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Notes -
Amazon thinks I should care. They put out a zillion publicity puff pieces about how I and everyone else should care. They made this video to sell it to people about how they should care.
Personally, I find the actor playing Arondir rather wooden (like his cuirass) but others, even those critical, have found him one of the few good actors. Whatever, opinions differ.
I would be very happy to see this actor playing a character in Middle-earth - say, a human inhabitant of the village of Tirharad (invented for the show) which is populated by descendants of the Men who fought under Morgoth and are being watched (over) by the Elves. Tirharad is a canon-compliant notion for being all black and brown actors, and having white Elves as an occupying force would reinforce the show's parables about colonialism and blaming people for the sins of their ancestors and so forth. Oddly enough, Tirharad is very white; Bronwyn and Theo are the only brown humans I've seen, and we got a nice scene of White Guy Racist To Black Elf in the tavern.
If they gave literally two minutes establishing who is Princess Dísa (e.g. she is from the royal house of the Blacklocks, one of the two Dwarven strongholds in the East), then that would avoid all the "who is this one, single, solitary black Dwarf in Khazad-dum among all the other white Scottish Dwarves?" questions.
I don't care that Tar-Míriel is played by a black actress. At least she's a human playing a human who looks like a queen should look. And you can find some way that her ancestry would be not contradictory with canon if you go into the history of the Three Houses of the Edain and their allies. No quibbles there.
Do you want to call me "pretty ageist" because I think the actor cast as Celebrimbor is too old for the part, and the character should be younger? Go right ahead, fill out the entire bingo card while you're at it.
Why do you care that Amazon cares?
If my brother tries to piss me off by, like, wearing a blue shirt, why would that bother me? Casting black people doesn't bother me, so it doesn't bother me when Amazon casts black people even if they're trying to be twats while they do it.
It sounds like you have a lot of problems with the script and I agree they could have done a lot of things better. I get that and I agree that Disa is not a good character. Isn't that a problem with the script though? What does it have to do with the casting?
Like, basically, if you only have problems with thr script, that makes sense. If you think Amazon is trying to attack you I can understand being annoyed. But there's nothing wrong with using black actors so being annoyed that Amazon is doing it makes it seem a lot more racist.
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