#so idyllic representations of a pastoral post-labour society surrounded by fields and old world forests
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people fawning over the environmentalist themes in tolkien’s work has always made me deeply uneasy but I could never articulate why, and reading orientalism is clarifying a lot of that for me lol
#Said lays it out very clearly like#‘negative’ representations of the orient. as in representing them as deficient or lacking in some way#rests on ‘positive’ representations of the occident. as in the west is always ‘doing’ is always the thing driving human momentum#so idyllic representations of a pastoral post-labour society surrounded by fields and old world forests#populated by guys who have ample free time and fuck around all day#(& who are all white. at least in the films)#that’s not an uncomplicatedly good way to present the world#and is a perspective that is deeply informed by being beneficiaries of continued colonial extraction domination and exploitation#i meam the fictional world is literally called the centre of the earth lol#anyway not ‘cancelling’ tolkien or whatever I’m just glad to be able to understand why exactly#I think it’s bad to just uncritically praise his love of the environment as this like pure ideal#that is somehow uncorrupted by the historical and political context he came from#*post-scarcity I should say not necessarily post-labour#but like the labour processes that make that life idyllic in the first place are invisible
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