[ SECRET POST #2637 ]

[case]

⌈ Secret Post #2637 ⌋

Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS.

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Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 03 pages, 070 secrets from Secret Submission Post #377.
Secrets Not Posted: [ 1 - broken links ], [ 1 - not!secrets ], [ 0 - not!fandom ], [ 1 - too big ], [ 1 - repeat ].
Current Secret Submissions Post: here.
Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

Are those elves? Is this Tolkien? Because I can't empathize at all with you if that's the case; ever since I read these books as a kid his characters have always seemed so white to me. Like the characters in European fairy tales (that I also read around the same time). The idea of someone who looks like me or the people around me being in that universe seems completely alien and impossible. I mean, I can see your point if the books in question were Harry Potter, let's say, but... didn't he mean to write these story as legends for Britain?

[dreemyweird]

Yeah, and I think many of the characters were explicitly based on people of certain cultural backgrounds (e.g. the dwarves) - and not PoC, either. But I admit I'm not much of a specialist on the whole of the Tolkien 'verse, there might be someone there who could be non-white.

[(Anonymous)]

AYRT

I will concede that if you're fancasting, say, Haleth and the Haladin, or Ulfang and the Easterlings, it'd make sense to use POC actors -- but all the Silmarillion fancasts of these characters I've seen do use POC actors. Elves and the first two houses of the Edain, with their grey eyes and blonde hair and pale skin that keep getting mentioned repeatedly? Dwarves that seem based on Norse mythology? Never pinged as anything but white to me.

[gondremark]

The image makes me think Tolkien, but OP's statement that book characters "only get a vague description" is giving me second thoughts. Tolkien's descriptions are anything but vague. Ever notice how almost every canon-true illustration of Maedhros is recognisably the same guy? There's a very good reason for that, and it's Tolkien's deft use of adjectives.

[(Anonymous)]

Hmm, now that you mention it, that is weird. It's not just named characters, but he also had a tendency to provide physical descriptions across the board of entire groups of people. The Noldor are like this and the Vanyar are like this and the Numenoreans are like this but the Rohirrim are like this. Now, that's not to say that you can't headcanon individual, unnamed characters however you choose, but it's not weird at all for someone to have a certain image of these characters given the way they were written.

[gondremark]

Yeah. If I'm told that a character is a Vanyarin Elf and another is Rohirric I'm going to imagine both those characters as having pale skin and blonde hair, because that's what Tolkien has described as default for the Vanyar and Rohirrim, and if someone's going to call me racist for that, well, I'll just have to go dig up some quotations and shuffle all the blame to Tolkien himself.

[(Anonymous)]

I agree with you, I think Tolkien's intention is for the characters to be white. I'm sure he didn't think of that in a racist sense, it's just how he's written it.

[mimi-sardinia.livejournal.com]

I wouldn't be too sure about forgiving him of racism. He also had a tendency to make races who seerved Morgoth or Sauron - races like the Easterlings and Southrons - dark-skinned. Even ones like Dunlendings tended to be a bit more swarthy than Númenorian Men.

Tolkien made great use of what I refer to as "physical virtues". Physical characteristics that he tended to treat as sign that someone is either better or greater, or conversely is worse or less trustworthy. His heros were tall, good looking, usually good singers. The women were beautiful, had gorgeous long hair were great singers and dancers. Evil characters would have darker skin, be ugly, shifty-eyed. That sort of thing.

I can see where these things can be viewed harshly by modern standards, but I also see that Tolkien was making use of traditional tropes that appear in old legends too.

[(Anonymous)]

... didn't he mean to write these story as legends for Britain?

Doesn't necessarily mean that there can't be PoCs in the stories. And in fact there are groups of characters whose description suggest that they are PoCs - it's just that unfortunately most of these (ie the Easterlings and so son) are on the villains' side. Not that they all are, and it's not like there aren't awful white people either, but it's still all rather dodgy. But, anyway, if Tolkien himself included PoCs, even as less enlightened folks, it's not that far-fetched to imagine that other people that he doesn't really describe but which aren't that far from them (ie Haladin) could also be.

[(Anonymous)]

AYRT

Also covered this, see my response to dreemyweird above.

The point is not that these characters must be white, it's that there is reason enough why someone -- even someone who doesn't consider "white to be the default" -- would see them as being white. You could fancast characters whose races aren't specified as PoCs, and that would be a valid interpretation, but it isn't more valid than someone else's interpretation, be it white or PoCs-of-a-differing-ethnicty. You don't get to pull the race card to get one over people.

[(Anonymous)]

http://tolkiengateway.net/wiki/Racism_in_Tolkien's_Works

Also, there have always been POC in Britain and in Europe in general.

[(Anonymous)]

So because there were PoC they must be represented in all works no matter how marginal they were to those societies at those times?

[(Anonymous)]

"In all works". Mm-hm. How about like, half of them? A tenth? Ever?

How about enough so that most people didn't have to be surprised by the fact that yeah, PoC have always been in Europe, and maybe didn't have to claim that it would be "unrealistic" for a period piece set in Europe to have non-white characters?

[(Anonymous)]

It seems to me that when you criticize specific works (or fancasts, or whatever) for not including PoC, you are implicitly demanding that all works and fancasts include PoC. OP is going as far as saying that you're a racist if you don't. I mean, I'm not exaggerating here! That's literally the text of what OP is saying!

I agree with what you're saying here that it's not unrealistic and that there should be more situations and works that have PoC. But there's a gap between that argument and the broader ones that people seem to want to make about what writers Must Do.

Ah, I don't know, I'm sure I'm overreacting to some extent. Just a weird, absolutist vibe that comes up sometimes.

[(Anonymous)]

Stop pushing an American term into Europe, please and thank you.

[(Anonymous)]

I'm a European non-native English-speaker, so I apologise for my mistakes. It's very tricky trying to be PC in a language that's not your own. Can you suggest a more appropriate term for Europe?

[(Anonymous)]

I'm not even going to bother. Here, have a copy/pasted response:

The point is not that these characters must be white, it's that there is reason enough why someone -- even someone who doesn't consider "white to be the default" -- would see them as being white. You could fancast characters whose races aren't specified as PoCs, and that would be a valid interpretation, but it isn't more valid than someone else's interpretation, be it white or PoCs-of-a-differing-ethnicty. You don't get to pull the race card to get one over people.