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rynlingSorry, I want to try to articulate my frustration with this discourse more clearly.
When people critique the Redwall books as "racist," the argument often goes:
Mice are positioned as virtuous Christians, while
Rats are positioned as greedy Jews / violent Muslims
To which I always find myself thinking: Why are you equating Jews and Muslims with the fictional murder-rats in a series of fantasy books for children? I think that says more about you than it does about what you're critiquing, especially given that there's nothing in the books themselves that would support this interpretation.
The same goes for Lord of the Rings. When Tolkien was writing about orcs, he was thinking about Beowulf. What he was absolutely not thinking about when he wrote those books in the 1930s and 1940s were immigrants from South Asia. Why would you make that comparison?
What I'm trying to say is that this type of reading is doing a lot of work, and I'm not sure that this work is achieving its intended purpose of pushing back against problematic messaging. Cultural critique is important and necessary, but it should probably be directed at media that can support it.
When people critique the Redwall books as "racist," the argument often goes:
Mice are positioned as virtuous Christians, while
Rats are positioned as greedy Jews / violent Muslims
To which I always find myself thinking: Why are you equating Jews and Muslims with the fictional murder-rats in a series of fantasy books for children? I think that says more about you than it does about what you're critiquing, especially given that there's nothing in the books themselves that would support this interpretation.
The same goes for Lord of the Rings. When Tolkien was writing about orcs, he was thinking about Beowulf. What he was absolutely not thinking about when he wrote those books in the 1930s and 1940s were immigrants from South Asia. Why would you make that comparison?
What I'm trying to say is that this type of reading is doing a lot of work, and I'm not sure that this work is achieving its intended purpose of pushing back against problematic messaging. Cultural critique is important and necessary, but it should probably be directed at media that can support it.
