CHAT DUMP (and Quotes)

[Friday]

Tolkien did not have enough women in his Trilogy. Eowyn fuckin' rules though, and like they said, even having a few (or even just one) female character with agency is rare in modern works.

Honestly, my brobdingnagiest problem with Tolkien was that he cast every evil human as "swarthy dudes from the eastern hot desert lands." Even back in the Silmarillion, evil humans were explicitly a different looking race. As if humans divide themselves into evil and good groups by race/skin color. That's my personal brobdingnagiest problem with his works, and it reveals his British "white people are just better" mindset.

Is he the most racist British person? No, not by a mile. Not at the time, and not by modern standards. But it's 100% there in his works, staring you in the face.

Orcs are another matter, but the "west humans good, east humans bad" shit is pretty blatant racism. He does try to show that not -all- of the easterners were bad, like when Sam sees his first dead guy killed by another human, and wonders if this poor fellow was really evil at heart or just, you know, drafted up by Putin and sent into the meat grinder. But such musings do not redeem casting all easterners as the bad guys.

[nosimpleway]

That's something that kept coming up playing a game of the 5e LotR TTRPG. Like, some of those guys who are Always Evil? The Black Numenorians. "Whoa, that's not cool" became a running gag whenever they were mentioned.

[Friday]

*knock knock*

"Hello?"

"Hello, and blessings of the Light upon you! Have you considered joining our lord and savior Sauron, who says that the Valar are keeping immortality away from us purely because they're super uncool dudes and we should totally invade their holy divine land and kill them?"

"Honey close the door, a black person is here"

[Mongrel]

Tolkien did not have enough women in his Trilogy. Eowyn fuckin' rules though, and like they said, even having a few (or even just one) female character with agency is rare in modern works.

Honestly, my brobdingnagiest problem with Tolkien was that he cast every evil human as "swarthy dudes from the eastern hot desert lands." Even back in the Silmarillion, evil humans were explicitly a different looking race. As if humans divide themselves into evil and good groups by race/skin color. That's my personal brobdingnagiest problem with his works, and it reveals his British "white people are just better" mindset.

Is he the most racist British person? No, not by a mile. Not at the time, and not by modern standards. But it's 100% there in his works, staring you in the face.

Orcs are another matter, but the "west humans good, east humans bad" shit is pretty blatant racism. He does try to show that not -all- of the easterners were bad, like when Sam sees his first dead guy killed by another human, and wonders if this poor fellow was really evil at heart or just, you know, drafted up by Putin and sent into the meat grinder. But such musings do not redeem casting all easterners as the bad guys.

Yeah, the scene with Sam and the very confused and self-contradictory way he treated orcs was something of an indication that as person he probably would have questioned the specific race/species = evil trope with a little less Victorian British in him or a long enough life. Strong morals aside, he was a stickler, who would go so far as to upend his entire written world over minor edits, and inconsistencies Bothered him, and that's one thing you discover eventually is that racism isn't even remotely internally consistent. He never quite got there in his own lifetime, but I think he would have eventually.

[Büge]

He does try to show that not -all- of the easterners were bad, like when Sam sees his first dead guy killed by another human, and wonders if this poor fellow was really evil at heart or just, you know, drafted up by Putin and sent into the meat grinder. But such musings do not redeem casting all easterners as the bad guys.

I feel like he got a little self-aware of this problem in later parts of his writing, like when we saw a scene of two orcs discussing a plan to desert their post in Return of the King. It felt like he was (finally) trying to inject a little bit of humanity into the orcs. Of course, this just kind of adds to the discomforting reality that our heroes are slaughtering essentially slaves.

Another example were the Woses, the "brutish" and "unlovely" people who guide Théoden and the Rohirrim through a secret path to the Pelennor fields. Once the Rohirrim are through the pass, the Woses are like



Even though I'm sure Tolkien was trying to include a group to contrast the Orcs and Easterlings, it still feels paternalistic.

[nosimpleway]

I feel like he got a little self-aware of this problem in later parts of his writing,

It was after publication, so what's there is there, but in letters to people sent later in life he very much dialed it back. Like, to summarize, "I can't say orcs are irredeemably bad. The world accepted their making, so it follows that they are as much a part of nature as anything else, and it therefore follows that being of nature they are of God, and it follows from there that anything of God must be ultimately good."

Fault the logic as you will but yeah, Jolkien Rolkien Rolkien Tolkien himself took a look back at his "always Chaotic/Evil" races and went "Huh, that's... that's not a great thing to say about anybody, even if I made them up."

[Thad]

Yeah, that's consistent with Ainulindalë; there's the bit where the Valar are singing the world into being and Melkor intentionally creates discord and tries to corrupt the song but he can't; everything he creates ends up complementing the song in some way. There's still beauty in snow and ice.

[Mongrel]

[Friday]

a middle schooler

[Caithness]

22:52 <Romosome> Sharkey's grandpa was a clown
22:53 <Sharkey> yes.
22:53 <Sharkey> and a one eyed shriner
22:53 <Romosome> wait is that kid fucking dead
22:53 <Romosome> yeah I'm glad I bothered to show up tonight what the hell is this
22:53 <Brandleby> This movie has basically no plot and I'm still not following it.
22:54 <Romosome> Tonight's theme: Domestic Violence Humor
22:54 <Sharkey> funny we found a long lost half uncle out west here and he was a rodeo clown
22:54 <Sharkey> so there's probably some kind of fuckin clown gene

[Mongrel]

Or Cyrano de Bergerac, the deformed Frenchman who-

[Thad]

Gentle reminder that text can be copied and pasted as text instead of giant blurry JPGs of text.

okay now you're just mocking me

[Mongrel]

<McMurdo> evengelicals going on about The Rapture be like "God only went to the store for a pack of smokes; he'll be back any day now, you'll see."

[Mongrel]

[Büge]

[Mongrel]

<Sharkey> dreamed that my nemesis, Pablo Picasshole, was going around turning everyone cubist. nobody had a sense of perspective about it.

[Mongrel]

I enjoy this entirely too much, and not just because of the John Barleycorn analogue.

@ironic-points-of-light-deactivate

On a lighter note.

The main reason I ever wanted to write a Hungarian mythology-based urban fantasy is that I needed to see someone do Bread Magic in a mundane modern setting.

Bread Magic shows up in a variety in Hungarian fairytales. It works like this: when someone evil, usually the devil, sometimes a dragon, wants to come into your house and hurt you, usually by taking your children, what you do is put a loaf of bread on the windowsill. It will speak for you.

When evil demands admission, the bread will say: First, they buried me under the ground, and I survived. When I sprouted, they cruelly cut me down with sickles, and I survived. They threshed me with their flails and I survived. They ground me to flour with their millstones and I survived. They put me in a bowl and kneaded me, then they put me in a hot oven to bake me, and I survived. Have you done all these things? Until you do all these things and survive, you have no power here.

This is pretty powerful magic I think, and it makes sense in a country where wheat is the staple crop and bread is the staple food. If you have bread, you are alive, if you have no bread, you are dead, therefore bread is life. It was customary to refer to wheat as “life” well into the twentieth century, and not in high literary circles either: rural seasonal workers negotiated their wages in so and so many sacks of life.

And I totally want someone to do bread magic with a shitty store-bought muffin.

[Mongrel]

<dov> Every morning as I leave the house I tell my cat to be good, take care of the house, and "you are my daughter. never forget that" because fundamentally I see myself as the parent in a fantasy novel who leaves the house on what seems like a normal day just before the inciting incident of the plot
‪<dov> If I am slain by a foreign invader or a nefarious demonic cult I want my cat to know I loved her
<dov> She will need it in her hero's journey