Beardier than Thou

"Such men as he be never at heart's ease

Whiles they behold a greater than themselves

And therefore are they very dangerous"

 

Caesar describing Cassius, Shakespeare's Julius Caesar, Act1Scene2

 

 

"Memento mori. You are parasites, and a parasite which kills its host is a doomed parasite."

Thus I admonished The Lord of the Rings Online eight years ago, that in light of its rapidly diminishing gameplay value and overwhelming reliance on its Tolkien license, shitting on Tolkien's corpse was a bad, bad idea. Stay tuned, we'll come back to that by the end.

For a while, LotRO benefited from Standing Stone Games' split into a separate studio. The new adventures centering on Northern Mirkwood, the Iron Hills and Misty Mountains more closely approached the "Middle Earth Online" the game should originally have been instead of "Rehash the LotR Plot Online" it was turned into in its middle years. The "legendary" item system (a whole gear farm in each weapon) was retooled into something less aggravating last year, along with a few other quality of life changes and more attention to detail like interweaving quests instead of polishing off one location at a time forever. There are even some new monster models, after a long drought. But, after over a decade of catering only to the stupidest possible clientele, it was too little too late.

 

Standing Stone got desperate enough last month to give free access to all but the last major expansion, Gundabad, which no company does except in extremis. So I've sunk some cost into Gundabad, jumped back in and have been struggling to catch up on the past couple years' content. Initially, several others from the guild I'd joined two years ago also popped their heads up, until it almost seemed we'd get enough for an instance run. Two weeks later they were gone again. Partly, this can hardly be helped, as LotRO features a tremendous amount of repetitive "kill ten rats" content to wade through before reaching the even more repetitive end-game of farming a single instance for gear upgrades - a problem compounded by timesinks like nearly instantaneous respawns forcing you to kill everything twice in each location. Running the game on what would appear to be the same servers from fifteen years ago doesn't help, as more than a dozen players in any location immediately weigh the network lag down into rubberband land. And, of course, it's hard selling slightly blocky mid-2000s 3D graphics on a more modern market of downright fuckable photorealism, no matter how inspired your visual artists may be. Before I get to my complaints, let me admit LotRo's old knack for achingly scenic landscapes remains solid.

The Wells of Langflood: beauty, branches, bears and boggarts

Even some of the Gundabad zones seemingly created (just as Moria) with a mind toward low decorative workload (noone questions cave walls textured uniformly mottled gray) make inspired use of repeating motifs.

The (rather Spartan) cradle of Durin

And, as always, it's somehow even worse to see good work amidst bad, because the storytelling filling the precipices and caverns of Gundabad has taken a sharp nosedive. This was somewhat a problem after Mordor, with professional writers having apparently split the other way from old Turbine. For a while the team broke even, resigning themselves to mediocre drama, unambitious yet also unintrusive, but whichever writers joined preceding the release of Gundabad last year have dragged the new zones so deep into the realm of SJW lunacy as to overshadow any recovery LotRO has made in the past few years.

One sure sign is trying to gratuitously redeem villains and recast them as oppressed minorities. Suddenly we need to focus on good dwarves from the canonically evil Dourhand clan (some of the first enemies you fought back in 2007) because you see it was only their leaders that led them astray. The Nuremberg defense apparently remains perfectly valid in Nogrod. Even orcs, fucking ORCS, are gradually going the way of Warcraft noble savage orcs, deliberately flouting Tolkien's established narrative of them as thoroughly corrupted body, mind and soul by Morgoth (a.k.a. the devil himself) back in the first age. But the most obvious change is relocating Middle-Earth, like every single other product of our propaganda-choked society, to Femtasia, that FEMale chauvINIST utopia where women are always more clever, wiser, morally upright, skillful, braver, stronger, faster and flat-out more bionic than those lowly disgusting males in every possible way.

 

As a side-note, as much of this involves dwarf-women, and one of my old posts on bearded ladies saw a slight increase in hits last year, I may have shared in the guilt of justifying (inadvertently and only by omission of proper context) the notion of sending original recipe Ardan she-dwarves out on adventures. If so, I do regret it, and I'll plan a post at some point in the future about the topic of evolution in fantasy.

Though, as all modern media, LotRO suffered from occasional bouts of virtue signaling (refugee themed plots, a female master of Lake-Town, etc.) they integrated these half-decently into the existing literature. Its current problems appear to have started with Amma.

Back when Erebor was first opened up, one of the quests casually introduced you to the first female dwarf NPC, and Mother Amma was in fact a good character in keeping with Tolkien's own guidelines on the topic. She was protected and hidden away deep within one of her people's most secure fortresses. Which didn't stop her from being portrayed as a respectable matriarch and noted expert in the fine craftsmanship which so obsesses the Naugrim. Cool. I'm down with that.

But of course it's never enough. Not for the fanatics anyway.

The War of Three Peaks and Gundabad proper saw Amma and a host of new females transported to the front lines, increasingly monopolizing the action. Remember Tolkien laid out the central problem quite clearly: dwarves not only breed almost as slowly as elves but only have a 1/3 female population. Much like loonies from Heinlein's The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, this naturally mandates a rabid, unquestionable protectionism as core cultural value, or dwarven demographics would've dwindled to nothing back in the First Age no matter how many Durins they bring back from the dead.

LotRO keeps dwarf females looking masculine (and bearded (you can tell them by their voices)) but while lower cuteness would indicate a higher female involvement in masculine risk-taking, female scarcity would easily over-ride these dames' hirsute valor.

But of course, that's logic, and who needs logic when you've got feminism?

 

For one of the more absurd examples, meet the dwarf lesbians:

One sends you with a gift to her "wife" - an absurd notion both for the reasons above and for this being an infamously traditionalist society. In preindustrial times everyone was a quiverfull by default, with infanticide quietly making up the difference in lean years. While various cultures formalized some form or another of what each other might consider sexual deviance, social justice warriors consisently miss the little detail that true sexual freedom is a virtue and privilege of post-industrial, medically savvy modernity. In a royalist, medieval, 2/3 male dorfopolis you might conceivably (pun intended) see male-male homosexual acts tacitly normalized to ease tensions, but lesbianism would by definition be extramarital, and a childless lesbian marriage would almost certainly be an actively enforced taboo. Dwarf lesbians on the front lines of battle doubly so; two dead wombs for the price of one. Might as well salt yourselves and hop in a pot for the orcs' genocidal ease. But of course, for the SJW who shoehorned this in, a couple of unmarried dwarf lads expressing a fondness for each other in the trenches (iffy but at least arguable) wouldn't go nearly far enough. Had to make a show of strength by vandalizing the source material as much as possible.

Naturally, running a mission with one of the lasses, you find her as idealized as you'd expect, dashing ahead of you to solo everything, explicitly stating she doesn't like fighting and just wants to feel useful and expressing sorrow at having to kill poor innocent bats who've just been trained for evil. Your presence in that mission serves no purpose but to absorb her sanctimony.

 

But the sapphidwarfies are just barely scratching the surface. Back when taking stock of Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire's endlessly reiterated anti-male chauvinism, I noted their main gimmick of juxtaposing good women with bad men in order to drive home (consciously or subliminally) female superiority with every zone, every encounter and every dialogue. Here, three or four years later, we see avid students of that technique at work.

 

There's Hersegg, the young, sparsely-bearded librarian also inexplicably accepted as an experienced explorer and combatant. At least she at one point admits "I was too eager" but a lot more lines have her stuck babysitting an older male scholar Spall, presented as dead weight for being a nerd in a warzone.

There's the dwarf who pissed off his wife by appearing too protective of her. And instead of talking to him about it (you remember communication, that skill supposedly higher in females?) she puts him in the dog-house (gossiping about the problem with Mother Amma instead) until he redeems himself with a present of a show of fireworks.

 

Unjustifiably angry wife = prezzies! Yay equality!

 

Then you've got Elta, who sends you bounty-hunting after beasts with the twist that "I simply name my targets after folks I don't like" and yes of course all three inspirations are male, with the pretexts that they were "lazy to the bone" or "hovered over my shoulder" or had "a very cold personality" - hey, we introduced a female character whose only purpose is killing her male acquaintances in effigy. Cute, right? Adorable. Just like all those times Aragorn's long-lost brother Man-a-born sent you to kill disgusting pigs, slugs and worms named Galadriel, Arwen and Eowyn. Fucking adorable, right?

 

The next one took a slightly longer introduction. First we need to meet a male artisan who's introduced as too greedy and putting on airs for working up his ambition to recover his people's treasured gems and get his name in the history books, and writing convoluted contracts to lock others into servitude. His current servant, one Eskil Bloodthumb, is introduced as a worthless fuck-up -

- and after serving his purpose in feeling dejected and ashamed, instead of learning and growing into his role is immediately replaced with his hypercompetent sister Fastrith, who then starts a romance with one of the Moria dwarves from ten years ago. When debating whether to advance into a dangerous area, he staunchly defends her honor, proclaiming her great ability... and she retorts she might as well come along... otherwise her hapless new beardybeau will dumbly stumble into danger. Answering praise with mockery. Lovely. Definitely not an abusive relationship in the making. And completely different from the guy insulting his wife by (mistakenly) appearing motivated by protectiveness.

Oh, but the brother's not completely forgotten. Fastrith repeatedly quips "Good thing my brother Eskil is not here!" as a catchphrase during a fight. (see below)

Then you've got the two dwarf rogues, Ausma and Muta, who can't seem to go two steps without either being given a heavily scripted mission with more dialogue than half a dozen other characters put together or some other NPC randomly chanting "she is quite clever" or proving themselves superior to males. Note, it's a common trait of Mary Sue characters that the rest of the established cast must suddenly be twisted into helpless idiots or villains to justify Mary Sue's specialness. To the point here, the war hero Nain the Slakeless has to suddenly and inexplicably Rambo into a cave full of orcs by himself, to justify a rescue mission by one of the females, and he ends up shaved as a penalty for his male stupidity. Which stupidity somehow wasn't narratively necessary before females stepped into the picture. For bonus points:

 

Olivorc Twist, everyone. Or maybe Jean Valjorc?

This same mission chain ends with Nain forced to apologize to his orcish informant for mistrusting him and some orcs set up in a cozy little deluxe apartment in a dwarf skyscraper, as a deprived minority getting their due. In a delightfully Freudian slip, we see a glimpse of the dirty little secret behind women's criticism of men. The same quest chain at once tears down and symbolically castrates a respectable male while propping up and idealizing a murderous, ethically incapable replacement, redeeming the most brutal, sadistic, primitive brutes in reach.

No matter how hard you try, you will never be good enough, because what they want isn't "good" but reliably murderous and stupid and easy to manipulate into suicidal aggression. Girls want orc boys.

But if you think they stopped at dwarves, you've got another thing coming. And more things after that. One of Ausma's missions leads you to the game's first female orc NPC:

 

Loknashra... who is of course far better than the males around her (sexist male orc immediately cowers in fear of her) and badmouths her chief with impunity (the menfolk are doing everything wrong, y'see; and she's only stepping in 'for my people' and not for aggression, to prop up her inevitable moral superiority) earning the explicit admiration of the female dwarf for bonus interspecies sisterhood points.

But wait, there's more!

The hill-folk of Angmar make their return, in the conspicuous form of a plucky and inventive young female:

- whose quest chain leads you to confront and kill her evil father. Because of course.

 

But wait... there's more!

What, you thought they'd stop at humanoids?

 

You run across a warg asking you to rescue her pups from evil sorcerors sticking crystals in them for whatever reason. Of course, the same crystal treatment that drives her "mate" rabidly aggressive turns her into a lucid, noble paragon of virtue. How could it be otherwise?!?

I wasn't deliberately recording these from the start and I haven't even finished the damn expansion but I'm willing to bet it'll be more of the same. I'm stopping examples here for the sake of this already over-lengthy post remaining borderline readable, and for exhaustion at trying to track anti-male proselytism on its own moldy turf. See, that's one thing about fanatics: they never have anything new to say. Just as a Christian will answer everything with either "Jesus" or "Satan" a feminist's interpretation of every scenario is preordained by their holinesses MacKinnon, Steinem and Dworkin:

"Oh, honourable font of gyno-knowledge, might I borrow a moment of your time?"

"Yes, you filthy pig?"

"Half-dog, actually, but never mind. I was wondering what you think of elves."

"Female elves are better than male elves!"

"Oh! Follow-up question, any opinion on dwarves?"

"Female dwarves are better than male dwarves!"

"What a coincidence. Have you given any thought to librarians?"

"Female librarians are better than male librarians!"

"Interesting. While we're on the topic, what about apprentices?"

"Female apprentices are better than male apprentices!"

"How insightful. And what about hill-folk?"

"Female hill-folk are better than male hill-folk!"

"Curiouser and curiouser. What about orcs then?"

"Female orcs are better than male orcs!"

"Fascinating! Ah, but this might stump you: how do you see wargs?"

"Female wargs are better than male wargs!"

"Wasn't expecting that! Dare one inquire as to your opinion of dragons?"

"Female dragons are KillAllMen! KillAllMen! KillAllMen! KillAllMen! KillAllMen! KillAllMen! KillAllMen! KillAllMen! KillAllMen! KillAllMen! KillAllMen! KillAllMen! KillAllMen! KillAllMen! KillAllMen! KillAllMen! KillAllMen! KillAllMen!!! KillAllMen!!!!!1"

 

But to fully understand their motivation here, you have to remember fundamentalism includes not only monomania but active hostility against outside creativity, especially if it is admired, if it steals admiration away from the hagiography of the one true faith. Sidetrack a bit, for reference, to the iconoclasm of official religions, like christians' destruction of pagan art or conversely muslims' destruction or whitewashing of churches. Recent examples include the Islamic State's attempts to erase all history before themselves. Twenty years before that, younger viewers might not remember the international outrage at the Afghanis' destruction of the Bamiyan Buddha statues in 2001. Even I did not remember, until a recent refresher, that the (tragicomically incompetent, involving... shooting at the statues... with guns) demolition was undertaken for sheer spite, because foreigners has offered to help restore them.

 

This same mindset dominates social justice warriors' revisionist agenda. The harm inflicted against Middle-Earth with every XenArwen and Tauriel and Hollywood-pretty dwarves is not just a bug. It's a feature. Returning to LotRO and its newer writers' competence pay attention to the scintillating banter during one scripted encounter:

Fastrith says, ''If we were to find the stolen stones that made up the mosaic...''
Bróin says, ''...we could restore it!''
Bori says, ''That sounds hard.''
Bori says, ''You are more likely to find the lost Zabad'ibîn, I think.''
Fastrith says, ''Perhaps we will find both! Bróin will help me!''
Bróin says, ''I will!''
Imák says, ''Hmm... do you hear that?''
Imák says, ''There could be more. Do not relax your guard!''
Hobgoblin Prey-catcher says, ''They're in here!''
Imák says, ''There will be more of them. Let's return to the others and prepare!''
Bori says, ''What happened? I heard shouting!''
Imák says, ''Hobgoblins.''
Fastrith says, ''Hobgoblins! How exciting!''
Bróin says, ''How many are there?''
Imák says, ''Does it matter?''
Bróin says, ''Spoken like a Longbeard, Imák!''
Imák says, ''Hmmph.''
Bori says, ''Here they come!''
Bróin says, ''I will fight, if I must!''
Fastrith says, ''Good thing my brother Eskil is not here!''
Hobgoblin Prey-catcher says, ''Take this!''
Fastrith says, ''Good thing my brother Eskil is not here!''
Bróin says, ''Fastrith, are you all right?''

Does any of that sound like Middle-Earth to you? I think the "that sounds hard" coming out of the mouth of a canonically perseverent race is what truly gets me.

*Sigh*

No, Broin, Fastrith is very much not all right. She's a product of hijackers far more interested in giving all new characters B-movie gypsy fortuneteller accents than trying to adapt their dialogue to Tolkien's general style. Other scenes echo even more generic children's cartoon one-liners like "you won't get away with this" or "you underestimate us" or "you've bitten off more than you can chew" and even the dreaded "drat" until you start to realize the fanaticism is a smokescreen. This petty, infantile abuse is as much born of incompetence as it is of brainwashing. Directly mirroring the devaluation of the elves themselves in recent decades, those attempting to adapt good authors must feel a desperate need to vandalize. Faced with superior intellect, creativity, talent, they hunger only to deface, defame, destroy, for how well the other's ability reflects their own inability back at them... and feminism makes as good a pretext as any. A pretext and shield from warranted criticism, because as I noted with regard to both Deadfire and Wasteland 3, "Fanaticism is, among other things, a refuge for the incompetent. [...] unskilled hacks shielding themselves from criticism behind the unbending bulwark of constantly repeated politically correct mantras. My crap promotes people of the correct skin color or sex, so if you call my crap crap then you're a sexist, racist, child-molesting nazi pig."

 

It's not as if LotRO had not demonstrated, in its long years Online, that it is possible to insert new characters, including female ones, into the narrative while respecting Tolkien's original style and framework and even building upon it. Anyone remember Ellen Fremedon?

Aside from the geek cred inherent in her very name, bitter Ellen, in her far shorter appearance than Muta or Amma or Ausma, demonstrated both female leadership and interpersonal conflict stemming directly from the situation in which she and her social rival, Eowyn, find themselves. Conflict against another woman. That happens. Not that you'd know it from feminist iconography pitting the valiant sisterhood always vanquishing those disgusting hairy beasts guilty of all the world's ills - like "lazy to the bone" or "hovered over my shoulder" or had "a very cold personality". Ellen's criticism is both warranted (absent her secret wraith-slaying fate, Eowyn would do far more good as royal representative organizing an eventual exile than as another fresh recruit on the field) and slightly overstated for envy at her rival's higher standing, and your aid leads her to eventually relent enough to cooperate with the warrior princess - a perfectly natural social conflict resolved just as naturally, without the need to degrade either side. In fact, much of the Rohan expansion (though far from brilliantly written (e.g. Thrymm, oy vey)) dealt with the women left behind while the men went to war, the ladies of each fief coordinating defenses, stockpiling for the coming hardships, leading townsfolk to safety, one pining for her husband or father, another cursing him for leaving her, another struggling to fill his shoes or just keeping her mind on more pressing matters, another filling them quite adroitly, or yet another growing into her role independently, quest by quest.

 

I have to wonder, as Standing Stone watch the rejuvenating potential of their gambled freebie content trickle away to nothing, log-in by daily log-in, are they even asking themselves if, among other mistakes, they should've hired better writers? You know, instead of paying some brainwashed imbeciles to spit insults in your customers' faces? More so, to cut the literary branch out from under you with the pretext of the noble cause of spitting insults in your customers' faces? How much salary did you waste on those desperate to use an adaptation in an effort to destroy the original work, when all that's kept you afloat for a decade has been your Tolkien license?

Coincidentally enough, they seem to have posted a Lead Content Designer job about five days ago, just as I got angry enough to start taking notes for this post. Maybe I should apply? Whaddayasay, Fallen Stoners, are ya desperate enough?

'Cause I think you might find yourselves beyond desperation by this point.

Despite my inconsistent commas, action verbing and typos, I do think I've already done better in a page of fan fiction from ten years ago than your current employees in their official contributions. And I didn't need to deliberately shit on Tolkien's corpse to get my amateurish point across.

 

If that's your professional standard, then what the fuck am I <no longer> paying you for?