🥹🥹🥹🥹🥹 that's very high praise, thank you <3333!!!

I don't even fucking like academia, I didn't even DO a degree in literature, but this is just sad and embarrassing and frustrating and annoying in the worst way because I want to write better arguments now for a position/reading/idea I don't even fully agree with. >:(

"It's not racist or fascistic there's an ontologically 'corrupted' race that justifies Eternal War to stamp them out forever" (okay paraphrasing the actual quote) but this is not good scholarship. This is just a claim with no reference, no argument except but I don't feel that way :(

When you read it textually within even the in-text ideas about beauty, purity, pristineness versus corruption, marring, fallenness, you already have something more substantial to say about the ideological position of the text WITHOUT getting into JRRT's biography aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa

When you compare it to how the others speak and the relevant textual space the Orcs occupy, it does raise an in-universe class dimension, in addition to the purely racial one. You don't even need a sociological reading of the text, that would interrogate its relationship w/ Tolkien's social milieu!

Or well, I suppose it feels like poor close reading to me, because when I read the passages meant to humanise Orcs, the linguistic style employed immediately draws to memory every single upper middle class 1920s-1940s lit caricature of The Lower Classes.

Its also just very odd, the way all citations resort to Tolkien's intentions as final word - this is not how texts function on ANY level, this is something so basic and foundational to any kind of literary criticism/reading? Like, this is formalism on steroids but its not even *good* formalism

It produces bad scholarship - I don't think I've read such self-referrent readings, no attempt at situating Tolkien within a school of thought, a distinct disavowal of Tolkien's Catholicism except where it lends a positive sheen to the texts - and glaring blind spots.

I think I have to just admit that what counts as accepted Tolkien scholarship within the fandom is just going to frustrate me no end & stop trying to engage with it out of a misguided desire for in-depth readings of the texts. The defensiveness is tedious

LOL the tree scene annoyed me for this reason. I love a good weird tree but also. What was that for. What did that achieve except as one of those annoying Star Wars style Real Nerds Will Get ThisTM moments.