Quote:
Originally Posted by Andsigil
I'm not content with it.
I've reached my saturation point with the kind of mutated Puritanism that saturates Seth's article. I've heard too much of it over the years: "Tolkien is sexist", "Tolkien is racist", "Tolkien is classist", "Tolkien is reactionary", etc. etc. ad nauseum.
People can't even appreciate a good story anymore. Instead they take a good story like The Ring Trilogy and look for things that they can classify as "problematic" (or any of the other hackneyed Mc-Cliches they just have to use, or they can't sleep at night, I guess) in order to try and make pseudo-intellectualism seem like the genuine thing.
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It depends what you think constitutes "pseudo intellectualism" as opposed to the genuine kind, and what it means to "appreciate a good story".
In my thesis research I read a lot of stuff that was very harsh on Professor Tolkien's work, typically and unsurprisingly from political positions quite different from his own. When I read such things I would shrug my shoulders and think "Well, that's this person's interpretation. It's no skin off my nose if they have such-and-such a problem with it."
That's why these things don't bother me. They're just other people's opinions, in the end.