seeing news about the fallout remaster announcement feels like cruel irony to me
microsoft games are a bds boycott target, and because both bethesda + obsidian are owned by microsoft, this includes the games published by them.
microsoft is gonna further profit from a new virtual playground of ~post-apocalyptic bombed out towns in the desert~ while contributing to creating bombed out apocalyptic conditions in gazan towns, by collaborating with israel on so many fronts that bds calls microsoft the most complicit company in palestinian genocide.
and nostalgia-baited fans will still buy it bc playing pretend in a virtual world thats a knockoff of what real life people are currently facing – a virtual world funded by that very suffering of those real life people – is more important to them than simply playing a different game
I hope you can help me and my family who are besieged in Gaza🍉
https://gofund.me/9e302cd2
I hope you watch my account and see what we are going through, new displacement, new tents. We are suffering a lot. I don't know what awaits us. Our situation is very bad and difficult. It is really tragic.
Last year, I was pregnant with my daughter Tia during one of the hardest times of our lives. We were going through a terrible period of hunger and scarcity. There was barely any food, and I suffered deeply because I could not nourish my unborn baby the way a mother should. There was also almost no medical care or treatment to make sure she would be born safely.🥹😭
After months of fear and exhaustion, Tia was born in a fragile tent while bombs and destruction surrounded us. She was supposed to be born and grow up in our warm home, but our home was bombed and destroyed, leaving us with nothing but a worn tent. This small, fragile tent cannot protect her from the freezing cold in winter or the burning heat in summer.😢😢My daughter never received the childhood she deserved. Her first year of life has been filled with suffering, displacement, and pain. We have lived through the hardest days, and even as a baby, Tia feels the fear and anxiety around her every day.🥹
Today, my little girl is only one year old.🫂 She has never known what safety feels like. The only things she knows are hunger, fear, and the sound of bombs.😢
My baby urgently needs the most basic things to survive food, diapers, and clothes. What may seem small to others means everything for my daughter.
Sometimes I look at her and wonder if Tia could speak, she would tell you how sad she is and how much she needs your help. A baby should never have to live like this.
From the heart of a mother, I am begging you to please help my child. Even the smallest donation can make a difference in her life.
Please be the light that brightens Tia’s dark days. Your kindness could help save my innocent daughter’s life. 🤍😭
To donate, click here 👇
Please read the story below written by my dear friend Sahar:
"My daughter … Jordan Brusso needs your support for My One Year Old Has Onl
Since my son Mohammed's last doctor's appointment, during which he was prescribed medication, I haven't been able to provide the necessary treatment due to lack of funds. Please donate and share his story.
My campaign has been verified by
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@gazavetters, my number verified on the list is ( #736 )✅️
Please help us escape from Rafah .. my friend posted here and I'm forever indebted to all of you for your generosity.. we started to lose hope. please help and share .
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@el-shab-hussein @communistchilchuck
Hello , this is Edres Al Ali, I am organizing this for my frien… Edres Al Ali needs your support for Amid life's noise .. Help Rokaya's fami
.We lost our home and everything we owned, and now we live in a small shelter with no safety from the cold or hunger. Some nights, my children go to sleep without enough food, and it breaks my heart to watch them suffer.
Any donation, even a small one, can help provide food, warmth, and medicine for my children. Your kindness can give my family hope and a chance to live with dignity again
Hello my friend, I'm Aya, a mother of three. Our lives changed completely when our house was destroyed. My… AHMED ASHOUR needs your support
The war might be "over," but for us in Gaza, the struggle for survival has just begun. We are living in a tent that doesn't protect us from the freezing winter. Last night, the rain flooded everything we own. My little siblings were shivering, and I felt helpless as the water soaked our only blankets.
I’m asking for just €10. This small amount could buy a warm meal, a heavy jacket, or help us waterproof our tent. It is a lifeline for my family in these dire conditions.
If you can't donate, PLEASE REBLOG. Your reblog could be the reason my siblings sleep warm tonight.
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I am Muntaha, 25 years old, the daughter of this beautiful fa… Hamada Alskafi needs your support for Please save me and my family and reuni
Thank you for not forgetting us. 🙏❄️🍉
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An entire family was killed. Only one little boy survived because he was outside. He is in shock, calling for his mother. My heart is breaking for him.
My wife, our four children, and I are trapped in Gaza. We cannot leave. We live among the rubble, having lost almost everything, with no way to protect our children or secure even the most basic necessities.
Please don't look away. Stand with us. Share our story, and if you are able, please donate to help my children survive. Your kindness could mean the difference between despair and hope.
My friend Ahmed is enduring extreme pain in his bones right now. The doctors told him that it's because of a deficiency of vitamin D in his body. This is the result of severe anemia and malnutrition after years of food insecurity. He has been starving for so long his bones are breaking down. Please help him.
The occupation has disabled Ahmed, bombed his house and displaced his family repeatedly, systematically destroyed the infrastructure for clean water and pediatric healthcare. They deny him access to medical evacuation to a hospital outside Gaza and prevent him from accessing essential vitamins and pain relief. This is genocide. They are killing him. We need to intervene immediately. Ahmed deserves to grow old.
I need to stress this to you. Donate as soon as you can. The longer this goes on, the greater the impact on his body, and the harder it will be for him to recover. Everything in @ahmed-motaz's life has been taken from him. Please, please offer him support.
My friends, I am extremely sad because my life is getting worse due to my increasing pain from hunger and anemia. Worse still, the occupation forces haven't stopped b@mbing for a week, and the danger increases every moment. Shrapnel is falling into our tattered tent. Ple@se h@lp me so I can buy m@dicine and food, and so we can repair our tent . Ple@se h@lp us and don't leave us in this hell.
this technically is true but I think this also perfectly encapsulates why I am inherently distrustful of like. “”cozy”” “turn your brain off” fiction lmfao. like okay WHO gets to turn their brain off and who has to suffer through bigoted caricatures of themselves while everyone else is having cozy silly no brain time 😐
here's two articles about how JK Rowling just posted on X an upskirt photo of Freda Wallace, a transgender woman, after deadnaming her and misgendering her repeatedly online.
The wealthy author escalated a social media spat that resulted in posting a photo from a 2023 event at the Institute of Economic Affairs in
Rowling posted the picture taken from below because the trans woman, she said, was "refusing to debate me."
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 in general 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.
They lied to you when they said the genocide had stopped.
With the push of a button, the occupation wipes out entire residential squares, displacing thousands of families into the unknown on harsh displacement journeys that lack the most basic necessities of life. They want to destroy the present and the future, and make Gaza unlivable in full view of the silent world. Do not close your eyes to the horror of what we are experiencing, and do not tire of writing about us.
The bottom line is that everyone who has the ability to act or influence and then chooses silence bears a share of the responsibility as long as the genocide continues. Every spectator of hunger is a partner in its bitterness until bread reaches the mouths of the hungry, a partner in thirst until the throats of children are quenched, a partner in displacement until people return to their homes, a partner in pain until wounds are healed, and a partner in nights of terror until the dawn of safety comes... In times of massacres, neutrality does not grant innocence. Silence does not provide salvation; Because remaining silent about the crime prolongs its life and gives it space to continue.
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