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PaperclipPerfector  7mo ago (text post)   27622 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 15, 2024

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The voice acting is bad; the lines are needlessly made worse; the characterizations are butchered; several people have their races swapped or are made openly bisexual (note that having gay or bisexual characters isn't a problem to me, but they rewrote established characters lamenting old boyfriends coming back to life - a strangely hypersexual comment given that this crew was only established for this mission and had only been there for a few weeks). These people were creative and to my eyes had to subversive agenda. I genuinely think they saw it as a more natural story to have everyone look like southern Californian hip creatives.

That's the "modern audiences" bit from one of the Rings of Power producers which I can't now find but did stumble across another article which raised my blood pressure; I'm not impressed by multiple Hugo winner N.K. Jemisin's work in the first place ('the Origenes are allegory for Strong Black Women who get feared and hated by Black men and of course racist whites which is all whites' 'okay but these people literally have the power to destroy the world' 'you racist! that's why you don't like them!'), but this takes the cake - Nora, Tolkien was not writing about you back when he was inventing his own personal mythology inspired by the Warwickshire countryside pre-First World War, so put away your performative indignation about how very dare he not be 21st century Californian liberal and go find something else to be professionally aggrieved over while you wait for the plaudits of how wunnerfully talented and amaaaazing you are to be cast at your feet yet again:

Defenders of the series also say Amazon Studios isn’t being woke – it’s being savvy. All-White casts are no longer acceptable to modern audiences. “The Rings of Power” is being streamed in more than 240 countries.

“They want to have as many people watching as possible,” says Coren, the Tolkien biographer. “So, morally, economically, culturally on every level, it (diverse casting) is the right thing to do.”

Others say Amazon Studios did a public service by expunging some of the implicit racism in Tolkien’s Middle-earth.

N.K. Jemisin, an acclaimed Black fantasy and science fiction writer, has criticized Tolkien’s depiction of “orcs,” the dusky-hued, villainous foot soldiers who terrorize hobbits, elves and other pale-faced heroes. She said they are depicted as “faceless savage dark hordes” that exist so the good guys can “gleefully go genocidal on them.”

“Think about that,” Jemisin wrote. “Creatures that look like people, but aren’t really. Kinda-sorta-people, who aren’t worthy of even the most basic moral considerations, like the right to exist. Only way to deal with them is to control them utterly a la slavery, or wipe them all out.”

EDIT EDIT: In fact, Nora, if any ethnic group has a right to get riled up by the depiction of Orcs, it's - Mongolians. Not Black middle-class college educated professional women:

From the Selected Letters:

Orcs (the word is as far as I am concerned actually derived from Old English orc 'demon', but only because of its phonetic suitability) are nowhere clearly stated to be of any particular origin. But since they are servants of the Dark Power, and later of Sauron, neither of whom could, or would, produce living things, they must be 'corruptions'. They are not based on direct experience of mine; but owe, I suppose, a good deal to the goblin tradition (goblin is used as a translation in The Hobbit, where orc only occurs once, I think), especially as it appears in George MacDonald, except for the soft feet which I never believed in. The name has the form orch (pl. yrch) in Sindarin and uruk in the Black Speech.

  1. Why does Z put beaks and feathers on Orcs!? (Orcs is not a form of Auks.) The Orcs are definitely stated to be corruptions of the 'human' form seen in Elves and Men. They are (or were) squat, broad, flat-nosed, sallow-skinned, with wide mouths and slant eyes: in fact degraded and repulsive versions of the (to Europeans) least lovely Mongol-types.

Erik Kain has a good go at this notion of "updated for modern audiences".

EDIT: Is Nora a little bit racist herself? Or is it that "you can't be racist about white people"? Because this privileged Black woman is carrying on as though she's a poor black single mother living in poverty in the Deepest Deep South, while her entire life has been one of middle and upper-middle class achievement and garlanding with laurels:

Jemisin was born in Iowa City, Iowa, while her parents ...were completing masters programs at the University of Iowa. She ...received a B.S. in psychology. She went on to study counseling and earn her Master of Education ...worked as a counseling psychologist and career counselor before writing full-time.

Jemisin's debut novel ...was nominated for the 2010 Nebula Award and short-listed for the James Tiptree Jr. Award. In 2011, it was nominated for the Hugo Award, World Fantasy Award, and 2011 Locus Award for Best First Novel, winning the latter.

...delivery of the Guest of Honour speech at the 2013 Continuum in Australia

Jemisin was a co-Guest of Honor of the 2014 WisCon science fiction convention in Madison, Wisconsin. ...She was the Author Guest of Honor at Arisia 2015 in Boston, Massachusetts. In January 2016, Jemisin started writing "Otherworldly", a bimonthly column for The New York Times. In May 2016, Jemisin mounted a Patreon campaign which raised sufficient funding to allow her to quit her job as a counseling psychologist and focus full-time on her writing.

The Fifth Season won the Hugo Award for Best Novel, making Jemisin the first African-American writer to win a Hugo award in that category. The sequels in the trilogy, The Obelisk Gate and The Stone Sky, won the Hugo Award for Best Novel in 2017 and 2018, respectively, making Jemisin the first author to win the Hugo Award for Best Novel in three consecutive years, as well as the first to win for all three novels in a trilogy.

...Far Sector, a twelve-issue limited series comic written by Jemisin with art by Jamal Campbell, began publication in 2019. It was nominated for the 2021 Eisner Award for Best Limited Series.

Jemisin's urban fantasy novel The City We Became was published in March 2020. In October 2020, Jemisin was announced as a recipient of the MacArthur Fellows Program Genius Grant. In June 2021, Sony's TriStar Pictures won the rights to adapt The Broken Earth trilogy in a seven-figure deal with Jemisin adapting the novels for the screen herself. In 2021, she was included in the Time 100, Time's annual list of the 100 most influential people in the world.

Oh, that poor woman, struggling unrecognised to break into the Old White Male SF Writers cosy club!

As to that novel The City We Became, well of course you can't be racist about white people. All the lead characters are BIPOC and/or queer, while the bad one is - naturally - a white woman:

On Staten Island, the borough's avatar Aislyn, a white librarian in her thirties, is approached by the Woman in White, who offers to protect Aislyn from the avatar of New York City; they bond over racist humor. ...In Staten Island, Aislyn's father invites a neo-Nazi to stay with them; he sexually harasses Aislyn before she uses her powers to stop him and leaves the house.

The avatars
The Primary: the avatar of New York City. A queer Black homeless young man. A graffiti artist and hustler.
Manny: the avatar of Manhattan. A queer Black man in his late 20s. When he becomes Manhattan's avatar, he loses most memory of his former life as a newly arrived PhD student, representing his role as a new New Yorker. He can allow non-avatar New Yorkers to see the Enemy if he needs to use them. He is a somewhat ruthless strategist and channels the violent cut-throat nature of Manhattan and to a lesser extent the power of the financial markets. He has a crush on the Primary and feels a need to protect him.
Brooklyn "MC Free" Thomason: the avatar of Brooklyn. A Black, middle-aged former rapper, lawyer, and current city councilwoman. She has a child and a sick father. Her power is rooted in music: she can use it to attack and can sense the music in the city's noise.
Bronca Siwanoy: the avatar of The Bronx. A lesbian Lenape woman in her 60s. She has a PhD, a hot temper, and a son, and works at the Bronx Art Center. She is the oldest of the six avatars and thus the holder of the city's lexicon of knowledge. She channels her power through steel-toed boots which she used to kick men who sexually harassed her when she was 11 and police informants at Stonewall when she was 17.
Padmini Prakash: the avatar of Queens. A 25-year-old Tamil immigrant graduate student living in Queens. Her first name means "she who sits on the lotus". She can use mathematical imagination to change physical reality.
Aislyn Houlihan: the avatar of Staten Island. A 30-year-old Irish-American woman who lives with her parents on Staten Island. Her father is an abusive, racist cop who calls her "Apple", though her name means "dream". She can become invisible.
Veneza: the avatar of Jersey City. A young Black and Portuguese woman who works with Bronca at the Bronx Art Center.

I see Nora managed to include a Lenape character, even though they pretty much don't live in New York anymore. Ah well, I guess this is what makes it fantasy.

“We love New York. We have a history there before the white man ever showed up, but the Lenape are forgotten because they haven’t had a presence there in decades, centuries,” says Curtis Zunigha, co-director of the Manhattan-based Lenape Center. The center’s mission is to promote Native American arts and humanities, environmental stewardship and Lenape identity.

Zunigha, however, lives in Bartlesville, Oklahoma, where he also works as the director of cultural resources for the Delaware Tribe of Indians. Like many Lenape, he uses the term “Delaware” — the federally recognized name for the Lenape — interchangeably with the group’s own name for itself. None of the three co-directors of the Lenape Center live in New York City, but they decided to base their organization there because of its ties to their ancestry.

Ah, yes: the racist, neo-Nazi, drunken, violent, abusive Irish. I love you too, Nora. But the name is not "Aislyn" (any bets she pronounces it "Ace-linn"?) but Aisling (Ash-ling) and it doesn't mean "dream" as such, which would be "bringlóid" (shout out to ST:TNG for using it!), it means more "vision" and is in fact an entire genre of allegorical poetry, sometimes set to music and sung. Hey, are you culturally appropriating my heritage there, Nora? Tut-tut! Naughty! If you're not that culture you are not supposed to use it!

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