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Notes -
Right now, you all are probably sick to the back teeth of the discussion about Amazon's "Rings of Power", but I have to talk about this or I'll explode.
I haven't seen episode four yet, it's upcoming over here but it has aired in the US. I looked up some reviews (to see what is safe to skip if I watch this, because there's a lot of filler and not much plot in the episodes as yet) and I couldn't believe what the first one said, so I looked for a second one and yep, it's true.
The scriptwriters for episode four (apparently it's Stephany Folsom and J. D. Payne & Patrick McKay, yes our boys again) are introducing the reasons the Númenoreans don't like Elves. And - wait for it - it's because "they're going to take our jobs!". No, I swear, this is actually it.
Yes, ladies, gentlemen, and those of you who aren't too sure, a direct immigration reference. So I suppose I should take it that Pharazon is Donald Trump surfing to power on a wave of Númenorean populism which is racist and fascists, and Tar-Míriel is Hillary Clinton who is the true Queen from whom he usurps her power.
This episode, by the bye, is called "The Great Wave" because of the nightmare Tar-Míriel has about the great wave coming in to destroy Númenor, and by now it can't come fast enough for me. Excuse me while I run around screaming as though my hair is on fire, because I feel like it.
These - look, I don't want to be insulting about Mormons, but good Lord is it very, very hard to resist dropping one of the "m"s there - blond denizens of the Mountain West have not got one scrap of imagination above the banal. They cannot grapple with the deeper themes of death and immortality that Tolkien wrote into his work. Everything has to be something snatched from American political slogans. The Númenoreans don't envy and hate the Elves for the immortality they cannot have for themselves, it's because dey took er jerbs.
Let's go back to the source, shall we? From a very long and detailed letter of 1951:
From a letter of 1956:
I don't know if swearing is allowed in our new realm of liberty and justice for all, but how the fuck do you, self-proclaimed huge Tolkien fans, read the above and come away with "Got it, the rebellion in Númenor was all about demagogues stoking fear of immigrant labour taking native jobs"????
Ok I have no knowledge of this show, but you mentioned my people - are these people members? They don't have wikipedia pages. If they're putting woke stuff in shows, it may be possible that like many a show-biz member, they've fully been subsumed into the successor ideology and calling them "mormon" is a stretch.
I only quibble (just a bit!), because my tradition has produced the Battlestar Galactica guy, Orson Scott Card, Brandon Sanderson (is he good? Feels like people like him). I'll admit to having little knowledge of fantasy or sci fi literature but at least my impression was that we typically punched decently well above our weight class, perhaps not so
It seems far more likely to me that their personal beliefs had little to do with it and they wrote in whatever Amazon's audience analysis told them they needed to.
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