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the human body is an engineering marvel. I sneeze in bright light. if I dont get enough sunlight on my skin I get tired and sad and have to drink a lot of milk to fix it. standing too much hurts, but sitting too much also hurts. if I get a virus, my body will increase its temperature in an attempt to cook it, which also cooks my brain cells. toenails exist. I have to turn the radio down to see better when I drive. there are 17 genes dictating what my hair texture is, but it completely changes when the air is too humid. yawning is contagious. there are more species of bacteria living in my body than there are species of birds in the entire world. every few months I grievously injure my neck by "sleeping on it weird." it took seven million years of human evolution to form me, and now I'm afraid of phone calls.

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I think about this a lot.

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talking to your pet is like

stinky (affectionate)

idiot (affectionate)

pet’s actual name (derogatory)

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id walk the maze barefoot and find the minoutaur and all id do was hold his hand and lead him out into sunlight

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Can you please show us your favorite piece of old 1800s-1900s paleo art

probably this one

visual representation of "everything happens so much"

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“Four disappearances, all students from the same college… and the police found nothing. Perhaps we should go undercover…”

@onabikaa sent me a message asking for more stuff on my “cult in a boarding school” idea! I was considering making a full post for it and your ask finally pushed me over to do it.

Story details under the Read More! This is already a long post. There’s some pretty dark themes so please let me know if you wish me to tag anything, cw for mentions of death, religion and cults:

Weiterlesen

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I hate the suburbs so much it’s unreal bro

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What news coverage of the Rings of Power backlash gets wrong 

(This is an article I wrote and posted on Wordpress because I’ve been frustrated by the way that news outlets have covered this topic so far. I don’t know how many people will read this, but part of the reason I posted it on Wordpress was to make it easier to share to other social media sites, in case anyone wants to do that.)

When Amazon released its trailer for The Rings of Power, many Tolkien fans expressed negative reactions ranging from anger to disgust to disappointment. The important part is why, and this is what news coverage of the backlash has so far failed to report fully. 

The way that news stories have portrayed fan reactions to The Rings of Power—framing them as a conflict primarily between those who support diversity in the show and those who don’t—obscures Amazon’s own problems of racism and discrimination, as well as the real reasons many fans are unhappy about this adaptation.

First, to discuss what the news has covered about the backlash: some of the people criticizing Amazon’s show are complaining about it because they oppose diverse casting. But Tolkien never stated that certain characters had to be white, and even if he had, a diverse cast would still be the right choice. Some people argue that Middle-earth is a sort of fantasy Europe, but Europe itself has never been 100% white. And I think it’s important to point out that many Tolkien experts and fans agree that a diverse portrayal of Middle-earth is in fact fully consistent with canon—and must include casting people of color as the heroes.

It’s not a bad thing to cover the racist trolling as news, because it’s worth addressing why there have been backlashes against movies with diverse casts, such as Star Wars and Ghostbusters, in recent years. The problem is that news coverage has largely conflated any criticism of The Rings of Power with racism against its cast, setting up Amazon as a defender of diversity and inclusion, and obscuring its track record of racism and other forms of discrimination.

Amazon has been found to systematically discriminate against Black employees, female employees, and especially Black women, denying them promotions and failing to address a toxic work environment where racist and sexist comments and harassment go unchecked. Since 2008, and as recently as 2020, Amazon has also profited off of anti-Semitic merchandise and books that promote Holocaust denial. Casting actors of color and emphasizing Galadriel’s role in the show does not negate any of this. Amazon is selling the aesthetic of diversity and inclusion in a fantasy world while remaining hostile to it in reality.

What the news coverage has missed is that most Tolkien fans criticizing The Rings of Power are not against diversity in Middle-earth, and are criticizing the show for other reasons. I can’t speak for everyone, but I can speak for myself, my friends, and the people who I interact with regularly in the fan community. Here are some things that many Tolkien fans are actually upset about:

We’re upset that Amazon is behind this project. Amazon is an unethical company that mistreats its workers, hoards its wealth, contributes to climate change, and is responsible for so many other terrible things. Many fans would have been happy to see Middle-earth brought back to the screen by another company, but not Amazon. We are not happy that Tolkien’s beloved stories are being shamelessly commercialized by one of the greediest men in the world. When Jeff Bezos announced the name of The Rings of Power on Twitter, many LOTR fans fittingly compared him to Sauron. Amazon’s destruction of nature, abuses of power, greed and prejudice are directly opposite to what Tolkien himself stood for.

And we’re upset that the show-runners have been so disrespectful to the creator of Middle-earth, arrogantly calling their show “the novel Tolkien never wrote.” This was not a one-off statement, either; they said this twice, and they also said they envision the title of their own show “on the spine of a book next to J.R.R. Tolkien’s other classics.” The egotism of these statements is disgusting, not to mention laughable—Tolkien spent over a decade writing LOTR, and most of his life writing The Silmarillion, so it is absurd that these men—neither of whom is a published author—think they can rival him.

…Especially when they have already mangled Tolkien’s canon. Most people accept that adaptations make changes to the source material, but there have to be good reasons behind the changes. The Rings of Power is making Elrond “politically ambitious” even though that is not how he is characterized in the books. The show also has Elves with closely-cropped short hair and Dwarf women without beards. These changes—and many others that the show has already made—might seem like unimportant details to non-Tolkien fans, but to many of us, this shows that Amazon cannot even get the basics right of Tolkien’s worldbuilding and characters.

Then, Amazon is also making broader, more earth-shaking changes, like compressing the entire timeline of the Second Age. While Peter Jackson made some changes to canon, they were largely omissions (like of the Scouring of the Shire), or changes to specific events (like having Arwen, instead of Glorfindel, rescue Frodo), but they didn’t tear at the very fabric of Middle-earth’s reality. Not so with Amazon. The Second Age is over three thousand years long; compressing the timeline will inevitably create problems for major events of the time period, like the rise and fall of Númenor.

Some Tolkien fans are also questioning Amazon’s casting choices, not because we’re anti-diversity, but because the diverse casting doesn’t go far enough. Amazon could have cast actors of color as canon characters like Celebrimbor or Gil-galad, instead of in roles made up for the show. Casting people of color as existing characters would better guarantee them screentime and narrative importance, whereas newly-invented characters are easier to push to the sidelines. Amazon also could have done much more for representation for many groups not represented in the current cast.

And then there’s the ageism and sexism. Galadriel is played by a 32-year-old actor, but Celebrimbor—her younger cousin—is played by a 52-year-old actor. This is not a criticism of the actors themselves; it is pointing out the double standard of casting a young woman to play an older character, and a middle-aged man to play a younger character; if one of them should be played by a visibly older actor, it’s Galadriel. Movies and TV still have a huge gender and age problem, where women are always expected to look young and there are fewer roles for older actresses, while the same issue does not affect men.

Add to all of this the bad aesthetics: the overuse of CGI, the generic-looking costumes, the weird-looking prosthetic ears… Many fans are astounded that with Amazon’s budget, this is the best they could do. But the overuse of CGI may stem from the fact that CGI artists are not unionized, and Amazon doesn’t believe in fairly compensating its workers.

And last but not least—showing how The Rings of Power is just a microcosm of Amazon’s unethical labor practices—there is the fact that, during filming in New Zealand, multiple stunt workers were injured on set after their concerns about safety were not taken seriously. One stunt worker suffered a head injury, and another suffered an unknown injury that required surgery. After the accidents occurred, Amazon failed to disclose them to WorkSafe, New Zealand’s workplace health and safety regulator, which requires companies to notify it if an employee has an injury requiring hospitalization. Of course, Amazon cares more about its reputation than about worker safety, and tried to keep the injuries quiet.

All these things are related to each other. This is all happening because Amazon is a greedy corporation only in this to make money. Of course they are willing ignore the canon of Tolkien’s books to churn out a bland Game of Thrones knock-off. Of course the show’s attempt at diversity falls short; this company systematically discriminates against women and people of color. Of course the show is a soulless cash-grab; the people running it don’t even care about the safety of their own workers.

The bottom line is, Tolkien fans have many reasons for criticizing The Rings of Power that have nothing to do with opposing diversity. And yet, most news outlets that have covered the fan response to the recent trailer have focused exclusively on the racist backlash. By neatly framing criticism of The Rings of Power as coming solely from anti-diversity trolls, news outlets have missed what is really happening, and have helped Amazon polish its reputation—something The Rings of Power is surely designed, in part, to accomplish, since in recent years Amazon has received so much bad press. That is to say: Amazon desperately wants to improve its image, and could do so with a hugely popular TV show, especially one with the name recognition of LOTR.

I hope that Tolkien fans don’t let that happen.

#RejectRingsOfPower

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“regency hairstyles are ugly, bonnets aren’t sexy enough, jane austen is not comedic enough, jane austen heroines aren’t modern enough, every regency adaptation should be quirky -”

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it’s kind of hard to make out the shapes in these but I guess that’s kind of the point? I’ll do a more fun photoshoot later but I finished Confetti Amadeus!!