[Turambar]

Both Eve and Lush complain of others ganging up on them, or jumping down their throat. Other than red, who appears to be a genuine homophobe, I didn't see anyone mistreating Eve. I saw a few people disagreeing with her, politely (e.g.,obloquy, not living up to his name), and many other people who simply weren't interested in Eve's premise. One of the great things about barrowdowns is that there is almost no flaming; people are generally polite, and the moderators are ALWAYS polite. (There is a balrog thread in the "New Silmarillion" topic I read, some guy posted there who was, frankly, an obnoxious, arrogant jerk, and Mithadan and Aiwendil simply ignored all of his offensive ranting and with unfailing politeness simply stuck to the topic at hand. They must have "the patience of a saint", as my mother used to say. It was actually amazing to me for an Internet discussion board.)

Anyway, I think that if people like red can't offer anything more intelligent than "homosexuality is dirty", they should clam up, but I also think that Eve should not complain if people simply disagree with her or aren't interested in her topic. In other words, no flaming, and no whining either.

That being said, I think Eve’s premise is fairly typical of literary criticism on college campuses. IMHO, lit-crit essays are like Hollywood movies – the very finest are beautiful and insightful, but the other 90% are dreary stuff. In any case, in the typical college lit-crit, the critic takes whatever agenda he or she has – Marxism, feminism, queer theory, whatever, and finds all sorts of “exciting subtexts” (as Eve puts it) in some unsuspecting author’s works. Hence you end up with “Marxist Underpinnings of Dickens’ ‘Our Mutual Friend’”, or “Inchoate Feminism in Aristophanes” etc. etc. And for anyone with moderate intelligence (and Eve seems quite intelligent), it’s very easy to play this game. If you have the correct preconceptions, you can find subtexts to fit your bias in almost every literary work, just as a conspiracy nut can twist every event to fit the conspiracy premise. No doubt some dark Freudian interpretation of Shelob’s lair, and Sam’s killing of her with his magic sword, has already been written, and is waiting out there in cyberspace somewhere. And isn’t Sharkey’s corruption of the Shire a Marxist allegory of the capitalist oppressor?