Importance of white representation in fiction

[Senethro]

=>

Each time I let myself baited into answering you, you just show you're completely blind to anything that doesn't fit your pre-boxed opinion. I really should know better and stop wasting my time.

Because your'e doing what you're accusing me of doing! And being dishonest about it by claiming special authority about what constitutes authenticity, neutrality and honours the author.

 

[Gorbles]

Again, that's not the core of my irritation here. It's when these changes are politically motivated that I find them insufferable. Do I really haven't been clear about this point ?

Yes, but we both have different political viewpoints, including what counts as political, any potential dilution of the term, and so on. I'm trying to explain how I see it, vs. how you do. But yes, you have made it clear and I do understand you.

Isn't adaptation basically translation (but with medium rather than languages) ? You take something with meaning and tone, you try to keep both as you use a different language and culture. You argue that as long as the words are translated it's okay, I argue that if you ignore the tone and the accent, then it definitely doesn't carry everything that was said in the first place.

Semantically? It's more than purely translation. It typically involves a change of medium (from book to movie, for example), and as such the source material is adjusted to better suit the new medium. As has also been mentioned in the thread already, this can include changes to the setting that better reflect the time it's made in and the demographic it's made for. Now obviously, the latter bit is what's contentious.

The core tension here is between people who think that adaptations shouldn't change based on such qualifiers (or whom argue that such changes devalue the material itself, and thus, the story), and people who think either adaptations should, or can, or believe that the quality can be retained or even enhanced by such changes.

Everything is political if you push the definition enough, but then it become meaningless.
There is a pretty clear difference in intent and in means between unconscious tendencies stemming from the cultural and political landscape the creator has developed in, and deliberate alteration that are externally inflicted on a work for reasons which have nothing to do with artistic creativity. That's the whole difference between making an adaptation "with a twist" (where the intent is creative) and with altering for political purpose (where the intent is to use the work as a platform). The first is in service of the art (even if the result is bad), the second is exploiting the art.

It's like putting adds in, basically, and telling me that it doesn't affect the artistic integrity of the work.

A lot of things are political, but I'd argue the distinction doesn't become meaningless. At the very least, when discussing the insertion of beliefs into a piece of work, I'd argue any political slant is important. I agree, there's absolutely a difference between active intent and something like background or unconscious biases. I agree.

However, on the second part, I don't agree. Adaptations with a twist can be adaptations with a political point to them. Can they be done badly? Yes. But my disagreement would be to say that a political purpose doesn't make something bad. It doesn't make it exploitation, any more than political intent or bias from the original author does. Tolkien's work, for example, is undeniably influenced by the First World War. It's been the subject of a lot of studies and discourse over the decades. This wasn't just unconscious bias - though of course there was that, but explicitly he drew references from his experiences in the Great War. Any adaptation can choose to ignore this completely (I mean, I don't study films in any real capacity, but it doesn't seem like the popular movies engaged with this in any real way), or adapt this influence into the new medium. The biggest thing I remember watching the movies was the whole Ents > Isengard bit. Moreso than in the books, it was a very striking example of nature vs. industry. Maybe it was just coincidental. But it stood out to me at the time, more than the burning bodies, and more than a lot of some of the other parts of the Two Towers movie. That's anecdotal, anyhow, but I hope it was illustrative.

And we're here right in what I described earlier with "contrived rationalization". It's nearly always possible to rationalize something if you want it, it just take enough deliberate blindness.
Someone can also argue that Hobbits and elves don't have genitals and get pregnant by kissing, after all Tolkien never explicitely described them having sex in the books.
And yes it's a further stretch than Gandalf not being white, I know. My point is that if you're trying to contrive, you've already surrendered "good storytelling" for "trying to shoehorn something that doesn't flow well in the story", which is already diminishing the overall quality.

And to me, this is why I think you're simply more of a purist than me. The problem I see is that you're describing people taking excesses you personally disagree with as "contrived". You call it here "deliberate blindness". So while I understand you have made clear that you don't mind that people have different breaking points for immersion, you repeatedly give the impression that you consider people with different breaking points to be wrong.

My point about making Gandalf black revolves around the core point that it doesn't affect the storytelling. How can it surrender "good storytelling" if it doesn't relate to the story itself?

I understand that for you personally it's jarring for how you see the setting. Is this the same thing, to you?

 

[Senethro]

Dang. Death of Sidney Poitier and there is still gatekeeping for which roles a black man can play. They say "aesthetic", but what do they really mean?

 

[TheMeInTeam]

Where was any extension of the franchise or gain of political/economic rights (like desegregation or what have you) driven by the market?

Throughout history, from before/during Roman times to now. Market forces also created scenarios that allowed for slavery throughout history (most of which was not racial based, but no less awful despite that), so it's not a magic solution for everything by itself.

It is a mistake to think the market is necessarily going to act well or poorly or treat people well/poorly. It is also a mistake to think that an individual or group of individual humans can "beat the market" and optimize something better than the market can optimize it.

So if you're trying to produce a movie that makes money, leaving that to market forces will largely perform better than intervention. If you're trying to protect private property rights, avoid atrocities inflicted on pieces of your population (or all of it), and defend your country, relying on the market is not a recipe long-term existence.

Market forces invented racism.

Racism almost certainly predates any coherent organization that could even be loosely defined as a "market". Likely already present pre-agriculture, in hunter/gatherer times. People who aren't part of the tribe and look different weren't exactly loved throughout history.

 

[Akka]

The core tension here is between people who think that adaptations shouldn't change based on such qualifiers (or whom argue that such changes devalue the material itself, and thus, the story), and people who think either adaptations should, or can, or believe that the quality can be retained or even enhanced by such changes.

Rather, the faithfullness aspect is mainly about explaining the underlying expectations, the core tension being about politically-motivated change vs artistically-motivated or constraints-motivated changes and how they make missing expectations less tolerable.

Notice that financially-motivated changes which alter the story just to make it more "marketable" can be just as bad and egregious (if usually less preachy) than political ones, but people have a lesser tendency to defend blatant cash-grab, so there is usually not twenty pages long debate on if a cashgrab is artistically justified or not.

It doesn't make it exploitation, any more than political intent or bias from the original author does.

It's the entire difference between built-in and tacked-on. Are you going to say both are the same ?

And to me, this is why I think you're simply more of a purist than me. The problem I see is that you're describing people taking excesses you personally disagree with as "contrived". You call it here "deliberate blindness". So while I understand you have made clear that you don't mind that people have different breaking points for immersion, you repeatedly give the impression that you consider people with different breaking points to be wrong.

Difference in immersion breaking is absolutely not the same thing than contrived rationalization.
The first is "yeah, Gandalf is black, it doesn't really fit, but I don't care and it doesn't hamper my enjoyment". I disagree and might find the person to have low standards (because purist), but that's it.
The second, though, is trying to pretend that it does fit by using contrived arguments. Not the same beast at all.
(which is basically the dishonest version of "it's not important that it fits, because representation is more important than artistic integrity", which is the actual real subject of the thread when you remove the pretenses)

My point about making Gandalf black revolves around the core point that it doesn't affect the storytelling. How can it surrender "good storytelling" if it doesn't relate to the story itself?

I'm going to again repeat myself :

You've this strange argument that somehow "the plot" and its mechanisms are important, but the whole explicit descriptions in the books and the entire setting aren't.

And in the same vein :

If you adapt Dune and have Fremen who are asian-looking and who use chinese-themed words, you can manage to keep the story completely the same, and yet it wouldn't feel the same at all, even if the actors are good.

You really seem to not consider that the feeling of the setting is part of the storytelling. That's exactly why I used the "translation" metaphor and said that you consider it enough that the words are translated even if the tone and the accent aren't.

 

[Valka D'Ur]

Would it though? Star Trek's Klingons were originally inspired by the Mongolians I think, but since that inspiration has no influence on the story, Trek has been changing the Klingons here and there and trying different things with them. From what I remember Roddenberry based a bunch of the Trek races on various Earth cultures, but... that's just inspiration. There is no in-story link between these alien species and the Earth cultures they were initially based on, so the Trek universe has been changing there here and there, since the initial inspiration doesn't really matter.

Keep in mind that Roddenberry's first glimmers of ideas for Star Trek happened the year after the Cuban Missile Crisis. His pre-Hollywood producer/writer career was as a cop, and there's a story that he went up to a producer once, while in his uniform, handed him a script, and asked him to read it. I don't recall the rest of this story, but the fact is that what was considered normal then is not what is considered normal or even very familiar now, in many ways.

1964, when Star Trek was born (it went through a considerable time in development, pre-production, doing the first pilot with Jeffrey Hunter, and having to do another one because the studio suits didn't understand it - apparently "human slavery/imprisonment is bad" was too hard a concept for them to wrap their closed minds around"), was during the Cold War. That meant many of the writers and directors, as well as Roddenberry and the other producers (ie. Herb Solow, Robert Justman, et. al) saw life in terms of WWII and the Korean War, and quite a number of them had seen military or police service of some kind. That was true of science fiction authors in general, as Heinlein served in the navy, and even Asimov got drafted.

So this generation of writers and producers wrote what they knew and what they thought would be familiar to their intended audience. Star Trek was meant to be a science fiction version of a morality play, with things Roddenberry wanted to show or get his ideas known, but wouldn't be able to in a more direct way. So if you call the "other side" aliens and give them alien makeup and costumes, you can still tell the same stories that might otherwise be censored or ignored or not understood.

The Klingons of TOS and TAS represented Communist Asia (Russia & China), and were made up to look Mongolian. This was the way they were depicted up until the Motion Picture in 1979 remade the Klingons to be more alien-looking, and from that point through the next four TV series (TNG, DS9, Voyager, and Enterprise) they were depicted as still representing an Asian society, but the emphasis had morphed into a warrior race more akin to the samurai, with the nuances of honor, weapons-culture (bat'leths vs. katanas), and TNG even introduced the concept of the "Klingon tea ceremony" in the 2nd season.

The Romulans in TOS were initially based on the Romans. Novelist Diane Duane's take on the TOS Romulans is better and more nuanced than they became after TNG introduced their version - all of them wearing the same bowl haircut, bumpy foreheads, and insanely shoulder-padded uniforms reminiscent of Sue Ellen Ewing's costumes in Dallas. The TNG version is bizarre since they're cultural offshoots of Vulcans who refused to accept the philosophy of Surak and left Vulcan to pursue their own interests a mere few thousand years before TNG and that's not enough time for evolution to significantly change their cranial anatomy. In the '80s, the Klingons morphed into an "honorable warrior" race and the Romulans became the new authoritarian one-size-fits-all "Evil Empire." Then the Cardassians were introduced, then the Borg, and so on. Every new Star Trek series that comes along introduces its own version of the Evil Empire that at least reflects and is meant to represent what they perceive is the "enemy" in mainstream American life.

So Star Trek can be flexible, up to a point. I gave up DiscoTrek because for me, they went too far, in too bizarre a way, in reimagining the Klingons. That, and a godawful boring cast of characters and an "f-you" attitude toward continuity with TOS, is what made me give up on all prequel series. I have ZERO faith in any of them that insist they're compatible with what they're supposed to become to remain in continuity with TOS. Even Enterprise was more of a TNG prequel than a TOS prequel since it ignored so much of TOS canon. I then tried out the opposite new type of Trek series - Picard - and when Icheb was killed off in such a brutal, gory way, that was it. I very much doubt I will ever watch any new Star Trek again. They (whichever producer/showrunner/whatever) blew their last chance with me.

Fortunately I've got decades' worth of stuff to read, whether it's fanfic or pro novels not read yet. And that's just the physical stuff in my library. I don't know how many Star Trek stories have ever been written, but I think it's safe to number them in the millions at this point. The ones published in print 'zines and the more well-known fanfic sites are just the tip of the lot.

Why would the initial inspiration matter in the case of Middle Earth? I'm honestly curious because I don't see why it matters.

The initial inspiration for anything will usually influence a great deal of how it develops. The more coherently it sticks together (like a cake or a pie rather than a half-cake/half-pie), the more the readers/viewers should be able to get into it, like it, and pay for more of it.

If you get rid of the Chinese-themed swords, IMO it doesn't matter who you cast as the Fremen. And I mean, it does matter, because the Dune universe is our universe, except in the far future. The Fremen are supposed to be descendent from "Zensunni travellers", and the implication is that these wanderers have Buddhist and Islamic roots of some sort. I could be reading into the story too much, but I always imagined them to be of a varied ethnic mixture of people. I feel that DV did it right by casting the Fremen with actors of various ethnicities. No East Asians there from what I saw, but I don't necessarily see anything wrong about having east Asian looking Fremen. In fact, I would expect some of them to look like that.

I guess Villeneuve couldn't wrap his mind around the idea that Chani's father had to be male, but I will concede that he was spot-on with casting Dr. Yueh. This actor fits the description in the novel, which is that Yueh looks East Asian. Of course I'm going by looks, since I haven't seen the movie and don't know how well the actor actually plays the part. I thought Dean Stockwell did a decent job in the Lynch movie, but he was just a bit 'off' when it came to meshing his portrayal with how Yueh was in the novel.

In the end Midlde Earth is a made up reality that isn't tied to ours at all, so unless the race is described to matter in some way that matters to the plot, I don't see why it would. That's just my own personal opinion though.

Okay, here's an honest question. Why is the LOTR setting called "Middle Earth"? Is it like the Pellucidar books by Edgar Rice Burroughs, and there's an actual other world in the middle of the one we know?

 

[Hygro]

I care about immersion and self consistency as well. And it’s really badass when a media can go deep in providing supporting details.

We all understand that works of fantasy are largely “here is the changed premise, here is the way the premise acts with the default real world rules to make a story”. We understand that to have a story, we don’t say “because fantasy, anything goes.”

The issue is in the changed premise, some things are so fundamentally real-world breaking, that to push “real world” rules of physics and biology you are putting them above the already tenuous rules of the story.

And for the sake of immersion, I think it’s better to let many details be unanswered and and inconcluded.

In Lord of the Rings, the rules of magic so deeply override the rules of reality, that the immersive world, to me, is one of a god’s dream. If you try to fill in all unwritten gaps with implied historicity and science of the real world, you will wake me up from that dream, and break my immersion.

 

[warpus]

@Valka D'Ur I was suspicious of the Kynes casting decision when I first heard about it, because it seemed that it might be problematic for the story. At the time, in my mind at least, it would have been hard to convince the Fremen to embrace a female leader, based on who I felt the Fremen were when I read the books. All the sietch leaders in the books I can remember were always male. In my mind that was the "Fremen way" and the Fremen are very religious and embrace gender roles to some degree, so it seemed to make sense.

Since then though I've had a change of heart, mainly because the actor just fit the role so well. It felt right to me and I liked her more than the Kynes from the 1984 movie. I would still love to see the exact chain of events that lead the Fremen to embrace a female leader though. I want to see how that went down in DV's mind. I know we will probably never see it, but it's interesting to think about for my own headcanon. It must have been a different chain of events than you'd have w/ a male Kynes. After watching the movie for the first time though, I had a think, and the Fremen do place a lot of respect and leadership roles in the Sayyadinas and female Fremen warriors are in many ways as fierce as the men. So having a female leader doesn't seem so odd when you consider that. The Fremen embracing Kynes in the first place (as a leader) always also sort of seemed suspicious to me though. Herbert skirts around the question of "How did it happen?".. How did he convince them of the dream? It seems like it must have been a religious sort of event, maybe? I mean, the Fremen don't seem to take crap from anybody. How could an imperial ecologist convince them of anything? It seems like some sort of unusual event must have happened. I seem to remember that in the books Kynes was a good warrior and that impressed the Fremen, but I might be misremembering. I know that he/she kept talking and talking and sharing the dream and what's possible and eventually they gave in. But.. Fremen don't just give in. Something always felt missing to me here. And with a female Kynes I am feeling that but with a slightly higher intensity. It doesn't seem impossible for a male or female Kynes to become the leader of the Fremen, it just seems like something must have happened that we don't know about. The way Herbert described it in the novels always seemed incomplete to me.

A part of me wonders if DV is going to use this dynamic as a potential storytelling mechanism in Children of Dune, if that ever gets made. If Kynes was Chani's mother, then that means that Paul's children should have access to Kynes ancestral memories. This includes all the ecological knowledge. It could lead to interesting flashbacks involving Kynes and/or her female ancestors. At the same time though, don't Paul's children have access to both male and female ancestral memories at that point? I can't really remember, but when the gender change was first announced, a part of me started wondering "Why?" and this was one of the ideas I came up with. None of the other characters were changed from the way they were described in the books, so it seemed like there must have been some specific reason for Kynes being cast the way she was.

Personally I feel that if a black Gandalf could destroy the cohesiveness of the Lord of the Rings story in any way, then IMO it wouldn't have been a good story to begin with. The skin colour of the characters isn't a part of the story, so it shouldn't matter whether Gandalf is white, black, or purple. Okay, maybe not purple. The part of Gandalf that matters is his personality, and an actor of any ethnic background should be able to recreate that, assuming they are a good enough actor with the proper training and experience.

 

[bernie14]

I think you should read the subsequent posts.



I don't think there is much controversial that modern racism in america arose from use of slaves and taking land/resources, both activities driven by relatively novel/evolved forms of capital venture at the time. First came the drive, then came the ideology to justify it.

Yep, i read them. Doesn't change my take.

 

[Valka D'Ur]

@Valka D'Ur I was suspicious of the Kynes casting decision when I first heard about it, because it seemed that it might be problematic for the story. At the time, in my mind at least, it would have been hard to convince the Fremen to embrace a female leader, based on who I felt the Fremen were when I read the books. All the sietch leaders in the books I can remember were always male. In my mind that was the "Fremen way" and the Fremen are very religious and embrace gender roles to some degree, so it seemed to make sense.

Since then though I've had a change of heart, mainly because the actor just fit the role so well. It felt right to me and I liked her more than the Kynes from the 1984 movie. I would still love to see the exact chain of events that lead the Fremen to embrace a female leader though. I want to see how that went down in DV's mind. I know we will probably never see it, but it's interesting to think about for my own headcanon. It must have been a different chain of events than you'd have w/ a male Kynes. After watching the movie for the first time though, I had a think, and the Fremen do place a lot of respect and leadership roles in the Sayyadinas and female Fremen warriors are in many ways as fierce as the men. So having a female leader doesn't seem so odd when you consider that. The Fremen embracing Kynes in the first place (as a leader) always also sort of seemed suspicious to me though. Herbert skirts around the question of "How did it happen?".. How did he convince them of the dream? It seems like it must have been a religious sort of event, maybe? I mean, the Fremen don't seem to take crap from anybody. How could an imperial ecologist convince them of anything? It seems like some sort of unusual event must have happened. I seem to remember that in the books Kynes was a good warrior and that impressed the Fremen, but I might be misremembering. I know that he/she kept talking and talking and sharing the dream and what's possible and eventually they gave in. But.. Fremen don't just give in. Something always felt missing to me here. And with a female Kynes I am feeling that but with a slightly higher intensity. It doesn't seem impossible for a male or female Kynes to become the leader of the Fremen, it just seems like something must have happened that we don't know about. The way Herbert described it in the novels always seemed incomplete to me.

A part of me wonders if DV is going to use this dynamic as a potential storytelling mechanism in Children of Dune, if that ever gets made. If Kynes was Chani's mother, then that means that Paul's children should have access to Kynes ancestral memories. This includes all the ecological knowledge. It could lead to interesting flashbacks involving Kynes and/or her female ancestors. At the same time though, don't Paul's children have access to both male and female ancestral memories at that point? I can't really remember, but when the gender change was first announced, a part of me started wondering "Why?" and this was one of the ideas I came up with. None of the other characters were changed from the way they were described in the books, so it seemed like there must have been some specific reason for Kynes being cast the way she was.

I've seen a couple of review videos on YT now, which show some clips that weren't in the trailers. And even if it made sense that Kynes could be a woman (which it doesn't, for reasons I've already enumerated many times), I still wouldn't like her.

The reason? I hate her voice. I don't like her mumbly voice, just as I don't like this Chani's mumbly voice. They grate on my ears. If you really listen to the actor in the Lynch movie, you'll notice that they speak very precisely and enunciate their words carefully, even under stress. That's in keeping with how Frank Herbert wrote the dialogue in the novel. I get the impression that this is how David Lynch told them to speak, and it's interesting to see just how many of the cast of that movie started their acting careers in theatre, as opposed to TV or movies. It's critical in theatre to know how to speak and enunciate, whether it's precise and crisp, or getting into the proper accent, or whatever the role calls for. Every time I attended rehearsals in my own theatre days, when I heard the director yell "Project!" I knew they were admonishing one of the actors for not being loud enough or clear enough.

The leaders of the sietch are male. There is never a time in Fremen history when the leader of a sietch is not male. Even Sietch Jacurutu - the people the rest of the Fremen cast out for various crimes and shun utterly - don't allow women to be a naib.

How the Fremen came to embrace the dream of greening Dune - essentially terraforming it - began with Pardot Kynes, Liet's father. Pardot Kynes died, and his son inherited both his dream and his position as Imperial Planetologist (government position and the Imperium doesn't hand those positions out to women, and please don't point to Mohiam's position as a Truthsayer, because that's strictly a Bene Gesserit ability that many Imperial Houses have found beneficial to employ - it's not something that just anyone can do).

I'd have to re-read the relevant parts of the novel and the Dune Encyclopedia regarding the two Kynes men. A quick look at the DE article tells me that Liet-Kynes was only 35 years old at the time of Dune, so Max von Sydow was too old for the part.

As for Leto II accessing a female Kynes in Other Memory (or Ghanima doing so)... it's stated that Ghanima's guide to her mohalata (what the Bene Gesserit call Other Memory) is Chani, who acts as gatekeeper and protector so Ghanima's ancestral memories can't possess her. So if he makes Children of Dune into a movie, and if he follows the book, Ghanima won't be having any chats with the ancestral memory of a female Liet-Kynes. Ghanima's mother would never allow that, even if it were a still-living girl talking to her dead grandmother. As we see with Alia, it's so easy to become possessed as she never did have a proper guide/gatekeeper, and the only one who offered to help keep the voices away was the one who ended up possessing her.

 

[aelf]

And they are destroying it now. All you have to do is watch the ads on TV or the casting of new shows. The market follows the money.

And this is exactly what the 'immersion' or 'authenticity' purists are complaining about.

 

[Robo-Star]

The Fremen embracing Kynes in the first place (as a leader) always also sort of seemed suspicious to me though. Herbert skirts around the question of "How did it happen?".. How did he convince them of the dream? It seems like it must have been a religious sort of event, maybe? I mean, the Fremen don't seem to take crap from anybody. How could an imperial ecologist convince them of anything? It seems like some sort of unusual event must have happened. I seem to remember that in the books Kynes was a good warrior and that impressed the Fremen, but I might be misremembering. I know that he/she kept talking and talking and sharing the dream and what's possible and eventually they gave in. But.. Fremen don't just give in. Something always felt missing to me here.

Pardot Kynes did save some Freman youths from some Harkonnens, but then the Freman sent to assassinate him ostensibly committed suicide. "Talk about omens!".

 

[Chukchi Husky]

Okay, here's an honest question. Why is the LOTR setting called "Middle Earth"? Is it like the Pellucidar books by Edgar Rice Burroughs, and there's an actual other world in the middle of the one we know?

Middle-earth comes from Germanic mythology.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Midgard

 

[AmazonQueen]

I noticed The Wonder Years is being remade set in Alabama with a black family as the protagonists. Remaking a work to make it relevant to a new audience seems an entirely appropriate aim to me.

 

[Senethro]

I noticed The Wonder Years is being remade set in Alabama with a black family as the protagonists. Remaking a work to make it relevant to a new audience seems an entirely appropriate aim to me.

Hmmmm. How will the reaction differ for this? Will the aesthetics crowd be similarly up in arms about prestigious roles being lost to immersion breaking types?

 

[Birdjaguar]

Jan 14th, apple TV+ will feature Macbeth staring Denzel Washington in the lead. Frances McDormand plays his young wife. The show is in B&W too. Not only is Macbeth black, he is old too. The younger, ambitious general is replaced by a "boomer" who seeks kingship glory before he dies.

 

[Senethro]

Jan 14th, apple TV+ will feature Macbeth staring Denzel Washington in the lead. Frances McDormand plays his young wife. The show is in B&W too. Not only is Macbeth black, he is old too. The younger, ambitious general is replaced by a "boomer" who seeks kingship glory before he dies.

Everyone in this thread thinks the other side is silly, but imagine thinking Gandalf is on a higher pedestal than Shakespeare leading roles (other than the obvious one).

 

[aelf]

Jan 14th, apple TV+ will feature Macbeth staring Denzel Washington in the lead. Frances McDormand plays his young wife. The show is in B&W too. Not only is Macbeth black, he is old too. The younger, ambitious general is replaced by a "boomer" who seeks kingship glory before he dies.

Woke trash.

 

[Birdjaguar]

Any bets on how "woke" it will be?
People of color casting?
Gay/lesbian subplot?

'The Lord of the Rings' (Sept. 2, Amazon) - Like 'House of the Dragon,' the Amazon series will be a prequel, set thousands of years before the events in J.R.R. Tolkien's 'The Hobbit' and 'The Lord of the Rings.' Moreover, Amazon isn't shying away from the fact that show is going to be enormously expensive -- with a reported budget between $400 million and $500 million -- with Amazon programming chief Jennifer Salke telling the Hollywood Reporter last year, 'This is a full season of a huge world-building show. The number is a sexy headline or a crazy headline that's fun to click on, but [the budget] is really building the infrastructure of what will sustain the whole series.' Amazon also took the somewhat unusual step of announcing the premiere date 13 months in advance, the better to build the drumbeat for the show's arrival. Whether it will be the one series to rule the fall remains to be seen."

And more:

The series promises new adventures, characters and more as it takes place thousands of years before the events of J.R.R. Tolkien's classics, The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings trilogy. Unfortunately, this means you can't expect a Frodo (Elijah Wood) cameo when the premiere arrives next year.

Per Amazon Studios, the yet-to-be named series "brings to screens for the very first time the heroic legends of the fabled Second Age of Middle-earth's history…and will take viewers back to an era in which great powers were forged, kingdoms rose to glory and fell to ruin, unlikely heroes were tested, hope hung by the finest of threads, and the greatest villain that ever flowed from Tolkien's pen threatened to cover all the world in darkness."

The description continued, "Beginning in a time of relative peace, the series follows an ensemble cast of characters, both familiar and new, as they confront the long-feared re-emergence of evil to Middle-earth. From the darkest depths of the Misty Mountains, to the majestic forests of the elf-capital of Lindon, to the breathtaking island kingdom of Númenor, to the furthest reaches of the map, these kingdoms and characters will carve out legacies that live on long after they are gone."

As for the performers who will round out this ensemble cast? That would be Cynthia Addai-Robinson, Robert Aramayo, Owain Arthur, Maxim Baldry, Nazanin Boniadi, Morfydd Clark, Ismael Cruz Córdova, Charles Edwards, Trystan Gravelle, Sir Lenny Henry, Ema Horvath, Markella Kavenagh, Joseph Mawle, Tyroe Muhafidin, Sophia Nomvete, Lloyd Owen, Megan Richards, Dylan Smith, Charlie Vickers, Leon Wadham, Benjamin Walker, Daniel Weyman and Sara Zwangobani.

 

[Yeekim]

Any bets on how "woke" it will be?
People of color casting?

Reading the cast list, that appears confirmed.
Since it takes place in the Second Age, where I have little preconceived notions about how any of the characters should look like (only read Silmarillion once and barely remember anything), that is not really much of an issue though.