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ZorbaTHut  2yr ago (text post)   45549 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 5, 2022

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I was watching LOTR and the racial diversity stuck out to me in a negative way

Is this because I’m racist? No

That seems like a contradiction.

humans can naturally tell apart members of one tribe from another by appearance. I can tell French phenotype from Icelandic, Irish from Italian, Baltic from Russian.

Yes but the show is not in any of those places.

When people mate together in insularity over hundreds of years, then barring a caste system they generally begin to look the same.

Those are elves, dwarves, and hobbit which were initially created with singing if I understand my LOTR lore correctly. Is it really that hard to believe that the LOTR equivalent of God built the species with multiple skin colors that could mix as they wish and still keep going like that?

So when I see a whole bunch of dwarves living in a rock together, and then a token black dwarf is highlighted by camera, this throws off the believability of story.

I can believe in dwarves but not black dwarves is pretty much a racist argument.

Because if the dwarves were one community, you wouldn’t have such variability in phenotype.

Why not, it's a planet made with magic, why should the same phenotype rules apply to a mystical fantasy land.

I would prefer all the dwarves to be black, or all of them mulatto, then this weird hodgepodge of different phenotypes. If the dwarves are one people living together over thousands of years, then you really ought to cast them as one people, whatever shade of humanity you want.

I disagree, maybe they just had a white or a black mutation break out in the community via natural mutation. Some people living in lactose intolerant community randomly developed lactose tolerance, some black humans had a random mutation and we got white humans. These are real world cases where one group emerged from within another insulated group.

Then there’s the question of the black elves, but I’m not sure if Middle Earth is ready for this discussion. The elves were always depicted as very Northern European, with a sort of pacified and peaceful temperament. The inclusion of even Southern Europeans sort of violates our intuition here

It doesn't though. I can watch the show and my intuition is not violated, they are all elves made with magic. Maybe it's because I come from a non-white culture so I am more used to seeing mixed color groups of people in real life.

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