#diversetolkien

Diverse Tolkien Week day seven:

Miss Universe (2015) Vietnam ‘Phạm Hương’ as Melian

Hello Lovely Followers and Friends! Welcome to the official promo for #DiverseTolkienWeek or #dvtw21. You can find the page here! This is a week for Tolkien fans to reimagine their favorite worlds, books, movies, characters, etc., in a more diverse and inclusive way.

It will take place February 22nd-28th, 2021!

That said, even though this is a specifically Tolkien fandom week, all fans who enjoy fantasy are free to partake in the event and reimagine their original works or Fantasy/Sci-Fi fandoms in an inclusive way.

Below are the prompts. Interpret them how you will! Be that writing, art, music, essays, meta, etc., Be creative. Think outside of the box!  Tag appropriately.  

Use the hashtag #dvtw21 on both twitter and tumblr to post your work in. Feel free to @diversetolkien on both twitter and tumblr as well and I will share them on my platforms.   ·       Day 1: Women of Color ·       Day 2: Disability ·       Day 3: LGBTQA+ ·       Day 4: Religion/Faith/Culture ·       Day 5: Anti-racism ·       Day 6: Create A Diverse High Fantasy ·       Day 7: Something Black (For Black History Month!!)

Ohh anon, I feel you!! Any fandom can be improved with a shot of diversity. The best tags I’ve found are #mepoc and #diversetolkien (which is also a blog!)

I’m not an expert however and there are probably loads more amazing blogs out there for this kind of thing.

hey anon! that is fair, and tbh i felt like that too for a long time (esp. wrt eol) but the thing is… i just think tolkien did a bad job of writing them.

as it stands in the canon of the silm, both maeglin and eol are pretty repulsive and like you said very misogynistic. but tolkien also coded them very heavily as people of color, so looking at them from that perspective makes me think twice about so readily condemning them. the misogynist man of color trope is too common, too ugly, and too blatant for me to not want to break their characters apart and figure out a way to redeem them without the racism.

maeglin, especially, seems ripe for redemption. here you have this kid who grew up isolated, with parents who didn’t like each other very much, and then when he tried to escape his father chased after him and killed his mother. he was then thrust into society in gondolin completely unlike anything he’d ever known and even more isolated. his relationship with turgon is complicated, as turgon killed his father, and furthermore he has feelings for his cousin idril who not only doesn’t like him back but distrusts and hates him for no reason other than the situation of his birth and the belief that she can sense his “strange and crooked” thoughts. and then, of course, maeglin is kidnapped and tortured by morgoth into becoming his spy. even though his narrative paints maeglin in a pretty bad light, tolkien makes sure to point out that maeglin was “no weakling or craven” and that he made the deal with morgoth to save his own life. and who can blame him, really? after all, not everyone can be maedhros.

so that is what endears me to maeglin. he’s got a tragic backstory, and his poor treatment of idril is reciprocated by her in a way that makes me feel like the narrative is inherently biased against him. after all, if noldor historians, including some from gondolin like pengolodh, are the ones who supposedly wrote the silm, why would they give maeglin’s side of the story?

as for eol, he’s definitely harder for me to come around to. tolkien went back and forth over and over again on whether or not he raped aredhel, and in any case he was almost definitely abusive to her at least in isolating her. but the fact that he’s called over and over again a “dark elf” and both he and maeglin are described as “swart” … that racist coding is there again, you know? i want to dig past the surface-level interpretation and find something there that isn’t so … awful. sure, maybe eol was an awful dude. but the fact that tolkien spends so much time connecting that awfulness to his status as a dark elf [coding for being a person of color] makes me extremely uncomfortable dismissing him as outright evil. i don’t have that more complex version of eol quite figured out in my head yet, definitely not the way i understand and sympathize with maeglin, but i’d really like to try and get there.

plus, these are some of the very very very few elves tolkien condemns within the text. the feanorians commit terrible, awful, horrific deeds but the fandom loves them, and tolkien clearly did too. if we can forgive them and all their murdering, why can’t we extend the same sympathy and benefit of the doubt to the oft-maligned maeglin and eol?

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Today Crowley wore his shades indoors and sat a comfortable distance away from Aziraphale so that the angel wouldn't take it upon himself to remove them. The thought of removing the glasses was absolutely nauseating, as the angel was nothing short of a blinding beacon in the middle of a dark night.

He'd either made a small visit to Heaven or had spent the last few hours in some religious establishment. Normally he was bright to the point of slight irritation, but this was a migraine waiting to happen.

"Hey angel, do you think you could tone it down?" Spoke the demon from behind his book.

"Tone what down, Crowley?" Aziraphale turned from the shelf he was currently stocking to look at the demon. Crowley nearly gagged.

"The...light thing you have going on." He gestured to the angel, and the seemingly obvious halo of light he had radiating off of him. Aziraphale raised a brow to his suggestion, looking curiously around his space.

"Do you mean the light switch?"

It had been painstakingly clear that Azirapheal was not aware of his light, and Crowley wasn't exactly sure how to spell it out without possible offending him. So he brushed it off with a, "Do you have any alcohol strong enough for a migraine."

Big mistake.

"You're getting sick Crowley?" In a blink of an eye, Aziraphale had moved across the room to mere inches away from Crowley, "what are your symptoms?"

He was too close, definitely too close. Crowley could practically taste the holiness coming off of him.

"You know I just remembered I left the television on at home, I'll be back la--" Crowley maneuvered himself out of the chair in the most uncomfortable of fashion, partly to avoid being touched by Aziraphale, and partly because his eyes were shut tight.

It made for a very sloppy attempt at escape.

"Crowley, what on Earth are you doing?" Aziraphale cried as he grabbed the pile of demon that fell unceremoniously in his arms. The act was met with a sizzling, and a very high yelp from Crowley, who pushed at Aziraphale until the angel was a safe distance away from him.

Aziraphale stood dumbstruck by the occurrence, , and Crowley seemed to just be gathering his bearings. There was an awkward silence in which both demon and angel stared at each other--or Crowley attempted to stare.

"My dear boy, might this have to do with the light that you were talking about earlier?" Aziraphale said slowly.

"Wonder what made you think that." On the floor, the demon looked quite undignified, and yet somehow still managed to cross his arms and shoot an unfocused glare Aziraphale's way.

"My dear, I believe I owe you an apology. I hadn't thought it would affect you, but evidently, I was terribly wrong." In the span of his short sentence, he'd managed to reduce the glow that surrounded him to the normal shine, and with it went the nauseating brightness that had filled the bookshop not seconds ago.

"Oh do forgive me, Crowley." Sheepishly, Azirapheal begged.

Less concerned with apologies, and just grateful that he was no longer on the verge of death, he asked: "What was that?"

"Well...I got carried away at a church, you could say. The choir was singing the most lovely of praises, and I couldn't help myself, I had to stay for the entire thing. It seems that in my elation, I hadn't taken into consideration that the lingering energy of the church coupled with my happiness would have harmed you. But it appears I was greatly mistaken."

That made sense. An angel by itself could be hard for a demon to look at, especially when they were happy. Add prayers directed at God, and it got ridiculous. Over the years he'd grown accustomed to dealing with Aziraphale, but that was too much.

"Am I forgiven?" The angel extended a cautious hand to Crowley but stopped midway. The last thing he wanted to do was violate Crowley's bounders, especially after that ridiculous display.