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It addresses most of the themes that make more than a casual Tolkien experience uncomfortable, I do like the series a lot but if I think about it too much about it I need some aggressive reinterpretations of the source material. Ole’ JRR was way way too into bloodlines & religion & racism
Ole’ JRR was way way too into bloodlines & religion & racism
The racism, as I understand it, he kind of walked back later in life. Like his depiction of orcs as unambiguously evil, cruel, corrupt beings was a genuine writing mistake that he recognized, and something which iirc he considered to be fundamentally opposed to his views on how different peoples should be perceived. So I’d say that reinterpretations of his work/setting which view the orcs in a more sympathetic, less racist light should be entirely in line with how Tolkien himself came to think about it, or at least wish that he had presented it. I often wonder what he might have gone on to imply about the setting if he had lived longer.
As for the other stuff, yeah, it really does take the monarchist logic to its logical extreme. Not only is God real and his angels still hang around and influence things, but of course there are chosen kings who will be good rulers because they just have that divine right.
Dude LOTR is racist to humans, not just orcs. All the evil men are swarthy easterners and southerners (i.e. asians and africans), all the hero men are fair and from the west. Of course, the whites are the recipients of divine favor too.
Dude LOTR is racist to humans, not just orcs
Yeah, and to (((dwarves))) as well. im not saying the setting isnt fundamentally racist in a lot of ways, just that you don’t have to stretch too hard to reinterpret it in other ways and that Tolkien would probably be quite happy to see us doing so
I like tolkien, ok? weirdo anarcho-monarchist that he was
There’s a quote of him trying to explain his galaxybrain anarcho-monarchism somewhere
his politics were uh, not good
