site banner

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 13, 2023

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.

15
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

Honestly seeing that card makes me glad I quit playing Magic entirely five years ago, and it has little to do with making Aragorn black (which is stupid and jarring exactly because it makes no sense for reasons already outlined). The card's art is bad (nothing new for Magic, but at least the bad art used to be kind of quirky), the card name is stupid, the flavor makes no sense (the war is basically over when they get married, and they don't fight together), the mechanics are completely uninspired and have little sensible connection to the flavor, and the whole "let's make a boring cash-grab set based on random other fantasy IP" ...ugh. About the only thing that makes sense about the card is the color.

In Middle-Earth there's very little to do with (ordinary human) races. The humans, elves, hobbits, dwarves (and, of course, the orcs and various monsters) are all quite different, but they don't at all map onto race-as-we-know-it, and it would be, uh, pretty racist to try to make them match human races. You might be able to pull a Brandon Sanderson and make the elves be East-Asian but extra tall, but even that is questionable. (You could just race-swap the whole setting en masse and have everyone be the same non-white race, and that would be better, but it still misses that the setting is a fundamentally European mythology.) The problem is that while race (as it actually exists) is a non-issue*, genealogy is definitely not (as you point out), so you can't just have random people be random races.

*There's the well-known exception that the Haradrim are called "swarthy" at one point. But this definitely doesn't make them black and doesn't seem to have much to do with mapping to race-as-it-exists; they're just darker-skinned since they live in sunnier climes further south. If anything, the picture is of North Africans: the Haradrim invading with their Mumakil are probably intended to evoke the Carthaginians under Hannibal, and the Corsairs of Umbar, the Barbary Pirates. And going a bit further afield, the shrunken Gondor holding out against Mordor has shades of the Eastern Roman Empire against the Turks. But again, using race to represent this is a bad idea, not least because these resemblances are just evocative, not allegorical and definitely not intended to reflect on real-world races!

Oh boy, if some adaptation had the balls to do Punic Haradrim*, that would be great. If I had any hopes for Rings of Power and their diversity crap, I'd hope there, but the pair of typewriter-bashing monkeys in charge as showrunners have the imagination of a soggy brown paper bag and couldn't even envisage "Not... Californian? How work?"

You could even have black Haradrim because why the fuck not, let some sub-Saharans be part of the glorious empire! Far Harad! Rhun could encompass Central to All The Way East Asia, why the hell not again? Gimme some Golden Horde up in the mix, bro! If they wanted to put in "something approaching our world" race-mixing, there's room in canon, but it's not open to "let's have some random black Elves and Dwarves for no reason ever given while all the main named characters remain white".

*Would Tolkien object? Well, remember that Monica is a Punic name 😁