People were up in arms before a single episode aired, because they saw a fictional species (dwarf) had dark skin. many of those people have now pivoted their arguments against the show to being about pacing, writing (note: I’m in no way implying this is you, I haven’t seen any LotR series opinions on HN) - but the racist stuff has already occurred
I wonder how well it would go down if someone made a show about slavery in USA with all of the black people being played by non-blacks... For inclusivity you know? Get some Asians there. Maybe gender swap the historical big figures to boot and have them speak Chinese or something.
A better comparison would be Black Panther or Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon - fictional stories and worlds loosely inspired by real places, just like Middle Earth.
So here's the thing - in reality black slaves actually existed. So if you cast a white guy to play a black slave then yeah people would be a little bit confused. Dwarves are a fictional species which have never existed, and even if all dwarves have been described explicitly as being white in the books (and I don't think they have) there has been enough artistic license taken in the various recent films that straying from this is really not too outrageous.
I think you're kind of revealing a bit more about own feelings on race than you realise.
How do black dwarves make sense? Their entire species lives deep underground and never sees the light of day, so they don't need to evolve to protect their skin from UV rays.
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
You really really didn't think this through. While they live deep underground and don't need to protect from UV light, they also don't need to have white skin to let in sunlight for vitamin synthesis.
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.
> How do black dwarves make sense? Their entire species lives deep underground and never sees the light of day, so they don't need to evolve to protect their skin from UV rays.
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.
So you wouldn’t mind white Wakandans? One or two Vanilla Panthers? How about caucasian voodoo gods, or demons of Japanese myth? They’re fictional too.
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”.
Since there were no dark skin in depictions that are chronologicallly later, the two trilogies we already watched, it means that some terrible genocidal racial cleansing happened in between.
