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Lemniscate Blue posted:I'm still in the early 30s in the backlist but I see episode 89 having dropped six days ago. I can’t remember but if that is Old Forest time that is a good run of episodes. It’s picks up again at weathertop for some more high quality stuff. It’s all good tho
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Jan 28, 2019 21:01
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Data Graham posted:Aw, fucks sake, there they all are. Morte d’Arthur eps too. Just all showed up in a pile without the app notifying me apparently. It's trying to save you 
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Jan 28, 2019 23:01
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What podcast is this?
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Jan 29, 2019 07:36
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I did not know that Christopher Lee ever sang Ghost Riders In The Sky but now I do. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5PWuvHPGsjI
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Jan 30, 2019 12:46
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I'm rereading the Silmarillion, i like how the years of the lamps had only ferns and big weird trees and no flowers, much like actual prehistory
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Jan 31, 2019 20:38
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WoodrowSkillson posted:What podcast is this? https://mythgard.org/lotro/ Ignore the LOTRO stuff and just go to the "Exploring The Lord of the Rings" section
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Jan 31, 2019 22:08
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Crossposting this from the Lit thread:hackbunny posted:No idea if thread-appropriate, but IDGAF YOLO
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Jan 31, 2019 22:11
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Gimli, do you like lays about gladiators?
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Jan 31, 2019 23:05
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hackbunny posted:In Italy, there are two major literary associations related to Tolkien: the Società Tolkieniana Italiana ("Italian Tolkienian Society") and the Associazione Italiana di Studi Tolkieniani (Italian Association of Tolkienian Studies), that split off from the former when it filled with fascists... and the Tolkien estate has wisely sided with neither. You side with the side that isn't full of fascists, happy to help. There's a word for people who, when confronted with fascism, don't take a stand against it, and that word is not 'wise.'
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Jan 31, 2019 23:24
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In the translator's defense, Moby Dick is hilariously gay.
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Feb 1, 2019 00:41
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Lemniscate Blue posted:In the translator's defense, Moby Dick is hilariously gay. Yeah, it seems virtually certain that that's a good translator catching flak for a prior bowdlerization.
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Feb 1, 2019 00:46
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Lemniscate Blue posted:In the translator's defense, Moby Dick is hilariously gay. It's extremely gay and also very, very good.
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Feb 1, 2019 00:47
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Moby-Dick is about hunting sperm whales for their head oil, and there is a scene where all the men are kneading the oil from the whale together in a big barrel and laughing and joking and having a gay old time. LOTR has some guys who express love to each other and I think there's some forehead kissing. I think Italy will survive.
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Feb 1, 2019 01:54
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RoboChrist 9000 posted:You side with the side that isn't full of fascists, happy to help. There's a word for people who, when confronted with fascism, don't take a stand against it, and that word is not 'wise.' Well said.
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Feb 1, 2019 04:06
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They're all debating fanfiction-level translations so how can the Tolkien Estate weigh in on either side? Plus we know J.R.R.'s opinion on swarthy southerners. Best just to ignore that Italy exists altogether.
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Feb 1, 2019 20:33
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Shibawanko posted:I'm rereading the Silmarillion, i like how the years of the lamps had only ferns and big weird trees and no flowers, much like actual prehistory Huh! I've never made that connection before. I wonder how intentional that was. Come to think of it, I read Sil in New Zealand where there are indeed a lot of big dark quiet forests with huge trees and ferns; it certainly helped give a mental impression of the lamp years. sassassin posted:They're all debating fanfiction-level translations so how can the Tolkien Estate weigh in on either side? I thought Tolkien was okay with the Rome-and-Greece latitudes (or at least their languages)
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Feb 1, 2019 22:24
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The whole racial theory stuff is definitely the weakest part of Tolkien and I'd much prefer it if characters were noble or not just based on the choices they make rather than the shape of their brow etc. It's especially tedious how every people is basically divided into three types of decreasing quality (fallohide - stoor - harfoot, vanyar - noldor - teleri, hador - beor - haleth, a few others I'm forgetting)
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Feb 1, 2019 22:32
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Romans and Hellenes are good but proper Englishmen are their true inheritors, the degenerate Italians and Greeks are mere wops. Obviously.Shibawanko posted:The whole racial theory stuff is definitely the weakest part of Tolkien and I'd much prefer it if characters were noble or not just based on the choices they make rather than the shape of their brow etc. It's especially tedious how every people is basically divided into three types of decreasing quality (fallohide - stoor - harfoot, vanyar - noldor - teleri, hador - beor - haleth, a few others I'm forgetting) This is a super reductive view of Tolkien’s racial taxonomy. The Noldor were so much “better” than the Teleri that they loving mass murdered them in a group-psychosis inspired by revolutionary antitheist oration by torchlight, come on.
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Feb 1, 2019 22:35
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Is racism justified if you are literally superior ? (I mean I say no personally but Aragaorm for example is literally superior to regular men)
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Feb 1, 2019 22:38
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euphronius posted:Is racism justified if you are literally superior ? hmm I’m not sure, but it seems like the imperialist colonists from overseas who live for centuries, are all seven feet tall, and declared war on god are...bad?
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Feb 1, 2019 22:40
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They are really good at being bad.
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Feb 1, 2019 22:42
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skasion posted:hmm I’m not sure, but it seems like the imperialist colonists from overseas who live for centuries, are all seven feet tall, and declared war on god are...bad? Tolkien had issues. You don't have to be HP Lovecraft levels of horrible to write stories filled with disturbing under-and-over--tones.
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Feb 1, 2019 22:54
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Numenorean imperialism literally led directly to them bringing the devil home to Numenor where the devil easily turned the elite into a satanic cult that cheerfully torched human beings. This is despite the fact that Numenorean imperialists started out with (their idea of) such good intentions that even those of their rulers who opposed imperializing all over Middle-earth on moral grounds were like “well, I guess we have a duty to do it”. The point of the whole concept of Numenor (and probably of Tolkien’s racial taxonomies as a whole) is that having cool ancestors who got sick rewards from the gods like being tall and sexy and wise can’t free you from the innate moral wretchedness of humankind, if anything it makes you worse. e: since you brought him up I’ll add that it’s similar to how Lovecraft’s infamous racism chiefly takes the form of his (white, mentally unstable, unsociable and generally Lovecraft-like) protagonists and narrators sneering at the biological inferiority of the lesser races and preening themselves over the refined arts and culture and civilization of The White Man, before Lovecraft the author steps back to whisk the curtain away and reveal that white people actually aren’t worth the poo poo you scrape off your boot, they’re just mutant apes/food for fishmen/degenerate forms of hyper-Indian wizards beneath the Mojave/parasites adventitiously sprung up on a planet that exists to serve as a prison-tomb for ancient aliens/actual descendants through millions of years of bacterial ooze, and the only reason they think they are anything special is as a defense mechanism to keep their frail minds from collapsing into the meaningless crawling chaos of existence in a godless universe. skasion fucked around with this message at 23:23 on Feb 1, 2019 |
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Feb 1, 2019 23:07
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I think the issue WRT race in Tolkien and the Numenoreans in particular comes down to a question of nuance - putting aside, for the moment, comments made by the author outside the text itself. The Numenoreans are obviously more than capable of being evil and morally depraved, but they are also shown to be good and virtuous, as well. The Numenoreans, like the white peoples of Middle Earth, are like real world people; some are good, some are evil, many are somewhere in between simply trying to live their lives. The issue comes up when that is contrasted against both the racial coding of the Orcs, and the fact that aside from a throw-away comment about a soldier, the non-white peoples of Middle Earth are always violent assholes and almost always in thrall to some Dark Lord or another. The issue isn't that his whites are always perfect and good, because they're not. It's that his non-whites are always either evil or nonexistant. skasion posted:e: since you brought him up I’ll add that it’s similar to how Lovecraft’s infamous racism chiefly takes the form of his (white, mentally unstable, unsociable and generally Lovecraft-like) protagonists and narrators sneering at the biological inferiority of the lesser races and preening themselves over the refined arts and culture and civilization of The White Man, before Lovecraft the author steps back to whisk the curtain away and reveal that white people actually aren’t worth the poo poo you scrape off your boot, they’re just mutant apes/food for fishmen/degenerate forms of hyper-Indian wizards beneath the Mojave/parasites adventitiously sprung up on a planet that exists to serve as a prison-tomb for ancient aliens/actual descendants through millions of years of bacterial ooze, and the only reason they think they are anything special is as a defense mechanism to keep their frail minds from collapsing into the meaningless crawling chaos of existence in a godless universe. Are you seriously arguing that Lovecraft wasn't racist? Racism isn't rational or logical. You can, and Lovecraft did, simultaneously hold and express the idea that Human civilization and all its achievements are meaningless and worthless, while also arguing that blacks are sub-human savages scarcely better than apes. I love Lovecraft's works, but seriously, no. Lovecraft was a racist, and his racism informs and characterizes much of his output.
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Feb 2, 2019 00:20
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RoboChrist 9000 posted:Are you seriously arguing that Lovecraft wasn't racist? No, that’s literally the opposite of what I was saying. Lovecraft was a racist who understood the psychological underpinnings of his own racism extremely clearly.
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Feb 2, 2019 00:38
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“Racism is pointless vanity, but what the hell, it sure is fun”?
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Feb 2, 2019 00:46
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Data Graham posted:“Racism is pointless vanity, but what the hell, it sure is fun”? “Racism is pointless vanity, but I need something to get me out of bed in the morning, I can’t afford coffee and the universe is a howling void of nihil”
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Feb 2, 2019 00:50
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Sorry for misunderstanding you. I thought you were arguing that Lovecraft was actually using his cosmic horror/cosmic nihilism to try and lampoon racism. Because, you know, in the hands of a skilled author and one without the racist bigotry of Lovecraft, I think you definitely could do something quite clever along those lines. So much of Lovecraftian horror is 'behold the folly of man' and showing our assumptions regarding science and sometimes morality to be laughable failings of primitive apes trying and failing to understand a universe too complex for them. You could easily do a deconstruction for racism along the same vein. Use the cosmic horrors to show the sheer absurdity in pretending that something as trivial as skin color or where your ancestors lived is a meaningful distinction.
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Feb 2, 2019 01:28
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HPL does occasionally mock his own racist characters. An example in “Rats in the Walls” where his protagonist is a prosperous wasp businessman whose cat is named Niggerman and who proudly recounts his descent from slaveowners and spends the whole story trying to get back in with his noble roots across the pond, only to discover that his aristo ancestors were a cannibal cult that raised mutant subhuman slaves to sacrifice in impious rites; what’s worse, they were descended from Irishmen. The irony of this, and the protagonist’s resolute refusal to accept the truth as it becomes apparent to the reader, is the appeal of the story. The main character’s pretensions to be genetically better than other people are exposed as a veneer over an utter savagery which predates civilization, and this is the horror that HPL is trying to evoke with the story — a horror which, unlike some other of his stories, lands just as well whether one agrees with Lovecraft’s racist beliefs or reviles them. (To crown it all, the story was inspired by one about a black man, “The Unbroken Chain” by Irvin Cobb, a southern-born racist of exactly the same type as the protagonist of “Rats in the Walls”, right down to the comfortable, patronizing treatment of blacks).
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Feb 2, 2019 01:48
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skasion posted:Romans and Hellenes are good but proper Englishmen are their true inheritors, the degenerate Italians and Greeks are mere wops. Obviously. It's not that simple no but you do get a sense that part of why characters act the way they do is because of their pedigree rather than their character. The moment Tolkien introduces Ulfang and the easterlings you know that they're going to be no good and will betray people, on the other hand there isn't a single Vanyar who ever did anything wrong. Having a "fair complexion" doesn't exactly make you completely immune to mistakes and there's lots of characters who get arrogant because they take their heritage for granted, but there's clearly a pattern where there are some who are inherently more noble and so on. The Noldor sinned in Tolkien's eyes because they went against the natural order of things and became arrogant because they were naturally given more talents and status in the world than others, but that's implying that there is a natural order. The natural order in Tolkien is a kind of original sin, where entire bloodlines of people are presented as naturally less talented/skilled/noble just because one of their ancestors didn't want to follow a weird shiny man on a horse to the promised land 5 millennia ago. That way of thinking also led him into clear problems when trying to explain the Orcs since it implies that you can have a kind of inherited pure evil while living beings are still supposed to have an immortal soul and free will. I'm not implying that this should have been "fixed", just that it's a contradiction without which the stories can't really function. You cannot really imagine the stories without the Orcs and pure evil monsters, for example, there would be nothing driving the plot. Shibawanko fucked around with this message at 08:28 on Feb 2, 2019 |
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Feb 2, 2019 08:19
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Tolkien's racism isn't in deciding that x people are better than y, but in his constant sorting of peoples into meaningful categories based on their lineage. A person's character and temperament is unavoidably linked to their heritage. There are strengths and weaknesses to every race, colour and creed in Middle Earth (and beyond). Defining these is considered important in the text.
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Feb 3, 2019 18:34
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Lord of the Rings isn't racist. It's very inclusive. e: It's about a multiracial alliance taking fighting an imperialist power. BravestOfTheLamps fucked around with this message at 19:45 on Feb 3, 2019 |
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Feb 3, 2019 19:39
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That doesn't address what sassassin just said.
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Feb 3, 2019 20:07
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SHISHKABOB posted:That doesn't address what sassassin just said. BoL's a troll, everyone should know this by now. Weak effort this time, though.
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Feb 3, 2019 20:17
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Yeah, your fault if you haven't put sassassin on ignore.
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Feb 3, 2019 23:42
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I have one person on ignore on this whole site after 7 years. It's definitely not going to be someone who posts good stuff on the regular.
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Feb 3, 2019 23:55
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SHISHKABOB posted:I have one person on ignore on this whole site after 7 years. It's definitely not going to be someone who posts good stuff on the regular. Yeah I disagree with sassassin pretty often but they make for good discussion.
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Feb 4, 2019 03:51
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If people are genuinely upset by the things I post they should put me on ignore. It's a good function that protects everyone from witnessing unsightly meltdowns.
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Feb 4, 2019 11:22
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You're a good poster 
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Feb 4, 2019 11:43
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Shibawanko posted:It's not that simple no but you do get a sense that part of why characters act the way they do is because of their pedigree rather than their character. The moment Tolkien introduces Ulfang and the easterlings you know that they're going to be no good and will betray people, on the other hand there isn't a single Vanyar who ever did anything wrong. Having a "fair complexion" doesn't exactly make you completely immune to mistakes and there's lots of characters who get arrogant because they take their heritage for granted, but there's clearly a pattern where there are some who are inherently more noble and so on. I think you could do the story without Orcs but it did require some kind of thing for Sauron to boss around. In some ways the orcs are cleaner because the alternatives that come to mind ("Men who still worship Melkor," "Haradrim or Easterlings or whatever") have the same general problem, perhaps more strongly ("ah so it's minority religions eh?", "ah so it's Johnny Foreigner who serves evil, yes I see"). The nature of the tale requires some kind of antagonistic military force, whereas the Hobbit could have probably been done without it.
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Feb 4, 2019 13:25
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