HP Lovecraft, JRR Tolkien, and George RR Martin Are All Bad and Not Just For SJW Reasons

It’s become a foregone conclusion in the social justice geek community, that is, the subset of people who like stories about dragons but generally disapprove of decapitating witches and/or various ethnic and sexual minorities that the men who are perhaps the single greatest voices of 20th century fantasy fiction — Howard Lovecraft, John Tolkien, and George Martin — were awful human beings when they were alive and that our culture is likely the poorer because people of color, women, and other marginalized folks were shut out of pulp fiction in favor of these guys. Nevertheless, it’s also true that they were (or are, in Martin’s case) pretty good at certain very specific things.

I’m not here to bury or to praise Martin, Tolkien, or Lovecraft, nor am I here to rip into their racial politics. I’m here to say that the “complex” and “problematic” messaging that Martin and Lovecraft provide is in fact no more sophisticated than the “simplistic” pro-royalty, pseudoChristian propaganda of Tolkien.

There are certain axioms which, if we are to ever have a decent world, we must commit to. Some of these are “SJW” things. Many are simply common sense — and yet an overwhelming number of people refuse to acknowledge them.

Lovecraft is right. The cosmos doesn’t give a shit about us. I say this as a believer, incidentally — my faith not only accepts but in many ways depends on the fact that the Almighty won’t bail me out or punish the unjust.

Lovecraft is wrong. There is no normal, there is no “incorruptible,” implicitly Euro-American proper way to be. People Lovecraft viewed as like him committed some of the worst atrocities in history, and they were usually pretty bad at it too.

Tolkien is wrong. There’s no hero to save the day. No chosen person to ride in and rescue us all.

And Martin is wrong. Martin believes in a world where evil triumphs over good. The truth is that good and evil will never defeat one another, not because they are equal in power or because of some simplistic moral relativism, as Martin would likely say — but because they depend on one another.

The only hope for any of us is to look to the fantasy sagas we grew up with and reject their conclusions, even the deconstructive and cynical ones. No hero will come to save us, but villains can be defeated. Monsters exist. They are horrible and yet some of them have the capacity for decency, and Tolkien is correct that even those without that capacity have some greater role to play.

Your literary fantasy heroes are shit, and that’s a good thing — because honestly, who wants to live in Middle Earth, Westeros, or the Mythos?