Jessica. INTJ. Queer. Horses, dogs, tats, cats, cosplay, video games, nerd things. Multi-fandom personal blog. Iâm real into Astarion right now, youâre welcome. Still a lot of shitposts.
Based on the "white noise" special from season 3 of the audio drama so I recommend you listen along WITH HEADPHONES. I followed emmaslavin14's translation so check her YouTube channel and also support the AD on missevan if you can!!
a ton of people have unexpectedly followed me over the last 2 days so here is my rent-lowering gunshot:
the american south is the most racially diverse and poorest region of the united states, and any political sentiment that treats the south is stupid or expendable is inherently racist and classist. a lot of y'all are racist and classist. the south is also the heart of american culture. argue with a wall. you cannot deny that everybody in the entire world does not emulate artists from atlanta. there is vested interest in keeping the south poor and uneducated BECAUSE this is the most racially diverse region in this country. if you actually give a fuck about progress, you would fight for the south, not mock us.
A docu-horror podcast about grief, terror, and the American Dream. Follow podcasters Nicholas DeRoso and Solomon Crockett as they plumb the depths of Shelterwood, an infinite suburban development beyond the veil in search of Saddie DeRoso, Nick's missing sister.
For those who love Limetown, Lake Mungo, Twin Peaks, and I Saw The TV Glow.
From the producers who brought you @re-dracula. A Bloody FM production. Read our press kit here.
Right before every election, I try to get people to go vote for legislation that mitigates the damage America is doing and brainless dumbasses in my replies are like âI refuse to participate in this evil system, the only solution is revolution.â and another year passes and more Killing People and Locking Them Up legislation comes into effect and there is also still no revolution. Not the fault of these online leftists but infuriating anyway. We need to abolish America and until we do, America will continue to work as an evil explorative force globally and you will continue to live here. The least you can do is try to go out and vote against sending unlimited money to Israel and stripping healthcare from the 340 million people who live here. If voting did nothing at all, the GOP wouldnât be trying so desperately to meddle in elections and discourage people from voting. You live in a society. It might not be the one you want but you live in it. Call me a stupid lib or whatever but youâre doing fuck all to help anybody and being so smug about it.
It is one thing to not be able to vote and another thing entirely to brag about not voting when you could. That is not something to pat yourself on the back for.
its a cliche but im a slut for when a character is introduced as super chill and goofy and then you later find out theyre chill and goofy because theyre too powerful to be touched. the level 100 wizard whos already figured out everything and is just vibing now. big fan.
âPeople should pass a test before being allowed to have kids.â âIsnât it scary how white people have this inborn capacity for evil?â âIâll never pass because males and females have different skull shapes.â âAutistic people have a stronger sense of justice than anyone else.â âI donât want AMABs in my space because theyâre dangerous.â âYou shouldnât have access to hormones if you dress like THAT.â âAnyone who does something that awful isnât human.â âSome people really shouldnât be allowed to vote.â
This is eugenics. This is phrenology. THIS IS NAZI SHIT, YOU ARE A LEFTIST BUYING INTO NAZI SHIT. YOU ARE NOT IMMUNE TO NAZI SHIT.
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 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 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 Politicsâąïž, 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 NĂșmenor 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.
also re: âserkis is factually incorrect bc there canonically were hobbits with brown skin so tolkien is antiracistâ. hobbits with brown skin, in the period tolkien was writing in, did not deliberately signify racialisation. half the famous five kids were referred to as being nut brown. the stars of malory towers were described as brown skinned and were all fully white english. in enid blyton. ie a notoriously racist writer. the kid in the secret garden is described as brown. midcentury writers used brown as a standin for tanned! this is incredibly common! how are we doing âoh heâs just of his timeâ but not bothering to look at the âconventionsâ of his time! itâs fine if you want to interpret it as that in fanworks and adaptations but iâm going insane when people are acting like tolkien referring to characters as brown skinned makes them not-white and apparently makes him some sort of antiracist.
nimble, a border collie-papillon mix, wins the 12â class in the 2024 masters agility championship. the first time a mixed breed has won at westminster ever.
We're at the "JK Rowling is personally funding litigation to try and destroy AMNESTY INTERNATIONAL" stage of rabid UK terf brain.
Screenshot via Alejandra Caraballo @esqueer.net on bluesky
Tldr Amnesty International, global human rights organisation, published a report called 'A growing threat: the anti-rights movement in the UK'. In it is detailed, amongst others, a whole bunch of transphobic groups and organisations, including Beira's Place, JK Rowling's trans exclusionary sexual violence support service. JK Rowling threw a shit fit and got Amnesty to take the report down by threatening libel. This was obviously not enough, because you can't appease a fascist, so now she's going to bankroll a bunch of lawsuits anyway through the JK Rowling Women's Fund.*
You can read an archived version of the report here, please save it and share it.
*Not so friendly reminder there is no way to engage in the wizard books without enabling this shit.
The idea of âbut everyone knows thatâ needs to stop.
I saw a post about someone chiding Millennials for not knowing about JKRowlings transphobia, and asking how it is at all possible that people can exist in the world and the internet and, you know, not know.
Which I mean, I get. It is so present in so many of my online spaces that it seems astounding that someone could simply be ignorant! It feels impossible!
But let me tell you a story:
I went on a girls trip with a bunch of friends. All of us are rather incredibly liberal and all of us are incredibly online.
One girl would not stop talking about Harry Potter.
At one point, another girl asked her why she was ok with supporting it, and she had no real clue that JK Rowling was at all transphobic. She had heard that she likes to support Lesbian causes and thought âoh ok cool!â And that was it. She was AGOG with the news and rather horrified.
I must once again emphasize that she was an incredibly online person. Sheâs a foodie and a restaurant blogger.
Later in the trip we were picking restaurants and I suggested one I found on Google, and she gasped at me. Actually gasped, asking how I could ever be okay picking that one.
The shock mustâve been on my face, because she then told me all of the shitty things that restaurateur does. He abuses staff. Underpays them. Fires them on a whim. Is known for being one of the worst people to his employees in the entire restaurant business on this coast.
And she was so shocked I had never heard of this. Because in her mind, I was just as online as her. And in her online world, EVERYONE knew about this guy.
So I think the moral of this story is: always approach the other person with some empathy. Even online people, even people you think MUST know about how bad people are, may not have heard. It may truly be just them being on a different sphere of the internet than you.
So be gentle, be kind when letting people know they might not have heard about the cancellation of XYZ person. Donât assume that everyone knows all the same info as you.
By all means, let them know so they can make informed decisions, but being kind will go a lot further than attacking them for some info they might not know yet.
Serious explanation here: she's teaching them the instinct of being alert around enclosure openings! For example, if these were wild cats living in a bush, they'd run the risk of a larger predator running up to the opening and grabbing one of them. The mother cat is also only bapping them lightly without claws, so those slaps are more of an annoyance meant to get the kittens' attention, and to teach them to keep their eyes out for potential threats.
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amandla
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