Happy Bilbo and Frodo's Birthday, 2025!
Sep. 22nd, 2025 07:04 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
labingiHappy Bilbo and Frodo's Birthday! (In the great crossover 'verse in my mind, Frodo is 96 this year, I think. My math is bad, but for reasons unlikely to become apparent right now, my reference point is he's 46 years older than me, so.)
In honor of this year's birthday, I thought I'd respond Tolkienesquely to a video I recently watched, LibraryofaViking's "What Modern Fantasy Gets Wrong (and why it matters)," which is interesting and nuanced, and, its clickbaity title notwithstanding, respectful toward fantasy old and new.
Specifically, I want to respond to the video's reference to R. F. Kuang's defense of fantasy (and SF?) being ideological. I have not seen/read her speech. I'm responding to this video's reference to it; folks familiar with the whole are welcome to add context. I gather that Kuang defends ideological fantasy against the common (often rightwing) critique that it's being ruined by being too "ideological" or "political" (i.e. "woke"). As characterized by LibraryofaViking, she argues that it is artistically valid to take an ideological stand and pursue it didactically in a genre novel.
The Problem I See with (Some) Modern "Ideological" SF&F
I agree ideological didacticism is valid (i.e. it should be publishable and socially allowable, and it can have good artistic quality—Jemisin, for me, is an example; I haven't read Kuang). Likewise, I agree the rightwing critique often has a subtext that the problem is not (entirely) being ideological but being leftwing. It's not just critiquing bad writing; it's critiquing values the critic doesn't agree with and casting this disagreement as a question of "writing quality." Side note: these aren't separate issues; values and artistic quality are entangled, but they are also not the same thing.
That said, as someone often annoyed by the didacticism of modern SF&F, for me, the problem is not that it's ideological; it's that it's simplistic. The world is morally complex. The goal of didacticism is to teach a message clearly. It is inherently difficult to teach a complex message clearly. In my experience, most didactic texts address this by simplifying the message. For example, don't give the villain redeeming qualities lest the reader think the villain is not really a villain and, therefore, not understand their villainy is bad.
This is not a new issue. Milton attempted to write a clearly wrong yet psychologically realistic Satan and spawned centuries of narratives where Satan is the hero (not always because readers misunderstood him, but I'm sure many did.) I understand the urge to simplify for clarity, but it galls me, because the complexity of morality is one of my core values.
To paraphrase, Vash talking to Knives in Trigun, "You want things to be simple, but they're not simple." To indulge too much in that simplification is to risk (metaphorically speaking) Knives-like attitudes: hatred of the enemy as a justification for cruelty toward them. In a word, I find the simplistic* immoral. That is true whether its intended message is trad wifehood or trans rights, though I'd worry more about trad wifehood.
* Note: "Simplistic" suggests "oversimplified," not just "simple." I do think there are "simple" texts that are both highly moral and high quality: Good Dog Carl and Ferdinand might be examples.
What Does This Have to Do with Tolkien?
The Lord of the Rings often gets trotted out as an example of old-school fantasy that is not (too?) ideological. I am here to say that LotR is extremely ideological; what it's not is simplistic. There are many definitions of "ideology," but here's one from Britannica: "a system of ideas that aspires both to explain the world and to change it." Now, Tolkien was not out to create a new world order, but he absolutely was out to articulate a worldview he found moral in the hopes that others would too and would act accordingly in their lives, which would improve the world, as he saw it. That's ideological.
His ideology is that of a traditional Catholic and nostalgic Englishman, prominently including values like respect for wise authority, humility, compassion, wariness of too much power/domination, love and stewardship of nature, proportionality, respect for tradition, loyalty, family, sacrifice for moral causes, and interpersonal love. That is clear and consistent. But he also represents a great deal of complexity. I will give two examples.
One is just after Gandalf has "died" in Moria, when Aragorn is trying to get the team to shuffle off to Lothlorien. Frodo asks him why bother because they have no hope without Gandalf, and Aragorn says, "Then we must do without hope. There is always vengeance." (This is from memory, so sorry if the words are shade off.) In Tolkien's philosophy, this is the wrong answer, always. Hope (as in Christianity) is one of the cardinal moral values, whose loss signals the danger of loss of faith in God/goodness. Vengeance is never a good motive. Yet here is one of the most unambiguously virtuous characters in the story, the rightful, returning king, saying exactly the wrong thing. Why? We all know why. Because he, too, is stricken by the loss of Gandalf, who was a dear friend and their de facto leader. His loss leaves Aragorn as leader, a role he doesn't feel equal to, and Frodo's contention that they have no hope feels all too realistic. It's a dark moment, and he gives in to a dark impulse.
In a typical didactically ideological story, this would likely play out one of three ways: 1) the moral exemplar would never say the wrong thing (i.e. they would give the "right" reply to Frodo), 2) another character would immediately correct them, making it a "teachable moment," or 3) the statement would be a "gun on the wall," a lesson that would come back to haunt the character rather like Christmas Present using Scrooge's own words against him.
In LotR, not so. It's never mentioned again. No one corrects him. Nothing comes of it. Aragorn is still the rightful, returning king. (I didn't even think about that line for, like, forty years it flies so far under the radar.) But this is life, folks. We often say and do unwise things that end up having no real consequence—or we do good, even very difficult things, that never show an external benefit or reward. This makes me think of karma, an intentional, volitional action, which Aragorn's words are. My sensei has described karma as a seed that may germinate given the right soil. For Aragorn, the right soil isn't there. He has no pattern of refusing hope or being vengeful; this is just a bad moment. He is lucky that no one who hears his words is influenced by them to abandon hope or take up vengeance, but it's not only luck: all of the company were carefully chosen for their moral fiber. (Boromir gets desperate, but that's sure not because of Aragorn's one-off.) The whole thing is very realistic. Life is not a morality play; life is a really complex tangle of events.
My other example is more famous: it's Sam telling off Gollum for "sneaking" when Gollum was only trying to help, an act for which Sam quickly, if begrudgingly, halfway apologizes for, or at least acknowledges he was wrong. As many have observed—including C. S. Lewis, if memory serves—this scene is notable because the arguably most virtuous character commits a very small and understandable act of cruelty against one its most (what is the right adjective?) morally fallen (?) characters, and this act catalyzes a cascade of horrible events. It definitively turns Gollum away from listening to his better Sméagol and leads to his betraying the hobbits to Shelob.
This is a lesson: it illustrates that no one perfect, that we never know the full ramifications of our actions, that compassion is the better path, and probably more. But the nuance in the lesson is astounding. Consider that Sam is doing nothing more than behaving the way his good and loving father taught him. Sam was raised with a "spare the rod and spoil the child" mentality, and it worked well because his father disciplined him with love. Sam talks to Gollum as one would talk to a naughty boy because that is the cultural framework he has to work with. But Sam does not love Gollum and has no faith he can be redeemed (watch that loss of hope, Sam!), so his words don't act as loving discipline. And even if they were intended that way, they might still be catastrophic to a person whose psyche is already teetering on the edge of an inescapable abyss.
In a more typical ideologically didactic story, this sequence probably wouldn't have occurred because it would raise too many questions about the message. Is the author saying any imperfection should be punishable by horrible consequences? Is he saying it's okay to be mean to the mean because they'll just betray you anyway? So many possible misreadings! And we can't have that if our goal to be ultra clear in teaching value X.
But this is also life. Sometimes very small missteps have catastrophic consequences that we either can't have foreseen because we lacked knowledge and/or we didn't foresee because we were blinded by something else, as Sam is blinded by his own anger, fear, and protectiveness of Frodo, this last being one of his best impulses. We have to deal with the consequences anyway. Sometimes the seed falls into super compost and spawns massive triffid-like vines (in our own mind or someone else's), like the squash sprawling out my compost right now.
I agree with a lot of Tolkien's philosophy: I agree with humility and wariness of power, with compassion, loyalty, love, and regard for nature. I disagree with some things about his philosophy. I have problems with his adherence knowing your place and obeying your betters. I have problems with his (and traditional Christianity's) belief that, at a certain point, evildoers have just used up their chances and deserve to be damned ("cast out") presumably for eternity. And, of course, I have the usual critiques about his characterizations of race and gender, the Cockney Orcs. You know. But I appreciate his universe, even when I disagree with its ethics, because it is written with such nuance, realism, and (often) generosity towards our human frailty.
LotR is not a great book because it's not ideological. It's a great book because its ideology is complex. It's the complexity I feel missing in many leftwing* novels of today that are admirably trying to uphold social justice but read to me as unjust in their phoniness because "They want things to be simple, and things aren't simple."
* Complexity is missing in the rightwing, too, to be sure. But I don't bother to read these works and so don't care. When Dominic Noble reviews them, I actually find it kind of funny. I also realize that, with LotR, I'm praising a right-leaning text at the expense of left-leaning texts. For examples of the left-leaning ideological complexity, see Le Guin.
In honor of this year's birthday, I thought I'd respond Tolkienesquely to a video I recently watched, LibraryofaViking's "What Modern Fantasy Gets Wrong (and why it matters)," which is interesting and nuanced, and, its clickbaity title notwithstanding, respectful toward fantasy old and new.
Specifically, I want to respond to the video's reference to R. F. Kuang's defense of fantasy (and SF?) being ideological. I have not seen/read her speech. I'm responding to this video's reference to it; folks familiar with the whole are welcome to add context. I gather that Kuang defends ideological fantasy against the common (often rightwing) critique that it's being ruined by being too "ideological" or "political" (i.e. "woke"). As characterized by LibraryofaViking, she argues that it is artistically valid to take an ideological stand and pursue it didactically in a genre novel.
The Problem I See with (Some) Modern "Ideological" SF&F
I agree ideological didacticism is valid (i.e. it should be publishable and socially allowable, and it can have good artistic quality—Jemisin, for me, is an example; I haven't read Kuang). Likewise, I agree the rightwing critique often has a subtext that the problem is not (entirely) being ideological but being leftwing. It's not just critiquing bad writing; it's critiquing values the critic doesn't agree with and casting this disagreement as a question of "writing quality." Side note: these aren't separate issues; values and artistic quality are entangled, but they are also not the same thing.
That said, as someone often annoyed by the didacticism of modern SF&F, for me, the problem is not that it's ideological; it's that it's simplistic. The world is morally complex. The goal of didacticism is to teach a message clearly. It is inherently difficult to teach a complex message clearly. In my experience, most didactic texts address this by simplifying the message. For example, don't give the villain redeeming qualities lest the reader think the villain is not really a villain and, therefore, not understand their villainy is bad.
This is not a new issue. Milton attempted to write a clearly wrong yet psychologically realistic Satan and spawned centuries of narratives where Satan is the hero (not always because readers misunderstood him, but I'm sure many did.) I understand the urge to simplify for clarity, but it galls me, because the complexity of morality is one of my core values.
To paraphrase, Vash talking to Knives in Trigun, "You want things to be simple, but they're not simple." To indulge too much in that simplification is to risk (metaphorically speaking) Knives-like attitudes: hatred of the enemy as a justification for cruelty toward them. In a word, I find the simplistic* immoral. That is true whether its intended message is trad wifehood or trans rights, though I'd worry more about trad wifehood.
* Note: "Simplistic" suggests "oversimplified," not just "simple." I do think there are "simple" texts that are both highly moral and high quality: Good Dog Carl and Ferdinand might be examples.
What Does This Have to Do with Tolkien?
The Lord of the Rings often gets trotted out as an example of old-school fantasy that is not (too?) ideological. I am here to say that LotR is extremely ideological; what it's not is simplistic. There are many definitions of "ideology," but here's one from Britannica: "a system of ideas that aspires both to explain the world and to change it." Now, Tolkien was not out to create a new world order, but he absolutely was out to articulate a worldview he found moral in the hopes that others would too and would act accordingly in their lives, which would improve the world, as he saw it. That's ideological.
His ideology is that of a traditional Catholic and nostalgic Englishman, prominently including values like respect for wise authority, humility, compassion, wariness of too much power/domination, love and stewardship of nature, proportionality, respect for tradition, loyalty, family, sacrifice for moral causes, and interpersonal love. That is clear and consistent. But he also represents a great deal of complexity. I will give two examples.
One is just after Gandalf has "died" in Moria, when Aragorn is trying to get the team to shuffle off to Lothlorien. Frodo asks him why bother because they have no hope without Gandalf, and Aragorn says, "Then we must do without hope. There is always vengeance." (This is from memory, so sorry if the words are shade off.) In Tolkien's philosophy, this is the wrong answer, always. Hope (as in Christianity) is one of the cardinal moral values, whose loss signals the danger of loss of faith in God/goodness. Vengeance is never a good motive. Yet here is one of the most unambiguously virtuous characters in the story, the rightful, returning king, saying exactly the wrong thing. Why? We all know why. Because he, too, is stricken by the loss of Gandalf, who was a dear friend and their de facto leader. His loss leaves Aragorn as leader, a role he doesn't feel equal to, and Frodo's contention that they have no hope feels all too realistic. It's a dark moment, and he gives in to a dark impulse.
In a typical didactically ideological story, this would likely play out one of three ways: 1) the moral exemplar would never say the wrong thing (i.e. they would give the "right" reply to Frodo), 2) another character would immediately correct them, making it a "teachable moment," or 3) the statement would be a "gun on the wall," a lesson that would come back to haunt the character rather like Christmas Present using Scrooge's own words against him.
In LotR, not so. It's never mentioned again. No one corrects him. Nothing comes of it. Aragorn is still the rightful, returning king. (I didn't even think about that line for, like, forty years it flies so far under the radar.) But this is life, folks. We often say and do unwise things that end up having no real consequence—or we do good, even very difficult things, that never show an external benefit or reward. This makes me think of karma, an intentional, volitional action, which Aragorn's words are. My sensei has described karma as a seed that may germinate given the right soil. For Aragorn, the right soil isn't there. He has no pattern of refusing hope or being vengeful; this is just a bad moment. He is lucky that no one who hears his words is influenced by them to abandon hope or take up vengeance, but it's not only luck: all of the company were carefully chosen for their moral fiber. (Boromir gets desperate, but that's sure not because of Aragorn's one-off.) The whole thing is very realistic. Life is not a morality play; life is a really complex tangle of events.
My other example is more famous: it's Sam telling off Gollum for "sneaking" when Gollum was only trying to help, an act for which Sam quickly, if begrudgingly, halfway apologizes for, or at least acknowledges he was wrong. As many have observed—including C. S. Lewis, if memory serves—this scene is notable because the arguably most virtuous character commits a very small and understandable act of cruelty against one its most (what is the right adjective?) morally fallen (?) characters, and this act catalyzes a cascade of horrible events. It definitively turns Gollum away from listening to his better Sméagol and leads to his betraying the hobbits to Shelob.
This is a lesson: it illustrates that no one perfect, that we never know the full ramifications of our actions, that compassion is the better path, and probably more. But the nuance in the lesson is astounding. Consider that Sam is doing nothing more than behaving the way his good and loving father taught him. Sam was raised with a "spare the rod and spoil the child" mentality, and it worked well because his father disciplined him with love. Sam talks to Gollum as one would talk to a naughty boy because that is the cultural framework he has to work with. But Sam does not love Gollum and has no faith he can be redeemed (watch that loss of hope, Sam!), so his words don't act as loving discipline. And even if they were intended that way, they might still be catastrophic to a person whose psyche is already teetering on the edge of an inescapable abyss.
In a more typical ideologically didactic story, this sequence probably wouldn't have occurred because it would raise too many questions about the message. Is the author saying any imperfection should be punishable by horrible consequences? Is he saying it's okay to be mean to the mean because they'll just betray you anyway? So many possible misreadings! And we can't have that if our goal to be ultra clear in teaching value X.
But this is also life. Sometimes very small missteps have catastrophic consequences that we either can't have foreseen because we lacked knowledge and/or we didn't foresee because we were blinded by something else, as Sam is blinded by his own anger, fear, and protectiveness of Frodo, this last being one of his best impulses. We have to deal with the consequences anyway. Sometimes the seed falls into super compost and spawns massive triffid-like vines (in our own mind or someone else's), like the squash sprawling out my compost right now.
I agree with a lot of Tolkien's philosophy: I agree with humility and wariness of power, with compassion, loyalty, love, and regard for nature. I disagree with some things about his philosophy. I have problems with his adherence knowing your place and obeying your betters. I have problems with his (and traditional Christianity's) belief that, at a certain point, evildoers have just used up their chances and deserve to be damned ("cast out") presumably for eternity. And, of course, I have the usual critiques about his characterizations of race and gender, the Cockney Orcs. You know. But I appreciate his universe, even when I disagree with its ethics, because it is written with such nuance, realism, and (often) generosity towards our human frailty.
LotR is not a great book because it's not ideological. It's a great book because its ideology is complex. It's the complexity I feel missing in many leftwing* novels of today that are admirably trying to uphold social justice but read to me as unjust in their phoniness because "They want things to be simple, and things aren't simple."
* Complexity is missing in the rightwing, too, to be sure. But I don't bother to read these works and so don't care. When Dominic Noble reviews them, I actually find it kind of funny. I also realize that, with LotR, I'm praising a right-leaning text at the expense of left-leaning texts. For examples of the left-leaning ideological complexity, see Le Guin.
