He is the only anarcho monarchist. Strider is a king. Not a king of anything. Just sitting around in a tavern drinking a beer and better than everyone else because he is a king.

I had a migraine session on reddit back when hogwarts legacy was released from arguing how blatant the racial coding of the goblins was. The game actually encapsulates how mindless it has become for this "head empty, genocide ready" mentality for designated "evil" races in modern fantasy to be readily used by writers and accepted wholesale by apparently most of the audience.

Beyond the already odious Jewish caricature borrowed from the original Harry Potter representation as greedy moneylenders, classic subconscious British liberal chauvinism by JKR, the game went further by making the goblins an antagonistic faction which uses militant means to secure their species rights. This is viewed by the protagonists through the same light that liberals view real world armed resistance groups of marginalized peoples like the Black Panthers and, of course, Palestinians.

The goblins canonically live in an apartheid state where they're relegated as financial serfs for the humans, with restrictions on magic use and unable to access the same educational institutions that humans do. Yet, because Ranrok (their leader) chose violence (along with doing plot nonsense bad things to justify their elimination), the usual liberal exclamation of "they've gone too far and ruined the purity of their victimhood" comes up. There is literally a comprador goblin by the name of Arn who opposes Ranrok's movement and bemoans (in a chud dialogue scene) that "While I would like to see goblinkind treated by wizards as equals, bloodshed is not the answer."

This typical liberal sentiment, the same one even MLK denounced in his Birmingham Jail letter, is wildly hilarious when applied to the Harry Potter universe. Ranrok is defeated, so certainly his violent ways must be disproven by a vindication of the liberal "peaceful gradualism" theory right? Except the game is set a full century before the books, and so we know that canonically absolutely nothing has changed in human-goblin race relations nor would goblin rights improve even a single inch. Dumbass comprador Arn's fantasy of a "diplomatic end to the discord with wizardkind" still has predictably made zero progress in a hundred years, and ever onwards considering J.K. "Elves love slavery" Rowling never cared about addressing the racial apartheid of the setting.

Also, the protagonist is a full blown psychotic terrorist who literally shouts "Your blood is on Ranrok's hands" as they murder goblinfolk- all while being an underage Hogwarts student. This last bit tore apart the cognitive dissonance far enough that even the reddit crowd started memeing about it (and of course, there were the customary apologists in there explainbroing how this was all still OK and kosher).

My issue is that I view the legacy of past works from a consequentialist perspective and see things this way: every public figure has two sides to them. Tolkein, the private man, may have had a genuine crisis of faith with what he produced and some of his writings suggest something to this like. Tolkein the author however, never expressed any substantive reservations in his canonical publications to correct his original portrayal of the orcs as categorically evil and irredeemable. This is his public side and the legacy that we are left to contend with, as it is the only one which the general population would see through his published works. Through this, the fantasy standard of "evil" races which he popularized (and basically created, frankly) for posterity, and the consequences of that legacy, is an absolutely vile outcome of a so-called "Christian" referenced work and his pretensions to such does make him "clownish."

There's an endless amount of written mental masturbation by "Tolkein scholars" how poor Tolkein was "so confused" and "so conflicted" with how his worldbuilding ended up conflicting chiefly with Christian redemption doctrine through his racial characterizations. There's an entire natopedia page on his so-called "moral dilemma." If you're interested in engaging with the topic on his own terms as he presents them, you may check that out, though I've read all of it, I personally have no interest in assessing him on that sort of register.

Crucially, neither did he ever consider it problematic that he drew inspiration for the orcs from European caricatures of African and Asian peoples- in fact, through his entire moral dilemma, he never once considered why he needed to make them, in his own words, "squat, broad, flat-nosed, sallow-skinned (a.k.a. yellow and brown skin), with wide mouths and slant eyes: in fact degraded and repulsive versions of the (to Europeans) least lovely Mongol-types." This compounds the "dilemma" as he explicitly admits to race coding the orcs.

The bottom line is that no one forced him to write things that were antithetical to his professed faith other than himself and his partial self realization of this being expressed through private musings rather than being made plain and explicit in revisions of his work or canonical publications that made explicit a corrective to the portrayal is not a mark in his favor. The latter was a path he could have chosen if so inclined, if the dilemma was really as serious to him as Tolkein scholars, with an agenda of rehabilitating him for the modern age, allege him to have felt.

The best thing to do was simply not write such problematic material, and it's always important to keep in mind that there were contemporaneous writers and people in every age ever who thought differently to whatever "dominant" local prejudice, contrary to the belief of the "man of their time" cultural relativism fetishist crowd. Especially by the mid 20th century, where there was no shortage of people even enclosed in the confines of the perpetually chauvinist terf island of imperialist Britain that did not view portrayals of the "other" in such a Manichean perspective as Tolkein did.

The second best course would have been to issue a corrective, either through a sequel or outright revision. On this front, Charles Dickens wrote problematic works with countless prejudical tropes. For one of them at least, the characterization of the greedy antagonistic Fa#in as an explicit Jewish caricature eventually gave him pause either through personal reflection or reportedly through lobbying by a Jewish acquaintance. He later revised his work to remove every reference to Fa#in as a Jew.

Tolkein did not choose to do that. He was clearly too much in love with what he created (more unfavorably said, I'd say he frankly liked the smell of his own flatulence too much) to revise his canonical works. Instead, he tried to bend Christian doctrine to fit his own pre-established problematic worldbuilding rather than tear down and adjust what he developed to re-align with his faith. These are the half-assed "contradictions" that Tolkein scholars attribute to his latter renditions on the etiology of the orcs.

TL;DR, Tolkein is a clown because he rejected any substantive praxis of his faith onto his works. Instead, he tried to have his cake and eat it too, calling his work Christian-based when he refused to allow Christian doctrine to alter what he already wrote. To put it crudely, he sharted on a plate, and upon realizing his mistake, he decided to sprinkle some parsley on top rather than remove the plate and sanitize it. This self conceit is why I have no patience for engaging with his contradictions on his own terms and why I don't hold reservations for viewing him as I do.

However, I recognize his work is a permanent fixture on contemporary literature and his tropes are now standards of the fantasy genre. I have no issue with people who are fans of his work and would personally prefer to accomodate his (half-baked, in my view) expressions of his "dilemma" in more a favorable light than I do. Yet, I would never pretend to see him through such lens personally.