This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
I realise I'm a little late to the party, but I want to talk about Tolkien and RoP.
One of the themes of Lord of the Rings is the idea that the smallest, the humblest person can change the destiny of the world, and become a hero. The Hobbits represent small, humble, ordinary people. They don’t lust for power or fame, or aspire to do great deeds. Thus the Ring can’t corrupt them in the way that it would corrupt Boromir or Galadriel, although it can make them covet it as a possession. We see this when Sam willingly gives it back to Frodo, even though we have seen others kill for it having been exposed to it for far shorter periods. Bilbo manages to give it up, after having owned it and been subjected to its influence for 60 years, and Frodo manages to bear it right into the heart of Mt Doom, with the Ring fighting him all the way.
The Ring works by tempting its owners, offering them ways to get what they desire most. The Wizards want to make the world a better place. The Elves want to stop the decay of the world. Men desire power and the ability to defeat their enemies. Dwarves desire treasure. All of them want something they don’t already have, therefore the Ring has something to work with, something to offer them. While Hobbits are content creatures: “But where our hearts truly lie is in peace and quiet and good tilled earth. For all Hobbits share a love of all things that grow. And yes, no doubt to others, our ways seem quaint. But today of all days, it is brought home to me it is no bad thing to celebrate a simple life.”
Galadriel was never some paladin of light. She is the ultimate redemption arc. Someone who had many of the same flaws as Sauron, but who came back. Sauron had a chance for redemption, but couldn't follow through due to his pride. Like Galadriel he was told to come back to Valinor. He didn't want to leave his powerbase or his pride behind however. The character who some consider to be the ultimate hero of the tale, who gets the last scene is not Aragorn the King or an immortal elf. It's the family man with scars, who lost his friend, and who comes home to his family and does the best he can.
It seems Amazon Studios never bothered to understand when they decided they'll make Galadriel a sort of "girlboss" claiming to save the world but with the writers' focus being on her path to glory like most woke cape blockbusters these days. Given how literarily significant Tolkien is world over, its so bizarre that they'd try to pick apart his legacy and crap all over him. Within my reading circle in India, LOTR is a favourite. The supposed racism doesn't even register. The last RoP trailer in regional languages here also got ratio'd on YouTube. I don't know what Amazon was thinking. They said this is the most expensive show ever and that the future of the studio itself relies on its success, and yet they decide to check the woke quotas instead of giving Tolkien fans what they want. Did they really just not expect this level of blowback? Its so unfathomable to me that the answer is that simple, could it be something else?
What I found most frustrating about Amazon's 'girlbossifaction' of Galadriel is the undermining of what I believe to be one of the best mythological portrayals of femininity in modern literature (and cinema), something that is increasingly lacking in modern storytelling. This is actually a problem I have with even those who would criticize modern woke media, constantly pointing back to the 80s and their 'true strong female characters' like Sarah Connor and Ellen Ripley. Sarah Connor and Ellen Ripley may be female characters, but they aren't really feminine characters. They're just women inhabiting the archetypical male character. In fairness, they are good characters, but there's nothing really feminine about them other than are relatively aesthetic or superficial sense of 'motherliness' slapped on top.
Galadriel is the feminine archetype, or at least one of the feminine archetypes. She is the embodiment of ethereal beauty, not just in the sense of physical attractiveness, but also in the philosophical sense. She represents purity. This is also true of all the Elves, which in some sense are archetypically feminine as a whole, and Galadriel naturally being the most powerful of them all. We even get to see a glimpse of negative aspects, or the shadow of this archetype when she is tempted by the One Ring, where her desire to rule takes on a feminine twist, best represented by the line "All shall love me and despair!", that she (and the feminine archetype) could use her ethereal beauty to ensnare the will of men to worship her. Her role in the Lord of the Rings is similarly archetypically feminine. She does not play an active, overt role in the story, which is archetypically masculine but nevertheless her role is critically important to the narrative. She is the light out of the darkest hour the Fellowship had yet faced, the death of Gandalf. She provides the characters with much needed support, both material and spiritual, the consequences of which play out fully through the entire trilology. I think this is best represented by Gimli, who despite his fierce hatred of Elves, immediately is entranced and falls in (platonic(?)) love with Galadriel upon seeing her. Gimli is 'tamed' by Galadriel and her femininity. Upon leaving Lothlorien, Gimli asks for a single strand of her hair, to which she gives Gimli three. These strands of hair would become Gimli's most prized processions, and really is the beginning of Gimli's lessening of hatred/prejudice towards the Elves. To be a bit crass about it, this represents the purest and moral form of 'simping'.
Amazon has gotten rid of this wonderous portrayal of femininity and replaced with yet another essentially masculinized female character. Perhaps this is somewhat reflected in the source material. While I am a large LotR fan, I have never really delved into the 'supplementary' material, only sticking to the 'mainline' books (and films). From what I understand, in the Unfinished Tales, Galadriel is somewhat of a more masculine, sword-swinging warrior in her youth who leads a rebellion, before ultimately maturing to the feminine archetype we know later in her life. However, the Unfinished Tales are, in fact, unfinished and a more a jumbled mess of ideas than a coherent story, so I wonder if this was ever Tolkien's intention. Regardless, maybe Amazon with their girlboss Galadriel will have a character arc for her that results in her embracing this pure feminine archetype for her in the end. But I highly doubt it. Even if I believed that the writers for Rings of Power were capable of such good writing, the idea of actually embracing the feminine archetype as positive thing is anathema. Female characters can only be written as archetypically masculine now, usually with an additional, ironic element of snark towards men. This harkens back to some recent comments I've made both here and on the subreddit just before the move, that the female role is dead or dying and all there is left is for women to act like men and compare themselves to men.
If I were writing a LOTR prequel show and had "don't upset the fans" sticky-noted to my monitor, delving into what Tolkien actually had planned for is probably going to be my bible (over fealty to "are we correctly preserving the divine feminine" etc).
Funnily, the Sarah Connors and Ellen Ripleys [1] are more of an 80s-90s picture of "strong female characters", though that view gets regurgitated by the (mostly male) reddit/IMDb film culture -- usually to put down a female lead lauded as strong that may come off as too vulnerable or indirect or reliant on others. There is certainly a painful way to write these characters, most commonly seen in Disney's attempts to discharge its guilt in its live-action remakes [2], but most prestige screenwriting has much better developed and complex view of what strong female characters can be now, particularly in TV and four-quad, family media.
Yeoh's leading role in Everything Everywhere All at Once is probably one of the best characters and is interesting as a direct subversion of the strong female action star. She is given the capability for extreme violence, to shed the family she resents for true independence, and to live a thousand lives where she is successful in all the ways she wished for -- but it doesn't bring any success. She succeeds when she fully embraces the typically feminine virtue of kindness that she finally recognises as expressed, purely, vulnerably, bravely in her husband.
[1] For Alien, at least. In Aliens Ripley's character is more genuinely feminine-coded with both her and the big bad xeno cast as conflicting mother roles.
[2] An issue more of competing interests between fidelity and addressing problematic elements than anything -- either shrug and replicate it or go full on with the inversion. If Cinderella is criticised for being a bit flat and without agency, it'd be a more fun movie to make her and the prince a bit dim but destined for happiness if the godmother can only pull it all off against the odds.
More options
Context Copy link
Its also worth noting that Galadriel was married to Celeborn in the First Age and their daughter Celebrian was born early in the Second Age, but looks like both of them have been retconned from the show. It may be one thing that the Elvish society has evolved beyond human borders of intimacy, and become far more comfortable expressing closeness in a platonic way, but the show doesn't sufficiently establish exactly what kind of relationship Elrond and Galadriel share, its just coming off like he's making googly eyes at her. They might as well be completely different characters then, given that Elrond is married to Celebrian in canon. So what then, Arwen and the Twins are "written out" too?
More options
Context Copy link
Not really. Galadriel, in Tolkein's telling, is a failure as an elf, full of mortal fires and furies and ambitions. Instead of retreating to the west and eternal communion with Eru and the Maiar, she clung on to dominion in Middle Earth, willingly accepting the corrupting power of her ring (which, remember, draws its power from Sauron and The Ring just the same as the Nazgul's rings did) in order to keep Loth Lorien in a state of protected stasis. Her journey in the LotR is the story of finally learning to let go of earthly loves and trust in the underlying goodness of powerlessness and subsumption into communion with God.
Much of that isn't particularly relevant to the narrative being told in LotR. And the feminine archetype doesn't mean she's perfectly good or moral either, that's not what I was talking about. Her desire to to preserve Lothlorien is completely keeping in with her theme of purity, and definitely has aspects of the shadow.
Absolutely, in the context of the narrative of Lord of the Rings, she absolutely does represent femininity. That is not mutually exclusive with other, religious themes.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link