The Hobbit Cast Swaps Genders in All-Female Photoshoot
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No, it's not a positive thing. Every story benefits from a diverse cast. The Fellowship has members of 5 different races, and each one has a different background, different personalities, and different wants, and those are often in conflict of each other. The same is true even more so for the rest of the cast. Gender is just one more, and important, dimension here, and a very easy one to implement on top. A story where every character is pretty much alike will have a hard time to draw the audience in.JonnyHG said:
I don't think it is that easy to "change" the gender of an important "cast" member in basically any story!CloudAtlas said:
LotR i.e. is (slap me if you will) a story of a fellowship of men, traveling through the country, fighting evil, ...
If you would "switch" some of those men for women you can't have this same story anymore! Sure, maybe the "alternative" could also be nice and great and deep and whatever, but it would be different. And the question arises: Do you want the story to be different? Do you want the inevitable "sidestory" of man-woman-love-sex-whatever? (this is there already)
Also, while Tolkien didn't have that many women, those few that got "screen time" are not just standing around! They are damn "badass"! Galadriel is basically the most powerful elf. Without Eowyn they would never have beaten the Witch King! ... They all play a part of the story! If you like the story as it is ... well it's up to you!
I like Tolkien's works, but I'd like them more if they weren't such terrible sausage fests. The story wouldn't need to have been fundamentally different either if, for example, one of the Hobbits was a girl, Legolas female, had female elven soldiers, or if Eomer died and Eowyn became queen of Rohan.Geisterkarle said:
Exactly.CloudAtlas said:
Having said that, I'd much rather have an all male cast than have one token female that inevitably falls in love with the hero for no reason. However, there's no reason why that has to be the case.
The idea that it wouldn't work if there were female characters is preposterous. You can have ancient wizards, hobbits, dwarfs, elves and so on, and everything is fine. But if there's a woman, everyone would freak out, it seems. People really shouldn't find it easier to accept made up magical creatures than women.
I have a question:CloudAtlas said:
If I were to decide to write a story where it was an alternate, fantasy history, in which the founding fathers from US history fought T-Rexes and Dragons and stuff - would you expect some of them to be black, or asian, or female?
The reason I ask, is because Tolkien built LotR as a fantastical alternate history for England, the same way that you had the old Asian folktales or Beowulf.
Because he was building it as an alternate history that would have been told if England had it's own ancient folktales, it makes sense that everything about it would represent England and it's history to that time.
What that gets you is a few women that have great power and can enact huge change, but when it comes to front line fighting and soldiers, it was all men, all the time. Which is exactly what LotR is like. A few women, but carry considerable weight on the story, similar to England having their Queen, as well as frontlines of war that are entirely men.
It would hardly be fair to figure that because I'm white, male, straight, middle-class and wrote an alternative history of the founding fathers where they were still old, white men, means that I'm a bigot, or that replacing those characters with "diverse" ones should happen. And I see it the same way here with LotR.
I would expect your story to feature female characters, yes. After all, roughly half the population of the US at any point in time was female, so there's no reason not to feature them. Blacks and Asians, not necessarily, no..Areloch said:
As I said before, and more than once, I'm not holding anything against Tolkien. But all that "fictional history" stuff or "that was just what these times were like" is no excuse to have so few female characters if you were to write such a story today. I'm not talking about a 50/50 gender ratio or anything like that (although you can do that), but you can do better than the LOTR, with exactly one female character that really does much, Eowyn. And even she has a pitiful end. I gave some examples for what could have been done different. Yea maybe the human societies in Middle Earth are traditional, to match to this fictional history stuff, but why do the elves have to be the same? Why aren't elven women fighting side by side with the men? Would make sense, too: elves are few in numbers, being immortal, can easily spend a couple of years on military training without harm, and the male elves pretty much look like women anyway
. Change that, and you could easily have a female Legolas too, and a female Haldir (in the movies), and you could show Galadriel actually doing something, and let Arwen not just wait in Rivendell until everything sorts itself out. To see a genuine, non-sexual friendship grow between Legolina and Gimli, wouldn't that be something cool, something which you don't see a lot in any story of any genre for that matter?And speaking of the Hobbits and friendships, would it be so nonsensical for Sam being a girl? I mean, gardener is not exactly an overly manly profession, is it, and you could say there's some sexual tension between male Sam and Frodo anyway.
Now you just have to give Eowyn's arc a better ending, and these small and ultimately inconsequential changes already give you more and better female characters. And you still have your 'historically accurate' human societies, with armies without a single female soldiers, or women in leadership positions, so nothing has changed in this department.
It's difficult for me to tell if you read my post since you didn't address the points I made.CloudAtlas said:
I understand that you would have preferred it to have more female characters. That's perfectly fine. As you have already illustrated, quite a bit of diversity exists in the story. I don't think it's necessary for every story to have diversity to the max. Ironically, that would make for a pretty boring formula. Once we start placing restrictions or quotas on how much diversity (or anything for that matter) a story should have, we are seriously stifling creativity.
Others have provided historical context for the lack of female characters. Perhaps it's surprising that there are as many as there are. I personally think it's a waste of time to take a piece of art and say that it's not good enough, that there should have been changes because it's the representation of that artist. What is not a waste of time is to realize the lack of female characters, and work to create more dots of the spectrum that contain more diversity such as Game of Thrones or The Hunger Games.
Don't worry, I read your post.JonnyHG said:
First, there's a wide field between almost zero gender diversity à la The Hobbit and 50/50. I'm sure we can move a bit further to the latter end of the spectrum without risking to stifle creativity.
Oh, and please don't conjure the spectre of legal rules or censorship by talking about quotas and restrictions and such.
I'm not asking for anything to be changed in Tolkien's work. I welcomed all changes in the movie versions of LOTR and the Hobbit that go into this direction, though.
I don't know what point you're trying to make, but Tolkien did have some sweet female characters. Just look at Eowyn, she rode to war against everyone's orders and killed the Witch-King. Galadriel also destroyed Dol Guldur.thaluikhain said:
Tolkien fought in the First World War and his stories were shaped by that experience. Hence the "brotherhood" of the Fellowship and Thorin's company.
The books were also written over 50 years ago. It's pretty sad if you guys are going to criticise a work of fiction written that long ago because it's not "inclusive" or relevent enough in the modern day.
All I'm going to say is that maybe Tolkien liked Eomer as a character and wanted him as a king.CloudAtlas said:
Maybe Tolkien liked that Eowyn and Farmir were sick of the fighting and decided to get married and settle down in Ithilien.
You've got to remember this isn't ASoIAF. LoTR was the very first "high fantasy" novel apart from maybe Narnia. Tolkien wasn't looking to make massive feminist points and bold statements about diversity. The guy was just having fun writing a mythology for the languages he invented.
He was writing a history. In history you have the odd strong female ruler such as Cleopatra, Elizabath the First etc. but the driving figures of history are overwhelmingly male. Sorry but that's fact. Therefore in his medieval mythology he's going to have the men going out and doing the governing, and the fighting, because the world was different then and the women had to stay at home and have the babies.
Also your point about having female elven warriors and having Legolas as a female would just completely destroy the point of Eowyn's character. Eowyn is a woman and defies her father by going to war, slaying the Witch-King in the process. If Legolas was just around anyway she could've easily slain the Witch-King and the fact that Elven women went to war for thousands of years and were regular foot soldiers would've made Eowyn's brave decision far less important.
Also Galadriel is so OP. Powerful first age Elf, ring of power, mighty sorceress, absolutely wrecks and tears down Dol Guldur. Yeah she does actually do some things.
Fact is, Tolkien was writing a simple story. Cramming diversity and political correctness into every is going to make it muddled. Having Aragorn as a black man, Legolas as a female bisexual elf and Gimli as a gay Dwarf is going to dilute the story and take it away from the simple tale of brotherhood and friendship that Tolkien wanted to tell (see Frodo and Sam).
You don't have to explain that to me. Back in high school, back when the LOTR movies hit the cinemas, I was as big a Tolkien nerd as any of you.endtherapture said:
But today, I have a more sober view, and I can see its shortcomings too, and the lack of female characters is one of them. And, no, I don't accept the "historical accuracy" defense. If dragons, dwarves, orcs and wizards are no problem, then a by medieval standards possibly somewhat above average number of important female figures shouldn't be either.
In the Lord of the Rings, Galadriel does two things: Not taking the ring, and giving away gifts. That's it. There may be more, but it is not shown. So, like many other supposedly good female characters, she is not important for what she does, but for what she is. Whatever might noteworthy about her is largely told, but not shown. In the books, Arwen does even less, in the movies, she gets at least on scene. That's why I'm saying Eowyn is the only female character who really does anything, who plays an active role.
Meh. Not impressed. Bilbo looks alright and I can understand having Mr. "I forgot my pocket handkerchief"'s distaff counterpart being well groomed, but why on Middle Earth do even Gandalf and Balin's counterparts look like they're about the same age as Ori? And is it just me or is Bombur rather thin for the role? I'll grant that Thorin looks like she could be related to movie-Thorin and certainly has the physicality down - probably the second best attempt after Bilbo, really - but on the whole I have to say I'm disappointed.
Why? Things are criticised for being dated or no longer relevant or would have been done better nowdays all the time.endtherapture said:
Simple story? Ah huh.endtherapture said:
And...he can have several different types of elves, several nations of dwarfs, 4 or 5 different breeds of hobbits,an order of wizards and a bunch of different nations and tribes of humans, but he can't put diversity in, because that would confuse people? You can be as diverse as you want, as long as everyone is straight and white and male?
Just stop being a White Knight for the minorities and criticising a story for something it's not meant to be. Just because a story doesn't have gays/lesbians/women/different ethnicities in doesn't mean Tolkien was a terrible person with backwards views.thaluikhain said:
I love Lord of the Rings with it's white, male, straight cast. I also love Game of Thrones with it's diverse characters of homosexuals, different ethnic groups and women. But they're too different kettle of fish and just because Tolkien's simple storyline doesn't contain hundreds of different characters doesn't make it a bad thing.
You've got to remember being homosexual was a crime at the period of time he wrote the book. If Sam/Frodo or Legolas/Gimli were gay the publisher would've never published it.
You'll note, of course, that I never said it meant he was.endtherapture said:
Also..."for something it's not meant to be"? What kind of defence is that supposed to be?
Watch the DVDs in the extended edition of Fellowship of the Ring. It gives a good documentary of how the story of Lord of the Rings shaped up. It's ultimately a tale of brotherhood and camaraderie shaped by Tolkien's war experiences as much as it is a mythology for his language studies. To make Frodo and Sam gay lovers would take away from that, their love was the ultimate friendship and it was also platonic. Same with Legolas and Gimli.thaluikhain said: