'd guess, center on a medium brown skin tone as the most typical kind of human, with a blur of eye and nose and lip shapes and hair textures no longer tending to clump into semi-distinct groups, and people wouldn't worry about racial diversity in casting anymore than we worry about eye color or innie-vs-outie belly button diversity in casting now. Having a lot of either very pale- or very dark-skinned people in a cast, and not nearly as many skin tones in between, might be what seems odd to the eyes of the future.

[Withywindle]

38. We build on the braver decisions of the past.

Nichelle Nichols felt treated badly on the set of Star Trek and wanted to quit, but Martin Luther King asked her not to, because her character on the show was important: a Black woman who was a professional in her high-tech field and respected by her co-workers. Black children especially needed to see that. She was an inspiration to a whole generation of Black actors, writers, and astronauts. (Mae Jemison, for example, first Black woman in space. She also had a role on ST:TNG)

The original series looks clunky now but the effect it had was actually really big.

All the efforts at representation we make now will (hopefully) look clunky in the future. We're doing it now for the young people who will go through and build on it.

Black Panther was such a cultural phenomenon, not because there'd never been a blockbuster movie with a Black superhero before, there had been. But there'd never been a superhero movie with SO MANY Black superheroes before. A whole country full of them. Different personality types, different powers, different agendas. The only white characters were secondary. And that's OK.

I'm not totally sold on the "medium-brown" tone of the future, because it erases not only different skin colors but different cultures. Imperialism does that: tries to force everyone into the same dominant culture mode.

I think we should make decisions that are bold for our time. I HOPE they will be bold for the future.

They might not be. Progress isn't linear in a straight line unless people fight.

The Weimar era in Germany was in so many ways highly progressive for LGBTQ+ folks, at least in the urban centers. The progress was violently set back by the Nazis - and continued by Allied law enforcement after the war. It took us 50 years to get back to anything close to that level. If Magnus Hirschfeld hadn't been persecuted and his research burned, it's possible that at least four generations of trans people would have been able to know themselves sooner, and we wouldn't have to listen to ignorant people calling it a teen fad.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnus_Hirschfeld

[budkin]

39. "Woke"

Is the new MAGA rallying cry

[Torchlight]

41. Seems they're easily triggered by fictional characters re-imagined

as something they never imagined; even those fictional roles not part of original canon must adhere to their comfort. I kinda feel bad for them-- a constrained imagination is illustrative of a very constrained mind, and I'd hate to live in a world so small made that way by my own device.

Personally, I'm looking forward to it-- setting the series in the second age allows for all sorts of hero-myth stories to follow from it.