PrimeJunta

Very well. Proceeding. I'll make this a series, with one point per post, otherwise I think the quoting inside one post will get out of hand. I'll even make a mini-essay from each. Point 1. Racial purity and eugenics One of the most central recurring themes in Tolkien is that of bloodlines. These are so important that he actually provided family trees in the appendices to his work. Characters with "pure" bloodlines are longer-lived, better-looking (the word he significantly and characteristically uses is 'fairer', which of course also has a connotation of 'lighter-skinned or haired'). Case in point: Aragorn. He is explicitly described as a throwback to 'pure' Numenorean stock, with a lifespan far longer than ordinary humans. "Miscegenation" is everywhere portrayed as bad, e.g. in the way the Gondorean bloodlines lost their purity and the advantages thereof when the Numenorean descendants there bred with 'lesser Men.' One of the central plot points in LotR is the return of the rightful King -- rightful solely by virtue of carrying the right set of ancestors, which is also the very thing that makes him so obviously superior to Denethor and Boromir of the diluted Gondorean bloodline, both so easily corrupted by the wiles of the Enemy. The same thinking is found everywhere, right down to the characteristics ascribed to the various hobbit bloodlines. Pippin is adventurous and outgoing because he's a Took. Frodo and Bilbo get their unexpected courage and strength of character from the same bloodline. Every single 'heroic' character in Tolkien comes from a 'noble' bloodline... unless you count "heroically supporting your heroic master as a faithful servant or sidekick," as Sam Gamgee does. I could dig up more examples from elven bloodlines, but I think that would be belaboring the point. Challenge: Name a single heroic character from Tolkien who does not have noble blood, excluding the 'heroic servant/sidekick' role. Okay, moving on to the next one. Feel feel to reply to this one while I'm writing.

@AlO3 I'd certainly use them for reference, but if I expect to defend a list in debate, it would have to be something I put thought into myself. I'm generally not comfortable defending other people's ideas, even if I agree with them.

@Sharp_one yes we can. Guns in a fantasy setting with bronze-age technology would be obviously anachronistic, for example.

Tokenism is painfully obvious too, and I guarantee it'll get you a bigger scolding from those so inclined than just leaving the token minority out. I just re-read this thread, and I didn't see any arguments you made. Just lots of incoherent rage and assertions without evidence, plus a link to an article that listed many of the obvious ways Tolkien's work is racist, followed by a laughable argument that it's not actually racist at all because hobbits and Christianity. Would you really like me to compile a list of obviously racist and sexist features in Tolkien? I can do that, but it's a bit of work. I'll do it if you promise me to address them point by point, with actual argument, in your own words, and without resorting to the kind of name-calling you've been doing so far.

Okay. Thanks for setting that straight.

@Sharp_one Are you saying that good stories can only be about white, straight, able-bodied men? If not, what are you saying, exactly?

No offense, Merlkir, but you're raging so hard I don't think you're receptive to an actual discussion. If you like, we can get back to this after you've calmed down a little.

@JFSOCC wrong pissing contest. Kveldulf was trying to prove the existence of God. Adhin was the one who thought 'colonial era' meant 18th c North America.

Heh, yeah, I actually gave up on the series at Toll the Hounds; I just skimmed through Dust of Dreams and The Crippled God to find out what happened to everybody. I think he just ran out of epic somewhere along the line. (Or, seriously... he got too successful and stopped listening to his editor. Plus he stupidly stuck with that "every volume has to be more epic than the previous one" thing.) That said, I prefer to judge authors by their best work rather than their worst, and at his best IMO he's very good. The story about the rise and fall of Rhulad Sengar was top-notch IMO. Edit: and also, I was mostly thinking of his world-building. His world feels lived-in in a way that most other fantasy worlds don't, including Miéville's and Moorcöck's, but Tolkien's does. I'm not sure I could even break down exactly where that feeling comes from, but he has it. Felix Gilman's Half-Made World, strangely, has it too, even though it really oughtn't.

True, dat. However it makes up for it in depth and breadth. All of his peoples have histories and fully fleshed-out languages, literatures, and mythologies. The world feels lived-in in a way that no other fantasy world I've read quite manages. IMO that's really the crux of it; he gets away with wooden writing, awful plot holes, and terrible pacing just because the world it all happens in is so vividly imagined in such depth and detail. It's almost like reading a ho-hum writer describe a place he's actually lived in and extensively studied. Miéville, Moorcöck, Felix Gilman, Steven Erickson etc. are brilliant but pretty thin by comparison. (I have an especial soft spot for Miéville actually; I wish he'd get back to the Bas-Lag books though as that world has a lot of still untapped promise IMO.) Erickson at his best has something of the same quality, but even so I can't help feeling that he's making it up as he goes along, as it were.

@Karkarov, of course he wasn't trying to make a political statement. However to argue that his political, racial, sexual, religious etc. attitudes somehow miraculously left no trace whatsoever in his work strikes me as frankly absurd. How could they not?

I agree 100%. That said, I do find it useful to acknowledge nasty undercurrents where they're present, rather than trying to prove they're not there just because you like something.

I don't actually have a problem with Tolkien at all. I've read LotR dozens of times (not exaggerating; I'm on my third set of copies because the previous two just fell to bits), The Silmarillion maybe a dozen times, and pretty much everything else except a few volumes of the increasingly tedious History of Middle Earth, most of it more than once. I love the hell out of Tolkien. Which doesn't change the fact that there are plenty of at least somewhat ugly undercurrents there. Eugenics. Racist and sexist stereotypes. Extreme conservatism in political ideas. That sort of thing. Still IMO in its own class as far as invented fantasy worlds go.

If a white Western European today wrote an epic about white Western European-types defending the West against Eastern hordes of dark, scimitar-wielding masses of pure evil, speaking a guttural language phonetically similar to Turkish, and included a poignant scene where one of the heroes wonders if their dead brown-skinned elephant-riding allies were born evil or just deluded, wouldn't you find it just a tiny bit racist?

I almost replied to Walsingham meself but didn't bother. Still, some specifics: check out the story of Fëanor and his sons, the Kinslaying, and the exile of the Noldor. That's some very serious elven dickishness there, and it's so fundamental to the mythos that without it there wouldn't have been a Ring. As to the racism and sexism bit... by modern standards, Tolkien certainly was, but by the standards of his time, no more than most and a good deal less than many. A great many of his contemporaries -- also in England, don't forget -- were raging antisemites, for example; he was not and said so. He was a raging Luddite and reactionary though, and it shows in his fiction. That said, like it or not, there is a pretty conspicuous undercurrent in the LotR especially which resonates with the "Eurabia" crowd. The Orcs are rather conspicuous stand-ins for Turks/Mongols/Arabs. Tolkien even said more or less as much in one of his letters. FWIW my wife's of Middle Eastern origin and she picks up on it, which detracts from her enjoyment of the book and films somewhat. But that was par for course for the time, too. My take? I don't see any problem with enjoying something while acknowledging its sometimes problematic aspects. I'm a massive fan of Wagner's operas, despite some rather poisonous undercurrents there too (not to mention that ol' Richard was a right old **** himself).

It is. But there's a different kind of fun in it. I enjoyed IWD and ToEE a lot, and a great part of the fun was the self-created party.

The advantage is that you get to create them. I.e., you can create a party with exactly the composition you want.

Nope. They're still munchkiny non-trade-offs, at least in all (or nearly all?) really existing games. You'd have to have significant numbers of mace-immune and sword-immune critters in the game, and make them also immune to alternative attack methods available for both mace and sword specialists, and, in a party-based game, make it so that the sword-specialist couldn't move to a useful support role when encountering sword-immunes. Otherwise there's very little downside to making half your party mace-specialists and the other half sword-specialists. I.e., you'd be balancing the entire game around that trade-off, it would be both limiting and extremely contrived. Much simpler to just not have that trade-off perk available in the first place. I can only think of one type of game where this would be a genuine trade-off, and to my knowledge nobody's made that game yet. An extremely resource-scarce one, where weapon maintenance is a big gameplay element. Think Fallout with one-tenth the amount of stuff in it, and weapons costing ten times as much. In that kind of situation, being able to competently use whatever happens to be available is a genuine advantage, and trading that off for specialization would bite.

Can't be properly medieval without the hurdy-gurdy. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QHmML7bu-iM

Actually IMO your swords/maces tradeoff trait is an example of something you shouldn't have, regardless of the number of swords and maces in the game. This is a classic "I don't want to use swords anyway" non-trade-off. Cf. the various weapon specialist builds in D&D. You'd practically have to balance the entire game around that trait to make it non-munchkiny. I can think of ways to do that, of course, but a trait that forces you to reconsider pretty much the entire game is probably not a good example of a balanced trait.

Unfortunately yes. It takes a special effort to craft a setting where that isn't the case. That's one reason I liked Planescape so much; if you're tangling with demigods and archdevils on a daily basis, Meteor Storm seems a whole lot less impressive all of a sudden.

You're not. I think we're going to be disappointed though; one of MCA's companion-writing pillars is that they have to stroke the player's ego. Plus 'adolescent power fantasy' is one of the cornerstones of all the IE games, even PS:T.

@rjshae IMO the problem with tradeoff perks is that quite often they end up being "greatly strengthen this thing I'm going to use all the time and greatly weaken this thing I wasn't going to use at all anyway." I.e., they get munchkiny very quickly. It's very rare to feel you're actually losing something in the exchange.

Well, 1 out of 9 isn't too bad. (Put another way, this is not the game you're looking for.)

@Kveldulf, I'm going to let this drop, mostly because it's more and more off-topic here – and also you're misunderstanding what I'm stating, and I have a feeling it would be a lot of work to work through that misunderstanding, and I don't feel particularly keen to do that work. If you're really interested in this worldview, read the Popper book I recommended earlier.