Uh oh! It seems that some woman is offering some opinions about Tolkien!
Over on Time.com, Ruth Davis Konigsberg has a brief personal essay reflecting on the almost complete lack of female characters in the new Hobbit film, and in Tolkien’s ouvre generally. As she notes, it’s not until about two hours in to the nearly three-hour movie that “we finally meet someone without a Y chromosome,” namely Cate Blanchett’s Galadriel — and she was added into the originally all-male story by the screenwriters. Blanchette’s is the only female name out of 37 named in the cast list – though there are a couple of unnamed female characters who make brief appearances.
“I did not read The Hobbit or the The Lord of the Rings trilogy as a child, and I have always felt a bit alienated from the fandom surrounding them,” Konigsberg observes.
Now I think I know why: Tolkien seems to have wiped women off the face of Middle-earth. I suppose it’s understandable that a story in which the primary activity seems to be chopping off each other’s body parts for no particular reason might be a little heavy on male characters — although it’s not as though Tolkien had to hew to historical accuracy when he created his fantastical world. The problem is one of biological accuracy. Tolkien’s characters defy the basics of reproduction: dwarf fathers beget dwarf sons, hobbit uncles pass rings down to hobbit nephews. If there are any mothers or daughters, aunts or nieces, they make no appearances. Trolls and orcs especially seem to rely on asexual reproduction, breeding whole male populations, which of course come in handy when amassing an army to attack the dwarves and elves.
Yes, yes, as she admits, Tolkien’s few female characters tend to be powerful. But that hardly changes the basic fact that the Hobbit, and Tolkien generally, is overloaded with dudes.
These fairly commonplace observations have, naturally, sent the orcs and the elf princesses of the Men’s Rights subreddit into an uproar. Naturally, none of them seem to have bothered to read any of Konigsberg’s brief piece before setting forth their opinions, which sometimes accuse her of ignoring things she specifically acknowledged (like that whole powerful-female-character thing), and completely miss that the bit about reproduction is, you know, a joke on Konigsberg’s part.
Here are some of my favorite idiotic comments from the “discussion.” (Click on the yellow comments to see the originals on Reddit.)
Uh, Jane Austen’s books are filled with dudes. Especially Pride and Prejudice 2: Mr. Darcy’s Revenge, which was later adapted into a buddy cop movie starring Robin Williams and Danny Glover.
EDITED TO ADD: Somehow forgot to include two of my favorite comments:
Oh, and if you were unable to find a woman in the picture above, try this one instead:
@Katz: That’s a reason to wear sexy costumes, but seriously, both Spectres were supposed to actually be able to fight, and that would be pretty impossible in those heels… But yeah, this is my pet peeve.
Remember the bit about Teatime’s inner child in Hogfather? Pratchett definitely doesn’t think children are all sweetness and light.
That “self defence against fruit” thing reminds me of Black Adder goes fourth. Can’t find it on youtube now, but George asks captain Black Adder why he embarked on a military career if he hates war so much. Black Adder explains that when he started out as a soldier, British soldiers went to the colonies. The ideal enemy was considered a three-feet pygmé armed with dry grass. If they had spears, you almost thought twice about attacking. He wasn’t prepared for one day facing a million Germans with machine guns.
Later on there’s this storyline about how Black Adder once saved the life of a fellow officer “in the colonies”. Eventually it’s revealed that Black Adder killed a woman who tried to hit the fellow officer with a piece of mango. “But it was a sharp piece of mango! Very sharp!”.
I see DKM is still trying to sneak into older threads and give his last disgusting word. Coward.
🙂
For me the thing that keeps me fond is how Alan Moore reacts to people who are all fanboyish about Rorschach. D: …because when you brilliantly excoriate Objectivism, the last thing you expect is for the Objectivists to just miss the point, right? (insert pithy excoriation of Objectivists and Ayn Rand here)
Cassandra: no, I was trying to capture something about both Pratchett and Gaiman there. Not just the darkness of it, but the particular flavor of it. Not just a Lovecraftian sense that the universe is against, but that sense that maybe you are, in fact, the worst part of a bad world. I don’t know how to clarify that better. And with Pratchett and kids, not generally the sense that kids are terrific, but that in spite of them being much better from a distance, and over-romanticized, that sense that they’re worth fighting for.
But now Gaiman sounds terrible. That’s not exactly a defense of him, now is it? 😛
I have to say that this is the nicest discussion of “things I don’t like” that I have ever been involved in. (At least one the internet, although this is a fair bit nicer that a lot of irl ones as well.)
Slightly off topic, but there’s a Sandman quote I HATE. It’s said by Death when she’s taking a baby away. The baby says something like “was that all?” and Death goes “You got what everyone gets; a life-time”.
Okay, that wasn’t anything that really bothered me when I read the comic. Maybe she just wanted to cheer the baby up or whatever. But then I saw that there’s actually this piece of merchandise (which is NOT Neil Gaiman’s fault, since he doesn’t own the characters) with an ankh and the quote written on it. Because there are apparently lots of people out there who thinks this is some deep truth.
Look. If I discovered I was only paid a fraction of what my colleagues are paid every month, and I went to my boss to complain, and he said “You get what everyone gets; a salary”, he wouldn’t be PROFOUND, he would be a DOUCHE.
I think that particular quote was a lot more biting when given to the immortal who’d lived 700 years, always avoiding death and never living; when it was applied to the baby it sort of scraped away a layer of romanticism and kind of hurt a little bit. It bothered me.
It felt to me like the author pointing out the two sides of the coin, the arbitrary unfairness of it. Death may be natural and normal, but it’s rarely fair. I’m not sure if it’s a Deepity (that is, a thought that sounds Deep, but ain’t really) or if it’s uncomfortable because it should be.
But, then, the first time I read it, I was a wingnut, and so my views towards Death are a bit different now.
It’s one of the reasons I really love this place. You disagree with me? But that’s okay because we’re all adults? Wha-huh? THIS DOESN’T HAPPEN IT’S UNPOSSIBLE AAAAAA
@Howard:
Yeah, if you think Rorschach is wonderful you’re clearly a moron.
Although it was fairly recently I learnt that “objectivism” can also mean “the philosophy of Ayn Rand”. You think I should know these things, being a philosophy professor and all, but for some strange reason Rand gets overlooked in every serious History of Moral Philosophy ever written, and you never see ANY current moral philosopher (I mean actual philosophers who get their stuff published in peer reviewed papers) who refers to Rand, so maybe that’s why. The thing is, “objectivism” has a standard meaning in metaethics, which is “theory according to which there is a true morality which is independent of time and culture” or something like that. It’s consistent with objectivism in this sense that the true morality is utilitarianism, Kantianism, some kind of religious ethics or whatever.
SO in my head I rather labelled Rorschach “a nasty kind of retributivist deontologist” or something like that. When internet geeks went “Rorschach is such an objectivist” I was like “Yeah… But Ozymandias is probably one too, only a utilitarian one”.
So many internet discussions suddenly became comprehensible to me once I learnt that if you’re not an actual philosopher, you mean “Ayn Rand’s philosophy” when you say “objectivist”.
One of the things I liked about American Gods is that there was a lot of “dark” in it, but that the dark wasn’t something inherent; that some of it, maybe the greater part of it was internal to oneself, and that it could be destroyed/put at bay.
Objectivist vs. objectivist. Suble, but important distinctions.
Particularly subtle when you begin the sentence with the former.
Actually I guess it’s subtle regardless which order you put them in.
Dark is good, I like dark. That’s not what grates on me about Gaiman’s style, it’s the sort of pantomime-y tone. I found Neverwhere particularly annoying, even though I loved the underlying concept.
I’m glad to hear I’m not the only one left cold by Gaiman’s writing.
One of the reasons I recommend the Sandman is I know that technically, it’s very, very good, and it resonates with a lot of people, so when I suggest it I actually hope the person I’m offering it to gets more out of it than I did. That’s the way I am with everything he reads – Technically fantastic, but it just doesn’t touch me like it does with others.
Actually the only reason I ever picked it up in the first place, back when I was very new to the world of comics, is because I read somewhere that the first volume of the trade had a Scarecrow cameo, and the Scarecrow is my favorite comic character of all time. I’ll give it to Gaiman – I did love that Scarecrow cameo.
Howard, I actually forgot that she said that to the 700-year-old man too. Right. In that context, it might be supposed to point out that there’s no fairness in life.
But when people sport an ankh with that quote, it strikes me as a deepity.
What does wingnut mean?
I started reading Sandman when someone said “you look just like Death in Sandman!”.
a wingnut is someone who is far out on the extreme of a position. Abnoy is a wingnut boy-gamer.
Meller is a wingnut gLibertarian.
Etc.
Just so. And I was using it here as shorthand for right-wing religious wingnut, or fundie.
Cassandra: I’m trying to picture what you meant by pantomime-y, here, but all I can think of are the really creepy bits of Coraline (the movie) where the not-quite-human things are trying to fake it.
Which is, of course, so utterly accurate of Objectivism, with the caveat that in Objectivism you get to make up the rules, keep them to yourself, and judge everybody else by them. (I was going someplace with that, but this nice gentleman named Godwin told me to leave it hanging right there, because you’re all smart folks who understand the implications of that kind of starting point. I like him! He’s nice! But I like everybody.)
By and large the other thing is that wingnut is a perjorative way of putting someone on the extreme.
So one doesn’t often put those who are “out there” on one’s own side of the divide into the “wingnut” category. I suspect it’s because we are afraid people won’t see the differences we do with them.
Whoa, I totally missed Meller’s resurfacing. He’s like a boil or something, ain’t he?
My personal interpretation of V for Vendetta was that V was NEVER intended to be considered ‘better’ than the government. The only reason he didn’t cause as much damage as the government was because he didn’t have their power. Like, he’s charming, charismatic, and compelling… but he’s just as bad.
The torture as means to personal revelation thing also really bothered me from day one. I mean, I was sexually abused for a year because my abuser had delusions of doing the same thing. He just needed to break me to make me better! Instead, our brain split into sentient pieces that turned against him, threw him out, and made him cry. Because that’s how shit goes down in real life; people break in different ways, and if they happen to break in a way that’s beneficial, it’s THEM doing it, not their tormenters.
Much to my horror, I find myself… admiring Rorschach, in a demented way. Like, he’s a horrible human being, with horrible views… but in a perverse way, I envy his sheer raw drive. (And yes, I realize that probably the only reason he MAINTAINS that drive is because he’s a wingnut.) Especially compared to Dan, who is more humane but I constantly wanted to throttle.
Fandom bitched that the Silk Spectre was passive, and I never got that. She stood down the equivalent of a GOD. The only action Dan initiated was to break Rorschach out of jail, and that I interpreted as because Rorschach has enough drive and initiative for a goddamn platoon and could tell Dan what to do.
“When she wants to be included/treated like a human being”
Your side goes on and on about it all the time, but what does it even mean? Don’t you realize that the reason why human males sexually “objectify” human females is precisely because they recognize them as fellow beings of the opposite gender? Even when human males sexually objectify non-humans (living and non-living), half the time it’s because of their resemblance/resonance to human females. Do you want human males to lose sexual interest in human females altogether? Would that stop your whining once and for all? But even when they do, there are still complaints, like with the case of so-called “herbivores”. Women are just too fickle. They don’t like it when men notice them sexually, they don’t like it when men ignore them sexually. Huh, make up your minds! Oh, I know, your side wants human males to have a sex drive, but only the way your side, likes it i.e. “gentleman”, but then how come the ladies reject the “nice guys” for the “bad boys”, at least until they hit the wall and/or their biological starts ticking it’s countdown, whichever comes first (i.e. women wise up only when they’re washed up).
Btw, on the topic of fun sci-fi, has anyone else read “the dancers at the end of time” (An alien heat, the hollow lands, the end of all songs) series by Michael Moorcock? It’s part of his vast “eternal champion” series, but can be read independently. There are only a few things you’ll miss if you haven’t read the rest of the books. And it has a totally different tone from the other eternal champion books, where the hero is all dark and brooding.
The male protagonist in “dancers” is called Jherek Carnelian. He lives in the far far far far far future. People have “power rings” which allows you to create anything you want out of anything with your mind. The rings somehow draw their energy from the stars, but nobody knows how they work any longer, since it was ages since there were any proper scientists. If someone dies, they can just be resurrected by using a power ring. There’s no illness and no lack of anything. Everyone just spend there time partying, having sex and doing art installations. Jherek has a thing for nineteenth century Europe, so he does lots of installations on that theme, although he gets most stuff wrong since everyone is pretty clueless about actual history.
One day Mrs Amelia Underwood unexpectedly arrives from actual nineteenth century London. She’s been kidnapped and dropped off in Jherek’s time by a time-traveller (for reasons that are eventually revealed). Jherek decides that he’s gonna fall in love with her as part of his art installation, and lots of hilarity ensues from his complete misconceptions about how “falling in love according to nineteenth century costumes” is supposed to work. Eventually, Amelia ends up living in his house as a friend while she’s trying the best she can to find out a way to go back to her time and place. She is returned, but by then Jherek has (of course) fallen in love with her for real and decides to pursue her through time.
They’re both great characters; Amelia is deeply religious but no fanatic, and portrayed as fairly open-minded (explained by her growing up in different countries with her father who was a missionary). She’s intelligent and resourceful and has the ability to grind her teeth together and try to solve the problem rather than break down, even as her entire world seems to be collapsing around her. Jherek is, as Amelia also points out, in a way incredibly innocent, since he’s never had to face any problems in his entire life. And he’s also incredibly kind, to the point where he’s just puzzled as to why anyone would do such a thing when a much more brutal nineteenth century man punches him. But it seems like a pretty credible way to end up, if you’ve really lived a completely and utterly problem-free life.
So, want to read some really funny and original sci-fi, this is a recommendation.
Does anyone else here a strange hum? Like a machine failing the Turing test? (Not you Dvärghundspossen)