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Maldevinine t1_iscji8i wrote

Reply to comment by melleb in New study shows newspaper images from Hurricane Harvey in 2017 continued patterns of presenting people of color as victims and white people as rescuers bringing order back to the chaos, this may not have been conscious or ill-intentioned decisions, but reflect patterns in journalism and cultural by giuliomagnifico

Internal Consistency and the Suspension of Disbelief.

These are major issues within the fantasy writing sphere, because you're trying to get people to believe something that is inherently unbelievable. A large part of getting people to suspend disbelief over the fantastical things is ensuring that all the normal things behave in exactly the way that the responders to the artwork expect.

And people are not just randomly black. It's the result of evolutionary selection for specific traits over long periods of time. So if all the elves are black, well that's just black elves. If one elf is black, what's different about this one? Where's the rest of their family? What historical differences are there? If you don't at least acknowledge that (Like Shakespeare did in Othello) you've just put a crack in the suspension of disbelief.

That is of course putting aside the novel context, where JRR Tolkien explicitly described the elves as white. Not just a bit white, full on 'albino covered in white paint' white.

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