You can’t build a big, fancy fantasy castle out of only cornerstones. Well, maybe you can... seeing as how this is a “fantasy” we’re talking about here, which implies you can make whatever rules you want. But it wouldn’t be a very interesting fancy castle, now would it?
Okay, look—we’re a pop culture news site, not purveyors of fantastical allegory. What we’re trying to say with this ham-fisted metaphor is that foundational texts are great and all, but it’s important to contextualize them as a means to often support larger, more complex and diverse stories. Case in point: Both J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings trilogy and Peter Jackson’s pretty damn faithful adaptations. Sure, they remain compelling, grand narratives of classic Good versus Evil, but in a modern cultural landscape they remain a just a tad heavy on the testosterone...
Which is to say, all the male characters get big, beefy-boy roles while the women are largely relegated to the sidelines apart from a smattering of scenes. When women are in a scene, it’s usually only in relation to the male humans, dwarves, elves, and hobbits around them. Here, check out this handy “supercut” from Jackson’s film trilogy featuring only scenes in which two women speak to each other about something unrelated to men, aka the Bechdel Test.
“Where’s mama?”
One line of dialogue. One. Technically two if you count Eowyn’s “Shhh” that follows. That’s pretty damn sparse, even taking Tolkien’s patriarchal fantasy setting constructed during the early 20th century into consideration. And before our comments section is flooded by angry Tolkienists hellbent on dropping contrarian extended lore evidence of Middle Earth being a wondrous place of egalitarianism and universal suffrage, let us just offer a resounding, “You are still completely wrong” as a retort.
Anyway, as we said earlier, it’s all about cornerstones. LOTR is great, but it can only truly be great if we’re allowed to critique it contextually and fairly. In any case, it already seems pretty certain that the upcoming Amazon Prime series, The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power, will update Middle Earth’s gender and racial dynamics at least just a smidge, so we’ll have plenty of women and minorities utter throwaway lines like “Where’s mama?” in just a few months’ time.
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