So I have not really been talking about this season because I just have not really been enjoying it. However with this last episode I think it’s really important to stress considering the intent of the writers.
In my mind we have gone so far past the point of thinking about why characters act a certain way in universe and instead need to start questioning why characters have been written they way they were.
All this to say, discord about the fictional aspects of the show are way less important right now then real considerations of the writing and authorial intent.
Who’s excited for Season Three coming November 11th?! (115 days away but who’s counting?)
We’d like to invite you to another TROP Rewatch, starting this Friday, July 24th, in the lead up to season three. Feel free to use the Reforged prompts listed on our blog to create as you watch, or just follow along and enjoy getting back into the world of Middle Earth.
it is that deep. the mischaracterisation of armand is that deep. i wish for everyone to realise what great disservice the writers have done to his character with their racist storytelling. armand has been described in the show as something repulsive, something without a presence, a fuck cloud and a rotten thing, something boring to death and insipid, something that cannot be loved and something that provokes a reaction of strong disgust in many other characters; lestat was genuinely stunned that louis deemed armand a companion-material. let that sink in.
some will try to argue that all those remarks are only targeted at his evil deeds. unfortauntely that is not true. in the books, however scared or repulsed lestat was by some of armand's actions, he still found him beautiful. he still described him with very reverent language. that was the core of it: everyone desired armand. that was why he suffered so much. everyone treated him like a pretty conquest. at the beginning of tva david talbot literally out of the blue started playing with his hair and sniffing them. it was the most dehumanising desire, that always showed the truth: he was too beautiful for this world.
this is how marius described armand in blood and gold:
"And there I saw beauty, beauty which has always been my downfall, beauty in a new and celestial form. Heaven had cast down upon this stone floor an abandoned angel, of auburn curls and perfectly formed limbs, of fair and mysterious face. His soft reddish hair was loose and tangled. His flesh was pale and the bones of his face only faintly sharpened by his Slavic blood."
"This was a boy, as I had said, and he had a head of long curly hair. But his face was shining white, and perfect, the countenance of a god it seemed, a Cupid out of Caravaggio, seductive yet ethereal, with auburn hair and dark brown eyes."
more quotes from books here:
so on what grounds is armand getting so much verbal humiliation in the show? all i see is that the writers for the third time in a row focused on his 'weird' side, his 'gremlin' side, his 'evil and crazy' side, while... completely ditching the rest of the picture. why is it that no one called him beautiful yet? why is he being so perpetually degraded, so belittled and debased verbally? because to me it screams fucking racism, it screams to me all those writers sitting and scribbling their notes about armand and never once admitting to themselves that assad is beautiful, that this bangladeshi man could be described in such a way, that he could actually be considered that. his screentime got radically reduced this season, they literally cut parts of tvl where his character was of paramount importance and any time armand was on screen, we were just given the following messages: he's weird!! he's crazy!! he's evil!! he's desperate!! while completely disregarding the rest. it is a deeply rooted, unconscious racism that genuinely terrifies and saddens me and i truly have no idea how these scripts made it air.
I know we saw his full face already on the building wrap but a full body shot got me EXCITED!!!
is it just me or does he look slightly pathetic and bedraggled?? the scruff looks born of desperation and not intentional, he’s wearing light armor with a tunic, it’s like he’s not quite reached his full power yet. I think this feeds into the theory that we’re going to see him struggle this season forging the One and perhaps in battle too, sending his armies to pick fights with the elves while he is locked away working.
Genuinely feels like they keep bringing up Armand's childhood sexual abuse/slavery to directly contrast it with Lestat in a way that's like "look at our sweet boy lestat who goes through so much and yet is still loving and precious and independent unlike gross yucky gremlin Armand who has the same trauma but is EVIL and MEAN and DESPERATE and UNLOVABLE" :/ idk it really rubs we the wrong way tbh
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?’
I'm going to start this by saying if you're NOT BLACK and you come on here trying to tell me what other Black people are saying, or tell me about the books - A)you're getting blocked B) I know what you are - so stay in a white baby's place, which is not my comments.
See. the one thing that has remained true about all three seasons, is that Memory IS A Monster. Just not in the way these showrunners and writers are thinking.
The importance of having Black people in the writers room is not just the handling of dialog, but in the assistance of knowing details and the effect it may, or may not have on an audience. Now we know Rolin Jones wasn't eeeeeeeever going to allow them to call the trial a LYNCHING, because whiteness has to defend itself, but there are other things that stand out to me as a Black viewer.
LOUIS THE PIMP
I remember the very first time Mr. Charles and I watched S1Ep1 and Daniel says "You were a pimp!" in this kind of 'homg, what kind of Black debauchery is this' way. We were cackling.
Have you ever met S1Ep1 Louis de Pointe du Lac? He banters with the girls, who in turn are not afraid to say whatever they want to him. He tries to smooth over problems and the only person we see him get rowdy with is Paul, because "You couldn't look weak on Liberty Street”
This was no Iceberg Slim. This wasn't Max Julien's Goldie. He wasn't even Willie Dynamite. That doesn't take away from the effect Louis had on his girls, those that cried and as he said, he stuffed his ears from the hearing of said cries - but he wasn't like others that I knew from the culture.
So, why has so much been made of Louis The Pimp this season? It's been hammered on again and again. Well, I think Merrick Mayfair tells us what the issue is in Episode 6.
"Great Mama Ernestine sends her regards, says the du Lac boys walked past her porch heads so high you wouldn’t know their money came from flesh."
You know who else had money that came from flesh? Louis de Pointe du Lac. The white one, from the books and films. Vampiredom's saddest, loneliest Participant in That Most Peculiar Institution.
I think this is RJ & Crew's way of saying "Sure, swap 'em out. Racebend to your heart's content, but he's not any better than the slave master and don't you forget it!"
Which is disingenuous for reasons I shouldn't have to explain to grown ass adults on this site.
This season, in my opinion, is about resentment of the Black characters. You don't have to agree, because I'm not writing this for agreement. I'm just thinking out loud. If you like s3, I love that for you. Anyways, the fandom to some degree has always hated Louis, but now I believe the writers are showing their hatred of this Louis to us. This Claudia This season is about the unmaking of these Black characters.
We've all seen the "Louisiana fried chicken" comment. That's not by accident, or a throwaway line. That's to "humble" the Black man that bought his sister a honeymoon package on The Blackstar Line - a shipping line incorporated by Marcus Garvey, the organizer of the Universal Negro Improvement Association.
Rolin & Co. have fans clamouring for the 'knocking down a peg or two" of the Black man who loved his 'churchy', mentally ill brother enough to not institutionalize him and with him, give us a taste of our much beloved Nicholas, or Hines Brothers.
"With Episode 1, titled “In Throes of Increasing Wonder…,” the show not only crafts one of the best pilots in the history of television, it also showcases Black culture in New Orleans, and how essential this is to Louis’ life. It’s clear here, from Louis being called a slur by a fellow businessman to the familial joy seen at his sister Grace’s (Kalyne Coleman) wedding, that Blackness is not only integral to Louis’ story, but the story this adaptation is trying to tell." Paste Magazine
This is about the unmaking of Louis de Pointe du Lac and Claudia.
"I always thought that Louis slightly cribbed James Baldwin's speech patterns, and that's what he took with him to Dubai. It's an affectation. But then as he comes back to himself, his real, true New Orleans accent creeps back in." Jacob Anderson, Backstage
Claudia, Episode 6:
"took your Black queen and ran off with him across the ocean..."
Young militants referred to Baldwin, unsmilingly, as Martin Luther Queen. Henry Louis Gates, The Fire Last Time
The use of another Black voice to say these things is certainly interesting, but unsurprising. (I don't need to get into everything she said for obvious reasons - if you're fine with everything she said, hooray for you, we're here for what I think.)
"The one good thing in my bleak… [sobbing] Black life, and I don’t know where she is!"
I won't argue the difficulty of living as a Black woman with people who aren't either one, or agree with the sentiment above. I will point out that in her time in NOLA, following her transformation, Claudia did live better materially than most Black girls and women. The most notable exceptions that we know through the show being Grace and Florence - who did not live 'bleak Black lives'.
Claudia as a vampire had better chances at survival than most Black girls and women, even in her worst circumstances. But that line, isn't about any of that - that line is to undo every moment in S1 where Claudia did have moments of happiness. To undo moments in S2 where she found acceptance and what she wanted.
"Bleak Black Life", indeed. Catchy isn't it? Like the antithesis of 'Black Lives Matter'. AND IF YOU DON'T BELIEVE US - LOOK AT DEE PHARMA. A COCAINE WHORE BUCKET. (they like buckets, these white writers - buckets of chicken, whore buckets...)
AND SPEAKING OF HYPERSEXUALIZATION…
"Some joy I know, knowin’ is how good I humiliated you in New Orleans, how I ginned up the train for the slave here.
'Lestat said he’d do worse than rape me, Daddy Lou.'
Worked good, didn’t it?"
Because the only solution to having an audience thinking their white lead was capable of victimizing these Blacks that the writers didn't want in the first place, is to show that a lynched, Black female (I use this word deliberately) is unworthy of your belief with regards to him.
The same white guy that killed poor Miss Lilly for the crime of being a poor substitute for Louis. That dropped Louis from miles above earth. That raged at Claudia like she was a rival lover instead of an inconvenient daughter.
This guy can't be held up as the great focus for the Great Conversion to S3 and a whiter audience and whiter tastes without the undoing and unmaking and unmanning of the lead/s of S1&S2.
Come on now, this was a bit heavy handed (from Merrick's summoning):
"Son of Ham," - That's real cute, paired with Claudia calling him a slave multiple times.
I don't need to get hit repeatedly on the head with a hammer to get the message Rolin & Co are sending. I'm out - but I just wanted to be clear about the why.
