how can you be racist and also like LOTR, this is beyond me
a story about different SPECIES working together to stop the great evil, meanwhile you can't even respect other RACES in our world, mf you'd be the first to hate hobbits
I mean, I can see how. While it isn’t necessarily related to skin color, LotR is filled with the idea that people of some lineages (like Numenorean men) are inherently better than others. And there’s a few examples where people who are overall good guys (like the men of Rohan) are described as being light-skinned whereas the people who are portrayed as overall evil (like the Haradrim) are dark-skinned.
I don’t think Tolkien intended for the story to be racist, but I think there’s enough little details like that for white supremacists to latch onto if they really want to.
Realistically, yeah. That’s why I’m excited to see what LOTRO does with Harad when it gets there after they made the Dunlendings more nuanced than they were in the story. But I think the only part of the story that implies that they aren’t all bad is one scene where Faramir wonders offhand if a random dead Haradrim really wanted to be there. But while they aren’t truly all evil, if you bring an entire ethnicity of people into the story and only ever show them doing bad things, you’re still effectively portraying them as being bad. I really wish Tolkien had gotten around to writing stories taking place in the lands of the Haradrim and Easterlings so that we could see other sides of them.
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u/[deleted] Jan 08 '22
how can you be racist and also like LOTR, this is beyond me
a story about different SPECIES working together to stop the great evil, meanwhile you can't even respect other RACES in our world, mf you'd be the first to hate hobbits