I’m a huge Tolkien fanboy, loved LOTR and the Silm since I was a kid. But I swear interacting with other super fans is like walking on thin ice. Everything’s chill as long as you go with the hive mind, but then you say that you think X character isn’t that good or that a certain aspect of the plot wasn’t done well and you get dogpiled. This also includes the obvious, like the blatant racism on display with orcs and elves or the treatment of some characters who are implied to be neurodivergent or gay. The r/tolkienfans subreddit comes to mind, I’ve seen a lot of threads turn into passive aggressive shitflinging because the OP talked about gays, praised the movies or made a “childish” thread about a character they like (God forbid every post isn’t an essays worth of analysis)
Rings of Power definetly made things worse. If you expressed anything but pure contempt for the very concept, and everything attached to it. You get called out hardcore. I told a guy that it didn’t look too bad and suddenly, I’m a fake fan that loves to consume corporate trash. Amazon’s an evil company of course, but I remember a lot of th backlash being more about the women and POC than anything Bezos is up too.
Orcs are the dark skinned savages from the east and the Elves are the perfect fair skinned people from the west who are responsible for everythijng good in the world. Which, to be fair, is an extreme oversimplification but it’s the general idea.
Okay, this I can see. What about the second one?
Oh that’s just me being petty. I’ve noticed that if you like certain characters, you get weird looks. Like Feanor. I’ve seen people legitimately argue that Feanor fans are fascists or something.
Feanor is… not exactly my favorite character, but I think he’s one of the most well-crafted given what Tolkien was going for (something that reads like an actual ancient mythology). He’s like someone out of a Greek tragedy.
He’s one of the best characters in the book, precisely because he’s such a bastard. We’re so used to seeing Elves be wise and stoic that an Elf whose passionate, proud and hateful just blows my mind. Besides, the Valar are incompetent and let a lot of bad things happen.
Fair
Gollum, maybe? (I’m just guessing.)
There are some poor depictions of physical impairments, too. The movies make a kind of grotesque spectacle of physical differences. Especially in the Hobbit movies. Not so much in the book.
Do you think the idea of giving different races their own special traits is problematic, too? Or am I taking into it too much?
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In fandom there is actually more racism against the elves than against the orcs. Orcs are just taken for granted so they are not much discussed. It’s even more pronounced in other fantasy fandoms, for example warhammer.