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AD&D and Lord of the Rings aren't all that connected, despite AD&D being effectively DIY fan-fic of LOTR.
The main point of objecting to all the diversity in the Amazon version of LOTR is that Dr Tolkien didn't base his world on a diverse egalitarian democracy.
It's based on Northern Europe, specifically centered on Jolly Ol' England.
That means we're going to have some pale ass characters and hardly a female ruler. Galadriel is an exception and she's shown to be exceptional, but everyone forgets her hubby! Celeborn was king to her queen.
My objection to the diversity is that if you're going to toss that into an established world, you've got to have it make some degree of sense or the willing suspension of disbelief will pop like the gossamer bubble it is.
If dwarves don't normally have dark brown skin and other classic negroid features, you have to explain why there's a queen with those features. If dwarven society is normally patriarchal, then you need to explain why there's a queen on the throne running the place.
The latter isn't even all that hard, we have English history as a real world example! The former is a lot more difficult to swallow.
Yes, children, I know that Kenneth Branaugh got away with it in his productions of Shakespeare, most glaringly in Much Ado About Nothing, but his stated goal was "best actor for the role I could get to respond" and that gives us Denzel Washington being brothers with Keanu Reeves.
You will not, however, he didn't case a white dude for Othello.
There's times and places to play this game.
Amazon's LOTR creators are bragging about shoving THE MESSAGE down our throats and making it an allegory of their vision of the real world.
What's all that got to do with AD&D?
Fuck all!
But AD&D is racist as fuck if you look at the surface.
Most of the various races have a beef against at least one other race and will go a killin' on sight.
But I looked at it more carefully when Hasbro tried to sanitize the racism against Orcs because someone decided Orcs were an allegory for black-people.
It's not a clash of races, it's a clash of cultures.
The different races even have different patron deities. A holy war if you use those gods in your campaign.
Never mind that you can choose to play as an egalitarian world as you like.
I know I have.
Never have I gotten more feedback from the players about a setting than the time I made the languages nationalistic and had nations which were predominately of a single race, but not exclusively so.
They took the idea of a nexus world having a bar and grill that served sophant meat in stride, but make the Elves speak a non-racial language?
The language thing still shocks me. There are people running around loose who literally could not process the concept "the people from country A speak language A, and the people from country B speak language B, even if those people are elves or orcs". I don't just mean that these people really really prefer the idea that orcs are all born with the preprogrammed knowledge of a specific language, I mean they simply could not hear what we were saying when we told them that, in this setting, everybody learns the language spoken by the people around them, just like it actually works in the real world.
ReplyDeleteAs far as dark-skinned or different-looking dwarves in Middle-earth go, people do forget that there are Houses of the dwarves other than Durin's Folk. Durin was the Eldest, and has the most prestige, but there are many others, and some of them may have evolved with darker skins. I wonder how they'd react to Chaos Dwarfs as originally described (pseudo-Babylonian/Assyrian dwarfs with a culture so evil that orcs look positively benign next to it)?
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