At the Public Medievalist, Paul Sturtevant continues series on race, racism and the middle ages with a look at the use of “race” in fantasy, including Dungeons & Dragons: “Tolkien crafted his fantasy world intricately. He, for example, took great pains to calculate distances and accommodate for the […]
At the New York Times, Joseph Loconte discusses “How J. R. R. Tolkien found Mordor on the Western Front.”
Friend of the Gutter, Kate Laity writes about medieval settings, ideas of heroism and masculinity, and “how people use history to veil the way they think about how things are now.”
The New Yorker profiles writer Michael Moorcock. Moorcock’s influence is nothing like Tolkien’s, at least on the surface, but his vision of a speculative-fiction genre that can be psychologically complex is evident in how very sophisticated some of it has become—from True Detective to Jeff VanderMeer, from David […]
At Paste Magazine, Austin Walker writes about non-player characters, failure, autonomy, The Shadow of Morder and Watch Dogs: “And here, then, is the largest problem with these systems as they stand. No matter how many songs the Orcs of Mordor sing, no matter the desperation of [Watch Dogs‘] […]
“For the ordinary dude to be triumphant, the Strong Female Character has to entirely disappear into Subservient Trophy Character mode. This is Trinity Syndrome à la The Matrix: the hugely capable woman who never once becomes as independent, significant, and exciting as she is in her introductory scene.” […]
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The Cultural Gutter 