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Hand-wringing over media consumption is the 69th form of liberalism.
Oh that's why. I always wonder if Sauron is just evil because he's evil. I really don't get Sauron's motivation. But I haven't finished the books yet and am reading them now, I hope I will get some clearity.
Well, long story short, from the Silmarillion, he was basically Satan's lieutenant in Middle Earth cosmology. He is basically evil but also wants power and revenge for his previous losses.
Tolkien was trad-cath of the Augustus Pugin sort. He idolized decentralised rural life and was sceptical of industrialisation which is clear in the rings series. He was part of the gothic revival in the turn of the century which also saw more socialists in the arts & craft movement but he was more of the Oxford types. I don't think he was more problematic about race than his contemporaries. (Like the redskin picaninnies in Peter Pan, yikes.)
What I do have a problem with is Tolkein's rambling. It takes him 400 pages of describing every rock, clearing or tree that the main characters see before getting to Elrond. I like the main idea of the Hobbit more because it's more anti-war and anti-money.Holy shit yes!! Im reading the books now. The beginning was excruciating to read. It serious took so fucking long to go anywhere important. Up untill the prancing pony almost everything was useless to the story. Lmao. And I don't even read the songs and poems.
Tolkein was really creative with his fictional races. We had
- white people
- hairy white people
- tall white people
- hairy white people 2: electric boogaloo
- fuck idk, talking trees?
- racially coded orcs
- the eagles? Are we counting the eagles?
Hey now, don't forget the "Swarthy Men of the East"
For real don't forget, Rhun and Harad were IMO the most interesting cultures he created for how little we got of them.
Edit: On further reflection having the bad humans all be brown easterners is indeed a little sus.
I mean I’ll give JR credit for having that scene where Sam finds the body of a “swarthy easterner” and emphasizes with him, wondering if he was just another common farm boy swept up in conflict against his will.
But that seemed to be the extent of Tolkien’s progressivism.
I knew I forgot the other type of humans, those were the guys on the big elephants right?
Yeah, Haradrim were the kinda Indian coded guys with the Mumakiil and the Easterlings of Rhun were the notpersians with the slick crimson and gold armor.
At least those are actual races, unlike white, black, [insert continent]-n, or whatever unscientific tool the Americans use to control their population.
I have encountered people who have told me, earnestly, that "funny-looking humanoids" is the only proper way to do fantasy races and anything else is wrong.
I don’t care if it’s a blind spot of mine, it’s an intentional blind spot. Yes all the races are segregated, but it’s fucking high fantasy. Yes there’s a lot of stuff about royal bloodlines, but fantasy has been about kings and queens and shit literally since the beginning of storytelling.
I love these stories, have done since I was a kid. I refuse to let my politics ruin them for me lol. At least they’re not blatant anti-communist propaganda, or weird Christian brainwashing like Narnia.
I've seen the movies, and read the books. They were entertaining.
Edit: OH SORRY you wanted me to make a moral judgement about them. Uhhh they are canceled because there wasn't enough female dwarves, 0/10 for Misogyny.
We enter the eternal discussion: if you lack female characters do you automatically become homo-erotic?
I don't care for that discussion. I view everything through a homoerotic lense and I don't feel like I have to explain myself any further. Academia? Destroyed.
Who remembers the video games? Lotr return of the king was my shit on ps2
Hell yes I remember getting stoned and playing this game for hours listening to Bolt Thrower. Hell yes.
The best lord of the rings video game is the divide and conquer mod for total war: medieval 2
I can't believe you'd do The Last Days of the Third Age Mount & Blade: Warband mod dirty like this.
Tbh I haven’t played it. But I have been tempted to pirate warband just to play it. Does it have stuff like trolls?
It sure does :)
Trolls and other special units are one of my favourite parts of the mod.
Trolls in particular are super cool. You can't play as one but evil armies regularly field one or two. They've given them unique models and enough armour that most blows from most weapons don't do any damage to them. They move really slowly and flinch periodically in daylight but the only way to actually kill them is high tier units wielding elvish or dwarvish weapons or a succesful cavalry charge, which is hard to pull off because horses are terrified of trolls. Blows from their clubs can hit send multiple units flying (without necesarily killing them) and easily batter down gates in sieges. They've also implemented ents, giant spiders and wargs in similarly cool and impactful ways as well as a lot of hero characters and special items.
The mod creators have done a really good job of taking the original M&B game as a lattice and engine and turning it into something a lot more fun and that feels uniquely LOTRy. They've tuned up the battle and campaign AI, overhauled most of the game systems and added a whole lot of new mechanics. On top of that the emergent storytelling is out of this world. I'm still kinda torn up from my first Rohan campaign I dropped 60 odd hours in three years ago after Faramir died on the Pellenor fields trying to drive the orcs back from the gates of Minas Tirith and I probably could have saved him but instead had chosen to help Theoden drive main force of Isengard into the dead marshes.
It's a treat.
If you like strategy videogames and are at all emotionally invested in the LOTR characters or setting I can strongly recommend you give it a try.
So you can’t be trolls, but can you field them? Can I play as an orc and have some troll boys with me? Because tbh most of the good factions bore me (at least in divide and conquer)
Absolutely, if you're any of the evil aligned factions you can field trolls and wargs and occasionally attract the help of giant spiders and nazgul.
Yah know how a lot of people really love the cool concepts Lovecraft came up and use them in cool books, movies, video games and RPGs, despite the fact Lovecraft himself was an awful human and a pretty meh writer?
This is how a contextualize the works of JRR Tolkien, the only saving grace for JRR being that he had some actual writing talent unlike Lovecraft. He really was a pioneer in the concept of “word building”, he actually built a whole fucking world with volumes of content that most readers would never find but snippets of. Making whole languages, histories, maps and and mythologies for the world his stories took place in, that was really amazing stuff, and it’s part of the reason he is so famous today. That inspired a lot of people to do the same but with their own stories. A lot of world building heavy fiction that exists today probably wouldn’t exist if JRR hadn’t spent ludicrous amounts of time making twenty different dialects of Elvin. Table top role playing games were pretty much invented by LoTRs fans.
But truth is while he’s better than Lovecraft he’s still not a great writer, his stories are formulaic and love going on stupid tangents. Really the movies tell a better story than his books did. Also he was a grumpy racist British man, like pretty much anyone who’d spend years of his life alone in his office making his own fanfic version of Finnish.
Orcs aren't the proletariat, but they are a lazy 'other'. A peoples without any moral good in them who are simply evil because they are born evil. Therefore it's totally fine to kill them because they're evil.
That is most hum-drum boilerplate dehumanization which you've seen every racist tout about their target of oppression. To Tolkien's credit, I don't think he actively realized what he was doing with the Orcs, and may have even started to catch on that he did an oopsie later in life. However, it didn't stop them from being used as a dogwhistle for every chud who wants an easily 'other' to happily chop to pieces in D&D.
Christ, just see the 'Goblinslayer' anime for the logical conclusion where even orc/goblin baby-murder is justified.
They were elves who were captured by Melkor/Morgoth who were then enslaved, tortured, and yeah, basically bred to be soulless killing machines.
Wikipedia already has the struggle sesh covered:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tolkien_and_race
The orcs kind of are. Sauron/Saruman are factions of the capitalist class. Elves and Gondor are the high and low aristocracy, horrible in the past but decayed and preferable to the bourgeoisie.
Hobbits are....Dithmarschen? Peasant republic with a Kulak/Gentry ruling class?
Hobbits with a Kulak ruling class is really the best sentence I have and will ever see on chapo.chat. Everyone else go home.
Tolkien is anarcho-momarchist.
He doesnt care by what method the devine mantle of kingship is applied, so long as you respect it.
Aragon? A park ranger? Secretly a king so he is just better in every way. Is he a king of anything? No. He is simply a king. So his ideas are better.
Sauron's greatest sin was not respecting thr hirearchy and trying to replave it himself.
Look at the wringwraths. Kings. So they are corrupted by evil into unkillable badasses. Normal people just turn into gollums.
It's nothing but cliche after cliche after cliche. A dark lord sealed away for thousands of years? Medieval kingdoms? Elves and dwarves who (of course) hate each other? A mysterious old mentor wizard (who of course dies, but Tolkien didn't even have the guts to make the death stick)?
I don't see why everyone loves it so much. Tolkien should've read some Robert Jordan and Brandon Sanderson. Then maybe he could've come up with something good, or at least halfway original.
Squinting really hard at the screen trying to gauge how sarcastic you are
I am nothing but sincere in suggesting that Tolkien should have read Brandon Sanderson before starting work on his novel
I mean the issue is half those cliques were byproducts of Tolkien himself. The entire epic fantasy genre was pioneered by guys who were fans of the dude.
It kinda of sucks in a way, since if you at all enjoy anything in the epic fantasy genre, even fucking dungeons and dragons, you have to have some knowledge of Tolkien’s stupid bigotries in order to “account” for them.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandon_Sanderson
Brandon Sanderson (born December 19, 1975)
Saruman was Kautsky. Sauron was a Hoxaist, Gondor, Rohan, and the Lindar are textbook colonial-imperialist empires, and Legolas and Gimli were a couple. No I will not be answering questions.
