the human heart is no small thing

This sick bleach shirt I made. Something to showcase my undying love for prehistoric cave art.

the one with the whales

Volume 24, Issue 1 Asexuality in Tolkien's Legendarium

Happy Pride everyone! The Journal of Tolkien Research has just published a new issue focused on the asexual and aromantic spectrums and how they resonate within Tolkien's Legendarium. The mods over here are so excited to read these and will be posting a weekly article summary for the next few months!

Introduction: Asexuality and Aromanticism in Tolkien's Works

Clare Moore and Rory Queripel

“Mythology is Language and Language is Mythology”: Allegory, Applicability, and/or Asexuality in Tolkien’s Legendarium

Rory M. Queripel

“Motions of Love and Friendship”: Elven (A)sexuality

Clare Moore

Chaste Bachelors and Abstaining Husbands: Celibacy and Asexuality in the Line of Finwë

Kristine Larsen

“A Natural Human Activity”: the Split Attraction Model as a tool for reading Tolkien’s Legendarium

Sarah Courtis

“As Bachelors Very Exceptional”: An Asexual Reading of Frodo Baggins

Danna Petersen-Deeprose

What is Unwritten May Yet Resonate: In Search of Female A-spec Resonances in Tolkien

Jackie Sheppard

An Asexual Autist’s Feminist Musings on The Lord of the Rings

Thinking about Stratt--who has such a unique blend of optimism and cynicism, willing to place Earth's hopes in an interstellar mission but approaching making it happen in such a ruthlessly pragmatic way--growing up as a kid in East Germany and living through die Wende and the collapse of the Eastern Bloc is just really politically fascinating. Partly because Stratt herself is so politically fascinating, but there's also something else there, something that speaks to growing up watching protests and upheaval on one side of the Iron Curtain, only to end up working for the extremely international European Space Agency as an adult (and then transition into leading the even more international Petrova Taskforce). In that context, movie!Stratt has seen both human conflict and human cooperation in spades, and I could see it hugely informing her perspective on the Hail Mary mission.

It's because Weir is interested in politics, he just doesn't realize it because his framework for what counts as "political" is really bad and narrow.

Weir's books (or at least The Martian and Project Hail Mary, I can't speak for Artemis which I haven't read) are incredibly interested in themes of international cooperation. Which is, of course, the definition of political. In The Martian, a number of countries' space agencies work together to help get Mark Watney home; in Project Hail Mary the eponymous project is the work of the entire international community and the mission is meant to be an multinational one, even if only Ryland Grace actually survives. That's incredibly political and not on accident. International cooperation -- which is one of the things that contributes to Stratt being such a fascinating character -- is clearly a theme Weir cares about and returns to frequently in his writing.

However, Andy Weir (being a cishet white American man) thinks politics are for other people. I can almost guarantee you that a large part of his personal definition of the political revolves around identity politics, which he thinks he's exempt from as a "normal" person who exists outside of those othering categories (heavy on the sarcasm, of course). Politics are things like racial equality and pronouns, something that, in his mind, exist independently from the scientific cooperation he's fascinated by and keeps returning to in his work. Which is deeply incorrect, but a view that a lot of people nonetheless hold.

Book summaries below: