#unless you cast poc in which case wailing and gnashing of teeth

[anghraine]

Tolkien's handling of race in LotR is bad, and should not be defended, but pointing out that the Jackson LotR films are perhaps even worse on that issue seems to be *really* unpopular with most of the fans. You'd think that a film series from the 2000s should be held to a higher standard than fantasy literature written in the '30s and '40s, but apparently not.

Exactly. Whenever someone (not even me specifically, or my friends—others have pointed this out!) tries to discuss it, people tend to get super defensive and make extremely dubious arguments to defend the racial casting and coding.

And it's like, yes, I have my bias as someone who has a lot of other issues with the films and who has resented their stranglehold on fandom for years. But I see people go on about how the Jackson films' racism was just being true to Tolkien's vision, despite manifestly not being "true to Tolkien's vision" in multiple respects, so a) why should racism be the thing they couldn't change, especially amidst all the other things they did change, and b) they're actually worse than the book in this regard at any rate.

Like, Tolkien's descriptions of dark-skinned heroic characters are entrenched in colorism, imperialism, all kinds of awful assumptions about how the world works even when he's awkwardly trying to push back (I think @elwing had an interesting discussion of how we can see this in the ambivalent representation of Tar-Aldarion, for instance). But literally nothing was preventing the filmmakers from including characters like those and just not retaining the textual descriptions, which would be weird to include in film anyway.

Of course, Tolkien himself was indignant at the idea that Middle-earth is exclusively Northern or English, no matter how many times certain folks repeat the "mythology for England" quote devoid of its original context. So my view is that the book absolutely has a lot of unconsidered or poorly considered racism and racist assumptions, but that this is not incompatible with the films and fandom being still worse and all the more culpable when you consider our RL circumstances.