Professor Frink: In Episode BF12, you were battling barbarians while riding a winged Appaloosa, yet in the very next scene, my dear, you're clearly atop a winged Arabian! Please to explain it!

Lucy Lawless: Uh, yeah, well, whenever you notice something like that... a wizard did it.

• The Simpsons, Treehouse of Horror X (S11E4)

I suppose that Wheel of Time , Rings of Power and House of the Dragon are indicative of a new trend in entertainment pursuant to which from now on, every scene in every television show or movie is going to need to look like the United Colors of Benetton™.

There’s nothing wrong about trying to create roles for black (or Hispanic, or Asian, or whatever other group is perceived to have been underrepresented) actors and actresses in genres that traditionally don’t make room for them, but the way that it’s done is really just shitting all over the audience. The creators’ desire to signal their virtue is greater than any attempt at preserving the integrity of the finished product.

The general consensus is that darker skin is the result of evolutionary processes that protect people from ultraviolet rays of the sun in the tropics and the Southern Hemisphere. I know there are outliers who dispute this but the reality is that ethnic groups with darker skin are all in the tropics and the Southern Hemisphere.

Regardless of the precise nature of the evolutionary paths that led to darker skin color, we also know very clearly that interracial couples mixing their genes create children that tend to a color that is somewhere in between, and although this is not uniformly true with one generation, the statistical likelihood over successive generations tends to this, such that evolutionary scientists have come up with a picture of what they think everyone on Earth is going to look like given a long enough timeline in terms of skin tone.

Everyone knows all of this. Despite that, the audience is supposed to suspend its disbelief about all of this when it watches the new generation of television shows. I’m sure the showrunners are jumping up and down about “subverting our expectations”, but as a popular video criticizing the Star Wars sequels states, “Having Jar-Jar Binks piss on the grave of Han Solo subverts your expectations too, but that doesn’t mean it’s good”.

Yes, it’s fantasy. It’s already asking us to believe that there are wizards and dragons and magic rings. However, in the case of The Lord of the Rings, the author of the series recognized that these things are fantastic, and so in order to help the reader suspend his disbelief the author created a rich and internally consistent history for his fantasy world. The languages follow linguistic laws in their evolution, and provide place names that relate to one another in ways that make them sound “real”.

It's clear that Robert Jordan’s world is the product of someone who read “Fantasy Worldbuilding for Dummies” by contrast, but even so, he gave it a cursory try. He created a world that had some internally consistent facts even if his “language” was piss-poor and many of the facets of his world didn’t seem well thought out. Georgerr Martin falls somewhere in the middle, not as bad as Jordan but nowhere near as good as Tolkien (both in writing quality and with respect to world building).

So why the necessity of creating these multiracial communities with no explanation? Why doesn’t everyone have a similar skin tone in a pre-industrial, somewhat isolated community? That would make sense. Explain it for God’s sake if you’re going to insist on having these magically colorblind multiracial communities. I would have more respect for a Wheel of Time adaptation that had everyone in Emond’s Field black and Rand a white ginger guy (though imagine the comic effect of a black Tam al’Thor saying, “Rand, you aren’t my biological son” and Rand being shocked, à la Steve Martin in “The Jerk” – “you mean I’m not black?”).

It's just lazy and vomitously politically correct at the same time. All of these worlds detail dozens of different cultures, and in each case major characters can hail from those cultures. So why the necessity of a white-haired black Targaryen (talking about “purity of the blood”, no less!), or a supposedly isolated community looking like the United Colors of Benetton™? Why is a small, tight-knit community of “Harfoots” radically mixed, racially speaking?

The Tolkien prequel could have had a major plot line in Far Harad (ruled by Queen Beruthiel). This would be internally consistent with Tolkien’s world and provided major roles for non-white actors and actresses. Jordan’s world has tons of major roles for non-white characters; as I recall the Princess of Seanchan was black, and having a black Siuan Sanche was in keeping with the geographic realities (such as they were) of the world. Having Emond’s Field an interracial paradise was not. Georgerr Martin’s world already had some major roles for non-white actors in the main series and there was no reason that the new series couldn’t incorporate people from those cultures into the main story.

Instead of doing this, they opted for laziness. They also are trying to rub it in the audience’s faces – “see how virtuous we are? See what we did here? Look at how racially enlightened and wonderful our rapey torture porn series can be!”

If they really, really want and need to die on that hill, at least explain it. Address the elephant in the room. Are you trying to tell me that in a viciously cutthroat and ambitious world like Westeros no one is going to even mention “hey, the Lord of the Ships is black as a Summer Isles guy”? Especially when no one else in all of Westeros is apparently black? Seriously?

Audiences might understand if the Harfoots are the result of two distinct groups meeting and agreeing to travel together. But explain it. Don’t just dump it in front of your viewers.

None of these shows explain these things. Ignoring it is just an insult to the audience, though. They might as well just say a wizard did it.

(Use of masculine pronouns as a generic standard and the word “actress” are intentional.)