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Journalists: Why do extreme right wing racists love Tolkien so much?
Elrond: I'm really worried about how my race is going to be replaced by a bunch of dark-skinned inferior races
Journalists: I don't get it, how could they corrupt something so pure?
Like honestly, the entire corpus of Tolkien's work can't be redeemed
It isn't just a case of the author being racist where you might be able to separate the author from his work
It's the work itself that's the problem
This whole world is built on the idea that races are absolutely real with sharp boundaries for inclusion and exclusion and deep, biological differences between them that often have moral valence
That's racist!
And from that poisoned shithole of a premise flows a bunch of other terrible ideas, like:
If someone from one race has a baby with someone from another race, they're only half as special
Prohibitions on inter-racial partners? That's Klan-type thinking folks!
Don't believe me? Recall: Arwen's entire story-arc is this bittersweet "oh no I fell in love with the wrong person, I guess I'll die" story
And of course there's the fact that in this universe, it's just accepted that being a member of some races means you merit death
And this goes for killing individual orcs, all the way up to genocide
And you can nit-pick, you can say that the author was better than his work, or that it wasn't his intention or whatever
But the story itself dovetails nicely with white supremacist thinking, and in a way that makes it un-salvageable
