He was obviously high as a kite and seeing things.
The Klingons in the Original Series were a very obvious analogy for the Soviets. Roddenberry actually wanted them to be complex enough to question whether what they were doing was moral or not – hence episodes like “Day of the Dove” and “Errand of Mercy” where the Klingons and humans both work together or at least go out of their way not to fight.
As a Soviet stand-in, Roddenberry’s script-writing “Bible” forbade the writers from having the Federation and Klingons in open conflict; they are often depicted as fighting through proxies. It wasn’t until TNG’s Klingons became space-Vikings that they became super-warlike.
With all of this deep Tolkien discussion, there is a distinct whiff of weed, perhaps Longbottom leaf.
Ok, let me throw my take into this.
Smaug isn’t evil, he is just an exceptionally talented capitalist. He worked hard to gather all of that treasure, it is in his physical nature to collect these things, and while so many other races basically gave up and let Smaug be, the Dwarves greed and desire for material wealth brought the plauge of Smaug’s destruction onto the world.
If it can be imagined, the Rankin-Bass versions of Tolkien are more sophisticated and subtle in their more mature understanding of Tolkien than the recent blockbusters, which is why i posted the above. In the same episode it also shows Sam being tempted with images of good (green valleys, evil overthrown); a subtle distinction that was easy for more well read people making stuff in the 70s, apparently a harder distinction to make in the black vs white thinking today.
The real reason Tolkien’s work seems to have racial overtones is less to do with the Orcs and more to do with the Elves. The “fair people” who were all but demi-gods at the top end of the sliding scale were certainly not dark skinned and curly haired types. The men who “bred” with said Elves turned into Atlanteans, the best of the best of men. The dirtly, surly, men left on the continent were but grubby shadows of these bloodlines. (The purest Elves, by contrast, are the ones who never set foot on the grubby lands).
And that emphasis on bloodlines makes it hard for modern readers to square a lot of Tolkien’s world building with contemporary sensibilities. It’s not so much that Tolkien is racist, per se, but that he thinks racially.
No one has mentioned the Easterlings and the Haradrim yet?
(though I shouldn’t dip my toe into this conversation, considering most of my Tolkien lore came from playing Angband)
Oh wow
I. . .
I. . .
. . . can we go back to trying to make Timex have an honest argument about orcs, please? I want that image scrolled off the bottom of the page ASAP.
What, this image?
US centrism is weird.
Oh…oh no…
It is horrifying for sure.
But I think we should refresh it every 20 posts or so just to squick out @ArmandoPenblade
(Don’t do this please)
That’s my new phone wallapaper.
Who? I can’t think of an example of this. Even Satan and demons are corrupted angels in Christian myth. (And in ancient Jewish mythology, like the book of Job, Satan is more like a trickster god.)
China Mieville, author of fantastic fiction, avowed socialist, Ph.D in Economics from the London School, erstwhile socialist candidate for the House of Commons, once famously wrote:
Tolkien is the wen on the arse of fantasy literature. His oeuvre is massive and contagious—you can’t ignore it, so don’t even try. The best you can do is consciously try to lance the boil. And there’s a lot to dislike—his cod-Wagnerian pomposity, his boys-own-adventure glorying in war, his small-minded and reactionary love for hierarchical status-quos, his belief in absolute morality that blurs moral and political complexity. Tolkien’s clichés—elves ‘n’ dwarfs ‘n’ magic rings—have spread like viruses. He wrote that the function of fantasy was ‘consolation’, thereby making it an article of policy that a fantasy writer should mollycoddle the reader.
OTOH, he has since revealed that he has a quite nuanced and erudite take on Tolkien, so this may not qualify as stupidity:
Tolkien explains that he has a ‘cordial dislike of allegory’. Amen! Amen! And just to be clear, there is no contradiction at all between this fact, and the certain truth that his world throws off metaphors, can and should be read as doing all sorts of things, wittingly or unwittingly, with ideas of society, of class, the war, etc. But here is precisely the difference between allegory and metaphor: the latter is fecund, polysemic, generative of meanings but evasive of stability; the former is fecund and interesting largely to the extent that it fails. In his abjuring of allegory, Tolkien refuses the notion that a work of fiction is, in some reductive way, primarily, solely, or really ‘about’ something else, narrowly and precisely. That the work of the reader is one of code-breaking, that if we find the right key we can perform a hermeneutic algorithm and ‘solve’ the book. Tolkien knows that that makes for both clumsy fiction and clunky code. His dissatisfaction with the Narnia books was in part precisely because they veered too close to allegory, and therefore did not believe in their own landscape.
Nope, not getting better with repeated views.
I dunno, for some reason it strikes me more as Star Wars than religious. Bernie looks like Obi Wan.
So uh exactly how many people are going to try for the Democratic nomination. 40? 100? Geesh.
All of them.