I was thinking about this, though. Fantasy as we commonly accept it is based on medieval England and Europe. Knights and castles, etc. In movies and TV, every actor who isn't British adopts a faux (often bad) English accent. It certainly needn't adhere to those tropes, but the building blocks are pretty "white" to…

It's not uncomfortable that they skew white, it's the unfortunate way that the mumakil and orcs are described as darker skinned, contributing to the possibility of reading racial intent in the text. Plus the whole "free people of the west" stuff. I'm not saying any of it was intentional, but there are folks who take…

"That all ends with this movie."

That's great! Now, can you stretch that out for another 90 minutes?

EXACTLY. And now you see why he's so angry about turning in the first place! There's no going back! He'd probably just eventually explode.

I don't think I noticed that, even after reading it a couple of times. I wonder if that's to imply they were sunburnt from farming, or what?

…um……..I'm going to go with the latter in this particular case.

GEEKWORLD

Yeah, that's the "uncomfortable" stuff. Maybe it's naïve, but I sort of choose to hope there wasn't any real intent there. There are a lot of stories that involve "bad guys" who look different/are obviously bad just by looking at them. (Klingons, at least for awhile, Morlocks, etc.) I don't THINK Tolkein was an…

It's really a catch-22. He gets angry, which turns him black…..which makes him angrier, etc….

Ditto. I know of the Marvel character named Hyperion, but….that's it.

My experience was similar. Big sci-fi reader as a kid, never picked it up. I only read it well into adulthood, after a friend lent me a copy after the movie was released, just to see what the buzz/controversy was about. It was a'ight.

This sounds like a really promising Chapelle sketch.

Well, LOTR was written by Tolkein as a sort of "English myth", so it's not really surprising how race skews very white in his work. It can be a little uncomfortable, but I always took it more as a result of his specific cultural interest, and maybe a simple produce of its time, than any outright racism.
And of course,…

Yup.

I'm thinking "Inn Humans", about the proprietors of a local hotel.

God, I hope you're right. My fear is that everything he's done has ALREADY been normalized. It's been done before, so there's precedent. I wouldn't mind seeing him go out in a spectacular, glorious failure that might finally be the rebuke his methodology and personality require.

There's no shame in giving him a chance once he was elected. He might have surprised us and NOT been a complete and utter joke. Alas, that was not to be.

I suppose so. There's lots to parse here. Everyone involved is well within their rights to drop them, distance themselves, whatever. It's just interesting that it's all done without any kind of actual conviction or even direct affect/influence on their art. The court of public opinion—or the court of their own…

Fair enough. I guess it all comes down to popularity. Generations have been listening to music made by people who have done awful things. Those awful things didn't prompt their labels to drop them, etc. I guess the moral of the story is: if you're gonna do awful stuff, be sure you're lucrative enough for your…