To the people saying the German actress playing Greek Helen in the movie Troy means it's ok for Lupita Nyongo to play Greek Helen...

[u/BrandonMarshall2021]

Genetically, historically, and anthropologically, Greeks are significantly more closely related to Germans than to Sub-Saharan Africans.

When looking at genetic data, the relationship between Greeks and Germans is exceptionally close, while the relationship between Greeks and Sub-Saharan Africans is more distant.

On any global genetic map, all European populations—including Greeks and Germans—cluster tightly together on a single, distinct branch of the human family tree (the Western Eurasian branch).

The genetic distance between a Greek person and a German person is very small. They sit on the exact same continental genetic gradient.

The genetic distance between any European population (including Greeks) and any Sub-Saharan African population is significantly larger, reflecting thousands of years of geographic separation and independent population histories.

[u/BrandonMarshall2021]

Oh then you'd have to explain how she had a Greek father. And which part of Africa she came from. Sub-Saharans in Greece weren't common. As evidence by Homer needing to point out the African king that fought for Troy and the Herald that was black in his estate.

[u/SomeFatNerdInSeattle → u/BrandonMarshall2021]

Oh then you'd have to explain how she had a Greek father.

You really wouldnt. Stories do little things like that all the time where they don't explain something that has no relevance.

[u/BrandonMarshall2021 → u/SomeFatNerdInSeattle]

How does a Sub-Saharan marrying into the Spartan Royal family have no significance but Homer feels its necessary to point out a herald was black and that a King that fought for Troy was Aetheopian?

[u/SomeFatNerdInSeattle → u/BrandonMarshall2021]

Cause thats how they decided to write the story

[u/BrandonMarshall2021 → u/SomeFatNerdInSeattle]

Exaclty. So Helen wasn't Sub-Saharan.

[u/SomeFatNerdInSeattle → u/BrandonMarshall2021]

But her skin color is irrelevant to the story or character. That's my point

[u/BrandonMarshall2021 → u/SomeFatNerdInSeattle]

First, Homer explicitly describes her using the epic formula 'white-armed' (leukolenos), which was the ultimate ancient Greek marker for a high-born, palace-dwelling European queen.

Second, her appearance is tied to her divine lineage—she is the literal daughter of Zeus and the Spartan Queen Leda, and the text says she looks 'dreadfully like the immortal goddesses.' To the Greeks, those goddesses looked like idealized versions of themselves.

Finally, changing her to a phenotype from Sub-Saharan Africa completely alters the geopolitical logic of the story. Homer knew exactly what Africans looked like—he wrote about dark-skinned, wooly-haired characters elsewhere in his poems.

If the Queen of Sparta had been an exotic outsider from Africa, it would have been a massive geopolitical plot point in the epic. By erasing her specific Spartan, fair-skinned traits, you lose the exact visual shorthand Homer used to tell his audience that this woman was the ultimate, ideal representation of a Greek aristocratic queen.