I mean, I get it. Most media leans primarily toward catering to white, heterosexual males.

But -- I guess the way I see it is that it's primarily a work of fiction focusing on building a unique, personal mythology/epic for the English people?

Exclusive for them, I mean. (King Arthur notwithstanding, because they share that with France iirc.)

So I'm like -- would you complain at the same time that, say, a movie about the epic of Gilgamesh had only one white character in the film?

Or that Les Miserables had no Native Americans in it?

Stuff like that

And I get that it's a fantasy world, and that fantasy worlds don't have to follow rules or anything -- but Middle Earth, as it is now, is how Tolkein designed it to be. And I very much doubt he did what he

did because he was racist, or secretly thought all dark-skinner people were evil.

I don't know, maybe I don't "get" it.

*skinned

i think part of the problem is that there are people of color in middle-earth

and they are, in fact, all villainous but also irrelevant

royaltimes: Yeah, I get that as well. That personally made me a bit uncomfortable when I read about it.

i also don;t know how many people see it as exclusively english, or what that means say for english arabs that the only non-white people are the haradwaith

That's the thing, Tolkien as far as I've researched/been taught wrote the thing exclusively as being a way for the English people to have their own unique mythology

So it's very much steeped in being "English" -- and there's precedence in the history of English Lit. that anything seen as being "Oriental"

Or from the East

either highly sexualized, violent, or "evil." But it's not in a bad way? (Or inherently bad.) but more tempting.

Like in Othello -- the main character kills himself, in the end, because his Moor heritage "damns" him.

i'm not sure if that can be not bad really, it's the underlying jingoism and bigotry inherent to nationalism

Yeah, no. I agree.

And the excuse that "Well, that's just the way it was back then." in regards to both Tolkien times and less modern times (re: Lit.) shouldn't fly either.

I guess what I'm trying to say is that I understand what they're coming from, but as a person of color it makes me feel slightly uneasy

*where

*it makes me slightly uneasy that re-imagining classic works to be more inclusive is becoming a thing

yeah that's perfectly fair i think

Like, sometimes I feel like it borders slightly on the fetishistic -- and I know that's not how everyone feels, but yeah. just my 2 cents

shadowpact: as a dark-skinned person i am uniquely offended by this :|