The racist backlash to The Little Mermaid and Lord of The Rings is exhausting and extremely predictable – By Aja Romano (VOX) / Sept 17, 2022
Lord of the Rings and The Little Mermaid are just the latest targets of racist fans.
Two new adaptations of The Lord of the Rings and The Little Mermaid are prompting deep outrage and indignation among fans who are arguing that the projects’ increased diversity has weakened their faithfulness to the original story.
Detractors of Amazon’s new Lord of the Rings series, which debuted this month, claim that casting Black and Asian actors undermines the show’s faithfulness to Tolkien’s world. Meanwhile, some ostensible fans of Disney’s animated Little Mermaid are rejecting the new live-action version for swapping out the titular mermaid’s famous blue eyes and red hair for the features of Black actress Halle Bailey.
The Lord of the Rings: Rings of Power first drew widespread anger from fans because it casts Black and Asian actors as characters across the spectrum of fictional Middle Earth races. Fans’ chief complaint was that the decision to include nonwhite characters had ruined the authenticity of Tolkien’s world, because he had never described his elves, hobbits, men, and dwarves as anything other than white. Then last week, Disney released the first trailer for The Little Mermaid, featuring Bailey singing “Part of Your World.” Thousands of YouTube users brigaded, leaving more than 2 million dislikes and countless derogatory comments on the trailer, and creating memes ridiculing the film for casting Bailey and mocking all of its supporters.
To anyone who’s paid any attention to geek culture over the past decade or so, these arguments probably feel endless and exhausting. After all, this is the same cycle of backlash that plays out when any beloved story gets rebooted (or, in the case of Tolkien’s The Silmarillion, adapted to film for the first time) and makes any changes, big or small. The anger intensifies to a new level when they’re big changes that shake the foundations of a story that was originally framed within a white, male worldview. Let’s face it: Most of the stories that have been passed down to us throughout the centuries have been created for us by white men.
