But is it? The Two Rivers is supposed to be this reclusive backwater, where Tam al'Thor leaving and marrying an outsider was something super out of the norm because people married within the Two Rivers for dozens of generations (which was why the Old Blood was still so strong there), and where Rand's
hair color set him apart fom the majority. And now you turn Nyneave and Perrin into black folk. If you make the origin area of the series this ethnically diverse, it undermines the established lore. For no other reason than either a) make a checkmark on a focus group spreadsheet, b) be "diverse" for the sake of woke diversity, or c) a combination of both. As I already said in the
"Popular Things in Scifi and Fantasy that many people love but you hate."-thread, I've got nothing against ethnically or otherwise diverse casts. In fact, I'd love to watch something like
Tyrant set in 12th century Bagdad, or a series centered on Old Egypt and the cataclysm we've come to know as
The Sea Peoples, or something centered on the Nubian pharaohs, or maybe an wholly Indian fantasy series. Or something like
Rome.
What I do have something against is making casting choices for pure political and/or marketing reasons that, for no other reason than that, then screw with the lore and thereby diminish the overall quality of the product. If you have intermarriage on a local level for maybe 2.000 years without any significant input of outside bloodlines I'd say it's highly unlikely, if not outright impossible that you end up with still vastly and easily discernable phenotypic differences like fully different skin colors as an end result. Especially, as mentioned above, when someone's
hair color is what makes them stand out. So, what then? How to explain the differences?
Logically, that'd mean both Perrin's and Nynaeve's families ought to be recent additions to the Two Rivers - which they clearly and most emphatically
are not, given the prominence of Manetheren blood in their heritage. So you end up with logical inconsistencies that nibble away at the foundations of the setting, and for what? To fill a quota? That's what bothers me: if it doesn't
need changing,
then don't. change. it!