Critical Miss: Lord of the Wrongs

[Magnesium360]

I think there already are English orcs. They're called football fans.

TOP SCORE! Just don't say that at an English football game.

 

[L4Y Duke]

Sometimes, a racial change works.

I mean, look at the SWAT TV show. Note how the leader's white.

Now look at the movie they made, with the leader being played by Samuel L. Muddaeffing Jackson. IT so totally works.

 

[The Wooster]

And if you didn't find a black man walking around Sherwood Forest under highly contrived circumstances distracting, maybe I could point you to Kevin Costner's accent in the same film? If you're going to argue that skin colour is irrelevant in film roles, then surely accent is too. And after all, Americans and English folk are both white, so it's practically the same thing.

Interesting thing though. Freeman was by far the best actor played the best character in the entire film. As for accents, you're proving my point as much as you're disproving it. Audiences are far more tolerant of bad or innacurate accents than they are of a character being the "wrong" colour. I'm not arguing for multiethnic casts in every film. I'm arguing that people picking and choosing which gross innacuracies they choose to get offended by is hypocritical and motivated by predjudice.

 

[Cory Rydell]

To be fair, the Lord of the Rings IS medieval.
Assuming that the one Black Dwarf in the Hobbit is a gangsta and having him hold the drugs while the white dwarf makes the pitch,
now THAT'S racist
Plus, The wizards were gay in the book, or do you not recall Saruman's "cloak of many colors"?

Actually the white dwarf has a sack in his hand, the black one is rifling through his duffle bag where he keeps all of his watermelon and grape soda. Interesting fun fact, I originally designed the white dwarf to be latino, but Grey had me change it because a button-up just buttoned at the top is too much. We were trying to not be too racist or something and since I havent been to enough seminars on proper PC protocol, I didnt know what to do. So Bam! white dwarf. Also the horse is a low-rider horse.

 

[The Wooster]

To be fair, the Lord of the Rings IS medieval.
Assuming that the one Black Dwarf in the Hobbit is a gangsta and having him hold the drugs while the white dwarf makes the pitch,
now THAT'S racist
Plus, The wizards were gay in the book, or do you not recall Saruman's "cloak of many colors"?

Actually the white dwarf has a sack in his hand, the black one is rifling through his duffle bag where he keeps all of his watermelon and grape soda. Interesting fun fact, I originally designed the white dwarf to be latino, but Grey had me change it because a button-up just buttoned at the top is too much. We were trying to not be too racist or something and since I havent been to enough seminars on proper PC protocol, I didnt know what to do. So Bam! white dwarf. Also the horse is a low-rider horse.

Cory originally came to me with concerns that the strip did present some unfortunate racial stereotypes.

I said it was fine. I'm English and I don't find it offensive at all.

Hahaa. Funny stuff. But i kinda feel bad for the balrog, Can't you just outrun him or just walk up some stairs get away?

Well, remember the fucker can fly.

 

[psycoking]

Uhg. To all the jackasses claiming that all hobbits are white, is it really that horrible that someone of a different race than the one you've pictured in your head gets cast for the fantasy film du jour? I mean, I understand that films based on actual history should be racially accurate, BUT THIS IS FANTASY WE ARE TALKING ABOUT. As long as they get the character's personality right then it really doesn't matter who gets cast. Besides, I don't remember Tolkien ever saying middle earth was Europe, or that everyone was white. That's just something that we all assumed because Tolkien was a white European.

Maybe I would agree with the naysayers if this were an actual case of the PC police asking for diversity, but it's not. A casting director was turning down dark skinned actors because of his personal belief that hobbits must all be white. When you can't even get a part as an extra just because of your skin color, that's called discrimination.

In all honesty, I think I'm just tired of all these nonsensical fantasy racial stereotypes. I mean, who the hell decided that all dwarves have to speak with a Scottish accent? And why the hell does every film set in the past have to have people speaking with English accents? How about some diversity just for the sake of being different. Dwarves with Irish accents! The Rohirim now all sound Swedish, and the men of Gondor are American. And just to piss people off, all Elves are now Asian's with bleached blond hair. That's fair skinned and fair haired, so you can't say its inaccurate!

 

[Logic 0]

We need those English orcs to make lord of the rings hilarious.

 

[Darth_Dude]

"Colored hobbits"

...

Samwise was originally black... read the book... seriously people...

WHAT? I read the books, I'm pretty sure he wasnt black. None of them were, the Shire was supposed to be set in Mediaval England.

 

[JemJar]

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.

This is genius.

To my mind, if a director wants to say "All members of fictional fantasy race XYZ in my adaptation of a book where their skin colour is entirely irrelevant are white" then that's fine. It certainly beats him saying "Right, so this master race are all white but this crappy slave race are all black".

And I think a black James Bond is entirely suitable. If we can get away with reboots and whole new stories and blindly accept the fact that James has metamorphosed even when the supporting cast hasn't (there have only been two Ms) why shouldn't we accept a black Bond?

 

[Desert Tiger]

Uhg. To all the jackasses claiming that all hobbits are white, is it really that horrible that someone of a different race than the one you've pictured in your head gets cast for the fantasy film du jour? I mean, I understand that films based on actual history should be racially accurate, BUT THIS IS FANTASY WE ARE TALKING ABOUT. As long as they get the character's personality right then it really doesn't matter who gets cast. Besides, I don't remember Tolkien ever saying middle earth was Europe, or that everyone was white. That's just something that we all assumed because Tolkien was a white European.

Maybe I would agree with the naysayers if this were an actual case of the PC police asking for diversity, but it's not. A casting director was turning down dark skinned actors because of his personal belief that hobbits must all be white. When you can't even get a part as an extra just because of your skin color, that's called discrimination.

In all honesty, I think I'm just tired of all these nonsensical fantasy racial stereotypes. I mean, who the hell decided that all dwarves have to speak with a Scottish accent? And why the hell does every film set in the past have to have people speaking with English accents? How about some diversity just for the sake of being different. Dwarves with Irish accents! The Rohirim now all sound Swedish, and the men of Gondor are American. And just to piss people off, all Elves are now Asian's with bleached blond hair. That's fair skinned and fair haired, so you can't say its inaccurate!

People like you are the reason PC is so out of control.

If actors in wheelchairs were turned down, would that be discrimination too? No, because they wouldn't fit the setting. When was the last time you saw a paralympic champion hobbit? Same applies for race.

Also - Tolkien fleshed out his entire world, from east to west, north to south. Nowhere has a climate that would cause such pigmentation to develop, even LESS so considering the hobbits generally live in areas with a cooler climate.

"But it's fantasy!" Yes. It is. However, it's light fantasy. It means not everybody is a mage, not everyone gets to be the chosen one, and only extremely important characters hold any semblance of any form of power or gets to be in any way different from anybody else. Light fantasy is basically structured as medieval England (with the same costumes, weapons, culture etc) but with all the embelishments of mysticism, magic and monsters kicking added over the surface.

"In all honesty, I think I'm just tired of all these nonsensical fantasy racial stereotypes. I mean, who the hell decided that all dwarves have to speak with a Scottish accent? And why the hell does every film set in the past have to have people speaking with English accents? How about some diversity just for the sake of being different. Dwarves with Irish accents! The Rohirim now all sound Swedish, and the men of Gondor are American. And just to piss people off, all Elves are now Asian's with bleached blond hair. That's fair skinned and fair haired, so you can't say its inaccurate!"

Sooo... you're tired of it being nonsensical, and then you just wrote that?

...I give up.

 

[Desert Tiger]

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.

This is genius.

To my mind, if a director wants to say "All members of fictional fantasy race XYZ in my adaptation of a book where their skin colour is entirely irrelevant are white" then that's fine. It certainly beats him saying "Right, so this master race are all white but this crappy slave race are all black".

And I think a black James Bond is entirely suitable. If we can get away with reboots and whole new stories and blindly accept the fact that James has metamorphosed even when the supporting cast hasn't (there have only been two Ms) why shouldn't we accept a black Bond?

Little different in that black people actually exist in the Bond universe. We're talking them appearing from thin frickin' air then dissapearing completely years later.

 

[nipsen]

Honestly, if you have so little imagination that a black hobbit would "break the immersion" of a film then it's a wonder you got through the book in the first place.

..did someone actually say that..? Wow..

Great strip as usual, though. Laughed very loudly.

 

[Baalthazaq]

Samwise was originally black... read the book... seriously people...

I did read the book and I don't remember this, but I doubt it came up that often.

I request a quote for proof.

Yep part of the reason why I didn't like it as it wasn't true to the history it was trying to tell which further proves my point on this whole "Staying true" to the source.

Samwise wasn't black in the book but it did state his skin was darker than the average hobbit then again he was a gardener so he probably got a tan.

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.
Therefore, could you have made Samwise black? 100% yes, and if anything many more things click into place when you do. Seriously, reread lord of the rings now. Does it make more sense or less sense?

Is it likely Tolkien had this in mind?
Does Tolkien often expand and develop stereotypes to get his characters?

This isn't a criticism of Tolkien, it's a description of a world that existed here in the same timeframe.

This annoyed me to a great extent - Sam worked outside, so he got a tan. He's a gardener. This does not mean he is a naturally dark skinned person. Also, Gamgee was a local word for cotton in Birmingham which Tolkien used coincidentally, he actually gave it an orgin of Elvish words meaning 'game' and 'wick.'

As much as America may seem like the centre of the world, there was no equivalent of the civil rights movement in the UK where Tolkien lived. Unlike the USA, in 1948, there were very few dark skinned people in the UK. Tolkien did not encounter dark skinned people in his daily life, from this perspective there's no reason for him to even think of including them in his epic.

While I'll admit that I haven't had time to 'reread lord of the rings,' I'm almost certain that I would gain nothing by turning Sam into a character of a different 'race.' Tolkien was mainly concerned with imitating great nordic myths and poems, not creating an allegory of anything. Tolkien had no black stereotypes to expand on.
Sorry for the random rant but I just had to put that right.

1) Sam was a character of a different race. He was a Harfoot.
2) The harfoots being darker (which they are), has no backward relation on Samwise being a gardener, any more than YOU being a Gardener makes Caucasians darker. Tans don't work that way.

Harfoots are dark.
Sam is a Harfoot.

Take any Philosophy, Math, Logic, Computing, Classical history, linguistics, Z schema, epistemology, TOK, or programming class, and you'll see, without any argumentation, that armed only with those two points, Sam, too, is dark.

Gardening is irrelevant.

 

[Mr.Squishy]

As long as they get the character's personality right then it really doesn't matter who gets cast.

So...Christian Bale as Mahatma Gandhi, or Chow Yun Fat as Martin Luther King would sit okay with you?

 

[The Wooster]

Ignore this. Wrong topic.

 

[Kelethor]

Ah, female Nazgul. Almost as controversial as the Female Space Marine.

The logical compromise then is to make a cosmetically similar but obviously inferior Nazgul for the females. It worked for Warhammer after all.

OHOHOHOHO, is funny because it is not true!


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UBztjzDr0fM


OT: Im kinda...well, im kinda on the fence on this one. on the one hand, I feel that an author as respected and well known (Or any person's creative work) should be respected. if Tolkien didn't want their to be black hobbits in the shire because it wouldn't make sense, then It wouldn't make sense to have black hobbits.

On the other hand, should it really matter? I mean, if the black hobbit is a good actor and does a good job, then his color shouldn't matter. Right? Right?!?

I just don't really know how to feel about this one?

 

[CitySquirrel]

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

This is actually the definition of racism... the belief that behavior is defined by race.

Just adapting the books to a film means creating an inauthentic version of the story. And this is completely ignoring the specific decisions that deviate from the book...like giving a somewhat minor character (Arwen) a larger role and in doing so creating a situation that downplays a very important part of the original story, which is in this case the will of hobbits demonstrated by Frodo's resistance of the rings power.

 

[Chazfreakish]

Samwise was originally black... read the book... seriously people...

I did read the book and I don't remember this, but I doubt it came up that often.

I request a quote for proof.

Yep part of the reason why I didn't like it as it wasn't true to the history it was trying to tell which further proves my point on this whole "Staying true" to the source.

Samwise wasn't black in the book but it did state his skin was darker than the average hobbit then again he was a gardener so he probably got a tan.

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.
Therefore, could you have made Samwise black? 100% yes, and if anything many more things click into place when you do. Seriously, reread lord of the rings now. Does it make more sense or less sense?

Is it likely Tolkien had this in mind?
Does Tolkien often expand and develop stereotypes to get his characters?

This isn't a criticism of Tolkien, it's a description of a world that existed here in the same timeframe.

This annoyed me to a great extent - Sam worked outside, so he got a tan. He's a gardener. This does not mean he is a naturally dark skinned person. Also, Gamgee was a local word for cotton in Birmingham which Tolkien used coincidentally, he actually gave it an orgin of Elvish words meaning 'game' and 'wick.'

As much as America may seem like the centre of the world, there was no equivalent of the civil rights movement in the UK where Tolkien lived. Unlike the USA, in 1948, there were very few dark skinned people in the UK. Tolkien did not encounter dark skinned people in his daily life, from this perspective there's no reason for him to even think of including them in his epic.

While I'll admit that I haven't had time to 'reread lord of the rings,' I'm almost certain that I would gain nothing by turning Sam into a character of a different 'race.' Tolkien was mainly concerned with imitating great nordic myths and poems, not creating an allegory of anything. Tolkien had no black stereotypes to expand on.
Sorry for the random rant but I just had to put that right.

1) Sam was a character of a different race. He was a Harfoot.
2) The harfoots being darker (which they are), has no backward relation on Samwise being a gardener, any more than YOU being a Gardener makes Caucasians darker. Tans don't work that way.

Harfoots are dark.
Sam is a Harfoot.

Take any Philosophy, Math, Logic, Computing, Classical history, linguistics, Z schema, epistemology, TOK, or programming class, and you'll see, without any argumentation, that armed only with those two points, Sam, too, is dark.

Gardening is irrelevant.

Different race? Tolkien himself describes them as breeds. In fact as I read my copy of The Lord of the Rings right now the description of Harfoots describes them as being 'browner of skin' (not very specific) and also describes them as the 'most normal and representative variety of Hobbit, and far the most numerous.' This is a direct quote from the text. I was merely pointing out that there is no racial subtext in Sam's character to be found and whatever colour his skin was, Tolkien was neither intentionally or unintentionally creating a subservient character defined by his skin colour. Also, Tolkien refers to middle earth as being 6000 years before our time, at a point when cotton and race could not possibly be used as parallels.

 

[Richard Ledger]

Other races of men do exist in middle earth. In the east there are Asian style people and not too far to the south there are Arab style people. The Lord of the Rings is set in less than a quarter of middle earth and middle earth is not even the entire world. It is not a racial trait of a hobbit to be black so they should not be black, I would be very pissed off if this happened. Black people probably do exist in middle earth just not in the North West where the Hobbit/Lord of the Rings is set. Considering the fastest transportation baring perhaps a giant eagle (or other non attainable transport) is horse then they probable can not get near the North West where the predominant race is the Dunlending (described as dark haired Caucasian).

It?s like having a black guy playing King Arthur... it would suck.

To comment on the argument above I agree with Chazfreakish. JRR Tolkien hated that people even tried to look for algorithms in his writing and consider that he states the hobbits are based on rural English life (in which at the time there are NO black people involved at his time of living there). Also English people on the whole have browner skin compared to Scandinavians, does this make them black?

 

[XShrike]

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.
The main gist of the strip is pointing out the hypcrisy in criticising black hobbits while the film openly casts dark haired actors as blonde characters. It's hypocritical and irritating.

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.

I don't really care about race just consistency. My main point was that all but, humans seemed to travel very little outside their native lands. So the various fantasy races wouldn't have much diversity in features. These are fantasy races, although based on European folklore, and could be whatever color you want.

I also kind of get irritated if it feels like they are putting token ethnicities into something. The Forbidden Kingdom really annoyed me because instead of just having a cool "Kung Fu" movie with Jet Lee and Jackie Chan. They make some kind of stupid plot hook that lets a modern day white teenage male go back to ancient China and be the chosen one. I have a feeling this was done mostly to have a relatable character than the token issue. Either way, consistency damn it!

Now that I write this wasn't there a story about some casting director getting fired for immediately dismissing any black actor trying out for a hobbit in The Hobbit?