@mekkaokereke

There has been a microcosm of that debate in #ttrpg / #dnd spaces. A lot of gamers want to move away from the "Designated Bad Guy Races" and portray, say, orcs as people like everyone else.

And predictably, there is a fierce backlash against this from other gamers who claim that "I don't want politics in my gaming!" Which, of course, means that they are comfortable with the politics as they are, and don't want to think about them.

(They also don't want to acknowledge that Gary Gygax, one of the founders of the hobby, was a massive racist and misogynist who baked his assumptions into the game, but that's another story...)

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/dungeons-and-dragons-is-shedding-race-in-gaming-heres-why-it-matters/

@mekkaokereke oh no. Don’t point this out to them. They can’t even handle Harry Potters racism. lol.

@mekkaokereke
Thanks, Mekka!
1. I confess. I really loved LOTR.
2. I’m happy I noticed the white supremacy and the royalism/classism without having them pointed out to me.
3. An entire generation fell in love with Harry Potter before…
4. We’re big kids now. We don’t have to hang on to the popular fiction of our youth. We don’t live in a present that’s inferior to a prior golden age. New authors are creating new inspiring fiction. And much of it works to be free of those encoded hierarchies.

@mekkaokereke

He wrote this stuff, and so it should be obvious why the white right-wing gravitates towards it.

Which also neatly explains why a good segment of online Tolkien fanatics absolutely lost the entirety of their shit when Rings of Power introduced an elf played by a man of color.

@mekkaokereke I vividly recall pointing all of this out to a group of Tolkien fans on UseNet ~1995. They were incensed.

I didn't say they couldn't read it any more. I didn't even say Tolkien "was" racist. I calmly pointed out these obvious facts of the text, and they lost their damn minds.

There was *one guy* with a Chinese-looking name--Wong or Kang or something like that--who was like, "But I want to hear this!"

@mekkaokereke Russian professor Kirill Yeskov wrote a bootleg LotR novel called "The Last Ringbearer" based on the premise that the story as told by LotR was propaganda and victor's history to justify "the West" conquering and subjugating "the East".

Yeskov calls out the racism in Tolkien's descriptions of other peoples... and then blows the game by making it all into a plot by the Elves who he makes up as thinly disguised fantasy Jews. 🤷‍♂️

@mekkaokereke Yeah, it's very unsurprising they like it, but I'm still a bit amazed that they almost always name their ventures after the things that were clearly stated as evil or tools for evil.

@mekkaokereke

Tolkien grew up in South Africa, IIRC. I've read his works more than once, but have also come to acknowledge that they rest on a racist paradigm (among other things). It's probably more obvious to someone with the experiences of a black American or South African than it was to me when I was a white teenager from Scandinavia.

@mekkaokereke "The white is silent" is an absolutely brilliant phrase! As for the rest, it's depressing that people still need to explain the racist and xenophobic "undertones" that have been obvious for 70 years at this point. But even more depressing that people with power see that work of fiction as some kind of universal truth or guiding light or... I don't even know what to call it. I'm not a fan of this timeline.

@mekkaokereke David Brian’s article on Tolkien completely changed my perspective on him:

https://www.salon.com/2002/12/17/tolkien_brin/

Once I saw it, I could not unsee it. So racist and discriminatory in so many ways.

@mekkaokereke when he talked about the "wicked dark men of the east" that made my senses tingle a bit ):