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So what I think is that there's this default belief in patriarchy that men are superior to women and therefore the "masculine" sphere is superior to the "feminine" sphere. And so, as feminists have fought to expand the number of allowable female activities, men (on the aggregate over generations) have retreated from those activities because they're now seen as "feminine", and so partaking in them is incommensurate with their belief in their own superiority. And, unfortunately, as this has progressed, this has resulted in a lot of men sectioning themselves off from, frankly, everything that actually makes being alive worthwhile. It's a misery spiral, and the only way out is to abandon male supremacy.
You can see this very starkly in certain professions too.
Like mine, archaeology. It used to be dominated by men as late as the 70s. And back then it was highly regarded as this grand prestigious profession.
But starting sometime over the last 40 years the gender demographics of it have shifted drastically. Now it's split pretty evenly between men and women (still almost entirely cis though. Anna Prentiss and myself are literally the only two trans people, let alone trans women, that I know of in the field.) In some places it's even dominated by women! And look how its now regarded: its prestige is almost entirely gone. Some people in other acedemic fields barely even consider it an acedemic profession, most outright deny that its a science at all! And in the toxic manosphere its openly hated. Men like Graham Hancock have made an entire career out of demonizing the field of archaeology.
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I really don’t want to open this can of worms because Tumblr hath no fury like people called out on their political performativeness but it is literally driving me up the wall to watch people react to Serkis’ ‘keep Tolkien white’ commentary by insisting twice as hard that Tolkien would descend down to earth and dropkick the entire Republican party to hell or whatever, just because they want to ensure that a piece of media they enjoy isn’t seen as being morally impure. Case in point: I have seen at least five instances of Tolkien’s ‘I hate apartheid’ valedictorian address being used as a ‘counter’ to Serkis being racist, including by actual news outlets.
Except it’s only ever the ‘I hate apartheid’ line that’s shared, and not the actual quote in its full context. Because here it is:
If we consider what Merton College and what the Oxford School of English owes to the Antipodes, to the Southern Hemisphere, especially to scholars born in Australia and New Zealand, it may well be felt that it is only just that one of them should now ascend an Oxford chair of English. Indeed it may be thought that justice has been delayed since 1925. There are of course other lands under the Southern Cross. I was born in one; though I do not claim to be the most learned of those who have come hither from the far end of the Dark Continent. But I have the hatred of apartheid in my bones; and most of all I detest the segregation or separation of Language and Literature. I do not care which of them you think White.
Which is to say. This isn’t exactly the antiracist quote of the century, to say the least. This is a white South Africa born man and a white Australian shaking hands and going ‘omg we relate’ and expressing what is a very, very mild ‘segregation is not great’ opinion in order to convey his thoughts on an academic subject, ie the confluence of language and literature. Using race to make a point about his own subject of interest, in his own interest, which is, amusingly enough, what a lot of ostensibly well meaning progressive seem to be doing.
I also think that some of the general surprise around ‘what do you mean large swathes of the Tolkien fandom are incredibly conservative!?’ in lib/left Tolkien fandom is the result of a tendency in said parts of the fandom to transpose one’s own progressiveness onto Tolkien and turn a blind eye to things like, say, the Shire being a very specifically mid-century British racist construct that is very, very clear in its politics, often going so far as to insist it’s anarchist or an ideal society or whatever the fuck… and then getting really Pikachu-meme ‘but they’re misreading it’ every single time a conservative explains exactly what it is about the legendarium that they really love, and get surprised when someone uses the Shire being a racist construct to do more racism. It is 2026 let us do away with ‘I don’t see colour’ interpretations of media, I beg. Nobody is cancelling you for enjoying a book that is not kind to race. Most of the books I love are not kind to race.
I genuinely don’t have the energy to go deeper into it now because I and others have been beating this drum for ages but like man. Man. I’m not surprised by Serkis’ comment. I don’t really give a shit about what Andy Serkis says and does because if I was the kind of person who gave a fuck about Andy ‘I felt like an ethnic minority on the Black Panther set’ ‘I somehow interpreted Animal Farm in the most ridiculous way possible’ Serkis’ opinions on anything, let alone race, my life would be much sadder. I think the adaptation will be an enshittified money-grab, and I will probably embrace cannibalism when McDonalds inevitably starts giving out little Gollums with every Happy Meal. Again.
What I am surprised and disappointed by is how the liberal-left reaction to this shit is to always and forever just either pretend it doesn’t exist in the text, or is the result of a complete misreading. So seldom is the response ‘fuck me, this book has some real wild thoughts on race, let’s see how we can engage creatively with that in an adaptation’. Which has never happened. In fact, all your thoughts on Amazon and lore faithfulness and other adaption criticism or applause aside, TROP, the only Tolkien interpretation that has directly engaged with race has thus far done so very, very badly, and only on a surface level. Why?
Because the loudest parts of liberal Tolkien fandom is not interested in exploring race as it exists in the text, to explore it progressively, to engage creatively with the structural conservatism present within the very construction of Middle Earth. They’re interested in concessions that change very little: you can have your brown elves, as long as we don’t have to think about the implications of foundational aspects of our beloved world, which we relate to greatly and do not wish to think about why we relate to it beyond our own experience of encountering the text.
No, it’s always either an insistence that the Racists are Wrong because the Text is Pure, or a slight, grudging concession that Tolkien had ‘a few racist elements’ but ‘nothing like the racism of today’. Of course it’s nothing like the racism of today. Tolkien isn’t writing in 2026. It was the racism of yesterday, and it is very clearly written into the text. Tolkien is not your mildly problematic grandpa. Tolkien was an Oxford don with an enormous, wide-ranging cultural impact, and refusing to acknowledge that is the misreading, not the pointing out of or engagement with structural racism within the text.
There's also a version of this where people cite Tolkien's 1938 letter to the German publisher, ie the one where he refuses to confirm he's of "Aryan" descent and basically tells them to fuck off, as the other canonical "proof text" that Tolkien Was Not Racist, and it does the same flattening as the valedictorian quote. It's a great letter, very ‘get thee gone from my gate’ but it is also a letter about refusing a specific, legally coded Nazi racial category, not a statement about the internal racial logic of his own fiction.
Nobody is saying Tolkien was a fascist white supremacist Nazi. Hell, Tolkien’s own thoughts on military atrocity in general is pretty clear in the depictions of the escalating kinslayings. But people love to conflate "hated actual fascism, said so on the record and is very evident in his fiction" with "therefore the legendarium contains no racialised hierarchy," as though those two things have to rise or fall together, when they don't. You can be sincerely, personally opposed to Nazi race science and apartheid violence and still write a mythology where moral and aesthetic worth consistently map onto a Northern-European somatic ideal. Because the racialisation Tolkien both inherited and passed on wasn't Nazi race science, it was the broader Edwardian/interwar philological raciology he was actually swimming in, hell, drowning in, considering the Oxford environment. And I find it so, so frustrating how fandom keeps failing to make this distinction: structural racialisation and personal bigotry are not the same axis, and refusing to be measured on one doesn't clear you on the other.
The Southrons/Easterlings material is obviously the part most quoted when it comes to Tolkien’s ‘problematic elements’ except it's imo super telling how rarely it actually gets quoted compared to how often it gets vaguely waved at (except Charles E Mills. I love you Charles E Mills). Anyway “Black men like half-trolls," swarthy, slant-eyed, riding out of the south and east to serve Sauron… it’s the same mapping of good-north/evil-south-and-east you get in a dozen other early-twentieth-century adventure texts. And this imo actually undermines the "it's just medievalism, calm down" defense, because medievalism is a selectively retrospective construction of which past you're claiming and which one you're othering, not some sort of static, neutral historical styling.
Tolkien's medievalism is specifically Northern European heroic-elegiac medievalism, the "Northernness" he talks about loving as a kid, and that aesthetic preference is not extractable from the racial hierarchy it produces on the page. You cannot keep the aesthetic and disclaim the politics because as in all art, the aesthetic is the politics, that's what "structural" means as opposed to "incidental”, and I just wish that many extremely clever people who understand this in a contemporary sense would allow themselves to feel uncomfortable and look at it in a beloved text.
Jackson's trilogy didn't invent racialisation in Tolkien, hell I think he even softened some of it because the Scouring is straight up impossible to adapt without it being very clear about its politics, but his adaptation does go quite some way make the existing racism legible… casting, costuming, choreography and cinematography does the same racialised sorting the text does, and does it visually: Uruk-hai as a kind of grunting brutalised, brutalistic mass, Haradrim on oliphaunts as a fairly straightforward Orientalist boogeyman, and the Fellowship itself photographed like a Pre-Raphaelite fantasy lmfao. Serkis isn't introducing a new interpretive layer with his commentary, hell Serkis was in all those Jackson films as well! Serkis is being very clear about what aspects of the legendarium matter to him, and that aspect happens to be the whiteness of it all. And I genuinely cannot understand why the huge ‘scandal’ around his comment is not that someone said the quiet part, but that saying it out loud is what became the scandal, taken as some kind of transgression against Tolkien and all his readers with Good Politics™️, rather than the quarter-century of adaptations, readings, and analysis of the text that wordlessly encoded the racism and got called faithful and dedicated for it.
I didn’t want to go to author is dead territory but. Fandom discourse keeps reaching for authorial intent as the arbiter of textual meaning in exactly the way most of these same people would reject in any other context. Everyone is a massive New Critic the second the author in question is someone they love. But Tolkien doesn’t need to have consciously intended a racial hierarchy or a white nationalist mythology for the text to functionally produce one, for it to be so loved by conservatives and ethnonationalists who come fifty years after his time.
Intent is not even a contested position in literary theory, it's just the very basic understanding that "text has ideology independent of authorial intent". The insistence on relitigating Tolkien's personal feelings as though that settles the structural question is wild to me, and I find it so extremely unproductive how liberal fandom reaches for this constantly, repeatedly chanting Tolkien’s few vaguely liberal statements that read far less liberally in context. But I guess the alternative, ie reading the actual construction of race in the legendarium on its own terms, requires giving up the fantasy that the thing you love is politically inert. And it’s just so sad man. Like I fucking love the legendarium, and I think insisting on its moral purity is the worst thing you can do to it.
I think my entire argument can be summed up in a few questions. Why do conservatives keep saying "I love Tolkien" completely unashamedly, in a way they don’t realy say about most other ‘canonical’ twentieth-century texts, while we on the left have to perform a whole apologetic dance before we say it? What is it that they embrace about the text, that we have to occlude in order to express an unproblematic ‘love’? Why do we have to disavow parts of a text to claim we love it? Who are we performing to? What are we losing in focusing so hard on this performance?
This is why the Serkis-style comment, or the Rings of Power casting discourse, ends up being the deepest engagement we collectively get in fandom terms. Because both "sides" of that fight are actually shallow in the same way, just from opposite ends. The right-wing backlash to diverse casting is, repulsively, responding to something absolutely present in the text: a defensive crouch around a racial aesthetic it identifies as being under threat. The liberal-left response, the "just add brown elves" gesture, claims the problem to be one of representation and casting rather than structure, which is precisely why the racial elements of The Rings of Power satisfies no one and changes nothing.
You can put actors of colour in Númenor and Harfoot villages and yet the underlying moral framework of who is coded as inherently noble and who as inherently monstrous, whose skin colour the textual narrative uses as a standin for corruption, stays completely untouched. Again, see my TROP link above, with the jihadi-coding of the villains. Because that framework isn't located in the casting of an adaptation, it's located in the construction of Arda itself and physiognomy-as-morality at the level of the prose itself, constantly present throughout the text. Casting a Black actor as an elf doesn't do anything to the fact that "evil race coded as racially other" is still sitting right there in the Southrons and the orcs, unadapted, undiscussed, doing exactly the same work it always did, and this work takes on a new look in post-2001 adaptations.
So what you get is two adaptations of the same tiresome insanemaking discourse rather than two different arguments: the right defends the racial aesthetic as the substance of their love, and the liberal mainstream defends the fantasy that representation-level tweaks constitute engagement with race. And so, nobody actually produces the adaptation that takes seriously what nonwhite Tolkien scholars have been saying for decades, which is that you'd have to touch the orc/Southron/Valar/Valinor/blondeness architecture itself to ever productively have this conversation. Not diversify who plays the good guys, but interrogate why "evil" in this legendarium has a face and a hair colour and points compass east.
But if the talk about this goes on as it does, and continues between Tolkien the Pure versus Tolkien the Misread, there will never be anyone willing to make that adaptation, and we’ll go on forever in a sisyphean climb, where both the reactionary embrace and the progressive denial are just two versions of refusing to read the same damn book. Basically, I think we on the left etc need to stop treating "is Tolkien racist" as a yes/no gate you have to clear before you're allowed to enjoy the books, and stop acting like enjoying problematic media makes you a fascist. We need to start treating the racialised architecture within Tolkien’s world as the actual object of study, same way you'd read imperial romance or Forster or Kipling or Haggard, without needing to acquit or convict the author first.
Which means we have to name the conservatism specifically rather than gesturing at "some outdated attitudes," trace where it comes from historically (the philological Northernness Tolkien grew up steeped in, not some special personal failing that reflects badly on you), and then ask what an adaptation would look like which dramatised that rather than smoothing over it or weaponising it. We have to let go of the idea that critical engagement is disloyalty, and let go of the idea that loving something requires defending its honour. We need to get the resilience needed to engage with the idea that a work can be both formative and ideologically compromised at the same time.
We don’t need to resolve that tension into either adoring hagiography or totalising cancellation. If we do, we're going to keep getting “keep the Shire white” Serkis soundbites and “hooray we cast a brown elf in our we-invented-elf-jihadis show!” news cycles standing in for a conversation that hasn't actually started yet, and ngl buddies I have to say I personally will be biting people the next time I see yet another rendition of the same damn response-reaction cycle start again because everyone, both the conservatives and the left, wants the things they love to be a reflection of themselves, and will twist themselves into pretzels to ensure that remains the case.
this is my first time in the pacific northwest. we drove through a forest so wet and foggy you couldn’t see the bends in the road ten yards ahead of you and it straight up felt like a horror game until we emerged into a sunny valley with a rainbow over it and then we went to a taco bell and in it there was a guy dressed like a hot dog and a guy dressed like hamburger. is it all like this
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kinda tired of non binary being tied to skinny androgyny that's mostly white. I say that's as a non binary transmasc/boy thing who's fat and black.
being non binary can look like anything and anyone but especially individuals who have different body types outside of thin. they can have body/facial hair too. show up for all enbies.
Came across this art installation, Liza Lou's Kitchen, at the Whitney Museum of American Art, NYC. It's a kitchen made of tiny glass beads, that artist Liza Lou did, taking 5 yrs. to complete, from 1991 - 1996.
couple days ago i tagged along with my brothers and sister who were watching Spider-Man 3 (2007) and watched like, the whole thing except for the first 30 minutes of it.
Who told me that this movie was bad??? It was fantastic. Masterpiece
In some ways that are very noticeable it was not a "Good Movie", but according to an idea of a "good movie" which is based around how embarrassed you are to be watching it
The action scenes were very creative and engaging, and interacted with the surroundings in interesting ways. All the character arcs were really well done. It had real emotional depth and drama. It was tightly plotted as well.
There was A Something that is definitely missing from MCU and I'm struggling to put my finger on what it is.
I had the same experience when I watched that spiderman trilogy a few years ago. The conclusion I came to is that what the MCU is missing is Saving People as a general motivation.
like, this is most obvious in Homecoming, where Peter wants to upgrade from the baby heroing of stopping street level crime to fighting space gods, and the progression of his arc is him gaining the experience to get that “promotion”. The implication is kinda that stopping a bus from crashing is kinda lame, cuz you only save like, what, twenty people?? And if you fight a space god, you save millions of people. There’s no point in helping someone carry their groceries or saving people in a burning building, because the numbers are too small to mean anything. What’s the point of saving anyone if you can’t save everyone? If you’re not incredibly powerful, you can’t make a real difference.
And I think this is the MCU’s disconnect from the superhero genre. We’re not watching people who have a passion for helping others and using their abilities to alleviate suffering—we’re watching people win glory in their personal epics. The soap opera of gods and giants. That’s not a bad type of story, but it lacks one of the core emotions of superhero stories—the fantasy of being able to make a tangible difference. This extends into the MCU’s unwillingness to disrupt the status quo, as described in this excellent video by PopCultureDetective. (One example of his that really stood out to me is how in Age of Ultron, Stark and Banner’s attempt to use their superhuman genius to create something that will benefit all humanity is framed as foolish, dangerous hubris.)
This incongruence is most obvious when comparing Spiderman movies, because the core of Spider-Man’s character is “great power, great responsibility”. The thing that makes Peter Parker stand out is how no matter how broke, lonely, or even powerless he is, he still tries to use what he has to help the people he can.
I think it’s also noticeable how the MCU superheroes don’t really have Helping People as their Job. Like, whatever they’re doing in between movies, when we’re not watching, when there isn’t a massive problem to solve, they don’t have Rescue as their day to day Job the same way most superheroes do. Plenty of them have Beating Up Bad Guys as their Job, but that makes them more……soldier than superhero. More military than first responder.
Anyway, that’s a huge ramble, I’ve just been thinking about this for like years trying to figure out why the MCU made me so uncomfortable.
THIS IS WHAT OSP's Superheroes in Empty Worlds VIDEO IS ABOUT! SUPERHEROES ARE SUPPOSE TO SAVE PEOPLE!
And its not something that like, breaks the movie in the moment- it just sits in the back of your mind, kinda itchy feeling. And then you hear Tony Stark say "isn't that the point? that we get to go home?" And you're like, why would a superhero say that the point of heroing is to stop heroing?
There's always gonna be people in a burning building that need someone who can walk through fire.
This is why I LOVED 2025 Superman. He's constantly saving people. He's always checking in and caring about those around him. And even when he's busy, the world is still lived in! Its so busy; you can believe that Metropolis gets attacked by something at least once a week and thats why the other heroes are there.
I didn't elaborate earlier because the humidity and other arbitrary stuff are making me super depressed and I did not have the energy, but this is exactly it.
There was some of this in the first Avengers movie, but you're right, MCU really dropped the ball on superheroes saving people.
Like, I remember, a few years back some rando on tumblr said something about super heroes being a fascist genre because their purpose is to collaborate with and enforce the power of the State, and this argument makes sense to make about the MCU.
But it's not what superheroes are about.
There's a lot of things superheroes could be, but one of the most important things is a vision of "What if there was a person with power to help people and that person was GOOD?"
And "using powers to help people" doesn't mean "collaborating with the government" or "fighting crime in collaboration with the cops" or even "vigilante justice" even though all of those things have come up a lot in superhero stories to the point that people can have a hard time thinking of alternatives
But there are plenty of alternatives. Saving people from natural disasters/accidents? Taking care of and protecting people the system doesn't help? Protecting civilians in a warzone? Shielding people at protests? Oops, now your superhero is considered a " terrorist... "
That's the thing, a superhero advancing the cause of good would have a hard time not getting into conflict with the government. A superpowered individual that collaborates extensively with the State might not even be a superhero. There's another archetype we could look at, that of the supersoldier. A superpowered person who is either created by a government's military or appropriated by it to advance the goals of the State.
Supersoldiers and superheroes are pretty different, and in some ways, non-overlapping things, and MCU ended up conflating the two.
I feel like any kind of satisfying arc for Captain America would have had him STOP being a supersoldier and start being a superhero, and of course MCU shat the bed on that one.
Once again, Captain America: The Winter Soldier was the best MCU movie, showing Cap's depression and then existential crisis as he realizes the government he was working for is evil and corrupt, and as with every other aspect of that movie that made it so great, the creators were like "UH OH" and never did it again.
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