Kerch wrote:
Playing *rsehole's advocate here and say that Middle-Earth was very much a european setting (based directly on Britain I believe) and the diverse casting is just an effort at being progressive to score social justice points and generating interest by way of deliberate political controversy.. They don't care about being progressive for the sake of being good people, mind you, they just want money.
IMO, if they wanted to be diverse they ought to depict the easterlings and haradrim and all those. That way they could have many actors of colour and show a prevously little-explored side of Middle-Earth. Not to mention that non-western tolkienesque fantasy is rare to begin with. And it would've been an opportunity to depict those people positively/more neutral in contrast to their villainous role in the original stories which admittedly had racist overtones at times (but remember those were different times, and Tolkien certainly was no Lovecraft).
I've been pondering the idea of casting little people actors for the hobbits. It'd be cliché, since they're pretty much always playing fantasy species, but they don't get an awful lot of opportunities to play main characters.
(And then there's Snow White and the Huntsmen, where the little people playing the dwarves had their faces digitally replaced by normal sized actors. Seems like that ought to have been more controversial than it ended up being)
But yeah, it's been known for a while this is just going to be Amazon's Game of Thrones.
So above all expect a lot of graphic, incestuous, pedophilic but still eroticised rape and excessive violence for the sake of it. The casting is inconsequential to how much I'm not interesting in seeing this.
nah, sorry, for diversification purposes the "hero peoples" have to be diversified. There's no use putting BIPOCs in the show and then making them "other" again, which also bears a large risk, in the case of fantasy literature, of mystification and orientalising of that other people.
I'm really happy right now I consider all of these children's books, be it Lord of the Rings or Song of Ice and Fire, and therefore this all doesn't matter because the content doesn''t change in any meaningful way, it didn't mean anything to begin with. so, yeah, go ahead. Why not cast a little woman to play Gandalf, who cares.
_________________
I can read facial expressions. I did the test.