As I wrote recently, “fan-baiting” has become the go-to marketing tactic for the talentless dullards ruling the roost in modern Hollywood. Take a venerable, well-loved franchise, churn out a clumsy “reboot”, with race, gender and/or sexuality-swapped main characters.
Then, when fans are inevitably aghast at what’s been done to their beloved thing, shriek that they’re “racists” or “whatever-phobes”. Mainstream critics are either bought off altogether or bullied into going along with the lie that the race-baiting dreck is the pinnacle of cinematic art. If necessary, manufacture the “racism” yourself with a handful of sock-puppet social media accounts.
It’s foolproof.
As Amazon is proving, with The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power.
The “remake” of the classic is poorly written, poorly acted, and full of insults to the core fans. They have black elves and black hobbits, and the hero is now a strong, independent female who is as appealing as a rectal probe. Everything about the production is insulting and stupid.
As I wrote in my own review, it’s not even genuinely bad enough to be entertainingly bad. It’s like C. S. Lewis’ vision of evil in Perelandra: just petty and monotonous: “a black puerility” (in more ways than one).
Why would a presumably reasonably perspicacious corporate behemoth waste a whole billion dollars on this garbage? Fan-baiting only explains part of it.
More important is why the fans care so much in the first place. In J. R. R. Tolkien’s case especially, it’s because of his unassailable greatness.
And that, not imaginary “racism”, is what really gets up the noses of the woke. So they attack it, not because of its intrinsic “offensiveness” — because there is none. What really offends them is the nagging knowledge that they have not and cannot create anything anywhere near as great.
It’s cultural vandalism.
This is where non-Western people, who now control the centers of cultural production, have nothing to offer, so they set about vandalizing the culture they acquired. The people behind the reboot of the Lord of the Rings are engaged in cultural vandalism. The point of the effort was not to improve the original, but to deface it.
Where is the black Lord of the Rings? Chinese culture has its epics of the imagination, classics like Journey to the West — notably, the Chinese haven’t done a Lord of the Rings knock-off (rather, the wokesters have bowdlerised another great Chinese story, Mulan). India, with its own share of epic literature, doesn’t, either — it’s too busy making stunning Bollywood epics like Baahubali.
Asian culture has long paid the ultimate homage to the classic of the Western canon. While the wokesters infesting the once-great conservatoria of Europe make mockery by displacing Wagner and Mozart in favour of deservedly obscure “composers of color”, Chinese and Korean musicians lovingly keep Bach and Beethoven on the pedestal their astonishing creations deserve.
The statue-smashing, white-erasing vandals tear down Western culture precisely because of its greatness.
As Joe Sobran noted years ago, “Western man towers over the rest of the world in ways so large as to be almost inexpressible.” The creative energy behind something like the Tolkien books is beyond the imagination of our alien rulers. The result, as Sobran also noted, is envy.
Envy naturally leads to hostility. The point of the cultural vandalism is to express the frustration and anger that naturally wells up in these people when confronted by Western culture. They fling their poo at it because that is all they can do. Like the Taliban blowing up the Buddhas of Bamiyan or BLM tearing down white statues, the people defacing our culture are moved by resentment at their own inferiority.
By attacking the most beloved author of the English canon (Tolkien outsells everything but the Bible; his voluminous legacy of work was still being published up to half a century after his death), the cultural vandals have thrown one brick too many. It’s clear that Tolkien fans are not for turning. When the vandals scream “racism” at them, the fans simply mock them.
Maybe Western man is finally tiring of the ungrateful guests he generously invited into his lands.
Takimag