Why the fuck are you here

It's like if we called cars "spaceships" because a car salesman once lied about their product being capable of space travel

Tenna art by @9Aaaalt29 on twt

The crowd roared in confused enthusiasm as Tenna gave a gracious flurry of low-FPS bows, pausing only for the occasional stink-nose at his audience plants who weren’t throwing enough 3D roses.

Eventually, the room fell silent. It was Senshi’s turn to speak.

He puffed out his chest, took a long, sweeping look over the audience… and shook his head.

“I can see not all of you are eating properly.”

The crowd murmured with embarrassment.

“I don’t know who needs to hear this, but it’s time to take the turkey out of your icebox. I have seen the ingenious technology with which your people store food... and I have also seen the waste which results from such convenience.

“The food you take had a life. Beasts grew fat on the grass of the field, plants grew from the sun’s rays, and mushrooms grew from minerals in the cracks of caves. And yet, it sits in your iceboxes, collecting moisture until it perishes.

“Eat what is given to you. Because its life will make you stronger, too.”

Without another word, Senshi left his podium and stepped away from the stage. The crowd murmured in confusion. “Is he really like that?” somebody said. “I only remember reblogging the photosets of him tripping and showing ass.”

--

Back in the Green Room, Tenna wrung his antennas nervously.

“Y-y-you think they liked me!? They HAD to!! I mean, I don’t know what Asgore was thinking, getting that weird haircut and running that food waste campaign, but… YOU thought I did good, didn’t you, Kris?”

Laios nodded aggressively, a streak of blue face paint peeling from his forehead.

“You did AMAZING, Tenna! By the way, now that we’ve seen all your insider campaign secrets, do you have any more videos of Susie? Especially her tail... If I could get a look at that, I could finally tell if she’s a dinosaur or --”

THWACK. Fake antlers butted Laios’s head.

“LAIOS?? Weren’t we dressed up to help SENSHI???” Marcille hissed, gesturing awkwardly with her hooves.

Suddenly, Tenna turned to the two adventurers.

“Hey, WAIT a second. SOMETHING’s not right here...”

Laios and Marcille held their breath.

“Where the heck are my POINTS!?”

Just then, the door opened. Chilchuck took one step into the room, whistling and holding a large bag.

Everyone turned to him.

Chilchuck paused, took a step backwards, and closed the door.

“CHILCHUCK!!!” yelled Tenna.

“How come Chilchuck got to stay Chilchuck!?” yelled Marcille at the same time.

--

The sharpest, best-trained pilots make worse decisions when they're tired or sick or stressed out, so there's two of them. The most dedicated and experienced air traffic controllers garble an instruction over the radio sometimes, so pilots are trained to always repeat clearances back to catch misunderstandings quickly. The best and brightest maintenance mechanic still overlooks a screw or misconnects a wire once or twice in her career, so aircraft systems are built with two or three or four layers of redundancy, and pilots are exhaustively trained to deal with failures safely. 

The original push behind naming cultural appropriation and having these conversations were so that we as a society could evaluate why we were punished for our heritage while white People were not. It was supposed to be about seeking solutions. The idea was to create a society where we could celebrate our cultures with impunity. It was never about telling white people that they “weren’t allowed” to do certain things. We did ask that white People stop doing certain things because they weren’t doing them respectfully and were not invited to do them, but the primary reason we asked them to desist was to reclaim the things they had stolen and to reassign them culturally back where they belonged.

White “allies” saw these conversations happening and instead of trying to aplify our own voices or even try to learn about the complexities behind why we were saying what we were saying, they instead began screaming over us and creating a narrative that was hardly even the bones of what we originally set out to say. It was like they took the conversation we were trying to have, completely decontextualized it, and stripped it of all it’s nuance in order to gain social currency by seeming progressive.

So the conversation around cultural appropriation went from “This aspect of our heritage belongs to us and we find it egregious that we are shamed for it. What steps can we take to address the racism that’s creating this situation as well as rehome the things that have been stolen” to “you’re not allowed to do that because if you do that you’re racist, we don’t really understand why that’s racist but you’re not allowed to do that and if you do that you’re a klansman no exceptions. So you’re not allowed because because”

At the end of the day, did I like the fact that sally was wearing dreads? No. But my primary concern was not that sally was wearing dreads but rather that sally could wear dreads and I couldn’t. THAT was the intended focus of those conversations. It was about addressing the inequality. It was about us. Now the conversation is just about sally and were completely forgotten.

She literally went “debate me! Debate me!” Over and over like the grifter she is and when she couldn’t get what she wanted and when “no” wasn’t enough she resorted to retaliatory sex-pestery, posting an image of somebody’s body with intention to shame and embarrass and spawn more waspish tittering from her internet followers.

the problem of racism in tolkien fandom will not be resolved for as long as people believe that the mere act of critique is a violence in itself, and that therefore having made a critique, the person who has made a critique can either be unpersoned or that norms of politeness no longer apply. of course, this fandom is too "polite" to do slurs in askboxes for the most part, but there are other mechanisms of rude communications that fly in the name of "debate". do you think its polite to misread someone and then accuse them via that misreading, of not extending enough grace to a dead historical figure? personally, i think that's quite rude as a quibble, not least because of the total disengagement with the actual arguments being made. do you think its polite to send people snide asks for weeks on end, insisting on them defending their viewpoint, their specifically racial critique of the canon? personally, i think not! but you know, ymmv.

the problem of racism in tolkien fandom will not be resolved for as long as it takes (primarily) non-white fans doing the careful work of exposition and critique in order to uncover and engage with tolkien's racism and genealogies of his thinking for any non-apologetic engagement with tolkien and race to occur in fandom. and what do i mean by non-apologetic engagement? i mean that so far outside of a very small selection of tolkien academics (and a tiny handful of white fans) who i can all roughly count on my fingers, very few expositions of race in tolkien's work are not accompanied by a cringing apology that insists that a) tolkien was not racist himself personally and b) he was a man of his time and c) that there clearly were "exceptions" to his racial ideology in his works. this defensive pose allows the protective psychological mechanisms of political whiteness to continually step in and therefore absolve itself of engagement with race in tolkien's text. to put it plainly: i am claiming that the problem of racism in tolkien fandom, in specifically making tolkien fandom a hostile space for fans of colour, will not be resolved for as long as white fans cannot call tolkien a racist. if that sounds hardline, so be it.

the problem of racism in tolkien fandom will not be resolved for as long as it is largely only non-white fans investing the time and energy in expositing and critiquing race and tolkien specifically within a fandom space. it will not be resolved for so long as non-white fans are forced to rehearse and explain racist ideas, histories and thinking to white fans who refuse to do any amount of research themselves, or who settle on an anodyne "listen to non-white voices". believe me it is not very hard to do the research if you are actually interested in creating a non-hostile atmosphere and space for non-white fans. but that process has to be co-creative. i am inviting you to participate in actually doing this hard work of critique and conversation because you care about race and because, hopefully, you care about your non-white brethren within fandom spaces.

the problem of a hostile atmosphere towards non-white fans in tolkien fandom is not a problem that non-white fans can resolve, but one that i think falls to white fans to police, resolve and make socially unviable. if there is something i want to communicate persuasively, i think it would be this: what exactly do the norms of "politeness" in the fandom serve? how are you thinking about what is polite and what is not? what feelings are you prioritising when any attempt to engage with race is treated as "hurting" people's feelings or making things "less fun"? what feelings are being prioritised when discussions abt race in the texts are labelled "fandom discourse" or "fandom wank"? what feelings are being prioritised when a non-white fan is being asked to extend grace to a dead white historical figure? are you able and willing to police such communications even internally, even when you think non-white fans are absent from your conversations? when they aren't watching? or is it only something you become aware of when a non-white fan turns their eyes on you? these are questions i would like liberal white fans to ask themselves and to have a serious debate about.

Anyway, while leftist MRAs on here act like a minority of women making mean comments about men online is a real problem, at best men are invested in destroying women's presence in politics and are at worst are like "every guy I know has committed rape, no biggie 🤷‍♀️ screaming and crying and throwing up WHY WON'T THESE BITCHES DATE US????"