‘House Of The Dragon’ Viewership Falls Sharply With Episode 3
(boundingintocomics.com)
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Either they'll pull some all-black Wildling clan out of their ass, or they'll just sporadically add some black Wilding characters here and there. Neither makes any damn sense coming from a race of people who spent the last couple thousand years isolated in a frozen tundra where no one could get in or out, making it impossible for a dark-skinned ethnicity to ever develop there.
If they followed logic they wouldn't have added a black dwarf to Rings of Power, since they live almost excusively under ground. They also wouldn't have made a black elf, since they were created under starlight, before Eru even created the two trees, or the sun, after the trees were destroyed.
The only explanation that makes sense, that I've heard, for the black elf is he's a half breed, of an elf and black human. However, that wouldn't really make sense cannonically, since Tolkien made elf-human pairings incredibly rare. They were so rare, that the Silmarillion was almost exclusively about Luthien (an elf) and Beren (a human), or at least was the most important part, according to Tolkien. If I remember correctly, the children from that pairing led to Elrond and Arwen, as well as the entire Numenorian line, and kingdom, then to Gondor and Arnor, the Dunedain, and eventually to Aragorn. The Silmarillion amd the appendices read more like a history book and genetic lineage than a comprehensive story, all of which shows that elf-human pairings were exceedingly rare, and documented. Furthermore, every single description of elves says they're fair skinned, meaning white.
Still, that would require the writers/producers to know about the lore, and care about it.
I’m laughing as I read your post because I can totally see them doing that.
Yeah ... dark skin = melanin ... which is your genetic sunblocking chemical. Side effect, no vitamin D.
So two things this idea of northern-waste niggers have against them ...
One ... not enough sun at high latitudes to cause a genetic mutation for darker skin.
Two ... A lack of a critical nutrient provided by what little sun exists would ensure that those that did develop darker skin would have a harder time with passing on successful genes.
That being said ... the Inuit are still somewhat olive-skinned, due to a relatively short evolutionary time in the frozen north after being separated from their Mongolian ancestors. 50k years is a blink of an eye. 2k years, as you proposed is even less, so ...
I can suspend my disbelief ... but I just can't suspend it with a rope around its neck.
Well, if you measure evolutionary rates by generations rather than years, and keep in mind that northerly adaptations are rather smallish changes that can happen over a fairly few generations with enough pressure* and a smallish population .... but that would just argue more for the loss of melanin, unless they have some way to make up for the vitamin D and lack of sunlight issue, possibly through diet; if there's enough in their food, then skin absorption won't matter so much.)
The Pern stories kind of started with the same premise, though most of the "evolution" - beyond the survivors of the og 5000 settlers breeding into mutty "future people", as would be expected - was cultural and linguistic, and we see how culture can almost completely change in, like, three generations (Ontario is actually a good example. It was very (Small c, kind of rightish Liberal for the most part in the cities, large C outside) conservative WASPy when I was growing up, and didn't even legalize "Sunday Shopping" until the 1990s - now it's primed to vote federal ND fucking P.)
*pressure, of course, means deaths caused directly, or at least more or less so, because of the trait in question, whether that trait is physical, or mental/behavioural ...
Well, with McCaffery's work, if you get to the point where just before the meteor strikes the planet, she details the landing of the colonists ... and the disaster of the first threadfall as well as their efforts to bread the fire-lizards into full-sized dragons to char the thread while airborne.
Fast forward to Moretta's Ride and you get explained about the 200 year gaps in the passing of the red star.
Finally they find that the southern continent is a paradise because of the soil worms that consume the thread. Soil worms that the original colonists bred and introduced.
(Sorry, I found Dragonsinger/Dragonsong/Dragondrums early in my 6th grade year and spent a long time collecting and reading the rest of the works. Must like Piers Anthony's Xanth series.)
Yes, that population went through several bottlenecks, and this back when they were still arguing "macro" vs "micro" evolution. In fact, a lot of the "sexism" of the first few books seems to have come from the worst bottleneck (caused by a pandemic); when something like that happens, the commoners are less likely to give up their girls to the other Estates (in this case, Weyrs and Guilds.)