#just this wedding quest is reasonably recent yknow

[severalowls]

Ive been playing lord of the rings online again for nostalgia reasons. Fairly simple gameplay, a little retro. General community vibe is a bunch of nerds over 50 who probably literally speak elvish and get grumpy if you call it elven. Generally praised for being lovingly tolkein-y.

Which is great! Until the subreddit you go to for guides has several people unprompted doing the 'the amazon show was bad but especially because it featured "Blacks"' and then the next quest you do ingame after seeing that is... an epilogue to the book plotline which is inexplicably a seasonal event everybody is invited to do annually instead of part of the main story which follows the plot of the books and epilogues... which is aragorn and arwen's wedding, played out in full. Which is cute. And the guests and crowd are like, every single major NPC from the main story! Which is cool! Except every single fucking one of them is white. A crowd that exists nowhere good on earth.

And you realise why the subreddit is like that and how everybody's absolutely seeped in this ultra english-1950s fantasy world but at least when it was text you could fill in the gaps yourself because jolkein probably wasn't actively intentionally being a racist and explicitly ensuring every single one of his polite little old fashioned mans was explicitly described as only white. But when the game artists, designing the versions of the minor rolkein characters between the game launch in like 2006 and this wedding scene in like 2013, at every single turn portrayed them as specifically, actively, only, explicitly white... jesus fucking christ you can see why this fostered a community which is happy to rant about "Blacks" uncontested and suddenly the whole thing feels a lot less cozy forever.

Edit: upon inspection the peejack movies were in fact just as bad