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Again, all of this is the stuff of fantasy, so really, who cares whether they’re played by white or Black actors?

As it turns out, the answer is lots and lots of people.

A key cry among these kinds of fans is that such productions are insisting on what they’ve dubbed “forced diversity.” Detractors claim that the goal isn’t really to meaningfully inject realistic representation into the universe, but rather to advance a “woke ideological agenda.” This argument has been particularly loud among right-wing politicians and conservative influencers.

The ideal for such fans would be something they tend to describe as “organic diversity” — something that would arise naturally from the canonical descriptions of characters. For instance, one Tolkien scholar complained to CNN that since Tolkien described elves as “fair-faced,” anything too tawny would ruin the authenticity of the show.

“This is not something organic that’s coming out of Middle Earth,” Tolkien expert Louis Markos told CNN. “This is really an agenda that is being imposed upon it.”

Framing the mere existence of nonwhite characters in media as an inherently political stance is itself an ideological agenda. Moreover, it contradicts the long legacy of fantasy adaptations deviating from canonical descriptions of characters, and fans usually not minding — as long as the casting still reinforces a white, male-centric worldview.

Tyrion Lannister was specifically described as “One green eye and one black one peered out from under a lank fall of hair so blond it seemed white”. There was no outcry when he showed up in the show looking like this pic.twitter.com/6vZnKdAela

— Laura Shortridge-Scott (@DiscordianKitty) September 5, 2022

This brings us to the larger issue at play. This isn’t just about hobbits and “fair-faced” elves and redheaded mermaids, but about the existence of real people in our nonfictional world.

Welcome to the culture war, for the 8 millionth time

The endless culture war over increasingly diverse media has famously targeted everything from games to Ghostbusters, and now it has arrived to a fantasy universe near you. See the latest Star Wars series, or Captain Marvel, or Black Panther, or Black Adam, or Star Wars again — or pretty much every familiar franchise being adapted or remade these days with women and/or Black protagonists.

Usually, the audience that resists change will decry every reason except racism and misogyny for their hatred of these changes. For example, they might argue that casting actors of color is a cheap aesthetic change that does nothing to deepen the worldview of a story. Or, if the casting does result in a shift in worldview, they might argue that said worldview isn’t faithful to the original creator’s vision. (This usually makes it clear they never understood the creator’s original vision at all, because these narratives nearly always have deeply humanist and optimistic themes that align far more closely with a progressive worldview than with a traditionalist worldview — especially a racist one.)

Amazon Studios / IMDB
Cynthia Addai-Robinson as the Queen Regent Miriel in Lord of the Rings: Rings of Power.

Diverse casting can come with pitfalls and sometimes can be a shortcut to appearing progressive without actually being progressive. (See: Bridgerton and Hamilton.) Studios such as Disney are often more invested in rebooting their existing IP rather than taking chances on new and exciting stories from minority creators. Fans argue that this emphasis on simply redoing an old story with a casting facelift has led to a repetitive, tedious emphasis on pointless reboots and tired retreads rather than something truly meaningfully different and expansive.

However, these arguments often drown out the voices of fans of color who are overjoyed when they see themselves reflected in the legacy media they love — like the parents who celebrated the new Little Mermaid trailer by sharing photos and videos of their Black daughters reacting ecstatically.

What’s more, when high-powered studios like Disney do take such chances on new original work, the resulting wonderful work often also draws tremendous amounts of inflamed backlash. Pixar’s sleeper hit Turning Red became a surprise culture war target because of its culturally unique place and subject, as well as its characters.

This all suggests that the arguments for less diversity are just as shallow and political, just as racist and sexist, as they sound. Journalist and period drama expert Amanda-Rae Prescott learned this lesson well when she began tracking the fandom for the cult PBS series Sanditon. The series, an adaptation of Jane Austen’s unfinished novel, features one character of color — hardly the racially diverse cast of much more high-profile period dramas such as Bridgerton and The Gilded Age. As Prescott observed, despite many fans wanting more characters of color to also have more screentime, the majority of the show’s white fandom was committed to “maintaining Sanditon as the anti-Bridgerton” — in other words, to preserving its mainly white cast.

Prescott next saw a similar form of racist gatekeeping around the recent Netflix adaptation of Austen’s Persuasion, with white Austen fans masking racism behind other critiques of the movie as well as ostensibly lighthearted memes making fun of the film in oblique ways.

Both types of racist objections have attached to these new adaptations. The Little Mermaid trailer comments are currently wall-to-wall with haters making fun of people who like the trailer, using a variant of a copy/paste meme to mock the idea of liking the movie at all. The meme, like so many politically motivated memes, masks the real racist agenda behind it.

The repetitive nature of all these forms of discourse, Prescott points out, is part of the system.

“The same people who were angry about a Black Queen and a South Asian Viscountess on Bridgerton are the same people who are now angry about BIPOC elves, witches, and mermaids,” Prescott told me in an email. “You can copy and paste racist comments about diverse period dramas onto the racist comments about these fantasy franchises. There are people in period drama fandom who watch these series because they don’t want to see Black or POC characters, and it’s the same trend in speculative fiction.”

Prescott said she believes a driving theme of these campaigns is obfuscation — the use of some other argument to mask the real one. With historical dramas, it’s the argument for “historical accuracy.” With fantasy and science fiction adaptations, it’s the argument for preserving whatever version of the franchise you grew up with. “Racists weaponize childhood nostalgia to oppose diverse casting in these sci-fi/fantasy series because they cannot rely on whitewashed history to oppose diverse casting,” Prescott wrote.

Here, again, though, these arguments prove facile and flimsy. After all, generations of Disney fans who grew up with the beloved 1997 version of Cinderella, a.k.a. “the Brandy Cinderella,” didn’t subsequently have meltdowns over later adaptations that cast Cinderella as white. Instead, last year’s Cinderella saw Billy Porter’s genderless fairy godmother facing — sigh — transphobic backlash, because if there’s one thing fairies are famous for, it’s their rigid gender binary.

In other words, the backlash only ever works in one direction, and it only ever has one ultimate aim: erasing and threatening difference and deviance.

Prescott doesn’t have much hope that it will stop anytime soon.

“I believe racists are going to attack ANY series that they believe should have been 100% white,” Prescott wrote. “Racists are going to get mad at the next superhero or horror show that racebends a character, and they’ll be outraged over whatever the next Bridgerton is. Their goal is to stop all efforts to diversify Hollywood.”

One can expect a similar dynamic if US reformers embark on a similar project. After the popular uprisings in the US in 2020 in response to the murder of George Floyd, some believed that the United States could not reckon with racism if its founding text still contained clauses that dehumanized enslaved people and sanctioned slavery as punishment for a crime.

William Aceves, a dean at California Western School of Law, declared in an essay for the University of Pennsylvania Law Review that “ours is a racist constitution.” He argued that until the country excised vestiges of slavery like the Three-Fifths and Fugitive Slave Clauses, it could not move on from its history of racial violence. In an interview with me, Aceves wondered: “Why are we so quick to celebrate a document that by its terms, in black and white, incorporates racist concepts?”

Even before 2020, antiracism scholar Ibram X. Kendi proposed an amendment that would establish and permanently fund a Department of Anti-racism that would be tasked with monitoring and preclearing all local, state, and federal public policies to ensure they wouldn’t lead to racial inequality.

One could see a similar dynamic unfold when the new Chilean constitution was being written. The constitution there, adopted in 1980, is a holdover from the brutal military dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet, who rose to power after a US-backed coup d’état. His regime oversaw the torture of tens of thousands of Chileans and the execution or forced disappearance of thousands of political prisoners, a violent period that has remained etched into the national memory.

Pro-reform activists certainly viewed the new constitution as a symbolic turning of the page from a brutal era. But while that impulse seemed enough to animate the movement to put a new constitution on the ballot, it dissipated in the face of the actual document itself, a lengthy, 388-article constitution that made the symbolic real — and consequently lost support.

Last Sunday, as he reflected on the 49th anniversary of the coup that brought Pinochet to power, Boric noted that although his camp had suffered a defeat at the polls, it had been a “democratic defeat” and did not lead to a country taking up arms and violence.

But Vergara says the defeat came about in part because the “Reject” camp was careful not to rely exclusively on right-wing politicians to get their message to people. “The strategy was to disassociate ‘Reject’ from Pinochet, and they were very effective,” she said.

For now, Boric is going back to the drawing board, looking for an opening to try again with a new constitutional text. After the vote, he immediately reshuffled his cabinet and called for a dialogue with the country’s conservatives, who are now bargaining from a position of strength. He has been careful to remind his constituents in public remarks that voters disagreed with the actual text, not the larger impetus for change they voiced in 2022.

Some US observers are also keeping the hope alive. Julie Suk, a professor at Fordham Law School who studies gender violence and women’s rights, and a participant in the “Democracy Constitution” project, put it this way: The proposal “doesn’t become law today, but I think there are a lot of very interesting and innovative provisions in it that will reset the baselines from which the Chileans, and even people around the world, debate about what a constitution can do.”

But as Chile’s attempt shows, remaking your country’s foundational document is a herculean task, even with the wind behind the cause of reform.

Jesús Rodríguez is a writer and lawyer in Washington, DC, and the publisher of Alienhood, a newsletter on law and illegality.

On Thursday, Germany announced that it would send another big tranche of weapons, including two multiple-rocket launchers and about 50 armored personnel vehicles. But so far, Leonards and Mardars are not on the list.

The larger questions over the West’s ability to supply Ukraine

In a speech on Thursday, Scholz defended Germany’s support for Ukraine. ”Weapons deliveries from us — but also from our allies — have contributed to things turning out differently to how the Russian president planned,” he said.

Western support for Ukraine has undoubtedly helped shape this war. The International Donor Coordination Center (IDCC) at US European Command in Stuttgart, Germany, coordinates the multinational effort to deliver supplies to Ukraine. According to the IDCC, as of September 15, it has assisted in the delivery of more than 172,000 tons of equipment and more than 164 million lethal and nonlethal items.

But how sustainable that support will be is a question that is starting to emerge, and may be why the debate over these tanks is so fraught. Right now, the challenge is less political will — with some exceptions, Europe’s commitment to Ukraine persists — than a matter of practicality. There are only so many weapons to give, and you can only replace them so fast.

This is a problem for everyone, including the United States, but much more so for many European countries, many of which did not have the kind of arsenals or commitment to military readiness that exists in the US. And Russia’s invasion has changed the calculus for a lot of countries, which all of a sudden saw the security situation transform and, like Germany, realized their own defense strategies and investments had to change.

The decision to give weapons is largely a country-by-country, ad hoc decision. At the start of the war, lots of European countries looked at their stockpiles and basically said, “What can we afford to give away?” This was the military equivalent of digging in the back of the garage. Countries dusted off old Soviet-era weapons and cleared out weapons systems that they wanted to replace anyway, and that may or may not have worked.

Ihor Tkachov/AFP via Getty Images
Ukrainian artillerymen fire 2s7 Pion, a Soviet self-propelled 203mm cannon, on the southern front line of Ukraine on September 15.

But at a certain point, those obvious giveaways run out, and all of a sudden the inventory isn’t looking so robust. Countries now “have to dip into that and take bits and pieces from that and supply that to Ukraine, especially for the heavy ammunition for artillery,” said Siemon Wezeman, a senior researcher with the arms transfers program at the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI). “And you start quickly looking at the bottom of your file, and it has to be replaced. It has to be replaced rather quickly.”

Then there are the more advanced and expensive weapons systems — like those high-end tanks that Ukraine really wants but that these countries also need for their own defense. “If they give away equipment, they fear that they can’t or won’t be able to afford to replace that equipment,” said Max Bergmann, director of the Europe program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “And that inevitably leads to just hesitation.”

As experts said, it’s really hard to know exactly what individual countries have in their stockpiles, and what weapons they can afford to part with. But this is likely why Ukraine is trying to push the debate, especially with Germany — to try to seize on its success and convince Europe that it is in its interest, now, to donate the advanced weaponry. And some in Ukraine, and in European capitals, are arguing that it is worth sacrificing some European capability in the short term, because Ukraine, ultimately, is the front line of the Russian threat right now.

And in some ways, it will force the West to reckon with the realities of long-term support for Ukraine. As experts said, European governments may need to replace the ad hoc donations with a more coordinated approach — things like plans to scale up industrial capacity, and better funding to balance the security needs of Ukraine and of EU member states, beyond what already exists.

“There is a pretty strong feeling that supplying weapons is a must,” said Wezeman. Ukraine “cannot do without — and actually, the more the better. It’s just a question of where is that more and where are those betters that we can at this moment hand over.”

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