It’s tediously predictable that as soon as a person of colour is cast in a franchise that is traditionally considered to have white characters, there’ll be some sort of uproar from toxic corners of online fandom. So it is with Amazon’s upcoming The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power. A few minutes on YouTube will dredge up literally hundreds of videos with hundreds of thousands of views, all featuring fans complaining about a “disastrous”, “woke” retelling of a beloved story they are yet to actually see. I’d advise against watching these missives if you value your blood pressure, or have a low tolerance for monotonous-voiced white American dudes in baseball caps using words like “wokeify”. The comments below these videos are, as you’d expect, a cesspit.
It’s depressing, predictable and, my god, I wish we could ignore it. Annoyingly, though, such critics are noisy. They make a racket louder than 10,000 Uruk-hai clashing their swords against shields, and do so with the same purpose: to intimidate, distract and unnerve. When the first character portraits from Amazon’s much-anticipated and almost impossibly expensive Lord of the Rings prequel series emerged, showing actors of colour, including black elf, hobbit and dwarf characters, webcams were immediately fired-up and keyboards frantically bashed.
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