Iโm not trying to play devilโs advocate about the Tolkien and race post, I agree with most of what youโre saying about the denial. But modern non fiction Marxist critics forget one thing that hopefully fandom doesnโt, 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 itโs important to acknowledge the biases in his writing, but not decide it as intentional, because heโs 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 doesnโt make the text less racist but itโs an important thing to consider. Thatโs all, I agree with your other points.ย
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 Iโm snowed under atm โ ๏ธ
So thereโs a lot of talk about Tolkien being โof his time and classโ but precious little about what that environment actually looked like other than comparing him to his fellow religious conservative Oxford dons. โOf his timeโ is not a neutral statement and it certainly isnโt applicable to Tolkien, but more importantly, โnorms of his timeโ seem to often be, in this fandom, calibrated to โwhat Tolkien saidโ rather than โwhat was actually happening thenโ.
Anyway, I will try to be a little more direct than in that last post. So the โthe fundamentally racist elements of the legendarium are because Tolkien was a man of his timeโ 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 Moodyโs 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 whatโs more likely than โthe legendarium is the way it is with regards to race because Tolkien didnโt know any such antiracist thought existedโ is that โthe legendarium is the way it is with regards to race specifically because Tolkien did know such antiracist thought existedโ.
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 sharkyโs minion gangs in scouring of the shire were called the hobbiton majlis or something, i would probably start cooking peopleโs cats
Anyway, Iโm so tired of how โof 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.ย
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 donโt 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 โunconscious biasโ 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 ๐ญ
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 โnormal people not kings of menโ 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 Nรบmenor "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 Faramirโs entire speech about greater and lesser men, and the โchildless lords sit alone while barbarians bay at the gatesโ 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 โbirthright citizenshipโ as a consequence of a personโs 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 โmigrant criminalityโ discourse, how can you say he didnโt anticipate the rise of postcolonial global migration ๐ญ
(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 Fรซanorians are fucking ISIS, and i certainly am not saying that the exiled Noldor are the equivalent of stateless refugees, so pls donโt jump up my ass ๐ญ)
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 Menโข๏ธ 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. Itโs not a borrowed aesthetic! The entire legendarium runs on this logic!ย
Once again, and this is also re: a few reblogs of my original post that take a similar route, what do you mean โhe did not anticipate a world where migration is the normโ??? ๐ญThe legendarium isnโt 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 โhis timeโ kept moving and the foundational elements of the legendarium didnโt.ย
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 didnโt have the capacity to scrutinise race to the level he does โ ๏ธ
Anyway I think where the fandom focus on โunconscious 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 heโs hit. Which is to say, the insistence on โTolkien was of his time and his time was badโ being the chosen interpretive lens is less a claim about โthe timeโ Tolkien existed in than it is a claim about us as a fandom today.ย
On a vaguely related note, I also think โthis fandom gives grace to the authorโ 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 youโre in (and a towards Christopher LMFAOOO) never have I been in a fandom that consistently deifies the creator to this extent, and itโs doubly baffling considering that he isnโt 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.ย
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 โgrateful to the author for this wonderful worldโ 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 โwhy the fuck did you do this? what the fuck is wrong with you? did you hate twelve year old me personally?โย
I have a longer post cooking abt the historical elements of Tolkien as a man of his time re ideological genealogies and contemporaries, but in the meanwhile I just want to say by his own letters (letter 83, written in 1944), Tolkien was an avowed supported of General Franco, which a) most writers of his generation were in active and public opposition to Franco and b) Tolkien spends a not inconsiderate part of his letter bitching about how the notoriously conservative C S Lewis himself is opposed to Franco and infected by "Red propaganda" and c) if it comes to fellow Catholics, Graham Greene himself opposed Franco, even if he was unhappy abt murders of priests. And I also think it is very important to note re the stewarding of these conversations that there are exactly two papers on Tolkien's support for Franco, one by an independent scholar and one by the head of the Tolkien Society in Spain, who managed a private interview with Priscilla Tolkien and who cited her godfather having been a Francoist himself - and THAT author is, guess what??? a fucking Francoist himself. The conversations and scholarship about Tolkien are NOT happening in a neutral and "normal" space.
After having fun doing reviews ofย #SomethingIsOutThereย I figure Iโd do one forย #Timelockย - a lesser known Maryam dโAbo space prison movie from 1996.
As inย Something is Out There, dโAbo plays a crew member of a space prison ship, albeit this time sheโs human and the captain of the ship. Sheโs a bit older, and that makes her more credible as a tough-as-nails experienced commander of a space vessel rather than just the lone lucky survivor of a large crew.
If you have any imagination, youโll probably guess correctly how the story goes. Prison riot, escape scheme, and so on. No surprises there. But the characters are fun and everyone seems to be having a blast filming this thing. The out-of-left-field ending is also a bit of fun. Pretty sure itโs just a dream, though.
Anyway, check outย Timelockย for a bit of a fun diversion.
It is really important to me that all of you learn about Al Bean, astronaut on Apollo 12 and the fourth man to walk on the moon, who after 20 years in the US Navy and 18 years with NASA during which he spent 69 days in space and more than 10 hours doing EVAs on the moon , retired to become a painter.
He is my favorite astronaut for any number of reasons, but heโs also one of my favorite visual artists.
Like, look at this stuff????
Itโs all so expressive and textured and colorful! He literally painted his own experience on the moon! And that's just really fucking cool to me!
Just look at this! This is one of my absolute favorite emotions of all time. Is Anyone Out There? is like the ultimate reaction image. Any time I have an existential crisis, this is how I picture myself.
And then there's this one:
The Fantasy
For all of the six Apollo missions to land on the moon, there was no spare time. Every second of their time on the surface was budgeted to perfection: sleeping, eating, putting on the suits, entering and exiting the LEM, rock collection, setting up longterm experiments to transmit data back to Earth, everything. These timetables usually got screwed over by something, but for the most part the astronauts stuck to them.
The crew of Apollo 12 (Pete Conrad, Al Bean, and Dick Gordon) had other plans. Conrad and Bean had snuck a small camera with a timer into the LEM to take a couple pictures together on the moon throughout the mission. They had hidden the key for the timer in one of the rock collection bags, with the idea being to grab the key soon after landing, take some fun photos here and there, and then sneak the camera back to Earth to develop them. They had practiced where they would hide the key and how to get it out from under the collected rocks back on Earth dozens of times.
But when they got to the moon, the key was nowhere to be found. Al Bean spent precious time digging through the collection bags before he called it off. The camera had been pushing their luck anyways, he couldn't afford to spend anymore time not on the mission objectives. Conrad and Bean continued the mission as per the NASA plan while Dick Gordon orbited overhead.
Fast forward to the very end of the mission. Bean and Conrad are doing last checks of the LEM before they enter for the last time and depart from the moon. As Bean is stowing one of the collection bags, the camera key falls out. The unofficially planned photo time has come and gone, and he tosses the key over his shoulder to rest forever on the surface of the moon.
This painting, The Fantasy, is that moment. There have never been three people on the moon at the same time, there was never an unofficial photo shoot on the moon, this picture could never have happened.
"The most experienced astronaut was designated commander, in charge of all aspects of the mission, including flying the lunar module. Prudent thinking suggested that the next-most-experienced crew member be assigned to take care of the command module, since it was our only way back home. Pete had flown two Gemini flights, the second with Dick as his crewmate. This left the least experienced - me - to accompany the commander on the lunar surface.
"I was the rookie. I had not flown at all; yet I got the prize assignment. But not once during the three years of training which preceded our mission did Dick say that it wasn't fair and that he wished he could walk on the moon, too. I do not have his unwavering discipline or strength of character.
"We often fantasized about Dick's joining us on the moon but we never found a way. In my paintings, though, I can have it my way. Now, at last, our best friend has come the last sixty miles." - Al Bean, about The Fantasy.
turns out i wasn't making that up, his name is Dr. Toru Miyazaki! he also wrote a book called "The Day Cats Live To Be Thirty", so cats are kind of his thing.
apparently, cats' kidneys tend to be the thing that takes them down, something about their bodies being unable to self-clean their kidneys, and the vaccine is supposed revitalize the body's ability to do just that. It would be very VERY fucking cool to have cats suddenly reaching 30 years of age be the normal thing.
As they age, almost all cats develop kidney disease, from which they eventually die. Just as in humans, kidney disease i
Dr. Toru Miyazakiโs AIM injection for cat kidney disease enters trials in 2025, aiming for a 2027 release. Greycoat Research supports the sc
whoa wait i actually read the articles and it's so much cooler than just that!!
dude cracked the case about WHY kidneys fail, across the board as far as i can tell. turns out there's a specific molecule whose job it is to attach to waste and signal macrophages to come eat it. it remains inactive in cats for some reason, but the molecule is still there. basically what he's done is found the switch to activate them. this will be profound not only for our domestic babies, but for big cats too - especially cheetahs!
although his research was focused on cats, it's already being used to develop drugs for humans too!
on top of that, since these molecules are tags for waste, this could also dramatically lower the rate of fatty liver disease, liver cancer, urinary crystals, rheumatoid arthritis, and even some neurological cases! like, they're hoping it may have an impact on parkinson's and alzheimers, but it DOES have an impact on stroke recovery. like. holy shit.
furthermore, he's insisting that the feline drug be affordable if and when it rolls out onto the market. he wants this to be something anyone can get for their cat!! idk how much sway he'll have over the human drug, but hopefully enough that it, too, won't be that expensive.
annnnnd in his research that he's still doing for the human side of things, he's found a potential link between this molecule and estrogen. in the 20,000 samples he's tested, women between ages 10 and 29 had the highest amount of this molecule present in their blood (a higher amount means Something Fucky is going on, essentially. There's a higher amount of waste the body is trying to clean out) but it drops down to be almost equal amongst men and women after menopause. it hasn't been looked into yet, but fuck, just the fact it's noted and known and probably WILL be looked into soon??? imagine if this is what leads to figuring out all the various ways the ovaries and uterus fucks with people and how to fix it. or even like, maybe there's something about estrogen that makes it work better. who knows! but it's rad the link is there to be researched :D
man just think, not only could our kitties start living longer, healthier lives, but just maybe dialysis will become as rare and obsolete as the iron lung is for people. what a badass Dr. Toru is!
Update: So they have done clinical trials and have submitted it for approval as of april 2026. They are expecting it to be available late 2026/early 2027
The AIM protein drug for feline chronic kidney disease has been submitted for approval in Japan (April 2026). We break down clinical trial d
As for the study itself, the 360 day follow up on stage 3 kidney failure kitties showed that the control had a survival rate of about 20%, while the test group had a survival rate of 80%
New 2026 study: AIM protein boosts cat kidney disease survival from 20% to 80%. Discover how this scientific breakthrough is changing the fu
Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937)
Mulan (1998)
Aladdin (1992)
Alice in Wonderland (1951)
Beauty and the Beast (1991)
The Little Mermaid (1989)
Peter Pan (1953)
Cinderella (1950)
Sleeping Beauty (1959)
Pocahontas (1995)
Finally took a crack at drawing Go-Go Tomago and Honey Lemon from the Disney version of โBig Hero 6.โ Thanks go to my cousin Molly for helping with the Japanese on Go-Go's shirt.
โ๐๐ญ๐ก๐๐ซ ๐ฉ๐๐จ๐ฉ๐ฅ๐ ๐ฐ๐จ๐ฎ๐ฅ๐ ๐ฌ๐๐ฒ: โ๐๐ก, ๐ข๐ญโ๐ฌ ๐ฃ๐ฎ๐ฌ๐ญ ๐๐ง๐จ๐ญ๐ก๐๐ซ ๐จ๐ง๐ ๐จ๐ ๐ฒ๐จ๐ฎ๐ซ ๐ฅ๐๐ฆ๐ ๐๐จ๐ ๐๐๐ฎ๐ฌ๐๐ฌ, ๐๐ฅ๐ข๐ณ๐๐๐๐ญ๐ก. ๐๐จ๐ฎ ๐ค๐ง๐จ๐ฐ, ๐๐ซ๐จ๐ฉ ๐ข๐ญ. ๐๐ญโ๐ฅ๐ฅ ๐ ๐จ ๐๐ฐ๐๐ฒ.โ ๐๐ง๐ ๐ ๐ฐ๐จ๐ฎ๐ฅ๐ ๐ฃ๐ฎ๐ฌ๐ญ ๐ฅ๐จ๐ฌ๐ ๐ฆ๐ฒ ๐๐จ๐จ๐ฅ ๐ญ๐จ๐ญ๐๐ฅ๐ฅ๐ฒ ๐๐ง๐ ๐ฌ๐๐ฒ: โ๐๐ก๐ข๐ฌ ๐ข๐ฌ ๐๐๐ ๐ ๐จ๐ข๐ง๐ ๐๐ฐ๐๐ฒ, ๐ข๐ญโ๐ฌ ๐ ๐จ๐ข๐ง๐ ๐ญ๐จ ๐๐๐๐จ๐ฆ๐ ๐๐ง ๐๐ฉ๐ข๐๐๐ฆ๐ข๐!โ ๐ ๐๐ข๐ ๐ค๐ง๐จ๐ฐ, ๐๐ซ๐จ๐ฆ ๐๐จ๐๐ญ๐จ๐ซ ๐๐ซ๐ข๐๐ง๐๐ฌ, ๐ญ๐ก๐๐ญ ๐ข๐ญ ๐ฐ๐๐ฌ ๐ ๐จ๐ข๐ง๐ ๐ญ๐จ ๐๐๐๐จ๐ฆ๐ ๐๐ง ๐๐ฉ๐ข๐๐๐ฆ๐ข๐ ๐๐ง๐ ๐ญ๐ก๐๐ญ ๐ข๐ญ ๐ฐ๐๐ฌ ๐๐๐ง๐ ๐๐ซ๐จ๐ฎ๐ฌ. ๐๐ง๐ ๐ญ๐ก๐๐ง ๐ ๐๐จ๐ฎ๐ง๐ ๐จ๐ฎ๐ญ ๐ญ๐ก๐๐ญ ๐๐จ๐๐ค ๐ฐ๐๐ฌ ๐ฌ๐ข๐๐ค ๐๐ง๐ ๐ ๐ฌ๐๐ฐ ๐ก๐ข๐ฆ, ๐๐ง๐ ๐ ๐๐๐ฅ๐ญ ๐ฉ๐๐ซ๐ฌ๐จ๐ง๐๐ฅ๐ฅ๐ฒ ๐ญ๐ก๐ ๐ญ๐ซ๐๐ ๐๐๐ฒ ๐จ๐ ๐ ๐ฏ๐๐ซ๐ฒ ๐๐๐๐ซ ๐๐ซ๐ข๐๐ง๐.โ
Elizabeth Taylor chats with Whoopi Goldberg on the debut episode of The Whoopi Goldberg Show, originally broadcast in syndication on September 14th, 1992. An early trailblazer in the fight against HIV/AIDS and a staunch and outspoken LGBTQ+ ally, Elizabeth committed her time and energy to the cause when her friend and co-star Rock Hudson was diagnosed with AIDS prior to his passing in 1985. Elizabeth went on to become a co-founder (alongside Dr. Mathilde Krim) of the first AIDS research center amfAR, and later founded her separate Elizabeth Taylor AIDS Foundation in 1991 with the specific focus of providing nutritious meals (as well as medical and financial assistance) to people living with HIV and AIDS. She also lobbied the U.S. congress to contribute more money for AIDS research and education, devoting the last twenty-six years of her life to the cause. After Elizabeth passed away in 2011 at the age of 79, a large portion of the $156,800,000 raised at the Christieโs auction of her legendary jewelry collection was bequeathed to her charity in order to continue providing the services and assistance she believed were important in perpetuity. Still actively raising funds today, Elizabethโs grandson Quinn Tivey is now an officer and co-trustee of her foundation. Reflecting on his grandmotherโs humanitarianism and advocacy, he recently stated: โThe fight against HIV/AIDS was such a vital part of her legacy, and although the fight is far from over, Iโm honored to see the Elizabeth Taylor AIDS Foundation continue her work, educating legislators, raising awareness for the public, disproving myths and decreasing fear and stigma. Grandma stood up for what she believed in, living boldly and courageously. She would never buckle under pressure, and she certainly would not support the status quo if the status quo didnโt feel right.โ
nobody better say a goddamned word against Elizabeth Taylor in front of me, is all I can say. She fought this fight before it was popular, before it was acceptable, even before people knew it WAS a fight. She didnโt care if it made people think less of her. She fought it.
And if I said Megamind through its three subversions of Superman shows a deeper understanding that the point of Superman is that he was loved and taught to love by good, present parents, and because of that he is able to return that love to a world even if it doesn't always accept it, and he is not corrupted by his power, than many other films either subverting or playing the superman story straight.
Megamind has three Superman subversions. One is obviously Megamind himself. He was not raised loved by the world, but rather was loved by those hated by the world. Because he was still raised with love, he does care about other people, hence his character development. But because he didn't receive wider love growing up, his own is misplaced at first.
Metro Man was not loved growing up in a way that mattered. His adopted father was clearly very absent, and while we don't know much about his family, their relationship seems superficial. Because of this, his sense of duty to the world is also superficial, hence his boredom.
Hal wasn't raised with power. He gained it and was shown how to use it by a 'space dad' who only taught him power and not love. Hence, he sees it only as a grasping means to an end.
All three of these subversions, in their negative space, create the silhouette of the superhero that they are parodying. That silhouette is of a space child that came to earth and was cared for very deeply by the world, and taught love through his experience of love, and because of that holds fast to his duty to the world. Which is Superman.
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