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leohttbriar · 1 year

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Choose violence 8, 10, 24 for Tolkien? :)

<3 when i saw you had sent me an ask, i blushed so hard i'm pretty sure i gave myself a mild fever. omg hi <3

also, so sorry but i def employed some tolkien-esque verbose-ness in answering these lol. especially the last one, whew. like, im embarrassed.

8. common fandom opinion that everyone is wrong about

what’s funny with the tolkien fandom is that the movie fans and the book fans have whole different spheres of bugaboos and Annoying Habits so it’s easy to vacillate between either camp when you keep encountering the Nonsense.

that being said, i one hundred percent consider myself a “book fan” and think movie fans are more annoying than all of us literates. like, they can’t help it—the movies are the source of most their ills— but as a rule movie fans are wrong about like all of the characters. as in, legolas isn’t mister stoic badass, sam isn’t More Heroic, aragorn isn’t pathetically reluctant, elrond is much prettier than hugo weaving, and denethor is not nutso (to name a few).

i would say, though, that book fans are generally really bad at figuring out what parts of the movies to pick on. like for years i’ve been so baffled by people still being angry over glorfindel’s exclusion in the fellowship movie and no offense to people who have read the silmarillion and the fellowship…but that was not only the best adaptational change but it also improves on the book. in that, sending arwen to guide them to rivendell and to physically hold frodo to her as she defended the last homely house with water horses, is an genuine story improvement—not just because lotr is a sausage fest and that Sucks but because it foreshadows arwen giving frodo her passage west, via a flight east, it lets arwen actually parallel luthien riding across middle earth on huan, which in turn gives arwen an equal sort of challenge in living up to a legacy, something that can thematically help aragorn live up to his, doing that thing tolkien does best and telling the same story over and over until the song finally scans and the rhyme resolves and the Big Story ends.

of course, the movies left out the arwen-giving-frodo-the-evenstar-gem thing so in terms of Sexism both media are equivalent.

i think book fans in general are wayyyyy too like faithful monk readers of the bible. and not even like medieval monk readers, where there’s a clear delineation between various interpretive approaches, going from the literal to the poetic in degree. no, tolkien fans i think have mistaken a rich creative world for something near perfection, to the point where they don’t really know how to explain why the amazon series is bad beyond “amazon is bad” and what makes tolkien’s fantasy unique. tolkien fans, in terms of pedantry, are worse than dune fans.

but yeah. everyone is wrong about glorfindel in fellowship. he is Not as interesting as arwen as a character and does Not really fit in the story.

10. worst part of fanon

definitely the freaks who treat genuine baddies as misunderstood kittens. like, i don’t feel very sorry for maedhros? also, why is the elrond-considers-maedhros-and-maglor-as-dads caucus in the tolkien fandom so loud??? look, there’s no arguing these are tragic and pathetic blorbos, and i personally love stories in which they seek atonement, but elrond had a dad. if i were elrond or elros, i wouldn’t even be considering letting someone else slot into that position. especially not with my dad constantly being in the sky, like a particularly unfair reminder. maedhros can be complicated and alluring, but i hate the fanon of him or maglor genuinely adopting the baby half-elves out of untainted goodwill. it softens them in a way that makes me like them less.

also, the fanon of people being like “tolkien wasn’t sexist. look at melian.” does that count as fanon? if so, i hate that too.

24. topic that brings up the most rancid discourse

i feel like this goes for all fandoms, but by far any sort of accusation of racism in the work or in fan works is the most grenade-like kind of accusation one can lob.

with tolkien, i see a lot of people often focused on tolkien’s own opinions on “allegory,” and to be quite honest, anyone who uses that to say tolkien isn’t as racist as you might assume, is dumb as a rock.

tolkien’s frustration with "allegory" is the concept of 1 to 1 relationships. he didn't like when people were like "rohan is anglo saxon england" or "aragorn is [insert historical figure]" or any sort of reductive comparisons of lotr to real life figures and struggles in world war ii. (interestingly, however, he has said that dwarves were very inspired by jewish people. like, to the point that saying tolkien's dwarves are jewish is as accurate as saying shylock in merchant of venice is jewish--in that, they are characters in a story written by a christian who didn't really understand a whole heckuva lot about judaism. but that's a whole other topic.) and while that might tempt you to think that he therefore was not trying to represent any person or civilization from the real world in his books, unfortunately the core tenet of analytical reading is to assume deliberation over every single detail. you do in fact have to choose an idea before you write it down. and tolkien wrote the word "swarthy" one too many times for any of us to assume good-faith.

of course, there's also the claim of lotr not being as racist as the man (tolkien) likely was because art and the artist are not the same thing. and yeah. but again. "swarthy."

there is no easy answer to the whole death-of-the-author debate and questions over how much biography should be allowed in critical readings--at least no easy answer that doesn't just boil down to the simple demand to "think critically" (which isn't all that simple, in the end)--so i'm definitely not going to try to arrive at one now. but when it comes to tolkien's little made-up world, there are certain tropes in the fan interaction with it that make me somewhat queasy? like tolkien was so demonstrably inspired by real-world mythos and folklore that it is so easy to fit some of his characters and stories into real-world folk art and aesthetic. and to me there's a sliding scale of acceptable inspiration to maybe-we-shouldn't(?) inspiration. like when i see fan art that is labeled "indigenous tolkien," with no tribe or even geographic region specified, i find that weird.

and the reason i find that weird is the fundamental reason that i think discourse in fan circles over racial biases can get so rancid (unlike the discourse in non fan circles! just kidding, fandom discourse has nothing on a medievalist conference with a panel on white supremacy in the field, lol), and that reason is: tolkien's made-up world is not as made-up as the immersiveness of his world suggests. it is very rooted, and deliberately so, in the histories and folklore of western-european people (in particular) and thus the stories, the characters, the aesthetics, the ethics, and the themes are all off-shoots of these traditions. there is a missing element of material recognition in the interpretations of tolkien as really one thing or the other. material culture plays a much bigger role in the whole of all his arda-tales than is immediately obvious.

people want to give fantasy a pass when it comes to certain biases and they use that annoying allegory quote to do it with tolkien's work. because they are enlightened and do not project white supremacy and other legacies of colonialism onto a "made-up world." but tolkien would probably be the first to say that his work was built off fairy-stories, as a contribution to the genre.

he even goes on this relevant tangent at the beginning of "on fairy stories":

It is perhaps not unnatural that in England, the land where the love of the delicate and fine has often reappeared in art, fancy should in this matter turn towards the dainty and diminutive, as in France it went to court and put on powder and diamonds.

whether or not he's right about this distinction between english fairies and french fairies, this still shows that he considers the fantastical an expression of real and observable culture. therefore, despite the fact that it is bad-faith to read anything in tolkien as 1 to 1, he was trying to represent our world with his because he doesn't see the fairy/monstrous/supernatural as entirely separate from the physical/metaphysical or the human imagination. he was just trying to tell the same story that has always been told, from creation and onward.

so yeah. it is entirely valid to call aragorn's Specialness as a Special Sort of Human kind of fascist.

(and just as the rooted-ness of tolkien's fantasy world means that his work cannot escape accusations of bias, the rooted-ness also opens the way for a specific kind of progressive reading that is less about plugging one's ears to the bias but leaning into it. the real-world is more complex than one man can imagine it and when that one man is trying his hardest to represent the world, as any good writer would do regardless of genre, things will slip in to the story that the man chose but may not have understood. eowyn's speech about staying in the burning house is feminist thought even if tolkien would probably never have claimed it as such. the love between legolas and gimli is canonically transgressive and metaphysically-challenging--aspects of a love that tolkien probably would have assumed of gay love, in his time. if that makes sense. his biases don't define the art, even if they are present. especially since he was a very good writer and reader.)

#tolkien

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