I’m not trying to play devil’s advocate about the Tolkien and race post, I agree with most of what you’re saying about the denial. But modern non fiction Marxist critics forget one thing that hopefully fandom doesn’t, that is to give the author grace instead of immediately deciding that the racial politics of his work is intentional. I accept Tolkien was a conservetive, but I find it hard to believe that he was exposed to anti racist thought like we are today. I think it’s important to acknowledge the biases in his writing, but not decide it as intentional, because he’s a linguist based in a very white part of England, whose background is in European history who did not anticipate a world where migration is the norm. Of course that doesn’t make the text less racist but it’s an important thing to consider. That’s all, I agree with your other points.
Thanks for the question, and please bear with me re asks gang, I was stupid enough to leave inbox on for a while, not realising the post would break containment, so I’m snowed under atm ☠️
So there’s a lot of talk about Tolkien being ‘of his time and class’ but precious little about what that environment actually looked like other than comparing him to his fellow religious conservative Oxford dons. ‘Of his time’ is not a neutral statement and it certainly isn’t applicable to Tolkien, but more importantly, ‘norms of his time’ seem to often be, in this fandom, calibrated to ‘what Tolkien said’ rather than ‘what was actually happening then’.
Anyway, I will try to be a little more direct than in that last post. So the “the fundamentally racist elements of the legendarium are because Tolkien was a man of his time” line really annoys me (and others!) because imo it lets Tolkien's own Oxford tea table stand in for the entire twentieth century as if there wasn't an entire world outside the Inkling Orgy arguing furiously about race and empire.
I can give you an example literally from Oxford itself! The Indian Majlis had been meeting at Oxford since 1896! The Majlis, for those who might not be aware, was a full-on political and debating society which produced a fuckton of the people who'd go on to lead independence movements across South Asia. This was not some obscure footnote he would need to trudge to a specialist archive to dig up, and I can confirm that attending debates and discussion groups is, was, and has always been a large part of Oxford University life. Ie this was happening in his university in his lifetime among people of his class group he'd have had every opportunity to meet and engage with, whose existence he absolutely would have been aware of.
Beyond the Oxford ventures, you have things like Moody’s League of Coloured Peoples, founded in London in 1931 and organising against colour bar practices in Britain itself. The West African Students' Union had been running since 1925, building a public anticolonial intellectual culture that fed directly into multiple independence movements of the following decades. CLR James was in England from 1932! And so on and so forth! And many in these organisations were white British activists or public intellectuals or writers! This was a live political and literary scene running in parallel with Tolkien's and explicitly arguing against the racial categories his fiction sought to preserve. Which is to say, I think what’s more likely than ‘the legendarium is the way it is with regards to race because Tolkien didn’t know any such antiracist thought existed’ is that ‘the legendarium is the way it is with regards to race specifically because Tolkien did know such antiracist thought existed’.
can i say i am so glad the guy was not a lazy writer and also that he disliked direct allegory because if one of sharky’s minion gangs in scouring of the shire were called the hobbiton majlis or something, i would probably start cooking people’s cats
Anyway, I’m so tired of how “of his time" just keeps getting used to mean "the time as understood by conservative Oxford dons," when the actual record shows Black British and colony diasporas and white progressives were producing sustained public counter-discourse in the same space the whole time, in his own country, in his own language, in his literal university. So when people say he was "just a product of his environment," I just always want to know which environment they mean exactly, because the one he was actually in very much did sustain quite a lot of anticolonial thought.
Also just to get into the basics again, bro was famously a philologist, ie not exactly a profession where you could plausibly bumble through life without ever encountering race-as-a-formal-category. Philology in this period, and especially in Oxbridge, was literally a primary engine of race science. The Indo-European/Aryan linguistic apparatus that mapped language families onto racial stock was built by people doing Tolkien's exact job, so I really don’t think he passively inherited racial categories without noticing, he inherited them deliberately through years of formal study, with copious footnotes and his own academic judgement. Like I always find it so funny when people, even on that post, refer to the racial dynamics of the legendarium as ‘unconscious bias’ because I just know Tolkien is spinning like a power drill in his grave every single time, because they just implied he was shit at his job 😭
Anyway, the entire feudal value system of the legendarium runs on inherited blood as a determinant of worth (even within the Shire, ie the most ‘normal people not kings of men’ place, where Sam is placed as a Good Man Friday), and this is a very well known fact within fandom. Aragorn's legitimacy is genealogical-first and earned-second, the blood of Númenor "running true" in some lines and "thinning" in others is outright presented as a real, quasi-biological fact about a person's capacity for greatness, and not to forget Faramir’s entire speech about greater and lesser men, and the ‘childless lords sit alone while barbarians bay at the gates’ bit.
Or if you prefer a Silm example, (note: the context of the exile and whether or not you think they deserved what they got is irrelevant to this point) but the Doom of Mandos and the Noldorin re-entry ban, when viewed as a mechanism detached from context, is fundamentally just the ontological excision of a ‘birthright citizenship’ as a consequence of a person’s actions. Idk how big this was outside the UK but remember when Shamima Begum was extensively groomed as a child and fucked off to join ISIS and the UK decided to strip her of citizenship and leave her stateless? This is basically just that, ie the legitimisation of an ontologically confirmed birthright citizenship that can be granted to exceptional cases at the behest of the ruling body (see: Hobbits, Peredhels) due to their extraordinary actions, but also can just as easily be taken away by the same ruling body in response to a transgression. Like this is literally just present-day ‘migrant criminality’ discourse, how can you say he didn’t anticipate the rise of postcolonial global migration 😭
(once again to the reader, please let me reiterate i am simply comparing the mechanism of the exile alone, i am not saying that the Fëanorians are fucking ISIS, and i certainly am not saying that the exiled Noldor are the equivalent of stateless refugees, so pls don’t jump up my ass 😭)
Tolkien wasn't writing this in a vacuum where phrenology was a fringe pseudoscience nobody respectable touched, it was institutionally embedded and state sanctioned British science well into the interwar period, with its own society and journals, and an enormous presence in Oxbridge. Moral and mental character of Great Men™️ being first fixed by descent and the subsequent positive/negative shaping of character by choices and environment being seen as a somewhat effective yet undeniably secondary mechanism, is literally the loadbearing premise of race science. It’s not a borrowed aesthetic! The entire legendarium runs on this logic!
Once again, and this is also re: a few reblogs of my original post that take a similar route, what do you mean ‘he did not anticipate a world where migration is the norm’??? 😭The legendarium isn’t a product of 1937 alone, bro was notoriously still tinkering with its genealogies and societal architecture well into the 1960s and early 70s and pretty much until the day he died, like a fucking dweeb (for once, complimentary), hence why it takes the fragmented form it does. That's a working lifespan that runs through major global decolonisation, Windrush, the 1958 Notting Hill race riots, the 1962 Commonwealth Immigrants Act, through literally the entire long and convoluted and drawn out process by which Britain had to publicly and unavoidably reckon with the idea that the empire's subjects were now their neighbours. At some point we need to truly engage with what "of his time" means, ie we have to reckon with the fact that “his time” kept moving and the foundational elements of the legendarium didn’t.
And to bring up the same example from my original post but in a different light, Tolkien was completely capable of precise and deliberate racial argument the second it was framed as being about himself rather than his fiction. In said well known example, in 1938, some German publisher wants confirmation of his "Aryan" descent for translation rights, and Tolkien's (drafted) response is sharp and furiously specific, knowing exactly what's being asked of him by the Nazis and exactly why it's grotesque. Compare that to the total absence of literally any comparable interrogation applied to the Haradrim or orcs, or the entire chronology and geography of Middle-earth where evil consistently arrives from the same two compass directions wearing the same coded features. Man like. Tolkien was honestly a pretty clever guy, and ngl I feel it does him a (very funny) disservice to assume he didn’t have the capacity to scrutinise race to the level he does ☠️
Anyway I think where the fandom focus on “unconscious bias of the era" does not actually originate in a true desire to absolve Tolkien (fair enough, because this is a man who has never once asked to be absolved of the opinions he holds strongly enough to work into his narrative at such depth) the individual, and but rather in the interests of keeping the emotional crutch of loving a beloved childhood text without having to acknowledge that the person who made it was making choices in the same way Rudyard Kipling or Rider Haggard was making choices, and yet very few people offer Haggard this kind of protective custody in present day.
Almost nobody aside from hardcore conservatives sits around saying King Solomon's Mines just "reflected the assumptions of empire" as if Haggard had no hand in shaping said assumptions himself, we read it (correctly) as a deliberately shaped ideological project worth taking seriously as an argument. Tolkien, specifically due to the fandom culture around him both then and now, often gets a pass that even Kipling doesn't, and imo it's not because the textual evidence is thinner but because the fandom loves him more and flinches harder when he’s hit. Which is to say, the insistence on ‘Tolkien was of his time and his time was bad’ being the chosen interpretive lens is less a claim about ‘the time’ Tolkien existed in than it is a claim about us as a fandom today.
On a vaguely related note, I also think ‘this fandom gives grace to the author’ should not be treated as a complimentary statement, especially because one of the elements of the Tolkien fandom which genuinely baffles me is the general air of author-genuflection across the board regardless of what fandom pocket you’re in (and a towards Christopher LMFAOOO) never have I been in a fandom that consistently deifies the creator to this extent, and it’s doubly baffling considering that he isn’t exactly a sensitive up and coming artist but a dude who has enormous mainstream cultural impact and, crucially, has been dead as a doornail for decades.
Like it is quite funny but also on a serious note, whilst the sentiment is understandable because yeah the world and its languages are as immense as the work he put into it and it is very important to so many of us, I think a publicly performed culture of ‘grateful to the author for this wonderful world’ is one of the things that preclude a deeper critical understanding of the legendarium itself. Amusingly, this is literally the only thing that makes me miss the bloodsoaked battlefields of anime fandom, because Masashi Kishimoto may have painstakingly drawn 3 billion pages of Naruto, but 95% of the fandom would probably, upon meeting the guy, tie him to a chair and beat him repeatedly on the head with a rubber hammer going ‘why the fuck did you do this? what the fuck is wrong with you? did you hate twelve year old me personally?’
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They gotta stop aging Robin up I swear to god. He’s like fully an adult man half the time and it fucking sucks. Make him recognizably a child or don’t bother including him at all. “But it makes people uncomfortable” yeah dude! Because it is! You’re never going to make it okay so make it interesting! Make it mean something! Like Robin is fully just a grooming story. I don’t mean sexually but it’s a narrative about a man convincing himself that his relationship with a kid is so special and unique that the normal boundaries between child and adult can be suspended, that the child’s circumstances and capabilities and needs are so extraordinary that they are rendered a kind of un-child, and that the scale of their eagerness and want counts as consent. Robin’s already traumatized, so what is there to lose?
Everyone wants Batman to be morally complicated so they make him a huge douchebag for no reason but flinch away from the actual parts of his character that are really troubling. The “is it wrong to have Robin?” question is always brought up and then neatly solved in a way that absolves Batman. But like. One of Batman’s most consistent character traits is that he’s able to convince himself of anything no matter how stupid.
Batman is a hyper-intelligent, hyper-powerful Sherlock Holmes character piloted by the ghost of a lonely child. He’s a genius who uses his intelligence to justify acting upon the emotional impulses of an 8 year old with horrific trauma and unmet needs. He uses children for his own emotional gratification and convinces himself that, while it might not be right, it’s not wrong enough to stop doing it.
And, well, many such cases!
Honestly I think the cognitive dissonance of like a 9 a year old Robin does so much more to establish Bruce as a psychologically complicated and morally gray character than any amount of the pointless assholery people just keep piling on to his personality.
#Batman is a grown man who is so desperate to believe that what he went through as a child was survivable
#that he will go through multiple sidekicks the way people go through outdoor cats.
#he loves his family so much and he cannot understand that he allows them access to more danger than they ever would have been in otherwise.
#he is a metaphor for the positive ways trauma can encourage people to help others
#but also for the ways people will project on others and try to live vicariously through them!
#batman is trying to exert control over childhood as a concept! he is making child soldiers to prove he could have done more than he did!
#and over and over again the universe tries to tell him that he can’t. and so he gets another sidekick.
#because surely THIS time the small traumatized child will have the strength and will and power of an adult.
#and then Bruce can finally sleep easy knowing if he’d only been a stronger boy he could have saved his parents.
listen i will not hear a word against armand he is perfect he is stunning. it’s all ‘characters these days talk like they’re trying to get a good grade in therapy >:/‘ until you behead your 72-year rebound manipulationship and the shared ex he left you for so you can force his decapitated body to write apology notes by threatening the life of the girl you tricked him into paying to pretend to be his dead daughter who you killed. he even apologized for killing her ok he’s doing the 12 steps it’s called taking accountability it’s called healing
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the thing that jon bois really gets about sports is. ok. all of life is creating meaning out of things that have no meaning. devon cooley voice nothing matters we're all gonna die. but of course all sorts of things have meaning, because we ascribe it. justice and love and collectible toy dolls and art and different coloured rectangles of fabric. and the thing about sports is it's the ultimate form of that. it says ok -- there's two guys hitting a ball to each other and they really badly want the other guy to miss. there's 11 women trying to kick a ball around with their feet to put it in a big net box. there's two people facing each other, one with a bat, the other with a ball. one must prevail. and it matters, because we make it matter. teams are arbitrary and the people on the teams are arbitrary and none of it means anything and you can't even control it! you can control only yourself, and a good portion of the time you're not even in the game, right, you're on the sidelines. and you throw your lot in anyway and say make this hurt. make this hurt and make me care so it can mean something, so i can flip it over and make joy. and it works! and that's why sports are everything
when you're arvid lindblad and you got a 9 on your maths and chem gcses a year early and you're a former snapchat wyll warrior and you correctly prophesized to lando norris you'd see him in f1 in 5 years and you aura farm every other day and you're nonchalant asf and you're a model by nature and you're on a magazine cover and you're a skateboarder and you're really into fashion and you don't follow the rich millionaire herd that plays golf and lives in monaco and you somehow do this while making your way into the f1 record books and oh you're also like the coolest guy on the grid ok ok we get it
the difference to me, by the way, when it comes to sidney crosby’s acts of goodness and kindness versus nico hischier’s, is that i believe sid is aware that he is choosing to do good or kind things because deep in the recesses of his mind exists an abacus on which he is tallying the worth of his soul and he is always fighting in the spiritual trenches to keep that thing in the green. there’s a sort of self-awareness to sid’s kindness and generosity, like a gently smug kind of layer deep down underneath it where he knows he’s just bought himself one more opportunity to grab an opposing player by the knees and spin-launch them into the boards like mario does to bowser. every time he screeches at someone on the ice with a cracking voice that they’re being a pussy or steamrolls into an early-twenties player for no reason but the crime of being gen z he knows he has to go out into the world and perform a miracle. this has nothing to do with his public perception btw he does not care what the world thinks of him. it’s all for his private and meticulously kept internal abacus.
nico, however, does good and is kind because the concept of behaving another way does not seem to ever register in his mind. he is being the best nico he can be. he believes everyone around him, even jack hughes, is both trying their best and also proud of everything they try. even jack hughes! if nico wasn’t a hockey player his chosen career would be like a guy who listens to 911 calls and dispatches himself to them. he’d be a guy who holds the nose of the plane steady during turbulence. he’d be a professional guy who squeezes your hand once and tells you how brave you’re being at the dentists or the doctors. and he’d mean it. he does think you’re being brave. he thinks everyone is being brave. even jack hughes
public rpf of male athletes isn’t a reverse uno card that’s secretly also activism against the misogyny and homophobia in sports or violence against women. by making that argument, you’re just embarrassing yourself and undermining actual efforts to make sports more welcoming for nontraditional types of fans/players
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i love my mutuals because we never talk but we still… like… follow each other……….. and i admire that we stick together even tho there is no communication in the slightest………u kno what i mean… hello…
don't forget the nazis and communists were allies during ww2 and would've remained allies if hitler hadn't betrayed stalin. the two ideologies are not opposites.
for many people, especially those who suffered under the Soviet Union (or Soviet backed communist puppet regimes) or the descendants of those people, seeing a hammer and sickle on someone’s blog or t shirt can feel as bad as seeing a swastika. especially since many people in eastern Europe suffered under both the communists and the Nazis and were the victims of the Nazi-Soviet alliance. Not to mention the many Jews who had family murdered in Soviet pogroms and other family murdered by the Nazis.
I agree with the rest of the commentary but I don’t think people at either extreme are adopting their politics “because it’s trendy”.
The trendiness makes it more pervasive, which makes it easier to fall into echo chambers that validate those who believe it, and the algorithm is certainly part of the shape that takes now, but people tend to have actual internal reasons—even if they’re bad or fallacious ones or don’t actually make any sense when picked apart—why they consider their politics/beliefs are true or moral.
Yeah, the idea that people fall down the alt-right/left pipeline "because it's trendy" is completely missing the point. It's about radicalization. It's about falling in with people who bombard you with existential fear, loathing, and despair. It's about people telling you you're special, that you're part of a small, select group of people who know what's really going on. It's about people insisting something has been stolen from you (usually by The Jews) and that you have to fight, scream, and, ultimately, kill, to get it back
sources: unknown // unknown // maplepecanpastry on tumblr // ashmanathletics on tiktok // i saw the tv glow (2024) // pray for me by kendrick lamar // unknown // what are you waiting for? by derald cannon jr. // unknown // unknown // drunk drivers/killer whales by car seat headrest // polekingrasputin on instagram
it really is crazy that women's clothes don't fit anybody. fat women can't find clothes, skinny women can't find clothes, tall women can't find clothes, short women can't find clothes, big chested women can't find clothes, small chested women can't find clothes. who the fuck are these being made for
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