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 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.
There's something really fascinating to me about how Denethor, who is portrayed (and almost certainly sees himself) as a cold, pragmatic ruler shows far more emotion and (especially!) grief than kindly old Théoden does. We never really hear about how Elfhild's death affected him, or see him grieve Théodred. The only time we hear of him mourning is his sister Théodwyn's death, which greatly grieved him.
We know however that Finduilas' death greatly grieved Denethor, as did Boromir's, and Faramir's near death causes him to have a full on breakdown.
Denethor might strive to be emotionless in his decision making, and to be as pragmatic as possible, but that doesn't mean he doesn't feel. He does, and I think far more than Théoden.
she's kinda the MVP of reaction pictures this episode. just flabbergasted at what she is witnessing. eyes wide and jaw on the floor while rhaenyra was coke ranting manically about the peace deal. i know being under the same roof as them is gonna make mysaria rethink all of her life choices
a dynamic I really enjoy in fiction is when a relationship starts with some power imbalance, then changes into something sweet and balanced, and eventually shifts into imbalance in the other direction 🤤
also, I really don't know how to phrase this but to me the finale misses the joke, you know?
it forgets that the christian cosmology was the setting, told through corporate satire, not the villain. even God wasn’t an active tyrant; she was an absent CEO, leaving individual contributors like Aziraphale and Crowley to realize their job descriptions were irrelevant to the company's bottom line anyway, so they coasted by on minimum effort
that corporate satire was what allowed this to be a comedy, a space to tell a beautiful story about choices, humanity, and love.
the finale for some reason treats that background seriously, it turns that setting into an omnipotent, dystopian threat, which completely suffocates both the romance and the humor by replacing a petty system you can outwit, outsmart, outmanouver with a bleak, unearned nightmare where "the company controls your every breath, and you can never clock out"
mad again. crowley's whole point is that humanity doesn't deserve to suffer for the crimes committed by heaven and hell, so his solution is to create a new universe without angels or demons. sacrificing themselves for humanity, sure, I get it. but what about all the humans who were wiped out with the book of life? god gave them the option of returning all those humans, and instead his solution is to start all over a la the great flood, something crowley was staunchly opposed to. so not only is there no happy ending for crowley and aziraphale, but there's no happy ending for recently corporeal jesus, or mrs sandwich, mr arnold, nina and maggie, adam and the them, newt and anathema. it's jobs kids all over again. they didn't want the new children the angels offered them, job and sitis wanted their children back. it's the same choice they gave adam. he wanted things to go back to normal with heaven and hell behaving themselves so he could play with his friends. how could crowley and aziraphale be happy sacrificing their existence knowing it condemns all of the humanity they know and love?
What baffles me the most about the Good Omens ending is how easy it would have been to fix it. There’s a simple way to still have a bittersweet ending without erasing the universe and killing off every single character in the show. In fact, from the moment Michael destroyed the book and I realised where things were heading, I fully expected the writers to take that route.
Instead of asking for new universe, Crowley and Aziraphale could have simply asked God to change the existing one. Get rid of Heaven and Hell, remove all supernatural elements so that all angels and demons would become ordinary mortals.
Perhaps the writers felt like that would have been a cop out. After all, there needs to be sacrifice. All happy endings come with a price.
But there would have been one. Crowley and Aziraphale would have been turned into humans. No powers, no immortality. Instead of a potential eternity together, they would have only had a brief human lifespan, a few happy years before their inevitable deaths. For two beings who waited thousands of years to be together, giving up most of their future together would have felt like an incredible sacrifice.
Plus, losing their powers would have meant no longer being able to protect the world. Free will comes with a hefty price, it means you have to watch humanity struggle while being helpless to interfere. I feel like that would have actually been a fitting note to end on for a show that was always about humanity in all its messiness.
some other incredibly fucked-up way that I'll put in the tags
Voting ended onMay 5
also please feel free to tag when and where you were upon discovering you'd been pronouncing this incorrectly/everyone else was pronouncing this incorrectly
Is there a word for when you’re driving down the highway and start to approach you’re exit and you realize that you could just keep going? Like physically, you could just keep going. Nothing is stopping you. You don’t have money, but you have money to get you some place, for a moment. Even if it cost you someone’s worry, your own job, you could do it and besides, people have done worse. You could go and be forgiven. And there’s a hunger to it, fervent and demanding, because you’ve never wanted anything more than this. You are fed up with your life, sick of functioning under these conditions just so, of never taking the moment in between your mailbox and the apartment door to scream until your throat tears. You are already in your car. But then your exit comes and you take it, because somehow you have to. What’s the word for that?
“It’s a dangerous business, Frodo, going out of your door. You step into the Road, and if you don’t keep your feet, there is no knowing where you might be swept off to.”
So many people told me to skip Dragon Age 2 when I got into this series, and I’m? Absolutely floored by that.
The way the companions are introduced? The COMPANIONS themselves? The beautiful, unending tragedy of Hawke in this atrocious city, mixed with some brilliant banters and poignant monologues?
Like I cannot believe they got away with this game in 2011. Everyone is bisexual and it actually changes dialogue and acknowledges the queerness of it all. Aveline finds love and remarries after her husband dies (not for money or power or security but because she loves this man!!). Anders is literally a conservative’s greatest fear: a queer, demon possessed civil rights activist. The game feels entirely different depending on whether Bethany or Carver survive Lothering. Hawke becomes a nobleman in Kirkwall and their entire manor is run by two dwarves, a dog, and an elven girl.
And the companions and their relationships feel so alive and full, even when Hawke isn’t present. Varric pays off crime bosses to leave Merril alone as she wanders around Darktown. Aveline hosts holiday parties and is incredibly sad that Isabela didn’t come. They all play Wicked Grace at the Hanged Man and Fenris is awful, but Anders is worse. Aveline makes sure the guards don’t bother Fenris in High Town, and steers Templars away from Anders’s clinic. They don’t always agree, they bicker and fight with one another, but they are Friends.
Oh, you wanna know about the gameplay? I don’t play Dragon Age for gameplay, I got nothing. Something something spiders and reused maps but that just means I always know where to go.
“But I didn’t and still don’t like making a cult of women’s knowledge, preening ourselves on knowing things men don’t know, women’s deep irrational wisdom, women’s instinctive knowledge of Nature, and so on. All that all too often merely reinforces the masculinist idea of women as primitive and inferior – women’s knowledge as elementary, primitive, always down below at the dark roots, while men get to cultivate and own the flowers and crops that come up into the light. But why should women keep talking baby talk while men get to grow up? Why should women feel blindly while men get to think?”
I just want to watch 10 seasons of a 2000s style sitcom about dunk&egg era targs
I wanna see big family dinners with everyone from Queen Myriah to Bloodraven to Maekar and Dyanna and their kids
I need westerosi holidays that blow up into big fights because what do you mean we're having the Feast of our Father Above at DRAGONSTONE?? Does no one care about grandma and grandpa anymore??
Aggressively badly aged "jokes" about the Dornish that make you go "uggh I can't believe people thought this was okay back in 205 AC"
I want filler episodes where Baelor and his sons sneak around doing hijinks with Rhaegel without their wives noticing and end up stranded in the Kingswood somehow
Two parter episodes with Famous Celebrity Actor appearing as Bittersteel or some shit
Bloodraven aka the eldritch abomination scary neighbor that no parents want their kids to ever interact with somehow forms an unlikely but touching friendship with Aemon
Kid Daeron having a prophetic dream where something goes terribly wrong and then spending the episode trying to prevent it but accidentally causing it and ruining Aelor and Aelora's nameday party
Vacation episodes in Summerhall where Dyanna invites the whole family over for a week and Maekar categorically refuses to play with the kids or let anyone touch his barbecue but realises the importance of family when Aerion almost drowns Matarys is the pool or something
It's just Modern Family with extra political ramifications and existential supernatural undertones :D
broke: jaime is maedhros’s asoiaf because he lost a hand!
woke: beric dondarrion is maedhros’s asoiaf because he did deeds of surpassing valour, his spirit burned like a white fire within, and he was as one that returneth from the dead, keen and terrible; and they fled before him. […] for his heart was sick and weary with the burden of the dreadful oath. and ginger.
gummygunk
stormborns
yousharknotpass
ellievsbear
2087
