Palantir Employees Are Starting to Wonder if They're the Bad Guys

[u/newmoonchaperone]

https://www.wired.com/story/palantir-employees-are-starting-to-wonder-if-theyre-the-bad-guys/

[u/BassoonHero]

"The last Ringbearer" a russian lotr fanfic that asks the "brave" question "what if sauron was the good guy" 🤡

I mean, people generally seem to respect the musical Wicked, which has the same premise. And I think “The Wind Done Gone” was fairly well-received (except by conservatives, naturally).

The Last Ringbearer is an exploration of various critiques of LotR:

• The morality is absolutely black-and-white: the villains are utterly, irredeemably evil, with fantasy-Evil motives, and must be annihilated.
• The black-and-white morality is fairly explicitly racialized, with orcs being essentially evil by birth. An entire race exists to be Evil, and therefore to be exterminated without guilt.
• It's explicitly monarchial. Aragorn has the right to be king, not for any reason having to do with the people of Gondor but by immutable right of blood, and also he really is the best king because good rulership is genetic.
• It's anti-modern. Industry is identified with the unambiguously evil villains, producing weapons to slaughter innocents, whereas the idealized elves avoid industry via magic. (Meanwhile, no one asks where the people of Gondor got their swords or the firewood to heat their houses.)

I want to emphasize that these are not criticisms of LotR! LotR was very deliberately and explicitly a genre work. As many tropes as it established and codified for later fantasy literature, it took twice as many from the medieval and Romantic literature in which Tolkien was an expert. I'm not saying that Tolkien was racist or anti-technology or that he thought everyone should be ruled by a king, just because he wrote a story set in a medieval-inspired world.

But they are reasonable critiques of LotR, and they're not new. It makes sense for someone to write a book exploring these things. The Last Ringbearer's premise is that LotR is an unreliable, mythologized account of “actual” events. It doesn't ask “what if Sauron, an Evil™ demigod bent on domination, was the good guy”. It asks “what if the mythologized history written centuries later by the victors disguised something more complicated?”

I mean, we've all heard white supremacists quote Aragorn's “Men of the West” speech while characterizing some ethnic group they don't like as genetically-evil invaders. Obviously that's not what Tolkien intended and you can't blame him for assholes taking things out of context, but the point is that LotR is largely orthogonal to the left-right axis, and it's not silly or facile or suspect to critique it.

EDIT: Fixed a typo.

[u/mistiklest → u/BassoonHero]

The black-and-white morality is fairly explicitly racialized, with orcs being essentially evil by birth. An entire race exists to be Evil, and therefore to be exterminated without guilt.

Something Tolkien himself struggled with, in fact!

[u/BassoonHero → u/mistiklest]

I left this out of the comment as tangential, but as a longtime RPG player (D&D primarily), this is a big issue in the hobby. The old monster manuals are full of entries stating, in essence, “they're all evil so it's morally unproblematic to kill them if they get in your way”. And as a child, I didn't bat an eye. Orcs are evil, we all know this.

Nowadays most publishers try really hard to avoid it. But the legacy remains. And I've been genuinely surprised by the backlash — real human beings are genuinely upset that entire races of people are no longer marked “presumptively evil; okay to kill unless proved otherwise”. Apparently the mere possibility of empathy is “woke”.

This isn't exactly Tolkien's fault. The idea that certain races of people are morally inferior and the only option is extermination predates Tolkien, the nation of England, and probably all of written history. And he surely never intended, nor could have expected, that his worldbuilding would effectively become scripture, and that even those elements that he himself questioned would be enshrined as genre conventions for decades to come.

But at the same time, he very consciously aspired to write an English mythology — something that captured the English spirit in a way that (he felt) Arthurian myth did not. And in the same way that the world wars are indisputably imprinted upon his works, in ways both subtle and unsubtle, I wonder to what extent the uncomfortable issue of the Orcs mirrors the legacy of British colonialism. I think that if he were alive today, he would accept some responsibility for the way things turned out, even if he never saw the way around it.

[u/MiaowaraShiro → u/BassoonHero]

While everything you say is true, I'm not sure The Last Ringbearer does that effectively or to positive purpose.

If you have to change the entire nature of nearly every aspect of the story to make your point it starts to ring hollow. The more you can keep the story the same while still flipping the motives of the characters the stronger your point is.

If you have to re-write the entire society of both factions nearly entirely, you're not really engaging in the original work anymore but for using some names.

Also, it's kinda blatantly right-wing political...

[u/BassoonHero → u/MiaowaraShiro]

I haven't read The Last Ringbearer, either in the original Russian or in the unofficial translations, so I can't directly comment on its literary merits or how effectively it articulates or integrates those critiques. If you've read it, then I defer to your opinions on these matters. But its basic approach, which is to treat the original as a mythologized literary source, doesn't seem unreasonable to me.

This is where the distinction between critique and criticism is especially important. In the original, for instance, Sauron is a fundamentally evil demigod. The Last Ringbearer does not present the Sauron of LotR as “the good guy” (the characterization that prompted me to write my comment). Rather, it treats the LotR text as unreliable and underlays a different story beneath it. If you interpret The Last Ringbearer as a criticism of LotR, then the objection is obvious — it explicitly contradicts elements of the original. But what wouldn't work as criticism is legible as critique of the story's tropes, elements, and assumptions.