Taurus said

"Stunt" casting or not, they deliberately chose black actors when they knew the fandom would be expecting white ones.

But that's not my point. My point is that, from a storytelling perspective, we have a single black elf in a sea of palefaces and nobody notices? If the characters see 'just another elf', then fine. If they see an elf of singular coloration and hair, wouldn't someone at some point make note of it? It's just weird.

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Demanding Jim Crow casting requirements for a show on which the concept of race applies to elves and hobbits indicates a rather profound “obsession with identity issues that only go skin deep.” The primary tensions in Middle Earth are among races even more fictional than the ones that divide contemporary society. The fact that its cultures are inspired by real-world history does not rationalize imposing patterns of migration, conquest, and exploitation onto a fictional universe in which they did not take place. J. R. R. Tolkien’s tendency to essentialize his fictional races, giving them intrinsic moral qualities, is the subject of a great deal of research and commentary, but that’s not really the issue here. There are stories set in universes where race works similarly to how it does in contemporary society and where it should influence casting choices, but this isn’t one of them.

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