[j_barbossa]

Media productions are daughters of their time. We currently have a situation where the elite in Hollywood are desperate to bring diversity and blackwashing into the stories. When a new LOTR series is shot in 50 years from now, this will no longer be an issue.

[dougmwne]

As a fantasy series, it seems the ethnicities of the actors are quite irrelevant. I can understand that it can be a bit odd in historical dramas, but male actors used to play the female roles in plays. It seems pretty secondary unless the plot is explicitly about race. And historical accuracy, even in historical dramas is usually tenuous at best anyway.

I’d suggest that when you say “blackwashing” people are going to take that as a signal that you have some pretty toxic politics.

[prepend]

I think it’s an opportunity to explain how elves and dwarves ended up with different skin colors and whatnot. It’s a good opportunity for world building.

In the Hobbit movies there were some black elves and they didn’t describe anything about them. Just that there were some Black Forest elves mixed in with all the other elves.

I guess it slightly distracted where every minor detail had some back story and history, but I don’t think detracted from the story. I don’t think leaving out these details was in the top 100 flaws of the Hobbit movie.

As someone really into Tolkien, I’d rather see them expand or adapt the lore than just swap out details. It’s not that it’s the end of the world, but it’s dangerous to change details from someone else’s work because I never know what was the actual important piece. I suppose I could change Michaelangelo’s David’s sex but it would be hard to recreate it with the same qualia as Muchaelangelo as I’m not him. It’s not the sex of the sculpture that’s important, it’s my implementation. I’m sure Michaelangelo would have e carved an amazing woman, or African, or Asian, or any background. But few are Michaelangelo.

An example of this that I think went kind of well is the Kevin Kostner Robin Hood movie where they cast Morgan Freeman and gave him a back story of being a Moor from the crusades who returned to England. I think this worked out better than if they had just randomly changed a Robin Hood character ‘a race.