yep

[queer-antics]

I am obsessed with the juxtaposition of these shots. From the glamour of the gilded bathroom in Russia where he is physically distancing himself from the people in the room. Versus, the emotional intimacy in the small grimy bathroom with Shane. Its incredible visual storytelling.

[deepetch]

This is awesome on so many levels.

Ladies and Gentlemen i present to you John Carpenter’s The Thing, as performed by the claymated, Antarctic cast of the hit children’s animation Pingu. Directed by Lee Hardcastle, in under 3 minutes. Noot, Noot.

[junkyardddog]

Oh my fucking god.

[queerkreep-deactivated20161009]

JESUS CHRIST

[sixthrock]

I’m still amazed at how they got a “noot noot” to sound so much like a “fuck you”

[kyoshi-lesbians]

my controversial opinion is I don’t think Zuko was confused by “my first girlfriend turned into the moon”

[kyoshi-lesbians]

he was there during siege of the North. he infiltrated the spirit oasis. he has an uncle who studies spirits and the spirit world. he watched the sky go dark then the moon suddenly reappear like everyone else in the entire world did. and most importantly he watched zhao get eaten by a giant godzilla fish spirit.

[kyoshi-lesbians]

his entire life since he saw that beam of blue-white light in the south pole has been ‘this day has already been so goddamn weird’

[edgar-allan-possum]

The only really new information was that that was Sokka’s girlfriend

[library-graffiti]

Important opinion in the tags that I need to have be part of the post:

[clearascountryair]

Also, Iroh was there? He literally watched Sokka make out with the moon spirit. And you want to tell me that a romantic sap like him would not have immediately told Zuko about this romantic tragedy? Please, Zuko has known about this for ages, he just knows that this is not an acceptable situation in which to say “yeah, I know.”

[nuancecomprehender]

my life isnt perfect but at least im not doing a mans laundry

[disgustinggf]

[holymagdalenes]

"There's no hope for the future." And that's how they felt during the Atomic Age, during the World Wars, during the Enlightenment Revolutions, during thr plagues, during the Viking raids, during the fall of Rome.

Yet, we persisted.

[ave-immaculata]

[letmetakeastabatit]

CS Lewis had something to say about this

[angie-words]

Been feeling a bit hopeless of late. Wasn't expecting to stumble across a quote that would fundamentally alter my perspective and make me cry during my lunch break but here we are

[outrageousring5655]

This is an excellent sentiment.

[x-creature-feature-x]

when i was 10 same sex marriage was legalised in england and wales. that summer i went to so many weddings. there were weeks i went to a wedding every single day, some days we had to choose which wedding to go to. i loved it cuz i got to dress up and hang out w a bunch of happy ppl and eat food and dance. when i see that quote abt how gay ppl during the aids crisis had to choose between funerals it reminds me of that summer. of how far weve come and how far we still have to go. hiv is now controllable with a pill once a day. only 6 ppl have ever been cured of aids. the uk wasnt hit nearly as hard by hiv/aids as other countries like it, partly cuz of a massive public information campaign. 20,000 ppl still died. i went to so many 10 year anniversary parties last year.

[campmiasmas]

MEGAN LAWLESS as SARAH HARPER OBSESSION (2025) dir. Curry Barker

[prokopetz]

You'd think "don't use a fictional creature as an allegory for oppressed minorities and as a horde of vile automatons that it's always okay to kill in the same work at the same time" would be a no brainer, but roughly 70% of all works featuring goblins and/or robots demonstrate otherwise.

[bicokun]

Star Wars using this exact formula with droids blows my mind to this day. Like, they really can’t decide whether they’re actually an oppressed group or genuinely mindless automatons whose inner lives we don’t need to worry about.

[prokopetz]

Given that Solo: A Star Wars Story features a droid liberation activist who's very obviously characterised as a mean-spirited parody of a women's rights activist and whose concerns are consistently treated as misguided and laughable (before they blow her up and use her brain to repair a spaceship), I'm not sure it's that the writers can't decide so much as it that they don't want to say what they really think out loud.

[balrogballs]

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.

[jennelikejennay]

Wow, this puts into words a lot of things that have been sloshing around in my mind a very long time.

I grew up in a similar soup to Tolkien's, especially in college, surrounded by people who really did believe in this stuff. If you read a lot of primary sources (as he did) you can hardly miss that throughout recorded history, people really did think that stuff like courage, laziness, criminality, even good and evil were inherited. And you can grow up today in a not-actively-racist home and kind of keep the two worldviews sitting uncomfortably in your head: on the one hand, people come in tribes that are actually predictive of what they're like as people, and on the other hand, you should not be mean to Black people. It's kind of like how you read a lot of fantasy about people's homelands and the long history and lore of the place where they are, while living on stolen land. It sits in the fantasy and lore part of your mind, where you don't reflect on it because you don't think it drives your actions in real life.

But in fact it is not true, not on a fact level nor on a symbolic, mythical level; if it feels true the reason is probably that you read a lot of fantasy where it's heavily baked into almost everything.

I think it's very easy, when Tolkien is criticized, to defend him because we're really defending ourselves. It can't be racist because I would have noticed if it was. He can't have been racist because I unconsciously agreed with him as I was reading, I lived in that world where race determined everything, and if that's racist then I'm a little racist and I'm nottt. Like him, I can believe race is real on a mythic level but act like it's not real in my day to day life, right?

But I don't think you can have these things in the mythic basement of your mind and not have them affect your actions at all. Myths have power, surely that's one true thing Tolkien taught us.

At the time when I realized this, I ended up simply abandoning fantasy altogether. I couldn't find a way to save it, because all the fantasy I had ever read was based on some folklore or other, from a time when people did believe this stuff. Without kings, without bloodlines, without magic tribes, what's left?

Science fiction can leave these problems behind, because it takes zero workarounds to imagine that space would be diverse, I'm not borrowing anything specific from the past, disproven theories can naturally be left behind in favor of fresh science. But in retrospect I didn't really have to ditch fantasy, I've since seen it done very well. You just have to ditch Tolkien. You can't write a Tolkien knockoff without either copying over the racism or seriously diverging from the way he built his world.

I think it's possible to have compassion for Tolkien as a guy who wanted a national myth and wanted to write about groups of people the way people in the past did, and also thought he could be kind in real life to real people. But I think he was wrong about that. I think these myths do drive a lot of awful, if not in his own actions, certainly in the actions of people inspired by him.

How to engage with Middle-earth without adopting that myth is beyond me. I do think it can be done, there are certainly people that do. But like OP says, it's got to go far beyond throwing a few Black elves in there.

[thirdity]

“You write the beginning and then you go back and rewrite the beginning, and you never got off page one. It’s kind of a syndrome, and I have a rash piece of advice which is — Go on, page two, page three, and never look back. Get something finished, no matter how lousy it is. […] Perfectionists cannot get going unless they kind of do violence to their own instincts, and just blast ahead.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin, The Last Interview and Other Conversations

[currentlycryingaboutlancelot]

hamlet’s “i did love you once” and ophelia’s “indeed, my lord, you did make me believe so” is such an underrated gut punch. it’s betrayal it’s heartbreak it’s vulnerability it’s so over. truly no one is doing it like shakespeare

[love-ardour-anarchism]

“If you deny any affinity with another person or kind of person, if you declare it to be wholly different from yourself—as men have done to women, and class has done to class, and nation has done to nation—you may hate it, or deify it, but in either case you have denied its spiritual equality, and its human reality. You have made it into a thing, to which the only possible relationship is a power relationship. And thus you have fatally impoverished your own reality.” Ursula K. Le Guin "American SF and The Other" in Science-Fiction Studies 7, 1975.

[yeyinde]

Collins is gone.

Namaygoosisagagun First Nation/Collins has burned to the ground. The entire community is nothing but ashes after being quickly consumed by wildfires. They did not have any support from emergency services, and no one offered aid. The community saved themselves by escaping into boats because no one came.

Mishkeegogamang and Cat Lake have lost power. Families are ending up in shelters with nothing. Armstrong, Lac La Croix, Whitesand, Gull Bay, Lac des Mille Lacs are currently in the fires path and all members are being evacuated.

All this loss, all this devastation, and it was entirely preventable.

After steadily underfunding wildland firefighting and purposefully excluding Indigenous wildland firefighters and Indigenous wildfire organizations from wildfire operations, firefighter training, decisionmaking, and resource exchanges, in 2025, Doug Ford slashed the forest firefighting budget.

It's hard to ignore his decision to cut funding and leave us out of adequate fire training (even though we've lived with forest fires for thousands of years—far longer than settlers have been in Canada—and made sure fires like the ones we're all seeing today were prevented through kinisitotēn) when, despite making up less than 5% of the population, we account for 42% percent of all wildfire evacuations in Canada.

And when we are successfully evacuated, we face discrimination and racism—like Kashechewan—because it's always been easier to blame us than it is to blame the true culprit: denialism, corportate greed, and colonization.

The people of Collins and every other impacted community deserve better.

Right now, the AFN is currently accepting donations to help Collins First Nation. If you're able to, please consider donating.

ONWA (Ontario Native Women's Association) is another great place to donate to. They have outreach vans going to motels and inns and offering food, water, resources, and cultural support to those impacted by the wildfires.

Other places to consider donating to are Mikinakoos Emergency Fund, Red Cross, True North Aid, Indigenous Climate Action. You can also send donations directly to Whitesand First Nation via e-transfer ([email protected]) and they request that you add your full name in the e-transfer comment section to receive a tax receipt.

*Before sending money, verify that the appeal appears on an official First Nation, Tribal Council or registered charity channel.

If you can't offer financial support, please consider donating items of need. Moontime Connections is currently accepting drop-off donations. If you live in the Thunder Bay area, Namaygoosisagagun Health Office is also taking in donations! They can also bemailed to Superior Inn Hotel & Conference Centre at 555 West Arthur Street, Thunder Bay, ON, P7E 5P8.

items needed are: food, diapers, medical masks, men’s and women’s joggers (all sizes), children’s clothing (newborn to size 14), children’s shoes, summer clothing, men’s clothing, toiletries (lotion, Vaseline, toothpaste, toothbrushes, shampoo, conditioner, soap, deodorant, etc.), strollers, adult depends-all sizes, dog & cat food

wīya ispīh iyiniw-kiskīyihtamowin pasikōpayiki kāwi askiy ta-iyihyīmakan

[aaaangel444]

[heyfruitcake]

Now that everyone is discussing Nolan's Odyssey movie, I feel like it's a good time to let non-Italians know that the production dumped plastic props into the Italian sea. Weirdly enough I could not find any article in English about it but it's a fucking problem nonetheless.

I might translate this article later today. This one was the most complete one, even in Italian news it's not talked about that much.

L'Odissea di Nolan tra "scheletri spazzatura" e relitti: Arpa al lavoro in Sicilia, che succede

Non è la prima volta che la produzione solleva un vespaio in Sicilia. A Lipari una squadra di sub sarebbe però già impegnata a bonificare i

[ignitelimelight]

They dumped plastic skeletons in environmentally protected areas, against the literal contracts they had to sign to get the permits to film in environmentally protected areas. Like they not only did a bad ecological thing that freaked out some divers, they literally broke environmental protection laws and their contract with the Italian government

[fuckyeahdavidandyonatan]

They also filmed in illegally occupied territories in western sahara

'Cultural parasites': Calls for boycott of The Odyssey over filming in occupied Western Sahara

Sahrawi filmmakers criticise Christopher Nolan for complicity in Moroccan exploitation of Sahrawi land

[ymutate]

Brian Haberlin (American, born 1963)

Pygmalion, 2025

Watercolor on paper

21 × 14 in (53.3 × 35.6 cm)

Private collection

[naamahdarling]

Watercolor??????