Warning, long rant that may upset some LotR fans:

To be fair Lord of the Rings is pretty racist. I mean it’s not coincidence that all the good guys in Tolkien’s universe happen to be white people from the west and all the bad guys to be dark skinned hordes from the east, some of which are just genetically predisposed to evil and others having been “corrupted” by an “eastern despot”. It’s also got this sort of absolutist moral righteousness about it that, as we have seen with how certain parties to current conflicts have appropriated Lord of the Rings terminology to dehumanize their opponents, lends itself to teaching people to think in terms of simplistic good vs evil narratives. Not once is an actual material motivation given for why the bad guys do what they do, it’s all just evil for evil’s sake. And it constantly talks of the “free peoples” of Middle Earth as opposed to all those unfree barbarians in the east who are either just too slavish, or greedy, or in some other way morally weak such that they fall under the rule of the big bad despot, but meanwhile pretty much everyone but the hobbits lives under some form of monarchy whose right to rule is basically divinely ordained and unquestioned. Also, pretty much all the main characters (again with the exception of the hobbits) are some sort of nobility.

And while i do give credit where credit is due and acknowledge that it does have some very impressive achievements especially in terms of inventing entire languages and building a very expansive lore around them, including some really good imitations of medieval poetry, a lot of the worldbuilding itself is not all that great. Like there are supposed to be all these civilizations but most of the time it doesn’t really seem like they make any sense, it seems like there are way too few people in the world and there is no agriculture, or any real economic activity (except for the dwarves who are constantly portrayed as greedy) to justify how all of those cities got built and sustain themselves. And for all that it’s touted as having drawn so much inspiration from pre-christian germanic legends, its actual underlying mythology is really just very derivative of the biblical creation myth, complete with a monotheistic god and a pantheon of various angels and “fallen angels”.

Anyway, that was my little rant about Lord of the Rings which i’ve had a lot of these issues with for many years, since way before i became a communist. And i did and still do enjoy both the books and the movies on some level, it’s just that they are clearly heavily tainted by the ideological viewpoint and bigotries of their author. That being said this weirdo clown Haz who tries to make it all about “woke elves” vs “chad Sauron” is missing the point completely. No one in their right mind could think Sauron was the good guy because he was written to be irredeemably and unambiguously evil. Patsocs making a fool of themselves as usual with just really dumb takes.

As for Mordor representing “dirty” industrial society counterposed with the “clean” and idyllic pre-industrial feudalism of the “free peoples” of Middle Earth, yeah a big part of the message of the books is “industry bad, nature good”. Ironic that Tolkien claimed he hated allegories because he sure wrote some pretty obvious ones. Anyhow that doesn’t make Sauron good, it just makes the message of the books naive and misguided, it speaks again to Tolkien’s black and white idealistic thinking and his romanticization of pre-industrial society. That comes from a very privileged point of view since he himself benefited from the living standards provided by the industrial revolution and living in the core of an empire that used that advantage to loot half the planet.

(Interestingly, i have nowhere near the same level of criticism for The Hobbit. In fact i think it’s great on pretty much every level. Because it was written as a children’s book it does not really attempt to be anything more than a cute adventure fairy tale. It’s not overexplained like The Lord of the Rings, and there is very little to no room in it for any ideological baggage to be inserted by the author because its themes are much more simplistic.)

Reactionaries try not to use LOTR, star wars,Harry Potter, and marvel metaphors in politics challenge (impossible)