#but nobody is allowed to criticize the aggressively and non-canonically anglo casting of the movies ever

[anghraine]

woodelf68 replied to this post:

I was a book fan first, but I honestly never form much of a visual image of characters when I read a book, so it didn't matter to me.

Cool, but that doesn't mean it can't matter to other people.

There's a very weird assumption in a lot of Tolkien fandom discourse that caring about actors actually looking like their characters is trivial and shallow, they cast for talent not appearance etc etc, so casting Anglo actors in non-Anglo roles is totally okay—unless, of course, casting for talent and not appearance results in heroic roles going to people other than pale, mostly light-haired, mostly Anglo white actors, at which point the fandom has screaming meltdowns.

And frankly, film fans always show up to make this about their personal preferences whenever anyone tries to discuss the problems with the films' casting. Yeah, it's a personal gripe in this particular case, but for those of us who do care about both this instance and the more problematic wider trend in the casting of the films, it's deeply frustrating that we still can't criticize it without fans of the movies rushing in after 20 years.

I thought it was great casting because they LOOK like they could be brothers,

They do, as do many other actors.

and I can't picture the characters any other way anymore.

Yeah, that's actually a major reason that some of us care a lot about this. For one, it can simply be irritating that we rarely see depictions of our favorite characters that look remotely like them, but more importantly, these sorts of choices shape the popular conception of what Middle-earth's heroes are allowed to look like.

And as a neighbouring realm to Rohan, I wouldn't expect them to look much different as far as ethnicity?

Uh ... if you're talking about what's visually effective on film, I think sharing a border on the opposite end of the country from where Boromir and Faramir live and where their families are from matters much less than differentiating the peoples in a clear way. The movies honestly seem largely disinterested in the ways in which Gondorians and Rohirrim are contrasting foils for each other even as they draw nearer in culture, and particularly clear foils in the ruling families—but that would require caring about Gondor to anything like the extent that they care about Rohan, which they evidently don't.

If you're talking about Tolkien's version, meanwhile, Gondor is a vastly more ancient nation than Rohan, and includes multiple ethnic groups that long predate the arrival of the Rohirrim from the North, and mostly look nothing like them. According to Tolkien, the Dúnedain of southern Gondor are very different from any of the Northern-inspired peoples of Middle-earth. He indignantly wrote that, while the Shire was indeed meant to represent England, Minas Tirith is 600 miles south (at around the latitude of Florence, Italy) while the great Gondorian port of Pelargir is at about the latitude of Troy (now in Turkey), and he insisted that his vision for Gondor was therefore not remotely Nordic.

Elsewhere, he repeatedly compared the Gondor of LOTR to the Byzantine Empire, and also said that the Dúnedain of Gondor were best envisioned as ancient Egyptians. Tolkien's depiction of the Gondorian peoples had lots of influences to be sure—but blond English people are not among them, and they are clearly meant to contrast visually with the Rohirrim in particular.

The movies' indifference to all this in terms of casting is one debate, but the matter of whether the casting for Gondor is accurate to Tolkien's descriptions in or out of LOTR is very straightforward. It's not.