Critical Miss: Lord of the Wrongs Pages PREV 1 2 3 4 5 NEXT | |
Or a anti-semitic Australian... But then, Saving Private Ryan had how many European accented people? And Robin Hood would have spoken with the Midlands Nasal twang - but we couldn't have Darth Vader speaking in Dorset tones, could we m'dear? | |
Firstly I'm going to say I will be going to see the Hobbit regardless of who they hire as I trust Jackson will make a good film, the appearance of Asian or black Hobbits will just irk me slightly but wont stop me from enjoying the film. Hobbits are found outside the Shire but not by much (as in close by) as they like staying where they are unlike we humans. Middle Earth is but a small part of the world it inhabits, it just so happens to have a similar climate to that of Europe with hotter countries being quite remoteish unless you had a very good boat (as you'd have to travel via Mordor if you want to get in by land) And it was only really countries such as Gondor that could of traded with these people as Rohan and the Shire are land locked. So basically Hobbits as a race have not travelled far enough to justify becoming black or Asian they've mostly kept to where they have been for hundreds of years. Middle Earth's setting isn't that easy to travel around, for instance the mystical homeland of the elves is where America is for us... yet no one but the elves has the means to get there. On the subject of Star trek sorry but the core principles of star trek were still there with a few nagging details which no one in the right mind would care about for example, Legola's eyebrows or Galdalfs beard not being as long as it should be they're small details that I didn't care about because what made Gandalf Gandalf was still there. Were as if we were to make Gandalf's character have ebony black skin, be female and have a large afro but still have him act the same it would seem VERY out of place nevermind not being in anyway true to the source apart from personality. When this cropped up a few weeks ago I asked a lot of people to describe a hobbit to me they all said small, white with English accents oddly enough it wasn't just the white people who I asked that said this. I'm all for artistic license but you do not change parts what makes a character who they are just to seem not racist but by doing so shows that you really are a racist. Edit: Also I'm well aware Mel Gibson is not Scottish but even with his bad accent he still played the character fairly well as he looked the part as well as acted it. Also perfecting accents is rather hard and finding big named actors to fit the roles even more so, so I can forgive small details such as accents but I cant forgive big details as over all appearence | |
Gangsta dwarves would make everything better. EVERYTHING. | |
XD I laughed my ass off at that! OT: Didn't see much of a difference with the female Nazghoul. Also, can Humans or Elves say digga? | |
Actually, the last panel was drawn well. Yes, good comic. | |
I'll laugh once I take it all in. | |
Am I a terrible person for laughing at that Balrog joke? I know it was obvious but... :( I lol'd | |
There are already British orks though ;) | |
Not Sam specifically, but the Harfoots as a race (of which sam is one) are described as darker skinned. Not just "darker than the average hobbit". The Lord of the Rings, completed in 1948 (15 years pre-civil rights act, and started 10 years before that), had the darker skinned Hobbit Samwise Gamgee (Gamgee translated: Cotton-wool), who did all the hard labour, walks around calling Frodo Master Frodo, who marries Rose Cotton, in a world he sets, if I'm not mistaken 300 years earlier. There's a HELL of a lot of other stuff you can draw parallels to. But seriously, is there any description of how MUCH darker they were exactly? No. Is it likely Tolkien had this in mind? This isn't a criticism of Tolkien, it's a description of a world that existed here in the same timeframe. | |
Be a good chap and point me to the exact point where Tolkein explains that his invented universe is subject to the processes of evolution, would you? I seem to be under the impression that The Silmarillion, (sp?) and Unfinished Tales set out a very specific creationist history. On a more general note: -Bimbley | |
You know what? I really do give up. If you cant see why Asian/black Hobbits make no sense geographically never mind the fact that middle earth is based on Nordic/ Anglo-Saxon mythology then fine you continue on with your PC positive racist outlook on life. Now I perhaps I may should of stated this at the start but I dont care if there is a Asian casted as an extra as no one really pays attention to extras, my fear is when they start changing main characters just to avoid seeming racist. I know there is more to a character than their skin colour but their skin colour is still a part of their character, the comic book character Steel is black and he should never be casted by a white man because its a part of his character just as being white is a part of Batmans and spiderman. If I was born black my personality would be different, just in the same way if I was born a woman. Our skin colour partly defines who we are, its not a big factor but still a factor none the less Now Superman? yeah sure make him black cause he's a alien he can be what ever colour we want him to be but he's one of the few characters we can do that to as he's one of the few cases in which colour is not a factor Now I'm going to ignore this thread as I fear the amount of ignorance coming from the posts might start to effect me. | |
The Shire does not have a climate like Great Britain. It's sunny and pleasant all year-round (most years) and they regularly have ample harvests. Whereas Britain is one of the rainiest countries in Europe, and one of the most Northerly, so it's bloody freezing for half of the year. The Shire might well be an idyllic version of England - but that idyllic version of England is much sunnier. AND the hobbits migrated there anyway, so the climate of the Shire has exactly bugger all to do with their ethnicity...
...and multiple other posts along these lines, self-proclaimed 'Tolkien scholars' and otherwise. Anyone who actually is a Tolkien scholar - or has read the bit of the book where he describes hobbits, which is a bit below the required standard for 'scholarly' but it is a bit dry - will know that Tolkien describes as being multiracial.
Compare with
That's an unequivocal description, by Tolkien - who, let's not forget invented hobbits - that Halflings are multiracial (there's a third group, the Stoors, which he doesn't specify the skin tone of - but he refers to others as 'darker' or 'fairer' than them, so it's not a stretch to think they're probably 'somewhere in the middle') He then goes on to say
That'd be the dark-skinned ones, for those keeping track. - He describes Hobbits of the Shire thus :
The only bit of that which you can infer as "so they're white" is 'red-cheeked' - but white people don't have a monopoly on red cheeks; it's just more obvious the paler you are. Not too mention that white humans don't generally have 'thick, curly, brown hair' - not unless there's some non-white ancestry involved in the not-all-that-distant past. But that's conjecture as well, because we're talking about hobbits, and they can have curly hair just because. In summary then, Tolkien describes Hobbits of the Shire as having : 1. Thick, brown, curly hair So let's stop pretending that hobbits are white because Tolkien said so. If the idea of black and asian hobbits 'repulses' you, that's not because you've studied any Tolkien. It's probably because you're more than a bit racist. *All Tolkien quotes are from The Lord of the Rings Prologue 1 (Concerning Hobbits) | |
This comic tries to hard to deliver not very funny punch lines. | |
browner of skin, doesn't mean they are black. Just tanner than the other super honky hobbits. And Tolkien never out and out say the were black, just browner skinned. So they could have been more Native American, Asian Indian, Middle Eastern, or maybe just Italian/Greek looking. Browner skinned compared to creamy white can mean almost anything. | |
My only concern about having different races of hobbits: if they were all white in the LotR movies and more racially diverse in the prequel, that raises some very unfortunate implications about what happened to all the non-white hobbits in the intervening time. | |
Someone explain to me the female nazgul....cause I have no idea | |
loved the We out digga lol. | |
He wasn't so much skeptical, as he did say no MAN can defeat me. Then Eywen (SP) takes off her helmet, and the witch king seemed rather accepting. Until he died. | |
This is obviously a dig at the furor over Heimdall in Thor, so I think that should be in the comic's tags. | |
I'm really not sure which side you're taking :D | |
The fact that you wouldn't be able to tell, regardless. | |
The problem is that the Harfoots are described as "browner of skin". Browner than what exactly? Browner than orcs? Browner than Haradrim? Of course not. What he means is browner than Fallohides. Which could mean any number of things. Harfoots = Browner So who the hell is darker than who? Its pretty obvious from the context of those quotes you so willfully removed them from. | |
We are still talking about this? Originally I agreed that dark skinned hobbits would be inauthentic, but you know there are dark skinned hobbits in the books right? They are called horfoots. Look it up. OT: Funny comic though :P | |
Oh yeah, so hottt! Can you say rule 34? | |
"Female Nazgul" cracked me up. I think one of the funniest things about the "minority hobbits" thing is that many of the same people who complained about the person who auditioned (on the Escapist, at least) then turned around and defended a black Norse God. Anyway, if we allow gay wizards in Lord of the rings, it's only a matter of time before they infiltrate Harry Pott...Oh, right. | |
Blooms eyebrows are not a continuity error, they are a casting error (One present in a whole slew of the Elves cast in the film). If you're going to insist that all hobbits are white because they're white in the book (except those that... you know... aren't) even though race has absolutely zero relevance to their character then you can sure as shit insist they hire some actors that are actually blonde. | |
'Wait...' Isnt Legolas Metrosexual? | |
We out digga' That's so gonna be my new catchphrase! | |
Is this comic based on a random thought or is it triggered by the apparent outrage of a black Norse god in the Thor movie? The latter doesn't really bother me. If they are gods or advanced enough aliens they can look like whatever they want. If they want to get really specific Thor should be a red head and not blonde. Any way, Middle Earth is based on at least Western Europe. Except for humans it didn't sound like much, if any, of the other races traveled far from their native lands. Any isolated population is going to have pretty uniform features. This would make most of the races "white". Although at the relative time they probably made distinctions among that. At the start of the 1900s people were still making distinctions among what would just be considered "white" today. | |
Its not really Peter Jackson's fault. The whole world has become so politically correct that not having different ethnicities is considered 'rascist' rather than 'accurate'. I mean I heard of a black guy being cast as Frank Sinatra at some point. FRANK SINATRA. Whole world needs to learn to just loosen its belt. | |
I think you (and everybody else who's going really into depth about the conditions and environment of middle earth) are kind of missing the point. Pretty much every central character in the Hobbit (and LOTR) is white. No one is disputing that (though some will argue Tolkien was very vague when it came to describing race) we're disputing that it's even remotely relevent when it comes to casting. Race is simply not central to these characters, it's unimportant, a vague background detail at best. Why not have a black hobbit? Would it effect any real changes on the character? If it breaks people's immersion then those people need to go watch more theatre. For a good laugh. Find anyone arguing about multi-ethnic hobbits, go into their post history and do a search for the prince of Persia movie. See how many of them thought race was entirely unimportant when it came to casting the movie. Funny how that changes. | |
One thing you will notice though is that in almost every example your giving there were factors that made it viable. Shakespeare's plays were not some high-brow affair whent hey were created, they were quite low-brow plays designed to appeal to the masses. They were created as things a travelling group of players could pretty much grab and adapt on the fly using anyone that was on hand. Things like "James Bond" are ongoing franchises nowadays, and as they modernized things they simply had the original "M" step down and be replaced (so to speak). Continuity and how this all works has never been a strong point of the series. The thing is that with "Lord Of The Rings" you have a massive world with ridiculous amounts of backstory and lore. What makes it endure is the amount of fairly consistant detail throughout the entire work. In comparison pretty much every counter-example mentioned is comparitively shallow. When your dealing with movies that are being sold in part due to their attention to detail and physical recreations of Tolkien's middle earth, something like using actors of the wrong ethnicity becomes a big deal in cases like this. What's more the reason why it's being done, and promoted ahead of time, is intentionally to make waves. On top of that consider that artists like "The Brothers Hildebrandt" have been doing artwork for Middle Earth for a very long time. It's not like the vision of Middle Earth is something totally based on text, like comic books there are pretty solid examples made even during Tolkien's time of what things are supposed to look like, and that artwork was drawn on as inspirations for making these movies. I don't consider it racist to expect them to maintain the integrity of a classic franchise like this under the circumstances. Also I will point out that in cases where you had people playing cross-race in movies efforts were in many cases made to try and disguise the fact, either by relying on primitive photography (the Italian guys playing the Indians in a Spaghetti western can pass when it's Black and White) or other tricks in many cases. Not to mention the simple reason that it was passable due to them being able to find people of the appropriate ethnicities who could act in great enough numbers. Back in earlier Hollywood if you wanted a seen with 50 Indians you actually needed 50 guys who looked like Indians, and unless you had 50 of them to show up in costumes, you had to improvise. Right now nobody is going to be able to claim that they just didn't have enough caucasian guys to fill out all the hobbit roles with a straight face. Shotting a Western in Italy in the 1960s for example was a totally differant situation than what we're dealing with here today. See, if they happened to have a black guy play a hobbit because they thought he was good at it, but used makeup and CGI to change his skin tone for the movie, that would be something else. Right now it's pretty much a giant political stunt, done to get attention. That's one of the reasons why I find it so tasteless and it gets me more irritated than it should. Truthfully if they were going to have a black guy playing a hobbit briefly in the movie and nobody heard about it, and it was just kind of there whent he film was released, I doubt this would ever have become as big a deal as it is now. However since the movie is still being made, and the inconsisticy is known, and the film can still be changed before release (edited if nothing else) it opens the door for people who want to maintain the integrity of the world's portrayal to sound off about it. By defending these guys, your pretty much playing in to a publicity stunt. The bottom line is that like with "Heimdall" in "Thor" which is another movie pulling the same thing, we know what things are supposed to look like due to there being plenty of material (including visual material) for referance. The issue is about integrity rather than any kind of racism. I'd feel the same way if someone decided to Whitewash "Spawn" in a new movie or TV series, because making him and his family/friends white would "sell better". Spawn is black, the way Hobbits and Heimdall are white, it's just how the characters are. In today's CURRENT world, there is no reason why you can't be accurate, and honestly the more minor the part is the less excuse you have for doing it wrong, because you can't say that you couldn't find the right kind of person who had the nessicary acting abillity (which is one of the few excuses that still makes sense, and when used efforts are usually made to get the actor in question the "pass" as the character). | |
Well the thing is that Superman has a visual prescence, and pretty much always has given that he's from comic books. We know what the character is supposed to look like. If your doing a movie based on an established character, you should be trying to recreate the artwork as closely as possible. The same incidently also applies to non-white characters as well. This is part of the problem with people's "Horfoot" arguements about them being brown as opposed to ruddy or a more tan/olive color. We know what they look like because of the color artwork produced FOR Lord Of The Rings/The Hobbit by guys like "The Brothers Hildebrandt" and other sources. What's more this artwork was what was tapped for getting the "look" right for the movies so far. As far as personality varying with race, that's not true in the least. Actually that bit strikes me as being a bit racist. These kinds of traits are the result of culture rather than any kind of inborn genetics. With countries being divided into sub-cultures based on race, you DO see people of various ethnicities behaving the same way, but that's because of how they are taught and raised. As guys like Bill Cosby have pointed out, the biggest problem facing Black America today, isn't any kind of racism, but Black America itself where the dominant culture is opposed to things like education, and hard work, and where being a criminal to get ahead is presented as a positive thing. The whole "get rich or die trying" attitude. Black guys who get educated, and move on to have relatively normal jobs are oftentimes accused of selling out, or not being black enough, etc... People can provide access to education, but in the end it doesn't matter if nobody decides to take it, or people decide to constantly loot the schools and destroy the property as a form of "rebellion". It's complicated, but the bottom line is that nothing intristic to the people makes them act this way, black guys CAN behave just like anyone else. This is why I frequently talk about targeting cultures (of various sorts) both domestically and internationally, NOT being a racist actually means being fairly brutal because it means I feel I can expect the same level of behavior for every group of people. If you think Blacks, Arabs, or any other group can't be any differant than they are now because of intristic traits, then that's racist. At any rate, on the subject you can pull out a comic book or piece of vintage Lord Of The Rings Artwork, and show "this is what it's supposed to look like". That's the crux of the arguement here above and beyond anything. The issue is that there is nothing at all ambigious about Heimdall in the comics, or what Hobbits are supposed to look like. | |
Honestly I think this controversy would be much more interesting if Heimdall was being played by a muppet. | |
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Actually, gangsta dwarfs would be a really refreshing change in the oh-so-stagnant world of fantasy.