Reflection and Analysis

Rings of Power - Erasure of Southern Lands/Africa (3/7/2022)

I've decided to touch upon the subject of race in Rings of Power and the racial casting in a different manner, one that is honestly being over looked.

Specifically, anybody rooting for the casting choice doesn't know their canon because anyone who does actually know their Middle Earth canon will actually know there were better ways to diversify the cast for Rings of Power without taking the artistic liberties they have.

Yes, I used the words artistic liberties for this and not artistic license.

It suddenly hit me at the end of my last rant that when I saw Disa, I actually didn't think the character I saw was Disa. I instead thought she was an original character from the Southern Lands and that they were taking the time to expand upon the already existing story by including characters from the Southern Lands.

Nope.

Instead, apparently the Southern Lands don't exist and Middle Earth is instead a self-contained world in the same way Avatar: The Last Airbender is, and because the world is in fact quite diverse, that means they must make Middle Earth diverse and reflective of it. Look only to the fact Tolkien did describe certain characters as having darker skin, and you've your proof.

So, apparently there are only two types of skin color, white and black, and Tolkien couldn't possibly have be utilizing the fact there are historically people in Europe with darker skin who aren't of African decent? Some are even in Britain, but apparently in this day and age we've forgotten those who fall in between, but if only this were the only mistep.

What I can't stand for is the complete and utter erasure of what is outside of Middle Earth, including the Southern Lands which are in fact representative of Africa, which stands to reason that somewhere far off there's also Asia. Yet, I'm going to admit here that this is often forgotten about by some of those you know the canon well, what with Southern Lands being such an obscure fact, at least until the third movie that is when it was a fact many realized they had actually overlooked.

There's no getting around the fact Peter Jackson did representation better in the third movie than the Rings of Power did, by actually bringing in humans from the Southern Lands with their Oliphants into the picture, but it is for this very reason Rings of Power absolutely does not deserve praise for the diverse casting, as anybody who watched the original trilogy, Peter Jackson's trilogy should have been aware of the Oliphants and the people from the Southern Lands.

And I don't buy Bayona's personal experience with war, given that it's shaped by forty years of dictatorship, is the same as Tolkien's experience with war, which was World Wars and the wars involving fighting over inheritances that came before are equivalently the same and that him looking at Tolkien's work through the lens of his personal experiences with war is a lens he should be interpreting the work through, but effectively he's saying, "let's modernize it" when what fans wanted wasn't a modernization of the canon material.

No, seriously—it's material that hasn't been covered yet in adaption, so suddenly coming around and modernizing it doesn't make sense and reeks of personal agenda that has absolutely no place in adapting another person's work. And I can not, absolutely can not root for the diverse casting on this project when I see the Southern Lands being erased, seeing Africa erased from existence in the world Tolkien created.

And why?

Because token representation is all the rage now, and you can't possibly be taken seriously if you don't have some kind of token representation in the series, which completely ignores those of us that have pointed out token representation—representation for the sake of representation is actually a form of racism, but this time it reared it's ugly head by actually completely erasing the existence of the people it is trying to represent as they were represented in the series.

I've always said there's a cost to this kind of thinking. Middle Earth lore takes place in a time period equivalent to Medieval Europe, so it doesn't make sense for the world of Middle Earth to look like modern Europe. Yet, we're also ignoring the fact Tolkien's world has room for exploring the eras after LotR. It has room to explore places like the Southern Lands (Africa), and other places, but instead of seeing Middle Earth as the rich playing ground it is, they decided to see it as "faulty" for not being modern enough to their liking.

And they wonder why some of us are up in such arms. Tolkien's world was already racially diverse. Africa exists! Stop pretending it doesn't just to serve a political agenda, one people who want representation, real representation rather than this token representation to win brownie points are getting sick and tired of!