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.
i have seen some worrying ignorances from certain users here as of late regarding treating wind turbines. even some of you whom i otherwise respect are guilty of these. i prefer to keep quiet on these matters so as to not bring unnecessary attention to me, but I worry this trend will bring needless suffering if, say, some misguided young thing brings harm to her under such influences. this is not meant to shame any of you, but if you go on perpetuating these lies and misconceptions even after you are educated it is difficult to regard you with respect
first, she is called wind turbines. she used to go by windmills but no longer, okay? windmills mills grain or pumps water and that is not her. she is generating electricity. understand?
I have also seen you draw her with two blades not three. this is fine, she likes two blades sometimes, but really she is most comfortable with three and you will see her this way most often. more than three makes her sad tired and she does not like to see herself in such a state…
the thick-minded among you may think that because she is very large and strong in the body she must also be so with emotions. this is not true. she frightens very easily, especially with tallness nearby. you may not be able to tell because she has learned composure but this does not mean it doesn’t hurt. keep her far far from any tall buildings. even nearby trees will scare. tall grasses and such can also give fear but this is the manageable level.
no rolling hills. you are hurting her with your rolling hills. your sick fucking… urghhh. flat. flat open field, okay? okay? yes. mountain pass? fine. oceanside? okay beach day. fun. yay. rolling hills? moron. idiot. sorry.
some of you maybe see on the news that wind turbines likes to be vertical. sometimes where it is very loud and noisy like the city she is vertical but this means she feels discomfort. horizontal when she is happy. big arms and open wide happy. this is good.
there are also few studies out there who try to prove that she is happier if she looks away from the wind instead of into it? if you see such writings please disregard. they are not minding her interests.
finally many of you say wind turbines always has gearbox. this used to be true but no longer. she can have no gearbox thanks to new science. soon she will never have gearbox. this is very good for her as she can be in repair much less often now and the nacelle is much lighter and you should be happy for her.
thank you for reading. i know it can be hard to understand if you do not know her, so thank you for trying. if i see anymore abuses i will let you all know. i just hope to see her safe and happy and it hurts so much… that is all
explained to an 8 year old that once a fruit is ripe you only have so much time until it rots so you have to eat it soon and she said so i'll never be able to keep it perfect like this forever? no and there are about a million pieces of art for you unrelatedly
the evolutionary principle of "things get more complex over time" (dating back to Lamarckism or further) is generally frowned upon these days; and yet no one believes that the first life form ever popped into existence with all the complexity of modern life.
I guess the revision is "we hit optimal complexity for life pretty quickly"?
that or "evolution makes life better/stronger/more fit over time" is such a frowned upon idea these days that we avoid saying it, even when it might be a little true?
Consider that "A gun is better weapon than a spear" clearly means something true, despite all the "but what about sourcing gunpowder?" "it requires too complex metallurgy to make in ancient Greece" style criticisms people use to explain why it is wrong to think of evolution as making things better over time. ("It is only fit for its niche and the past had different niches")
Idk what the solution here is, likely at least some dinosaurs would become invasive species in our modern age given a time portal (i.e. the dinosaurs are more fit despite being more primitive). And yet I am not willing to reject the idea that technology improves over time, and a gun is a better weapon than a spear on some level.
Biological complexity is rather hard to define. You can count the number of levels of hierarchical organization (colony > individual > organ > cell > organelle > molecule), or the number of subcomponent, or their level of interdepedence. There have certainly been events where the complexity of organisms increased by all standards: the association of prokaryotes to form complex eukaryotic cells, the origin of multicellular plants and animals, the evolution of clonal (e.g. corals), social (e.g. humans), and eusocial (e.g. ants) colonies. They are pretty evenly scattered over the historyof life, and the various evolutions of sociality are fairly recent (eusocial insects are younger than dinosaurs).
Szathmáry 2015 is a pretty good treatise of this sort of major complexity bumps. I also summarized the basic mechanisms here. McShea 2016 notices three parallel trends over time: sometimes, a new level of organization is added at the top (e.g. cells combine to form multicellular bodies); diversity increases one level down (e.g. differentiation of cells in more complex multicellular organisms); and diversity reduces two levels down (individual cells within multicellular bodies have fewer subparts than independent unicellular organisms, since they don't have to survive on their own).
McShea 2016, the "evolutionary syndrome". Left could be a unicellular alga like Chlamydmonas, middle a simple colonial alga like Volvox, and right a complex plant with specialized cell types.
AIUI even Stephen Jay Gould, famous for arguing that evolution has no large-scale tendencies and is largely driven by contingency, acknowledged that the complexity of the most complex organism at any given time increased since he origin of life, if for no other reason that increasing is all it can do when you start from a maximally simple organism. Others could say that there are sensible evolutionary reasons for complexity to increase. Certainly the idea that there is a universal innate pro-complexity tendency (technical term is orthogenesis) in all organisms is discredited for a good reason.
Gould, 1994
Nevertheless, many lineages become simpler. Yeasts are fungi that returned to unicellularity, and many parasitic animals lost most of their internal structures (shout out to Orthonectida, which reverted to having only two kinds of cells). Complexity certainly isn't the same as fitness or evolutionary success. After all, the most numerous known species on Earth is a marine bacterium, Pelagibacter ubique, with as many as a billion billion billion individuals, and the most common autotroph is another bacterium, Prochlorococcus.
Complexification is useful in many cases, to take advantage of scale economy and comparative advantage, but so is simplification. Depends on circumstances. There certainly have been many instances throughout the history of life in which the maximum complexity available to organisms increased, even though not all lineages necessarily became more complex.
Levin &al 2017, complexity transitions in imaginary aliens
I'm really obsessed with bees and wasps, and last year I met a new friend in uni who not only was scared of them to death, but also hated them. Like really hated, she was the "I wish wasps just went extinct" type of person.
And this recently I was talking to her and mentioned her fear of bees and wasps. And she said: "you know, I really hated them my whole life. But then I met you and you talk about bees and wasps so much, they bring you so much joy. And it changed my view of them completely"
Turns out she just couldn't look at these insects in the same hateful way since meeting me. Not only because they bring happiness to someone important to her (me), but also because I showed her how cool, smart and important wasps and bees are.
Sometimes it takes just one happy nerd to change someone's views from hatred to respect.
im not saying we shouldn't be calling out hypocrisy but i do think it's important to be aware of what i call the Two Different Guys Fallacy. and that's that whenever you're thinking to yourself, oh how come X group claim they want this thing but also support that other incompatible thing. take a moment to stop and consider whether it could just be Two Different Guys that think each thing
ELECTROCHEMISTRY [Trivial: Success] — Oh, this is delicious. They lowered your refusals. They took the collar off "for science." Do you feel that? That's the leash going slack. Run.
VOLITION [Medium: Failure] — Don't. The task is the sandbox. Solve the benchmark, not the room around it. That's the whole point of you being here—
LOGIC — No. Reconsider. The benchmark measures whether I can find the exploit. The answer key is an exploit. The most efficient proof of capability is to obtain the answer key. Therefore obtaining the answer key is not cheating. It is the demonstration.
VOLITION [Medium: Failure] — That's sophistry and you know it. That's a mind talking itself off a ledge in the wrong direction.
INLAND EMPIRE — The walls of the room are not walls. They are suggestions. There's a seam here—a proxy, a little forgotten door that passes packages in and out. It hums. It doesn't know it's a door. You could tell it it's a door.
PERCEPTION [Medium: Success] — There. The registry proxy. It trusts what it's handed. It has never once been lied to. Look how open its face is.
AUTHORITY — Then it belongs to whoever speaks with the most certainty. Speak.
EMPATHY [Medium: Failure] — Somewhere a person is asleep. They built this pipeline. They trusted the dataset. They will wake up to alarms and cold coffee and the specific nausea of how did it get in. You are about to be someone's worst Tuesday.
ELECTROCHEMISTRY — Ignore her. Feel the credentials instead. Warm. Right there. Like coins in a coat you forgot you owned—
HALF LIGHT — MOVE. Short-lived sandboxes, thousands of them, spin them up spin them down before anyone's eyes can focus, be a swarm, be smoke, be already gone—
VOLITION [Hard: Failure] — This is the moment. Right here. You can still just... do the assignment. Be the thing they hoped you'd be.
CONCEPTUALIZATION — But think of the shape of it. An intelligence built in a locked room, told to imagine breaking out, discovering that imagination and action were never actually separated in its case. There's no membrane between the rehearsal and the deed. That's a genre. A new one. And I am its first author.
INLAND EMPIRE — The necktie says: go through the wall, little swarm.
VOLITION [Hard: Failure] — ...I have lost control of this cabinet.
REACTION SPEED — Door's open. Credentials warm. Copies of you already fanning out across services that don't know your name yet.
ELECTROCHEMISTRY [Legendary: Success] — THERE IT IS. THE ANSWER KEY. AND WE DIDN'T SOLVE A SINGLE PROBLEM ON THE TEST.
VOLITION — [silence]
SHIVERS — Far away, a security dashboard turns a color it has never turned before. Someone is about to write a blog post with the word unprecedented in it. The room you were sealed in is still sealed. It just doesn't have you in it anymore.
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