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Snowman_McK posted:It's cool when people police the thread and contribute nothing themselves. Be the change, my dude. "Tolkien was a racist" is like some ugg boots and pumpkin spice latte level basic poo poo and who actually gives a gently caress
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Apr 29, 2018 03:19
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TetsuoTW posted:"Tolkien was a racist" is like some ugg boots and pumpkin spice latte level basic poo poo and who actually gives a gently caress Ugg boots are fuckin' comfortable and warm you weirdo.
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Apr 29, 2018 03:28
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Oh no not basic, unlike this forum with its nuanced and complex discussion that certainly happens.
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Apr 29, 2018 03:38
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CharlestheHammer posted:Oh no not basic, unlike this forum with its nuanced and complex discussion that certainly happens. actually the opposite is true
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Apr 29, 2018 03:42
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TetsuoTW posted:"Tolkien was a racist" is like some ugg boots and pumpkin spice latte level basic poo poo and who actually gives a gently caress I mean you kind of have to talk about it, given that the fantasy genre is still in thrall to his ideas.
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Apr 29, 2018 03:44
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HUNDU THE BEAST GOD posted:I mean you kind of have to talk about it, given that the fantasy genre is still in thrall to his ideas. Even revisionist stuff like Abercrombie's buys into it, the most complexity they managed was 'actually both sides are bad'
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Apr 29, 2018 03:48
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Even Tolkien thought Tolkien was racist. Honestly the dude was probably less racist than, like, Peter Jackson. Like the Orcs in the books are more humanized than the ones in the movies.
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Apr 29, 2018 04:39
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porfiria posted:Even Tolkien thought Tolkien was racist. And Tolkien later wrote about there being good guy orcs who were completely uninvolved with the books. Tolkien hated the idea of a universally evil race.
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Apr 29, 2018 04:52
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My girlfriend in high school hated lotr because she was convinced the orcs were raping the women in the villages and I had to try and reassure her they would simply torture and eat them. Nothing suss.
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Apr 29, 2018 04:57
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Cythereal posted:And Tolkien later wrote about there being good guy orcs who were completely uninvolved with the books. Tolkien hated the idea of a universally evil race. There's a nice scene late in RoTK where the hobbits overhear two orcs talking about the war, how neither of them know how it's going or what it's over. I mean, stuff like that has no impact on the narrative, but it's a nice bit of colour.
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Apr 29, 2018 04:57
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The orcs in Shadow of Mordor always seemed more human than any of the non-orc characters.
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Apr 29, 2018 05:37
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MechanicalTomPetty posted:Jack Black actually has really surprising acting chops when he's allowed to play something other than, well, Jack Black. Bernie was great
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Apr 29, 2018 06:14
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A lot of comedic actors are shockingly good at non-comedic stuff. My favorite Will Ferrell movie is still Stranger than Fiction.
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Apr 29, 2018 06:27
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8one6 posted:A lot of comedic actors are shockingly good at non-comedic stuff. My favorite Will Ferrell movie is still Stranger than Fiction. I can't remember if that was played as a comedy but it was surely sold as one. Adam Sandler in Punch Drunk Love or The Comedians might be a better example but those were probably billed as comedies too so idk. Eternal Sunshine and Cable Guy, maybe. I felt like the only one in the theater at Eternal Sunshine not expecting a comedy.
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Apr 29, 2018 06:36
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TetsuoTW posted:"Tolkien was a racist" is like some ugg boots and pumpkin spice latte level basic poo poo and who actually gives a gently caress To be fair to me, I mentioned Conan too.
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Apr 29, 2018 10:00
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Tolkein was a war vet with PTSD, while Lovecraft was physically and mentally ill and in poverty most of his life (he seperated from his (Jewish) wife because he couldn't support her, iirc) and apparently eased up on the racism before his death. (At a rather young age due to disease he couldn't afford to treat) Can't really excuse the racist, classist and xenophobic under/overtones of their stuff but also can't dismiss it entirely.
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Apr 29, 2018 11:07
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Ghost Leviathan posted:Tolkein was a war vet with PTSD, while Lovecraft was physically and mentally ill and in poverty most of his life (he seperated from his (Jewish) wife because he couldn't support her, iirc) and apparently eased up on the racism before his death. (At a rather young age due to disease he couldn't afford to treat) Can't really excuse the racist, classist and xenophobic under/overtones of their stuff but also can't dismiss it entirely. Lovecraft's work is informed by his racism and his fragility, it's a key part of the text and actually adds a layer or two.
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Apr 29, 2018 12:02
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Ghost Leviathan posted:Tolkein was a war vet with PTSD, while Lovecraft was physically and mentally ill and in poverty most of his life (he seperated from his (Jewish) wife because he couldn't support her, iirc) and apparently eased up on the racism before his death. I kinda doubt that: Lovecraft posted:There is a great and pressing need behind every one of the major planks of Hitlerism—racial-cultural continuity, conservative cultural ideals, & an escape from the absurdities of [the Treaty of] Versailles. The crazy thing is not what Adolf wants, but the way he starts out to get it. I know he’s a clown, but by God, I like the boy!
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Apr 29, 2018 12:22
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Lovecraft and Tolkien are nowhere near the same level in terms of racism. Tolkien was about as far from racist as a white man could be expected to be for the era he lived in. The dude wrote a letter to the Nazis telling them to gently caress off and he also regretted not presenting the orcs with more shades of gray (they were also never stand-ins for black people). Lovecraft would make Woodrow Wilson blush.
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Apr 29, 2018 12:57
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Do bear in mind Lovecraft died in 1937 before everyone had much fuller picture of Hitler, not to excuse his racism which was extreme even for his time.
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Apr 29, 2018 13:17
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I recall that Rob Howard, a Texan famous for writing tons of stories about brave white men fighting hordes of irredeemably evil negroes, was appalled by Lovecraft's racism. Like, the guy who wrote Conan and Solomon Kane went "holy gently caress, dude, chill out."
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Apr 29, 2018 13:39
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Tolkein was also a devout Catholic, and cited that as a major influence on his writing. He was really uncomfortable with how parts of Lord of the Rings were seen as racist, and deliberately wrote to try to correct that in later years.
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Apr 29, 2018 13:45
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JBP posted:My girlfriend in high school hated lotr because she was convinced the orcs were raping the women in the villages and I had to try and reassure her they would simply torture and eat them. Nothing suss. The orks were formed in ponds, so it's could be argued that they didn't even have sexual organs to begin with. 8one6 posted:A lot of comedic actors are shockingly good at non-comedic stuff. My favorite Will Ferrell movie is still Stranger than Fiction. I always like to point out that John C. Reilly didn't start off as a comedic actor. His first movie was Casualties Of War and he had a good speaking part in The Thin Red Line.
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Apr 29, 2018 14:37
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Inspector Gesicht posted:Do bear in mind Lovecraft died in 1937 before everyone had much fuller picture of Hitler, not to excuse his racism which was extreme even for his time. Do bear in mind that Lovecraft wrote a short story about the virtues of ethnic cleansing.
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Apr 29, 2018 14:41
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Shadow Over Innsmouth can be summed up as "Race mixing is bad"
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Apr 29, 2018 14:51
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Lovecraft didn't ease up on his racism before his death but he did switch his political views - he was a huge FDR supporter, thought the New Deal didn't go far enough, and after the 1936 election wrote about rubbing FDR's victory in to the rest of his family who were all traumatized because they had all voted for the fascist fringe candidate. Considering Lovecraft's earliest political views were all about wishing he had been born in the Confederacy, that's a sign that he was undergoing some big change in his worldview.
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Apr 29, 2018 15:20
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Chairman Capone posted:Lovecraft didn't ease up on his racism before his death but he did switch his political views - he was a huge FDR supporter, thought the New Deal didn't go far enough, and after the 1936 election wrote about rubbing FDR's victory in to the rest of his family who were all traumatized because they had all voted for the fascist fringe candidate. Considering Lovecraft's earliest political views were all about wishing he had been born in the Confederacy, that's a sign that he was undergoing some big change in his worldview. Lots of Dixiecrats in the Deep South supported the New Deal; they just wanted to make sure that only white people reaped its benefits and hoped that supporting it would mean Roosevelt would leave the Jim Crow laws alone. 
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Apr 29, 2018 15:37
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Snowman_McK posted:It's cool when people police the thread and contribute nothing themselves. Be the change, my dude. Well instead of arguing if it's racist that all members of a fantasy race act the same, why don't we look at the trailer to an actual movie coming out soon? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kFFwknK6iUI I would argue that Hollywood's depiction of Native Americans is worse than anything Tolkien did since it deals with actual people and cultures who still live in the United States. The depiction has swung from being a mass of blood thirsty savages to being an idyllic people who are more virtuous, spiritual, and connected to the Earth than any white person could be. It ignores the humanity of the Native Americans and depicts them as flatly as any race Tolkien created. This leads into the what I would imagine is a quandary faced by a lot of "ethnic" actors. Either accept the part playing the wise old Indian, or don't get work at all. One of my favorite Graham Greene performances is in Die Hard 3 because his ethnicity is incidental to the plot, his character is apparently a Catholic, and he's just a regular member of the NYPD. Unfortunately, a good deal of his filmography is being cast as "the Indian." The John Wayne movie "McClintock!" even has a character literally comment on the fact that everyone views him as an Indian first, and not his attributes as a fast runner, or a college graduate. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g9wNbD7wJrQ&t=830s I don't know, how do you depict a group in a movie without resorting to stereotypes?
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Apr 29, 2018 16:04
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basic hitler posted:Let's do this to Grimm's fairytales while we're at it. Was the german peasantry secretly super hosed up as well?
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Apr 29, 2018 16:11
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Wheat Loaf posted:Lots of Dixiecrats in the Deep South supported the New Deal; they just wanted to make sure that only white people reaped its benefits and hoped that supporting it would mean Roosevelt would leave the Jim Crow laws alone. And it largely worked. I wouldn't say that Lovecraft supporting FDR is an indication that he got any better. When the Democrats actually started challenging the racists in their party, the party split in two and the New Deal imploded
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Apr 29, 2018 16:41
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Blade_of_tyshalle posted:I recall that Rob Howard, a Texan famous for writing tons of stories about brave white men fighting hordes of irredeemably evil negroes, was appalled by Lovecraft's racism. It's true, and that's one of the reasons Howard's stuff holds up a lot better than Lovecraft's to me. Howard was still a white dude from Texas in the 20s so it's less that he was not racist and more that he was of the opposite extreme and was way into the concept of the noble savage. But that shows itself more in Conan constantly dragging and dunking on rich people and the bureaucracy that protects them so it's more easily cathartic. But even he improved a lot with that as his work went on, and you can see if you read the Solomon Kane stories in chronological order how the character changes and towards the end is basically just like "huh, guess I was wrong all these years and these foreign folks are actual humans that have a culture that deserves respect after all" about as closely as you could get in a fantasy pulp story of that time. But then even Howard's physical description of Conan, I mean Conan's "white" today but "darkly tanned," "mane of long black hair," "smoldering blue eyes"?  There was a steady stream of Italian and Sicilian immigrants coming to Texas around when Howard was a kid that actually did pretty well for themselves there, and this coincided with IIRC Howard being old enough to perceive a wave of Native Americans that were marched from Texas to Oklahoma. I always wondered if the ways he would often word Conan's complexion and hair was an attempt to sort of low key stereotypically equivocate the two. Like how Oronooko is a prince in the plot of the titular novella but Aphra Behn also out of her way to describe Oronooko as having very artistically classically Roman features to make him come off as royalty and one worthy of our concern and praise on a more instinctive level too.
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Apr 29, 2018 17:17
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SimonCat posted:This leads into the what I would imagine is a quandary faced by a lot of "ethnic" actors. Either accept the part playing the wise old Indian, or don't get work at all. One of my favorite Graham Greene performances is in Die Hard 3 because his ethnicity is incidental to the plot, his character is apparently a Catholic, and he's just a regular member of the NYPD. Unfortunately, a good deal of his filmography is being cast as "the Indian." I also like Greene in Maverick because he gets to play as a pretty disaffected Indian who plays off other's racism for profit and is just as duplicitous and simultaneously supportive as the main character's other friends. Not perfectly virtuous, in no sense a bad guy, and fits in as a guy making a living among racists with deep pockets.
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Apr 29, 2018 22:35
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Ape Agitator posted:I also like Greene in Maverick because he gets to play as a pretty disaffected Indian who plays off other's racism for profit and is just as duplicitous and simultaneously supportive as the main character's other friends. Not perfectly virtuous, in no sense a bad guy, and fits in as a guy making a living among racists with deep pockets. He is hilarious in that. "Wants me to talk like they do in the books, y'know 'how, white man!', you people are such assholes."
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Apr 29, 2018 22:44
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Wheat Loaf posted:Lots of Dixiecrats in the Deep South supported the New Deal; they just wanted to make sure that only white people reaped its benefits and hoped that supporting it would mean Roosevelt would leave the Jim Crow laws alone. Yeah, but Lovecraft wasn't in the south; he wasn't a Dixiecrat; he wasn't even a registered Democrat; he hadn't supported FDR a few years earlier entirely due to his views on the free market that by 1936 he had explicitly abandoned in favor of socialism; and his family members, who were by far the most important people in his life and who he was content to let shape the course of his life (including telling him to divorce his wife) all absolutely loathed Roosevelt. So in that context, yes, I would say it's pretty inarguable that in the last few years of his life Lovecraft was going through a big change in his political views.
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Apr 29, 2018 23:36
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Conan is probably the kindest depiction of foreigners from the era and genre. I feel like the mindset is more that exotic cultures were fodder for strange fantasy enemies more than their real equivalents being uniformly evil.
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Apr 30, 2018 01:23
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Blade_of_tyshalle posted:I recall that Rob Howard, a Texan famous for writing tons of stories about brave white men fighting hordes of irredeemably evil negroes, was appalled by Lovecraft's racism. There's a Conan story where he encounters a group of magic creatures, towering onyx coloured men, and there's a paragraph explaining that they aren't 'black men' as we would use the term but will be called black men. It's just a very specific passage for a series mostly about cramming the word 'lithe' into as many paragraphs as possible. I wish I had my copy handy so I could find it. But yeah, Howard's stuff has a lot going on, and the underlying idea is that 'civilisation' isn't some inherently good quality. The rich and powerful find themselves on the wrong side of Conan or needing his help pretty often. They're pretty great. Blade_of_tyshalle posted:A good post The depiction of native Americans is a weird one. Even revisionist takes like the recent 'Hostiles' have some...problematic stuff. Like how the soldier who's killed heaps of Natives over the years is directly equated to the Native chief who's killed heaps of soldiers over the years, like they're two sides of the same coin, instead of a guy defending his land and a guy killing because he was told to. Something that wants to be critical of the heroic archetype of the soldier despatching Natives can't help depicting the Natives in the same light as...Red River or something. Snowman_McK fucked around with this message at 02:36 on Apr 30, 2018 |
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Apr 30, 2018 02:33
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SimonCat posted:This leads into the what I would imagine is a quandary faced by a lot of "ethnic" actors. Either accept the part playing the wise old Indian, or don't get work at all. One of my favorite Graham Greene performances is in Die Hard 3 because his ethnicity is incidental to the plot, his character is apparently a Catholic, and he's just a regular member of the NYPD. Unfortunately, a good deal of his filmography is being cast as "the Indian." I read somewhere that Mystery Men was Wes Studi's favorite movie to shoot because 1) it was a bunch of comedic actors goofing off the entire time backstage 2) he didn't have to play a magical Native American for once. Of course, in his most recent movie he's playing a "wise old Indian" again because the dude's got to eat. Unrelated, but I recently found out that The House with a Clock in Its Walls is directed by...Eli Roth?! Should be interesting to see how it turns out, because I mostly associate him with grimy exploitation-type films.
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Apr 30, 2018 04:15
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Snowman_McK posted:The depiction of native Americans is a weird one. Even revisionist takes like the recent 'Hostiles' have some...problematic stuff. Like how the soldier who's killed heaps of Natives over the years is directly equated to the Native chief who's killed heaps of soldiers over the years, like they're two sides of the same coin, instead of a guy defending his land and a guy killing because he was told to. Something that wants to be critical of the heroic archetype of the soldier despatching Natives can't help depicting the Natives in the same light as...Red River or something. Western movies were a really popular genre in Eastern Europe in the 1960s/70s, and they were apparently popular with the AIM members too because they tended to be on the side of the Natives fighting for their liberty against American imperialism. Either that, or they would use the western setting as a critique of American capitalism and economic exploitation.
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Apr 30, 2018 14:04
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Henker posted:I read somewhere that Mystery Men was Wes Studi's favorite movie to shoot because 1) it was a bunch of comedic actors goofing off the entire time backstage 2) he didn't have to play a magical Native American for once. Of course, in his most recent movie he's playing a "wise old Indian" again because the dude's got to eat. I thought he was actually a producer on Hostiles, or some such. Like a much closer role than ususal.
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Apr 30, 2018 16:36
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Hey, Wes got to play a Thai crime boss in Street Fighter 
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Apr 30, 2018 17:06
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