Transcript
Speaker: Hello, everyone, and welcome to Queer Lodgings, the queer -led podcast about everything Tolkien. I'm Grace, and I'm here with my usual co -host, Leah. Hi. And Alicia. Hello, hello. Today, we'd like to introduce you to a pair of scholars, Megan B. Abrahamson and Maria K. Alberto, who are doing some really interesting work around transformative works in relation to Tolkien and how fans are constructing the racial identity of one character in particular.
Speaker: Hello to you both, and thank you for joining us. Howdy. Hello, thanks for having us. Absolutely. So let's gather together, toast each other with a cordial of Miravour, and dig into this topic. Before we start, a bit of transparency. February is Black History Month in the United States, and given that it's the first February of the Pod's existence, we wanted to release an episode of Queer Lodgings that reflects that fact, to stand in solidarity and recognition of all of the Black Tolkien fans out there.
Speaker: At the same time, none of us among the hosting crew are black, and it doesn't feel particularly appropriate or like good allyship to ask some of the amazing future guests that we've been talking about setting up recording sessions with to shift their schedules around and take on more work just to accommodate us, a bunch of white folks. We recognize and own the dissonance.
Speaker: But we did know of a few researchers who have been working to hold space for the voices of Black fans and of fans who are actively looking to shift the way that we all think about the racial identity of characters in Tolkien's legendarium. So with full transparency as to the limitation of our lens, let's dig in. Let's talk about Fingon.
Speaker: For some context here, in August of 2022, I got to see Megan present a talk about Fingan at MISCON, the Mythopoeic Societies Conference that was held that year in Albuquerque, New Mexico. That talk focused on work that Megan and Maria were actively engaged in and was titled Long Dark Hair in Great Plates Braided with Gold, Black Fingan and Race Mending in Transformative Folk and Fan Works. I was hooked as soon as I read the program. Challenging a dominant narrative that considers whiteness to be the unexamined default? Sign me up.
Speaker: So really, there are three individuals that we want to introduce our listeners to right away, Megan, Maria, and Fingan. Let's start with introductions from the researchers. Megan, would you go ahead and introduce yourself? Yeah, so I'm Megan Abramson. I have a PhD in English with a focus on medieval literature, so I'm a medievalist by trade. I'm currently teaching at Central New Mexico Community College. I'm on the governing board for the Mythopoeic Society with Grace and Alicia.
Speaker: And Tim, I'm the editor of Mythprint, where I'm attempting to use my admittedly small platform, but I'm trying to publish more reviews of mythopoeic works by historically underrepresented minorities in the area of fantasy. And a quick plug, I'm always accepting reviews and short articles. Email me at mythprint at mythsoc .org. We'll put that link in the show notes too. Yeah, perfect. And Maria, would you go ahead and introduce yourself?
Speaker: Suppose I could manage that. Hello all. My name is Maria K. Alberto. I'm waving, though that's not going to come through. My pronouns are she, her, and I'm a PhD candidate at the University of Utah. I'm currently working on finishing my dissertation on cannons and popular culture. More broadly, I'm interested in researching digital storytelling, transformative fan works, fandom community practices, and genre literature of the 20th and 21st centuries.
Speaker: Tolkien and Tolkien fandom are like right there in the center of this Venn diagram, and we gotta love that. A long time Tolkien fan, I've written a fair bit about both these texts and about Tolkien fandom, including working with Dom Feligund on the Tolkien thick survey, writing essays about seduction in the legendarium and Tolkien fan films, and coming soon book chapters on Tolkien's mythic cities and queer readings of Beyleg and Turin.
Speaker: Is there a way to read Balag and Turin that's not queer? You know, you'd be surprised by the number of people who insist that there are, but... They're just good friends. Just good friends, the best friends. It's just roommates. Gasp, they were roommates. As though queer platonic partnerships aren't a thing. Come on, people. And now we should introduce the star of the show, Alicia Megan Maria. Who is Fingon?
Speaker: All right, I will go first and give people some, like, bare bones to his Fingon. For those of you who have not read the Somerillian, he's a Somerillian elf. He's one of the elves who was kind of a dick with Feanor, participated in the kinslaying, but Feanor left him behind. He had to cross the Hela Caraxa.
Speaker: which we have discussed in our Galadriel episode. It was the grinding ice. A lot of elves died. He came over to Middle -earth real pissed off. But he's mostly known for the fact that he kind of re -bridged that gap. He was really good friends with Mythrose. Everyone ships him in Mythrose.
Speaker: He rescued my throws from the top of Morgoth's tower by cutting off his hand. And the other things that he's kind of well known for is that his father died in one -on -one combat with Morgoth, and he himself died in the Battle of Unnumbered Tears, along with almost everyone else, to Gothmog, the chief of the Balrogs.
Speaker: most metal deaths like ever. It's one of those diversity when a queer character has had his banner drawn into the mire of his blood. Fun fact, that was actually a working title for this project. It was a working title. I feel like the joke there might not be legible to some of our audiences. Megan, I'm gonna recommend we change that. I know. It's a tumbler in joke for sure. Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah, but thank you so much for the introduction to our star leash. I think that's that's maybe what I would have covered as well. So yeah.
Speaker: I think he's he's an interesting character because he has similar sort of excuses as Galadriel sometimes is given in the sense that he showed up to the kinslaying and people were already killing each other. So he didn't know who started it or why. So he just went on the side of his friends, right? It's like some excuse, same thing with Galadriel, right? And so so yeah, so I think a lot of people latched on to him as sort of a step up in the heroism and goodness levels, then
Speaker: I mean, they're all murderers. They're all mass murderers. Everyone is problematic. Everyone's problematic. But he's like, yeah, slightly less problematic. But yeah, that's exactly how I would introduce him. All right, then walk us through this project that you've undertaken. How did it come about? What's the scope? What's the purpose?
Speaker: So I think I'll start Maria at anything that you like. So because I'll start with essentially the version that I presented at MythCon was still very much in draft form and it continues to evolve. It's going to be Foreign Anthology on Race and Racisms in Tolkien. It's going to be edited by Robin Ann Reed and it's forthcoming from McFarland.
Speaker: Oh, the funny story is Maria and I both submitted very similar proposals to this anthology to Robin. And she's like, these are great, but like, I don't need two of the exact same paper. And we're like, well, hey, we can just write it together then. So we did. What we essentially noticed was there this growing Fannin is what we'll call it or what it's called.
Speaker: which is a fan headcanon or canon, right? So something that many fans believe to be canon, even though there's not technically textual basis for it. So we'll go into that. So anyway, we noticed this growing fanon of portraying Fingon more than almost any other Tolkien character as Black in fan art. And our goal was to look into this
Speaker: and try to learn about why fans did this, why it appeared on Tumblr pretty much exclusively and when. So we distributed an IRB exempted survey in summer of 2022, and we got responses from 311 participants who quote unquote interact with Tolkien fan art on Tumblr. And of those 94 reported having created fan art of Thingon. And those are the responses that we focused most on. Yeah.
Speaker: Something that I would add here, partly because it's just the part that I plug for almost every project I work on, but also because I feel it gets into something you talked about at the intro this episode. We thought the survey was particularly important because I mean, again, both Megan and I have the training experience. We could have just looked at texts, right? We could have looked at purely fan art. We could have looked at some of the textual details that we'll talk about later, but we're like, we want to hear from our fellow fans as well.
Speaker: And we want specifically to hear from the people who are creating this figure, how that came to them, how they see that kind of circulating in those spaces on Tumblr. And we also had a couple of questions that were like, have you experienced any pushback? Have you experienced any kind of.
Speaker: negative outcomes from doing this. But again, we would not have been able to do that as researchers by simply looking at the fan arts, edits or the text. So the entire chapter could have been focused on those things, but we went with the survey as well because we wanted to include fan voices in this project.
Speaker: I will also say that one downside of this is we ended up with way more stuff than we can write about in a single book chapter. Robin has already asked us like oh god what are you guys doing? Much more kindly than that because Robin's wonderful. So we're gonna have to continue to kind of think about this and write about this even beyond the book chapters we just got so much stuff. I am very excited to hear more about that. Indeed.
Speaker: I do want to ask a question for people who are not as familiar with academics. What is an IRB exempted survey? Oh, Megan, can I do this one? I want to do this one. Please, please. So IRB is the Institutional Review Board. And most colleges, universities above a certain size, medical institutions, things like that, that do human subject research will have an IRB. Just anecdotally, the IRB at my university, they're very familiar with the med school people.
Speaker: probably get my applications and are like, this crazy girl again, what what is she doing? But it's a way of having like outside parties look at the research you're proposing to do and ensure that it is ethical that you are not intentionally or accidentally kind of
Speaker: conducting research in a way that would harm your participants. So with the kind of work that we're doing, it's a survey on Tumblr, right? If you don't want to do it, you scroll past it, but it's still, it's good practice to have that kind of survey of whether your work is ethical, whether you are treating fellow human beings with that respect, even as if, even while you want to study their behaviors.
Speaker: So I always plug IRB, especially for fan studies projects that actually talk to fans because yeah, you need that.
Speaker: So I hope that answers your question. Perfect. Thank you. Absolutely. I want to get into your findings here in a second, but first you have been very upfront about the limitations of this study and the context of seeking to undertake it in the first place. What were some of those factors that you saw as potentially impacting how willing people might have been to share their response?
Speaker: Yeah, absolutely. So, so for sure, right. Anytime fans are going to talk to researchers about fandom, they're always going to paint like maybe a nicer picture for us than is actually true. And we were and have been upfront that we are two white researchers researching this topic. So fans of color may have held back on account of that. They're certainly.
Speaker: Definitely that potential, right? So we're aware of that. And just in general, Tolkien fandom, Tolkien scholarship is really white. I have a Twitter and a Facebook that I'm on not, not on very much, but I know that there's a lot of racism that Tolkien's fans either say or deal with. You guys, I'm sure, I know Alicia does the modding for our, our social media accounts with them at the PX Society and has to deal with a lot of it. So I'd actually love to hear.
Speaker: sort of what the baseline is from you. I feel like I'd learn a lot more hearing that from you. But I mean, it's certainly there in Tolkien's texts, despite a lot of people wanting to tie ourselves in knots to deny. It's there in the Peter Jackson films. It's there when fans of color cosplay Tolkien characters and get harassment for it. Yeah, you guys can certainly say more to this than me.
Speaker: But there is just this overwhelming and rather tragic assumption that all the Tolkien characters, whether elves, dwarves, or hobbits, are also fundamentally white. They're European or British. They are in our heads played by white actors, or in our films played by white actors, unfortunately.
Speaker: When we have multiple races interacting, we don't really, they're only like fantasy races portrayed in our heads as white actors. So any art or portrayal of any Tolkien character is this really transformative thing, right? And we use the work of Dallas John Baker, who talks about terms of talking back to Tolkien, right? So I think any time you have a non -white portrayal of a Tolkien character,
Speaker: You're doing that in a really cool transformative way. Yeah, that's, that's maybe one way of starting it. I don't know if you guys can talk to more of the issues you guys see on Twitter or Facebook.
Speaker: or Maria, if you have anything to add to that. So I have a couple of things and I'm just like, where do I start with this? Because the flip side of imagining whiteness as the default for our heroes or our heroic characters, of course, is imagining racial otherness as the default for our antagonists, our enemies, our faceless masses.
Speaker: So this is also usually on my mind because my dissertation touches on Dungeons and Dragons, which takes all of that and exacerbates it, builds it into rule systems and game systems, and all of a sudden, as a player, you are complicit in playing out that stuff.
Speaker: rather than simply reading it in Tolkien or watching it in Tolkien filmic adaptations. So I feel like that's also something to highlight is that if whiteness is the racial default in one way and we see other racial identities as a default in other ways.
Speaker: And of course, there has been a discussion, never enough, that we also see this coming through in Tolkien's texts. So yeah, I just wanted to briefly say that. Someone else whose work we are drawing on beyond Dallas John Baker and talking back to Tolkien is Ebony Elizabeth Thomas writing about re -storying. And we were very excited to look at her work as well because she is one of the few people who also talks about
Speaker: Tolkien characters beyond the characters in The Lord of the Rings. Like in her article, I believe she writes about Varda and about Indus, and we just read that and were like, oh my god, yes, absolutely. So already this kind of method of reading was really exciting to us, and we're going to be
Speaker: putting Baker and Thomas into a little bit more dialogue in future drafts. But again, the fact that she was talking about characters from the same text that we are and how they may be depicted in fan works was really exciting to us. I'm not on Tumblr and one of the most prevalent black depictions of a Tolkien character I ever see is Varda.
Speaker: Yeah, it's interesting that that came up. In terms of racism in general and the Tolkien fan space, I can speak to it on Facebook. I cannot speak to it on Twitter. Tim would be the person who could speak to it better on Twitter, although I suppose Grace could as well, because she's been jumping into some shit. I get all of the really racist Reddit notifications is what I get, actually. But, you know, it's all over.
Speaker: Yeah, it's kind of calmed down on Facebook to some extent since the height of Rings of Power. And I think that is a mixture of the fact that I don't engage in any Tolkien space other than the ones that I moderate. And I moderate that place at this point with an iron fucking fist because I am done.
Speaker: with everyone talking out of both sides of their mouth and like racist dog whistles, I am 100 % done with it. And I think people at this point have latched onto the fact that I'm done with it and have stopped pushing me.
Speaker: But I do still see a fair amount of racist horseshit that goes on and most of it has been on Twitter because I am a part of a secret group of angry Tolkien leftists and we talk to each other about the racist shit that we see on the internet and if we need help combating it.
Speaker: One of the things that I had noticed when I was taking a look at the Tolkien fan art survey that you set up right up front in talking about it, there's a paragraph where you
Speaker: Like you lay out the Tolkien fans who speak up about anything, touching on race, racism, or lived experience regarding grace are often harassed for doing so. And then, you know, some language about how wanting to hear people's thoughts without perpetuating that reality and kind of putting people in a place where they would, in responding, would have to engage with more of that potentially and everything. So I thought that was very important, but I also noticed
Speaker: Shouty's got a lot to say today. Yeah, my white cat is weighing in on this topic. It's great. We're all great. She's a true comrade. She's a true ally.
Speaker: One of the things that I was also thinking about was the timing on which you were engaging in this research. And I think somewhere, if you're in discussion with you or somewhere that I'd read in relation to the survey, you talked about how this data was being collected prior to rings of power, but in the context of where some of the race -blind casting or intentionally non -white casting decisions had been made,
Speaker: And some of that, that uptick of racism in Tolkien internet spaces was already happening. So I very much appreciate you doing this project in that context and all that, but was, can you speak to anything more of like what you were mindful of as you were setting this up there? Yeah. So the timeline of this. So one thing I want to, I do want to point out is that similar to with Black Hermione.
Speaker: Black Hermione was a headcanon that many fans, a fanon, right? That many fans held way before the Cursed Child and the casting of the Black actress to portray Hermione, right? The whole, that whole thing happened. That fans came up with it first, right? And so, not that like, yeah, I don't know if we can say, you know, Peter Jackson did anything great for us there, but certainly fans had these headcanons or whatever of
Speaker: Varda or Fingon as Black earlier than Rings of Power was even like, they'd even started casting for that. And then we, we, we distributed the survey after Diesa and Arandir were cast.
Speaker: I mean, there was already backlash from that. And actually, I don't know if this is the place to talk about it, but we did ask what kind of pushback you got or negative, did you get, what kind of feedback did you get positive or negative? And like, there were only three people who felt comfortable enough to say that they had gotten harassment. One was on, and none of them were on their portrayal of Fingon.
Speaker: It was, one was a piece of art on, of Deesa. Another was, I think, Arethel Fingon's sister. And then I forget what the third one was. I can, I can look it up, but it was like very little. And I believe all of it was harassment that people on Tumblr reported getting on other platforms, not on Tumblr, weirdly.
Speaker: Not to say that there's not harassment on Tumblr. I'm glad to keep emphasizing that because, yeah. It's easy to think, like, and it's very tempting to say Tumblr in this utopics place. It's really, it's just smaller. Well, and also it's survey bias, like the people who are going to be taking this survey about Black Fingon, we assume that most of them have some kind of positive stakes in this particular portrayal. And so, of course, that's going to be the majority of the data that we collect. Yeah, right.
Speaker: I had an additional thought about this, and this might be going off on a bit of a tangent, but so stop me if it is. So I feel like, and maybe this is me being a longtime Tolkien fan, standing on my lawn, shaking my fist, old man yells at Cloudstyle. But I feel like a lot of these conversations regarding race in Tolkien fan works are echoing in interesting ways
Speaker: decades ago, conversations about queerness in Tolkien's fan works. Like right now we are at a stage where we can have like a fantastic podcast like this. And I hope, assume you guys aren't getting like a barrage of hate for it. And we did it first.
Speaker: I give up. It's just, it's much easier to talk about queer readings of Tolkien. I can find multiple homes for articles. Like I can publish in myth lore. I can work with Robin. I can, I can go to the journal of Tolkien research and to talk about queer head canons and queer readings in fan spaces like Humbler. That's just another day that ends in Y. Right. And for the most part, I'm not going to be getting harassment for
Speaker: meta I read or meta I reblog or meta I write regarding queerness.
Speaker: but that has not always been the case. And I'm thinking specifically of Tylos's work, like I'm actually blanking on the essay title, like what Tolkien officially said about elf sex from like 2001 from that era. Like that was a big deal that that got written. And that was a big deal that that was available. And that talked very publicly about something that a lot of Tolkien fans did not want to engage with. That conversation has moved on and now we do very regularly.
Speaker: So again, it's interesting to see the ways in which conversations about race are re -echoing a lot of that pattern. Oh, we can't talk about that. You can enjoy Tolkien and Tolkien fan works without bringing race into this, into our good white Tolkien instead of our good straight Tolkien. So I just, I feel like that's an interesting kind of observation to echo here about what I'm seeing with this, this like fandom wide conversation.
Speaker: That is really interesting and it's very indicative of like where American society is right now. It's, it's way more okay to be gay now than it was 20 years ago. It's not okay to be trans in general American society. So you get a lot of pushback about trans readings still. Oh yeah. And it is more socially acceptable to be queer.
Speaker: than to be black in America right now. Cause I mean, queer people aren't getting gunned down in the streets, which is still somehow happening. They're getting gunned down in nightclubs, but. That's fair. That's fair. But it's like the sheer volume of it happening is so much less. And it shouldn't be happening at all. Yeah. And they also don't have the power of, you know, the state behind them.
Speaker: doing actually perpetuating those crimes. So that's one big difference is one of those things is being subsidized by our tax dollars and half of our city budgets and stuff is devoted to gutting down Black people in the streets, other than getting down queer people in the streets. The proportion of our municipal budgets that are going to anti -queer legislation is statistically smaller at this point, yes.
Speaker: But yeah, the kind of the ballooning conversation about being trans, I feel like if history is moving like in a spiral, you know, it's like repeating and echoing itself for sure. I do feel like, you know, this conversation about race and like how it's, you know, it's more okay to be queer, I mean, it's okay to be Black now. I feel like it's kind of dragging all of those things, you know, back into the light again where it's sort of like,
Speaker: Oh, it's really never, it's still not okay to be know all of these things as, you know, society sort of rubber banding between acceptance and persecution. You know, and I feel like to kind of jump into that one narrative that
Speaker: I know I've seen Megan can speak to this more, whether this came through in our data as well. But there's also this narrative of, well, I go to Tolkien, I go to fandom, I go to D &D to escape all that. There is this kind of valorization, lionization of escapism. And like, in one sense, two thumbs up. That's great. That's true. However, a couple of things, a couple of problems with that. The level of escapism that is available to a white man and make comfortable background
Speaker: who experiences violence and brutality, etc., through their newsfeed. That is very different from someone who is a fan of the same text and coming to that as a person of color, who has more lived experience, who may have experienced that themselves, or their community, their family,
Speaker: So again, what escapism looks like is different to different people. And I feel like that element of escapism doesn't get touched on by some of the people who want to hold up a little bit more escapism and Tolkien. The second part of this is that sometimes that response risks
Speaker: or intentionally slides into saying that, well, escapism is only available when it doesn't touch on race. So escapism is only possible when I don't have to grapple with the fact that elves can be black or indigenous. That is a dangerous slippery slope that you can find yourself falling down when being like, I don't want to talk about race in Tolkien because I go to Tolkien for escapism or any other type of
Speaker: fantasy. So again, I really love that we've kind of taken that tangent because I feel it's super relevant, both to our contemporary moment, and honestly also to the state of fandom. And a good, a good article to back that up is by Stitch for Teen Vogue, who actually gets to escape into fandom. That's a good one.
Speaker: just that that covers that further reading. Teen folk has just been killing it the past like five years. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Especially stage. I know exactly. Yes. Yeah. That's great. And one more thing I want to touch on before we move on with actually talking about Black Vangon, which is what we're supposed to be doing.
Speaker: I just want to bring up that my BIPOC queer friends have a theory that being queer is more okay than being black right now because there are white gay men. And when you think about the biggest kind of queer causes of the past few decades, it was gay marriage and gay marriage happened
Speaker: And now no one cares anymore. Like, is there a group of white gay men, and yeah, I'm going to come for white gay men, who don't give a shit about trans people or the other queer people in our community and are okay to, I don't know, play the turf game and let all this slide because they could marry their partner and they don't give a shit about other people's rights. And that is such a fundamentally white way of viewing the world. It's disgusting.
Speaker: For further reading on that, look up the term homo normativity, y 'all. So you're getting lots of homework throughout this podcast. Sorry, but there you go. This is what we do. We're going to have a robust show notes section, and I do like that. Please do. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker: So bringing it back around to Black Fingan, I know Leah had some questions about kind of like why Fingan? So coming back to things, can you guys go a little bit further into explaining why Fingan, why was he the place to focus on? We kind of touched on it a little bit more, but one of the characters that you guys encountered that kind of had a similar level of being portrayed specifically Black in the art or the costume.
Speaker: I think I want to say, first of all, there's like we've been saying, there's plenty of characters who have been portrayed as many non -white races or ethnicities by artists.
Speaker: The focus that we chose to do on Black Fingon is not to say that there's not art of Fingon as Asian or indigenous, nor that there aren't other characters like such as Barda, Luthien, Indus as Black. So you can't, it's really hard to answer that. Okay, I ultimately want to say that Fingon is the character with the most non -white representation and Black Fingon is the most of that.
Speaker: of any other character is probably what I would ultimately say. It's of course hard to quantify art that way. Varda may even have been the first so that that's why Thomas and Stornialo picked up on it and talk about it in their work on re -storying. But I think Fingon stuck around. And we'll get to this more later, but Fingon has a one textual visual description that fans latched on to.
Speaker: that is so that it's in the text. It's not merely a headcanon. Like you can say, oh, Varda as black, that would be really cool. She's the lady of stars. So like, I don't know, you can do something with like the night sky and stars standing out on her. Like that's a cool visual artistic representation that you can do with darker skin tone, right? But it's not in the text per se. Whereas the, Maria, do you want to read the Fingon line?
Speaker: I think you should do it because you're on a roll. So, Fingon, there's this description of him in the peoples of Middle -earth, so it's not even in the Silmarillion proper, that describes Fingon as wearing his long dark hair in great plates braided with gold. And if you try this, if you just Google that phrase, you get black hairstyles, right? You get locks, you get cornrows, you get
Speaker: you know, the braids with gold. So our theory is that fans picked up on that. As with Black Hermione in the description of her hair, fans picked up on that. And so that's what gave Fingon both the impetus for portraying him as Black and also sort of staying power. Because you get images of Black Fingon with that quote underneath it, because Tolkien fans love to cite their work, right? And so that gave it the staying power and
Speaker: Yeah, I think that's why Blackfangun, I think. Not to say there are others. And we also, especially for this article, have not a lot of word space. So we had to pick one. Sure.
Speaker: I agree with all of that. And again, I really am happy that Megan got to read you that quote because yeah, that is the textual basis that we're seeing. And yeah, we have like 5 ,000 words. That's not a lot. That's not a lot.
Speaker: especially for a topic of this caliber, but that was one reason we settled on Fingon is because we saw that difference between representation of racial identity based on a textual detail as opposed to a desire for textual detail and textual representation, which is maybe what we see with Varda, with Indus, the Vanyar, with whoever else. Another thing though, and this almost speaks to a
Speaker: It's both a strength and a limitation of fan studies, which is that if you don't have someone who knows the stuff, how are you going to study the stuff? So I will not speak for Megan, but I'll tell you for myself, I've been on Tumblr for a long time. I remember in 2013 and 2014 seeing the first edits and seeing the first fan art 10 years ago, right?
Speaker: It's just I happened to be in the place at the time, seeing the thing happen. And so I can say anecdotally from my own memory, I remember seeing this a long time ago before I started seeing, like, Ikelian and Ahemfu beyond seeing the
Speaker: various Lords of the Houses of Gondolin in certain ways, before seeing Arath -El, even before seeing Varda. But that's just my memory. So we were at one point like combing through our Tumblr blog, archives going, where was that first one? Gosh darn it. You know, the one of Sykeem White, or the thinking of these specific edits from 10 years ago. But again, that is both a strength and a limitation of fan studies as an area, because
Speaker: happened to be around, happened to know those were some of the earliest ones, happened to remember it and be able to build our own citations from our blog archives. But if we hadn't, this might be a very different article. Lots of reasons why Fingon, I guess, if you want to sound like lots of reasons.
Speaker: Can you also explain a little bit more why you looked at Tumblr in particular as the platform to both host the survey and also to examine within the scope of the survey?
Speaker: Yeah, Tumblr is the place where this was born, right? This, I mean, you, or, and where it got the most popular. In the PowerPoint that I presented at MythCon, there's some slides that people can go view. You know, again, that's the old version of the paper. So, you know, maybe take it with a grain of salt, but the, just a Google image search of the character Fingon versus a Tumblr image search of the character Fingon.
Speaker: just shows it's vastly different. A Google image search is all white to hang on. A tumblr image search is about half and half I'd say of clearly white and clearly non -white whether that is black or indigenous or other just you know more tan you know some of the art right you can't always tell what the artist is going for but
Speaker: It just is there, right? And so Tumblr is also, so I think some of it's branched out into Twitter because since the, since the porn ban on Tumblr. And now people are coming back to Tumblr because of Musk. Uh, so they're fleeing Twitter and they're coming back. And, uh, yeah, I think, I think Maria could maybe add a little bit more on the 2013 debut of Blackfang on, Sykem White, you mentioned him, but I think we might want to explain that a bit more.
Speaker: Yeah, so one other thing here is that to put more recommended reading on your plate, I also do a platform studies, which is the kind of approach that whatever platform a text is built on or created using or distributed on, that will impact the text itself because a platform has specific affordances.
Speaker: are like features. There are both technical affordances, which are like, this is what you can do because that's the way the platform was built. These are the buttons you have, these are the functionalities you have. And then you have social affordances, which are like, this is the community practice that has developed because this is the kind of site this is. So Tumblr is at this point primarily a fan site. It's primarily fan users.
Speaker: Other people may be there, but they are outnumbered by those of us who are there for our blurbos. So the social and technical affordances of Tumblr are particularly suited for certain kinds of fan art and fan communities in ways that Twitter and other social media sites at this point are just not there yet. There's more of a fan community there than there is on other social media sites.
Speaker: Yeah. So I think, I think that's, that's worth noting. I had something else to add and I have completely forgotten it because I got on my platforms. So Fox, so I'll come back to that when I remember what it is. And just like why, why it happened on tumblr. I was, I'm, I'm going to search back and try and find, cause I know we were claiming it happened around 2013, but like, I think there's even earlier stuff. I was going to try and find it, see if I can use her name, but.
Speaker: This is why I have a co -author, folks, that your co -author will help keep you on track and hopefully you can do the same for them. All right. Yes. So for anyone who's listening to this later and just, I'm going to briefly describe a type of band work that you see quite often on Tumblr and then try to connect this with an example that we saw with Black Bingo. So an edit used to be called a Manip or a Graphic.
Speaker: other terms for it is when fans will like take different aesthetic photos that they feel represents a character. These can be things that are you know not human, they're not facial or anything like a beautifully lit picture of like a vase or flowers or whatever and you usually will have these kind of in the same range of colors or the photos of these different things contrasting colors something to set up a kind of
Speaker: pleasing overall visual that somehow represents the character. Sometimes an edit will also include faces. If the character in question has been featured in a filmic adaptation, oftentimes those faces are going to be of the actor who was cast, or perhaps of a child actor who looks like them and that's like the younger version of the character, then you have the older version of the character
Speaker: whatever that might be. Edits get really interesting when you are trying to make an edit for a character who's never been adapted. So like Fingon.
Speaker: We're never gonna, I'm saying it right now, February, the year of our Lord 2023, we are never gonna get an adaptation in which we see Fingon. So any representation of Fingon is gonna have to be fan art of him, or it's gonna have to be the artist creating that is like, I think this person, this model, this actor, whoever, this looks like who I imagined Fingon to be. And so that's the person I'm going to include in my edit along with my carefully selected color complimentary
Speaker: stills, right? So one of the first people that I recollect seeing being passed by the fan as Pingon is a black American model named Sykem White, who is just gorgeous. And his face was being put into these edits alongside pictures of like snowy mountains, silver armor, blue and gold and all these colors that are associated with Pingon.
Speaker: And between that kind of association and the captions and descriptions that were being put at the bottom of that post, you were supposed to be able to read Saikim White as Bingon. And so again, those were some of the earliest pieces of fan works
Speaker: that I saw circulating that had black thing gone. As, as we mentioned earlier, Megan is searching because there might've been one or two before that. This is a different, it seems like a different model. I'm not positive, but I'm seeing the, the tumbler user Dwemer lakes. The first one I saw the first one that shows up at least on in my tumbler re blogs is 2014.
Speaker: I'll put it in the chat here. You guys can include it if you want. I will also say we have a Tumblr. It's a little bit more dormant now where we were kind of collecting these and we were going to include the link to this in our book chapter. Obviously you can't hyperlink it, but so people can see it and be like, okay, so these are all the visuals that couldn't fit in a McFarland book chapter of 5 ,000 words. So we're sitting around that. And no images. No color print. No nothing.
Speaker: But there's an example. Yeah. Yeah. And again, we want to just hammer home that Tumblr is not this amazing progressive place, right? Even though our respondents may have reported less harassment than they got on other platforms. Maria said this first. I'm just going to steal her words that Tumblr supports progressive culture, but it does not equate to a progressive culture. There's still harassment. It still comes down on by POC people.
Speaker: more often, right, all these things. And folks who are living in the intersectionality are characters representing those intersectionalities. Yes, absolutely, absolutely. And again, just it might be less visible to us when we were circulating the survey, circling back to again, we said we were white right up front. So people might not feel comfortable sharing certain aspects of their experience. Or alternatively, as Megan also said earlier,
Speaker: trying to put forward Tolkien fandom in the best light. Even though we said we're both Tolkien, I don't know how much more explicit we can be, but we've been here. We know this is not the whole picture. We are engaging in this in our academic personas, so we need you to tell us all this, but we've seen the truth. We know. We've seen all that going down on our fandom. Well, I kind of
Speaker: ask you, do you want to take the moment to wildly speculate about using the platform of Tumblr and its influence on what the fictions are made and what fans create? How do you guys feel about how token fans have moved over to Twitter or TikTok? And how might those platforms influence the fictions of Bingon or of other different fan characters or fan
Speaker: What kind of output do you think might emerge from those spaces? And what kind of fannins would potentially emerge from those sort of spaces? Well, with the caveat, this is going to be entirely speculative because I'm not on any of those platforms. I mean, I hope that it's something that spreads, right? That Blackfangon is not just limited to Tumblr.
Speaker: I hope that cosplayers pick up Fingon, right? I hope these things happen. I imagine that the overlap is mostly Tumblr, Twitter, Facebook. So I imagine Twitter and Facebook is where it's going to go next. Maybe Tumblr, TikTok. Yeah. I don't know. This is the way in which I am old. I don't know what the kids are doing these days.
Speaker: You guys are probably considered quote unquote old in Tumblr, right? And so I'm like, I'm, I am officially in that space as well. And I'm like, that makes me too old for TikTok. So I'm not going to do it. But I've been really thinking about how Twitter is put diplomatically involving and how it's changing.
Speaker: And I'm both really curious and a little bit worried about fans on that space. I'm worried about the kids, you know? I'm worried about all the gungans. I don't worry so much about them on Tumblr, which might be a mistake, but yeah.
Speaker: but I do worry more about them on Twitter. And I'm like, hey, I want you guys to make good art and make art that talks back to Tolkien. So I guess I've just been thinking a lot about how our platforms for output and for sharing influence are what we create and the audience that we have.
Speaker: 100 % and I'm really excited to hear you put forward that last point because that's absolutely where I would have gone in this wild speculation, which is to disclaimer, I am not on TikTok and I will not be on TikTok ever. However, another one of my co -authors, shout out to Effie Separatus, does work on Harry Potter fan works on TikTok and looking at
Speaker: what loosely quote -unquote fan fiction looks like in that space. When TikTok as a platform is supporting a very different kind of storytelling, it just becomes a different media, you are not
Speaker: sharing your work or the same kinds of work in the same way there as you would be in a space that supports images, that supports text, supports links in a different way. TikTok is about visualization of the self. And so what Effie was finding with a different fandom is like people would be visualizing themselves
Speaker: as whether OCs or Harry Potter canon characters or a mixture of both. But again, they themselves, their bodies, their visitors, they were the ones performing these characters and they could bring in props, they could bring in other people, they could bring in footage from the films, but those were secondary to the self.
Speaker: Now, again, wild speculation. So I feel like I can repeat that a million times. What comes to mind thinking about those affordances of TikTok, I'm like, wouldn't it be interesting to see a resurgence of the horse girl in Middle Earth or girl fill into Middle Earth? Because that is a sub -genre from early Tolkien fandom that focused on the self in ways that would be very interesting to see ported over to TikTok. That interests me. But again, wild speculation.
Speaker: Yeah. Well, that sounds really cool. What? I think it's also you had made the point that Fingan is a character that we are never going to see an adaptation, at least not not within our lifetimes. Pretty sure. And so thinking about the different platforms and how they either work with. This is such a shouty, heavy episode. She's got a lot to say. She's like, she facts that.
Speaker: That's the TikTok star. You have a TikTok already and you are not, we are not doing more of them. So thinking about the fact that Fingon isn't a character that we're likely to see in adaptation and how the different platforms
Speaker: kind of the character of the different platforms leans into either more creative works, manipulations of visual language and heuristics, or focus on the self and sort of real life footage and everything like that. I think it's really interesting to consider where we might see those depictions come in more
Speaker: like whether that will be that will become a norm in fan fiction or whether we're going to see someone start up a TikTok and you know do TikToks as Fingon or what have you. I should say that I can imagine that being quite the case but like if it were that would probably be the platform where it happened. Somebody proved me wrong. Could just put that out to our listeners here. Prove me wrong here.
Speaker: I have a question about the Rings of Power, which is probably going to be surprising to anyone who heard our Rings of Power episodes. Did you find that the casting and then the actual airing of Rings of Power has affected the depiction of Black Fingon or just other elves of color?
Speaker: Okay. I want to jump in on this one. Sorry, Megan. I have also been looking for a place to fit in this particular discussion point because I feel it's important. So in early drafts of this project, and perhaps we got to talk about whether this is going to stay, we are using the term race bending. Race bending is a bit of a fandom holdover.
Speaker: It's been around for a bit, you don't see it as much anymore, but it describes, and so it's drawing from the term gender bending, which is, all of this is playing on terminology from Avatar the Last Airbender, right? You can manipulate this particular element, except in these cases, you are manipulating the gender or the race
Speaker: of the character in question. And those two terms, gender bending and race bending, kind of originated to describe the phenomena of changing a character's race, sex, gender from a canon depiction to something that was not portrayed in canon. So that was more common when you had less representation of characters who were not cis, white, male, et cetera. The default is what we've been kind of calling it that still exists in much media.
Speaker: So they're older fandom terms. One issue with race bending in particular is that it still assumes whiteness is the default and that we are moving away from it, manipulating it, bending it in order to better serve our own interests and our own needs. The interest in the needs part, that's great. The default whiteness that still exists, not so great.
Speaker: So especially because there is no canon depiction of Fingon. So assuming that he's by default white is its own issue. Yeah. Yeah. So we're using the term race bending in this project because that is how fandom has used it. Right. Describing the depiction of Fingon as black as race bending. However, again, it assumes that canon depicts in one way and we're changing that with rings of power.
Speaker: I'm not sure that what we're seeing there could be characterized in the same way as what we're doing with Black Bingo, because in that text, characters are, you know, Black, they are white, they already have in their pasting this diversity, so are we saying that Rings of Power is race -bending?
Speaker: Are we saying that fan art is not race bending by depicting Arandir or Disa? And I don't really have a perfect answer for that, but I just want to point out that that's a major difference between what they have done with Rings of Power in their casting and then what we're doing looking at fan works, specifically the ones that focus on or depict Blackfang on. So just wanted to point that out.
Speaker: I don't know if that's a satisfying answer on Rings of Power, but I'm, I'm about Rings of Power for other reasons. Yeah. I mean, I don't know that we saw necessarily much change in Vingon just cause this happened so much earlier. It was sort of as entrenched as it's going to get, you know, which is just like the fans artists who have, except so right. There was, there was sort of more of an influx to Tumblr after 2014. Right. And so a lot of our survey respondents.
Speaker: who drew Blackfengan or non -whitefengan, right, said that they specifically saw other versions of him as Black first. And that's what inspired them, right? I also think that, and again, for anyone who's coming to this and may not have been as steeped in Tumblr fandom, in Tumblr Tolkien fandom as some of us here, I'm raising my hand, that's me. I think it's hard to
Speaker: You can't overestimate how attached even those of us who are doing queer readings, readings that reimagine racial identity, whatever, we're still very attached to this text. Rings of Power is a separate text from the Silmarillion in terms of chronology, in terms of characters, in terms of everything.
Speaker: what you see with Arandir is a different kind of elf from a different age than Fingon, so I think most Tolkien fans are highly aware of that and whatever trends you may see ticking up or changing because of Arandir or because of any other character from Rings of Power are not necessarily going
Speaker: to translate or correlate to Black Fingon. Fans are very aware of the differences between those two texts and those characters. So the trends for one are gonna mostly, I imagine, stay with the one with Brings of Power rather than jump over to Silmarillion, which is a different beast.
Speaker: That is a really good point and something we've touched on before that Tolkien fans that participate in making fan works are some of the most knowledgeable people specifically about the Silmarillion and the history of Middle Earth that I've ever come across given that I run in scholarly circles. Like there are fans who know just as much if not more than people who actively study Tolkien because they will hunt down in the middle of the
Speaker: 3000 pages of the history of Middle Earth for like one sentence they know is there to back up an entire fan and that they have. I guess what I am more
Speaker: interested in here is that seeing a major depiction in media of elves being black will pull in new fans who will then start engaging in some of this earlier work. And I mean, at this point, it's probably not been enough time to see like an influx of people being like, yeah, Arandir, he's a black elf.
Speaker: I'm Black. I'm an artist. Let me start pumping out Black Elf art because, you know, art takes time. Yeah. Well, but I'm excited that you said that for a couple of reasons. One, I agree with you. That's kind of gateway into other areas of Tolkien's legendarium.
Speaker: That's more the effect that I would speculate rings of power is going to have rather than a direct impact specifically on black people just because of that awareness of different texts, etc. Another thing is, though, it's really interesting that you say that about how seeing a particular depiction right of
Speaker: Blackness and Middle Earth of a Black Elf will make creators feel more welcome to add to that, the dialogue with that, because that is actually a complication raised by one of our sources. And this was by diverse Tolkien who writes a blog, did a podcast for a bit. I'm not sure either are still super active. You reached out to them, didn't hear, didn't hear back.
Speaker: But they make the case that Black Fingon is actually that entry point in a certain way, right? But also that there are issues with this. One is the potential complication that, say, artists who are not Black coming to depict this character will do so in a way that could slide closer to tokenism. And thus, fans may be like, oh, amazing, a Black Elf. I'm going to go and engage with the rest of this material. Oh, my God, wait, what?
Speaker: and kind of, you know, be disappointed by reductive stereotyping by the fact that this is only, you know, fan depictions by all these other issues.
Speaker: This is not to say Megan or I have a perfect answer to this, but more to say that's an additional complication. And reiterating again, our kind of overarching point here, which is that just because there are strides that we see as positive and progressive, that doesn't change decades of issues, issues in the text and so on.
Speaker: Yeah, we of course hope that it inspires further art, further cosplays, further conversation. Further conversation, yes, right? And that it doesn't stop with, hey, we've got our Black Elf in our, you know,
Speaker: CW diverse team here, right? We've got our, we've got our attractive black elf box check. We're done now. We've, we're diverse. We don't want that either. One of the things that I do think is interesting though, is that as time goes on, and this is moving very slowly, we're seeing depictions of characters within the legendarium as non -white.
Speaker: across ages of Middle Earth. And my hope is that someone who wants to dig into that will look back and say, oh, oh, here's other other support from my thoughts and theories, like my my affirmative theories on this. And because there's, you know, all these depictions of Black Fingan and because there's a
Speaker: a character created for Rings of Power. And because of all this, like, oh, I can absolutely, you know, this character in the third age that I'm writing about, I could absolutely make this theory and advance this theory and feel like it is supported within the world as opposed to brand new.
Speaker: Yeah, so I completely agree with that. I'm really excited to hear you say that. And also what I'm hoping, fingers crossed because this is such a, feels like such a big ass sitting where I am today. I hope that we can also have the conversation at some point about how there doesn't need to be an absolute valorization of
Speaker: There are problems in our canon. If you're just gonna play in the canon, you're gonna replicate those problems to some extent, no matter how good your intentions are. And again, I'm coming at this from someone who is both a longtime Tolkien fan, been around seeing all that, and also someone who is writing about Dungeons and Dragons, where just recently there has been this tremendous push to be like, oh, past versions of the Drow are no longer canon. You don't have to do all this.
Speaker: Oh my God, but there are problems. There are tremendous problems in that back catalog and that canon. And if your approach is to be, we're just gonna wipe this light clean and start over, but your systems are built on everything else in that canon, you really are not addressing the problems in there. So to kind of reel this back away from my Dungeons and Dragons feel back to Tolkien, if we feel like we're constrained to acting within the canon,
Speaker: there are problems in the canon and you're going to be bound by those same limitations at some point. That's a really important point. Thank you so much for saying that. This kind of leads us into, I don't want to get back to you guys, your study. And what were some of the most interesting things that you found and that interested you the most? Yeah, I can certainly start with this. So the biggest question I think that we were trying to get at here
Speaker: was the why, right? Why people decided to do this. Cause, cause, uh, you know, the default is white and people could have stuck with that and they didn't in, in sort of a mass, mass way, like lots of people chose not to. So chose to ignore this quote unquote assumed default white version of this character. Right. And many people pushed back against that.
Speaker: So the reasons that we got, and I'll just sort of list them because I sort of sorted them into categories. And the, the reasons that we got was artists of color, specifically wanting to see themselves in the story, right? The sort of just, just wanting to see yourself represented. Right. And that was from, from artists of color. That was, I want to point out a minority of our respondents, most of our respondents who drew black thing on were themselves white. So it's very small minority.
Speaker: of them were artists of color. But those few did mention wanting to see themselves in the story. There were sort of aesthetic reasons, such as wanting to just visually diversify the large cast of characters, the joke being they are all white dudes with long dark hair, all of them tall, all of them attractive. All of their names that start with an F. All their names start with F. You put them in a row.
Speaker: oh you're like who's that they're holding a harp it could be magalor or it could be fingon i don't know you know and i just want to say like like yeah the way Tolkien fandom is right people freaked out when they gave Tariel red hair because like oh my god that
Speaker: Because no, no, no, only my throws and Amorod and Amoras had red hair in all of - Oh, you're saying she's a Feanorian descendant? Right, yeah, there was all that score. Anyway, that's a total side note. I apologize. That just struck - it kicked me in the face with the memory. Love it. But people freaked out even about that, so - I mean, people are still freaking out about Legolas being blonde in the movies, so, you know. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. It's been decades, y 'all.
Speaker: Okay, so wanting to diversify this large cast of characters, various interactions with canon, so like the description of Fingon's hair that we talked about, also other descriptions of the Vanyar, which are really cool that I can get into, and other sort of arguing that greater diversity suits Tolkien's mythology better.
Speaker: right? And sort of the messages that he does explicitly say but doesn't implicitly follow up on, right? That these messages of different people need to work together, that sort of message. And then also, I really liked this one that just simply wanting to see heroic blackness in a canon that so often aligns black with evil, right? We get, you know, the descriptions of all the bad guys in Lord of the Rings are black, right? That so
Speaker: wanting to see a this really heroic obviously still flawed right everyone in the summer lane is flawed, including Galadriel Alicia. Right, but like that so so wanting to see heroism in a black character in a Tolkien property is like a huge one as well. I can quote one survey respondent here.
Speaker: Should I do that? Do you want the quote? Okay. All right. All right. So, so this is a survey respondent here. Quote, because diversity. So this is when we asked why because diversity in my creative endeavors is important to me because black people matter and deserve to see themselves in their favorite characters, the way I as a white person can. Because Fingan is one of my favorite characters. And I put a lot of care into how I depict him as a noble and good yet flawed and imperfect person. And black people can be all of those things.
Speaker: Because trying to figure out which elf dude with long dark hair and pale skin is which gets tiring. Because aside from the politics of diversity, visual diversity in my creations is aesthetically pleasing. Because there are a lot of very handsome black models out there that I can find pictures of and use in making my graphics. And then another person when we asked why simply said why not and I like that answer too.
Speaker: One thing I will say here is because I do I do love that quote and I do think that it does a fantastic job of encapsulating a lot of the reasons that Megan has already outlined that we've seen people provide, however, I just want to add like a kind of a.
Speaker: disclaimer here that it I feel like that one also exemplifies some of the potential shortcomings that we see because for this person alongside we have diversity as aesthetic right so identity as aesthetic and this person is admitting you know to and there is some literature on this which is the idea of identity tourism like I want to see what it would be like to be a race other than
Speaker: white. And you see this a lot. I think the literature usually talks about cruises or video game avatars, right? But basically, there is the potential shortcoming that whatever aggressive, positive reasons we might have for greater visual representation of diverse identities, the potential shortcoming is that those are the reasons. There's always that it's aesthetic. That's not that's not it. So just wanted to add that kind of cautionary notes to the
Speaker: I could maybe jump on the one bit about the descriptions of the Vanyar, if there's a good time for that, right? And Maria jump in, whatever. But so Fingon is...
Speaker: he's of the Noldor that come over to Middle -earth. There's also another group of elves called the Vanyar who are who love the Valar more and they live closer to the light of the trees and they're good -er -ist and they don't leave like those nasty Noldor, right? They don't leave Eden or Valinor or whatever you want to call it.
Speaker: like those nasty, rebellious Noldor. So Fingon is related to them. His grandmother, Indus, right? Yes. So Fenway's second wife is a Vanyar, right? So his grandmother is Vanyar. And so I think it went in this direction that Black Fingon came first and then people were like, well, he's related to a lot of people in the Silmarillion. They need to be Black too.
Speaker: Right. So I think black thing gone came first. And then we're like, ah, his sister, Aretha, who is literally described as white with white hands. Like they literally, you know, white skin, right? Absolutely. This is definitely textual that the fandom is just like, nah, she's, she's black. She still wears white for the aesthetic, but she's black. Right. And then his, his grandmother specifically, and I really liked that again, fandom.
Speaker: You know, because, okay, Fingon's black, so we have to make the Vanyar black, but then they found textual reasons to do that. They said, hey, because this group of elves lives closer to the light of the trees, which is effectively the sun, there's gonna be more melanin in their skin, and therefore they're going to be darker.
Speaker: And then that comes through and then you, you know, you get black Galadriel as a result, like you can, you know, it can, it can trickle down the whole way. And, you know, as other people mentioned, like, okay, their height, maybe have some having something to do with that. And that's why the, the head cannon. So yeah, so people did some, some interesting things there. I don't know if Maria can add any more to that.
Speaker: Nah, I like that. I'd be able to say it's one of my favorite headcanons. Yeah, yeah. So I think that's cool. So then you get this whole branch of all the main characters in the Silmarillion who are now Black because of Black Vangon. I love how when people don't marry themselves to their assumptions of canon, there are a lot of different lenses through which to interpret the canonical lines that
Speaker: make some of the different readings make a lot of sense. And holding space for those is, I think, really, really important. Yeah. And yeah, and just like flat out ignoring, yes, Arethel is late, the White Lady of the Noldor, just flat out ignoring that, flat out ignoring the index where Tolkien says
Speaker: Vanyar are fair and no fair does not mean beautiful here, fair means white here. Like that's an actual note. And just ignoring that one but saying nah they live close to the trees, sorry Tolkien you're wrong. I enjoy the the simultaneous energy of I have cited every single possible potential quote in my work cited page of this particular fan work and also
Speaker: the council has made a stupid decision and so I've elected to ignore it. Right, right. You have to have that background information to be able to ignore it though. You have to have that information. You have to know it. That is the most Tolkien fan of energy right there. It is. Also we've talked previously about Tolkien and how like he doesn't actually describe
Speaker: Skin color very frequently he does it in a few places Specifically around hobbits and around different groups of men, but he always almost describes how fair and like
Speaker: elf maiden hands are. I am positive he has some weird hand fetish. Well, it's a medieval romance thing. It's a medieval romance function. It's Tristan and his soul, you know, of the white hands and all this. It's very much that's where he's getting it from.
Speaker: Right. I think also, though, and this and I am definitely thinking of the Bay Lake Turin paper, which is looking at queer readings of medieval sources and how that's complicated from what we how we can do queries and contemporary works. The thing is, and this is not to discredit Megan's point at all, this is simply to add a further complication as someone who
Speaker: began in medieval work and went to 18th century studies and now is doing work, which is that the nuances of those traditions get lost to people who have not done extensive study of medieval literature, the lays, the courtly, the romances, you know, the courtly traditions, what those were intended to do gets lost. And we just are left with the signifier of white hands. And so what do we latch on to?
Speaker: the whiteness, right? And so then that gets perpetuated and that gets picked up by cultural artifacts, products, and traditions that are just like, I want to draw in the people who like Tolkien. What do I take from Tolkien to, you know, make the thing to make me money? So I'm being a little pessimistic here, but all this to say that the richness of those traditions can be diluted or lost when you don't have like the background for them.
Speaker: And unfortunately, what that gets diluted down to would be like that, that signifier of whiteness.
Speaker: You've actually hit on an entire other podcast episode that I want to do. So check your inboxes for invitations if you want to talk about that. Come back. I find people who visually depict Tolkien's characters to be pretty brave. Like I'm speaking as a cosplayer. I'm currently working on an Ecthelion cosplay. And how many lines of depiction does Tolkien give Ecthelion? Three. Three.
Speaker: In the entire legendarium, yeah, to build a visual representation based on such few words is incredible to me. And it's, there is so much room to go in and play in a lot of cases. I don't even remember who Achillean is. There's a fountain involved. He killed the fucking Balrog, my dude, and died in the... I thought there was Glorfindel. ...witch Balrog. Yeah, that's true. He died in the fountain in Gondola. Yeah, I know. Yeah, there's a fountain.
Speaker: Exelion is my favorite elf. My own pro Noldor. I mean, they're all murderers. All colonizers and murderers. I mean, we all have problematic faves. Thank you for using that term and saving me from doing it. I appreciate it.
Speaker: I mean, what other points do we want to make? Um, I feel like we got to do more of our points here than in our 5 ,000 words. And I'm so grateful for that. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, if you just want to link to this podcast at the end of your paper, it's supplemental. Yeah. Eventually I'll have a transcript of it together for you all too, but that won't be for a little while, but when you can get your words back.
Speaker: There you go. I love that. I love that. What are the takeaways from this research that you as researchers think that we should be aware of as Tolkien fans and scholars and creative minds in our own right? So we need to crunch our data some more, massage it a little bit more, perhaps expand our scope. But our preliminary findings suggest that, again, the bulk of artists producing these visual representations of Bingan as black
Speaker: are themselves white artists. So not people of color wanting to see themselves in Middle Earth. We have a few of those, but the bulk of it is white artists. Just out of curiosity, have you found that percentage breakdown to be disproportionate to the racial demographic population of, say, the United States or fairly well in keeping with that?
Speaker: I almost don't want to say anything yet till I do better numbers. Fair. So I think fantasy, fandom, fantasy scholarship is going to be more white than America is. And I would say it's probably more in keeping with those numbers.
Speaker: what we're seeing. Right, just because I mean, as welcoming as fandom can be, like this is also still a leisure activity more accessible to people who have more disposable income, more time, more energy than others. And unfortunately, we know how that disparity often plays out among the minds of different identities. So
Speaker: I like to think that it's white people interested in diversifying Tolkien's canon to make it safe for non -white people to seat themselves in the stories, but it comes with many, many problems that we've, from tokenism to simply luring people in and then those people discovering, actually, this isn't really a safe fandom for me or people who look like me. So there's, there's still problems there, but it's going against the grain.
Speaker: And that's worth talking about and highlighting. And it's going against the grain and it's talking back to Tolkien and it's sort of an example of that. But whether it actually has any actual concrete ramifications still remains to be seen.
Speaker: two things I would add here, and they're kind of just restating Megan's point. So apologies for the plagiarism. One is that there are no easy answers, basically. If you're coming to depictions of Black Fingon in Tolkien fan art and being like, oh, if I can see these, that's going to mean everything's A -OK with Tolkien's text or Tolkien fandom. That's just not true. That's just not true. So there are no easy answers. And also, again, to kind of reiterate something, Megan started pointing out
Speaker: Having the space and doing these kinds of things in fandom is not a panacea for real world issues. It's not necessarily even addressing real world issues. Even something as simple as, is fantasy fandom, is Tolkien fandom a safe and welcoming place for fans of color? So not valorizing fan art to the extent of saying, this means it's safe, fun, and a wonderful place for everyone.
Speaker: They can't, it can be that way. It doesn't necessarily mean it inherently is. On the other hand, it's a step up from
Speaker: Well, the only black people in Tolkien are evil. A hundred percent, a hundred percent. It's a, it's a yes and situation. Yeah. It's not an either or. Yeah. Right. You know, cause you get plenty of one fan, one of our survey respondents. I do want to highlight here again, a quote. Uh, Fingon is, although having taken a few morally complicated actions in his life, considered incredibly heroic and a positive fan favorite figure.
Speaker: Unlike characters like Aeol or the Haradrim, villains who have been depicted and coded as diverse, that's in the text, Fingon very much falls into Tolkien's mold of a good guy, someone with a pure heart and a bright sword who takes the fight to the forces of darkness. Such characters, both in Tolkien's works and many others, are often depicted as white, giving rise to the idea that white people are heroes and that people of color are villains. This is a way to rebel and turn that stereotype on its head. So it is
Speaker: you know, with all the problems of, yeah, with all the problems, with all the butts, it is an attempt to change or talk back to what we see depicted in Tolkien and Tolkien fandom and Tolkien scholarship and give an opportunity to see it a different way, right? A specific talking back to and ignoring the parts of canon that are bad that we don't, you know,
Speaker: Well, and not just that, I think. And not ignoring, right? But it's changing. It's changing. Yeah. Well, I think it's also really key for all of us within this fandom to acknowledge that fandom isn't static. It's not a, you know, take it as it comes sort of thing. As much as there are people who are looking to diversify understandings of the canon, there are also people who are looking to purify understandings. Yes. Of the canon.
Speaker: And to take it back for like white supremacy and to impose that lens and make that lens the dominant lens. And so work like this, I think is really important in sort of holding the line and making sure that there is space. Yeah, I would love for.
Speaker: the future of fan art to be such that a white supremacist looking for a picture of Fingan has to go back to before 2000 to find Ario 2010 to even find art where Fingan is white like he's quote unquote supposed to be because just like the head hand is taken over. I blood for that. And also, even in the fan art that is, there is an explicit line that this fan art is not meant to be used that way. Right?
Speaker: Yeah, one thing we haven't really touched on is how fans have cast a morally complicated character as Black. And I think that's very important. He is a heroic character, but he's a complicated character. And so often when you get racial tokenism, it is an unambiguously good character who's never done anything bad. And that's one of the pushbacks you get about diverse casting in popular media. And I like that
Speaker: we have a heroic character that is complicated and he's actually given the full character treatment and not just, oh, well, here's this unambiguously good guy. It would be like, I don't know, casting Keleborn as Black. Or, I mean, I think Varda as Black is kind of that, right? She's sort of a non - I mean, she's a non -entity, she's over -powerful, but doesn't have a personality. I don't know.
Speaker: I don't like any of the Valor. She's the Virgin Mary, right? Which she can do no wrong for sure, right? So Tolkien would not say that Barda is complicated. I would, but Tolkien didn't write her that way. So yeah, so I think that that's a difference, right? Is that yeah, that so the Black Barda is this unambiguously good character and Fingon is like, ah, he's a little messy.
Speaker: you just let your Feianorian apologetics shine through just a little bit. Just a little bit. They did not do good things, but they had some good reasons. We'll get you back on and actually fully discuss that. Yeah, I'm sure you're going to be back on for our
Speaker: I will briefly say this because it has to be said, the Russian gunship absolutely complicates portrayals. This is absolutely stuff we can't get into. We do not have time to get into this in the paper.
Speaker: That is one character. Bingon alongside Maethros, who tends to be the fan favorite of the two of them. That's a whole different story. So, again, we do not have time. And this is still usually depicted as white, though sometimes many people have played with making Maethros black as well, or, you know, non -white. Yeah, far less common, but yeah. But anyway, that is just a whole other story and that absolutely changes how Bingon is portrayed. So just had to throw that out there.
Speaker: So when we do an episode of that ship, of that ferrying, we're either going to need you back on or we're going to need you to like give us some quotes. We're here for you. I will send you a list of thick. I'll do you one better.
Speaker: Yeah, please actually just send me a reading list. Like that's not for the podcast, just send me a reading list. Just send me a reading list. I would, the homework for everybody else, I would also like the, what's like the individual study word thing, the independent study course list. Independent study course, yeah, yeah.
Speaker: We covered a pretty wide range of your study and kind of where you're going and what you're going to keep doing. But were there any sort of last things that you guys wanted to talk about?
Speaker: not related to Thingon, but if you have an episode on queer coding, it's so much to say about Myron, so call me up. I don't think we can fit it in a single episode. I think we're going to leave. That is absolutely true. It's an ongoing theme of this podcast, and I'm sure it's going to come, as I say, it's going to come many, many times. Okay.
Speaker: We might just need like a panel discussion or something. I was thinking I would love to get Taylor and Maria having a conversation. I think I know of Taylor. I've never met in person. And I know that there are some people who are all doing very interesting scholarship on Sauron right now and I would love to just
Speaker: I'd love to just have them sit down on a Zencaster call here and I sip my tea and listen to them. That would be an interesting call. As I say, the Sauron panel is the one where all three of us hosts will just be sitting here and be like, how about it, you guys? Take it away. Oh, God.
Speaker: I think I, I do want to say, I think one thing we can all be aware of as consumers of Tolkien media is to give more of a platform to these depictions. I think that, you know, whether it's reposting, retweeting, reblogging, liking, sharing art that, you know, supporting all these artists in, in the way of just giving them more platform, giving them more exposure. And I think, I think because the more.
Speaker: we show people who disagree with this, the more that it can't be a bad thing to sort of desensitize certain people to, well, it's okay if Tolkien characters have dark skin. That seems that's such a baseline thing and it has its own problems, but many people in Tolkien fandom scholarship still need that message, just still simply need to see these characters.
Speaker: seeing noble heroic characters as non -white. And I think that just that one step is an important one to making Tolkien scholarship, Tolkien fandom fantasy less white and more safe for non -white people. Likewise, for people who are doing scholarship on these topics, as Megan and I have both emphasized multiple times, we are ourselves white and our experiences, et cetera.
Speaker: our limitations on what we could do with this. But I know that a lot of folks who are doing really good work on this are either doing self -publish or trade publishing. I'm thinking immediately of Stitch. I'm thinking of Diverse Tolkien. There are people who are also writing on this in different ways, different venues, supporting those folks as well, because like our work is a minor step. It's not the only one. And I hope that doesn't remain the only one. Absolutely.
Speaker: All right, Megan, Maria, are there any upcoming projects that you'd like our listeners to be aware of or websites or social media where they can glimpse a little bit more of your work? I have a Twitter, but I'm mostly just there to like our flag means death actor tweets. Uh, so I am, I am on Twitter. Megal in the bold spelled M a Y G L E N double.
Speaker: old D &D characters will say, based on the character, Myglen. Anyway, it's like Megan, whatever. Anyway, uh, mostly what I want to do though is plug Mythprint again. I am genuinely interested in getting more reviews of fantasy works, mythopoeic works,
Speaker: that are by artists, authors of color. So if you read one of those, liked it, write me a review anytime, like certified, I have rolling deadlines. So I'm trying to get in my very small platform, trying to get make fantasy less white, right? So I want to plug and promote books and media by creators of color, articles written by
Speaker: people of color as well. By all means, send them to me. It's Mythprint, M -Y -T -H -P -R -I -N -T, at mythsoft .org. That's the best way to get hold of me.
Speaker: All right. And for me, I am also on the sinking ship that is Twitter. I'm there at Maria K. Alberto. It's a lot of like retweeting scholarly stuff. If you're interested in Tolkien scholarship though, and looking for a wider, more inclusive kind of look at that Robin Reed, who's also publishing the book where we're going to write this chapter. She runs a wonderful, welcoming fan studies, Tolkien studies group. And I think you can reach her at writing from Ithilien on Substack and she's wonderful.
Speaker: If you're interested in learning more about fan studies as a discipline or an area, I'm also an organizing member of the Fan Studies Network North America, and I always have to give them a shout out for the awesome, welcoming work they do. And you can find us just by googling that. And if you email us, you'll probably reach me, honestly. I manage our inbox. Yeah. And then also when the book that Robin is putting together, that the chapter that you're writing comes out, we will
Speaker: of course, add it belatedly to the show notes, but we won't have that yet. You know, the academic publishing cycle, like two years. So, you know, if you're listening to this five years from 2023, I hope that we're all doing okay, and that the link is there.
Speaker: In the meantime, Alicia, would you let the folks know where they can find us? Sure. You can find us on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, or you can stream our episodes directly on Zencaster, that's zencaster .com slash queer lodgings, the Tolkien podcast with hyphens in between all of those words. Please leave us a rating and like, share, and subscribe. You can also find us on Facebook at queer lodgings.
Speaker: at Twitter for right now at queer underscore lodgings. And if you have any feedback or episode ideas, please give us an email at queer lodgings podcast at gmail .com. Thank you so much, Megan and Maria. This was an awesome conversation. Thank you so much for having us. Thanks for having us. This is this is wonderful.
Speaker: I swear we usually don't have this many technical issues. It's a special day. It's okay, it gave me time to hide the myth print, like the paper that I used to print myth print from Shouty because she had decided that that was her best possible bed and she would like to crinkle it all the time.
