“Rings of Power!” A new addition to the world of Middle Earth, telling the story of how the rings came to be. I originally hadn’t felt myself drawn to watch the show, and to be quite honest, the only reason that I ended up doing so was because my father told me that he and my mother enjoyed it, so I figured why not? Now that I’m on the penultimate episode of the season, I have to say that I did rather enjoy the show, for the most part. The characters are okay (Elrond and Durin’s relationship is one for the history books) and have ultimately earned their spot as my favorites. On top of that, the various interwoven plots have been quite interesting to follow, and I can’t wait to see how they will all collide and ultimately line up to lead to the events in “The Hobbit.” My main problem, however, ultimately falls on the elves.

Going into this show, I had heard whisperings of the introduction of Black elves into the series, and as I waited for the show to come out I had been glad to know that we would finally get that representation. So imagine my surprise when the first image pops up on the screen, featuring Galadriel’s childhood, and all I see are white elves. Every single one. After that, my expectations for the show dropped. Rather than enjoying the plot, I spent the rest of the episode searching for Black people. And I will say, it was amazing seeing Black actors among the harfoots, dwarves and humans! They were seamlessly introduced, no questioning about why they were there, and the various actors and actresses did a wonderful job. And I feel that because they did so well with every other fantasy race in the show, it only highlighted the issue of there being only one Black elf.

The issue that is generally held with the elves, at least from my unerstanding and viewpoint, is that they are highlighted as noble and wonderful—beautiful creatures that are above the rest of Middle Earth. And in terms of casting, the actors who played the elves were always white. To be quite honest I didn’t really like the elves (the dwarves and the hobbits were my favorites), but that doesn’t discount the harm that such casting choices inflicted on viewers of color. And so, after years of speaking out on the need for diverse casting and the issues that a lack of representation causes, I figured that a lot more care would be taken to fix this issue. And I think that the writers for this show heard the complaints, and then tried to solve it in a way that more or less completely missed the issue. Rather than simply making it so that actors of color filled the role of the elves, they instead created a plot that pointed out how elves weren’t perfect, and how sometimes they are wrong, and entitled, and that they aren’t better than everyone, rather than focusing on casting. That isn’t to say that such a plot wasn’t good (in fact, I think that it was a necessary and important thing to do, and I personally enjoyed this disruption of perfection). I just feel that as a Black viewer who was looking forward to the diversity of the Middle Earth world, that it was a quite obvious oversight that made it difficult to appreciate this new chapter as a whole.

So, to make a long article rather short, I am so happy to see the amount of diversity that is represented in Middle Earth through the dwarves, the humans and the harfoots. And I think that it is great that Black fans are able to look at the screen and be able to see a Black elf (and one that is rather moral, compared to the others). However, I don’t think that I should be left to settle for just one. I think more diversity can (and should) be added to the series, and I hope to see actions taken to do so in the next season.