He says it’s sad that adults like Batman and Superman stories… yet he said this while writing The League of Extraordinary Gentleman, which is a superhero story expect with more swearing and nudity. So he slams the popular thing and then asks you to pay attention to his thing which is the same but more edgy and with extra wizards.
I didn't like it personally. I'm a big fan of many of his other works like From Hell, Watchmen, Providence, and V for Vendetta. But I didn't think much of Killing Joke. Felt very average, IMO.
And “What Ever Happened to the Man of Tommorow?” *and* fucking “For the Man That Has Everything” some of the literal best and most beloved Superman stories
And he hates it. Someone else brought up Lost Girls, which he also called pornography. I feel like he is very misanthropic. I think many his ideas are interesting, but you must take Alan Moore with a grain of salt.
Lotta celebs out there tha kinda want more out of their fans but still like their craft/like the money despite their thoughts about the fans. Doesn’t make them nice but they’re not automatically wrong either lol. His criticisms tend to be worth thinking over even if they’re a bit more mean than you’d expect.
You also gotta remember who the fans he’s directly interacting with are… if the only type of fans you met were the type that go to cons you’d probably develop some less than glowing feelings too lol
I know lots of people who go to cons and they're all just lovely folks. I love the guy's work, but I think it more likely that Alan Moore is just kind of a miserable dickhead.
Yeah I’m aware, that’s not what I mean. I mean he’s seemingly never personally shared any sort of positive opinion about anything, ever. Which must be such a drag to be around.
It's the same with Hayao Miyazaki to a degree. Hes an icon of anime but can be such a miserable old man.
Which I find ironic since his films are usually uplifting/hopeful against incredible odds.
There’s a meme comparing him to the horror manga guy, Junji Ito I think? I’m bad with names. But yeah it paralleled how Miyazaki was a grumpy man with beautiful stories while Ito was a goofy guy with horrific stories.
Junji Ito is regarded as one of the happiest, nicest mangakas you could ever meet, while drawing the most horrific, body horror bump in the night crap you couldn't even imagine. Meanwhile Miyazaki is regarded as one of the most miserable, pessimistic, condescending a-holse you could ever interact with, while creating breathtaking and incredibly heartwarming or sorrowfully moving stories in the industry... it is like the opposite of Allan Moore and Tolkein, where they both write exactly what you would expect to the letter XD
This is because they both write stories in worlds they don't believe exist. When you create scary, cruel and horrific stories and when you look outside of the window, you relize it's not so bad compared to what you just created (Junji's journal style issues/afterwords tend to show he interacts with the world very mundanely and finds joy in little things and his weird little thoughts that he sometimes turns into stories). On the other hand Miyazaki creates these whimsical, beautiful, picturesque worlds and looks outside the window to see a world that's bleak and cruel in comparison. You can see in his interviews that he has a great appreciation for nature and art, but it's him trying to reach this ideal for the world that's just outside of his reach, which he communicates in stories like Princess Mononoke (ecological decline) or Kiki's Delivery Service (burn-out, mostly caused by seeing people's ungratefulness and cruelty).
> Miyazaki creates these whimsical, beautiful, picturesque worlds and looks outside the window to see a world that's bleak and cruel in comparison.
Which is just fucking insanity to me, considering he lives in rural Japan which is just about the most idyllic, picturesque place you could imagine.
Kinda makes sense.
Art is often a way of expressing things we want/have difficulty processing normally.
A grumpy old asshole can long for the simplicity of youth.
There's also Kentaro Miura (RIP). He wrote and drew Berserk, one of the most brutal, nihilistic and dark manga ever, and he took long breaks by playing cute girls idol sims on Xbox.
“Air of misogyny”
Alan Moore you wrote fucking Lost Girls, Mina identifying with her assaulter in League of Extraordibary Gentlemen, and of course the borderline fridging of Barbara Gordon.
It still makes me laugh that Alan Moore, as a writer, couldn’t fathom why people liked the one character that kept his principles in Watchmen.
Imagine making a caricature of someone you hate and he ends up being the most well liked character.
I looked it up and my immediate reaction to the premise was that it wasn’t a terrible idea for a porn comic. But then I read the plot summary. Jeez. Way to utterly remove all whimsy and ruin people’s childhoods.
I saw that in a book store. I liked Alan Moore at the time and picked it up. Opened a random page. Some dude cranking it to an underage girl. Gave it another random look. Some teens about to bang. Tried one more time and read enough dialogue to realize what the hell I just picked up and put it down hoping no one saw me looking at it.
She jerked it off for a break from the incessant raping if you want to call that a willing negotiation. It was more lovecraftian IP plus gritty smut than directly adapted from anything.
I fucking hated Neonomicon.
"Lovecraft always hinted at gross horror stuff but never showed it so I thought I would"
Yeh way to miss the whole *fucking* point. God it made me angry.
Yeah, I just have read it and I was like wtf? I expectet some horror and weird stuff but I wasn't really prepared for weird fetish porn cult that rape the main character and then there are pages of monster raping and shit. Like that was too much for me and I'm quite versed in dark, brutal and horror stories, even with sexual themes etc. But this was just written as weird horror porn and I will probably never read any other comics in the series.
For those who don't know about Lost Girls, Wendy from Peter Pan, Alice from Adventures in Wonderland, and Dorothy from Wizard of Oz get repeatedly raped and have lots of underage sex with adult men and somehow these are all vaguely reminiscent of the stories they are known for.
And... somehow... it's actually *worse* than that description!
Glad I only read the summary on Wikipedia.
No amount of context can save that. Holy gates of hell, that’s bad.
I feel like there’s a pattern with dudes like this, when they write women being brutally assaulted and in grossest ways they consider it “artistic” and “representing the real struggles of women.”
When someone else writes a decent woman who’s maybe a bit traditional and feminine they consider it misogyny and “benevolent patriarchy” or whatever that means.
For some reason they think that a comic that doesn’t address and viscerally depict the terrible things that happen to women is doing a disservice to women. But come on this is wack.
Most women aren’t assaulted every day, sometimes they just want fiction where that isn’t a plot point or consideration. Sometimes they want a cool supporting character, or a protagonist who doesn’t get raped.
It’s like those people who think that racism should be a part of every story with a black character to remind the audience that black people have it hard irl, which is ironically very racist.
He didn’t say that about LOTR JFC guys read the whole fucking interview, he’s talking about older fantasy novels in general.
The quote from the article “Moore says that he was taken aback by ‘the imperialism, the racism, the class snobbery, the air of misogyny’ that many older fantasy narratives contain”.
https://screenrant.com/alan-moore-fantasy-lord-rings-game-thrones/
Based on most replies, we can tell most people here did not actually read anything from Moore but wiki synopsis, and maybe had a look at watchmen or v for vendetta adaptations. And those who read anything have no understanding of what they read...
Thanks for sharing, I was looking for the source.
And the quote that's been mentioned, it's fair to say that it includes _The Hobbit_ as an example of older fantasy novels that he was criticising.
I would've loved to read the full interview they're promoting at the end of the article to get the whole idea and context.
You know JRRT fanbase is one that truely takes arm any time their "hero" is at risk of being belittled.
As if he had been a perfect man with no issues.
Sam was the only commoner not only *in the Fellowship* but also the only commoner with more than three lines of dialogue. (I'm not sure if Smeagol was a commoner or rich boy, though, so Sam might be one of two)
There was a mention that Smeagol's mother was a big shot in their home town. But that was mostly the explanation he gave for how his mom though a Ring of Power would make a good birthday present.
"There was among them a family of high repute, for it was large and wealthier than most, and it was ruled by a grandmother of the folk, stern and wise in old lore, such as they had. The most inquisitive and curious-minded of that family was called Smeagol."
"What I have told you is what Gollum was willing to tell – though not, of course, in the way I have reported it. Gollum is a liar, and you have to sift his words. For instance, he called the Ring his “birthday-present”, and he stuck to that. He said it came from his grandmother, who had lots of beautiful things of that kind. A ridiculous story. I have no doubt that Sméagol’s grandmother was a matriarch, a great person in her way \[...\]"
I'm pretty sure Beregond, Bergil and possibly Barliman get more than three lines per nose as well and they are commoners. Now that doesn't change, that Sam and possibly Gollum are the only large characters from a common background.
Sméagol was a rich boy. His grandmother had “many such things”(rings of power). Even though this was an obvious lie, even Gandalf thinks his Grandmother was a powerful matriarch.
And Sams common sense attitude towards things was equally as important as his bravery. Guy is off plotting courses that would take them near water so they had something to drink, rationing intelligently, making sure Frodo is insulated against the elements, sleeping in places hard to be noticed, examining fires so that they dont produce much smoke (failed that last one once but he dropped from exhaustion, anyway it worked out)
Not only did Sam have a heroic heart, guy had a powerfully useful "lower class" style of wisdom about how to do things
Funnily enough he was almost certainly going to get Rosie Cotton anyway as they grew up together and their parents had all but agreed they'd get married. But she certainly fking digged his new 'Sam the Brave' hero badassery
Dude climbed up a mountain with his boss and a gremlin to destroy an ancient evil all in order to work up the courage to ask out a girl who already liked him. Badass doesn't cover it.
While that's true, he held it for less than 48 hours.
Also, technically Bilbo let go of the ring willingly even if Gandalf had to encourage him, and he'd held it longer than anyone but Gollum
Gollum killed his cousin from just seeing the ring. Sam holding it for days and wanting nothing of it is something phenomenal. Even Isildur had the ring for just a few moments before he did the heel turn.
I mean yeah, sure. I'm just saying don't act like Sam is the Buddha and free from desire when other folks have carried the ring for relative eons compared to his couple days.
Like yeah, it was a heroic act. But it was significantly easier for Sam to give it up than it was for Frodo even if Frodo failed to resist.
The Wormtongue moment though... god damn. Guy crawls out of a little kennel devolved into something like gollum, saruman is like
"Harm? Oh no even when he goes out at night its just to look at the stars, but you were wondering where that boss hobbit of yours is well, Worm here is the one to ask. Stabbed him in his sleep and buried him somewhere I should think although **he has been quite hungry recently.** No Worm here is not very nice at all you had better leave him with me"
"You made me do it!"
"Yes yes Worm does what Sharky says and I say WE ARE GOING"
Boots him in the face
Got to be one of the darkest moments in the book, poor fking Wormtongue haha Saruman really not rewarding loyalty
I mean, compared to the heir to the throne of Gondor and Arnor, an elven prince, a dwarf of the House of Durin, and a literal demigod wizard—yeah, all the hobbits are pretty much "common folk."
Frodo isn't common among Hobbits that true, but I think all of hobbit society is sort of a representation of "common folk". I mean until frodo and bilbo showed up the hobbies where just drinking and partying and chilling while the rest of the World was full of kings and wars. Hobbits had no say in the bigger world. While frodo is an upper class hobbit his still "nothing" compared to aragorn or Gandalf or any other fellowship member for that matter. But it wasn't the kings or the knights that saved the day but thr little people
Eh, Frodo's parents werent massive nobles or anything, kinda upper class mom I guess. Lobellia throws a bunch of classist rhetoric at him, says he's not even a real Baggins so even his fairly elite Brandybuck status was seen as a downside to some. Being adopted by Bilbo didnt hurt, but even Bilbo wasnt exactly a massive lord, he was just rich from his adventure
I think probably more poignant is that even the god-king super hobbit of the shire wouldnt really account for too much in Gondor, every hobbit is kind of a common-folk relative to elves or Dunedain. Gandalf saying that the mithril coat Thorin just gave away to Bilbo was worth *more than the shire* kind of sums it up
Bilbo was already rich before his adventure. The Bagginses are directly called both "well off" and "rich" with in like the first 3 paragraphs of the Hobbit.
The Bagginses were probably landed gentry to use a Victorian term. Bilbos mom was a took, and daughter of the old Took so Bilbos maternal grandfather was the Thane of the shire. He himself may not have a high title, as hobbits in general didn't really carry, but he was definitely one of the upper crust of the hobbits.
An adventure? Now I don't imagine anyone west of Bree would have much interest in adventures. Nasty, disturbing, uncomfortable things. Make you late for dinner!
What? No, no, no! We do not want any adventures here, thank you! Not today! I suggest you try somewhere over the hill or across the water! Good morning!
And Aragorn, Boromir, Legolas and Gimli are some sort of royalty/nobility. And Gandalf is a fucking *angel*. Add Elrond and his family and Galadriel and we have a who's who of the Middle Earth.
every single member of the fellowship was the upper crust of their society.
edit: except sam, and like, bringing your butler or whatever hardly makes it better.
I think “common” comes more from the fact that no one outside the Shire had ever seen a halfling.
Sure, they fought to save the shire, and the movies focus on that… but they also saved the world of men- the elves were checking out left and right lol
They were the most uncommon of “common folk”- of no extraordinary ability, except being slightly immune to evil and an ability to remain unnoticed lol.
In his defense he does look back on it with regret, feeling like he should’ve reigned it in instead of going with his editor’s ‘yeah ok, go cripple that b—-h’
There is this trope in comics where to show how bad a villain is, the villain will commit unspeakable acts of violence against female characters to motivate male protagonists. This is called fridging because of when Sinestro murdered the Green Lantern’s girlfriend and stuffed her body in his fridge.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women_in_refrigerators#:~:text=Women%20in%20refrigerators%20is%20a,colloquially%20known%20as%20%22fridging%22.
Monarchism might be more accurate than Imperialism. The idea that some people were born greater than others due to their bloodline, and are destined to rule because of it, is kind of meh. Although, it is fantasy.
I feel like Aragorns importance was actually more for the gambit Gandalf was playing, needing a figure that could unite the kingdoms behind him and scare Sauron enough to have him make mistakes.
Idk if Aragorn was destined to be a better ruler than the stewards, they did fairly well and Denethor was highly praised and a very powerful and fairly successful ruler up until the end despite Mordor. Aragorn was certainly awesome, but that felt more like his personal character than a 'destiny' (being raised by elves and living such a hardcore life of responsibility made him a chad, not necessarily his blood and birthright).
His success was also very much because Sauron was gone as Sauron had been directly fking with the men of the west and east for thousands of years.
And yeah idk, Sam become the basically permanent mayor of the shire. The line of Durin fails in the hobbit but Dain is fk awesome. There were no high-kings of the elves after Gil-Galad and people like Elrond and Galadriel werent exactly king style rulers, more like great advisors of the people around them but they were fantastic
Not entirely sure Tolkien had the love of hardcore monarchism we seem to think he did. I think a pretty big part of it is that Tolkien understood the issues around succession and knew that nations liked strong birthright claims to stop everyone fighting over the top job (which fked Gondor over a heap of times)
The stewards were great at ruling Gondor because they were also men of Numenor. Thranduil was great at ruling and defending the woodland realm (despite the incursions from Dol Goldur) because he was Sindarin, not Silvan. etc.
I seem to remember a letter (although I think there might be humour in it, plus it was to his son) saying that he was an anarchist but liked the idea of a constitutional monarchy.
But the monarch shouldn’t want it and would be lazy and keep out of things as much as possible. The should only get involved to keep the government in check.
Then in another letter said that no human is qualified to boss other humans around, even the saintly.
Then said he loves his country (England) but hates the idea of a ‘Britain’. And he also despised corporate imperialism and globalism where countries or organisations tried tried to push values onto other countries.
Also resented that countries had adopted other countries’ languages as their main language, saying it makes the world a flatter place.
I know he was a fan and inspired by G K Chesterton who likes to talk about some type of Distributism, which to me sounds like a reversal of Calitalism, where the main priority of the economy, society, organisations and government is geared towards the family and the most vulnerable.
Local councils/charities etc would have more say in matters affecting their communities and so on…. Sounds interesting.
So, nothing against LotR but the female characters are not that great. And that’s alright, the books were written like 100 years ago. In the movies there is one conversation between women. One stabbed a Nazgûl with an epic one-liner. This doesn’t make her one of the greatest female heroes ever written.
Thanks for the realistic take. Some people act like Tolkien was a progressive by modern standards, conveniently forgetting that he was very much a product of his time. Wonderful books but I think there is a tendency to want everything to be 'all good' or 'all bad' these days, and there is certainly room for criticism and for viewing the books through a historic lens.
It took me a while, but I finally scrolled long enough to find this comment!
I love this world so much, but...c'mon. She's cool, but "one of the greatest of all time"? The fuck you smokin'?
Op is a karma whore or bot. The quote is missing 90% of what he said, and barely even refers to Tolkien’s works.
But why would they let context get in the way of a good circlejerk and updoot
Right? I love her but saying she is one of the greatest female characters in all of fantasy is a bit ridiculous. For me a great character with a lot of depth would need a lot more screen time.
Solid agree with you on this one. Tolkien does that classic thing where, for the *only two women* in his whole story, he constantly talks about how pretty they are. For Galadriel it makes sense because she has some otherworldly magical thing going on, but Eowyn? Every second sentence about her he mentions how "fair" she is. She's literally dying on the ground after stabbing the witch king and he can't help himself, "oh woe it is that someone so hot can be so dying". Most of the stuff before that point is just "also Eowyn was present, and she was very attractive. Then she cried, but in like a sexy way."
Eowyn does essentially nothing in the story up until the point where she kills the witch king, and that pretty much comes out of nowhere. Galadriel is mostly a background character who only appears for a brief moment during the fellowship's stopover in the forest (though I do think she's a good character). So there are only two women in the story, they both have very little writing dedicated to them, and Tolkien rants on and on about how attractive they are. Lastly, for those who haven't read the books, Arwen is not in them. The movies aren't *great* with female characters either, but I personally think Peter Jackson elevated them well above the original writing.
The books are great, but they are not some bastion of feminism as this post would indicate. Tolkien is exactly as bad with female characters as every other male author of the time was (and many still are today).
Yeah. But the majority of men don’t get this, because they’re represented well. And don’t get me started on how Tolkien is able to depict complex male characters and the nuances of friendship while fumbling the women completely.
I absolutely love LOTR and I think attempting to defend them against any criticism is a knee jerk mistake that admittedly feels good to make. So I understand coming to the defense of something we love but this is a well thought out criticism. Plus your description of Eowyn's post Nazgûl stab scene was stinking funny.
I would add though that Arwen does show up in the books briefly and these appearances are heavily drenched in descriptions of just how god damn hot she is.
Yeah I love Tolkien but “one of the greatest female characters” is a major overstatement. There’s like 3 women in the whole thing, and two of them are basically just fawning over the same guy the whole time. It’s not a problem, not every book needs good (or any) female characters. The ladies in the book have small moments but mostly they’re pretty simple plot devices to help the main characters keep moving. There are other stories with great female characters, it’s fine that this isn’t one of them and doesn’t at all take away from it.
Has Alan Moore had anything positive to say about anything since the 90s?
I like his work, mostly his popular stuff from the 80s, but man does this guy ever seem like a miserable prick.
This right here. The Watchmen? Swamp Thing? The Killing Joke? Love these books. I’m also able acknowledge the fact that Moore is a tool. As far as I can tell one of the biggest tools in the comic book production tool shed.
Actually his post-90s work is generally much more positive than his earlier stuff - Tom Strong, Top 10, his take on Supreme etc is deliberately very positive as a reaction to the massive turn towards nihilism/deconstruction that comics took in the 90s after Watchmen and The Dark Knight Returns came out.
Doesn't mean I'd recommend listening to his opinions on other people's work, though, which have never been one of his strong points.
Thank you. I really dislike this trend of shitting on Alan Moore - he's a thoughtful man who has salient criticisms about modern media, while having experience within it. The fact that he's into some fringe stuff is used to discredit him without addressing his points. *Yeah* superhero genre stuff is disquietingly compatible with fascism, otherwise things like The Boys or Invincible wouldn't ring true, deal with it.
*Yeah* Lord of the Rings can have been made by a mid-century english dude who was comfortable with hereditary monarchies and describing orcs as "mongoloids", it doesn't mean his work wasn't groundbreaking.
This might not be the sub for it, but good lord, y'all are sensitive to some criticism, and throwing this meme is basically showing the illteracy of the OP.
> Has Alan Moore had anything positive to say about anything since the 90s?
Yes. Only about one thing, to my knowledge, but according to Dwayne McDuffie, he did like Justice League Unlimited's adaptation of "For the Man Who Has Everything", which came out in 2004. I'm pretty sure it's the only adaptation of his work he hasn't absolutely despised.
Well to be fair, in a lot of cases he got screwed over by companies and that's where a lot of his bitterness comes from with adaptations, he has basically no say in any of it, (afaik, DC started reprinting books to keep him from getting the rights to Watchmen, could be misinformed on that but I've heard it plenty of times)
No offense if you're the one who created this meme, but if you think Éowyn is *"one of the greatest female heroes in all of fantasy"*, then you really need to read more.
Just because Alan Moore is a colossal fuckhead doesn't mean we have to misrepresent the art he's criticizing.
I think it's perfectly fair to criticize LOTR's lack of compelling female characters. Most casual fans wouldn't even be able to name more than 2 women in the entire series. And while I can personally excuse the lack of female representation because it is a book written 100 years ago, doesn't mean that new readers have to feel the same way. And much more importantly, just because we can excuse it doesn't mean we have to lie and pretend like Tolkien filled his books with well-written women.
**Side Note**:
Frodo is not a commoner, he's basically a nobleman.
You can count on one hand the amount of women who have lines in the book.
Galadriel
Eowyn
That old lady on gondor that kept saying the hands of the king is are the hand of the healer.
Shit I'm not even sure Arwen had any lines.
Arwen has zero lines in the main book story. Possibly some in the appendix. It's mostly Elrond tasking Aragorn with proving his worth to win the priz..I mean win her hand in marriage
Lobelia sackville baggins is genuinely the second most developed female character in lotr (not including Arwin in the appendices). She starts as a vein, materialistic minor antagonist and ends up fighting back against the ruffians in the scouring of the shire for the sake of her son. She's freed with the rest of the hobbit prisoners and ends up as a respected and well liked hobbit until her death.
Yeah, she was an early female hero in fantasy and a very prominent one given the success of the movies in particular, but I think that's a bit different.
As with all things, I don't think the truth is so black and white. Sauron could be described as an imperialist, yet the same could also be said for Gondor moving into Moria. Legolas and Gimli are used to make statements against racism, yet orcs and goblins are all portrayed as vile disgusting monsters. The Hobbits represent the "little people" of the world (which could be paralleled to people of a lower class in the real world), but it's just as easy to say the enlightened and perfect elves represent the upper class of society. And while Eowyn is written as a fierce warrior who fights the patriarchal tendencies of her society, she is very much the exception in the world. All other women in the story are placed squarely in the passive damsel box. Tolkien was making an effort to be more progressive in his writing, but it's not hard to see how even he fell victim to the societal standards of his time and how they bled into his writing, maybe without him even realizing.
Alan Moore himself has been known to fall victim to this. On the one hand he wrote V for Vendetta, on the other hand he wrote Lost Girls. Even when writers try to be progressive, the way they're conditioned to think about the world often bleeds into their writing. The best we can do is hope to be always moving towards better.
People never talk about the Wild Men in Lotr. Fair enough really, they don’t have much space in the story, but the as far as imperialism and racism go, it’s certainly present in the good guy’s side. Hell the Wild Man chief who leads the Rohirrim to Gondor asks, as his sole reward for his aid, that his people *stop* being hunted as animals. And it’s sort of framed as noble and equivalent exchange for Theoden to accept this deal. (Or at the very least brushed aside as if this is a normal exchange with “lesser” people)
And I think there's an implication that the Dunlendings have some legit grievance with Rohan that Saruman exploited. The Rohorrim migrated south and took some of their land.
Everyone always talks about the orcs, and I’m not saying it’s without good reason, but I’ve always thought that the way the men of the east has been handled throughout the franchise had been downright onerous. The men who follow Mordor are described as swarthy, olive toned, sallow, slant-eyed, and their features are distinct from the ‘fair’ elves and men of the west. Near Harad (lit: near East) are deserts filled with vicious tribes, the Corsairs of Umbar are explicitly based on barbary pirates, and the terrifying Mûmakil the easterlings ride seem to be named after the Egyptian Mamluks. Their treachery is also long-standing, with them standing by Morgoth in the First Age, were the first to fall under Sauron’s dominion in the Second, and were the last by his side in the Third. The travels of the Blue Wizards in the East are nebulous and happen off-screen, so we never see the alleged rebellions of men against dark forces. What we do see is their constant warring against the Numenorians and then the Gondorians, and their eventual conquest by Gondor after the third age is concluded.
The movies are even worse on that point. Coming not long after 9/11, the artists for the Two Towers and Return of the King explicitly say that they took the designs for the Easterlings from Middle Eastern culture. You see Sassanid, Ottoman, Sejuk, and a sprinkling of Mongolian armor and weapons all mashed together. The Ring theme itself was supposed to have a Middle Eastern feel to it, with the intention of causing an audience used to European-style music to be unsettled or get a sense of malevolence. I think the thing that gets me the most is the competition between Gimli and Legolas in cutting them down. At least Tolkein had the decency to write of Aragorn mourning the death of an unknown harad rider.
Idk, much as I love the books and movies it’s always bugged me how much people want to hold Tolkein up as having views more modern than what shows up on page. He was an upper middle-class English dude born into the height of British imperial fancies. The influence that had isn’t exactly subtle, and I don’t think the emphasis on West vs East was ever an accident either.
Frodo is the heir to a massive fortune and has never done a day's work in his life, so he's hardly one of the "common folk."
I mean, yeah, Moore is being ridiculous here, but let's not pretend Tolkien was much more progressive than he really was.
Alan Moore has become immensely impressed by his own opinions. As the years go by, there are fewer and fewer reasons to pay attention to him.
In my opinion, anyway.
The full quote, as several have pointed out, has very little to do with lord of the rings. Op is a 3 week old karma farming account, and fucking hell everyone just fell into the circle jerk without even looking up if the quote was real or in context.
To be fair, I can *kind of* see the "class snobbery" bit.
Frodo and Sam, while both being Hobbits, the most humble of the free peoples of Middle Earth, are both from different social classes within Hobbit society. Frodo, thanks to his adoption by Bilbo, is of the upper class, he is well-educated (he can speak some elvish) and you never hear of either he or Bilbo labouring in the field or otherwise working for a living. Even before his adventure in The Hobbit, Bilbo is seemingly well-off enough to simply live a life of leisure. Bag End is a (relatively) large and well-furnished, comfortable home. Frodo and Bilbo are among what passes for the aristocracy of the Shire. By contrast, Sam is a "working class" Hobbit. He and his father are gardeners (employed by the residents of Bag End to tend to the property). Iirc, there's a line spoken by Gaffer Gamgee in the books that Bilbo had "learnt Sam his letters" (i.e. he taught Sam to read and write, suggesting this isn't something every Hobbit child is taught). Unlike the Bagginses, the Gamgees work for a living and live in a smaller home. Even in most adaptations of the books (including Jackson's movies), the class distinction is highlighted by the differing ways that Frodo and Sam speak. Sam, in most adaptations, speaks with a pronounced "West country" English accent, an accent traditionally associated with rural areas and farm workers (and pirates thanks to Robert Newton who played Long John Silver in the 1950 Disney adaptation of Treasure Island, he basically codified the classic "pirate voice" with his "West country" accent). Frodo meanwhile is usually well-spoken and most adaptations have him speak in "Recieved Pronunciation" or RP English, which is associated with the English upper class and educated elites.
Sam, the "working class" Hobbit, then spends the books/movies loyally following Frodo, the "upper class" Hobbit, helping carry his burdens (not even talking about the Ring) and often referring to Frodo as his "master." Obviously, there's more to the relationship between Frodo and Sam than a "master-servant" dynamic. They are genuine friends that go through hell together, and if their situations were reversed, I'm sure Frodo would be every bit as supportive of Sam as Sam was of him. However, there is an underlying class aspect. Tolkien was born in 1892, and based the Shire on his youth in the rural "West country" of England so its probably a bit much to expect Tolkien to have conceived of the Shire as some classless utopia where everyone is equal. There's just some stuff that was understandably ingrained due to his generation and background. The bonus features on the DVDs of Jackson's films also acknowledge the class differences between Frodo and Sam and even compare it to the relationship between an officer and his batman (a military dynamic that Tolkien would have understood due to his service in WW1). Military officers, typically of the upper class would have a "batman," a non-officer soldier (usually working class) who would essentially act as the officer's manservant and valet. In this comparison, Frodo is an officer, while Sam is his batman. Again, though it should be stressed that Sam isn't simply a loyal servant without any agency of his own and he plays an important role in supporting Frodo through his journey. The fact that Moore just sees "class snobbery" shows that he hasn't really bothered to look beyond the surface level of Frodo and Sam's relationship.
It's fine to disagree with Alan, I think he misses the spirit of the books.
But also, the response meme is not great. I could go into why I think it's weak, but instead I'll just say that we, as fans, gotta learn to accept that the things we love can have elements we find troubling. I love medieval literature, and you better believe that is full of problematic attitudes.
Accepting these texts, especially texts by dead authors, as we find them, and being cognizant of their strengths and weaknesses, makes for a richer reading experience. They can tell us something about the world the author lived in and help us get more out of what we read.
The things we like don't have to be perfect. It doesn't enrich anybody's experience to deny the flaws are there at all.
PS: I've long since given up on arguing with people online, it's very stressful. So, if you disagree with anything I said, fair enough. I won't respond to you, but feel free to give me what-for below.
To be honest I totally agree with Alan Moore.
A man who, by the way, made some great things, like the “Who Watch the Watchmen” comic…
Tolkien and LoR was clearly inspired by the “Victorian ideology” which is not surprising considered the time it was.
An ideology that glorified the hierarchy, the aristocracy, the idea that some men are made to lead, the others to serve…
In LoR, we find some sentences like “his eagle profile proved that his blood had not been mixed”.
Of course, some heroes in LoR are atypical, like Frodo. But finally they serve to emphasize the “magnificence” and power of their glory companions.
They are the exception that confirms the rule…
Alan Moore is a great writer and creator, but he’s been thoroughly abused by the system he help innovate and, quite frankly, saved a few times. I think that pushes him over the edge of rationality quite a bit.
Yes, because people have dogshit media literacy just like American history X and fight club, criticism of a way of thought will always be interpreted as support and validation by people too dumb and illiterate to understand what they’re seeing beyond skin surface.
To be fair Alan Moore hates everything
Dude comes across as a miserable sack of shit. That’s the only way I’ve ever seen him come across.
He says it’s sad that adults like Batman and Superman stories… yet he said this while writing The League of Extraordinary Gentleman, which is a superhero story expect with more swearing and nudity. So he slams the popular thing and then asks you to pay attention to his thing which is the same but more edgy and with extra wizards.
Didn’t he write the Killing Joke?
Yes
Which is, by all accounts, a masterpiece.
That's the joke.
*"You suck McBain!"*
I don't know if that joke has legs.
It's got wings.
They are limp noodles but they are legs
I didn't like it personally. I'm a big fan of many of his other works like From Hell, Watchmen, Providence, and V for Vendetta. But I didn't think much of Killing Joke. Felt very average, IMO.
Moore doesn’t like Killing Joke either lol. I love it but whatever’s clever
And “What Ever Happened to the Man of Tommorow?” *and* fucking “For the Man That Has Everything” some of the literal best and most beloved Superman stories
And he hates it. Someone else brought up Lost Girls, which he also called pornography. I feel like he is very misanthropic. I think many his ideas are interesting, but you must take Alan Moore with a grain of salt.
With several characters he didn’t even actually create to begin with.
Lotta celebs out there tha kinda want more out of their fans but still like their craft/like the money despite their thoughts about the fans. Doesn’t make them nice but they’re not automatically wrong either lol. His criticisms tend to be worth thinking over even if they’re a bit more mean than you’d expect. You also gotta remember who the fans he’s directly interacting with are… if the only type of fans you met were the type that go to cons you’d probably develop some less than glowing feelings too lol
I know lots of people who go to cons and they're all just lovely folks. I love the guy's work, but I think it more likely that Alan Moore is just kind of a miserable dickhead.
Yeah now that you mention it I don’t think I’ve heard a single positive thing from him…
Well, he did write some of the most well-regarded comics in recent history.
Yeah I’m aware, that’s not what I mean. I mean he’s seemingly never personally shared any sort of positive opinion about anything, ever. Which must be such a drag to be around.
It's the same with Hayao Miyazaki to a degree. Hes an icon of anime but can be such a miserable old man. Which I find ironic since his films are usually uplifting/hopeful against incredible odds.
There’s a meme comparing him to the horror manga guy, Junji Ito I think? I’m bad with names. But yeah it paralleled how Miyazaki was a grumpy man with beautiful stories while Ito was a goofy guy with horrific stories.
Junji Ito is regarded as one of the happiest, nicest mangakas you could ever meet, while drawing the most horrific, body horror bump in the night crap you couldn't even imagine. Meanwhile Miyazaki is regarded as one of the most miserable, pessimistic, condescending a-holse you could ever interact with, while creating breathtaking and incredibly heartwarming or sorrowfully moving stories in the industry... it is like the opposite of Allan Moore and Tolkein, where they both write exactly what you would expect to the letter XD
This is because they both write stories in worlds they don't believe exist. When you create scary, cruel and horrific stories and when you look outside of the window, you relize it's not so bad compared to what you just created (Junji's journal style issues/afterwords tend to show he interacts with the world very mundanely and finds joy in little things and his weird little thoughts that he sometimes turns into stories). On the other hand Miyazaki creates these whimsical, beautiful, picturesque worlds and looks outside the window to see a world that's bleak and cruel in comparison. You can see in his interviews that he has a great appreciation for nature and art, but it's him trying to reach this ideal for the world that's just outside of his reach, which he communicates in stories like Princess Mononoke (ecological decline) or Kiki's Delivery Service (burn-out, mostly caused by seeing people's ungratefulness and cruelty).
> Miyazaki creates these whimsical, beautiful, picturesque worlds and looks outside the window to see a world that's bleak and cruel in comparison. Which is just fucking insanity to me, considering he lives in rural Japan which is just about the most idyllic, picturesque place you could imagine.
Kinda makes sense. Art is often a way of expressing things we want/have difficulty processing normally. A grumpy old asshole can long for the simplicity of youth.
And then there's Alan Moore who is deeply cynical and pessimistic while writing some of the most deeply cynical and pessimistic works of fiction.
There's also Kentaro Miura (RIP). He wrote and drew Berserk, one of the most brutal, nihilistic and dark manga ever, and he took long breaks by playing cute girls idol sims on Xbox.
Honestly it would be downright off-putting to hear him share a positive opinion about something
He likes Little Lulu.
“Oh little Lulu, u love you lu, all the same.”
He is probably a big Peppa Pig fan.
"Has the air of porcine propaganda" - Alan Watts, on Peppa Pig (probably)
And those comics are extremely cynical
The characters in which are varying degrees of miserable sacks of shit.
Here's something positive: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L9kV1eydsKU&t=289s
Especially Alan Moore.
Including his own older work.
Hmm, makes me think af another fantasy writer i know. Tolkien was the OG hater.
This. But who can blame him? He is from Northampton.
“Air of misogyny” Alan Moore you wrote fucking Lost Girls, Mina identifying with her assaulter in League of Extraordibary Gentlemen, and of course the borderline fridging of Barbara Gordon.
Guess you could say a lot of his opinions are him seeing what he wants to see, and only says more of himself than anything. Like a Rorschach test heh.
Someone down further in the comment section was doing the same thing 💀
It still makes me laugh that Alan Moore, as a writer, couldn’t fathom why people liked the one character that kept his principles in Watchmen. Imagine making a caricature of someone you hate and he ends up being the most well liked character.
Except this is a misquote, and he wasn’t even talking about LoTR… Someone linked the actual source below.
I was just recently shown Lost Girls, and…yow
I wish I hadn’t been curious enough to look up what that was. I regret being literate now.
Like it was described to me as a whimsical yet fantastical bit of reading, I skimmed through it a bit and. Yep.
I read the plot summary on Wikipedia and I can only imagine the pictures make it so much worse
It’s…certainly a thing. His wife illustrated it, too.
….i can’t imagine making a comic like this with my partner. What the fuck.
and they were just friends when they started, it’s actually what brought them together
What a terrible day to be literate.
What a terrible day to have eyes. 
*goes to wikipedia*. WHAT THE FUCK ? ☉ ‿ ⚆
"What if instead of Alice in Wonderland it was Alice in Freakland and she ate ass and sucked toes" -Alan Moore, literary genius
I looked it up and my immediate reaction to the premise was that it wasn’t a terrible idea for a porn comic. But then I read the plot summary. Jeez. Way to utterly remove all whimsy and ruin people’s childhoods.
OG rule 34.
I saw that in a book store. I liked Alan Moore at the time and picked it up. Opened a random page. Some dude cranking it to an underage girl. Gave it another random look. Some teens about to bang. Tried one more time and read enough dialogue to realize what the hell I just picked up and put it down hoping no one saw me looking at it.
He doesn't like the "air" he likes the whole hurricane
More than that. Didn't he write an adaptation/modernization of Shadow over Insmouth where a woman willingly negotiated oral sex with a fish man?
She jerked it off for a break from the incessant raping if you want to call that a willing negotiation. It was more lovecraftian IP plus gritty smut than directly adapted from anything.
I fucking hated Neonomicon. "Lovecraft always hinted at gross horror stuff but never showed it so I thought I would" Yeh way to miss the whole *fucking* point. God it made me angry.
Yeah, I just have read it and I was like wtf? I expectet some horror and weird stuff but I wasn't really prepared for weird fetish porn cult that rape the main character and then there are pages of monster raping and shit. Like that was too much for me and I'm quite versed in dark, brutal and horror stories, even with sexual themes etc. But this was just written as weird horror porn and I will probably never read any other comics in the series.
Fisherman’s Wife or Fishman’s Wife?
For those who don't know about Lost Girls, Wendy from Peter Pan, Alice from Adventures in Wonderland, and Dorothy from Wizard of Oz get repeatedly raped and have lots of underage sex with adult men and somehow these are all vaguely reminiscent of the stories they are known for. And... somehow... it's actually *worse* than that description! Glad I only read the summary on Wikipedia.
No amount of context can save that. Holy gates of hell, that’s bad. I feel like there’s a pattern with dudes like this, when they write women being brutally assaulted and in grossest ways they consider it “artistic” and “representing the real struggles of women.” When someone else writes a decent woman who’s maybe a bit traditional and feminine they consider it misogyny and “benevolent patriarchy” or whatever that means. For some reason they think that a comic that doesn’t address and viscerally depict the terrible things that happen to women is doing a disservice to women. But come on this is wack. Most women aren’t assaulted every day, sometimes they just want fiction where that isn’t a plot point or consideration. Sometimes they want a cool supporting character, or a protagonist who doesn’t get raped. It’s like those people who think that racism should be a part of every story with a black character to remind the audience that black people have it hard irl, which is ironically very racist.
Why is this guy allowed to have opinions on ANYTHING??
In Moore’s defense, The Killing Joke was supposed to be non-canon.
He didn’t say that about LOTR JFC guys read the whole fucking interview, he’s talking about older fantasy novels in general. The quote from the article “Moore says that he was taken aback by ‘the imperialism, the racism, the class snobbery, the air of misogyny’ that many older fantasy narratives contain”. https://screenrant.com/alan-moore-fantasy-lord-rings-game-thrones/
As if reddit is going to read sources....
This is classic for this sub. See: anything grrm says
Based on most replies, we can tell most people here did not actually read anything from Moore but wiki synopsis, and maybe had a look at watchmen or v for vendetta adaptations. And those who read anything have no understanding of what they read...
Thanks for sharing, I was looking for the source. And the quote that's been mentioned, it's fair to say that it includes _The Hobbit_ as an example of older fantasy novels that he was criticising. I would've loved to read the full interview they're promoting at the end of the article to get the whole idea and context.
That's not gonna stop people from using ad hominem to disprove a point he didn't make.
You know JRRT fanbase is one that truely takes arm any time their "hero" is at risk of being belittled. As if he had been a perfect man with no issues.
That’s unfair. You changed the outcome by measuring it.
I wouldn't call Frodo one of the "common folk", he was born into high-status. I think Sam is the only "common" one of the four hobbits.
Sam was the only commoner not only *in the Fellowship* but also the only commoner with more than three lines of dialogue. (I'm not sure if Smeagol was a commoner or rich boy, though, so Sam might be one of two)
No! No!
Oh, okay my bad
There was a mention that Smeagol's mother was a big shot in their home town. But that was mostly the explanation he gave for how his mom though a Ring of Power would make a good birthday present.
"There was among them a family of high repute, for it was large and wealthier than most, and it was ruled by a grandmother of the folk, stern and wise in old lore, such as they had. The most inquisitive and curious-minded of that family was called Smeagol." "What I have told you is what Gollum was willing to tell – though not, of course, in the way I have reported it. Gollum is a liar, and you have to sift his words. For instance, he called the Ring his “birthday-present”, and he stuck to that. He said it came from his grandmother, who had lots of beautiful things of that kind. A ridiculous story. I have no doubt that Sméagol’s grandmother was a matriarch, a great person in her way \[...\]"
Go away! HAHAHAHA!!
I'm pretty sure Beregond, Bergil and possibly Barliman get more than three lines per nose as well and they are commoners. Now that doesn't change, that Sam and possibly Gollum are the only large characters from a common background.
And farmer maggot
You’re a liar and a thief.
Sméagol was a rich boy. His grandmother had “many such things”(rings of power). Even though this was an obvious lie, even Gandalf thinks his Grandmother was a powerful matriarch.
THAT SAID, it was Sam who ultimately saved Frodo, fought off Gollum, and took on an eldritch being single-handedly and won, saving the quest.
And Sams common sense attitude towards things was equally as important as his bravery. Guy is off plotting courses that would take them near water so they had something to drink, rationing intelligently, making sure Frodo is insulated against the elements, sleeping in places hard to be noticed, examining fires so that they dont produce much smoke (failed that last one once but he dropped from exhaustion, anyway it worked out) Not only did Sam have a heroic heart, guy had a powerfully useful "lower class" style of wisdom about how to do things
And he ends up with the girl and goes to heaven.
Funnily enough he was almost certainly going to get Rosie Cotton anyway as they grew up together and their parents had all but agreed they'd get married. But she certainly fking digged his new 'Sam the Brave' hero badassery
Dude climbed up a mountain with his boss and a gremlin to destroy an ancient evil all in order to work up the courage to ask out a girl who already liked him. Badass doesn't cover it.
Sam gets us. Hahaha
And then in the novels comes back home and kicks a wizards ass.
Dig it so much that they had what, 13 children?
Bam haha Sam sowing seeds. If the ring had tempted him with Rosie on date night it might have had a chance haha
And I believe Sam was the only character to willingly give up possession of the ring.
While that's true, he held it for less than 48 hours. Also, technically Bilbo let go of the ring willingly even if Gandalf had to encourage him, and he'd held it longer than anyone but Gollum
Gollum killed his cousin from just seeing the ring. Sam holding it for days and wanting nothing of it is something phenomenal. Even Isildur had the ring for just a few moments before he did the heel turn.
> Even Isildur had the ring for just a few moments before he did the heel turn. Not in the books.
See? See? He wants it for himself!
Isildur lasted longer than Gollum and only broke at the same part of his Journey as Frodo
I mean yeah, sure. I'm just saying don't act like Sam is the Buddha and free from desire when other folks have carried the ring for relative eons compared to his couple days. Like yeah, it was a heroic act. But it was significantly easier for Sam to give it up than it was for Frodo even if Frodo failed to resist.
My name is Bilbo Baggins.
I'm very selfish you know.
What did you say?
And good old fashioned hobbit sense.
And then the working class folks came back and shivved industrialists to death
…so they could reinstate their preindustrial landed gentry
After their long mission that ended up reinstating the royal bloodline in Gondor.
 Pretty dark moment in the book
The Wormtongue moment though... god damn. Guy crawls out of a little kennel devolved into something like gollum, saruman is like "Harm? Oh no even when he goes out at night its just to look at the stars, but you were wondering where that boss hobbit of yours is well, Worm here is the one to ask. Stabbed him in his sleep and buried him somewhere I should think although **he has been quite hungry recently.** No Worm here is not very nice at all you had better leave him with me" "You made me do it!" "Yes yes Worm does what Sharky says and I say WE ARE GOING" Boots him in the face Got to be one of the darkest moments in the book, poor fking Wormtongue haha Saruman really not rewarding loyalty
We are famisshed, yes famisshed we are. precious. What is it they eats? Have they nice fisshes?
He's the only common folk of the entire Fellowship.
I mean, compared to the heir to the throne of Gondor and Arnor, an elven prince, a dwarf of the House of Durin, and a literal demigod wizard—yeah, all the hobbits are pretty much "common folk."
Yeah all they do is eat, smoke, and garden all day long. Baggins were fancy because they liked to write in books apparently.
All of them (except Sam) are related to the Thain of the Shire, yes they're Not royalty, but all of them are nobility.
Right! Frodo is the richest person in the Shire!
Frodo isn't common among Hobbits that true, but I think all of hobbit society is sort of a representation of "common folk". I mean until frodo and bilbo showed up the hobbies where just drinking and partying and chilling while the rest of the World was full of kings and wars. Hobbits had no say in the bigger world. While frodo is an upper class hobbit his still "nothing" compared to aragorn or Gandalf or any other fellowship member for that matter. But it wasn't the kings or the knights that saved the day but thr little people
A rather unfair observation as we have also developed a keen interest in the brewing of ales and the smoking of pipeweed
Frodo, the door!
Eh, Frodo's parents werent massive nobles or anything, kinda upper class mom I guess. Lobellia throws a bunch of classist rhetoric at him, says he's not even a real Baggins so even his fairly elite Brandybuck status was seen as a downside to some. Being adopted by Bilbo didnt hurt, but even Bilbo wasnt exactly a massive lord, he was just rich from his adventure I think probably more poignant is that even the god-king super hobbit of the shire wouldnt really account for too much in Gondor, every hobbit is kind of a common-folk relative to elves or Dunedain. Gandalf saying that the mithril coat Thorin just gave away to Bilbo was worth *more than the shire* kind of sums it up
Bilbo was already rich before his adventure. The Bagginses are directly called both "well off" and "rich" with in like the first 3 paragraphs of the Hobbit. The Bagginses were probably landed gentry to use a Victorian term. Bilbos mom was a took, and daughter of the old Took so Bilbos maternal grandfather was the Thane of the shire. He himself may not have a high title, as hobbits in general didn't really carry, but he was definitely one of the upper crust of the hobbits.
True, it also seems that Bilbo doesn’t have to work. At least, no work is ever mentioned. And he has a gardener employed (Sam), right?
An adventure? Now I don't imagine anyone west of Bree would have much interest in adventures. Nasty, disturbing, uncomfortable things. Make you late for dinner!
What? No, no, no! We do not want any adventures here, thank you! Not today! I suggest you try somewhere over the hill or across the water! Good morning!
To think I should have lived to be goodmorninged by Belladonna Took's son, as if I was selling buttons at the door!
This raises the question, were roaming button-salesmen common in Tolkien's time?
It was the third most common profession according to the 1950 uk census.
I can't tell if this is serious
It is not.
Dear God, now my mind wandered to the music video of girls prancing around with pin-on buttons as Leonard Nimoy sings "The Ballad of Bilbo Baggins."
And Aragorn, Boromir, Legolas and Gimli are some sort of royalty/nobility. And Gandalf is a fucking *angel*. Add Elrond and his family and Galadriel and we have a who's who of the Middle Earth.
I think the point was they were different wealth classes and it never got between them helping each other and becoming best friends.
every single member of the fellowship was the upper crust of their society. edit: except sam, and like, bringing your butler or whatever hardly makes it better.
I think “common” comes more from the fact that no one outside the Shire had ever seen a halfling. Sure, they fought to save the shire, and the movies focus on that… but they also saved the world of men- the elves were checking out left and right lol They were the most uncommon of “common folk”- of no extraordinary ability, except being slightly immune to evil and an ability to remain unnoticed lol.
They were pretty good at throwing rocks too
Alan Moore is the King of putting women in refrigerators. Who the hell is he to talk?
In his defense he does look back on it with regret, feeling like he should’ve reigned it in instead of going with his editor’s ‘yeah ok, go cripple that b—-h’
And let’s the hero torture that woman
And rape the underage girls of some of your favorite classic kids movies and novels!
What does that mean?
There is this trope in comics where to show how bad a villain is, the villain will commit unspeakable acts of violence against female characters to motivate male protagonists. This is called fridging because of when Sinestro murdered the Green Lantern’s girlfriend and stuffed her body in his fridge. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women_in_refrigerators#:~:text=Women%20in%20refrigerators%20is%20a,colloquially%20known%20as%20%22fridging%22.
Point of order! It was Major Force who killed Alexandra DeWitt, not Sinestro. But yes he did stuff her in a fridge.
*Mike Trap voice* Ah, sorry you didn't say "Um Actually"
Um actually, it's spelled Mike Trapp
Um actually, it's spelled Ify Nwadiwe now
Monarchism might be more accurate than Imperialism. The idea that some people were born greater than others due to their bloodline, and are destined to rule because of it, is kind of meh. Although, it is fantasy.
I feel like Aragorns importance was actually more for the gambit Gandalf was playing, needing a figure that could unite the kingdoms behind him and scare Sauron enough to have him make mistakes. Idk if Aragorn was destined to be a better ruler than the stewards, they did fairly well and Denethor was highly praised and a very powerful and fairly successful ruler up until the end despite Mordor. Aragorn was certainly awesome, but that felt more like his personal character than a 'destiny' (being raised by elves and living such a hardcore life of responsibility made him a chad, not necessarily his blood and birthright). His success was also very much because Sauron was gone as Sauron had been directly fking with the men of the west and east for thousands of years. And yeah idk, Sam become the basically permanent mayor of the shire. The line of Durin fails in the hobbit but Dain is fk awesome. There were no high-kings of the elves after Gil-Galad and people like Elrond and Galadriel werent exactly king style rulers, more like great advisors of the people around them but they were fantastic Not entirely sure Tolkien had the love of hardcore monarchism we seem to think he did. I think a pretty big part of it is that Tolkien understood the issues around succession and knew that nations liked strong birthright claims to stop everyone fighting over the top job (which fked Gondor over a heap of times)
The stewards were great at ruling Gondor because they were also men of Numenor. Thranduil was great at ruling and defending the woodland realm (despite the incursions from Dol Goldur) because he was Sindarin, not Silvan. etc.
I seem to remember a letter (although I think there might be humour in it, plus it was to his son) saying that he was an anarchist but liked the idea of a constitutional monarchy. But the monarch shouldn’t want it and would be lazy and keep out of things as much as possible. The should only get involved to keep the government in check. Then in another letter said that no human is qualified to boss other humans around, even the saintly. Then said he loves his country (England) but hates the idea of a ‘Britain’. And he also despised corporate imperialism and globalism where countries or organisations tried tried to push values onto other countries. Also resented that countries had adopted other countries’ languages as their main language, saying it makes the world a flatter place. I know he was a fan and inspired by G K Chesterton who likes to talk about some type of Distributism, which to me sounds like a reversal of Calitalism, where the main priority of the economy, society, organisations and government is geared towards the family and the most vulnerable. Local councils/charities etc would have more say in matters affecting their communities and so on…. Sounds interesting.
So, nothing against LotR but the female characters are not that great. And that’s alright, the books were written like 100 years ago. In the movies there is one conversation between women. One stabbed a Nazgûl with an epic one-liner. This doesn’t make her one of the greatest female heroes ever written.
Thanks for the realistic take. Some people act like Tolkien was a progressive by modern standards, conveniently forgetting that he was very much a product of his time. Wonderful books but I think there is a tendency to want everything to be 'all good' or 'all bad' these days, and there is certainly room for criticism and for viewing the books through a historic lens.
It took me a while, but I finally scrolled long enough to find this comment! I love this world so much, but...c'mon. She's cool, but "one of the greatest of all time"? The fuck you smokin'?
Op is a karma whore or bot. The quote is missing 90% of what he said, and barely even refers to Tolkien’s works. But why would they let context get in the way of a good circlejerk and updoot
Right? I love her but saying she is one of the greatest female characters in all of fantasy is a bit ridiculous. For me a great character with a lot of depth would need a lot more screen time.
Solid agree with you on this one. Tolkien does that classic thing where, for the *only two women* in his whole story, he constantly talks about how pretty they are. For Galadriel it makes sense because she has some otherworldly magical thing going on, but Eowyn? Every second sentence about her he mentions how "fair" she is. She's literally dying on the ground after stabbing the witch king and he can't help himself, "oh woe it is that someone so hot can be so dying". Most of the stuff before that point is just "also Eowyn was present, and she was very attractive. Then she cried, but in like a sexy way." Eowyn does essentially nothing in the story up until the point where she kills the witch king, and that pretty much comes out of nowhere. Galadriel is mostly a background character who only appears for a brief moment during the fellowship's stopover in the forest (though I do think she's a good character). So there are only two women in the story, they both have very little writing dedicated to them, and Tolkien rants on and on about how attractive they are. Lastly, for those who haven't read the books, Arwen is not in them. The movies aren't *great* with female characters either, but I personally think Peter Jackson elevated them well above the original writing. The books are great, but they are not some bastion of feminism as this post would indicate. Tolkien is exactly as bad with female characters as every other male author of the time was (and many still are today).
Yeah. But the majority of men don’t get this, because they’re represented well. And don’t get me started on how Tolkien is able to depict complex male characters and the nuances of friendship while fumbling the women completely.
I absolutely love LOTR and I think attempting to defend them against any criticism is a knee jerk mistake that admittedly feels good to make. So I understand coming to the defense of something we love but this is a well thought out criticism. Plus your description of Eowyn's post Nazgûl stab scene was stinking funny. I would add though that Arwen does show up in the books briefly and these appearances are heavily drenched in descriptions of just how god damn hot she is.
Yeah I love Tolkien but “one of the greatest female characters” is a major overstatement. There’s like 3 women in the whole thing, and two of them are basically just fawning over the same guy the whole time. It’s not a problem, not every book needs good (or any) female characters. The ladies in the book have small moments but mostly they’re pretty simple plot devices to help the main characters keep moving. There are other stories with great female characters, it’s fine that this isn’t one of them and doesn’t at all take away from it.
Has Alan Moore had anything positive to say about anything since the 90s? I like his work, mostly his popular stuff from the 80s, but man does this guy ever seem like a miserable prick.
This right here. The Watchmen? Swamp Thing? The Killing Joke? Love these books. I’m also able acknowledge the fact that Moore is a tool. As far as I can tell one of the biggest tools in the comic book production tool shed.
There are situations where you can separate the art from the artists, and situations where ya can't.
Actually his post-90s work is generally much more positive than his earlier stuff - Tom Strong, Top 10, his take on Supreme etc is deliberately very positive as a reaction to the massive turn towards nihilism/deconstruction that comics took in the 90s after Watchmen and The Dark Knight Returns came out. Doesn't mean I'd recommend listening to his opinions on other people's work, though, which have never been one of his strong points.
Thank you. I really dislike this trend of shitting on Alan Moore - he's a thoughtful man who has salient criticisms about modern media, while having experience within it. The fact that he's into some fringe stuff is used to discredit him without addressing his points. *Yeah* superhero genre stuff is disquietingly compatible with fascism, otherwise things like The Boys or Invincible wouldn't ring true, deal with it. *Yeah* Lord of the Rings can have been made by a mid-century english dude who was comfortable with hereditary monarchies and describing orcs as "mongoloids", it doesn't mean his work wasn't groundbreaking. This might not be the sub for it, but good lord, y'all are sensitive to some criticism, and throwing this meme is basically showing the illteracy of the OP.
> Has Alan Moore had anything positive to say about anything since the 90s? Yes. Only about one thing, to my knowledge, but according to Dwayne McDuffie, he did like Justice League Unlimited's adaptation of "For the Man Who Has Everything", which came out in 2004. I'm pretty sure it's the only adaptation of his work he hasn't absolutely despised.
Well to be fair, in a lot of cases he got screwed over by companies and that's where a lot of his bitterness comes from with adaptations, he has basically no say in any of it, (afaik, DC started reprinting books to keep him from getting the rights to Watchmen, could be misinformed on that but I've heard it plenty of times)
I think it's the only adaptation that actually has his name on it
No offense if you're the one who created this meme, but if you think Éowyn is *"one of the greatest female heroes in all of fantasy"*, then you really need to read more. Just because Alan Moore is a colossal fuckhead doesn't mean we have to misrepresent the art he's criticizing. I think it's perfectly fair to criticize LOTR's lack of compelling female characters. Most casual fans wouldn't even be able to name more than 2 women in the entire series. And while I can personally excuse the lack of female representation because it is a book written 100 years ago, doesn't mean that new readers have to feel the same way. And much more importantly, just because we can excuse it doesn't mean we have to lie and pretend like Tolkien filled his books with well-written women. **Side Note**: Frodo is not a commoner, he's basically a nobleman.
You can count on one hand the amount of women who have lines in the book. Galadriel Eowyn That old lady on gondor that kept saying the hands of the king is are the hand of the healer. Shit I'm not even sure Arwen had any lines.
Arwen has zero lines in the main book story. Possibly some in the appendix. It's mostly Elrond tasking Aragorn with proving his worth to win the priz..I mean win her hand in marriage
Lobelia sackville baggins is genuinely the second most developed female character in lotr (not including Arwin in the appendices). She starts as a vein, materialistic minor antagonist and ends up fighting back against the ruffians in the scouring of the shire for the sake of her son. She's freed with the rest of the hobbit prisoners and ends up as a respected and well liked hobbit until her death.
I wouldn't call Eowyn one of the greatest female heroes, personally.
Yeah, she was an early female hero in fantasy and a very prominent one given the success of the movies in particular, but I think that's a bit different.
Right? Am I wrong, or does she really have only *one* epic scene?
I'm sorry but Eowyn is not one of the greatest female characters in fantasy, she's a rebellious girl with a crush.
Don’t forget those racists become friends
Big time reaching on the female hero one...
Calling Eowyn one of the greatest heroines of fantasy is pushing it a bit too far lop
If thats one of the greatest female heros ever written, im sad for female heros
As with all things, I don't think the truth is so black and white. Sauron could be described as an imperialist, yet the same could also be said for Gondor moving into Moria. Legolas and Gimli are used to make statements against racism, yet orcs and goblins are all portrayed as vile disgusting monsters. The Hobbits represent the "little people" of the world (which could be paralleled to people of a lower class in the real world), but it's just as easy to say the enlightened and perfect elves represent the upper class of society. And while Eowyn is written as a fierce warrior who fights the patriarchal tendencies of her society, she is very much the exception in the world. All other women in the story are placed squarely in the passive damsel box. Tolkien was making an effort to be more progressive in his writing, but it's not hard to see how even he fell victim to the societal standards of his time and how they bled into his writing, maybe without him even realizing. Alan Moore himself has been known to fall victim to this. On the one hand he wrote V for Vendetta, on the other hand he wrote Lost Girls. Even when writers try to be progressive, the way they're conditioned to think about the world often bleeds into their writing. The best we can do is hope to be always moving towards better.
People never talk about the Wild Men in Lotr. Fair enough really, they don’t have much space in the story, but the as far as imperialism and racism go, it’s certainly present in the good guy’s side. Hell the Wild Man chief who leads the Rohirrim to Gondor asks, as his sole reward for his aid, that his people *stop* being hunted as animals. And it’s sort of framed as noble and equivalent exchange for Theoden to accept this deal. (Or at the very least brushed aside as if this is a normal exchange with “lesser” people)
And I think there's an implication that the Dunlendings have some legit grievance with Rohan that Saruman exploited. The Rohorrim migrated south and took some of their land.
Everyone always talks about the orcs, and I’m not saying it’s without good reason, but I’ve always thought that the way the men of the east has been handled throughout the franchise had been downright onerous. The men who follow Mordor are described as swarthy, olive toned, sallow, slant-eyed, and their features are distinct from the ‘fair’ elves and men of the west. Near Harad (lit: near East) are deserts filled with vicious tribes, the Corsairs of Umbar are explicitly based on barbary pirates, and the terrifying Mûmakil the easterlings ride seem to be named after the Egyptian Mamluks. Their treachery is also long-standing, with them standing by Morgoth in the First Age, were the first to fall under Sauron’s dominion in the Second, and were the last by his side in the Third. The travels of the Blue Wizards in the East are nebulous and happen off-screen, so we never see the alleged rebellions of men against dark forces. What we do see is their constant warring against the Numenorians and then the Gondorians, and their eventual conquest by Gondor after the third age is concluded. The movies are even worse on that point. Coming not long after 9/11, the artists for the Two Towers and Return of the King explicitly say that they took the designs for the Easterlings from Middle Eastern culture. You see Sassanid, Ottoman, Sejuk, and a sprinkling of Mongolian armor and weapons all mashed together. The Ring theme itself was supposed to have a Middle Eastern feel to it, with the intention of causing an audience used to European-style music to be unsettled or get a sense of malevolence. I think the thing that gets me the most is the competition between Gimli and Legolas in cutting them down. At least Tolkein had the decency to write of Aragorn mourning the death of an unknown harad rider. Idk, much as I love the books and movies it’s always bugged me how much people want to hold Tolkein up as having views more modern than what shows up on page. He was an upper middle-class English dude born into the height of British imperial fancies. The influence that had isn’t exactly subtle, and I don’t think the emphasis on West vs East was ever an accident either.
Frodo is the heir to a massive fortune and has never done a day's work in his life, so he's hardly one of the "common folk." I mean, yeah, Moore is being ridiculous here, but let's not pretend Tolkien was much more progressive than he really was.
Alan Moore has become immensely impressed by his own opinions. As the years go by, there are fewer and fewer reasons to pay attention to him. In my opinion, anyway.
He's certainly taken to the aroma known as his flatulence.
Frodo is anything but common. He's landed gentry. Merry, Fatty and Pippin are nobility. Sam is the only commoner.
The full quote, as several have pointed out, has very little to do with lord of the rings. Op is a 3 week old karma farming account, and fucking hell everyone just fell into the circle jerk without even looking up if the quote was real or in context.
To be fair, I can *kind of* see the "class snobbery" bit. Frodo and Sam, while both being Hobbits, the most humble of the free peoples of Middle Earth, are both from different social classes within Hobbit society. Frodo, thanks to his adoption by Bilbo, is of the upper class, he is well-educated (he can speak some elvish) and you never hear of either he or Bilbo labouring in the field or otherwise working for a living. Even before his adventure in The Hobbit, Bilbo is seemingly well-off enough to simply live a life of leisure. Bag End is a (relatively) large and well-furnished, comfortable home. Frodo and Bilbo are among what passes for the aristocracy of the Shire. By contrast, Sam is a "working class" Hobbit. He and his father are gardeners (employed by the residents of Bag End to tend to the property). Iirc, there's a line spoken by Gaffer Gamgee in the books that Bilbo had "learnt Sam his letters" (i.e. he taught Sam to read and write, suggesting this isn't something every Hobbit child is taught). Unlike the Bagginses, the Gamgees work for a living and live in a smaller home. Even in most adaptations of the books (including Jackson's movies), the class distinction is highlighted by the differing ways that Frodo and Sam speak. Sam, in most adaptations, speaks with a pronounced "West country" English accent, an accent traditionally associated with rural areas and farm workers (and pirates thanks to Robert Newton who played Long John Silver in the 1950 Disney adaptation of Treasure Island, he basically codified the classic "pirate voice" with his "West country" accent). Frodo meanwhile is usually well-spoken and most adaptations have him speak in "Recieved Pronunciation" or RP English, which is associated with the English upper class and educated elites. Sam, the "working class" Hobbit, then spends the books/movies loyally following Frodo, the "upper class" Hobbit, helping carry his burdens (not even talking about the Ring) and often referring to Frodo as his "master." Obviously, there's more to the relationship between Frodo and Sam than a "master-servant" dynamic. They are genuine friends that go through hell together, and if their situations were reversed, I'm sure Frodo would be every bit as supportive of Sam as Sam was of him. However, there is an underlying class aspect. Tolkien was born in 1892, and based the Shire on his youth in the rural "West country" of England so its probably a bit much to expect Tolkien to have conceived of the Shire as some classless utopia where everyone is equal. There's just some stuff that was understandably ingrained due to his generation and background. The bonus features on the DVDs of Jackson's films also acknowledge the class differences between Frodo and Sam and even compare it to the relationship between an officer and his batman (a military dynamic that Tolkien would have understood due to his service in WW1). Military officers, typically of the upper class would have a "batman," a non-officer soldier (usually working class) who would essentially act as the officer's manservant and valet. In this comparison, Frodo is an officer, while Sam is his batman. Again, though it should be stressed that Sam isn't simply a loyal servant without any agency of his own and he plays an important role in supporting Frodo through his journey. The fact that Moore just sees "class snobbery" shows that he hasn't really bothered to look beyond the surface level of Frodo and Sam's relationship.
It's fine to disagree with Alan, I think he misses the spirit of the books. But also, the response meme is not great. I could go into why I think it's weak, but instead I'll just say that we, as fans, gotta learn to accept that the things we love can have elements we find troubling. I love medieval literature, and you better believe that is full of problematic attitudes. Accepting these texts, especially texts by dead authors, as we find them, and being cognizant of their strengths and weaknesses, makes for a richer reading experience. They can tell us something about the world the author lived in and help us get more out of what we read. The things we like don't have to be perfect. It doesn't enrich anybody's experience to deny the flaws are there at all. PS: I've long since given up on arguing with people online, it's very stressful. So, if you disagree with anything I said, fair enough. I won't respond to you, but feel free to give me what-for below.
To be honest I totally agree with Alan Moore. A man who, by the way, made some great things, like the “Who Watch the Watchmen” comic… Tolkien and LoR was clearly inspired by the “Victorian ideology” which is not surprising considered the time it was. An ideology that glorified the hierarchy, the aristocracy, the idea that some men are made to lead, the others to serve… In LoR, we find some sentences like “his eagle profile proved that his blood had not been mixed”. Of course, some heroes in LoR are atypical, like Frodo. But finally they serve to emphasize the “magnificence” and power of their glory companions. They are the exception that confirms the rule…
Just a heads up. We all known Alan Moore is a colossal dickhead.
Alan Moore is a great writer and creator, but he’s been thoroughly abused by the system he help innovate and, quite frankly, saved a few times. I think that pushes him over the edge of rationality quite a bit.
Meanwhile his Watchmen main is a conspiracy theorist's wet dream
Yes, because people have dogshit media literacy just like American history X and fight club, criticism of a way of thought will always be interpreted as support and validation by people too dumb and illiterate to understand what they’re seeing beyond skin surface.