One woman and her cat (went to watch some sci-fi)

Star Trek, Doctor Who, Dracula and whatever else takes my fancy. Romanathethird on AO3.

[obscureau]

personally I DONT think Jane Austen intended for Mr. Bennet to be paying Mrs. Bennet a genuine compliment when he said she was as beautiful as any of their daughters. He seems kind of incapable of paying his wife a real compliment.

BUT

I still think we should have MILF Mrs. Bennet. I think everyone should be like “damn” when they see her and then she opens her mouth and they’re like “oh”. I want them to go through the same process Mr. Bennet did, in a much shorter time frame.

[pmamtraveller]

"Break Free," created by artist Disha Dua.

[the-punforgiven]

Strip poker at the knights order sucks ass this shit takes forever and we're running out of space on the table

Guy next to me took off one bessagew and you can't even see their face but you can feel their smug-ass grin beneath it

[loth-caatgirl]

[literallyjustaspider-deactivate]

[a-silly-poll-side-blog-yay]

was your pet expensive to get?

yes

no

not the most expensive but not the cheapest either

for free

it was a gift

found it outside

traded for something

results

Remaining time: 3 days 9 hours

[clementine-kesh]

the more i think about gandalf the more i like him. like yes he’s a very wise and powerful wizard but he’s also very cheeky and sometimes you can tell he’s using his reputation to mask the fact that he doesn’t know what the fuck is going on, which is very endearing. it’s good character building. i think a lot of the time characters who are written to be super wise and powerful end up feeling kind of flat because they’re lacking that bit of nuance that signals to the reader that ok, despite how awe inspiring this character is they’re still a person with some parsable degree of interiority

[clementine-kesh]

also it makes your world feel a lot bigger and scarier when the narratively confirmed most wise and powerful guy out there is sometimes a little scared too

[annabelle--cane]

yknow I'm feeling a bit brave so I will venture to say what this blighted essay's pitch actually is: reading project hail mary (novel and film) as a ravishment fantasy. in both main threads of the narrative grace is brought wildly out of his element and pulled into the orbit of a mysterious foreign stranger who is significantly stronger / richer / more powerful than him, forced to accept unsolicited lavish gifts and personal praise despite protests and discomfort, and made to live in isolated locations in extremely close proximity to these people with no say in the matter, all of which are common motifs in ravishment fantasies. on her own, stratt also brings in other common motifs of restraints, drugging, being above the law, multiple kidnappings (I'm doing crazy things with the classical definition of "rape" as in "abduction" and its shared etymology with "rapture" as in "being taken to the heavens"), and the very specific yet still common motif of "otherwise trustworthy partner goes too far and doesn't take 'no' for an answer." rocky on his own brings in the overprotective flavor common to a lot of dark romance novel heroes, i.e. "I make sure you sleep and I like to watch you while you do it, I make sure you eat enough even if you've got baggage about it, I make inhuman displays of strength when you're injured, and as long as I'm around I'll make sure nothing bad ever happens to you ever again."

the issue I was running into with researching this a few weeks ago is that almost all of the scholarly writing on the content of people's forced-sex fantasies focuses solely on women's fantasies and starts with the research question of "why would women enjoy imagining such a horrible misogynistic thing?" despite surveys often showing that men have force-fantasies (where they are the one being forced) at very comparable rates to women. my hypothesis for a bit was "either men's fantasies are exactly the same as women's or they're completely different in [x] way," which was disproven interestingly when I did finally find something about men's force-fantasies: in content they are almost exactly the same as women's fantasies but the emotional motivations are often different in [y] way, which I hadn't expected. and [y] also super applies to my buddy ryland, perhaps even more than my original [x] hypothesis.

my hopes for writing this are twofold: a) to address the question I sometimes see phm audience members come away with of "if grace likes his life by the end and doesn't seem that mad about all of that, is the message supposed to be 'violation of bodily autonomy is good, actually?'", and b) to lightly resist one of the prevailing notions in the study of forced-sex fantasies, that ravishment fantasies are solely abstracted and fantastical and pleasurable and are completely 100% separate from fearful paranoid imaginings of / flashbacks to realistic sexual violence.

[annabelle--cane]

oh also: the most common interpretation of why people have ravishment fantasies is that it allows the fantasist to disavow a desire they feel ashamed of because, in the fiction of the forcing, they don't *want* it at all, they're being made to do whatever it is and can't be considered at fault. as I allude to in my final paragraph of the original post, I think it's a tad more nuanced, but there's definitely a lot of truth to that. grace can tell stratt that he's not smart or important or capable or brave or selfless enough to do what she wants, but she'll ignore it, make him do it anyway, and kit him out with skilled staff members and expensive lab equipment and coffee just the way he likes it. it's a fantasy of being respected and heroic and good whether he likes it or not.

with rocky, the fantasy is of being forced to be loved and protected. rocky decides to initiate contact, he decides that he's moving into the hail mary, he decides that he's always going to watch grace sleep even if grace says he doesn't need it, he decides to gift grace the fuel to get home even when grace pretends he doesn't want it, and he decides he's not going to let grace die to save him even when grace says he's made his choice. the two scenarios allow grace to experience the rewards of being selfless without needing to be so gauche as to ever say he thinks he's that good of a person AND to experience the rewards of being selfish without saying he thinks he deserves to be cared for.

[amnesiaguy]

so ummm welcome to my jar:) lemme show you around! theres some holes poked in the top so i can breathe, theres some leaves to munch on, and ive even got a twig! #mytwig

[amnesiaguy]

weird as hell, thank you for asking

[victusinveritas]

[coginthemachine]

kindred spirits with our fave trade school alum

[thethirdromana]

Books I read for the first time in 2026

(2025, 2024, 2023)

In previous years I've posted this all in one go at the end of the year, but I'm thinking this year it might be more fun to just add to the thread as I finish each book. So let's go.

Breaking the Lore by Andy Redsmith This was a tumblr recommendation from goodness-knows-when. It's the Met Police with fantasy creatures, which makes it a lot like the Rivers of London series in content, if not in execution. This was lighter, sillier, and perfect for the tedious train journey that I read it on. I'm not sure if I care enough about the main character to read more of the series, though.

[thethirdromana]

Sea People by Christina Thompson I thought this was going to be a history of Polynesia. It's not; it's primarily a history of how Polynesian prehistory was uncovered, from initial queries by European explorers, through to investigating Polynesian oral history, right up to modern genetic analysis and experimental archaeology. That makes for quite a Eurocentric story, and while that was mostly unavoidable, I did find myself wishing that the author had found more space for Polynesian voices, sensitively written as it was. Still, a fascinating read.

[thethirdromana]

The Last Murder at the End of the World by Stuart Turton So conflicted about this one. On the one hand, it's inventive, twisty and meticulously plotted, and I'm impressed at how well all the complex strands of mystery at the start of the novel resolve by the end. On the other hand, the characters are flat and unconvincing, and the writing style was just plain bad; Turton never met an adverb he didn't like. I enjoyed this, but I'm frustrated it wasn't as good as perhaps a more energetic editor could have made it.

[thethirdromana]

The Book of Ile-Rien by Martha Wells This is an omnibus of two novels, set a couple of hundred years apart in the fantasy world of Ile-Rien - the first straight-up swords and sorcery, the second Victorianish intrigue. Both were great fun, though they could both have been 100 pages shorter without much harm being done. As ever, Wells' characters are great, and I particularly enjoyed how grounded and mature the romantic relationships felt in these novels.

[thethirdromana]

The Hands of the Emperor by Victoria Goddard Deeply frustrating book. The first third sets up a story of a devoted civil servant, Cliopher Mdang, trying to get the all-powerful Emperor he works with to relax and take a holiday. It's another "area man doesn't realise how much he is loved" storyline: sweet, gentle, delightful, with some interesting stuff about how Cliopher's island culture meshes - or doesn't - with that of the heart of the court. But the remainder is 500 increasingly tedious pages where Goddard tells us at length how brilliant Cliopher is in every aspect of his life, seasoned with anyone who doubts him getting their swift comeuppance. If Goddard had allowed her hero to have even a couple more flaws, this would have been a vastly better read.

[thethirdromana]

The Teixcalaan Series (A Memory Called Empire and A Desolation Called Peace) by Arkady Martine I didn't intend to read two books/series in a row that took the intersection of empire and cultural identity as their key theme, but here we are. The Teixcalaan duology does this vastly better than The Hands of the Emperor, not least because Arkady Martine remembers that imperialism is bad, and unlike Victoria Goddard, doesn't imply that it's probably OK as long as the empire in question has enough respect for minority cultures. The characters are wonderfully vivid and the worldbuilding, particularly around Teixcalaanli culture, is fabulous. The second book was maybe a shade more self-indulgent than the first, but you know what, the first was so good that I feel like Martine earned it.

[thethirdromana]

All the parenting books Going to pop this under a cut as it's a) long and b) probably not of general interest.

I accept that it's kind of weird to write reviews of parenting books before the baby has even made an appearance. But I have opinions already, and also I thought it might be interesting to write them down now and then see how much they change on actually putting any of this stuff into practice.

Modern Attachment Parenting by Jamie Grumet "Can I send you some parenting books?" a friend of mine asked when I told him I was pregnant. "Sure," I said. "But what I'd really like is something super practical and actionable, not the kind of thing that's just going to be vague and make me feel guilty for not living up to its standards." So he sent me this, which is about as vague and guilt-inducing as it is possible for a parenting book to be.

Maybe if you're from a culture where people tell you that cuddling the baby too much will spoil them, this is a valuable antidote. But I'm not, and it's also an incredibly, and I suspect needlessly, intensive way to do parenting, particularly for mothers (for all that Grumet insists her advice is gender-neutral), which is where the guilt comes in. There was a point about halfway through where the author talks about her pet serval, and I thought, thank fuck, I can ditch this. I would not take advice on any other topic from someone who thinks it's a good idea to combine a pet wildcat and a vulnerable human baby, so why would I take her advice on parenting?

Nor would my friend, incidentally. He and his partner did less than half of this stuff with their daughter. I still don't know why he thinks this was a good book to send me.

Cribsheet by Emily Oster I read and liked Oster's 'Expecting Better' on pregnancy, though it wasn't much use to me in the end: I've stuck quite happily with zero alcohol and minimal coffee, the biggest areas where she disagrees with NHS recommendations, and she did affirm what the NHS says about soft cheese, which is what I've really been missing for the past seven months. All the same, I thought I should read Cribsheet as well.

After Modern Attachment Parenting ladling on the guilt, it was a relief to read Oster's assessment that most of its tenets just don't matter. It's chapter after chapter that comes down to "do x if you want to, but it probably won't make much difference to your baby whether you do or not." Which is precisely the message I needed to hear, and probably will do even more so when the baby is actually present.

Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids by Bryan Caplan This is a book that a different friend swears by. He passionately loves being a dad, so I thought it was worth a read. It's the polar opposite of Modern Attachment Parenting, in that Caplan's thesis is that most of the variation within parenting styles in developed countries makes sod-all difference to people's children's health, wealth or happiness, so we should all just chill out a bit. I've made this sound similar to Cribsheet, but it's really not; Oster argues things like "the positive effects of breastfeeding are small" while Caplan is more "your parenting choices have literally no impact on your child's future life".

That is, of course, other than Bryan Caplan's parenting choices, which he credits with - for instance - ensuring his kids slept through the night from 3 months. And I don't know much about parenting, but that sounds a lot like bollocks to me. I think he just got lucky with good sleepers.

He cites a lot of studies to prove his overall thesis, but they are overwhelmingly adoption studies and studies of twins reared apart, which I am not qualified to assess but that don't feel like they pass the sniff test (something pretty weird has to have happened for twins to be reared apart in the first place). And he rounds it off by saying that everyone should have more kids, but governments shouldn't support policies like adequate maternity leave. Dear Bryan: go fuck yourself.

Your Baby, Week by Week by Simone Cave and Caroline Fertleman This one was a recommendation from a colleague with whom I have very little in common, but it's the super-practical, actionable book that I was looking for all along. It does what it says on the tin: how to expect the baby to behave week by week, including how much they'll cry, how many nappies they'll get through, etc etc. The things that a clueless first-time parent (me) will actually need to know. Though I think more than any of the others, this is the one where my opinion might change most - either way - when it comes down to actually putting it all into practice.

[thethirdromana]

Platform Decay by Martha Wells The things I like best in Murderbot books are the relationships between characters and the worldbuilding. I'm not that fussed by the action sequences, and this novel is almost nonstop action. It's punctuated by some very sweet character moments, but not quite enough to give me the breather that I wanted. And it would have benefitted from me having reread System Collapse more recently as well. Still, I'm looking forward to finding out where this series goes next.

[thethirdromana]

The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie by Muriel Spark Flawlessly constructed but I think not for me. I'm a little sad that I didn't read this aged 18 or 19, when its analysis of the often quite odd dynamics between charismatic teachers and their preferred students might felt more meaningful to me than it does now.

[thethirdromana]

The Olympian Affair by Jim Butcher I loved The Aeronaut's Windlass when it first came out, so I was delighted to learn it had gained a sequel. Swashbuckling steampunk fantasy with talking cats is precisely what I need right now, my intellectual level having been dented a bit by sleep deprivation, and this is just as much fun as the first one. I'm only disappointed that there aren't 20 of them.

[thethirdromana]

Warriorborn by Jim Butcher I messed up a bit here, because Warriorborn is a novella that takes place immediately before The Olympian Affair, so I was thoroughly spoiled for the ending. It was great fun anyway, for all the same reasons as The Olympian Affair.

[thethirdromana]

Star Trek: Strange New Worlds: Asylum by Una McCormack There are too many colons in that title. That aside, I've enjoyed every Star Trek novel that I've read by Una McCormack (and I've read about half of them) and this was no exception. It fills in a lovely bit of SNW backstory and I loved the worldbuilding around the Euxhana. My only difficulty - and this is a me problem - is that I prefer a more optimistic take on the Federation than Una McCormack does. The Federation's asylum process is central to this novel, and it's presented as a lot like the process in most modern liberal states today, complete with charities playing a role that should really be done by government. I think I would have liked something a shade more utopian.

[teaboot]

There's this thing I never realized I did when I was doing it that I like to think of as "Ownership of Space"

And it's that thing where you mentally place yourself as the second, auxiliary party to someone else that you consider to be "In Charge" of whatever space or occupation or responsibility you are assigned to

And when you are IN that mindset, it *feels* like you're being responsible. It *feels* like you're being respectful, and helpful, and contributing to the load.

But what you don't SEE- because it *feels* like deference- is that the other person who you're seeing as The Authority you report to- by being assigned that role, has also been assigned the invisible load of BEING YOUR MANAGER.

This is by FAR most commonly seen in husband-and-wife relationships, where the man says, "just tell me what I can do to HELP- you don't have to do it all by yourself, but it's like you won't even tell me when you NEED help. You just do everything and then get mad at me for not doing it first. I can help clean. I can help with the kids. I can help"

But I also see it- and am guilty myself of doing it- at work, at school, in public- that mental, "this is THEIR space, and i will be respectful and helpful to THEM"- without realizing that subservience in this manner isn't actually a good thing. That it actually shifts the burden of responsibility to the other person. That aspect was totally invisible to me.

I didn't understand that when I was told, "if you see something that needs to be done, just DO it", or, "take the initiative", what they ACTUALLY meant was, "I am not above you", or "you have equal say in what kind of environment you want to live or work in", or "I do not want full control over what happens here, I do not want to order you around, I do not want to be in charge, what I WANT is to co-command WITH you"

Being in The Assigned Authority position NOW, that is all so much clearer.

I am the senior member of my team at work, and now, every time I train a newbie, every time I finish catching them up to speed and giving them a list of everything that needs to be done, my next big hurdle seems to always be, "now take pride in the space when I'm not around". "Now don't assume I'll tell you when something is due or what orders to plan things in".

Now, having been on both sides of the struggle, I can appreciate the sticking points here

TO THE PERSON "IN CHARGE": The person deferring to you doesn't understand the invisible labor you're doing. They genuinely believe you know more, you WANT more, you see things they don't, and that they are being respectful and good by staying out of your way and waiting on your orders. THAT is the bit that's not clicking.

TO THE PERSON "WANTING TO HELP": "Help" implies that you are providing assistance to a problem that belongs to somebody else. Stop thinking like that. Understand that the problem belongs to BOTH of you equally, and consider what kind of shared space you BOTH want. What is your SHARED GOAL? Not THEIR goal, but a goal that belongs to you too. Own your space.

This is not a Commander-Lieutenant problem. This is a Partnership problem.

You Are Co-Commanders On This Ship

[teaboot]

Sharing my own tags actually

[pangur-and-grim]

"Claws like sharpened bananas shot toward me."

this sentence is

good

bad

Voting ended onJun 20

[pangur-and-grim]

ITS EVOCATIVE! LIKE GREAT BIG HUGE BANANAS EXCEPT SHARP!

[pangur-and-grim]

YOU DO IT ON ONE OF THESE! OBVIOUSLY!!!

[pangur-and-grim]

[pangur-and-grim]

a lot of people are very angry with me over this, but I'd just like you to sit down and imagine a banana. maybe a green one so it's extra firm. if you need it to be harder, you can toss it in the freezer.

and that brown end? the hard bit? pencil sharpener. or sharpened with a blade. are you following me? now, attach six of those to a harpy.

yeah. I think you're seeing the vision. you can apologize to me any time you're ready

[pangur-and-grim]

check in time:

I see the vision

it's still really bad

Voting ended onJul 11

[pangur-and-grim]

GOD DAMN IT!

[pitchdarkedge]

[ostensible-adult]

I hope this comes across as positive/complimentary: I'm reminded of the art teacher who is quoted somewhere on tumblr as saying approximately

I do not like this style. I will never like this style. ... My biggest criticism is that I merely dislike this [art project]. Make me hate it. Make me furious over how much fun you're having with this thing I hate.

You don't need that teacher's advice, though. You're already having so much fun that tumblr is furious.

[transastronautistic]

i have attempted the impossible — making banana Sharp — and i have good news and bad news

As preamble: i am one of the proud 27% who voted “good” on the first poll (didn’t see the second in time to vote). And, in fact, I found the imagery of “claws like sharpened bananas” so provocative i just had to give sharpening a banana a go (plus i remembered i threw some ripe bananas in the freezer like five months ago and thought hey, might as well! bananas, i’m sorry i failed to use you in smoothies as intended; i hope you find peace knowing you were donated to science instead. Rest In Peels.)

For my first attempt, I decided to take the easiest though least faithful-to-the-vision route first: sharpening the banana stem.

I was delighted to discover that a banana stem does fit into a pencil sharpener, so i got grinding.

And grinding.

And grinding.

Things were looking promising at first, but i rotated that thing in the sharpener for over three minutes and after a certain point, it just stopped getting sharper. I guess it became too narrow for the sharpener to like, reach?

(Pictured: the moment my wife asked me what the fuck i was doing to that banana)

But luckily my wife appeared around this time and, after expressing extreme bemusement, she acquiesced to applying her whittling skills to the task. I bestowed upon her a second frozen banana and she got to work.

What a champ.

And…it actually worked!! That bad boy was SHARP!

Like, not “draw blood easily” sharp. But yeah, if claws looking like this ^ were to shoot towards me, i’d be at least mildly afraid. That’s not nothin’ — right? right?

(I’m so good at photoshop)

But at this point i had to admit to myself the thing i’d known all along. Sharpening solely the stem wasn’t actually @pangur-and-grim’s vision.

So i tried, i really tried to sharpen the entire outer part of the banana with a knife sharpener + knife! Maybe it’s because the frozen bananas had thawed too much at this point but. it didn’t go…all that great

Then it was time for my final attempt.

I peeled one of those half-thawed nanners and shaped its soft body (which was the consistency of melty ice cream) with a combination of the knife sharpener and my bare fingers into what i hoped would be a fine point — once it re-froze.

One of them i “sharpened” the tip of; the other i tried to kinda sharpen the side of? By making a very thin ridge all along it. Because if they’re going to be claws they shouldn’t just poke people; they need to slice

Anyway that was an hour ago so i just checked on them and…

tragically, they are not sharp.

BUT i flattened them a little thinner to see if that helps, and now i’ll be patient for once in my life and wait to check on them till morning. Maybe being fully frozen will help

So yeah! The good news is you CAN sharpen a banana stem and that’s gotta count for something. The bad news is that sharpening the actual body of the banana has proven much more challenging.

if i never reblog with an update, it’ll mean I failed, no sharp peeled bananas to present. If i do update….

Well. You’ll get a photo of a razor-sharp banana.

It’ll totally happen. Totally

[lauralot89]

I was going to say I feel personally attacked by that "millennials can't buy travel tickets on anything but a computer" commercial but it's accurate

I do need a big screen to feel safe

[countthelions]

but literally pacific rim is absolutely fucking insane what it did. The world is ending because giant monsters have seen the environmental damage we've done to the planet and are ready to live in that ruin. Humanity built giant robots to fight them off. You cannot - canNOT pilot one of them alone. You HAVE to link yourself to someone who'll know you better than any person ever will.

It doesn't have to be romantic, and by the movie standards, that's fairly unlikely to make for a good connection.

Glados is there.

You get a giant sword.

[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.

[unamccormack]

What would The Traitors be like on Cardassia? I reckon it’s called The Order, and there are 3 people who are secretly designated dissidents, unknown even to each other. Everyone else is with the Order, and it’s their job to hunt down the dissidents. At the round table everyone gets a turn to denounce someone else, and the person with the most denunciations is exiled.

The dissidents have never won, in more than 25 seasons of The Order. Everyone knows it’s a massive fix but obviously nobody says so. It’s the third most watched show on Cardassia Prime after Clouds Over Culat and Real Housewives of Lakarian City.

[katbelleinthedark]

Amazing. And now the truly important question: does Cardassia have an equivalent to Love Island or The Bachelor/Bachelorette?

[unamccormack]

Yes but they are tremendously serious and ponderous programmes about the importance of marriage and the family. Everyone secretly finds them very dull but they watch dutifully so that they’re not caught out by Order informants and get a reputation for being anti-family.

[knivesandteeth]

after the reconstruction do they bring these back? is it a huge scandal when they include a "non-Cardassian" on the dating shows (they're still Cardassian but like maybe 1/4 Bajoran or something not even obvious)? Is the first season the dissidents win on the reconstructivist The Order a huge hit?

[unamccormack]

They come back full pelt with a series set on Risa and loads of aliens and the ensuing political firestorm collapses the conservative coalition in the Assembly enabling Castellan Ghemor to repeal Dukat's pre-war pro-family legislation. There are rumours that Ghemor's shadowy "fixer" Elim Garak advised the show's producers but surely that's the Ses'erakh gossip machine working overtime.

The dissidents winning The Order is indeed a massive hit, one of the most watched events on Cardassia in a generation, outmatched only by the first time Clouds Over Culat airs after the Fire, a Cardassian cultural moment as significant as Dirty Den serving Ange the divorce papers in the Christmas Eastenders or the wedding of Charles and Lady Di.

[katbelleinthedark]

Le gasp, like Den and Ange divorce papers! Also, what else does the rumour mill say: did Mr. Garak perhaps accompany the production crew on Risa?

[unamccormack]

Mr "Fixer" Garak is too busy fanning the political wildfires back in the capital, but he's getting hourly updates via his spy, i.e. one of the production runners.

[katbelleinthedark]

Damn. All that work and he didn't even get a free holiday out of it. :(

[unamccormack]

OF COURSE he didn’t even get a free holiday out of it. No rewards for Garak until he’s done ALL his chores.

[roberttingle]

annoying when shows set in the medieval period have the women with thier hair just long and unstyled and out . girl go put on your wimple girl 🤦‍♀️

[elvensilk]

like there are so many fun medieval hair and headgear options, it's so boring just seeing loose beachy waves meant to appeal to 21st century beauty standards

put that hot prince in a gay little hood with an ostrich feather or so help me god

[a-silly-poll-side-blog-yay]

the last food you ate is your nickname now how is it going

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