"Woke" Tolkien...

I must state here that I am not a Tolkien Scholar.  That is, I have not written books about the man.  I have read a rather significant amount of the man's work, and a bit more about the man himself, and his experiences. And I would submit that while I have produced a fair evaluation of the man's work, it was some ... almost fifty years ago, when I needed to produce a book report in sixth grade.  

But to see that some dipshit who claims to know the Lord of the Rings fairly well is disturbed by the latest venture into Middle Earth, it is abundantly clear that said dipshit does not understand the core of Tolkien's work.

Yup.  I went there.  I'm no Tolkien Scholar.  I've read the books so many times I've destroyed two sets - so far.  And while this Morse fellow feels he can quote stuff at you, there are plenty of others who can do the same, myself included.  But the bottom line if you read and think about the books is that the story is about love for a place a person has, the depths he is willing to go to sacrifice for that place, and the growth he and his friends experience in their journey.

Sure, the prequel expands on the love of place idea so you understand rather more deeply what that place is, what it represents, and what it does to those who live there.  So Morse really dug into his own ideology and stuffed it up the floorboard cracks in Tolkien's world, missing the point. As Jackson did, too.

Yeah, I've gone on about that before.  But if you read the books, you will note that the core of the story is not about the Ring of Power or any of the other stuff that goes on.  It's about this guy who happens to have a terrible purpose placed on him, and in doing so, that terrible purpose nearly kills him several times over.  It does kill many, including one of his companions on the journey, but in the end, he returns to the home he left, with his friend - and finds - at least, in the version Tolkien wrote - that it's not about what you do in the grand stage of the world, but it's all about how you take what you have learned about the world, and yourself, there, and how you use it at home.

For those of you new to the world, the Lord of The Rings story reaches it's first climax as Gollum/Smeagol falls into the fires of Mount Doom with the One Ring.  A more important climax follows after Frodo and Sam escape the flaming destruction of Mount Doom and Mordor, and the coronation of Aragorn as the king of the west.  Frodo, Sam, Merry, and Pippin make their way back to tell Bilbo about the end of the Ring, so he can add it to his book, then they return home.

Where Saruman and Wormtongue, having been banished from the ruins of Isengard by Gandalf The White, have set up shop, destroying much of what made the Shire the paradise Frodo and Sam left.  The horrors of concentration camps and the destruction of war they thought they'd managed to keep from the Shire had destroyed the peaceful land they left.  Rather than go elsewhere, rather than call for help, rather than look to others, they together raised armies, turned sentiment from fear and acceptance to a willingness to confront and drive off the danger and evil that had come to their homes.  

So in the end, these people who were so easily dismissed, only accepted as the accidental possessors of the greatest evil of the world, came into their own as their own saviors, their own leaders, and the people who left as mostly comic relief, and returned from the vast outland not as outcasts, but as the heroes their people needed to bring their place back to it's proper way of life.

And this Morse character who decries a cast of people who aren't all looking like him, well, there's a reason Dipshit fits him well.  The Party of Nine who are pulled together to take the ring to Mount Doom are all male.  That much is obvious.  But they're also fairly broadly representative of the people in the world.  Sure, there are no Riders of Rohan in the nine.  Their horses are represented.  And so are Hobbits.  So are Dwarves.  So are Elves.  So are men.  So for a dipshit like Morse to decry a multi-cultural cast in a story that Tolkien never told, but we're imaging it might be a possible past, clearly, Morse didn't understand the Lord of The Rings.  

It's not about these nine white guys getting something done.  It's all about a broadly diverse group of folks getting together and deciding it had to be done, they'd make sure it was done.  At whatever cost.

So, should you stumble across a Brandon Morse quip about anything other than the Lord of The Rings, keep in mind the fact that he overlooks some fairly obvious details when making his allegedly authoritative pronouncements.  So consider the source, and remember that his rather narrow view of reality is about as useful as his narrow view of fantasy.