Sigh…me and a friend talk about this a lot.
Well, let’s just start with Tolkien. I have four broad complaints with pretty much all of his stuff, although “The Hobbit” gets off less scathed for the most part. Here they are.
4. Holy cow, Tolkien was a fucking racist. Starting with, and assuming, segregated races; mixed race and/or corrupted elves as antagonists; alleged inspiration for orcs as African slaves working in coal and diamond mines he witnessed in South Africa; the dwarfs as a blatent, and anti-semitic, interpretation of Jews flawed by avarice; white men and elves as the eventual rulers of the world with no other skin tones even being possible apparently; etc. You can go ahead and claim that it was a product of his time and culture, which might mitigate it slightly, if every single fantasy writer who ever followed in Tolkien’s footsteps didn’t include the exact same features without much variation, completely ignorant of their original symbolism. Fuckers.
3. Sexism, oh god, so much sexism. There are close to a hundred named characters in LotR and it’s pretty hard to get the number of named females over ten, and that requires counting a gigantic, hideous spider queen which he constantly reminds his readers is a woman. Classy. Beyond the sheer disproportionate numbers, none of the women take an active role in the plot as a woman, at best they work their way onto the battlefield by pretending to be a man, and exuding masculine features. Most of the rest stand by passively as the men in their lives rush off to battle, and most of them are portrayed as being excessively sneaky and mysterious to boot. Basically, Tolkien had a pretty strong fear of women it seems to me, and again, it’s infected the entire genre he spawned, such that George R.R. Martin gets acclaimed as a near feminist god while still doing a shitty job overall.
2. Style, oh fuck, style. Boring, oh Jesus Christ, the books are so boring. Tolkien was a notoriously poor writer, and was far more interested in the history, language and scenery of his world than the characters or plot. Now, he did make a pretty impressive world, and he built it well, but this fucking style has since given birth to complete abominations like “The Wheel of Time.” God, how fucking dreary is that? They aren’t stories, they’re fucking travelogues. Learn to fucking tell a fucking story you fucking nitwits.
1. Theme—lets get into the basics here. Why did Tolkien write LotR? For a good romp? As a basic, boy’s adventure / power fantasy? No, he had a particular theme in mind—Tolkien was an avid anti-industrialist, and basically thought the world should go back to some sort of reactionary, idyll agrarian world which hasn’t existed in anywhere ever. Just…fuck that, right up the fucking butt. Technology rules, Tolkien can go plow himself with a vibrator for all I give a shit about his shoddy anti-industry message. But the best part is that no one even realizes that’s what it’s about! Not only did he have a shit-message, he couldn’t even write well enough to effectively convey that message to his readers. And the grandest irony is this—Tolkien would have absolutely hated his most diehard fans. The nerds most devoted and enabled by the technological and industrial aspects of society he hated are in fact his legacy’s greatest fans. It makes me cackle.
Twilight is a better saga than fucking LotR.
Look, that was all a bit hyperbolic, I admit. The issue at hand, fundamentally, is this. The fantasy genre grew from a series of books which were fundamentally racist, sexist, Christian focused, and politically reactionary. It was, by and large, a shit-fucking message, but no one grasps this, and writers these days employ the exact same series of tropes, and pump out the same shitty-valued tripe that Tolkien did, but of even worse quality, somehow. Some writers manage to play with and rise above the genre, but not many. Martin does to some extent. Gaimen somewhat as well. However, they have their own problems which are, for the most part, equally damning.
Sci-fi is a different issue all together, and I like it better, but it too has issues. I’d have to discuss that in a different post, because I went and gave myself a headache.
Bracken's Corner 