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I don't know if this is acceptably charitable, but is there any other interpretation outside of they just think we're stupid? They reskinned a character into a black skinned person, despite centuries of intermarrying Targaryens. Do they think that the desire for representation means that people are going to pointedly not think about the elephant in the room, in a show whose opening credits is a blood soaked family tree?
Who doesn't understand what's going on here?
The blatantness is part of the power play. I remind myself it is a TV show, I really should just relax, but getting people to sign up for stupid lies and pretend they are not is not a bug, it is a feature.
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They think "our audience is not going to be all book nerds, it'll be people who watched GoT last time and want to watch another show set in that world". Same with Rings of Power: they are looking to pull in a general audience not familiar with the canon and who don't care about it, but will remember the last hit TV show/movies and are willing to watch a high fantasy epic and pay for the privilege.
So if people complain the casting is not canon-compliant, they have the easy defence of "That's racism!" and get sympathy points for being attacked by trolls and bigots.
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Yes.
This is what people miss when they try to poke holes in stuff like gender identity; they don't care.
The master value is "equity" or "helping the downpressed"/"owning the oppressors" (defined as white men usually). So they are much less sensitive to claims of contradiction, illogic or irrationality.
In fact; they've already set the groundwork for treating the focus on logic as a mere contingent product of a certain sort of Western civilization or worse: not even just contingent (something can be true and our method for getting to it contingent) but always fraudulent and a cover for power.
Therefore their illogic in the service of helping oppressors is not inferior but of the same level, and actually better cause it's beneficial to an oppressed class.
Whenever I've seen a leftist hunted to ground on some of this stuff the final move is to always shrug their hands and go "well, it's helping the right people and it's all socially constructed anyway so I don't really care".
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