This would have made more sense. They are using the mixture in modern western societies as a template for other things. For example, the Dwarves and Numenór have visible multiculturalism (for want of a better word)... in reality, the various elements of such societies would have blended together over vast eons of time, each of the groups would have interbred. The only way round that would be a strict caste system, but none of these societies seem to have that.oneClimbs wrote: ↑September 26th, 2022, 12:45 am Thus far, I’ve enjoyed the show. I get some of the criticism, but overall I think the characters are interesting and the cinematography is really well executed.
Galadriel does come off abrasive but what is interesting is that nobody in her world likes her either because of it! She pretty much rubs everyone the wrong way.
But she does get knocked down a few notches and has to start relying on others and listening to them to accomplish her aims.
So she does have somewhat of an arc but also she’s lived for thousands of years so she’s gained skills and knowledge which makes her formidable but they really skim over that growth pretty fast so we don’t really get a chance to see that arc. We kind of fast forward to where she has risen to a high level of achievement.
So really the only thing that makes sense is to knock her down a few notches which is what happens. I think if they keep knocking her down far more that would make the story more interesting. People could relate to her and cheer for her but she needs to achieve that underdog status. Maybe she will.
I’m interested to see what they do with the characters.
The fact that they’ve introduced other ethnicities doesn’t bother me. It may not be “cannon” but I think it makes the characters more distinctive and easier to all tell apart.
It think it would make more sense to have the tribes be more homogeneous. Like it would have made more sense for the Harfoots all one ethnicity; make ‘em all “black.” I don’t see how it makes sense to have such a variety of ethnicities in such small tribes.
A whole nation of “black” elves, why not? We have multiple ethnicities all over earth, why not middle earth?
But still, that’s something I could really care less about.
I do think that they did this on purpose to intentionally create and fuel controversy to drive discussion. Disney does this too and it is all a pretty disgusting way to push views and such.
The BBC did an adaptation of His Dark Materials recently and had similar issues. The sad thing was that the casting had been done by quotas. It was as if someone had said every tenth character had to be black. Which knowing BBC bureaucracy they probably did. And even though the UK has significant long established Indian & Pakistani communities, and Chinese, there were little to no characters of South or East Asian appearance. Instead it was nearly all white and black. Weird.
ROP has one notable character of east Asian appearance in it (the human who goes back to the village), but this is all very odd... if they're going to run with this thing, mankind has at least three or four different main types, and the Chinese and Indians by themselves make up nearly half the human race.
And then if anyone criticises it – and there are legitimate criticisms – they blame racism and sexism and censor reviews. Typical big tech.
They may wish to avoid ethnic stereotyping, but they seem more than happy to do that as regards Scottish and Irish people. The dwarves are dumpy wee things with horrible fake Scottish accents and red beards, and the dreadful Harfoots are quasi-Irish who look like they never wash and are not very bright (another Irish stereotype.)
As for the canon thing... I'm not against some changes, but this is all over the place as regards Tolkien. I wish sometimes they'd do their own thing anew instead of leeching off another like this or Star Wars. At least Game of Thrones, daft pornography aside, is its own thing and doesn't pretend to be Tolkien. GoT has much more rounder female characters than JRRT does for one.
Sorry excuse the long post...