Anghraine

My icon has grey eyes and black hair just for Tolkien :P

So. I generally dislike Tolkien fandom's "canonicity discourse" (yes, I'm doing it anyway) and the idea of imposing a specific ranking of texts. That said, it's occurred to me that one of the reasons I feel deeply out of step with Tolkien fandom is that The Silmarillion (as in, the published book, not the in-story accounts) is on a drastically different level of canonicity for me than basically everything else with JRR Tolkien's name on it.

I don't dislike The Silmarillion or anything. I quite enjoy it! But for me, it shows its age—not in ~a man of his time~ sense, but in an editorial sense. Christopher Tolkien did an enormous amount of spectacular editorial work over the course of his life and we are deeply indebted to him. But I think he did pretty clearly get better at it over time, and particularly at presenting his father's mass of notes and documents and so on in a way that makes the texts as accessible as possible. At the same time, in later texts, he clearly differentiates between actual words JRRT wrote (whether in the main body or in notes) and his (CT's) own understanding and explanations as JRRT's confidant and literary heir. I do give a lot of credence to Christopher Tolkien's understanding of his father's work, actually, and I deeply respect (and am grateful for) CT's efforts to carefully and clearly explain things like dates of composition (and how this can be determined), direct context, how a given point relates to his father's broader work, etc, throughout these texts.

(Tangent: Facebook keeps recommending defensive Jackson stans griping about how Christopher Tolkien just didn't get his father's work like Jackson did and was so horribly ungrateful to the filmmakers and such an inferior scholar blahblah for the crime of disliking the films. FLAMES ON THE SIDE OF MY FACE!! I am not uncritical of Christopher Tolkien, and neither was Christopher Tolkien, but I think we owe an immeasurable debt of gratitude to him. Also, even to me, his response to the films seemed harsh at the time, but at this point, I think he was pretty much right, anyway, and correctly judged the films' impact and reflection of pop culture understanding of JRRT's work.)

So what is my issue with the published Silmarillion?

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I saw an interesting, but also somewhat disturbing, conversation about the history of the Sansa Stark hatedom that touched on something I've been thinking about for awhile.

The Sansa hatedom discussion was sparked by someone asking about the reasons for the dudebro Sansa hatedom of days of yore. Someone else brought up these same dudebros' idealization of Arya by contrast with Sansa and how they basically valued Arya in "not like the other girls" terms. Yet another person argued that this was #problematic because the criticism of NLOG is homophobic. Somebody was like ... don't you mean misogynistic? Neither of these characters are gay? The previous person explained that the criticism of NLOG ignores the social context that it arises out of and disproportionately targets GNC women who are often lesbians, hence the connection with homophobia.

I do get that a lot of the kneejerk condemnation of NLOG rhetoric arises out of the misogynistic and gender essentialist and generally fucked-up perception of GNC women as threatening to femininity in some way, that plenty of those GNC women are lesbians or otherwise WLW and thus it can factor into homophobia in practice, and that those condemnations of the NLOG rhetoric are trotted out to dismiss the most basic criticisms of gender role expectations for women (imagine a conversation about the connection between the make-up industry or body hair removal and the widespread social pressure put on women to conform to narrowly-defined and generally harmful and expensive beauty standards that did not promptly turn into defensive choice feminism screeds).

I even get that there are over-invested Sansa stans who prop her up at Arya's expense because they find Sansa's conformity to feminine gender performance appealing and more appropriate to their own expectations for women/girls, and that they have used criticisms of NLOG rhetoric to bash Arya (or basically any woman/girl who even mildly diverges from gender performance norms).

But in this case, the conversation was about the ways Sansa has been harshly criticized for her association with femininity/feminine performance, mostly by adult men hyper-scrutinizing the gender performance of a fictional eleven-year-old girl, and framed as inferior to Arya because those men (like many men!) hold anything and anyone associated with femininity in contempt. That is something that very definitely did happen, frequently. There is a reason that "like a girl" or "girly" is an insult and has considerable power in defining what masculinity looks like to so many men and boys (there are further complications w/ this that I don't have the time to get into, but it's certainly a very conspicuous aspect of the construction of normative masculinity). The idea that an entirely accurate description of something that actually happened is problematic, even unspeakable, because the criticism has been misused in other contexts sits really uncomfortably with me. It feels a bit like creeping up to alternative facts from the other side.

However. I'm also writing about hyper-scrutiny in my dissertation—generally speaking, the way in which women's behavior (especially wrt sexuality) is placed under such intense scrutiny that you get this obsessive nitpicking and over-scrutinizing of anything and everything a woman or female character does or feels. Literary critics absolutely fall prey to this and that's the context of the discussion in my dissertation—essentially, that each individual nitpick they're making could be correct as far as it goes, but the cascade of so many of them and the way some early modernist critics concentrate this scrutiny on female characters does seem pretty misogynistic after a while. And I've seen that kind of behavior in other contexts.

Like, when MTG released LOTR art in which Aragorn was depicted as Black, some people were explicitly racist about it, and some people explicitly welcomed the depiction. But the thing I noticed was the way that some people would make all these detail-focused criticisms of the art that didn't mention race at all, but seemed very disproportionately directed towards the art pieces that presented heroic characters as POC. And many of the people doing this were familiar as the same people who responded similarly to The Rings of Power, especially the characters played by POC. Some of these critics just kept escalating and eventually went full mask-off; there was one former follower (former because I blocked him) who at first seemed a normal enough nitpicky purist (something I get), then suspiciously so, and within a couple of days his blog was just overtly racist responses to any heroic Tolkien characters being depicted as POC. Some of these people never went that far, but would actively minimize the impact of racism and misogyny on the general ROP discourse (like, there were popular ROP discourse memes in which the more respectable criticisms were presented up front in large letters and the racism/misogyny in significantly smaller font on the edges of the image). Others didn't do that, either, but still hyper-focused on every "wrong" detail about characters played by POC like Disa, Arondir, and Míriel.

It is, let's say, unsurprising that the ROP characters who probably got the most positive fandom reception in the end despite the general histrionics around the show were Elrond, Durin, Halbrand, and (more controversially) Galadriel. The most popular ROP ship by a gigantic mile is a white het ship, and at least on AO3, Celeborn (who does not appear in the show and is only very briefly and belatedly mentioned at all) shows up in more ROP fics than any of the characters played by POC (Arondir and Isildur barely squeak onto AO3's top ten list of commonly tagged ROP characters, following after Galadriel, Halbrand/Sauron twice, Elrond, Adar, Elendil, Gil-galad, and Celeborn, with Míriel, Disa, and Bronwyn not even making the list).

So, like ... it's not news that Tolkien fandom is racist and misogynistic. But the broader point is that popular condemnation of something can reach such a volume and be so disproportionately targeted that even things that are individually true or at least defensible in isolation start looking really suspect. And often they are really suspect in ways that become pretty obvious (it's about ethics in gaming journalism!!!!). But I'm not entirely sure how to reconcile my extreme distaste for "you can't use criticism of NLOG to characterize dudebro fans actively using that exact framework in a grossly misogynistic way because of the homophobes" and my extreme distaste for Tolkien fandom's refusal to consider the context before they start going on screeds about Arondir or MTG Aragorn.

jubaah responded to this post:

sgbsdhjndssdb we are coming from different directions, for some reason I assumed it would be all númenor - so when i saw lindon & misty mountains thrown in there i was like aaah... okay... :'( okay

I replied:

Oh yeah, I can see that! It's going to be a big story, whatever it is. I didn't quite dare to hope for/dread a full treatment of Númenor, so 'breathtaking' has kind of got me... !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! But getting Lindon too...

jubaah responded:

YEAH :DDD

steinbecks said:

i want to see the drowning of numenor SO BAD

I replied:

You undoubtedly will!!!!

incognitajones said:

my brain right now is that Michael Scott gif on a loop... it's really happening!!!

brynnmclean said:

I am excited and terrified!

Aww, I've just spent several hours explaining various backstories from The Silmarillion to my mother. She's watching ROP and really likes it, and is also listening to an audiobook of The Silmarillion at night but keeps losing track of things and getting different things from each confused, and is trying to figure out details. She's very worried that the Stranger might be Sauron and took awhile to warm up to Galadriel but really liked her in Númenor. She also feels the Númenóreans should be more visually distinct in adaptations than they ever have been (I agree; it bothers me less with ROP because at least there's a cool, vivid aesthetic for them and no species is cast that way, but I would personally prefer a weirder take). She was baffled by basically everything Tolkien ever said about Elrond given his depiction in the Jackson movies, and had previously thought ROP's Míriel and Elbereth were the same person, so there was a lot to clear up, but it was fun (though as a dedicated dog person, she was very sad about Huan!).

I thought I’d become pretty zen about LOTR on Prime, but a Youtuber I was just watching was like … hey, what if it’s a prequel to the movies? They could share continuity and everything!

me:

Tagged:

#the one(1) thing that makes me pretty chill about it is the possibility of an interpretation of middle-earth that's DIFFERENT #even if it's bad it will be differently bad! #but what if ... not? #like yeah i expect there to be considerable influence bc the films exert /such/ a vast influence on the popular imagination #but aghhhhhhhhh #i mean ... i'm sure it would be complicated legally to do that but EVEN SO it will haunt my nightmares #lord of the rings movies #(i am not saying they are all bad fwiw #or even mostly bad #but they are flawed and theirs is not the sole permissible vision for middle-earth)

[ETA 3/14/2024: ngl it has since become very clear to me that much of "Tolkien" fandom actually disagrees that other cinematic visions of Middle-earth are a good thing, or even a tolerable thing. ROP does have a different vision from the Jackson films, but it's pretty moderately different tbh, and even that is a cause for sackcloth and ashes. Meanwhile, social media keeps bombarding me with defensive arguments against Christopher Tolkien's criticisms of the Jackson films, including "Christopher Tolkien did a lot of good but he didn't get his father the way Peter Jackson did and should have been more grateful to Jackson." I'm not uncritical of every editorial choice Christopher Tolkien ever made—nor was Christopher himself—but the stans who cannot hear a word against the films, including from Tolkien's now-dead son and confidant, while throwing screaming tantrums about ROP at every opportunity? Come on.]

I was searching f_fa for stuff on Númenor and instead found a nonny earnestly arguing that the Númenórean men in Rings of Power being hotter than Elvish men apart from Arondir is a serious problem of sexism.

Like, it's one thing to be a purist nitpicker (I am a purist nitpicker about many things!) and to be bothered by breaking the lore. I mean, IMO, it's actually a very minor breaking of lore as far as Tolkien's writings (rather than Silm fandom vibes) go. Tolkien fandom tends to downplay the weirdness of Númenóreans as Tolkien wrote them, where they're essentially a bridge between Elves and other Men—he wrote that they were barely distinguishable from Elves in appearance and in powers of mind. If you actually care about ROP being ~true to Tolkien's vision~ or whatever, you'd want Númenórean and Elvish characters to look more like each other than like anyone else (and, personally, I think visually associating Númenóreans and Elves could lay some important groundwork for the ultimate Númenórean resentment of being "denied" Elvish immortality—their very similarities are what feeds Númenórean bitterness over their mortality!). But I've yet to see anyone complaining about ROP who thinks the problem with (debatably) more attractive Númenórean men is that Elves should look like them. Instead it's about how Elves should be drastically and distinctly more beautiful than any and all Men (Túrin Turambar whomst, I guess).

How one group of male characters being cast with more conventionally attractive actors than a different group of male characters = sexism is beyond me. Elf stanning is serious business, I guess.

(Note: I do think there actually is sexism and racism in ROP's casting, in that the female actors, and actors of color, are largely stunning while the white male roles go to just about anyone. That's markedly superior to the endlessly glorified PJ films' casting, but the pattern is still worth discussing! The comparative hotness of Númenórean and Elvish men has fuck-all to do with it, though.)

I’m nervous about various specific fandoms each becoming a fandom for X new adaptation with dashes of the original canon thrown in, along the lines of P&P or LOTR fandoms

…but I’m petty enough to halfway look forward to it, too.

#a;lkjdfadf i've seen people going on about how terrible it would be if the line between amazon lotr and tolkien canon got blurred in fandom #and it's like ... lmao #who can imagine what THAT would be like??? #more like 'what if the current fanons got supplanted by different fanons' #at least they'll be new #/shrug

Damn. I've had a follower who's been fairly unpleasant on ROP posts, but in a way that could be attributed to general purism.

...nope! Don't know the person's gender, but they reblogged MTG Aragorn from me to be a racist asshole. A quick way to know who to block, I suppose.

continentwank + further bad ROP takes
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I can understand why people assume that my Faramir hair posts suggest that I would also be invested in Elves having long hair, but uhhhh no.

I mean, every time I get a response that's all "this post has the opposite energy as the Amazon show," it's like—um, thanks but no thanks? I care about Faramir's aesthetic so much because he's my fave character and he comes from my fave Middle-earth culture, and because it's so difficult to find depictions of either that aren't tremendously dominated by the films' bland Anglo take on them. The people going on about Elves' hair with a) dubious canon evidence and b) incessant idealization of the films are ... yeah, not ever going to be me.