It seems that Embracer Group and Middle-earth Enterprises have still not learned their lesson and are under the influence of the Dark Lord of ESG. Every time a film or video game embraces wokeness it flops. Amazon Films Rings of Power was a disaster.
I recently viewed the trailer for the upcoming Tales of the Shire video game. The game looks enchanting. The art style has a universal simplicity to it that is endearing. Given my appreciation of all things Tolkien, it is something I’d probably find very enjoyable.
But upon further examination, I have found that black hobbits with African features have mysteriously infiltrated the town of Bywater. If poverty, crime, drug use, cart-jacking, and fatherlessness in hobbit holes occur in Bywater, we’ll have a pretty good idea of why.
Black Hobbit Lives Matter
The “wise” bespectacled black hobbit shown in the photo below has unmistakable African features. The character artists and animators made sure he had African hair as well. This is intentional. Maybe his hobbit children will someday grow up to be astronauts.
In one segment of the promo video, a hobbit elder with grey hair and a black face appears. Notice the uncanny resemblance to British black actor Lenny Henry who played village leader Sadoc Burrows in Amazon’s Rings of Power Season One.
But wait! There are more black hobbits crawling out of the woodwork. In addition to the previous two, there are two more:
The Wētā Wokeshop
New Zealand-based Wētā Workshop Games is the studio behind Tales of the Shire. From the studio photo below, you can see that they don’t exactly practice the diversity that they preach. I doubt any of them would vote for Trump. Therefore it won’t take a rocket scientist to probably figure out who the culprits are that helped make this game woke.
Wētā partnered with Peter Jackson to create many of the props in the original Lord of the Rings Trilogy of film. It’s hard to believe they have fallen into the gutter of wokeness and have allowed this vandalism of Tolkien’s work.
Shill-for-hire Nerd of the Rings, flew down to New Zealand to interview the key members of the video game studio as seen below.
There can be no doubt that Wētā Workshop included black hobbits in their game because Embracer either allowed it or demanded it. Since Amazon’s Rings of Power and Magic the Gathering: Tales of Middle-earth were allowed to get away with it, why not Tales from the Shire too?
Venturebeat Interviews Embracer Group’s Lee Guinchard
In a recent VentureBeat interview with Lee Guinchard, it’s clear that Embracer Group is behind all of the wokeness that we’ve seen in the past few years in various Tolkien-themed works that they’ve licensed.
The author makes Guinchard out to be a heroic steward of the Tolkien franchise. To me, this is presumptuous given that Guinchard has not yet distinguished himself as being particularly loyal to Tolkien and his fans. The very fact that he allowed Wētā to race-swap the white hobbits for black hobbits proves he’s just the opposite — a woefully inept guardian of Tolkien’s legendarium.
Let’s explore some of the revealing quotes in the article to plumb the depths of Guinchard’s commitment to Middle-earth. Here he talks about Tales from the Shire:
With Tales of the Shire, there is a chance to reach new folks.
“That’s the power. It’s really the power of the of doing the right thing by the property,” Guinchard said. “We’ve had a lot more input into that because we have like an internal games team now. They have been a lot more involved in that in the last six to eight months. And again, it really hits a spot for us and also brings in potential new audiences. There are a lot of these cozy games now, but this one really is quite cozy.”
Who is this internal game team at Embracer? Let’s see their accomplishments and track record. Are they qualified?
Ginchard continues:
The game has a lot of attention to detail and has more diverse leadership with women leads. It’s a smaller game with a lower price point. It’s like a game in the “arts and crafts” category.
Ginchard lets the cat out of the bag when he touts the diverse leadership and women being leads of the Tails of the Shire project. But to what purpose? He fails to explain why having diversity and females in charge is advantageous. The current mythology that is being spread about diversity is that hiring minorities and females is a magic potion that will increase the quality of your entertainment media. Of course, this is all completely false and wishful thinking constantly promoted by the DEI industrial complex.
When Disney purchased Lucasfilm, they foolishly put a woman (Kathleen Kennedy) in charge who promptly destroyed the franchise with her feminist-inspired girl boss stupidity.
The VentureBeat article continues:
While the written word is clear, the visual interpretation is up for grabs. There are so many different kinds of art styles, Guinchard said, with the look of things like Fortnite, Borderlands, GTA, Tomb Raider and more. The teams will have to figure out what Frodo looks like and more. And if an Asian audience is looking at a version of The Lord of the Rings property in the future, how would it be visualized for them? That is what you have to think about when you envision a global market.
Imagine if Lucasfilm decided that Luke Skywalker had to look different to appeal to each segment of the global market. Really?!? Establishing what all of the iconic characters look like is YOUR JOB Mr. Guinchard. If you do not do this, you will leave every single character open to wild interpretations and dilute the franchise with abominations such as race-swapping. I would highly recommend that Peter Jackson’s versions of the characters be the gold standard for visual representation. Build on that. There is no reason to reinvent the wheel.
Tolkien’s works have a proven track record of appealing to international markets.
Japanese culture has a certain appeal to foreigners because of its intrinsic nature as an expression of Japanese sensibilities. If I go to Japan, I want to experience Japanese culture. If I as an American, buy a Japanese-created video game, I want it to be Japanese. I do not want a Japanese creator to change their art so I as an American will find it more palatable.
What Guinchard is doing here is pandering to his DEI and ESG overlords. Tolkien’s works are established IPs that have been incredibly successful for decades. They certainly don’t require the Embracer Group to meddle with how “global markets” see them.
Guinchard has not fully thought this through. He’s making it up as he goes along and throwing platitudes at the wall like spaghetti with hopes that it will stick.
Conclusion
I wonder what children and teens who play this game will feel when they grow up and read The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings and realize that black hobbits don’t exist in Middle-earth and that Embracer and Wētā betrayed them with their vandalism?
J.R.R. Tolkien’s literature is sacred and a key part of the canon of Western civilization. Hobbits with black pigmentation and African features do not belong in The Shire. Tolkien fans hate this! No amount of tortured sophistry can justify this blasphemous twisting of Tolkien’s Middle-earth.
Divisive modern politically charged concepts of representation, diversity, inclusion, and equity have no place in the fantasy world of Middle-earth. Tolkien’s universe was always meant to be a mythology that honored the English people. The hobbits were supposed to be a metaphor for the English country folk. English people are Anglo-Saxon — they are not African or have black pigmentation. Race swapping is spitting on Tolkien’s grave and alienating millions of his fans.
Given Embracer’s Group’s short and awful history of mismanaging the Tolkien IP, we might very well expect to find Asian hobbits and LGBTQ hobbits skulking around in the shadows in Tales from the Shire.
The Embracer Group has already demonstrated that they do not understand or respect Tolkien. Allowing race-swapping and gender-swapping for political purposes is unconscionable.
Embracer Group is from Sweden and in the past few years the Swedes have taken complete leave of their senses and allowed wholesale Muslim immigration into their northern nation. This act of self-loathing has caused Sweden to have the highest crime of any northern European country. Is Embracer Group infected with the same stupidity and hatred of Western civilization?
The tragedy of Embracer’s betrayal is foreshadowed in Tolkien’s works. The odious practice of race swapping that vandalizes Tolkien’s work is similar to how the orcs were created as found in The Silmarillion which is a sort of prequel to the events of the Lord of the Rings:
“Yet this is held true by the wise of Eressëa, that all those of the Quendi who came into the hands of Melkor, ere Utumno was broken, were put there in prison, and by slow arts of cruelty were corrupted and enslaved; and thus did Melkor breed the hideous race of the Orcs in envy and mockery of the Elves, of whom they were afterwards the bitterest foes.”
Embracer Group is disfiguring and torturing the lore just as Meklor tortured and disfigured elves and turned them into orcs. If Gwinchard was a bona fide student of Tolkien he would understand this and never allow it to happen. Instead, he’s an industry drone and a Middle-earth dilettante bent on earning more gold for his Swedish masters.
For decades, Tolkien’s The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings have enjoyed the status of being some of the best-selling books of all time. The Lord of The Ring was translated into 38 languages and has sold more than 150 million copies. It was subsequently enjoyed by people of all races and creeds without the need to have any characters race-swapped in the name of representation.
The sturdy halflings of the Shire don’t require any updating for modern sensibilities. Hobbits are perfect and delightful just the way Tolkien created them. If Lee Gwinchard and Embracer Group want to promote multiculturism and DEI idealogy as an excuse to expand their markets, they should do so with new IPs. Leave Tolkien and his millions of fans alone.
–Wolfshead
The developers look like they are composed of:
– effeminate men who look like pathetic and desperate chodes/cuckolds, they look sad and pitiful, I don’t even know why are they there
– women gone mental by being sex deprived due to their social conditining to turn down any man interested in then, they look scary and unbearable
– several unnatural-colored hair creatures of the 68th sex who will probably work on adding transvestite hobbits who are sexually attracted to their own sex because this is all Middle Earth is about now – not the forces of good banding together and fight evil, but instead a very subtle version of evil posing as good.
Reminds me of the quote “Evil cannot create anything new, only twist and corrupt the creations of Good.”
It also reminds me how in Naruto Shippuden, Uchiha Madara put everyone under the mass genjitsu Infinite Tsukuyomi where everyone was in a dream/hypnotized state living out a slightly better version of their lives while their actual bodies were on the battlefield fighting Uchiha Madara. Except in this case it’s not a dream, but a fever nightmare.
Hello, it’s late night here and I read this before going to bed.
Getting rid of this nonsense…will take a while. But thankfully the latest news are encouraging, more and more universities dissolve their DEI departments. Doesn’t stop students from being just terrible, they can of course demonstrate against the way Israel wages war in Gaza, but “Fatties/Gays for Gaza” and glorification of terrorists, really…?
Also concerning is how organized these protests are, many protesters are brought there, are neither students nor much interested why they demo for what. Antifa/NGO organization is behind this, they do not only coordinate across the USA or other countries but are truly global and international. Qatari money is likely to be involved, they finance only Islamic studies at American universities.
How Melkor created Orcs, excellent example, it is something that is totally lost to movie-only Tolkien watchers. It also shows the Christian roots of Tolkien’s work. This is how evil comes into the world, through twisting and lies, the corruption of beauty.
You might have heard about the Eurovision Song Contest, always a freak show and very political. A non-binary Swiss named Nemo won, mostly with Jury votes but also by far too much public votes. There are too many people twisted already.
But there was also Bambie Ray Robinson, Bambie Thug… search for Bambie Thug on X and shiver how a once lovely and beautiful young woman got twisted in body and mind to a satanist witch.
And Sweden, always Sweden… Malmö getting turned into the third world by muslim migrants, rape and murder even worse than in Europe (in Germany “local” rape and murder/stabbings are not even reported much anymore beyond local press) and sanity seems to have left the minds of too many inhabitants.
The “wise bespectacled black hobbit” is an abomination. The Tolkien Estate lost its last guardian with Christopher Tolkien. He was extremely restrictive. In hindsight, maybe he knew who would follow him and hoped to reign them in by example.
Woke or ignorant “don’t know, don’t care” people might just think of it as racism to be against black hobbits in adaptions of Tolkien’s work. But it is nothing but corruption, tainting Tolkien’s work. Just see how the black female dwarves in Amazon’s woke series that is rewriting Tolkien for worse manage to turn the whole dwarven race into a silly joke of wise women dealing with their grumpy stupid dwarven husbands.
Tolkien, Christianity, Western Civilization and core elements like the family itself are under attack by the devil. Wokeness and Diversity are the devil’s favorite twist. Years ago, I already thought these guys to be nuts, but otherwise harmless. I totally underestimated how this could spread like wildfire and cause all kinds of terrible things.