A nifty pinned post to point you to places around the blog (or off the blog, whatever the case may be) + ask guidelines, FAQ and navigation. Last updated: 29 June 2026.
I'm known around here as Art â short for my pen name A. R. Thompson â and I'm a freelance editor and indie author. This blog is my part-time writeblr, full-time outlet for *gestures vaguely* everything else. Or, in other words, it's where I answer questions and blog about writing, d/Deaf and HoH + disabled representation, autism, my special interests â primarily storytelling, mythology and folklore â and any and all fixations that come my way.
Other places you can find my stuff (aka, where I'll go if Tumblr completely fails):
my official blog â essays, short stories and my annual newsletter. You'll also find my editing services here.
Substack â short stories (this is likely where I'll be most active in the event of Tumblr's demise).
Payhip â the current and legacy versions of my Wordcount Tracker spreadsheet, plus downloadable epubs of my short stories.
If youâd like to support what I do, you can throw a coin to me via Ko-Fi.
If the askbox is open, then Iâm happy to take asks for writing advice! Just be warned that my average response time for advice-related asks is currently.. slow. So maybe donât send in anything time-sensitive đ . Also itâs helpful for us both if you check the ask guidelines and FAQ in this pinned post first.
[continue under cut for ask guidelines, FAQ and navigation]
Ask guidelines
Check the tag navigation and FAQ first â I try to be meticulous about tagging things so that itâs easy to find specific topics/posts. Iâve also been running this blog since 2017; chances are, thereâll be something helpful in here already.
I wonât do your research for you. Yes, Iâll fact-check and look stuff up if Iâm unsure, but Iâm not a search engine. If your question has a concrete, factual answer (e.g., âWhat causes deafness?â, âHow much do cochlear implants cost?â, âWhat is sign language?â), please look it up yourself.
Or, to put it another way: I can give advice/opinions/guidance based on my own experience and knowledge; share resources that Iâve gathered or written, and guide you towards places to find information. Separate research efforts are for paying clients.
Remember that my opinions and experiences arenât universal. Writing advice â especially relating to sensitivity and representation â is highly subjective. I do my best to read up on and consider other perspectives, but sometimes thereâll be nuances I miss or perspectives Iâm unaware of; your story and peopleâs reactions to it arenât my responsibility.
Remember that Iâm not obliged to answer your ask. While itâs totally okay to send a followup ask if youâre worried I havenât received your message or if you canât remember if you sent an ask, any hassling or pressuring me for an answer will get you blocked. If I canât answer an ask for whatever reason, Iâll always let you know.Â
Bottom line is: Iâm a human person with chronic illnesses + executive dysfunction doing this for free because I enjoy it; if it stops being enjoyable, I stop doing it. I will make liberal use of the block button.
FAQ
Q) âHow do I write d/Deaf characters?â
âIf you have a question about d/Deaf and HoH characters, start here: A primer on research for deaf and hard of hearing characters.
Then check out my âWriting Deaf Characters | People are Peopleâ post and the writing deaf characters tag.
Q) âHow do I write [disability/deafness/sign language] in [Sci-Fi/Fantasy/Historical] setting?â
Check the following tags: disabilities in SFF + disabilities in history + worldbuilding for deaf culture + superpowers and disabilitiesÂ
Q) âWhat pieces of media with deaf characters in do you recommend?â
Check [this ask] for some reccâd books, comics and TV series with deaf characters. Others that I like are Into the Drowning Deep by Mira Grant and A Quiet Place (2018). The novelisation of The Shape of Water does sign language fantastically. My deaf representation tag also has some posts where I talk about specific instances of deaf rep in media.
Q) âHow do I write a signed language?â
The TL;DR answer: I recommend writing signed dialogue like you would spoken dialogue, and switching out characteristics of spoken language with sign-specific ones â e.g., âsignedâ takes the place of âsaidâ, describe how the signs are shaped instead of describing the tone of voice, etc. Start with the following posts for more info: Writing Deaf Characters | Speech is Speech + Writing Sign Language FAQ. More useful links are in the navigation section.
Q) âHave you seen _ and what do you think about the representation of _â
Try plugging in the name of whatever book/film/show you want to ask me about into the search box. If Iâve talked about it at all, Iâll have tagged it so you can find it.
Q) âDo you have a chronic illness/are you deaf?â
Yes. The ones I discuss on here are Russell Silver Syndrome, autism, hypermobility, fibromyalgia. And the deafness, of course.
Q) âAre you deaf, Deaf or Hard of Hearing?â
I have profound deafness in my right ear and moderate loss in my left. Medically speaking, Iâm hard of hearing; I identify as deaf because thatâs personally important to me. I donât consider myself culturally Deaf because I was mainstreamed at a young age and only started to learn more about and engage with Deaf culture in my early teens.
Q) âWhat do I do about writerâs block?â / âIâm in a creative slump and canât get outâ etc.
Take a look in my writerâs block tag â¤ď¸
Navigation (key tags):
writing deaf characters - everything about writing D/deaf characters.
sign language - everything about sign language: how to write it, what itâs like to speak it, misinformation & truths, resources, etc. You can also use the search bar for specific sign languages; if Iâve posted about them, theyâll be tagged (e.g., auslan, ASL, BSL).
hearing aids - me talking about experiences with HAs, what theyâre like to use, and anything related to writing characters wearing HAs.
sensitivity & representation - all things relating to inclusivity, sensitivity and representation in fiction.
monsters & monstrosities - monsters and monster theory.
writing advice - the all-purpose tag for everything writing advice related.
writerâs block
summaries & blurbs - troubleshooting and advice for summaries/blurbs etc.
worldbuilding - everything related to worldbuilding for fiction.
misadventuring in mythology and folklore - Catch-all tag for myths, legends and folklore; search bar is your friend for specific topics. There are many shitposts here.
special interest tag / the hyperfixations tag - special interest central (mostly viking history, sherlock holmes, and all things mythology and folklore. In the process of sorting and combing these tags).
fragments of essays - when I have ideas for essays but not enough spoons to write them, the fragments go here.
my writing - all original writing: short stories, poems, WIPs, articles, essays etc.Â
The Wyrdseren - the duology to which #When Dealing with Wolves and #The Kindness of Ravens belongs
The Blood Enigma (WIP) - urban fantasy m/m(nb) romance about a legally dead (sort of) vampire trying to navigate his unlife, depression, grief and being a fugitive with a runaway child.
Falling Stars (WIP) - high fantasy apocalypse with a sprinkling of cosmic horror + polyamorous romance. Currently in draft zero.
The base image is from Norman Lindsayâs A Homage To Sappho
This will be the second time Iâve switched up the genitalia on one of this series but is the first time Iâve hand drawn the addition of the body hair and genitalia. More adjustments made tomorrow but yeah!
I have some segments to redo, refining to do with a single thread going back thru, and graphite to carefully remove but per request some of the ladies got top surgery
Iâm literally so stoked about this piece Iâm so mad I keep having to take breaks bc whenever I concentrate for too long my jaw clenched up again and I start getting pain in my faceee
*dragging myself across the floor and covered in blood* it is finishedâŚ
My bad Iâve been in a mixed episode for almost two months and itâs made me have more episodes of lying in bed unable to move or do anything meaningful
"I am not a vessel for your good intent" goes hard as a line from a disabled perspective. Abled people care so much more about being their idea of a good ally than they do actually being a good ally. They shove their good intent right down your throat and then act surprised when you tell them they're suffocating you.
[ID: An image of a sign with a blue background and with a graphic of a stick figure in a wheelchair at the beginning, resembling disabled parking space signs. The text below the stick figure reads "I am not a vessel for your good intent." /ID]
With Winnie-the-Pooh and The Battle of Hastings sharing an anniversary today, did you know that E. H. Shepard once drew this amazing scene for an exclusive book bag?
I feel like . A lot of Being Autistic is giving people way too much benefit of the doubt cause you're trying not to have a social anxiety paranoia doom spiral but sometimes they really and truly just are treating you like that & you have to be the crazy one & be like I know you're fucking lying to me
Like oh yeah no it's not that I didn't notice. I've just been ignoring it. Yknow. Which somehow feels worse and stupider than if I really didn't know any better
I have 45 usd oc commissions open ⥠I have 15 slots open!
I can not draw: real people (example: "can you draw me / my grandma / etc") as it is beyond my capabilities. Non humanoid characters, mecha, furry or helmed characters or characters with large horns that will not fit in the portrait aspect ratio.
You can purchase a comm here!
https://ko-fi.com/c/a0ddd9de2c
Commission available on Ko-fi.com
Lemme draw your dnd characters, tavs, book mcs! Id love to work for you!
[ID: A photograph featuring wall tiles. In a gap, a shark is doodled on the grout. An arrow points to the shark from writing saying âgrout white shark.â End ID.]
To my mind, the appeal of both [vampires and werewolves] is very strong and very obvious, and people are unlikely to be swayed from one to the other. If youâre interested in animals, control/lack thereof, The Fleshâ˘, transformation of the physical body, etc., the werewolf may suit you better. If youâre more interested in seduction, desire, dependence, transformation of social position, etc., the vampire may be just what you need.
I find itâs also worth pursuing where people want to place shame⌠vampires and werewolves both seem to struggle with shame over their âconditions,â and leaving only the question of whether you want your character to feel guilty over, say, their physical form vs. their desires. (Keeping in mind you can of course do anything with any character.)
Furthermore, there are clear class and gender implications to both archetypes. For a variety of reasons, there is an association between the âhigh classâ and âfemininityââthink 1700s men in their big wigs and heels and frilly, pastel outfits, or how Americans associate certain British accents both with money and effeminacy. (Note specifically that this does not rely on any presumed 'objective' associations with masculinity or femininityâobviously, these don't exist to begin with, but even when we can look back and say, e.g., "oh, the heels were actually a symbol of masculinity at the time," this does not alter the fact that in the current cultural eye they have been transformed.)
The fop, the dandy, cannot be extricated either from his money or his presumed femininity. It is not a coincidence that extreme femininity is associated with an extreme cost (in not only literal money but also time): shaving, waxing, skincare, large amounts of fabrics, structured garments which restrict movement (and therefore ability to do labor), attached frills and lace and bows, accessories, jewelry, makeup, lingerie, perfume, dozens of shoes.
There is, similarly, an association between âlow classâ and âmasculinityââwhen you picture a butch, do you see her as an accountant or a lumberjack? Physical strength, flannels, pants, manual labor, endless work to survive. These things are all bound up together.
Then you throw in the vampire and the werewolf. The traditional vampire is wealthy, remote, fashionable, slick, soft-spoken, implicitly fruity if not explicitly so. The male vampire is likely to be hairless, svelte, long-haired, and generally androgynous. The female vamp wears glossy makeup and long gowns.
The traditional werewolf, on the other hand, is often lower-class, working with their hands, living in closer proximity to nature and other people, louder, rougher, brasher, generally physically capable and able to show it. The male werewolf is likely to be hairy, muscular, short-haired (at least on top), and generally masculine. The female werewolfâwell, this depends. In the big alpha/beta/omega m/f circles she may literally be Just Some Girl, but in other cases she may be feral, unmannered, (at least slightly) muscular, etc. Of course, mass media is too afraid even to depict a woman with unshaven legs, so you're not likely to see her often.
If these seem like extremely racialized dynamics, you are correct. Iâve said this before, but the vampire has essentially transformed from the antisemitic/antiziganist/xenophobic âlooks pale and âwhiteâ like us, but in a WRONG, âdarkâ wayâ (light-skinned with dark hair/eyes and âsemiticâ/âforeignâ facial features) aesthetic to one of white Christian abnegation (if you pictured the Cullens, youâre right; if you pictured the original Interview With the Vampire, youâre also right).
Iâm less of a werewolf specialist, but I think that the complexity of shifting werewolf racializations also have something to do with the difficulty of defining something as definitively âwereâ or ânot wereâ. People of color have always been dehumanizingly compared to animals;Â Twilightâs turning an Indigenous nation into wolves is only the logical next move in a long history of anti-Indigenous racism. At the same time, thereâs this big new boom in werewolf media, and would you look at thatâjust as the vampire became white when he stepped into the heroâs role, so has the werewolf become this strapping, chiseled young white man ready to sweep young white women off their feet. And his female werewolf wears perfume! Oh, well.
(Note that these are only the broadest strokes of how vampires and werewolves are most popularly visualized, and therefore by necessity incomplete. Most ânon-normativeâ vamps and weres 'respond' to these archetypes rather than 'setting' them, in my opinion and experience.)
Also, thereâs just been so much more popular vampire media in the world, so vamps more easily take on whatever symbolism you want them to have because thereâs precedent. Popular, famous, everyone-knows-who-Dracula-is precedent. The vampire has been very clearly used to represent so many things that you have more to, in theory, respond to; at the very least, more to respond to that your readers are likely to recognize. Werewolves may better suit those who like uncharted territory!
My personal preference follows below the cut, because this has gotten long enough...
To give my own personal little flavoring of the vampire vs the werewolf⌠which is to say, to discuss why I am so consistently drawn to the vampire:
I like the symbolism of a creature which âlooks just like usâ but is not like us, which seduces others to be like itself, which refuses to breed cisheterosexually but builds (remote, disinterested) community nonetheless, which struggles with a desire that is not accepted in its society. If this sounds remarkably queer all of a sudden, that is correct!
(I find Iâm most compelled by werewolves, unsurprisingly, when they are big hairy butches. Iâm predictable that way.)
Thereâs also the natural Jewish reclamation of vampires; we have the blood libel and the âlooks like us but not like usâ and the conversion and isolationist community and the pale-and-dark thing going on all the time. Yes, please, help me romanticize Jewish men! Brooding intellectuals, you say? Swoon.
I also think my being drawn to vamps matches my preference for frills and capes and all things ouji-and-lolita-fashion; I simply prefer the aesthetic of some tall androgynous thing skulking about in Victorianesque ornament. I like candelabras, castles, and foggy moors. Androgynous men are easier to find in media than androgynous women; itâs been said a thousand times that Louis and Edward and insert-pop-culture-vamp-here is strangely effete, but naming an overtly masculine werewolfwoman is hard. There are fewer futches, even, in media than there are metrosexual men. Thatâs just how the world is. I like a lot of things that simply happen to match vampires more readily than werewolves, so I fell in with the vamp crowd.
(I also suddenly realize at this point that Iâve always liked Remus Lupin, that strange, guilty creature who seems deeply at odds with his condition in a way that quite clearly parallels a fear of his own masculinityâmade all the clearer by his panic at becoming a father. It seems the shame&masculinity combo, particularly paired with paternal guilt, can easily be used to compel me⌠much to ponder.)
I think thatâs the end of my screed. I donât think there really is an objective better creature in this discussion, and to die on that hill would be silly; I see all sides.
P.S. Please send me your masculine woman werewolf recommendations I am starving for some good food.
the werewolf essay I'm on now points out that trial transcripts from witch hunts aren't really a good reflection of the popular culture's concept of witches and werewolves, because the confessions tend to be led by what the judges etc. want to hear (especially in cases where confessions are extracted under torture) & what the judges want to hear is based on theological and scholarly discussion, not popular folklore. Which makes sense! But what cracks me up is that the author then points out that a better source of popular culture is in records of slander cases. Which also makes sense! because these are allegations made by everyday people against everyday people, across a pretty broad cross-section of society. so I guess if you really want to know about what people believed you need to read about the kinds of insults and slanging matches they had, and I think that's perfectly delightful
some of you will see a historical document recounting the story of a woman who confessed to witchcraft after being imprisoned, starved, beaten, and likely tortured and act like it's full of awesome true witch facts collected from a friendly interview
I really donât 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 Serkisâ âkeep Tolkien whiteâ 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 isnât seen as being morally impure. Case in point: I have seen at least five instances of Tolkienâs âI hate apartheidâ valedictorian address being used as a âcounterâ to Serkis being racist, including by actual news outlets.
Except itâs only ever the âI hate apartheidâ line thatâs 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 isnât 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 âomg we relateâ and expressing what is a very, very mild âsegregation is not greatâ 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 âwhat do you mean large swathes of the Tolkien fandom are incredibly conservative!?â in lib/left Tolkien fandom is the result of a tendency in said parts of the fandom to transpose oneâs 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 itâs anarchist or an ideal society or whatever the fuck⌠and then getting really Pikachu-meme âbut theyâre misreading itâ 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 âI donât see colourâ 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 donât have the energy to go deeper into it now because I and others have been beating this drum for ages but like man. Man. Iâm not surprised by Serkisâ comment. I donât 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 âI felt like an ethnic minority on the Black Panther setâ âI somehow interpreted Animal Farm in the most ridiculous way possibleâ Serkisâ 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 doesnât exist in the text, or is the result of a complete misreading. So seldom is the response âfuck me, this book has some real wild thoughts on race, letâs see how we can engage creatively with that in an adaptationâ. 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. Theyâre interested in concessions that change very little: you can have your brown elves, as long as we donât 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, itâs always either an insistence that the Racists are Wrong because the Text is Pure, or a slight, grudging concession that Tolkien had âa few racist elementsâ but ânothing like the racism of todayâ. Of course itâs nothing like the racism of today. Tolkien isnât 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 âget thee gone from my gateâ 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, Tolkienâs 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 Tolkienâs âproblematic elementsâ 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 âBlack men like half-trolls," swarthy, slant-eyed, riding out of the south and east to serve Sauron⌠itâs 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 "incidentalâ, 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 âscandalâ 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 Politicsâ˘ď¸, 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 didnât 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 doesnât 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 Tolkienâs 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 itâs 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 donât realy say about most other âcanonicalâ 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 âloveâ? 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 NĂşmenor 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 weâll 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 Tolkienâs 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 donât need to resolve that tension into either adoring hagiography or totalising cancellation. If we do, we're going to keep getting âkeep the Shire whiteâ Serkis soundbites and âhooray we cast a brown elf in our we-invented-elf-jihadis show!â 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.
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.
