Quote Originally Posted by TesalionLortus View Post
It literally doesn't change anything. It's basically what the game has been doing for XX years and what we expect from it as an adaptation. Expanding.
When MoL or whoever writes it, then that's the game doing its thing. When you do it, that's not the same and you claiming to be doing what the game does really doesn't cut it. They're not the ones trying to come up with a rationale for playable Haradrim.

Did Tolkien ever said what was happening in South Gondor and at its borders / in immediate vicinity for all these years? How battles or politics unfolded? No. That's pretty much sums it all up. There might be more recent reasons for present day diversity from the game (which isn't such a huge one anyway but it's clearly there).
The place is 'debatable'. Like Ithilien, which it borders onto. Nobody owns it, it's indefensible and so it's not safe to live there. Gondor's the other side of the Anduin, which that far down its course would be a huge Danube-like river. South Gondor is basically a buffer zone. You might reasonably expect a certain amount of skirmishing, like maybe there were some Rangers of Harondor akin to those in Ithilien, keeping tabs on what the Haradrim are up to and pushing back if they try to set up shop there.

The problem I had with what you said was that it involved a faction of Haradrim being friendly with Gondor when it's a given that there'd never been friendship. As for the diversity I don't think it's for any real reason other than "it's a game".

No, it's not how Tolkien set it up. He was doing both. There is nothing wrong with it and Tolkien himself was doing that. Some things are just very undetailed and THAT'S IT (not his intention to stay "internally consistently unrealistic" - seriously, that's just you), some things are specifically a certain way even if might come across as weird or not well thought through (let's say Shire is in that category then, or Breeland overall, or the orc ending in LOTR) and with everything else he was pretty much trying to create a sense of a real world which may feel realistic, with its deep history, nations, languages and these big wars being waged - but didn't have time nor interest to describe every single smaller-scale event... but that doesn't mean he didn't intend to be realistic. It's something I said once before - you either want to have it 100% one way or the other, in this absolutist way.
He's providing a sense of a living world but it's really just an impression; he was all about languages and history of the 'kings and battles' variety but he wasn't into politics. That becomes obvious if you compare it with novels that try to create realistic societies. Mundane details are realistic because that's compelling but there are a host of behind-the-scenes things that are glossed over or weirdly absent. Some places are believable: Rohan or Dunland, for example, because they're patterned after real societies but the Shire and Bree are weird. But the main thing is how relatively static things stay even over really long periods of time; that suits the story's needs but it isn't realistic.

Which is still just a very general way of putting it, especially that you would want some raiders or bandits from nearby regions going there to make their life worse, even in times of cease fire, and you wouldn't exactly want them discouraged from doing that. Plus, again, you can tell me that they had every crazy terror law out of North Korea - it still doesn't mean anything if you can't tell me how exactly was that supposed to work at ground level in more ancient/medieval-ish setting (where magic doesn't exactly do any tracking either). Secret police isn't modern but it's efficiency is certainly better and more widespread in modern times. Back then you would mostly focus your efforts in specific areas or countering specific groups, in specific places and with key infrastructure in mind, not on every single individual at every single backyard place no matter of what significance - that is literally a modern advancement in this area, that this level of control has become possible.
It's not that hard, you have networks of informers and a crafty spymaster to run the show (much like Varys does in GoT), and that's something that crops up time and again in history. Ancient Rome would be a particular case in point. If you want something more Harad-flavoured, then the Ottoman Empire had plenty of spies and informers as well.