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Sept. 12, 2024 - Sargon of Akkad - Carl Benjamin
18:18
Morally Grey Fantasy

All fantasy stories are about the emergence of the hero. Buy Islander #2 here: https://shop.lotuseaters.com

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Unlike most people, I've been laboriously slogging through Amazon's The Rings of Power, and like the rest of this very narrow cohort, I found it remarkable how profoundly rubbish it is.
Almost every aspect of it is terrible.
The costumes, the sets, the storyline, the events, the pacing, the actors themselves, the special effects, the motivations of the heroes and villains, and their characterisations, literally all of it, is just bad.
It did throw up something quite interesting though, which was in the fact that it was written by John Payne and Patrick McKay, a screenwriting duo of absolutely no note, who spent their entire careers failing upwards until somehow Amazon decided that they ought to be given half a billion dollars plus and the keys to the Tolkien estate.
As Rotten Tomato pointed out in their write-up of them when this project was announced, you've probably never heard of them, because prior to this they had three uncredited stints writing for forgettable properties.
It came as something of a surprise to Tolkien fans then to find out that this got a season two, and that in the first episode of that season, we saw an orc family for the first time in Lord of the Rings.
And progressive media outlets kicked into Overdrive to let us know that, yes, bigot, Tolkien did actually say that orcs reproduce and therefore an orc family is technically a valid concept within the universe.
Tolkien, as you are doubtless aware, wrote the orcs to be a race of violent, cruel, deceptive brutes.
Looks like meat's back on the menu, boys!
Though canonically the origins of the orcs is somewhat murky, as Tolkien never gave a single consistent answer to their origin, the general view appears to be that they are elves and men who are corrupted by the evil god Morgoth, somewhere in the distant past, and then enslaved to be his thralls.
In an unpublished note which was later published after his death by his son under a collection entitled Myths Transformed, Tolkien had said, quote, But even before this wickedness of Morgoth was suspected, the wise in the elder days taught always that the orcs were not made by Melkor, and therefore were not in their origin evil.
They might have become irredeemable, at least by elves and men, but they remained within the law.
That is, though of necessity being the fingers of the hand of Morgoth, they must be fought with the utmost severity, they must not be dealt with in their own terms of cruelty and treachery.
Many progressive Tolkien fans have taken this to mean that it is not necessary nor inevitable that the orcs are evil, and that perhaps that might mean that some orcs might be morally redeemable at some point.
But as we can see, Tolkien implies that it was the great power of Morgoth that twisted them into their evil nature, and therefore it would take a great power to redeem them, putting it beyond the power of elves and men.
What this means is that they are contingently irredeemable, that is, always evil by the standards of elves and men, because these races do not have the power to make it otherwise.
We of course already knew this to be the case, because they were made evil by Morgoth.
It wasn't necessary or inevitable, it was his action that created them, and it is beyond the power of elves or men to undo.
Therefore, elves and men, as Tolkien tells us, have only one option to deal with the inveterately evil orcs, which is to destroy them.
And it's not like this was some kind of hidden message in Lord of the Rings.
In the core material, Tolkien was pretty clear that the orcs are a villainous race, and killing them is not morally complex.
So what did our dynamic duo take from Tolkien's work?
Well, in a recent interview with Deadline, they were asked about their humanisation of the orcs, and Payne says this.
From the beginning of the season, we talked about the idea of having an arc, and we feel like this goes straight back to Tolkien.
You read the books, and you get these blips of moments where orcs are kind of on their own, and they're saying, Hey, what if one day there could be a place just for us?
We could have our own little land, our own little cottage by the sea, so to speak, where they have dreams, they have aspirations.
They don't want to just be mindless killing machines.
We tried to take that a step further and to continue to individuate them and dramatise what their desires and ambitions might be.
And McKay added, Villains are motivated by things that are in their own heads that make them feel like they're the hero of their own story, and that can make for really compelling drama, and so orcs who have dimension, who have things they care about, benefits all the stories in our mind.
This is a fascinatingly mediocre insight into the world of Middle-earth that displays the kind of wrinkle-free comprehension of what morality even is.
The orcs, as Tolkien shows us, are not by any means mindless or even stupid.
They are evil.
They aren't stormtroopers, who are basically normal people mistakenly fighting for a villain, and they don't wistfully pine for home.
They delight in war, torture, pain, suffering, and the advancement of misery.
We would call them selfish and sadistic.
If we were to take a utilitarian perspective on the worldview of the orc and say that anything that advances their own pleasure is morally good, then villainy is how an orc is moral.
By our standards then, the orcs are fundamentally evil, and they act that way to one another.
They are only cowed by fear of a greater power and not by concerns of the suffering of others.
They are creatures of hate, greed, torment, and cruelty.
They are the embodiment of vice, and their viciousness is what makes them what they are.
This is not just an aesthetic affectation.
The consequences of living this kind of life are substantively different from the consequences of living a virtuous life, which is why the orcs are so ugly and disgusting, and why the elves are so beautiful and good.
What kind of family life ought we expect an orc to have then?
Orcs do not like one another and turn on each other at the slightest provocation, so it's hard to believe that orc pairings would have a bond built on fidelity.
Orcs are incapable of love.
They are only capable of craving, and so it seems that they would have no reason to commit to one another and would engage in physical union for the sake of the pleasure it provides alone.
Orcs wouldn't form families but broods, in which males would not know nor care which children were their own and do nothing to take care of them.
The biggest members of the tribe would get the lion's share of the food, with the smallest skittering fearfully around the edges to make sure they aren't in range of abuse.
The attrition rate for orc children must be phenomenal given the high levels of casual violence they exhibit towards one another.
And this is what made a recent viral tweet by Nerd Rotics so funny.
Orcs just want a safe place to raise their kids, be evil and practice their corrupted form of life in peace, as if they're the moral equals of men and basically just want the same things, only dressed in different attire.
The very nature of displaying orc families like this raises valid questions about the setting's own internal contradictions, such as why is no orc ever in clean clothing?
Why does a loving family produce bloodthirsty offspring?
Why are the orcs portrayed as irredeemably evil elsewhere in the rings of power?
The fundamentals of a virtuous and loving family unit are completely absent in every aspect of this orc family, and yet we are expected to pretend as if one way of life is the equal to the other.
And it throws up even more problems about the orcs that rings of power will not be able to resolve.
If the orcs are fundamentally good, but in conflict with humans over, say, the same resources, then it would imply an unheroic diplomatic solution is not only possible, but desirable.
Moreover, the conflict therefore does not become one of morals, but one of skill.
It becomes a question of not who is more worthy, but who is more tactical, and the moral dimension to the entire story is completely lost.
It also implies that our enemies are actually just like us, made from the same stuff as us, driven by the same motives as us, which Tolkien informs us is just not true.
They are substantively different morally because of Morgoth's interventions.
However, the liberal brainiacs who wrote this series can't accept that two races of rational creatures could be fundamentally different on a moral level, because frankly, they'd find it racist.
They'd end up like modern dungeons and dragons, declaring that orcs are actually not evil, and are just another kind of human living an otherwise normal human life.
This would become then a way for the liberal to normalise the enemy into something domestic, dull, unserious, and unscary.
If they win, is it really so terrible?
What is ultimately at stake?
Why is Sauron even the villain, other than the fact that they tell us he is?
Why should we think that Middle-earth being ruled by family orcs would be a terrible outcome?
And suddenly we have undone the very magic itself that brings Lord of the Rings to life.
No longer is it a cataclysmic war between good and evil for the fate of the world in which good must triumph.
The entire mythological theme underpinning the universe is dissolved because we have established that good and evil are just two shades of the same colour.
Any enchantment anyone might have felt at being a part of the fellowship on their way to defeat an ancient and all-powerful evil evaporates into the air, and we are left with no compelling moral arc to events whatsoever.
So well done to our daring duo for making Lord of the Rings boring.
And what happens when you're committed to a morally grey fantasy?
Well, turns out you can't finish it.
George R. R. Martin is the example of how a fantasy story with no heroes can't come together on its own terms, because we need to be able to pick a side in a fairy tale conflict.
Stories are not objective histories.
They are moral lectures and follow a predetermined path.
It is not a coincidence that the hero always wins.
And this is why Martin is unable to finish his own fantasy series.
A brilliant post by Devon Erickson summarises the problem precisely, and I'm just going to read it for Baton.
The Song of Ice and Fire isn't actually supposed to be a dark Machiavellian hopeless subversion of Tolkien at all.
It's just supposed to start that way.
The details may be complex, but the formula is simple.
Low fantasy version of the British Isles torn apart by a multi-sided Machiavellian power struggle loosely based on the War of the Roses.
Things are bad because of the Machiavellian power struggle.
In the background, subtle hints of external magical otherworldly threat.
Warring factions scoff and ignore it at first, enter the high fantasy tropes.
Prophesied hero emerges to unite the morally grey factions into an unambiguously good pro-civilization force to confront and defeat the unambiguously evil threat to all life.
Full transition, in the end, to epic Tolkien-esque high fantasy, played straight rather than subverted.
Hero triumphant, humanity triumphant, realm unified in peace and prosperity, roll credits.
Were the story to be completed thus, completed as it wants to be completed, as it yearns to be completed, every dark, gritty Machiavellian moment would be fully justified.
Every chapter and scene filled with thugs and villains and no heroes at all would be fully justified, because they would merely serve to emphasise the rarity of heroes and the need for them.
Because they would make the arrival of a true hero that much more satisfying when, late but not too late, he arrived.
A song of ice and fire doesn't really want to be a subversion of Tolkien at all.
It wants to be a path out of darkness and into light.
It wants to be a study in how Tolkien is deeply relevant, even to a gritty, morally grey world.
This is what George knows it needs to be, but George cannot write it.
Why?
Because he's a socialist and a boomer.
Socialism's motivational core is envy, and its one underlying rule is thou shalt not be better than me.
The boomer's single guiding principle is whatever makes me feel pleasure right now is good and whatever makes me feel bad is evil.
Take these together and you get someone who has a real problem with heroes.
Heroes are, by definition, the best of us, at least on some dimension, and if your underlying motivation is envy, standing next to one is going to make you feel bad.
This means that socialists, boomers, and socialist boomers tend not to want to believe in heroes and heroism.
They want to convince themselves that anything which appears good is secretly evil, actually, and that anyone who makes them feel or look bad is obviously evil.
So when they see a hero, they tend to call him a fascist, because they want to feel morally superior to him.
The only way that they can admit that someone has a moral compass at all is if they can feel superior to him in some way, usually by portraying them as naive and hence doomed to failure because he is not empowered by cynicism and selfishness to pursue the most efficient path to whatever.
So if old George thinks that everyone who appears good is either secretly evil or openly stupid, then writing a character with heroic impulses is going to be tough and writing about how they succeed impossible.
This is why George can write characters with noble motives, John Snow, Edward Stark, etc., but he keeps making them fail.
You see, in George's world, heroism must be a sham or a weakness, because then George's own bad character is wisdom and enlightenment, instead of just a lack of moral virtue.
If heroes are all frauds or suckers, then George is being smart because he has seen through the whole heroism thing.
If heroes are real, and they sometimes do succeed, and they do make the world better for everyone, then George is just a fat, lazy, cynical old man who doesn't want to finish his art for the sake of integrity because he only ever wanted money and now he has more of that than he knows what to do with.
In order to finish his story, George would need to have an awakening of virtue.
He would first have to develop a sense of integrity, a desire to fulfil his promises even when no one can or will punish him for not doing so.
He would then have to develop a sense of humility, because to write a better person than he is, he would have to admit to himself that there was such a thing, that people can be better, and that trying to be better is an actual worthy goal, not just the act of falling for a con game run to control you.
The longer someone goes without admitting their faults, the harder those faults are to admit to, because they have been more deeply invested in.
And this means he would have to also develop the courage to admit to himself that he is in fact a fat, lazy, cynical old coward, and that Tolkien, whom he envies and despises, was the far better man all along.
George R. R. Martin can have no heroes, because they would suggest that one side is unambiguously right and the other side is unambiguously wrong.
Martin is not the American Tolkien.
He is, in fact, the American anti-Tolkian, and he is learning where the fruits of such a course end up.
And to defend his own failure, all of Martin's critiques of Tolkien are founded in anti-metaphor, the act of attempting to deconstruct and reduce to the mere details the great narrative of a story.
As he famously asked, Tolkien tells us the kingdom is well run, but what's Aragon's tax policy?
The obvious answer is, well, whatever was necessary for the kingdom to be well run, because if you're asking questions like this, then you're missing the point.
The story is not about these mundane technical details.
The story is about the fate of the moral arc of the universe itself.
Regardless of the personal failings of his characters, Martin would then, as the author, be forced to pick and endorse the moral views of one side over another, which is something that he personally is unable to do, and therefore he personally is unable to finish his novels.
Because as he is committed to a world in which there are no heroes, but many villains, he must therefore conclude that in the Game of Thrones, a villain must win.
And who wants to write that?
And so it's not a surprise that he'll make up any old excuse not to finish his own work.
As he recently claimed in one blog post, it's the rise of fascism around the world that's haunting him and preventing him from finishing his story.
Which really does sound like an excuse, doesn't it?
Folks, I hope you've enjoyed this.
This was a lot of work, actually, came together to make this video possible.
And so if you would be interested in something along these lines, issue 2 of Islander Magazine is now available, featuring articles, of course, by myself and many other luminaries of modern right-wing thought.
This is the cutting edge of where we are politically, philosophically, and aesthetically.
The magazine will only be on sale for about two, three weeks from when this video goes up, and will not be reprinted again.
So do follow the link in the description and get your copy while it is available.
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