Virtual Culture Warriors:
The Alt-Right Crusade Against Diversity in The Rings of Power
Here is the abstract I submitted for consideration to the Mid-Atlantic Popular Culture Association’s conference:
This project analyzes the online backlash against minimal attempts by the Amazon series, *The Rings of Power*, to engage with concepts of diversity, equity, and inclusion. The backlash began months before the show aired. In February, 2022, online version of an exclusive photo-spread in *Vanity Fair* was published and the *Rings of Power* Superbowl trailer was uploaded to YouTube. The backlash came primarily from two internet groups that Craig Franson has identified as being described as part of a decades-long pattern of "recurrent global hate mobs . . . targeting new, supermassive, studio productions" as part of their "international, far-right, culture war." Their goal isn't "just fighting to keep Tolkien’s imaginary world white and manly and straight. They’re fighting to restore that white-supremacist system in the real world, too." The two groups, operating in different parts of the internet, are "far-right trolls [and] conservative translators."
I use a corpus linguistics method: I collected the text of periodical articles and comments on the series by writers in the alt-right blogosphere and the text comments on the You-Tube trailer to create two corpora. Using textual analysis programs, I compare the language patterns in the two discourse communities. This method is a type of what Franco Moretti calls "distant reading," as opposed to the close reading of literary studies; rather than explicate the writing choices of individual authors, I look for patterns across the two corpora, using a Key Word in Context (KWIC) analysis. I identify the most frequently used significant words and create concordances for each one. A concordance shows the immediate context, that is, other words appearing next to or close to the key word, and allows me to analyze registers and rhetorical categories.
It builds on earlier work I did on the backlash against the Tolkien Society’s 2021 Seminar on “Tolkien and Diversity.” That was a fairly contained backlash (dying out fairly soon), but the ROP was much larger and went on longer (and, I suspect, will start up again when Season 2 begins, or when the early media coverage begins). Rather than pulling my presentations together for peer-reviewed publication, I have decided to make this work available online, both here in my Substack and in the “Conference Papers” section of the Journal of Tolkien Research.
I have a lot of work related to the other projects that I have to complete, but I figure some of this project can be done in chunks, rather than as one huge sustained post! One of the issues I have to work out is whether or not it’s possible to present quantitative data (tables! with numbers!) on Substack in such a way that it’s readable (which may be why the handouts/tables end up on JTR with the presentations, and I link to them).