Tag: anti-khazadism

Unpopular opinion but I can’t buy the Hobbit as a good metaphor of the evils of capitalism or that it says anything about how bad rich people are when the end has Bilbo going home rich. I just don’t get why I’m supposed to agree that the Dwarves are a metaphor for rich greedy people and the Jewish connection makes me dislike it. I know the canon hints they deserve their misfortune but I don’t agree with how it’s written.

I don’t agree with it, either.

I like Bilbo, but as I’ve said before, he’s the audience surrogate – that is, if the audience is a clueless white man. Bagginshield (unfortunately) isn’t canon, so we can’t say he spends the rest of his life grieving for Thorin as Thorin was meant to be grieved. It’s arguable that his time with the Ring affected him very deeply and negatively, but I don’t like that he never faced any clear consequences for what he did to Thorin. Thorin DIED. Bilbo…well, as you said, he went home rich, and in the books, there was never a single apology.

Fleshing out Thorin was definitely a good thing, but it makes the ending even harder to swallow. Why out of every character is he the one so bad he has to die, or have to spend the rest of his life always seen as bad compared to everyone else? I see other characters made mistakes too so why does he only have to pay with his life? I did notice people who got angry that Thranduil was more flawed in the movies and Bilbo didn’t chose to fight by the Elves /1

/2 are the same who said Thorin had it coming for the moral and in this
current time I don’t agree with that moral. I don’t agree with saying
it’s greedy to want a home back. It’s sad watching a character go
through all that and have to agree they have to die. It’s like excessive
punishment imho. (please don’t tag this with the fandom)
       
   

(Wasn’t planning on it.)

I agree that it’s kind of a rock-and-hard-place situation, but given the choice of seeing Thorin humanized and having his death hit harder or seeing him portrayed 100% as a greedy villain and having people cheer his death, I’ll take the first option. They were never going to address the anti-Semitism in a sensitive manner and let him have any semblance of a happy ending (possible even if he died – *cough*secret marriage*cough*), let’s be real.

I still absolutely agree with you about all of this.

Hey, the anon who sent the message about Tolkien fandom here. Clarifying that I got called an SJW for bringing up implications like the anti-semitism, so it was calling someone an SJW for bringing up social issues. Even mentioning it in a nice way has caused trouble if one doesn’t agree with Tolkien. I’ve seen people criticize the movies because they wanted Thorin to be just greedy like the book intended, but criticizing the intent was called SJW. Hope that clears it up a bit.

Yes, thank you for clarifying! I’m sorry people flew off the handle at you for calling out something legitimate. The anti-Semitism is really fucking gross, and Peter Jackson got a lot of things wrong, but humanizing (Dwarfenizing?) Thorin was not one of them.

How do you feel about Tolkien fandom? I never really felt welcome in it. I remember talking on livejournal about the Hobbit movies and people were mad because the elves were supposed to be above going to war over gold, but when I said I hated the reading of dwarves just being greedy and the portrayal of Thorin’s goldsickness I got called an SJW. It feels you’re not allowed to disagree with the text, you can complain about the movies but not the books.

(Sorry so late!)

OK, so. I’m not the best person to sympathize with over being called an SJW, because I disagree with a lot of so-called SJW ideology and methods (still very liberal, though!). However, you are 100% right. Both the movies and the books should be open to criticism, including the gross anti-Semitism. I mean, everything except for “MY HEADCANON SHOULD BE CANON AND YOU SUCK IF YOU DON’T THINK SO!” is fair game.