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What's wrong with a black Hobbit? [1]

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Date: 2022-09-16

. . or a black mermaid?

Staff member Christopher Reeve posted an article the other day about the casting of a black Little Mermaid. He made some excellent points.

A black YouTuber I follow also had a few things to say on the controversy. His take on the Little Mermaid, and on The Rings of Power, is that both are based on Northern European culture, and the authors specifically described what these characters looked like, and they weren’t black. He also had some good points, but I think he missed one. A very important one.

Northern European Culture.

With the occasional exception, all the fantasy we are seeing today has its roots in Europe. Sure, a Moana or a Mulan gets made every so often, but the bulk of Disney and Netflix fantasies are Germanic.

We don’t get to see African myths made into movies and TV shows. You don’t get stories like Brown Girl in the Ring, an urban fantasy with African mythic elements.

What you get are European stories with the occasional black character. “There! You’ve got a black hobbit and a black elf! Now stop bothering us.”

I would much rather see them make a film based on an African legend, with black characters, rather than a bastardized African story (even if it’s a Marvel Universe story) or a German fairy tale with a black character thrown in for the sake of inclusion and diversity.

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[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2022/9/16/2123131/-What-s-wrong-with-a-black-Hobbit

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