Any real fan would realize that logically, the Second Age SHOULD be more diverse than the Third.

You mean racist neckbeards who've never cracked a Tolkien book, and who don't realize there were Maoris in the LOTR movies!

They have no place in the fandom. Even the squealing movie fangurls had more right to belong!

There are no significant population of w.s. fans. So, there is not "net positive" from offending them. That is silly.

THe real question is, why do you want to divide the fandom by politicizing the I.P.

The problem I have with your comment is that I see woke lefties condemn literally EVERYTHING touching matters of race that is anything other than uncritically approving as "white supremacy." And when it has descended to the point where "professionalism" (i.e. attention to detail, punctuality, etc.) are now being labeled as "white supremacy culture," then I'm sorry, this has simply become ludicrous, and I have a very hard time taking complaints of "white supremacy," seriously, because all to often, that essentially means "agree with everything I say or you're a racist."

The casting of black people as elves and dwarves is troubling for a number of reasons, none of them racist. First, this is material based on northern European mythology. One would expect the characters to resemble northern Europeans, except where Tolkien explicitly depicted people differently (e.g. the Haradrim, the Woses, possibly the Dunlendings, etc.), and the fact that they are being shoehorned into roles that seem inappropriate is not the problem in and of itself, it's the forced diversity is a symptom of the real problem: wokeness, which entails pushing a narrative, and when an agenda is prioritized over storytelling, we've got a serious problem. We've seen a bunch of movies and TV shows that prioritized "representation" in the past several years (I've listed them on another thread), and they all sucked.

As a matter of fact I personally am as much or more bothered by the liberties I fear they will take with the material, because I know they don't have the rights to The Silmarillion. All they've got is the rights to The Lord of the Rings (inluding the appendices) and the Hobbit. And so I am extremely worried about how they are going to treat material that Tolkien wrote about most extensively in a book to which they don't have the screen rights.

Seriously though. The net positive of offending white supremacist sensibilities should make any decent person more open to diverse casting.

Well said. I must however slightly object to your characterizing this is specifically modern day American politics. It is, of course; this country is eaten up with this woke nonsense right now, and we're all the worse for it. But it is not limited to us. Tolkien's own country is heavily infected with this rot as well, hence the BBC puts a black Achilles in one of its productions, and British broadcaster Channel 5 brought us a black Anne Boleyn. So we're not the only ones responsible for forced diversity.

If I were willing to take you seriously, I could point out that in society with the kind of racial divisions that forbid intermarriage, plenty of sex and breeding happens within the races. And I could also point out that in large empires, immigration from happens, in the Roman Empire, a citizen who was born in Israel could find him posted to Britain during military service and then get a government job in Egypt, and end up having children by a wife who was originally from Gaul, and more by slaves from Germany and Nubia (Ethiopia). That's how racial mixing happens in vast multi-national empires.

But since you're defending the cause of white purity, I'm not, I'm just going to tell you to get the fuck out of the fandom. Your bullshit isn't tolerated here.

Only that they were not dark skinned ...

Did you win that bet yet?

She is virtue signaling and pissing on perceived enemies.

Oh you silly silly person! Localized incursions around the Gondorian coast and thinly populated areas don't make for massive shifts in populations, not compared to the kind of moving around you get in a vast nation that provides a network of roads, the rule of law, and cultural continuity, the kind that vanished in Europe when the western half of the Roman empire fell... and the Empire that once sent its citizens from Jerusalem to Hadrian's Wall became a scatter of warring tribes where everyone was sure that if they crossed the next hill they'd be cannibalized by the next tribe over. In the 2nd age, a person could travel from Harad to Arnor along Numenorean roads and pass through civilization most of the way, by the 3rd age it took Boromir months, a lot of fighting, and hacking through wilderness to get from Minas Tirith to Rivendell, and he thought he was the first person to make the trip in centuries.

Of course the REAL fans understand a bit about history, both of reality and of Middle-Earth, and the REAL fans are decent people and not the sort of tiny-dicked asshole who goes around complaining about diversity.