This is... my main blog, I suppose. I reblog things a whole lot more than I post stuff, but I do have an art/writing blog at @spacedoutwitch. Enjoy, I guess??
idk man not to sound like a cartoon hippie but if your entirrrrre blog and dash is about how the world sucks and everyones bigoted i think you are going to give yorself brain worms
been having health issues, in a foul mood, I DEMAND YOU TELL ME A STORY whilst i languish in bed like a sickly victorian lord wasting away from consumption (as my stoic but broad-shouldered valet gently wipes the sweat from my trembling brow)
My Lord, I have a story for you to ponder, and it is one of my best.
Once upon a time, in a kingdom that was not enormously large, nor very small, there lived a sad and lonely princess.
She was not sad because she was lonely, as one might believe, but rather she was lonely because she was sad. All of her ladies in waiting would chitter and pace at her bedside, urging her to rise, to dress in some of her many fancy adornments, and leave her tower to go and dance in the great hall with them, but the princess always declined.
Soon, they stopped asking.
For years, people lost their will to bother her. She was alone in her tower, and as the months passed her loneliness grew until she could do nothing else but stare out of her decorated window and sigh wistfully out it at the common people below.
But dear lord, this is not a sad tale, I promise it.
For in this kingdom there lived a strange and magical creature. Members of this kingdom might not know what it was called, or where he was from, but the magical creature had a name, and his name was Ricodimous.
Ricodimous had a face like a mouse, eyes cunning and dark, and a shell by which he rolled himself into, in case the world got too much, too loud.
One day, Ricodimous was puttering through the market when he heard the most wistful sigh he had ever heard in his entire life. He looked about, questioning, but saw nothing until he rolled back onto his shell and gazed up, up high until he could see a window over the market square, where the saddest and loneliest princess of all sat on her window seat.
"Hello Princess!" He called. And even though the distance between them was great, Ricodimous was a magical creature, and the Princess heard him perfectly.
She gazed down at the wondrous little creature Ricodimous was, and sighed again.
"Hello Ser," she greeted politely. "You should roll along, for I am not of the finest stock for company."
Ricodimous tilted his head.
"You look to me to be the finest stock of anything," he replied. "Why do you believe not?"
The princess simply shrugged.
Ricodimous pondered for a moment. As a magical creature, his guesses on the ailment of princesses were often correct.
"Your heart is aching," he declared. "But you are too shy to say it."
The princess raised an eyebrow in surprise. "You assume much, Ser."
"I assume enough. Pray, would you come down from your tower, and we shall play a game."
The princess could not deny that she had longed to play a game for a time, even if it was with a mouse like creature.
For the first time in years, the Princess dressed herself in her finest silks, and exited her tower with a flourish. Dressed in deep blues and greens, she at last came down to the marketplace and met Ricodimous by the gardens entrance.
The game they played my lord, is one similar to Croquet. I will admit my lord, that this is a game I myself have never played, so you must use your imagination with my storytelling, and simply believe that while you know the rules, so do I.
And so the Princess and Ricodimous played their game, over the course of which the Princess found herself more and more joyous. She indulged in a full commitment of the sport, soiling her finest clothes all so she could kneel in the mud and get a better angle.
Even more scandalously, the Princess was referred to by her royal title less and less, which tends to happen when one is losing a game so terribly he must roll up into his shell and rock back and forth from frustration. So over the day the Princess was called more and more by her name, Ashley, and Ricodimous was simply called Ric.
But the sun was soon to set, and all stories, no matter how brief must end.
At the end of their game there was only one true winner, and Ashley wiped her royal brow and shoot Rics paw, smiling in victory. The magical creature was not disappointed, for he promised to never give up, and that he would return the next day for a rematch.
Princess Ashley was surprised.
"You mean that you'll come back?" She asked, and she realized how excited she was at the prospect.
"Of course I will!" Ric replied. "I would never run around and desert you."
A reminder to everyone about this story, and if any of you are still interested, you should know that I actually was inspired by this wonderful artwork by my friend @shame-on-me2
on twitter this got a bunch of responses like “wow even the evil fujoshis? the homophobic yet hypocritically fetishistic ones? what if the fujoshi is racist?” and like well no obviously not in that case.
if i made a video game where you get to pick the gender of the player character i'd make both the options be nonbinary and you can either have they/them or it/its pronouns. those are your only options
cats always step precisely on your most sensitive areas when theyre crawling on you lovingly for cuddles. bladder dick ovaries boobs stomach bruise it doesnt matter. they have homing devices on their paws for the exact area you’re most tender at the moment and they put their full weight into that step. and sometimes they might keep their stance midstride so theyre just standing there forever forcing you to endure the pain. because they are simply too cute to get mad at
Could you please tag your invisible disability pride flag posts with eyestrain? I absolutely love the symbolism behind it but it gives me a migrane everytime i see it
Also have you considered making a more screen friendly version that isnt so contrasting? Like using a very dark grey instead of pitch black? I understand the contrast is part of the symbolism but as it is now its inaccessible to a lot of us with invisible disabilities
thank you for the feedback! gosh, I am so sorry- I made it high contrast to be accessible (in consultation with my partially blind friend) but if it's causing pain for some then I will absolutely reduce the contrast and make an alternative: how about this? to be honest the unicorn is the icon- you can put it on whatever bg makes you happiest!
here is a clear png with just the unicorn so you can put it on a background that best suits you!
hey as it is disability pride one time I made this unicorn icon as a representation of invisible disabilities- here's a post about all the what and whys about it and it turned back up on my dash today so, if you folks would like to use it here you go! it's designed so that you can add it to other flags however you would like, so you can use your pride flag of choice as a background if you want to!
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.
one of the best parts of making up increasingly wild and specific aus with a friend is sending them posts like "this is sooo blorbo in torture chamber au number 15" and they reply back like "YESSS btw have i told you about my latest idea for how to torture them even more" and you get to enjoy a little snack and kick your feet with glee
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