It's such a short step between criticizing character design and :reddit-logo: getting racist about the whole thing ("see, diversity bad! :so-true:") that I've decided I kind of just don't give a fuck. PJ's LOTR is only one visualization of the novels, and Tolkien himself had like one line in an appendix about how dwarves of both sexes have beards. Shit, Hugo Weaving was way too old to play an elf that's meant to be ethereally beautiful and youthful, and we all laud that depiction regardless. Tom Bombadil had more narrative impact than the beards of dwarves and that dude's cut from everything.
Pre-Jackson adaptations of LotR were honestly nice in that they were way more varied than what we saw for a long-ass time after the movies -- which, to be fair, are a great visualization in their own right, they just led to a generation of visual (and ethnic) homogeneity.
One of the old LotR animated films basically depicted Aragorn as vaguely indigenous / "Native American-y", for example.
EDIT: https://youtu.be/orLz433Cf-g maybe it's just me, I dunno. Also i forgot he was voiced by John Hurt.
something I appreciate about pre-Jackson LotR was there was a kind of unspoken agreement to make it very dreamlike and deliberately unrealistic. I always liked that kind of soft, surreal aesthetic of fantasy way more than all the gritty realistic stuff that came later. I like when things are inexplicable, like when Bilbo steals the coin purse from the trolls and it can talk.
Tolkien was a Brit living in imperialist Britain writing mythology based around Anglo-Saxon myths. It's a miracle it's good. Death of the Author that shit and depict any character however they want that still fits the characterization.
It's such a short step between criticizing character design and :reddit-logo: getting racist about the whole thing ("see, diversity bad! :so-true:") that I've decided I kind of just don't give a fuck. PJ's LOTR is only one visualization of the novels, and Tolkien himself had like one line in an appendix about how dwarves of both sexes have beards. Shit, Hugo Weaving was way too old to play an elf that's meant to be ethereally beautiful and youthful, and we all laud that depiction regardless. Tom Bombadil had more narrative impact than the beards of dwarves and that dude's cut from everything.
Pre-Jackson adaptations of LotR were honestly nice in that they were way more varied than what we saw for a long-ass time after the movies -- which, to be fair, are a great visualization in their own right, they just led to a generation of visual (and ethnic) homogeneity.
One of the old LotR animated films basically depicted Aragorn as vaguely indigenous / "Native American-y", for example. EDIT: https://youtu.be/orLz433Cf-g maybe it's just me, I dunno. Also i forgot he was voiced by John Hurt.
something I appreciate about pre-Jackson LotR was there was a kind of unspoken agreement to make it very dreamlike and deliberately unrealistic. I always liked that kind of soft, surreal aesthetic of fantasy way more than all the gritty realistic stuff that came later. I like when things are inexplicable, like when Bilbo steals the coin purse from the trolls and it can talk.
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This should be the official party position. Tolkien and race is way too thorny of an issue to get lost in the weeds arguing about dwarves.
Tolkien was a Brit living in imperialist Britain writing mythology based around Anglo-Saxon myths. It's a miracle it's good. Death of the Author that shit and depict any character however they want that still fits the characterization.
Tolkien might be second only to Nietzsche on having his work be loved by white-supremacists despite absolutely hating them.
A decent summary of how much Tolkien's work doesn't actually support the reactionary whitewashing bs against the casting:
https://old.reddit.com/r/RingsofPower/comments/sq9a1k/on_casting_critiques_of_the_rings_of_power_from_a/
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Which I remain mad about to this day.
This shit is hilarious cause they have clearly never read anything of the books