Current Events > I want to get into LOTR Expanded Material, but its whiteness turns me off

(+) Yeah! (+)

I've read The Lord of the Rings, I've read The Hobbit, and I've watched the extended editions of both. Yet, I've always been interested in the "expanded" content such as The Simarillion and those other later published works. Recently I was watching some lore videos and started to get interested again until all the fanart in these lore videos showed nothing but white dudes. White men, white elves, white dwarves, white Maia, white ass Eru children/gods (forgot the name), fucking Numenor motherfuckers with their white city and white ships and white tree, like holy fuck.

At a certain point I realized I just couldn't invest myself in this lore where black people just didn't exist nor asians or hispanics or brown people, oh and unless you're an elf, no women doing anything important especially when it comes to combat.

A world that accounts for a flat earth becoming a round earth, but in neither earth non-white people exist.

Is this just dumbass fanart or do those other novels really describe all those people as white/fair skin?

This is why I stan all black-clad Morgoth.

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Alright.
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knowing the TC, this is a parody topic, right?

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k...

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#LordOfTheRingsSoWhite

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Why do you care so much about the color of someone's skin? That's pretty damn racist.

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I feel the same way about Shakespeare

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I can't imagine wanting to get into that boring garbage in the first place, let alone being upset by the lack of racial diversity in medieval fantasy written during a time when that was the prevailing vision of the genre, Each species representing the motif of a European country. I also wouldn't be upset if a Saiyuki related piece of media were made with only Japanese characters =P

TL;DR-Okay

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Yeah so this is racist.

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This is probably just a troll topic, but I'll bite since I'm a Tolkien fanboy.

Tolkien made his stories as a faux history or legends of England. There are other races of people in Middle Earth, but they live in areas where the stories don't take place. There are the Haradrim and Easterlings in LOTR though. "Oh, so the non-white people are villains, hmm?" some say, but there's an inner monologue by Sam in The Two Towers where he sees a dead enemy soldier.

"He was glad that he could not see the dead face. He wondered what the mans name was and where he came from; and if he was really evil of heart, or what lies or threats had led him on the long march from his home; and if he would not really rather have stayed there in peace.

Those nations were forced or tricked into fighting for Sauron, as have "white" nations like the Numenorians who were tricked into waging war against the Valar which led to their island home being sunk into the sea by God. There are also many "white" people who straight up joined Sauron as well.


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Just fucking rewrite it then if it bothers you so much
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Dunlendings were white, some of the Easterlings were white