It started in earnest with Ghostbusters. No, not the beloved 1984 comedy classic, but the godawful 2016 all-female remake. The remake is awful. Audiences knew it was awful. But neither the studio or the critics could bring themselves to admit that it was an utter dog. So, they attacked the audiences, calling them sexists and misogynists.
As author and critic Bret Easton Ellis says, deep down, Hollywood knows these movies stink. But they’re so wedded to the cult of “diversity and inclusion” that they refuse to admit it.
It’s get-woke-go-broke on steroids. Instead of admitting that they’re making turkeys that audiences don’t want to see, Hollywood is simply doubling down. With Ghostbusters as their template, they’re trying to put on a new gambit: pre-emptively tell the audience that they’re “toxic” if they don’t like the latest pile of shit Hollywood is throwing at them.
Disney was pushing the narrative of “racist fans” before Obi-Wan Kenobi even aired (although Disney is oddly silent on its own habit of removing black actors from promotional material aimed at the lucrative Chinese market). Disney’s marketing defense has centred around “racist” Twitter messages sent to actor Moses Ingram. Yet Disney could only produce four such messages, each of which was found to have been sent from obvious sock-puppet accounts. Fans have accused Disney marketing of sending the messages themselves, to manufacture a ready-made excuse for yet another bomb.
Amazon is pursuing the same strategy with astonishing relentlessness, months out from the debut of its big-spending Rings of Power tv series.
Streaming giant Amazon has become protective of its new project, which has already found itself at the centre of controversy from furious fans who are tired of Woke.
Promotional videos are being inundated with ‘dislikes’ in a fan backlash called ‘ratio-ing’ which generally means the public are very unhappy. The collective forces of the ‘Access Media’ are being mustered to produce headlines such as, The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power Is Going To Upset Tolkien Purists, And That’s A Good Thing. Meanwhile, tens of thousands of comments have been deleted from the online trailer videos suggesting that the PR teams are on high alert.
Why all the outrage?
The series is set to include controversial changes to the source material such as female black dwarfs (without the specified full beards), transforming Galadriel into a ‘powerful female warlord’ (whose husband is weirdly absent), and oppressed nomadic tribes of Harfoots.
There are also black elves, something that never appears once in Tolkien’s massive corpus of writings on elves (the Moriquendi or “Dark Elves” were so named because they did not see the Light of the Trees, and are explicitly described as pale skinned).
Not to be outdone, Amazon has shoe-horned in black Hobbits. Again, something never once alluded to in all Tolkien’s writings. The sole line that defenders of Amazon’s race-baiting have seized on is that Tolkien described one of the three tribes of Hobbits, the Harfoots, as “browner of skin” than their fair-skinned cousins, the Stoors and Fallohides. Note that Tolkien doesn’t describe them as “swarthy” or “black”, as he invariably does those races of men who are clearly “People of Colour”. In other words, Harfoots are no darker than any other group of native Britons. Certainly not negroid Africans.
That the show-runners are totally disregarding Tolkien’s actual lore is demonstrated by actor Lenny Henry’s description of the (show) Harfoots:
‘We’re a nomadic tribe, moving with the weather and the fertility of the crops. We have big caravans on wooden wheels.’
In fact, Tolkien explicitly wrote of the Harfoots that, “They were the most inclined to settle in one place, and longest preserved their ancestral habit of living in tunnels and holes.” So, the most sedentary tribe of hobbits, not “nomadic”, and living in tunnels and holes, not “big caravans”.
But Henry is clearly just parroting the script that Marketing have shoved in front of him. Even worse is when Amazon trots out so-called “Tolkien scholars” like Mariana Rios Maldonado. But how much of a “Tolkien scholar” is she, really? Her academic bio lists her undergraduate studies as Literature and Spanish Linguistics at the Autonomous University of Zacatecas, Mexico. Obviously a hotbed of Tolkien scholarship. Her academic appointments include “Equality and Diversity Office”.
Her only real claim to “Tolkien scholarship” is a PhD work-in-progress on ?“Ethics, Femininity and the Encounter with the Other in J.R.R. Tolkien’s Middle-earth Narratives”, funded by the Mexican National Council for Science and Technology (CONACYT) as well as Mexico’s National Foundation for Fine Arts and Literature (Fundación INBA)
The defence rests, m’lud.
The only person who could genuinely claim the title of “Tolkien scholar” who’s had anything to do with the show was Tom Shippey. Shippey not only has the distinction of having actually known Tolkien, he occupied Tolkien’s previous academic position as Chair of English Language and Medieval English Literature at Leeds University. Shippey’s scholarship includes multiple papers and three books, including the hugely influential J. R. R. Tolkien: Author of the Century.
Tellingly, Shippey departed the Amazon production very early on, under a cloud of silence from the producers.
Why does all this matter?
For those who say, ‘it’s just a TV series’ – fans are not upset about the odd dodgy film but rather the sustained attack on cultural works and a determination to see them ‘re-contextualised’ and dismantled to fit within a narrow activist view of the world that insults and degrades Western storytelling.
It is being done in parallel with a movement that demands absolute authenticity toward non-European and LGBTQ+ content and history.
Spectator Australia
In other words, the deliberate and sweeping erasure of anything and everything white, straight and male.
But the Great Replacement is just a conspiracy theory, remember.
