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first post for context / see the tag 'open relationship au' for more snippets or the masterlist so kindly put together by @tafkarfanfic. it's time <3 (or is it...?)
July 2015
Shane texts Brian that he had an unexpected brand opportunity come up and that he'll be out of town for a few days. Then he books it to his cottage.
It's maybe cowardly but just this once, Shane thinks he's fine being a coward. The thought of seeing Brian right now makes him feel uneasy, like being on the ice without any padding. The version of himself who thought he could love Brian again seems like a stranger to him now. Shane doesn't want to become him again but he can't trust his own judgment, so. Safer to stay away.
Being alone in the cottage helps him gain some equilibrium, even though the closer it gets to Ilya's plane touching down in Montreal, the slower time seems to pass and the more Shane feels like clawing his skin off.
He still kind of can't believe Ilya offered to come. It makes him oddly giddy thinking about it, sets off a flutter in his stomach like he's some teenager with a crush.
Rose said you should stay single, he reminds himself. But then, She doesn't know Ilya, though. She wouldn't have said that if she knew him.
God, he really is turning into a teenager.
It should feel scarier, considering his track record. Shane has no rational explanation for why it doesn't. Why, despite everything, Ilya feels so safe to him.
The day Ilya arrives in Montreal, Shane drives back home feeling miraculously calm. It's like locking in for a game, he reasons. He knows the play, knows he has teammates backing him up, so now he just has to execute it.
Shane beats Ilya to the apartment by a couple of hours. He experiences a brief moment of panic when he hears a knock on the door, a vivid imagine of Brian standing on the other side popping up in his head.
It's Ilya, of course, which does nothing to slow Shane's heart rate but does make his stomach swoop funnily.
"Hey," he says, breathless.
"Hey," Ilya replies softly. He looks a little bit shell-shocked, eyes scanning Shane's face like he can't believe he's real.
Shane wants to kiss him so bad.
But first thing's first.
Ilya doesn't join him for the actual breakup. Even Shane, with his compromised judgment, recognizes how crazy that would be. He stays in the car outside, which shouldn't be a problem because Shane doesn't plan on letting this drag out.
"It'll be ten, maybe fifteen minutes," Shane tells him. His hands feel sweaty around the wheel of his car so he removes them, rubbing them on his pants. "If I'm not back in twenty, you can come in."
Ilya's eyebrows quirk. "That's quick."
"I can't do a whole confrontation," Shane says. "I just need to tell him it's over. I don't - I don't owe him anything more than that."
It feels kind of true. Shane counts that as progress.
"You don't," Ilya agrees.
He takes Shane's hand, squeezing it. Shane squeezes back, the touch grounding him.
His palm still feel warm as he's knocking on Brian's door.
It takes Brian twenty-seven seconds to answer. There's a surreal moment as he opens the door that Shane braces himself, expecting some flood of emotions, only for nothing to happen.
Shane is looking at his boyfriend of eight years and he feels nothing.
Then his eyes catch on the yellowing bruise on Brian's cheek and something does stir - a hollow kind of pain at the center of his chest.
He lied about that bruise so easily, his story seemingly designed to knock Shane off-kilter.
What else has he been lying about?
"You're back," Brian says once the door is closed. He smiles. "You know, you could have let yourself in. That's why I gave you a key."
"Right." Shane reaches into his pocket, fist closing around said key. "I actually - I came to give it back."
Brian blinks. "Give it back?"
"And to break up with you," Shane adds.
It slips out and Shane immediately regrets how flippant he sounds. Brian laughs, because of course he thinks it's a joke.
"You're fucking with me, right?"
"I'm not."
Shane tries to hand him the key. Brian's arms stay stubbornly at his side, smile sliding off his face. Finally, Shane puts the key down on the counter instead.
"You're fucking with me," Brian repeats shakily. "I don't - is this because of Vegas? I thought we were moving past it. Things have been good between us since we talked it out."
It's an unpleasant reminder of how differently they've been viewing this relationship. "Things haven't been good. I haven't been happy."
"Then you're not trying hard enough." Brian takes a step towards him, hand held out. Shane steps back. "Shane." His voice turns pleading. "Please, think it through. You can't give up on us just like that."
"This isn't a spur of the moment decision," Shane says. He really didn't mean to get into it but God. Has Brian always talked to him like this, like he's a stupid kid who doesn't understand his own heart? "I haven't been happy with you for a while."
"Is this because of Rozanov?"
Irritation shoots through Shane. "Fuck off."
"It is," Brian says, eyes heated. "We didn't start having problems until you started fucking him."
"And whose idea was that?" Shane snaps. He huffs, uncertain if he's more angry at Brian for making this so difficult or at himself for getting distracted. "It doesn't matter. I wasn't happy before we opened the relationship either. It's - you're not good for me. I don't think you ever were."
Brian laughs incredulously. "I get it. You need me to be the bad guy, huh?"
"That's not what I said."
"Might as well have. If I'm so awful, what does that make you? Why would you choose to be with someone who apparently makes you so miserable?"
"I was sixteen." Shane feels his shoulder hunching, feels the way he's making himself smaller, and forces himself to straighten. "I didn't know any better. You took advantage of that."
Brian goes still. "You're kidding me. That's your excuse?"
Shane's stomach twists. "It's not a fucking excuse."
"I didn't even know your age."
It didn't stop you once you found out, Shane almost responds. He can't. He feels exhausted all of a sudden, imagining going through every shitty thing Brian has done, having to argue every point and listen to Brian try to minimize it or pretend there wasn't any harm.
Shane doesn't want to do any of that. He just wants to get out of here.
He wants to see Ilya.
"I'm not gonna do this with you," he says. "It's over. We're broken up. Have a nice life, or whatever."
He turns to leave and Brian grabs his arm. Shane shakes him off unthinkingly and Brian flinches back at the force of it.
"Shane." Brian's demeanor has shifted completely, voice gone soft, eyes pleading. "Please. I can't lose you."
It's incredibly unkind, but Shane can't help but think he's being pathetic.
"I've hurt you," Brian continues, taking Shane's hesitation as some sign of his willingness to listen. "I understand. I never meant to, but I did and I'd do anything to make it up to you."
He's not even saying sorry. All of these theatrics and Brian can't even be bothered to apologize. Shane wonders if he even realizes it.
He shouldn't be entertaining this. He's not actually gonna forgive Brian. And still, "You could start by telling me the truth."
"The truth?" Brian echoes.
"How you really got that bruise," Shane suggests mildly. "Why you came to Vegas. Why you even suggested an open relationship in the first place, when you were fucking other people already."
He doesn't mean to let that last question slip but it's been eating at him since Rose suggested the possibility. He takes no pleasure in seeing Brian's face pale and knowing that she was right.
"Who have you been talking to?"
Shane wants to punch something. He wants to throw up. He didn't think it was possible for him to care so much when he doesn't even want Brian anymore, but it hurts all the same.
Rose was wrong. Shane is stupid. Naive and too trusting for his own good.
"It didn't mean anything," Brian is saying. His voice sounds far away. "It was a moment of weakness. You're the only one I love, the only one I've ever loved."
A sharp knock thankfully interrupts him. Before either of them can react the (apparently unlocked) door swings open.
"It's been twenty minutes," Ilya says. He shoots Brian a dismissive glance before focusing his attention on Shane. "Are you finished?"
Shane has never been happier to see him. "Yeah. Yeah, let's go."
"You can't be serious," Brian says weakly.
Shane ignores him. He reaches the door, allows Ilya to place his hand on the small of his back and guide him past the threshold.
Brian doesn't protests again. Maybe it's finally sinking in for him that it's useless. Maybe seeing Shane with Ilya made him stop wanting to try. Or maybe he fucking spontaneously combusted.
I saw a post of yours about Tintenherz about her loving whump and violence and such being at contrast with her being a childrens book author, but frankly, i think that's kind of the reason why she is such a successful childrens book author. That plus her vivid writing and world building. But to the main point: the world of children honestly has a lot of that, and having that in a childrens media makes that media something that kids absolutely love because it makes them feel seen.
I appreciate your posts because it gives me new perspectives on these books and inspires me to think about them!
You're very correct! The best children's books and children's stories are the ones that do not shy away from violence and other unpleasant things.
I was gonna disagree with you a little bit and talk about how whump (to me, at least) is not synonymous with fictional violence in general but rather, a specific type of fictional violence that serves specific reasons
but actually, you are completely right. Violence in children's stories, in good children's stories, often has a whumpy quality to it, because a good kid's story won't revel in or glorify it.
So yes, it makes complete sense that she'd love whump. Even her older books, written for a younger audience, often have a bit of a tragic element to it.
I think my definition of whump is more vague than yours so i defer to you on that but i find the discussion really interesting, and i agree about the portrayal in childrens stories. I feel like showing the impact of it is perhaps more important than the violence for making it meaningful to children.
Yeah absolutely about her books for younger kids too!
Also, side topic, something that really means a lot to me about Herr der Diebe is that it has a character that, validated by the narrative, escapes childhood and is much happier for it. You never get told that as a kid or ever, it's always "childhood is the best time in life" which is bullshit in my opinion. Or at least not possible to generalise like that.
Yes, very true! I'll admit, I did not really love Herr der Diebe that much, but that aspect of it was very cool. I think, maybe this all plays together: The validation of pain and suffering without glorifying it. Yes, childhood can be awful. Yes, horrible things happen, and you do not deserve them.
But you can survive. Things will get better when you grow up.
There's something about the inherent seriousness with which she (as all good authors of children's lit) approaches her characters, children and adults alike. How pain is never a joke to her, or something to be dismissed. How every one of her books feels like she's taking the audience extremely seriously, how she's never, never talking down to her readers, or trying to lecture them.
There's honestly not many authors of children's lit that approach their audience with the same respect as someone writing fiction for adults approaches theirs, but Funke is certainly one of them.
Omg yes this! Also, she brightens up that childhood with her stories and the magical colourful worlds which is also relevant to me. Her books were my absolute favourite as a kid, because the world felt so much brighter without compromising reality.
Throwback to when I was about 18 and I watched in real time as a trans guy I knew had his PTSD and anxiety manipulated against him by radfems as they groomed him into medically and socially detransitioning. We were in transmed spaces, so really he was only as nice as anyone could be in those cesspools, but I watched this generally funny and charismatic trans man that I looked up to deteriorate and detransition into a woman who was vocally just. bitter, jaded, miserable, constantly angry, constantly lashing out, and regularly relapsing both with self harm and substance abuse because the pain and dissociation that came with detransition was too much.
That was my wakeup call that I was laying with dogs and dangerously close to catching fleas.
There's a reason why you should never trust a radfem and it's because she would rather see you detransition and kill yourself in a hole of desperate dysphoria than let you live wholly as yourself.
Just so we're clear, the last thing that I had heard about this person several years ago was that she had detransitioned, became a TERF, and had attempted to take her life for the first time since before her transition.
I do not share this shit lightly. I'm using she/her here because that was what she was using last time I heard of her, but when this person was on T and surrounded by other trans people she was on several good clean streaks wrt both self harm and substances and was generally doing well. She was still struggling with her mental health but don't we all.
When she started hanging around radfems and detransitioned it triggered her suicidality so badly she tried to follow through for the first time in over a decade.
It is. There is nothing wrong with watching people have sex. The morality of it depends on the context (buying porn from sex workers to watch is good, revenge porn is bad, for example), but watching people fuck? That's morally neutral. It's just watching some activities.
Almost all porn is abuse, you know that right? Most women in porn are drugged and then raped.
Even if she were paid, it would still be coercive, similarly to prostitution. You cannot buy women, or their consent. That immediately creates a coercive force that makes the consent invalid.
Ok so first of all you're lying. That is not how most porn works at all.
Regarding economic coercion, that's called having a job. But also I promise you there is a world of difference between trying to buy a person (for the love of fuck will you people ever aknowledge its not only women in porn and work conditions are a concern for EVERYONE involved) and someone making a career in porn.
Also re read what I said because you have said nothing that argues against what im saying AT ALL.
The way these people talk about sex workers genuinely makes me sick. Sex workers are not being bought, they are not owned by people paying them. They are compensated for their services or performance, like every other worker. They own themselves no matter what. They deserve dignity and respect and their work not being described in such horrible fucking ways.
And it's genuinely fucked up to tell people what they can and cannot consent to tbh? You don't get to choose that for others and then try to say you genuinely care about consent. You just want to control people.
Absolutely right. We are people, we own ourselves, we decide what we do and don't want to do. Honestly if I attach the criteria of pay and a camera to my consent, denying me that is no less fucked up than forcing that on me.
Puritanical christians/radfems and rapists/traffickers are two sides of the same coin and all ultimately working towards the goal of ruining people's lives for their own benefit.
Also, it needs to be repeated again that stigmatization of sex work leaves trafficking victims trapped. They are now in an even more socioeconomically disadvantaged position than before because no one will want to help an "icky porn star" who is being exploited.
To help trafficked and coerced sex workers we necessarily must end the demonization of sex work or else you are giving traffickers the literal tools to force unwilling people into it!
One of my family members was sex trafficked. Her case became a part of state legal precedent because her trafficker's conviction resulted in an expanded definition of one of the terms used to define trafficking (kept vague for the sake of my family's anonymity.) You know what one of the biggest barriers was to her getting help?
The fact that everyone she reached out to saw her as a stupid meth head "whore" and not a person who was fucking afraid for her life.
If society had shown sex workers some basic amount of decency, she might have had the social standing to get help sooner.
I got to see a change in the criminal law, in real time, that shifted the window on how sex workers are treated in my state. Agencies that tended to treat them as perpetrators, even when they were victims, had their behavior changed the most. But even the more progressive police departments, and of course any number of labor- and benefit-related agencies, also got a few notches more understanding and accepting.
TL;DR: sex workers are people, sex work is work, and the road to utopia is paved with extremely boring legislation and administrative decisions.
this is such a simple point but god it needs to be repeated. i keep seeing even young, progressive people say "porn rots peoples brain" no!! misoginy rots peoples brains!! a video of people having sex consensually is literally fine!!
and not to become wokezilla but it has me sat the way bigotry and all of bad things a person can do continue to be Explained Away by speculating the bigot must have brain damage it be from porn or whatever, its not that bigotry benefits the bigot in society, it couldnt be that, otherwise everybody (including me!) could become a bigot, and im Morally Pure and Leftist, so bigots must have some immutable Sick In The Head quality that actually makes them act this way, it be from birth or from consumption of media that I Personally find immoral
En Anglais, on ne dit pas âquatre vingt dix neufâ, on dit âninety nineâ qu'on pourrait traduire comme âHurr durr, regardez mois, j'ai un système de numĂŠrotation fonctionnelâ et je crois que c'est magnifique.
Ilya always has a mop of frizzy wild curls at the cottage because
They're always in and out of the water â lake swims, pool swims, hot tub, showers â so doing his curl routine each time would be crazy when he could be spending that precious time sucking his boyfriend's dick.
Shane's not the biggest fan of how Ilya's styling products feel. He'll tolerate it, but Ilya can tell by his face that the texture isn't his favourite. Less product = more hair touching.
Shane's hands are always in his hair. When they're kissing. When they're watching a movie. When they fuck. When Ilya sits with his head in Shane's lap. When they're napping on the couch together. Shane's hands are usually full of a handful of Ilya's curls.
Shane seems to really like it. One time Shane said Ilya's fluffy hair made him look like a duckling and he's been chasing that high ever since.
He just prefers this version of him that doesn't need to look perfect and be perfect to be loved and adored. Shane never makes him feel lazy for letting his hair get a little wild over summer. He kisses his temples and tells him he's so fucking beautiful.
"I can't believe humans would hunt the thylacine to extinction, humans are fundamentally evil" Hey, did you know that extinction was long thought to be impossible, and within 50 years of humans realizing that extinction via overhunting was a possibility it practically stopped happening? Did you know that humans are so desperate to prevent more losses that they're funneling millions of collective hours and billions of euros into helping other species? Hours and euros that could be spent on humans, and species on whom humanity's own survival does not depend? Did you know that due to an accidental introduction of rats, the Lord Howe Island stick insect population was brought down to 24 individuals and now there are tens of thousands of them?
This bug. This bug that, to most humans, is utterly useless, relatively gross, and completely foreign. Humans saved it because humans do not want to cause another extinction ever again if they can avoid it.
Too many people on Tumblr never moved past their edgy highschool reverse misogyny phase and now are on here saying the same things there dad says about women but about trans men, intersex men, black and brown men, and disabled men, but thinking there being cool and progressive not just like... an asshole
this book is out now!!! it's a short read, less than 200 pages, and it's SO good. i literally had to pause halfway through just to send the author a message about how much i liked it. definitely leans more utopian than scientific, but that makes sense given the format, and i think it has a lot of good things to say.
once you really start thinking about how restrictive the world is for children and how many bullshit justifications we retroactively come up for it all the time, you can't stop seeing it everywhere. this book makes a good case for including children in our political efforts not as rhetorical devices but as an actual class of oppressed people.
Deciding on an outcome that feels right to you & then throwing money at it until it magically becomes true is a great approach to medical science, idk why you'd ever want to do it any other way
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 Politicsâ˘ď¸, 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 NĂşmenor 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.
Iâm not trying to play devilâs advocate about the Tolkien and race post, I agree with most of what youâre saying about the denial. But modern non fiction Marxist critics forget one thing that hopefully fandom doesnât, 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 itâs important to acknowledge the biases in his writing, but not decide it as intentional, because heâs 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 doesnât make the text less racist but itâs an important thing to consider. Thatâs all, I agree with your other points.Â
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 Iâm snowed under atm â ď¸
So thereâs a lot of talk about Tolkien being âof his time and classâ but precious little about what that environment actually looked like other than comparing him to his fellow religious conservative Oxford dons. âOf his timeâ is not a neutral statement and it certainly isnât applicable to Tolkien, but more importantly, ânorms of his timeâ seem to often be, in this fandom, calibrated to âwhat Tolkien saidâ rather than âwhat was actually happening thenâ.
Anyway, I will try to be a little more direct than in that last post. So the âthe fundamentally racist elements of the legendarium are because Tolkien was a man of his timeâ 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 Moodyâs 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 whatâs more likely than âthe legendarium is the way it is with regards to race because Tolkien didnât know any such antiracist thought existedâ is that âthe legendarium is the way it is with regards to race specifically because Tolkien did know such antiracist thought existedâ.
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 sharkyâs minion gangs in scouring of the shire were called the hobbiton majlis or something, i would probably start cooking peopleâs cats
Anyway, Iâm so tired of how âof 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.Â
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 donât 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 âunconscious biasâ 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 đ
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 ânormal people not kings of menâ 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 NĂşmenor "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 Faramirâs entire speech about greater and lesser men, and the âchildless lords sit alone while barbarians bay at the gatesâ 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 âbirthright citizenshipâ as a consequence of a personâs 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 âmigrant criminalityâ discourse, how can you say he didnât anticipate the rise of postcolonial global migration đ
(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 FĂŤanorians are fucking ISIS, and i certainly am not saying that the exiled Noldor are the equivalent of stateless refugees, so pls donât jump up my ass đ)
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 Menâ˘ď¸ 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. Itâs not a borrowed aesthetic! The entire legendarium runs on this logic!Â
Once again, and this is also re: a few reblogs of my original post that take a similar route, what do you mean âhe did not anticipate a world where migration is the normâ??? đThe legendarium isnât 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 âhis timeâ kept moving and the foundational elements of the legendarium didnât.Â
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 didnât have the capacity to scrutinise race to the level he does â ď¸
Anyway I think where the fandom focus on âunconscious 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 heâs hit. Which is to say, the insistence on âTolkien was of his time and his time was badâ being the chosen interpretive lens is less a claim about âthe timeâ Tolkien existed in than it is a claim about us as a fandom today.Â
On a vaguely related note, I also think âthis fandom gives grace to the authorâ 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 youâre in (and a towards Christopher LMFAOOO) never have I been in a fandom that consistently deifies the creator to this extent, and itâs doubly baffling considering that he isnât 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.Â
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 âgrateful to the author for this wonderful worldâ 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 âwhy the fuck did you do this? what the fuck is wrong with you? did you hate twelve year old me personally?âÂ
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.
People love to defend TMA/TME as a meaningful category by comparing it to BIPOC, which on the surface makes sense. BIPOC and TMA are both used to categorize minority groups that are at incredible risk of violence, and BIPOC in particular is widely accepted among any activist less racist than like. Ben Shapiro.
The only problem is the TME part. Because nonBIPOC isn't really a thing, is it? Because while black and indigenous people are grouped together by their at-risk status, no such commonality exists between everyone who isn't black or indigenous.
White people and arab people have the shared experience of not being black or indigenous, but not much else. There's no common interest or large-scale similarity that binds white people with arab people, or latino people, or any other racial minority. At best, any attempt to pretend they're one and the same is dumb as bricks, and at worst is a transparent attempt to paint a racial minority you don't like as being part of the oppressor class, and thus an acceptable target to punch "up" at.
But no, obviously TME is a very important term that definitely describes a coherent group of people. And also, that person posting about how nonBIPOCs are all illegal immigrants and terrorists and should all be killed is just complaining about their oppressors! They're literally punching up, or do you think white people are oppressed or something?
I continue to be fascinated by the logic of Word´s ongoing spell and grammar check issues. It currently marks this
as a potentially wrong word and suggests Blues instead, which makes zero sense in context, except for the fact that Rock in German can either mean skirt (like here) or the genre of music. And if it´s the genre of music, it would make sense to pair it with another genre, namely Blues. Bluse on the other hand means blouse, so this is also a very sensible and normal pairing of words, but the program makes me check, just in case.
On the other hand it is completely unable to flag that I had misspelled Quartier (lodgings) as Qaurtier, as if there is any word in the German language in which a q is not immediately followed by an u.
