The lazy, white supremacist trope in fantasy writing where nonhuman races represent nonwhite humans has a name now: Tolkien Minorities.
That is all.
@leila Yeah, rewatched the LoTR movies about 6 months ago, and while I still love them, they sure are about whiteness defending itself from a dusky Other aren't they?
@bulkington Oooooooh yeah. And coming out post-9/11 really charged their representation.
My pessimist side thinks that probably boosted their success by making them more subconsciously (?) satisfying to Western audiences bathed in "war on terror/civilization vs. barbarism" rhetoric.
@leila There was quite a bit of post-production so I'm sure the political climate had an influence, but the principal filming of the whole trilogy (which filmed simultaneously) wrapped up by 2000.
America was plenty racist & jingoistic and militaristic before 9/11. Outkast's "Bombs over Baghdad" came out at the beginning of 2000, if that's any indication of things.
@bulkington Oh yeah, I'm a pile of old dry bones who remembers all that stuff. I was thinking about the movies' reception with audiences, but absolutely true that the West and America in particular have been trafficking in orientalist and imperialist bullshit forever.
@leila Age of Napoleon is a good podcast and its presentation of Napoleon's "adventure" in Egypt as the ur-modern invasion that parallels the Iraq and Afghanistan invasions, down to the pretensions of political liberation.
@bulkington Ooh, thanks :)
@leila Yeah, it's done by a twitter lefty, (trillburn) though is not written with an explicitly ideological framing (I wouldn't call it a Marxist analysis, more a narrative with a historical-materialist awareness). My only complaint is it has not done nearly enough to bring France's colonial empire into the discussion.