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.
You know, an interesting tumblr transformation that's happened gradually, and which I've seen no one talk about: ask-culture has essentially dropped off to nothing.
By which I mean, asks used to be WAY more of the tumblr economy. They used to be more common to send, and receive, and see. They were integral to the collaborative, forum-like behavior of old tumblr communities, not even to speak on the HUGE number of ask-blogs that used to exist to only be interacted with in ask-form.
I'm not saying this in a vying-for-attention way but instead in an observational way: I used to get way way more asks in like 2015, even with a fraction of my follower count. I wonder if it's due to the homogenization of social media sites? There's a lot more of this divide between "content creator" and "consumer" instead of just a bunch of peer blogs who would talk to each other. "Asks" aren't really a thing on twitter, are they? And as I understand it, the closest thing to an "ask" on instagram or tiktok would be a creator screenshotting some comment and responding to it in a new reel or video or whatever those content mediums are. Are asks just too tumblr-specific? Is that aspect of the site culture dying out as more and more people converge to using all their social media sites in the same way?
it's probably from assholes making asks a minefield of trolling/harassment for years with no real blocking ability, which turned people off from allowing asks on their blogs so as a whole the site moved away from it
but now that we do have better blocking, we should try to revive it.
personally I'm annoyed by the socioeconomic conditions that made words like "unalive" necessary but simultaneously impressed by the linguistic adaptations young people have made to continue talking about important things while subject to those conditions and I think if you can't hold both of those thoughts in your head you might just be old man yelling at cloud
Two of my niblings (10 and 7) self-censor like this in real life during actual conversations. I tried briefly to explain to the 10-year-old that they didn't have to do that in real life after they said "unalive" out loud in casual conversation, and they just said they preferred to. On the one hand, I'm sad to see them unconsciously and fully without awareness succumbing to the panopticon. On the other... this post.
it's not unprecedented in the evolution of languages to see euphemisms adopted as synonyms or even supplanting earlier terms. lots of people say "passed away" even in situations where there would be no particular social cost to saying "died".
for a particularly strong version of this kind of replacement: the word "bear" comes from a proto-Germanic word meaning "brown one" because there was a taboo against saying the animal's actual name. the taboo is gone but it was so strong in the past that we have no record of what the proto-Germanic word for "bear" even was.
maybe in 300 years the word "die" will be archaic and kids will dig it out of an etymology textbook and start using it because "unalive" is getting censored.
I love asking people how their parents met. You always get an interesting reply. My best friend’s parents met on the relatively new internet in 1999. My other friend’s parents met at Burger King when one was the manager and the other was a regular customer. My parents met at the beach because they were neighbors in their rental houses, mom was on a church trip and dad was getting blackout drunk every night with his friends next door.
Aourg the toughest question of all times, I've already answered it, and I'll not make a new top 5 🥹
6: what books have you read in the last month?
I misread the question as "the last months", plural, so uh. I'm not deleting all that:
I've read Pride and Prejudice (twice) (It's my comfort read and I was very anxious about uni), but I've also read new books (to me):
She who became the sun, amazing read, looking forward to getting my hands on the second volume of the duology!!
Little Thieves, liked the story, but I've got beef with the choice of italicizing words that aren't in English but are *never* given an English translation. Like, either the narrator calls them that or she doesn't, she can't italicize them the whole novel. Stop stressing these words for nothing.
If We Were Villains, loved it! the use of Shakespeare, the drama, the closed setting, the suspense, the plot twists, lovely. Will read it again one day. I'm already recommending it to my best friend.
La Vie est à Nous, a political fiction about what if France had elected their Economy Nobel Prize winner as president, the guy who wants people to work only 20h a week. It's not a utopia, and I loved it.
In June I only read She Who Became the Sun, and I started reading Pride and Prejudice: a sourcebook (Routledge) and Les milliardaires ne paient pas d'impôt sur le revenu et nous allons y mettre fin, by Gabriel Zucman which I'm still currently reading, switching from one to the other.
Yesss. Already answered but I also like academic vulgarisation. Or Introductory books to concepts / subjects I haven't studied or didn't understand when I was in class :D
12: did you enjoy any compulsory high school readings?
Luckily, I did! I was in the Literature path in highschool, so I had a lot to read, and did not enjoy most of it, but there were some good ones.
From my French readings I enjoyed:
Le Quatrième Mur, Sorj Chalandon
Britannicus, Racine
Le Mariage de Figaro, Beaumarchais
There were also some poems, but I can't remember the title or the author...
In English I only remember The Oval Portrait, from Edgar Allan Poe, that we had to read for a reading comprehension test. We had semi-compulsory readings where we had to borrow a book in English from the school library, but we could choose which one from the collection. I read Love, Actually, and I did enjoy it but I knew the story from the movie already ahah
Omg that's so hard!!! I decided to put Whole series as "one book" because otherwise I just can't skfnskf also putting only fiction books because if I add non-fiction it's even harder. In no particular order other than when it came to mind:
Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen. truly my favourite book, I've read it like 6 times already, in 6 years.
The Hunger Games saga, Suzanne Collins
L'absence de l'auteur, Miriam Vieitez (also known as @girafeduvexin )
The London Charismatics saga, Jacquelyn Benson
Le Petit Prince, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
3: what is your favourite genre?
Dramaaaaa with a touch of fantasy.
7: is there a series/book that got you into reading?
Okay, the first book that got me into reading was like 365 stories (there was also one for February 29th for bissextile years!!), the stories were not very long, and it's the book my mum read me at night, one story a day, when I was learning how to read. So it's this read I progressively started reading with her, and then out loud on my own :D
7: is there a series/book that got you into reading?
As a child I had a subscription (thanks grandma <3) to a magazine called J'aime lire (literally: I like reading). In each magazine there was a full story, then small comics, and a serialised story. I loved these so much!
11: what non-fiction books do you like if any?
I absolutely like non-fiction books! One kind of those I like is autobiographical political essays. I don't think that's the official term but like. People who write about an aspect of their story to make a point about a societal issue. I dig that.
more cities for you... bordeaux, nantes, le havre? plus FREE SPACE: toulouse :D
!!
Haven't been to Le Havre yet, but I've exchanged Christmas Packages with friends from there dkdjcjqj
Bordeaux: I've spent a day there I think, like ten years ago. I like cities that are so near the sea or the Ocean, it's very pretty. It has the tramway, amazing. BUT its reputation as 2nd Paris makes it lose points.
Nantes: I'm actually there right now!!! Very nice city. I can't do much tourism sadly because I'm there for a Conference, might have some tourism time on Friday afternoon. There are so many parks!! trees!! Very walkable!! Benches often!! I like it very much. Although the busses and tramways are like untamed horses. You think they stop for you? wrong. jump in or it's over. Grab something before it starts again or it's your face on the floor. OH HAVE I MENTIONED free public transport on the weekend. I'm in love. The public transport can be wild for that price. I'll come back.
Toulouse: Love of my life <3 Well it's not an English city but it's mine <3 I didn't go there often when I was a child (except for the hospital, but that's not Toulouse much) but then I went to uni and now my life belongs there. It's the city where I became myself. I love its bricks, the colours. Not enough parks and trees, I'll say, but maybe I'm asking for too much. I love the independent shops and the cafés and there's always something to do, something to see. The Natural History Museum is my favourite, mostly because my grandma would always bring us (me and my brothers) there when we were younger, so it reminds me of her, and I haven't seen the other museums much. The subway stations are announced in Occitan as well as French and the signalisation is also in Occitan (street names) and there are some Occitan shops and events and that is precious to me.
London - love of my life. Probably too costly for me to ever live there, and also because of the Brexit I wouldn't even consider it, but I've always felt soooo good being there. I've been there 3 times: first with my mum, doing a HP tourist tour, very fun, I got to see Van Gogh paintings at the National Gallery 🥰 Second time on a school exchange, I saw Phantom of the Opera. I didn't understand much at all but they had good music dkdkjfd third time I came on my own to visit a friend and it was lovely <3 I especially love how common it is to see squirrels there. Even saw a fox once! I've always wanted to go to England, since I was like. 8yo. So going to London was the accomplishment of that dream and I thought I might be disappointed but not at all! A shame it's so far away.
Oxford - Went there with my host family in 2020! I thought it was beautiful but also it had that weird thing of— I've seen that in movies what do you mean it's real. The libraries are BEAUTIFUL. I wish my uni had that old timey look ngl
Paris - I have been there twice and don't feel any need to go back because I'm from the country and Paris is the enemy. But tbh I wish I'd visited some museums and been to some plays. I was disappointed by the Eiffel tower dlfnskfn I enjoyed the part where I walked through some streets that were mentioned in novels I'd read, kind of like London! but mostly I wasn't very happy about being there, unlike London.
Lyon - not yet! I've heard of it because (aside from being the 3rd/4th biggest city, in an eternal battle with Toulouse) I have friends that have lived there. Not necessarily a city on my list of cities to visit, I haven't heard much to recommend it.
The hard part about trying to stay on top of school work when you went all of high school doing the bare minimum and still passing is understanding what you limits are when you study. Like, how long can I study for before I get tired? Do I prefer to study/do school work before of after work? What helps me retain information more and what makes me retain less? This is so important for college students to know about themselves, hell even those in the workforce.
I discovered that I don't like studying after work because I feel tired, so I have to wake up early enough to get at least an hour of studying in before work (if I work from 3pm-9pm), but I can study/do homework if I work the morning shift (like 8am-4pm) since I can take a 30 min-1 hour nap and wake up energized to work!
For studying, I think the length for how long I can study for greatly depends on the task and subject! If I really enjoy the topic (theatre, psychology, physics, law and ELA) I can do work on it for HOURS!!! But topics that are less fun or interesting to me (anatomy, speech, math) I can only work for 1 to 2 hours, before I burn out...
However I do well at retaining information if I do commentary on it or relate to am interest of mine (or even incorporating the topic into jokes if I can). Something seems funny to me? Point it out and ponder what's funny about it! Something appears as strange? Talk about what's strange about it and figure out how to make the topic less foreign! You could also treat it as a podcast or a stream you're doing. I like to pretend I'm interacting with chat when I'm doing or reviewing work.
Anywho! Find out what works for you guys so you can flourish in both academics and work!! ૮₍´｡ᵔ ꈊ ᵔ｡`₎ა
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