The Journal of Fantasy and Fan Cultures, Volume 2 by Journal_of_Fantasy_and_Fan_Cultures

NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

MARTIJN J. LOOS is a young academic based in Tilburg, the Netherlands. His work focuses on the intersections between speculative fiction and continental philosophy, with special interest in the works of H. P. Lovecraft and their afterlives. Loos lectures on literature and political philosophy at University College Tilburg, and spends his free time savoring experimental sci-fi and the local beer culture in equal measures.

S. LEIGH ANN COWAN currently works as an assistant acquisitions editor in the field of academic publishing and is an independent scholar. She holds two degrees in English Literature and Language (BA 2018 and MA 2020), a certificate in publishing (2019), and a degree in Deaf Studies (MA 2022). Deaf herself, Leigh Ann’s research interests lie mostly in representations of deafness in literature, but more broadly she looks critically at discourses of characterization in media. Her past and current projects include social justice work and advocacy for deaf students and literacy, focusing largely on fictional works featuring deaf characters on her blog, “Ranked: Deaf Characters in Fiction (Updated Monthly),” which is hosted on The Modcast—Accessibility, Literature, and Mustachios. Her previous publications include: “More or Less Hearing: Representations of Deafness in Marvel Comics,” International Journal of Comic Art, vol. 24 no. 1 (2022), “One and One-Half Friends: A Laingian Approach to Katherine Paterson’s Bridge to Terabithia,” New Literaria, vol. 3 no. 2 (2022), and “A Proper Amount of Illness: A FeministMarxist Approach to Nellie Bly’s Ten Days in a Mad-House,” Feminist Spaces, vol. 4 no. 1 (2021).

EMMA BAER-SIMON is a second year MA student, progressing on to the PhD in English Literature at Penn State University. Her primary area of research is in Middle English literature, with a focus on the rhetorics of antisemitism in medieval literature and culture, and its reception in the fantasy genre. She is currently doing work on allegorizing the Holocaust in fantasy and how it has worked with medievalism to contribute to Holocaust revisionism and antisemitism. She is an involved participant in fandom spaces, through the dissemination of both creative and educational fan-content that encourages Jewish resistance in the face of antisemitism, both from the canon material and in fandom responses. BaerSimon is currently working on fanfiction that attempts to rectify some of the antisemitic issues in Attack on Titan, as well as frequently engaging with the fan community online by making informational videos and creating accessible bibliographies. She hopes to continue encouraging awareness of antisemitism, and the role that medievalism has played in its prevalence, both within academia and in fantasy and fandom culture.

ALLY ZLATAR holds a BFA in Visual Art & Art History from Queen’s University & an MLitt in Curatorial Practice and Contemporary Art from the Glasgow School of Art. Her Doctorate of Creative Arts is with the University of Southern Queensland, and she is focusing on embodied experiences of eating disorders in contemporary art. Zlatar is a Lecturer at the University of Glasgow, teaching Arts Research Methodologies. She also has taught at KICL London and the University of Essex. Zlatar also is a leader in art-activism. She was the winner of The Princess Diana Legacy Award 2021, on the 50 Women ESG Leaders 2022 list, a Y20 Award Finalist for Diversity and Inclusion (Youth 20 by G20 Summit), and also received special recognition from The British Citizen Award 2022 for her humanitarian work.

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AFFIRMATIVE LOVECRAFT FANDOM: BEYOND DISAVOWAL AND APOLOGISM AS APPROACHES TO LOVECRAFT’S RACISM

Martijn J. Loos

INTRODUCTION

The reception of H. P. Lovecraft’s (1890-1937) output, both fictional and non-fictional, has seen a remarkable trajectory. Not having been able to make a living from his writing, he died in poverty, his work regarded as pulp. Yet after his death his fame spread by way of the ‘Cthulhu Mythos’: the shared fictional universe of Lovecraft’s creation, to which other authors contribute to this day. The Mythos turned into a widespread fandom, and it meant the endurance of Lovecraft’s tropes, themes, fictional locales, and fictional entities. Lovecraft’s friend and collaborator August Derleth was instrumental in spreading the Mythos, both through his own work and by establishing Arkham House with Donald Wandrei in 1939, which was originally designed solely to conserve Lovecraft’s work as hardcovers. Arkham House publishes Mythos tales to this day, from pastiches to parodies.

The influence of fan activity in Lovecraft’s reception cannot be underestimated. Early literary criticism, emerging shortly after Lovecraft’s death, was mostly contained to amateur circles who were also confessed fans of Lovecraft’s work. This criticism included the likes of Fritz Leiber, George T. Wetzel, and Matthew H. Onderdonk, most of whom knew Lovecraft in life (Joshi, Dreamer 391). Through consistent fan effort, Lovecraft finally came to academic attention in the 1970s. The cultural fandom of Lovecraft was faster to develop. The Mythos was essential to this: practically any fan could write their own story within the larger universe. This practice continues to this day, centered around fan conventions like NecronomiCon, first held in 2013, and fan-based publishers of Mythos works, such as Arkham House and Crypt of Cthulhu.

Although it has been claimed that Lovecraft’s inclusion into the Library of America in 2005 meant he entered the American literary canon (Joshi, “Charles Baxter”; Sperling), not all is well in Lovecraft fandom. On the contrary, his reception is very polarized, a debate reflected in the fandom at large (Sederholm and Weinstock 25-33). What causes this polarized and contested, yet flourishing, reception of Lovecraft’s now-widespread legacy and inheritance? And what is at stake in discussing, interpreting, and contesting his work and life? Is there a need to add to the pile of opinions already formed on the matter? After all, “while serious fans and Lovecraft nerds still energetically debate his ‘real’ meaning, the media life of Cthulhu proceeds largely outside of their (or the author’s) control” (Lewis). I argue that two elements of Lovecraft’s legacy are largely responsible for his polarized fandom: the collaborative nature of the Cthulhu Mythos, and the racism and xenophobia underlying Lovecraft’s work. That last element has become increasingly important in popular and critical discussions of Lovecraft (Sederholm and Weinstock 25-8), yet the discussion is often sophistical and uncritical in nature. That is not to disregard other elements of his work that are influential and a rich ground for analysis and

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interpretation—most notably Lovecraft’s philosophical underpinnings—but the Mythos and Lovecraft’s racism are two elements which constitute an intersection that, I maintain, needs additional critical attention.

These two elements and the recent upsurge in Lovecraft’s popularity inform each other: Lovecraft’s immense popular appeal and widespread fandom warrants a critical approach to his legacy of racism. If writing in the Mythos, and the reading and analysis of Lovecraft are “site[s] of disputes about history, politics, and affect,” where we “advance claims about how we should understand both texts and also the social world” (Claverie 81), then scholarship has a stake in Lovecraft’s reception if it wishes to expand its understanding of the world and advance candid critical interpretations of it. If fiction “can inform the civic imagination through vigorous discussions about fictional representations” (Saler 52), then scholarship must surely not lag behind in formulating an approach to such a contested fictional legacy as Lovecraft’s. Additionally, because racism is inherent in Lovecraft’s work (Gray; Baxter; Joshi, Magick 162; Paz 3-4), anyone in the fandom who writes in the Cthulhu Mythos—privately, published, or somewhere in between—will have to deal with Lovecraft’s awful side due to the collaborative nature of the Mythos. As such, these intersections raise questions on how to deal with “non-innocent, non-pure histories” (Schneider 162); with a literarily and philosophically influential legacy marred by racism, elitism, classism, and antisemitism. Any continued work in the Cthulhu Mythos or other strands of Lovecraft fandom will hence have to make conscious choices about how to deal the entirety of Lovecraft’s legacy, warts and all.

But that is not what happens. On the contrary, two approaches to Lovecraft’s legacy of racism dominate fandom.1 The first is what I call disavowal, in which the entirety of Lovecraft—the man, his fiction, his epistolary and essayistic output, and, sometimes, the fandom surrounding him, including the Mythos—are disavowed because of his racism. The second is apologism, in which Lovecraft’s racism is acknowledged, but softened or justified by a variety of tactics.

I maintain that both approaches are fundamentally flawed and are an obstacle for Lovecraft fandom to flourish in this day and age. I will first discuss Lovecraft’s racism, and how it is evident in his fiction. Following this is a discussion of first the disavowal, then the apologism approach, including an outline of the essential problems they lead to. Then I will consider the WFA trophy controversy of 2015 as a case study showcasing how both approaches function in practice, and how analyzing the controversy simultaneously highlights these approaches’ bankruptcy. But the WFA trophy also demonstrates an alternative way forward, an approach that affirms Lovecraft’s racism first, and then works from there.

This alternative approach is, perhaps unsurprisingly, fan-driven. Some writers in the Mythos, most of them self-proclaimed Lovecraft fans, started to write what has been dubbed “post-Lovecraftian” fiction (Phipps).2 These works are set in the Mythos, but they first acknowledge, and then subvert and deconstruct Lovecraft’s racism. Scholarship is lagging behind fandom in utilizing this approach,3 which is where I wish to make my intervention. By identifying and naming the most common yet bankrupt approaches to Lovecraft’s racism, I signal the need for an alternative approach. I maintain that fandom should look at post-Lovecraftian fiction—and not to disavowal or apologism—in its approach to Lovecraft’s literary legacy; this alternate way I call ‘affirmative’ in regard to Lovecraft’s racism. Only by embracing this approach can the fandom become sustainable and bridge the impasse caused by its current polarized status.

LOVECRAFT’S LEGACY OF RACISM

Lovecraft’s racism is well-documented, both in his fiction and in his personal communications and essays. Whether he also held misogynist (Baxter; Joshi, “Paula Guran”) and homophobic (Joshi, Magick 37) views, or not, is still debated. Lovecraft’s racial hatred was primarily directed towards black people. He argued for a strong color line until his death and railed against intermarriage between

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black and white people, which would lead to “miscegenation” (Joshi, Dreamer 358). He claimed “racial mixture” would “lower the result” of a nation (Lovecraft, Selected Letters 1:17). Yet his racism was not limited to black people alone: he also abhorred Indigenous Australians, Irish, German, Polish, and Italian people; generally, anyone of non-WASP descent (Steiner 55). He backed this up with an appeal to scientific racism: “science shows the infinite superiority of the Teutonic Aryan over all others” (Selected Letters 1:17).

His racism extended to antisemitism. In a letter to Rheinhart Kleiner, Lovecraft recalls his first exposure to Jewish people when he went to high school in 1904: It was there that I formed my ineradicable aversion to the Semitic race. The Jews were brilliant in their classes—calculatingly & schemingly brilliant—but their ideals were sordid & their manners coarse. I became rather well known as an anti-Semitic before I had been at Hope Street many days. (Lovecraft, Letters to Kleiner 74-5)

Although Lovecraft spouted slogans such as “oppressive as it seems, the Jew must be muzzled” (Letters to Kleiner 19) in 1915, four years later he would meet his first Jewish friend, Samuel Loveman. He endorsed Loveman in the amateur journalism movement, noting how “Jew or not, I am rather proud to be his sponsor for the second advent of the Association. His poetical gifts are of the highest order, & I doubt if the amateur world can boast his superior” (119). He later also befriended the Jewish Robert Bloch and Kenneth Sterling. Yet most perplexing is perhaps his two-year marriage to Sonia Davis Greene in 1924, a Jewish businesswoman, a marriage to which I will return shortly.

This racism and antisemitism consequently led to some rather deplorable political associations. Lovecraft infamously called the Ku Klux Klan “that noble but much maligned band of Southerners” (Collected Essays 1:56), although later in life he repudiated the KKK (Joshi, Dreamer 98). A similar trend can be observed in his endorsement of Nazism: in a 1933 letter to J. Vernon Shea he stressed “a great & pressing need behind every one of the major planks of Hitlerism—racial-cultural continuity, conservative cultural ideals, & an escape from the absurdities to Versailles,” concluding “I know he [Hitler] is a clown, but by God, I like the boy!” (Selected Letters 4:257). As with the KKK, there is evidence his admiration for Hitler also dissipated later in life when Nazism’s excesses became better known (Joshi, Dreamer 359), but that does not mean that his views are any less reprehensible.

Leading Lovecraft scholar S. T. Joshi has ascribed this apparent ‘softening’ of Lovecraft’s xenophobic views to a shift in ideology (Magick 22, 162). Although the young Lovecraft saw biology as basis for his views, this later shifted to an ideology in which “it is culture rather than blood” that is the determinant (Joshi, Dreamer 361). This also explains his later Jewish friends, and marriage to Greene: he regarded them as well-assimilated, and hence culturally Aryan (221). Greene recalls in her memoir that “H.P. assured me that he was quite ‘cured’; that since I was so well assimilated into the American way of life and the American scene he felt sure our marriage would be a success” (Davis 26). Therefore, in Lovecraft’s eyes, Greene “no longer belonged to these mongrels” (368). Yet this belief was not consistently held, as evidenced by Lovecraft’s later begrudging respect for the Orthodox Jewish community in New York City:

Here exist assorted Jews in the absolutely unassimilated state, with their ancestral beards, skull-caps, and general costumes—which make them very pictureseque [sic], and not nearly so offensive as the strident, pushing Jews who affect clean shaves and American dress. (Lovecraft, Letters from NY 74)

Hence claims concerning the softening of his ideology should be met with caution, and neither should Lovecraft’s racism be oversimplified: it does appear that cultural, not biological, matters seem to preoccupy him most in the latter part of his life, but that does not necessarily lead to a consistent worldview which can be schematically laid out for critique. Furthermore, no matter to what degree

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this softening of his views—a shift from ‘biological’ to ‘cultural’ racism or his racialized admiration for ‘unassimilation’ evidenced in his admiration for Orthodox Jewish people in NYC—were consistent and/ or true, they remain extremely noxious ideas. They all remain fundamentally racist ideas, revolving around an extremely bigoted racialized view of the world, and as such these potential nuances do not exculpate Lovecraft.

These views, including their gradual shift, found a way into Lovecraft’s fiction (Joshi, Dreamer 357; Paz 3-4; Baxter). The absolute bottom is his early (1912) poem “On the Creation of N-----s,”⁴ which showcases his biological racism by likening black people to “semi-humans,” created to “fill the gap” between man and animal (“On the Creation”). Herbert West—Reanimator (1922) describes its lone black character as “a loathsome, gorilla-like thing, with abnormally long arms which I could not help but call fore-legs” (44). “The Horror at Red Hook” (1927) describes New York City’s multicultural Red Hook neighborhood as “a maze of hybrid squalor,” from which “the blasphemies of a hundred dialects assail the sky.” (150-151). “He” (1926) is a lesser-known tale dealing with the same subject matter but written from the first person. The true horror in the ghost-written “Medusa’s Coil” (1939) is not the fact that the Medusa of the title, Marceline, has a “hateful crinky coil of serpent-hair,” but instead that “though in deceitfully sleight proportion, Marceline was a negress” (68). In Lovecraft’s fiction, having black ancestry is a worse offense than being a mythological monster. The also ghostwritten novella The Mound (1940) features a non-ironic scene of unabashed craniometry (237), showcasing Lovecraft’s belief that his racism was scientifically confirmed (Paz 3-6). The three robbers who meet a gruesome end at the hands of the eponymous “The Terrible Old Man” (1921) happen to be named Angelo Ricci, Joe Czanek, and Manuel Silva, thus representing Italian, Polish and Portuguese immigrants. These three nationalities, in turn, were the three leading minorities in Providence, Rhode Island, Lovecraft’s hometown (Joshi, Magick 77-8).

This blatant racism, both in Lovecraft’s personal life as in his fiction, warrants a considered approach if we wish to establish a healthy fandom and academic practice that does not perpetuate and reproduce said racist violence. The most commonly seen approaches—disavowal and apologism—have problems specific to them but share the common predicament that they dance around the issue at stake. Both do not deal with Lovecraft’s racism as it is; they refuse to affirm its existence as being there first and foremost. As a consequence, the issue is not dealt with at all, leading to various nefarious consequences.

DISAVOWAL

When anti-racist and feminist thinking—or strands of fandom heavily influenced by them— encounter Lovecraft’s racism, an often-seen reaction is disavowal. That is, because of the non-innocent part of Lovecraft’s legacy, because of his racism, the entirety of his legacy is brusquely set aside. Disavowal refuses to engage with any part of Lovecraft, because of the parts that are tainted. I do not wish to argue that there is no merit in such a maneuver at all; the disavowal of xenophobia and bigotry is a necessary and laudable course of action.⁵ There is also no logical flaw in anti-racism being diametrically opposed to a man who espoused his virulent racism often and openly, both in his fiction and in his personal life. But not all is always as it seems, and I maintain Lovecraft fandom specifically cannot permit itself such unnuanced grand gestures if it wishes to have a sustainable future. At risk are critical finesse, in addition to leaving the playing field wide open to others.

The cultural blogosphere is particularly critical of Lovecraft because of his racist legacy, and as such it is the first place to analyze when discussing the disavowal approach. The central rhetoric is clear: “it’s too late to redeem Lovecraft” (Contreras). Lovecraft’s cross-medial influence is attested and immediately disavowed in calls to stop invoking the Mythos in video games (Greer). This commonly takes an activistic turn, exemplified by the petition against the continued use of Lovecraft’s likeness for the WFA trophy (Older), which I will return to later. It also often takes the form of calls to ‘cancel’ Lovecraft (Gault; Bal; Contreras; Coulombe), which is perhaps the most preeminent expression of the disavowal approach: Lovecraft’s literary legacy is built on racism, and hence the entire man must go.

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Both non-scholarly and academic disavowal throw the baby out with the bathwater. In the former case there is nothing left to talk about, and in the latter case it is decidedly unacademic in its fervor. As mentioned above, this approach is uncritical and uncandid, two denominators a fandom surrounding a racist figure cannot permit itself. And although a complete disavowal of virulent xenophobia is laudable in itself, the critical silence that follows after leads to another problem: the (re)signification of Lovecraft’s legacy is left to other parties with less innocent agendas. Various apologisms can fill the void, including the man of his time defense, to which I will return in detail. Hence disavowal’s primary problem is that it itself is uncandid and uncritical; its secondary problem lays in what comes after.

Although an alternate approach to Lovecraft’s legacy can learn from the disavowal approach’s relentless opposition to racism, it can learn as much from disavowal’s flaws. The first is not to lose critical finesse by making gestures that are too grand, be they laudable or not. Secondly, it must not refuse to deal with matters, unsavory or not, lest they be dealt with by others in ways that are inimical to the greater task at hand: to critically and candidly grapple with a non-innocent racist legacy which is too pervasive and influential to ignore.

APOLOGISM

Like disavowal, the apologism approach first acknowledges that Lovecraft’s legacy has racist underpinnings. But the similarities end after that initial step: whereas disavowal wishes to do away with all of Lovecraft, apologism wishes to keep Lovecraft close. To be able to do so, his racism will have to be deflected or somehow explained away, which can take many forms.⁶ The most commonly occurring apologisms are: the ‘man of his time’ defense, comparisons to other authors with non-innocent legacies, and insisting on Lovecraft being a cultural—rather than biological—racist. I will shortly return to these different strategies in order.

These apologisms are most often seen in Lovecraft fandom and in what I call ‘classical’ Lovecraft scholarship.⁷ Since the WFA controversy, Lovecraft fandom has felt a larger need to defend its object from accusations of racism (Saler 52), because if the object of fandom is discredited, the fandom itself can be perceived as being unjustified. What these two groups of proponents—fandom and scholars—appear to share is a feeling of being under attack, because a bad Lovecraft would reflect badly on them. If Lovecraft were to be condemned as a racist and antisemite, it could seem logical for third parties to assume that his fans and scholars share these prejudices (Walter). To prevent that, an attempt at apologizing for Lovecraft is mobilized, because a successful apology would justify Lovecraft as an object for both fandom and scholarly interest.

The prime apologism is what weird fiction scholar Ezra Claverie dubs the “man of his time defense” (8). It is unassuming in its main proposition: ‘yes, Lovecraft was a racist, but everyone was back then.’ This reasoning is used over the board, from academic criticism (Newitz 97; Lovett-Graff 175; Joshi, Magick 41-3) to fandom (Stevenson “Keep the beloved”; Claverie 86-9), and keeps returning in classical Lovecraft scholarship (De Camp 275; Joshi, Dreamer 358-60). Yet, as mentioned before, this is historically incorrect: although it is true that Lovecraft grew up in a time dubbed “the nadir of American race relations” (Logan xxi), he went above and beyond what was considered normal for the time. Hence the man of his time defense either sketches a false image of Lovecraft’s convictions or claims that the average American ‘of his time’ was virulently racist. Both are wrong. As for the former, Lovecraft himself was keenly aware of the fact that his views were not average, noting in a 1924 letter to his aunt Lillian Clark not to “fancy that my nervous reaction against alien N.Y. types takes the form of conversation likely to offend any individual. One knows when and where to discuss questions with a social or ethnic cast” (qtd. in De Camp 256). As for the latter, one can hardly state that the average American regarded—for example—New York City’s Chinatown as “a bastard mess of stewing mongrel flesh without intellect,” hoping that “a kindly gust of cyanogen could asphyxiate the whole gigantic abortion” (Lovecraft, Selected Letters 1:181).

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A slightly more nuanced, but likewise false, variation on the man of his time defense is the assertion that it was specifically Lovecraft’s family and social surroundings that were virulently racist (Joshi, “Racism and Recognition” 24). Lovecraft was brought up in an affluent New England WASP family, and the apologism states that therefore Lovecraft simply couldn’t help his racism. Historical evidence for this is likewise scant, and there are no surviving sources of Lovecraft’s family being exuberantly xenophobic (Steiner 54-5). It also seems to disregard Lovecraft’s extensive traveling across the eastern United States and Canada, and his time living in multicultural New York City from 1924 to 1926. In fact, man of his time reasoning disregards and trivializes the anti-racist movements of the time, including the writings of Lovecraft’s friend and correspondent James F. Morton (1870–1941), who actively advocated for racial equality. It also erases Lovecraft himself, as if he had no choice in his racism, which makes the defense all the more ironic when it is used in tandem with the earlier discussed claim that later in life Lovecraft ‘softened’ his xenophobic views. Hence the man of his time defense amounts to an attempt at revising the past, which has consequences ranging from the undesirable to the disastrous.

Comparing Lovecraft’s non-innocent legacy to those of other authors who were also shown to hold noxious views is a rather blatant deflection which refuses to deal with the issue at hand. Joshi, a consummate apologist, provides a good example: he singles out Bram Stoker (“Once More”), Raymond Chandler (“Reply to Baxter”), Edgar Allen Poe, H. G. Wells, Jack London, Robert E. Howard, Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, and George Orwell as authors who are “given a pass for their deviations of current sociopolitical orthodoxy” (“Racism and Recognition” 27). That is, the apologism goes, Lovecraft is singled out for his various -isms, whereas many others are not. This deflection implicitly overlaps with the man of his time defense, and its primary faults are the same. It attempts a revision of the past and does nothing to address the issue at stake: Lovecraft was a virulent racist. It also oversimplifies a hugely complicated matter on multiple levels: it not only flattens the mentioned authors’ viewpoints into a single assertion on their racism, but it also claims that contemporary discourse does not engage with their non-innocent legacies. Both are false.

I briefly treated apologizing Lovecraft’s racism on the grounds that he was a cultural rather than biological racist earlier. It mostly shows up in scholarship (Joshi, Magick 22, 162; Steiner 54) and alt-right discourse which uses this defense to justify their own calls for establishing a white ethnostate (Bimmler; Pechorin). It claims that Lovecraft’s racism shifted from being race-based to it being allegedly culturebased. I can be short on its faults: speaking from ‘within’ the defense, whether it is biological or cultural, racism is still deplorable and hence this defense does nothing to address the issue at stake. Addressing the defense from ‘outside’ of the argument, an easy separation between biological and cultural racism cannot easily be made (Saler 52), and hence the defense rests on a shaky foundation.

All forms of apologism share a haste to do away with Lovecraft’s racism so as to get faster to ‘the things that really matter’; be they Lovecraft’s fiction, his philosophical thought, or his life. This is exactly where the apologism approach’s biggest flaw resides: by focusing on an alleged more important thing behind the racism, the actual racism itself is not dealt with, and remains an open wound. From this impasse other problems arise—the wound is left to fester—as apologism then opens the way for revision of the past and a lack of criticality. As such, apologism’s commendable initial step—acknowledging Lovecraft’s racism—feels empty in retrospect: the racism is swept under the rug or otherwise deflected, with all the problems that brings.

THE BANKRUPTCY OF DISAVOWAL AND APOLOGISM

The man of his time defense opens the door for those with more nefarious agendas than the average apologist. Claverie has shown how “the man of his time” defense has become a bulwark for subsuming and justifying white nationalist talking points via Lovecraft’s works and legacy (92). In this capacity, a white nationalist “secondary fandom” (80) of Lovecraft takes Lovecraft’s legacy of racism not as something to be disavowed or apologized; but takes it as the main attraction to Lovecraft. Much of it takes

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place on website comment sections, niche magazines such as Instauration (Claverie 93-4), discussion/ imageboards such as 4chan and Stormfront (“most red pilled”; Bimmler), alt-right meme culture (see fig. 1), Facebook comments (Claverie 86-7), and white nationalist ‘race realist’ blogs (Pechorin; “Cosmic Horror”). Lovecraft’s inclusion in the recommended reading list of the American National Socialist White People Party, which claims that “Lovecraft was one of us, all right!” (Covington) is emblematic of this. By presenting Lovecraft as typical for his time, white nationalists can advance an image of the past in which racism was the norm, which means that contemporary anti-racist discourse is “an unjust and oppressive departure from the norms of an idyllic racist past” (Claverie 92).

This revision of the past opens the way to speculating on and advancing white nationalist claims in the present: “reactionary and White Nationalist fans [of Lovecraft] have a stake in (mis) remembering American history and re-narrating it to make White supremacy a normative, unstigmatized position, because if it was so in the past, it could be so again.” (101). This means that Lovecraft has been enthusiastically embraced by some white nationalists as a herald of their views and convenient disseminator of their agenda:

Lovecraft’s ever increasing [sic] influence in the artistic community, coupled with the eloquence and logic with which he is able to articulate positions that the PC world may find distasteful, make him, in my opinion, an ideal instrument for disseminating WN ideas. (Bimmler)

The capability of the man of his time defense to advance white nationalist agenda unquestionably demonstrates its bankruptcy. The fact that Lovecraft has been adopted in some white nationalist circles emphatically demonstrates the need for an alternate way of grappling with his racism, a way that does not lend itself to revision of the past.

The disavowal approach is also not innocent. By disavowing all of Lovecraft, the playing field is left wide open for others to resignify his legacy. Novelist Silvia Morena-Garcia explains the reaction of people of color when asked to contribute to her Lovecraftian anthology She Walks in Shadows (2015): “some people of color would tell me no, no, Lovecraft was racist, so I can’t write that” (“Writers of Color”). Although laudable in its gesture, it disregards the fact that someone else will “write that,” and 4chan’s /pol/ board shows what form that writing might take (see fig. 1).

These approaches to Lovecraft’s legacy share a common predicament: the real sore point, the issue at stake, Lovecraft’s blatant racism, is not dealt with. Disavowal and apologism dance around the issue in various ways and for various reasons. Yet their result is the same: it opens the door to malicious resignification, such as revision of the past, denying the existence of Lovecraft’s racism, or replacing simplifications with other simplifications. The way forward is then an approach that affirms the issue at stake, no matter how horrible, and from there resignifies Lovecraft’s legacy. We can look at the WFA trophy controversy to see these matters at work.

Fig. 1. Alt-right Lovecraft meme, posted on 4chan, /pol/ board, 1 February 2015.

Note: JFFC editors opted to censor the offensive word in question.

THE WFA TROPHY CONTROVERSY

Consider the controversy surrounding the World Fantasy Award trophy in 2015, a watershed moment in Lovecraftiana. Its significance is due to two main reasons: first, it dragged the debate on

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Lovecraft’s racism from limited discussions in scholarship into the online limelight; and second, it foreshadowed—and perhaps, partly caused—the first wave of post-Lovecraftian Mythos fiction (Saler 52). From the award’s inception in 1975 through 2015, its trophy was a caricature of Lovecraft by artist Gahan Wilson, nicknamed ‘The Howard’ (see fig. 2). Presaging the controversy were writer Nnedi Okorafor’s musings on being awarded with the bust of a racist man in 2011 for her novel Who Fears Death (2010). She asked on Facebook (“A friend of mine”) and her blog (“Lovecraft’s racism”) what to do with her prize after a friend of hers had shown her Lovecraft’s “On the Creation of N-----s,” making her aware of Lovecraft’s non-innocent legacy:

Anyway, a statuette of this racist man’s head is in my home. A statuette of this racist man’s head is one of my greatest honors as a writer. A statuette of this racist man’s head sits beside my Wole Soyinka Prize for Literature in Africa and my Carl Brandon Society Parallax Award (an award given to the best speculative fiction by a person of color). I’m conflicted. (Okorafor, “Lovecraft’s racism”)

Several other writers, including Jeff Vandermeer, Chris Barnes (Okorafor, “A friend of mine”), and China Miéville (Okorafor, “Lovecraft’s racism”) weighed in, and the discussion started rolling.

Three years later, when writer Daniel José Older started a petition in 2014 to change the Howard to a bust of Octavia E. Butler, the controversy really picked up steam. Older’s accompanying statements rubbed many the wrong way: “Many writers have spoken out about their discomfort with winning an award that lauds someone with such hideous opinions, most notably Nnedi Okorafor. It’s time to stop co-signing his bigotry and move sci-fi/fantasy out of the past” (“WFA Statue”). One ‘Steven Stevenson’ launched a counter-petition, claiming the push against Lovecraft’s likeness for the WFA was only “to be PC” (“Keep the beloved”). Editors of Tor.com—a bastion for sci-fi, fantasy, and weird fiction publishing— started weighing in (Schelbach), and the media hopped on the controversy train, too (Maroney; Flood).

The WFA decided to change its trophy from the Howard to a tree in front of a moon in 2015 (Cruz). This led to a reaction by none other than imminent Lovecraft scholar S. T. Joshi,⁸ who called it “craven yielding to the worst sort of political correctness and an explicit acceptance of the crude, ignorant, and tendentious slanders against Lovecraft propagated by a small but noisy band of agitators,” and handed in his own two World Fantasy Awards (Joshi, “The World Fantasy Award”). He weighed in twice more on the matter (“Crusades”; “Once More”), rebuking the WFA’s decision with arguments ranging from pointing out other writers with awards named after them being racists too (“Crusades”), to an elaborate man of his time defense (“Once More”).

Note how Joshi’s arguments are apologetic, using two of the apologist strategies I discussed before. He deflects the actual issue at stake: the WFA trophy was, without a doubt, a bust of a virulently racist man (Flood). However, the ‘other camp,’ exemplified by Daniel José Older, takes the disavowal approach to Lovecraft’s legacy: there is no engagement with the issue at stake at all, only an uncritical complete disavowal of the entirety of Lovecraft because of a contentious issue, employing a simplified understanding of Lovecraft’s racism. As such, the responses to the WFA controversy did not further the argument, nor did they lead to any sort of critical, affirmative way of dealing with Lovecraft. Instead, the WFA changed the bust (see fig. 2) without an accompanying statement—itself a form of dancing around the issue by not addressing it at all—only expanding the rift between both camps. As such, the WFA controversy can be seen as symptomatic of the impasse in Lovecraft fandom, and as demonstrating the bankruptcy of the two most commonly seen approaches to Lovecraft’s legacy of racism.

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As noted at the start of this small case study, not everything was bad about the controversy, however. Going back to 2011, before the discussion was well underway, Okorafor’s tentative conclusion on her feelings regarding the bust are extremely insightful contra the contentious discussion that would follow three years later:

Do I want “The Howard” (the nickname for the World Fantasy Award statuette. Lovecraft’s full name is “Howard Phillips Lovecraft”) replaced with the head of some other great writer? Maybe. Maybe it’s about that time. Maybe not. What I know I want is to face the history of this leg of literature rather than put it aside or bury it. If this is how some of the great minds of speculative fiction felt, then let’s deal with that... as opposed to never mention it or explain it away. If Lovecraft’s likeness and name are to be used in connection to the World Fantasy Award, I think there should be some discourse about what it means to honor a talented racist. (“Lovecraft’s Racism”)

Okorafor expresses a desire for affirmation: facing the issue at stake as it is, and then dealing with it from there. This is starkly opposed to disavowal (she does not want to “never mention it”), or apologism (neither does she want to “explain it away”). Instead, she wishes to “face” Lovecraft’s legacy of racism.

The WFA controversy was a microcosm showcasing the issue at stake: contemporary Lovecraft scholars and critics cannot properly deal with Lovecraft’s legacy, whereas fiction writers—writing in the Mythos being an integral, but specific, part of Lovecraft fandom—have been exploring a possible alternate way ahead. The apologism approach to Lovecraft’s racism was illustrated by Joshi and the like, the disavowal approach by Older. Okorafor expresses the need for an alternate approach: an affirmative one. As such, the WFA trophy controversy was a turning point in Lovecraftiana: historian Michael Saler notes how it “stimulated an efflorescence of new Mythos fictions reflecting these debates” (54). That is, it stimulated post-Lovecraftian fiction, Mythos tales that take an affirmative approach to Lovecraft’s noninnocent legacy.

AFFIRMATION

An affirmative approach to Lovecraft’s legacy of racism can help both Lovecraft fandom and scholarship navigate beyond the current impasse created by the disavowal and apologism approaches. I borrow the term ‘affirmation’ from the postcritical humanities (Braidotti). It entails a critical gesture that “first and foremost, insists that this is what was said or written” (Knittel 175), as opposed to claiming there is something else ‘behind’ the object of attention. In the context of Lovecraft’s racism, it means that the first critical step, be it in fandom or scholarship, should be the affirmation of that racism: a

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Fig. 2. Left, ‘The Howard,’ the World Fantasy Award’s trophy from 1975-2015, designed by Gahan Wilson. Right, the new trophy used since 2016, designed by Vincent Villafranca.

foundational gesture that insists on acknowledging Lovecraft’s racism first and only after that considers interpretation, discussion, and explication.

Using this gesture as an approach to Lovecraft’s racism can borrow the strengths of other approaches yet avoid their pitfalls. One can still radically say ‘no’—like disavowal does—after the initial affirmation of a racist legacy. The difference with disavowal that affirmation happens “in such a way that this ‘no’ keeps us concerned and related to what we refuse” (Thiele 28). This remains a critical gesture, as opposed to wholesale disavowal. Affirmation is akin to apologism in that it acknowledges Lovecraft’s racism, but the key difference lays in that affirmation insists on the bare fact: Lovecraft’s racism as it is Apologism’s revision of the past is enabled by the fluidity it allows towards the bare fact—for example, ‘his racism wasn’t that bad for his time!’—and I have shown what consequences that can have. So contrary to both disavowal and apologism, affirmation can enable “undergoing transformations in such a way as to be able to sustain them and make them work towards growth” (Braidotti 57). That is, by affirming Lovecraft’s racism first and foremost, fandom can then move on to find new and better ways to engage with Lovecraft’s legacy candidly and critically. Turning to post-Lovecraftian fiction can show us how.

Elizabeth Bear’s Shoggoths in Bloom (2008) takes a black professor, Paul Harding, as its protagonist. He faces prejudice in 1930s Maine: “Doctor Harding? Well, huh. Never met a colored professor before” (Bear 180). As reports of the Kristallnacht appear in the newspapers, Harding forms two unlikely bonds. First, over and across barriers of race, Harding befriends a local fisherman named Burt; second, Harding manages to communicate with a shoggoth, a Lovecraftian monster central to Lovecraft’s “At the Mountains of Madness” (1936). At this point in the story, the shoggoth reveals its history as having been created as part of an artificial slave race—created as labor and as weapon—tying Bear’s shoggoth to Lovecraft’s depiction of the Mythos creature. Harding contemplates using the immensely powerful, yet easily controllable, shoggoths to end the stirring war in Europe before it has even started, but ultimately decides against it. As such, Bear connects the titular shoggoths—slaves in Lovecraft’s original—to Harding’s experiences as a black man. By navigating these complex, entangled histories of racism, Bear affirms Lovecraft’s racism yet shows how we can move beyond, without apologizing for or disavowing it.

Ruthanna Emrys’ The Litany of Earth (2014) subverts Lovecraft’s “The Shadow over Innsmouth” (1936) by telling the story from the perspective of a female Deep One, a monstrous antagonist who is a thin stand-in for the racialized other in Lovecraft’s original (Pillsworth and Emrys, “Finding the Other Within”). Emrys’ protagonist, Aphra Marsh, faces the bigotry against Deep Ones evident in “The Shadow over Innsmouth.” Yet this time, we are exposed to the monsters’ inner world and realize the violence at the heart of the issue. Emrys, who comes from a family of Reform Jews and is in a same-sex marriage, notes how her “sympathy was squarely with the interned frog-monsters [the Deep Ones in “The Shadow over Innsmouth”],” because Emrys saw parallels between how they were depicted and negative depictions of Jewish people. As such, The Litany of the Earth was born, which takes the fundamentally affirmative angle of “cosmic horror written from the position of oppression, rather than privilege” (Pillsworth and Emrys, “Taking a Baseball Bat”).

Both works, emblematic of post-Lovecraftian fiction, are the works of fans. Bear examines her own complicated relationship to Lovecraft: “How is it, then, that there’s still so much to admire and inspire in work that is also so uncomfortable, so problematical?” So why does she write in the Mythos in the first place? Because she wants to argue with Lovecraft: “I want to argue with his deterministic view of genetics and morality, his apparent horror of interracial marriage and the resulting influence on the gene pool.” She places this arguing at the heart of her writing: “In a lot of ways, I think that is what literature is about; these ongoing conversations” (“Why We Still Write”). Note how “argu[ing]” is an affirmative gesture, not a disavowal (which would preclude arguing) or apologism (which would explain away what one could also argue about). Emrys voices a similar concern: she notes that Lovecraft’s “creations are rich in wonder and yes, in terror,” but she simultaneously realizes that “I am one of Lovecraft’s monsters,”

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which “shapes [her] reading inescapably” (Pillsworth and Emrys, “Finding the Other Within”).⁹ Both authors chose to grapple with this tension not by disavowing, nor by apologizing for, Lovecraft’s racism. Instead, it is affirmed: taken at face value, acknowledged as being there as it is, and then working from there. The result is beautiful fiction and an example for scholarship and the larger fandom to follow.

CONCLUSION

James Kneale has claimed that “once Lovecraft’s racism is discovered, it is difficult not to read him solely in terms of these fears and hatreds. His pathology represents a critical singularity, from which interpretations struggle to escape” (116-7). This claim points in the right direction, yet it also illustrates some of the sore points in contemporary Lovecraft fandom that I have addressed. First, it is not a matter of discovery; Lovecraft’s racism is conspicuous enough to be noticed immediately. A narrative of “discovering” works hand in hand with narratives of apologism or dismissal. Second, Kneale demonstrates the inability of scholarship and the larger fandom to grapple with Lovecraft’s racism: a critical language of “difficulty” and interpretations “escaping” is a language opposite to one of affirmation; the gesture of acknowledging what there is first. Third, a critical singularity is absolutely necessary in the face of Lovecraft’s ever-increasing ubiquity, but it is not one from which interpretations struggle to escape. On the contrary, interpretations should move closer to the facts—Lovecraft’s legacy of racism—and not further away. Interpretations should include Lovecraft’s racism, but “struggling to escape” from it is not the required critical attitude. Instead, the critical singularity required is one of struggling to acknowledge “his pathology”: an alternative affirmative approach to Lovecraft’s legacy of racism.

Post-Lovecraftian fiction shows what Lovecraft fandom can be. Neither disavowal nor apologism affirm—or, in Bear’s words, “argue”—with Lovecraft’s racism; there’s no actual conversation about how to deal with the non-innocent parts of his legacy. Instead, both approaches dance around the issue at stake, leading to others filling in the gap—with white nationalist discourse as the worst possibility—which forecloses all conversation. I mentioned in the introduction that I hold two elements of the Mythos responsible for Lovecraft’s contemporary ubiquity: its collaborative nature and its racist underpinnings. A specific segment of the contemporary Mythos, post-Lovecraftian fiction, created by fans, shows us how the rest of fandom can follow suit, existing at the intersection of these two elements. Subsequently, Lovecraft scholarship can follow. It must, if it is to remain sustainable. It must, when it comes to a celebrated, but racist, author’s legacy.

It is simultaneously peculiar and not surprising that fandom, not scholarship or criticism, is the pioneering force forging ahead in attempting to find a possible alternate approach to Lovecraft’s legacy. Peculiar, because it showcases a certain lack in Lovecraft scholarship, a certain sense of being hung up on ways of grappling with Lovecraft’s non-innocent legacy of racism which rely on bankrupt approaches. Not surprising, because fandom has often been ahead in matters such as these, as the emergence of postLovecraftian fiction once again shows. It is time to follow suit.

NOTES

1 There are more approaches to Lovecraft’s racism, such as feigned ignorance to its existence or refusing to acknowledge it at all. Nevertheless, these approaches are more niche and not as often seen in fandom. For example, feigned ignorance of Lovecraft’s racism is associated with commercial and/or public enterprises involving Lovecraft’s image, as these enterprises can have a vested interest in not mentioning the deplorable part of Lovecraft’s legacy. Due to these approaches being less common and less associated with fandom, I leave them out of my analysis.

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Martijn J. Loos

2 For example, Sarah Monette’s The Bone Key (2007), Elizabeth Bear’s Shoggoths in Bloom (2008), Ruthanna Emrys’ The Innsmouth Legacy series (2014-2018), the short story collection She Walks in Shadows edited by Silvia Morena-Garcia (2015), Kij Johnson’s The Dream-Quest of Vellit Boe (2016), Victor LaValle’s The Ballad of Black Thom (2016), Nick Mamatas’ I am Providence (2016), Matt Ruff’s well-known Lovecraft Country (2016), turned into a an HBO TV series by Misha Green (2020), and Phipps himself, with his Cthulhu Armageddon (2016) and The Tower of Zhaal (2017).

3 There are some noticeable exceptions in criticism (Kneale; Kumler; Saler) that have caught wind of fiction’s head start in this matter, but they fall short of formulating a unified critical approach.

⁴ I have chosen not to reproduce Lovecraft’s hateful speech. The exception is figure 1, which would lose its meaning if censored.

⁵ On the contrary, I maintain that post-Lovecraftian fiction exists exactly at this intersection of Lovecraft’s racism and anti-racist thinking. The crucial difference, however, is that post-Lovecraftian fiction takes an affirmative approach to Lovecraft’s trouble, whereas disavowal does away with anything Lovecraftian altogether. I return to this difference later on.

⁶ So many forms, that a tongue-in-cheek bingo card containing often-seen apologisms was created (“Lovecraft Apologist Bingo!”).

⁷ Classical Lovecraft scholarship is the longest-established style of Lovecraft scholarship that focuses on biographical, aesthetic, and philosophical criticism. It traces its beginnings back to the 1970s and 1980s (Mosig; Burleson; Joshi). For the last few decades, it has been represented most prominently by independent scholar S. T. Joshi.

⁸ Although my views on Lovecraft’s racism do not align with Joshi’s (cf. Joshi, “Racism and Recognition”), my work, like almost all modern Lovecraft scholarship, is highly indebted to his indefatigable and pioneering biographical work on Lovecraft.

⁹ This comment parallels Nnedi Okorafor’s comments on the subject: “Many of The Elders [i.e. great artists influential to Okorafor] we honor and need to learn from hate or hated us” (2011b). Although Okorafor does not write in the Mythos herself, this shows again that issue is larger than Lovecraft only.

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Loos // 17

BETRAYAL AND REDEMPTION: A COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS OF BOROMIR’S AND EDMUND’S CHARACTER ARCS

S. LEIGH ANN COWAN

Most readers remember characters by their actions—and, sometimes, by a single “identifying” action or trait. This is true of Boromir from J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings: readers most often remember him as the guy who tried to steal the Ring from Frodo. Edmund Pevensie of C.S. Lewis’s The Chronicles of Narnia is treated similarly: he is often identified, halfjokingly, as the kid who sold out his siblings for some candy—not even good candy, at that. While it is true that both Boromir and Edmund do betray those to whom they have obligations, there are many other identifiable actions and traits by which a reader might define them—Boromir’s relentless pursuit of allies against Mordor, for instance, or Edmund’s defeat of the White Witch in battle. Associating a character’s identity with a single action, particularly a negative action like betrayal, reduces that character to a straw man. There have been several academic analyses of Boromir’s betrayal and redemption, but not many of Edmund’s. I can find no articles comparing the two characters’ arcs. Using theories from the fields of social and individual psychology in conjunction with narrative analysis, this paper investigates how Boromir and Edmund’s dispositions and motivations influence their character arcs vis-à-vis the Hero’s Journey. The idea is to show that this one-dimensional identification of characters is insufficient to truly describe these characters, and it underplays the significance of their roles in Tolkien’s and Lewis’s stories. This paper argues that Boromir and Edmund becoming villains—albeit temporary villains— deviates from the Hero’s Journey (as coined by Joseph Campbell), but does not preclude their resuming it.

First, what is the Hero’s Journey? In his work The Hero with a Thousand Faces, Campbell describes a process of becoming. An archetype known as the Hero sets out on a quest, overcomes dangers untold and hardships unnumbered, and eventually returns home with some token of their success, and they are wholly changed. The first stage of this journey is the call, which spurs the Hero forward into the unknown (Campbell 53), where they must survive a succession of trials (89). The goal, of course, is to achieve the object of the quest—for example, Boromir sets out to investigate the meaning of his brother’s dream—and then, ideally, to return home with the trophy in hand. Campbell’s concept of the Hero’s Journey is therefore cyclical: the Hero ought to return to the beginning. However, he does cite exceptions to the rule: Heroes like the Buddha refuse to return home (179). In other words, some Heroes deviate from their Journies. This indicates that any individual who sets off on some quest is entering in a Hero’s Journey narrative, and that whether they return home is less important than whether they succeed in their quest (consider certain death missions, for example).

To illustrate this concept in the context of this paper’s topic, the below graphic contains three arcing arrows. The first in yellow represents the Hero’s Journey as portrayed by Campbell,

TheJournalofFantasyandFanCultures Volume 2, Fall 2022 Pages 18-28

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but here a red arrow interrupts the cycle, off-shooting to form a separate circle. In this graphic I have labeled this interruption as the moment of betrayal, the Hero deviating from the narratively expected path. The second circle can become its own journey, and whether the Hero makes it back to the original track depends on their repentance. In the diagram, the Hero does perform a redemptive act, which brings the betrayal arc to its completion, allowing the Hero to reenter the original Journey narrative. That the attempt to redeem oneself leads back to the moment of the betrayal is significant: the Hero cannot erase the past, and must acknowledge their wrongdoing in order to move forward.

Boromir and Edmund both have no choice but to leave their homes (the Initiation stage). As they find themselves in new territory, they must adapt not only to their surroundings but to other characters with whom they interact—and decide whether they are friends or foes—while navigating perils both physical and spiritual (the Trials and Tribulations of the Hero). Betrayals sidetrack both from their journeys, but they both make the decision to redeem themselves and seek forgiveness in one form or another. After redeeming themselves, both Boromir’s and Edmund’s narrative arcs follow the typical paths of the Hero. Boromir does not complete his journey in that he does not return home, but he does continue his journey in some form: the funeral given to him by Aragorn, Legolas, and Gimli brings his body on towards the sea—the great unknown—as Faramir’s vision portrays. Given that he survives the Battle of Beruna, Edmund, unlike Boromir, does complete his Hero’s Journey, eventually adopting the nomenclature King Edmund the Just and ruling peacefully alongside his siblings. His relationship with Lucy, especially, improves after the events of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.

My purpose here is to discuss Boromir and Edmund’s divergence from and return to the path of the Hero’s Journey. In order to understand the gravity of their actions, both negative and positive, I will delve into social and psychological theories that outline friendship, trust, and the dissolution of these. To answer questions like, “Can we consider Boromir a friend to any of the members of the Fellowship?” or, “Is a nasty sibling like Edmund counted among the Pevensies’ friends?” I will first create a working definition of friendship.

In his Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle describes friendship as a reciprocated feeling of goodwill between two persons. He further classifies three distinctive types of friendship: utility, pleasure, and virtue. Respectively, these are friendships based on achieving a goal or good; friendships founded on exchanging or receiving pleasantries; and—the most desirable form—friendships in which both persons share love and goodwill for the sake of the other’s happiness and health, rather than for any gain or pleasure (although these latter attributes can certainly be present in a virtuous friendship, they are neither the foundation nor the reason for the continuation of that relationship). Aristotle’s thoughts on friendship, for all his examples, are limited in many respects.For example, he does not consider

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reconciliation of friends after an argument, let alone a betrayal, which is a conspicuous oversight on his part. A more inclusive definition of friendship and its attributes allows us to look more closely at this concept of betrayal and how it affects friendships. It is helpful to view friendship as a social construct— thus the meaning and expressions of friendship are subject to social change (for instance, hand holding between male companions is common in the Middle East, whereas the practice became relatively taboo in Western society). Not only that, but friendship as a social construct allows individuals to maintain a stable identity (Demir 25). According to Melikşah Demir:

In friendship the recognition of the Other is not only experienced as a cognitive process for the persons involved in the relationship but primarily as a strong emotional process…It is not only a simple recognition and acceptance of the self but an ongoing identity formation process especially in moments of great difficulty. A friend’s support can involve not only giving advice but offering a new perspective for looking at our self, sometimes being harsh and critical to support a transformation. (26-27)

In other words, because we inevitably must define something by what it is not, even in friendship one must delineate oneself from the Other participating in the relationship. At the same time, one must recognize the individuality of the Other and the fact that in any one of the friendship types as outlined by Aristotle (utility, pleasure, virtue), each friend is reciprocating feelings, actions, and words in a continuous cognitive and emotional process. This process entails that each person should be loyal and empathetic to the Other. Indeed, a study of children’s friendship expectations reveals that these qualities are essential (MacEvoy 105). Certainly, these attributes are important in adult relationships as well.

When one feels that an Other exhibits these qualities of loyalty and empathy, one considers him or her to be trustworthy. More broadly defined, trust is “the expectation of good will in others, [which] can apply to specific persons, such as friends or neighbors” (Glanville 230). This recalls most strongly Aristotle’s definition of virtuous friendship, in which feelings of goodwill towards and for one another are reciprocated for the sake of goodwill itself rather than for utility or pleasure. Demir posits that “the desire to be recognized and accepted produces trust in the [Other] and their capacities and abilities” (27). In other words, trust comes down to believing that one bears goodwill towards the Other and that the Other bears goodwill towards one. Therefore, without trust, there can be no betrayal.

It is clear, then, that both the Fellowship and the Pevensy family harbor a certain amount of trust and goodwill among all of their respective members. It is also clear that both parties were betrayed by one of their own. What this doesn’t answer for is why Boromir and Edmund were in the position to become traitors. What led them to take the actions that they did? Might we find some shared personal attributes in Boromir and Edmund that caused them to betray those around them? Although Boromir and Edmund are very different characters, there has been very little analysis into what environmental, familial, or other personal factors could influence these characters’ motivations and desires. A deep reading of the stories demonstrates striking similarities between Boromir and Edmund in several respects: setting, personal growth, desire, and upbringing.

Gondor and London are very similar environments (the name “Gondor” even looks like a perversion or misreading of “London”) which produce characters very much alike: Boromir and Edmund, as well as Faramir and Lucy. These stone cities, by virtue of their hardness, are also considerably sterile;that is, very little of nature can eke out an existence, an idea especially explored in The Lord of the Rings. In The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, London is only a referenced setting, but one can assume that any natural things struggle in the wake of industrialization and war. In both novels, the fertility of nature is associated with spiritual growth and even happiness: after the wars of Middle Earth and Narnia, Gondor becomes more naturalized by the introduction of vibrant gardens, and the end of Narnia’s ice age brings abundance—and both herald a new order.

The Gondor and London which Boromir and Edmund know are the environments of war;

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nevertheless, they are these characters’ comfort zones. There is a certain predictability in knowing that nowhere is safe, that the Enemy can be around every corner; predictability means being able to adapt oneself to circumstances, which is a form of control. Intensifying, encroaching wars essentially evict both characters from their cities, separating them from all they know—the tall stone walls and buildings which protected them from the outside world, but which also isolated them. This isolation, as becomes clear from Boromir and Edmund’s interactions with strangers in new lands, stunts personal growth, particularly in the area of empathy. Although Boromir understands that other peoples and races are in peril, his primary concern, to the point of desperation, is to bring reinforcements to Gondor and save his own people before any others. Despite Edmund’s knowing that his spitefulness harms others, especially Lucy, he does not empathize with the pain and exasperation he causes, and in fact seems to relish it.

The turning point for both characters, the moments in which they realize empathy, occurs in the wilderness. By journeying out of their homes, the stone cities, and into the wilderness where they meet strangers—possible friends, but also possible foes—both Boromir and Edmund forge new connections, making themselves vulnerable by trusting others to stand by them and support them. In order to have a healthy interpersonal relationship, one must have trust, which is defined as “a confident expectation regarding another’s behavior,” and is “necessary between friends to make sure that confidences are not betrayed; that the friend can expect that his/her friend behaves properly and in line with his/her commitments. Reciprocity is also important in ensuring ongoing, happiness-promoting friendships. Feelings of obligation to friends make a person ‘indebted to the donor, and he remains so until he repays’, thus contributing to the stability of the friendship, or in more extreme cases, to the friendship breaking down” (Demir 26). The internal conflict within Boromir and Edmund seems to be a product of the eras in which they live rather than the sterile stone cities themselves: as wars claim lives of potential friends, perhaps it is best not to have friends at all, in order that one avoids the pain of losing them.

After a long search, Boromir finds himself among friends at Rivendell. Though we are not privy to information regarding whom he met along his initial travels, we can assume that he did not forge strong relationships with anyone, given his distrust of those present at Elrond’s house. Accompanying the Fellowship, Boromir sets out on the quest to keep the Ring out of enemy hands, and though he is not hesitant to disagree with the paths they take, “he does not contest [Aragorn’s] authority as the primary decision-maker of the group” (Beebout 6). Instead, he follows the Fellowship where they will, supporting them physically and emotionally through their trials. For example, though he protested the route through Moria, still he endured the path and even stood by Aragorn’s side against the Balrog when Gandalf ordered them to flee. This illustrates that Boromir is a brave and true captain, and though his ability to empathize with other people is underdeveloped throughout most of the novel, his duty to the Fellowship shines clear through his actions. Indeed, Pippin remembers that he “had liked [Boromir] from the first, admiring the great man’s lordly but kindly manner” (Tolkien 792), indicating that despite his stubbornness and prideful demeanor, he was courteous (with, perhaps, the exception being his treatment of Aragorn).

As the Fellowship endures hardship after hardship in the wild, the travelers grow closer as friends—a phenomenon most noticeable in the development between Legolas and Gimli in Lóthlorien. We see it also between Boromir and the others, except for Frodo, who detects a suspicious change in Boromir’s manner after the Fellowship meets Galadriel (Tolkien 360). It seems Boromir could delay persuading Frodo to hand him the Ring for Gondor’s sake until they reached the city, so Boromir did not consciously entertain any thoughts on the matter until Galadriel showed him his heart. This meeting is perhaps what instigated or awakened the lust for the Ring’s power, especially in close proximity. Miryam Librán-Moreno points out that:

The narrative stresses fairly often that Boromir had already something within him that made him susceptible to the call of the Ring, and that he took his peril with him into Lórien…However, it is no less often repeated that Boromir ﬁrst saw clearly that he desired the Ring when confronted

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with Galadriel’s probing test, and not earlier…Notice that the fulcrum on which Galadriel’s test was based is not an out-and-out character ﬂaw, but an initially positive trait which, once augmented to excess, becomes a vice: just as Athena perverted Ajax’s great sense of honor and pride into irrational shame in order to madden and blind him, the desire for the Ring that Galadriel’s test awoke in Boromir disﬁgured Boromir’s protectiveness and sense of responsibility to his people until it turned into a megalomaniac, self-centered near-despotism. (18)

But it does not feel sufficient to lay the blame of Boromir’s lapse at Galadriel’s feet. This idea of the wilderness as a catalyst for empathy reflects both Boromir and Edmund’s arcs, so it seems more likely than not that it is the environment itself, rather than the people they meet, which has the profoundest influence upon them.

For Boromir, his underdeveloped understanding of Frodo’s burden seems to further deteriorate in Lothlórien, the forest of twilight. Significantly, Tolkien describes this place as fading; it is near the end of its life. As the Fellowship leaves Lothlórien, they travel primarily by river, seldom setting foot on dry land; as a Man from a stone city, this would be an uncommon experience for Boromir, another segment of the journey in which he is out of routine. It is when the group comes ashore and finds themselves in another swathe of trees that Boromir and Frodo are finally alone. Arguably, Boromir has been planning to abduct the Ring since meeting Galadriel, so his mindset is only strengthened as they near the lands of Gondor and it becomes clear that the Fellowship is not rallying behind Boromir’s call to defense. Unable to resist the call of the Ring so near Gondor, Boromir attempts to take it from Frodo; however, he ultimately fails in this attempt. When the presence of the Ring vanishes, he realizes immediately what he has done: he has not only betrayed a friend, not only betrayed his people in Gondor, but also the whole of Middle Earth by jeopardizing the Quest. Though he briefly succumbs to the Ring’s lure, “Boromir realizes his wrong, gives his all to redeem himself, and confesses his wrongdoing, all of which shows a moral strength” (Beebout 1). In the stronghold of Gondor, surrounded by his supporters, it is unlikely Boromir would have failed in taking the Ring.

Unlike his counterpart, Edmund does not find himself in good company in Narnia. Practically the moment he sets foot through the wardrobe, Edmund allows himself to be seduced by Jadis, the White Witch. Although deep down Edmund realizes that the Witch is not true to her word (Lewis 128), he stubbornly clings to the idea that she will confer power and authority on him. The reader can rely only on speculation and on Peter’s admonitions to form an understanding of how Edmund typically behaves. We do learn that Edmund is “beastly” and “spiteful” (130, 135), but these terms may not be entirely credible, as they come from Peter, who is a child himself. Edmund constantly defies the authority of his elder siblings and betrays the trust of Lucy, hacking at the spiritual strings that connect them. Significantly, Edmund is only beastly and spiteful in certain settings in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe: in London, at the professor’s house (which, though it is in the countryside, is still an artificial structure), and in the winterscape of Narnia. Granted, these are the majority of the settings, but the emphasis is again on the journey and the seasons’ changes in connection to Edmund’s character development.

When all of the siblings are together in Narnia, Edmund grows colder towards his siblings, feeling that they are ignoring him. It is as though the longer he is in winter, the icier his heart becomes. Edmund turns his middle-child invisibility to his advantage and sneaks off to the Witch’s palace. The way is inhospitable, but instead of turning back, Edmund forces himself to his destination and receives an audience with the Witch. One might compare this journey to Boromir’s journey to Rivendell—though it is clear they have very different purposes. Even after Edmund tells her the whereabouts of his siblings, the Witch mistreats him and has him bound so that she will have all four of the Sons of Adam and Daughters of Eve under her wand. Along the way to capture the remaining Pevensies, Edmund witnesses what amounts to the murder of a gang of hapless creatures celebrating Christmas, who could have very well have been his own family. This precise moment sparks empathy, and soon enough we see the winterscape melting in tandem with his melting heart. In other words, once the Witch’s power begins to fail and

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Narnia begins to bloom, Edmund’s “beastliness” also melts away and his empathy becomes more fully realized. Arguably, his infatuation with the Witch is completely resolved at the moment she pins him to the tree with the intention of spilling his blood. His redemption, however, does not come until later in the story, after Aslan intercedes on Edmund’s behalf and Narnia is well into the midst of spring. As Jill Ogline writes:

The image of Edmund’s early morning walk with Aslan is one of the most powerful in the series, precisely for the reason that Lewis does not attempt to describe what occurred between the penitent boy and the Righteous Lord. The deepest repentance is a matter between the Lord and the sinner. It is a matter too personal to be shared even with the reader, who by this point has come to view him or herself as a fellow participant in the story. Lewis’s delicate handling of the talk underscores its poignancy. It is enough for the reader to know that it was a talk Edmund remembered all the days of his life and that he was never the same afterward. True repentance is a catalyst for change and Edmund immediately began to reflect more of the image of Aslan and less of his natural self. (51)

Compare this to the repentance scene between Boromir and Aragorn: short and bittersweet, and we are privy to their exchange. This underscores also the different outcomes: for death the reader requires closure, and for life the character is allowed privacy. But if we are truly to compare the redemptions of these characters, we have to consider their sacrifices: they both intend to give up their lives in support of a greater cause.

During the battle between Aslan’s forces and the Witch’s, Edmund attacks the Witch herself and knocks the wand from her hand, in effect defeating her, but not without consequence. The Witch strikes him down immediately afterward, leaving him near death. Here is where Edmund’s character arc diverges from Boromir’s: Edmund survives, thanks to the curative powers of his sister Lucy’s magic potion.

Readers may ask why, when Boromir and Edmund both betray their friends and family, as well as endanger an entire people(s), their “punishments” are not identical. That is, why does Boromir die and Edmund live? The answer lies not in a moral judgment, but in literary decisions: Boromir’s death progresses the narrative in a way it would certainly not have done had he lived. Faramir, who “sees” his brother’s death, has knowledge which Frodo does not, giving him an advantage: seeing that Frodo is genuinely dismayed to hear of the man’s death indicates to Faramir that the hobbit is trustworthy, thus ensuring that Frodo is free to continue the quest. Boromir’s demise also allows Pippin to enter into Denethor’s service, thus ensuring Faramir’s life is eventually saved. Edmund lives so that in Prince Caspian he will be Lucy’s supporter when she claims to have seen Aslan. The Battle of Beruna had already been won when Lucy comes to heal him. If she had not, Edmund would have died, and still it would not have been a statement of morality—only a consequence of circumstances stemming from his redemptive action. Although Edmund’s survival is crucial to Lewis’s idea that repentance is a symbol of rebirth in Christ, this is still not necessarily a moral decision, as The Last Battle demonstrates. So, Boromir’s dying is not a stake on moral judgment, just as Edmund’s living is not a judgment, either: it is a literary device.

Aside from Lewis’s clear allegory that maladaptive children are healed through Christ, one can argue that in order to grow as a character, they must make mistakes. That is why Tolkien’s characters tend to be well-developed and interesting—each of them has flaws, and most of them attempt to rectify their mistakes, or at least to acknowledge them. Kayla Beebout points out that “Boromir’s attack on Frodo causes him to see the true depth of his own flaws, and instead of giving in to them or bemoaning his fate, he takes action to overcome them. Thus, his fall can be seen as the root of his redemption” (6). We can extrapolate this concept to one of Lewis’s most rounded characters, Edmund, who would probably not have become humbled and wise had he not betrayed his own family for a piece of candy.

We’ve discussed, then, how their physical environment and its changes reflect and influence

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characters’ actions and feelings. But this is not the full story, only a piece of it. The objects of temptation in both novels also give deep insight into Boromir’s and Edmund’s motivations and desires. Both the Ring and the Witch can corrupt those who come in contact with them: that is, they dehumanize others. Gollum was once a hobbit, but became, after much exposure to the darkness, a spindly, pitiful creature; the Witch, with her dreaded wand, has the ability to change the living to cold stone. As the potential power of the Ring tempts Boromir, it is the power she promises him which Edmund ultimately finds desirable, rather than the magical Turkish Delight.

Motivation becomes crucial when considering the severity of the fall to temptation. Boromir and Edmund both desire power for nearly the same reason (to rule the land and its peoples), but this desire stems from a different motivation: Boromir wants to protect and serve Gondor, to be a good leader, whereas Edmund wants superiority for the sake of being above judgment, whether he is a good leader or not. In this way, Edmund is very much like the Witch, who loses much of her power after leaving the ruins of her own world, which she destroyed with the Deplorable Word rather than submit to the authority of her sister. The Witch nevertheless regains some power in Narnia, which she casts into perpetual winter after eating of the fruit of eternal life—symbolically analogous to the Turkish Delight which she feeds Edmund.

Essentially, Boromir is not after the Ring for the sake of the power itself: he comes from a place of love, to wield it for good, which is why he does not ultimately succeed in his betrayal—that is, he does not obtain the Ring. As he tries to persuade Frodo to relinquish possession of the Ring, he fabricates grandiose plans to enact as king:

“The Ring would give me power of Command. How I would drive the hosts of Mordor, and all men would flock to my banner!” Boromir strode up and down, speaking ever more loudly. Almost he seemed to have forgotten Frodo, while his talk dwelt on walls and weapons, and the mustering of men; and he drew plans for great alliances and glorious victories to be; and he cast down Mordor, and became himself a mighty king, benevolent and wise. (Tolkien 388-89)

Edmund, however, who does not imagine himself as benevolent and wise, does succeed in betraying his siblings. As he crosses the ice to the Witch’s palace, he warms himself by envisioning his future accomplishments:

“When I’m King of Narnia the first thing I shall do will be to make some decent roads.” And of course that set him off thinking about being a King and all the other things he would do and this cheered him up a good deal. He had just settled in his mind what sort of palace he would have and how many cars and all about his private cinema and where the principal railways would run and what laws he would make against beavers and dams and was putting the finishing touches to some schemes for keeping Peter in his place, when the weather changed. (Lewis 152)

He finds his way to the palace and tells the Witch exactly where to find his siblings. Had it not been for the Beavers’ quick thinking, they would have been caught. Instead of rewarding him, though, the Witch ties him up, signaling that the power (or lust for power—just as Galadriel’s gift of a golden belt foreshadows Boromir’s imminent betrayal (Tolkien 366)) has inescapably taken hold of Edmund until Aslan steps in.

It would be unjust to leave the discussion of motivational differences at that, with Edmund merely making a wicked decision. A factor to consider is the age of the characters: Boromir is a grown man, while Edmund is yet a boy. Life experience can certainly influence decisions; one can’t know that Boromir as a child might not have been Edmund and have fallen for the temptation of the Ring as Edmund fell for the Witch’s wiles. Similarly, one might consider Faramir and Lucy in light of the age difference: Lucy is yet too young to fully understand the war, while Edmund is aware, by virtue both of his age and his sex (in that traditionally, boys learn more about wars in general), that war has sundered him from those he

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loves and divested him of control. While Boromir and Faramir are both adults, we know from Tolkien’s notes that Boromir is “the protector and helper of Faramir” (Beebout 2), even taking on the journey in the wake of the prophetic dream to spare his younger brother the hardship and homesickness. Although age does not necessarily account for disposition of character, it does help to highlight that rational decision-making and critical thinking skills develop as a person grows and learns from their mistakes. An intriguing question: Would King Edmund the Just attempt to take the Ring from Frodo, if he were in Boromir’s position?

Another point worth noting is the formative power of social expectations. Responsibilities placed upon the older sibling can develop certain traits, depending on whether the sibling accepts or rejects the responsibilities and roles thrust upon them by the birth of younger sibling(s). For example, society often rears an older sibling to be a trustworthy and positive role model: Peter epitomizes this ideal, and Aragorn stands in as an appropriate figure (a king to his steward, a feudal chivalrous relationship, is analogous to brotherhood in this context). Boromir and Edmund are more dubious role models—both are entirely human and are subject to the same motivations, fears, and decision-making processes, but also fail expectations by virtue of their respective betrayals.

All these factors—setting, upbringing, personality—combine into a more rounded, interesting character. These factors help to explain the build-up to the moments of betrayal, as well as why Boromir and Edmund seem more likely to have done the things they do. Now is the time to examine the psychological processes that lead to redemptive actions. Why do Boromir and Edmund both feel terrible about their betrayals? More importantly, what about these feelings spurs them to attempt to make things right between themselves and others?

Betrayal, as defined by Peggy A. Hannon, is “the perceived violation of an implicit or explicit relationship-relevant norm;” one experiences betrayal when one believes the other “has knowingly departed from the norms of decency and fairness that are assumed to govern a relationship, thereby causing harm” (254). The keyword in the above definition is “perceived”—this follows from the idea that one’s perception of an Other is virtually always subjective rather than objective, problematizing judgment. Further, if one and an Other are not participating in a relationship in which there are mutual expectations of behavior—if two people are not on the same page about their relationship, that is— then there are no norms from which to depart. In other words, one person may feel betrayed, and the person who is perceived as the traitor may feel their actions were perfectly in line with the expectations of friendship. In the case that both participants in the relationship acknowledge that one has betrayed the Other, one may or may not take actions to redeem themselves. To recognize “one’s wrongdoing and accepting responsibility for it can be a humbling experience. Being humbled, though often painful, may make people more willing to sincerely repent for their actions” (Fisher 128). While this is true, the question remains: why do one’s recognition and acceptance of responsibility for wrongdoing lead to penitential behavior? The general consensus is that feelings of guilt induce a person to seek forgiveness for wrongdoing in order to alleviate the guilty feelings. It is important, however, to outline several distinctions between the various words associated with this consensus, particularly “guilt,” “guilt feeling,” “shame,” and “regret.” The first distinction is between guilt and guilt feeling. Harold H. Mosak writes that “Guilt is objective [as in breaking a moral law]…The guilt feeling, in contrast, is subjective [as in violating ethical convictions of one’s own]” (288-89). This means that it is possible, then, for a person to be guilty without feeling guilty and to feel guilty without being guilty. There is also a subtle but important difference between guilt feeling and shame. Mickie L. Fisher writes that:

Guilt [feeling] focuses on a particular action as being bad or immoral. Because guilt [feeling] centers on the wrongdoing, it often motivates people to repair relationships that have been damaged by offenses. Shame [i.e., self-condemnation], in contrast, focuses on a global sense of the self as bad or immoral. Shame often motivates people to hide their flaws or to lash out defensively against anything (or anyone) seen to threaten the integrity of the self. (129)

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In his research, Mathieu Doucet postulates that “Guilt [feeling] tends to be associated with futuredirected attempts to address previous wrongdoing, such as confessing, apologizing, and making amends, while shame is associated with externalizing blame, defensiveness, and denial” (457), thus strengthening the argument that there is a distinction. These distinctions, along with Mosak’s definitions of guilt and guilt feeling, show that a person who has a guilt feeling does not practice self-condemnation, but rather focuses on a specific action.

Applying these concepts to the focus characters of this research, Boromir from Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings and Edmund from Lewis’s The Chronicles of Narnia, reveals that both characters first feel shame, then experience a spiritual/emotional transformation that allows them to view their actions as wrongful rather than themselves as corrupted. After the realization that he has betrayed Frodo, Boromir “suddenly […] wept. He rose and passed his hand over his eyes, dashing away the tears. ‘What have I said?’ he cried. ‘What have I done? Frodo, Frodo!’ he called. ‘Come back! A madness took me, but it has passed. Come back!’” (Tolkien 390). Rather than call out an apology, Boromir blames the incident on an episode of insanity. Though it may be the case that the Ring caused the behavior, Boromir lacks the self-accountability necessary to perform penitence. Further, when Boromir returns to the camp where the rest of the Fellowship is waiting, he evades Aragorn’s questions by not answering directly (395), exhibiting the denial and defensiveness characteristic of shame. It is clear, however, that Boromir understands that his actions have caused others to suffer. When Aragorn finds him dying after the Orcs’ ambush, Boromir confesses: “I tried to take the Ring from Frodo…I am sorry. I have paid…Farewell, Aragorn! Go to Minas Tirith and save my people! I have failed” (403-04). His final words demonstrate that Boromir has guilt rather than shame; he acknowledges his wrongdoing, accepts responsibility for the consequences of it, and apologizes. Edmund’s behavior, too, is initially indicative of shame. Caught out at having lied in order to discredit Lucy’s claims of discovering a world within the wardrobe, Edmund’s first instinct is to make his siblings pay. This misdirected anger, particularly towards Peter, is suppressed feelings of shame. Edmund acts upon his desire to punish the Other for his own faults and betrays his siblings to the White Witch, but he soon comes to recognize his wrongdoing. As Narnia melts into spring and Aslan intervenes on Edmund’s behalf, Edmund comes to a state of self-awareness in which he can hold himself accountable, thereby allowing him to put aside shame and instead have guilt feelings. He apologizes to each of his siblings in turn, who each forgive him (Lewis 174). When the Witch comes to confront Aslan and points out that Edmund is a traitor, the boy is unperturbed, for “Edmund had got past thinking about himself after all he’d been through and after the talk he’d had [with Aslan] that morning” (175). This demonstrates that he has accepted that he has done wrong, and although nothing can change his past behavior, he can continue forward and attempt to make amends to those whom he hurt.

In the past, scholars have drawn unexamined parallels between Boromir and Saruman or Gollum, and have placed Boromir in opposition to Denethor’s “good” son Faramir (Forest-Hill 77). More recent essays have noted that Boromir’s fall is only partial—not to mention unsuccessful—and in fact he does at least attempt to redeem himself by fighting for the greater good. As Lynn Forest-Hill points out, Boromir’s “‘treachery’ is balanced against the positive effects of his defense of the younger hobbits, which cannot be accounted fruitless just because it has a less immediate effect than merely keeping them from capture” (77). In contrast to Boromir, who throughout the Fellowship is generally noble towards his companions, scholars writing about Edmund are quick to point out his horrid behaviors. Some compare the starkly different characterizations between The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe and Prince Caspian: “In many ways, King Edmund seems like an entirely different person than Edmund Pevensie. In The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe Lewis uses adjectives like sulky, mean, spiteful, and treacherous to describe Edmund. Peter calls him a ‘poisonous little beast,’ a title he certainly deserves. After he decides to let Lucy down and deny that he has seen Narnia, the narrator aptly summarizes his spiritual condition: ‘Edmund…was becoming a nastier person every minute.’ Before his redemption, there’s very little to like or admire about Edmund” (Jordan 73). But these scholars rarely analyze Edmund as an autonomous individual, choosing instead to focus on Aslan’s sacrifice. I hope to have shown with this paper that

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Boromir and Edmund are complex characters with many motivations and desires that influence their actions, whether positive or negative.

In the end, both Boromir and Edmund learn something about themselves: how each defines himself against and interacts with the Other reveals that he is willing to expend the Other in order to accomplish his own desire(s); yet there is a conflicting ideal within him which empathizes with the expended, or betrayed, Other. This ability to experience empathy sparks these characters’ redemptive acts. Redemption is perhaps the most crucial and meaningful act either character could have taken. Both Boromir and Edmund make conscious decisions to make their ways back to the right, moral path. Boromir, outnumbered by orcs, could flee to Minas Tirith, but he does not because the right action is to fight for the hobbits’ lives and freedom; Edmund could stay on the sidelines of the battlefield, but instead he seizes the opportunity to incapacitate the Witch, thus saving Narnian lives. These acts are where their character growth and development shine through. Rather than be remembered for their infamous betrayals, perhaps we should remember them instead for how they redeem themselves, forging their paths back onto the arc of the Hero’s Journey.

S. Leigh Ann Cowan

WORKS CITED

Beebout, Kayla. “”Few Have Gained Such a Victory:” A Defense of Boromir in The Lord of the Rings.” Journal of Tolkien Research, vol. 6, no. 2, 2018, pp. 1-9.

Campbell, Joseph. The Hero with a Thousand Faces. 1949. Princeton UP, 2004.

Demir, Melikşah. Friendship and Happiness: Across the Life-Span and Cultures. Springer, 2015. EBSCOhost

Doucet, Mathieu. “What Is the Link between Regret and Weakness of Will?” Philosophical Psychology, vol. 29, no. 3, Apr. 2016, pp. 448-461. EBSCOhost, doi:10.1080/09515089.2015.1099621.

Fisher, Mickie L., and Julie Juola Exline. “Self-Forgiveness versus Excusing: The Roles of Remorse, Effort, and Acceptance of Responsibility.” Self & Identity, vol. 5, no. 2, Apr. 2006, pp. 127-146. EBSCOhost, doi:10.1080/15298860600586123.

Forest-Hill, Lynn. “Boromir, Byrhtnoth, and Bayard: Finding a Language for Grief in J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings.” Tolkien Studies: An Annual Scholarly Review, Volume V, edited by Michael D. C. Drout, Douglas A. Anderson, and Verlyn Flieger, West Virginia UP, 2008, pp. 73-97.

Glanville, Jennifer L., and Pamela Paxton. “How Do We Learn to Trust? A Confirmatory Tetrad Analysis of the Sources of Generalized Trust.” Social Psychology Quarterly, vol. 70, no. 3, Sept. 2007, pp. 230-242. EBSCOhost.

Hannon, Peggy A., et al. “In the Wake of Betrayal: Amends, Forgiveness, and the Resolution of Betrayal.” Personal Relationships, vol. 17, no. 2, June 2010, pp. 253-278. EBSCOhost, doi:10.1111j.1475-6811.2010.01275.x.

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Jordan, Pamela L. “A Redeemed Life: Edmund Pevensie as an Example of Lewis’s ‘new kind of man.’” Inklings Forever, vol. 6, no. 12, pp. 71-73.

Lewis, C.S. The Chronicles of Narnia. HarperCollins, 2004.

Librán-Moreno, Miryam. “Parallel Lives: The Sons of Denethor and the Sons of Telamon.” Tolkien Studies: An Annual Scholarly Review, Volume II, edited by Michael D. C. Drout, Douglas A. Anderson, and Verlyn Flieger, West Virginia University Press, 2005, pp. 15-52.

MacEvoy, Julie Paquette, and Steven R. Asher. “When Friends Disappoint: Boys’ and Girls’ Responses to Transgressions of Friendship Expectations.” Child Development, vol. 83, no. 1, Jan. 2012, pp. 104-119. EBSCOhost, doi:10.1111/j.1467-8624.2011.01685.x.

Mosak, Harold H. “Guilt, Guilt Feelings, Regret, and Repentance.” Individual Psychology: The Journal of Adlerian Theory, Research & Practice, vol. 43, no. 3, Sept. 1987, p. 288. EBSCOhost.

Ogline, Jill. “Edmund Pevensie and the Character of the Redeemed.” Inklings Forever, vol. 2, no. 1, 1999, pp. 48-53.

Tolkien, J.R.R. The Lord of the Rings. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2012.

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FOLK,” “DEVELES” AND THE “KYNDE OF GOG MAGOG”: THE MISUSE OF MEDIEVAL ANTISEMITIC IMAGERY IN HAJIME ISAYAMA’S ATTACK ON TITAN

Emma Baer-Simon

INTRODUCTION

The popular manga series and its anime adaptation, Shingeki no Kyojin (Attack on Titan as it is known in English), has been the source of various heated debates among its extremely vocal fan community. The work has sparked conversations about imperialism, corruption, warfare, oppression, and various forms of discrimination. While there are some messages in the series that may be interpreted as critiques of oppressive institutions, there is also another, more concerning takeaway worthy of our analysis. Since its final chapter was released in Spring 2021, a few articles have broached the topic of some of its more concerning messages, such as the apparent glorification of genocide in its final pages, and the use of antisemitic imagery to do so. The deliberate coding of Eldians—the group of people showcased as the victims of ethnic-based discrimination—as Jewish creates a sinister trajectory that utilizes antisemitic tropes dating all the way back to late antiquity in order to illustrate this allegory. While many fans have argued that these clear parallels don’t necessarily signal the series as antisemitic—some in fact going so far as to claim that the anime brings light to antisemitism—the far-reaching influence and consequences of the sources from which these parallels are drawn imply a different conclusion. The question at the center of this discourse within the fandom is not whether Attack on Titan (AOT) is necessarily antisemitic, but rather if it is simply about antisemitism. I will argue that it is antisemitic, due to its failure to adequately address the treatment of its Jewish-coded characters as ill-founded and irrational, and instead makes the tenets of antisemitism used for its storytelling integral to these characters: stereotypes become real, and the oppression of the Eldians, unlike the oppression of the Jews, has a justifiable reason.

When asked about antisemitism in AOT, most fans would assume that it only goes so far as the parallelisms between the Eldians living in the internment zone in Marley, and the imagery used to target Jewish, Romani, Queer and Disabled people by the Nazis. With this logic, the argument that AOT is not antisemitic circulates frequently, basing its conclusion on the fact that the Marleyans are depicted as clearly in the wrong for victimizing the Eldians, who are also the protagonists of the series, in this way. It is probable, based on this imagery, that AOT is attempting to make a Holocaust allegory. However, AOT draws its poorly construed Holocaust allegory in a way that is incredibly insensitive to the actual harm that Holocaust victims and their descendants have experienced, by utilizing and solidifying antisemitic stereotypes and motifs that date all the way back to medieval Europe in order to tell this narrative, thus perpetuating the harmful ideologies that lead to antisemitism even today.

TheJournalofFantasyandFanCultures Volume 2, Fall 2022 Pages 29-41

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“CURSED

ANTISEMITISM TODAY: HOW IS ATTACK ON TITAN INVOLVED?

Recently, an attempt by the franchise to sell armbands replicating those worn by the Eldians in the series was quickly retracted due to justifiable fan outrage. One article states, “The production committee for the show acknowledged that the armbands recall real world examples of discrimination and apologized” (Lacerna). Another article admits, “To some fans, it all feels a little too close to the broad arc of most antisemitic conspiracy theories, which say that the Jews rule the world through an ancient conspiracy,” (Jackson), referring to the plot trajectory that the series takes when its protagonist, Eren Jaeger, initiates an attack against the rest of the world that leaves the formerly oppressed Eldians in a position to assert hegemony. These examples show that it is obvious to most fans and the production team for the series that the imagery used to target the Eldians originates from real symbols used to target real people, and it even goes so far as to exemplify some of the popular myths directed against Jews to complete its narrative.

The reason why the usage of Jewish oppression in this way is so concerning, is the fact that AOT has been taken up by far-right groups, using its messages to fuel their hatred: “For white nationalist denizens of /pol/, Attack on Titan is a brilliant way of normalizing white supremacist ideology for a mainstream audience” (Amin). If we aren’t careful about how we consume these messages, they could be used to do real harm to living Jews, just as the rhetoric of these ideologies has been used to target Jews in the past.

To further amplify the current relevance of this rhetoric, we need only to look at a Neo-Nazi Rally that occurred in Orlando, Florida on January 29th 2022. Participants were allegedly chanting, “The Jew is the devil,” “Jews rape children and drink their blood,” and “Jews brought slaves here.” (Stop Antisemitism). These particular accusations, especially the first two, closely parallel the discourse directed against the Jewish-coded Eldians in AOT: “devil” has been a common epithet directed at Jews for centuries, and accusations of consuming the blood of Christian children has existed since the Middle Ages. These dangerous stereotypes are frequently resurfacing in our current age of antisemitism, as this incident shows. Many fans of AOT would argue that these tropes are merely parallels, that they don’t exist anymore, that it’s “just fiction.” However, the events of January 29th are merely one example of many showing that these ideologies do still exist, and it is possible (considering the popularity of AOT in farright circles) that this anime is partially responsible for disseminating these motifs even further.

MEDIEVAL ORIGINS: “CURSED FOLK” AND “DEVELES”

With a clearer understanding of the depth to which these tropes reach, and the ways in which they have, and continue to perpetuate harm against Jewish people in lived experience, we can see how the depiction of Jewish-coded Eldians in Attack on Titan draws on not only 20th century and contemporary antisemitism, but also on medieval stereotypes of Jews, recognizable enough to perpetuate the ideologies that have harmed Jews in the past. Though the imagery depicted in AOT is based on discrimination faced by Jewish, Romani, Queer, and Disabled people (anyone targeted by the Nazis) in the Holocaust, I will be focusing here on discrimination against Jews specifically, by analyzing some of the antisemitic tropes seen in AOT and tracing back to their origin points in medieval Europe and some of the ways in which they manifested. Whether or not their use by Hajime Isayama is intentional, they occur too frequently and with a demonstration of too much awareness of their layered and far-reaching historical implications to be entirely innocent or insignificant.

Most fans of AOT would halt their understanding of antisemitic imagery at the Holocaust: the Eldians in Marley are forced to wear armbands resembling the yellow stars that Jews in Nazi Europe displayed, just as they are herded into separate living quarters akin to the ghettos (see fig. 1). Eldian children are spat on in the street and called “Devil bloods” (“That Day” 01:05), and an Eldian woman is executed by a Marleyan soldier who expresses his mingled desire and disgust as he kills her, proclaiming, “if only you weren’t a devil” (“That Day” 16:20). Without understanding how far back these practices

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trace beyond just the early-20th century discrimination that is deeply embedded in the recent memory of Jewish people all over the world, we are at risk of diminishing their impact and significance. As will be illustrated throughout this essay, the use of the word “devil” to describe Jews can be seen in a variety of medieval texts, and the separation of Jews into separate locales, as well as forms of identification being worn on visible parts of their body were also medieval practices.

England in the 13th century was what Geraldine Heng calls, “the first racial state in the west” (55). Jews in England were ordered to wear identification badges and markedly different clothing after the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215, after they had already been sequestered into archa towns, to secure their separation from Christians:

The tagging of people with a Jewish badge—whose features are prescribed, respecified, enlarged, recolored, moved around into ever more prominent positions on the human body and apparel and extended to the bodies of little children—and the herding of individuals and families into archa towns, the only places they are allowed to reside, in urban spaces segregated from Christians, are part and parcel of state racism’s signifying apparatus—the way state racism signs itself materially on the bodies and lives of Jews. (Heng 75)

The discrimination faced by Jews in 13th century England was, in fact racial discrimination, not just a matter of religious distrust imposed by the Christian majority. Many scholars would argue that Jews in medieval Europe were receivers of “anti-Judaism, an opposition to the religious beliefs of Jews” (Millar 141), rather than antisemitism, which in its official definition is, “Characterized by prejudice, hostility, or discrimination towards Jewish people on religious, cultural, or ethnic grounds” (“anti-Semitic”). However, as we will see by examining examples of the treatment of Jews within medieval literature, their depictions are far too virulent to be the product of only religious opposition.

Chaucer’s Prioress’s Tale is a prime example of this vehemence. The narrative tells of a young Christian boy who is murdered by the Jews that live in the “Jewerye” that nestles far too close in proximity to “Cristen folk.”

There was in Asye, in a greet cite, Amonges Cristene folk a Jewereye, Sustened by a lord of that contree

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Fig. 1. Yellow Star-Shaped Badge worn by Jews in Nazi Germany, courtesy of Fritz Gluckstein, 1941, US Holocaust Memorial Museum.

For foule usure and lucre of vileynye, Hateful to Crist and to his compaignye; And thurgh the street men myghte ride or wende, For it was free and open at eyther ende. (488-494)

According to the Prioress, this is the first major problem worthy of observing: that the Jews are not completely isolated and are free to move amongst Christians and leave as they wish, due to the “Jewerye” being “free and open at eyther ende.” She endows them with the stereotypical accusations of “usure.” As a result of the proliferation of medieval Jews in the profession of money-lending, they were often accused of, “usury—money lending on the basis of excessive profit” (Laquer 153). This is notably, not a point of religious contention, but a stereotype based on a profession that was statistically more common for Jews to practice. Therefore, only “anti-Judaism” within Millar’s definition in this case is no longer appropriate, and we must recognize their discrimination uniquely as antisemitism.

The racialization of the Jews in this tale continues when they are incited by Satan to murder the young Christian boy who is singing “O Alma Redemptoris” far too loudly within their earshot (551-564). After they murder him, they throw the body in a privy, “Where as thise Jewes purgen hire entraille./ O cursed folk of Herodes al newe,/ What may youre yvel entrente yow availle?” (573-575) The exaggerated cruelty in these lines serves to further the absolute hatred for Jews that the Prioress illustrates. She exclaims, in reaction to their deeds, “The blood out crieth on youre cursed dede” (578). The Jews are more than merely religious others, they are a cursed people, who according to the Prioress, must be kept separate from Christians due to the evil characteristics of their race. Merall Llewelyn Price adds to this point by stating that the Prioress’s language in the opening of the tale “is an early indicator that the tale will not be a simple exercise in anti-Judaism that critiques, however harshly, Judaic theology and culture, but rather will derive from and reinforce a constellation of overlapping myths about the fantasized character and behavior of Jews” (Price, “Imperial” 200). The Prioress’s Tale therefore showcases that attitudes concerning Jews in Medieval England went far beyond Religious disagreement, and we will see these racialized, antisemitic depictions projected strongly onto Isayama’s Eldians.

ELDIAN RADICALIZATION

In Attack on Titan, the Eldians too, are more than just a culturally different ethnic group, but are consistently referred to as a different “race.” They are forced into “internment” zones all over the world and are not permitted to live elsewhere, as well as being required to wear an armband displaying a starlike shape (see fig. 2), hearkening back to the yellow star badge that Jews in Nazi Germany were forced to wear (see fig. 1). We see this very effect taking place in AOT when Grisha Yeager’s past is revealed. In “That Day” we are shown a young Grisha and his sister Faye venturing outside the internment zone. When they are asked for their exit permits, and Grisha replies that he doesn’t have them, young Faye is taken away, and Grisha is beaten bloody by Marleyan soldiers. We later find out that Faye will never make it home but is set upon by dogs and cruelly murdered (“That Day”, 03:08). Grisha and Faye are children here, so we can only assume that their punishment would have been worse had they been adults. This separation, maintained by strict order and violent enforcement, clearly parallels the medieval, English areas in which Jews were driven to reside, and which the Prioress in Chaucer’s tale is so adamant about enforcing lest the “cursed folk” use their freedom to do evil, removed from intermingling with the rest of the population or risk severe punishment.

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Fig. 2. Grisha Jaeger wearing the Eldian Armband with its distinct, star-shaped emblem displayed in a visible part of his body; Hajime Isayama, “Grisha in the Year 817.”

The Eldians in AOT are repeatedly referred to as “the Eldian race.” They are not given significant religious differentiation from the Marleyans, except in a few instances, such as when Grisha asserts, “we’re not devil bloods, we’re God’s children” (“That Day” 08:33-08:36). Save for scant examples such as this one, we don’t know much about the Eldians’ beliefs or cultural practices at all, except for what is given to the audience by Marley’s portrayal of them. Our picture of Eldians comes from an overwhelmingly Marleyan perspective, despite the protagonists of the series being themselves Eldian, just as our knowledge of medieval Jews comes mostly from their oppressors. In fact, “Antisemitism has very little to do with the actual behavior of Jews,” but rather is formed by “delusionary perceptions that are accepted as authoritative and passed on and embellished from generation to generation” (Perry and Schweizer 3). The impact of this is that “real Jews whose isolation in the ghettos made it all the easier for people outside to perceive them, not as individual human beings but as walking symbols of those social and personal threats people could not confront in themselves but could attack directly when projected directly onto Jews” (Langmuir 309). Because real Jews were isolated, just as “real” Eldians are masked behind our overwhelming perspective of them as a racial group from an oppressor’s point of view: these dehumanizing myths are only able to grow stronger.

Eldians in AOT are shown as having little knowledge themselves of their own beliefs and traditions: their portrayal is overwhelmingly focused on their oppression, and the myths (which are not actually myths in this context) used to justify it. What little we know about Eldian history, outside of the narrative that comes from Marley’s narrative of oppression, comes from inference and interpretation only. At one point, Grisha Yeager is examining an ancient text, and infers from it that Ymir was no oppressor, but a civilizing hero who built infrastructure using her power to help her people (“That Day” 08:00-08:13). His friend Grice exclaims, “Impressive Grisha, how do you read this ancient language?” (08:17-08:20) Grisha replies with, “Oh no, I haven’t deciphered much of the writing at all yet” (08:2108:23). When Grice questions his evidence again, Grisha insists, “Because it’s obvious just from looking, and because I believe in our founder Ymir with all my heart!” (08:28-8:32). Grisha’s evidence has no basis except for his own visual interpretation skills and intuition, so there is no credible overturning of Marley’s hegemonic narrative. Without any actual Eldian voices or credible evidence to definitively prove their innocence from the accusations leveled against them by Marley, their agency is ostensibly stripped away, and the antisemitism that forms so much of their race-making becomes all the more powerful.

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FANTASIES OF JEWISH MONSTROSITY

Looking beyond the imagery used to target and oppress the Eldians in Marley, we need to examine the genetic differentiation that forms the primary basis for Eldia’s oppression: the power of the titans. Not only do the titans resemble antisemitic pictures of Jews, but their power itself is directly pulled from medieval antisemitism. There is a rich history of accusations against Jews performing ritual cannibalism, known more commonly as “blood libel.” The stereotype arose in 1235, in Fulda, Germany, when a group of children were found dead in the ruins of a mill, “resulting in the mass murder of the local Jews” (Bildhauer 80). Bettina Bildhauer also states that these accusations that the Jews were the ones responsible for the crime was the earliest evidence in our record of Jews utilizing blood for their cannibalistic rituals (80). Following this event, the myth spread across European imagination, leading to the unjust execution of many more groups of Jews. In the words of Gavin Langmuir, the “attractiveness of this new fantasy about Jews to wide sections of the population at large is obvious from its rapid spread” (Langmuir 277). Medieval Christians latched onto the myth that Jews were cannibalistic monsters with disturbing conviction.

The 14th century Middle English poem, The Siege of Jerusalem, contains one of many graphic manifestations of this motif:

On Marie, a myld wyf, for meschef of foode, Hire owen barn that ho bare ho brad on the gledis, Rostyth rigge and rib with rewful words, Sayth, “Sone, upon eche side our sorrow is alofte:

“Batail about the borwe our bodies to quelle, Withyn hunger so hote. That negh our herte brestyth. Therefore yeld that I thee gaf, and agen tourney And entre ther thou cam out,” and etyth a schouldere. (1081-1088)

In the poem, Marie, a Jewish woman driven to desperate hunger by the famine inflicted upon the city of Jerusalem by siege, goes so far as to devour her own child. Price writes, concerning this particular episode, “by the late 13th century, the story of Maria of Jerusalem was widely disseminated, entering into popular and even vernacular writing as well as into sermons, exempla and homilies as the sine qua non of maternal depravity” (“Imperial” 278). Marie showcases the epitome of horror that a mother could ever exemplify, by performing a recognizably Jewish crime. From the popularity of this narrative alone, we can see that the assumption that Jews were cannibals was popular and common within medieval imagination. And this did not end with the reformation either: German folktales in the 19th century—predominantly those by the Grimm brothers—also utilize these stereotypes to monger fear and discrimination against Jews that fueled the hatred that made an event such as the Holocaust possible (Martin 54). It is telling that these stereotypes were able to survive so widely, and the actual harm they were able to incite is even more of a warning for us to be continually aware of their presence.

The reason that projecting antisemitism onto Eldians—even if the overall narrative displays them as protagonists and admits to the injustice of their persecution—is such a problem is the fact that they alone possess the power of the titans. One Marleyan soldier states, “any one of you will turn into a man-eating monster,” referring to the Eldians’ “True form” (“That Day” 20:39). A few seconds later, the same soldier justifies his murder of the Eldians by protesting he is “not really killing humans” (20:57). It is confirmed in the following episode that indeed, only subjects of Ymir have the power of the titans (“Attack Titan” 03:04). Later, Commander of the Survey Corps, Hange Zoe, proclaims before a courtroom to deliver the knowledge they received from Grisha’s memoirs: “we’re of a special race that can turn into titans” (“Attack Titan” 18:18). This is significant because unlike Jews, who are undeniably human, with no secret monstrous powers, within the world of AOT, the Eldians are different, and they are dehumanized by the very fact that they possess the power to turn into cannibalistic monsters.

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NARRATIVES OF “JUSTIFIED” VENGEANCE

Ymir’s descendants supposedly used this power to take control over the world for themselves, and it is for this reason that they are conquered and forced into subjugation by Marley. The Eldian race “were heinous sinners understand? They committed genocide against all other races” (“That Day” 05:50-0553), says a frustrated Dr. Jaeger to young Grisha. Grisha replies in anger (05:53), unable to make sense of the fact that he and his poor, dead sister are being punished for crimes that his ancestors supposedly committed thousands of years ago. In fact, Jews in medieval Europe were also discriminated against on the basis of punishment for the sins their ancestors committed.

It was commonly believed in medieval Europe that Jews were responsible for the death of Christ. As Perry and Schweizer summarize, “The myth emerged that the Jews, murderers of the incarnate God who embodied all that was good, were a cursed people, children of the Devil, who willfully and maliciously challenged god’s design for humanity” (76). As a result of this conviction, the destruction of Jerusalem as divine vengeance upon the Jews, was a popular theme circulating across many media, and well-ingrained within European imagination. The Siege of Jerusalem is an effective example of this theme taking effect. The Siege is known for its graphic depictions of Jews being obliterated by newly converted Christians, Titus and Vespasian in the historical siege of 70 AD. As a particularly obtuse and violent example of the “Vengeance of Our Lord” tradition (as this narrative genre is recognized), The Siege, like other examples of the genre, displays gruesome anti-Jewish sentiment. The popularity of this narrative can also be attested by its nine surviving manuscript copies, “Found in four religious miscellanies, two historical compilations, one historical and religious collection and one manuscript containing religious and scientific pieces” (Millar 30). Bonnie Millar’s thorough work here also highlights that the manuscripts contain no significant differences from one another beyond dialectic dissonance, and every single version includes the maternal cannibalism episode (Millar 35). Moreover, The Siege was not alone: another alliterative poem titled Titus and Vespasian appears as a possible work influenced by the Siege, not far removed from it in the timeline of composition (Millar 105). Beyond these medieval texts, the earlymodern period proliferated the narrative across a series of dramatic adaptations. These plays enjoyed a rich stage presence from about the mid 14th century to around 1622 (Wright 1). What this tells us is that the destruction of Jerusalem, and particularly the most horrific episodes of Jewish suffering, was a concerningly popular narrative within many contexts. Even within its own contemporary environment, The Siege was already inspiring adaptation, addition, and further dissemination of its antisemitic agenda.

The vengeance program is declared when at the outset of The Siege, Titus declares, “And Y schal buske me boun hem bale forto wyrche: / To do the develes of dawe and Thy deth venge!” (187-188). Titus is essentially saying that he intends to wreak immense suffering upon the Jews as a punishment for their crime, and he notably here refers to them as “develes,” similarly the epithet of choice by Marleyans vocalizing their distate toward Eldians for the supposed crimes of their ancestor. Though Eldia’s subjugation of the rest of the world is not necessarily a “crime” that can be clearly paralleled with the death of Christ, the rhetoric weaponized toward Ymir’s descendants resembles the vengeance directed at Jews in Medieval Europe far too closely to be insignificant. And within the narrative trajectory of AOT, the Jewish-coded Eldians orchestrate their own retaliation against Marley’s physical and rhetorical vengeance, utilizing the violence that medieval Christians always feared Jews would unleash: the Antichrist, or, in the case of AOT, Eren Jaeger and the Rumbling.

DEVILS UNLEASHED

When Eren Jaeger realizes his true power, he vows to take revenge on the world for the persecution of his people, echoing the vehement wishes of his father to “set the world right,” by restoring absolute Eldian hegemony (“That Day” 07:45). This hearkens back to beliefs in medieval imagination of

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an army awaiting in the East to break free inevitably and strike violent devastation on the world. The army that awaited there included two monsters known as “Gog” and “Magog.” According to Bildhauer, “By the thirteenth century, Gog and Magog were thought of as Jewish and referred to as the Red Jews in a range of German texts” (80). Though Gog and Magog come originally from The Book of Revelation, within medieval Christian imagination, these monsters and the Jews who had unforgivably slain their Lord were one and the same. Images of Gog and Magog tend to depict naked cannibals, in some instances being ushered behind walls by Alexander the Great’s army (see fig. 3), and in others being shown consuming the flesh of a human being (see fig. 4). Both of these examples bear remarkable similarity to the stylistic depiction of the titans in AOT (see fig. 5 and fig. 6). It is not certain, but indeed possible that Hajime Isayama was using images of these medieval, notably Jewish monsters to create the mindless, terrifying cannibals in his narrative.

Fig. 3. Alexander’s forces building walls to enclose the people of Gog and Magog; Jean Wauquelin. Histoire d’Alexander, fol. 131v, 15th c. Bibliothèque nationale de France, Gallica

Fig. 4. Gog and Magog as cannibals consuming human flesh; Thomas de Kent. Roman de Toute Chevalerie, fol. 60v, 14th c. Bibliothèque nationale de France, Gallica

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Fig. 5. Titans pursuing fleeing humans; Hajime Isayama,“I’m Home,” Attack on Titan, 2.27, 01:07, Kodansha, 2017.

Fig. 6. A human being consumed by Titans; Hajime Isayama,“I’m Home,” Attack on Titan, 2.27, 01:39, Kodansha, 2017.

We see a graphic description of Jews as kindred of Gog and Magog in The Book of John Mandeville: “In that same lond, Jewes ben enclosid in the hilles of Capyze, that men callen Uber. And thilke Jewes ben of the kynde of Gog Magog, and they may noght com out at no syde” (2352-2354). The Jews are described as kin to Gog Magog, the monsters that will one day be unleashed upon the world with the power of the Antichrist, just as the Eldians living within their three walls on Paradis are of the same ilk as the titans. It was believed of Medieval Jews that “their beliefs exemplify the teachings of Antichrist and the devil; they are all fated to be damned as punishment for their errors” (Cohen 232). Therefore, Mandeville’s description of Jews in their enclosure, kindred of monsters, was not a unique perception in medieval Europe. Mandeville’s “wide readership is also attested by the two hundred and fifty to three hundred manuscripts that still survive today” (Kohanski and Benson 1). Like The Siege of Jerusalem, this was undoubtedly a popular text, signifying that awareness of the depravity of Jews that Mandeville describes was simultaneously accepted and even enjoyed by medieval Christian readers.

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The hills that enclose the Jews, as Mandeville describes, almost operate as walls in themselves: no one comes in or out, except in a few circumstances: sometime it is so that some of the Jewes gon over the hilles. But many may noght passe ther togedre, for the hilles beth so gret and so heye. And men say in the | contré aboute that in the tyme of Antecrist thay shulleth do myche harme to Cristen men. And therefore all the Jewes that dwelleth aboute in the worlde lerneth to speke Ebreu, for thilke spekith none thing but Ebreu. And then shal these Jewes speke Ebreu to hem as Y trowe. And lede hem to Cristendome for to destruye men of Christendom. For these Jewes sayen they wyte wel that the Jewes that dwelleth among thilke hilles shulleth come oute, and Cristen men shal be in her subjeccioun as they ben now under Cristen men. (Mandeville 2365-2374)

Roughly paraphrased, this passage warns that a few of the Jews may someday traverse the hills, but they are too high and dangerous for many to travel at once. Also, these very same Jews will escape from their enclosure when the reign of the Antichrist arrives, in order to wreak havoc on the world and destroy all of Christendom, to force Christians under their dominion just as Christians now do to the Jews living outside of these “walls.” Perry and Schweizer add that it was believed in medieval Europe, “the Antichrist will have a mighty army of Jewish soldiers who were also cannibals” (77). This clearly echoes the sentiments expressed in Mandeville. Furthermore, awakening this army “would make the Jews powerful enough to destroy Christendom and raise up Judaism again” (77). Kohanski and Benson’s commentary on these lines state, “The narrator suggests that all the world’s Jews are simply biding their time, waiting to aid and abet this final assault on Christendom” (123): just like the Eldians both inside and outside of the walls vow to wreak vengeance on Marley with their army of cannibals, dormant and waiting for an antihero to awaken them. Theresa Tinkle explains that Mandeville’s “text recognizes that oppression can breed violence—can create the Other as an enemy—and anticipates a future in which the roles will be reversed and Jews will exact vengeance” (462). We begin Attack on Titan seeing Eren Jaeger and the rest of the Eldians as oppressed victims, and end the narrative with their violent revenge upon the world, just as Mandeville warns his Christian readers that the Jews of Gog and Magog may someday do.

Indeed, Grisha Jaeger swears that his “ancestors’ so-called ‘sins’ were justified, but to set the world right as it had been, Eldia would have to be restored” (“That Day” 07:39-07:49). This line of dialogue implies that Grisha wishes his people to emerge from their prison behind the walls to which they had fled, and reclaim their dominance over their oppressors, in order to “set the world right.” Grisha is not here advocating for justice and equality, but for complete Eldian dominance, which is exactly what his son Eren will accomplish when he initiates the rumbling. Grisha had vowed to himself that he’d “show these Marleyans who the real devils were” (“That Day” 07:33-07:37), and indeed this is exactly what Eren does, by performing the actions of the medieval Antichrist and becoming the “real devil” that his oppressors had always accused him of being.

In “Night of the End”, Jean Kirschtein asks the Marleyan Commander Theo Magath “Does that sound like devils to you buddy?” after describing the hardship that he and the Eldians of Paradis have endured at the hands of Marley (06:40-06:54). Magath then declares accusatorily “Yeah, you seem like devils to me. The threat of Paradis came true, and now the world’s in danger” (06:57-07:05). Magath is a Marleyan, one that the viewers were at first conditioned to see as the enemy. Now however, he speaks the truth, and we are tempted to agree with him. The fact that the Marleyans are coded as Nazis, but then portrayed sympathetically as the series goes on is concerning enough on its own, but the undeniable truth of Magath’s words here only add to the concerning weight of this parallel. Despite Jean’s attempt to garner sympathy for the abuse of his people, Magath confirms that such abuse was, in fact, justified.

I cannot definitively prove that Hajime Isayama directly drew his narrative from The Book of John

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Mandeville, however Mandeville’s own assertions here were widely spread and commonly understood enough throughout medieval Christendom, and the parallels to the fate of Eldia and the actions of Eren Jaeger in the penultimate chapters of the Isayama’s Manga are far too striking to negate suspicion. Eren uses his titan power to awake thousands of colossal titans who are dormant within the walls of Paradis, and sends them across the world to vanquish everything in their path. Eren explains to Armin in Chapter 139, “Even if I didn’t know that you’d stop me in the end…I think I still would have flattened this world. Level almost every forest…and leave the land covered in carrion-fattened insects a few days later. I wanted to leave every surface a blank plain…” (“Final Episode”). Eren’s justification for initiating the rumbling had been so that he would force the hand of his friends to stop him and save the rest of the world, to be seen as saviors and win glory and respect for Eldians. However, Eren asserts here that he would have committed genocide even if this wasn’t his motivation. This is suspiciously similar to the fate that medieval Christians feared should the monstrous Jews imprisoned within the walls of Gog and Magog ever escape and awaken their army of monsters: “Antichrist was born a Jew and would preface the reign of heaven with a reign of terror” (Perry and Schweizer 77). Eren Jaeger, born an Eldian, indeed promised his friends a future in which Eldians were no longer the inferior race, his own version of a “reign of heaven,” but not before obliterating the rest of the world with his army of titans, the ultimate “reign of terror.” The Eldians, in the end, become exactly what the world had feared them to be all along.

CONCLUSION

The question we must ask ourselves now is, “Is Attack on Titan antisemitic? Or is it just about antisemitism?” Attack on Titan has disturbingly turned antisemitic accusations into real power, thus deepening the associations between Jews and power-mongering, monstrous capabilities, and a taste for wealth and Christian flesh. By giving the Eldians no chance to correct these accusations, nor prove that they are merely propaganda with convincing evidence, it only served to fuel more discrimination against real-life Jews. As Shaan Aamin correctly states, Isayama’s intent, however, does not remove the politics from Attack on Titan. Whether by cultural osmosis or coincidence, Isayama littered his series with allusions to racial, ethnic, and historical tropes. As a result, the “true” political message of the series has been the subject of furious debate online. Isayama’s silence just makes it easier for audiences to transpose their own ideologies onto the world [he] has created.

In order to stop these messages from being appropriated by the wrong ideologies, we need to be aware of their far-reaching harm and all of its potential implications. By coding the Eldians as Jewish, and imbuing them with the power and behavior projected onto Jews by Christians in medieval Europe, we are presented with a picture of them that is overwhelmingly antisemitic. This picture is one that could be far too easily appropriated by hate groups. Ideologies have caused harm in the past, and there is no reason why, when given fuel like this, they won’t have reason to do so again. This case-study raises the alarm that we must heed as consumers of fantasy media in general: problematic tropes, whether they be intentional or not, can still perpetuate dangerous assumptions, and in order to avoid disseminating them further, we need to be aware of their origins and implications. Being a responsible consumer of all genres of media, especially fantasy, means staying vigilant to archetypes of discrimination, and being able to critically recognize and interrogate them. Only then, can we work towards ending the channeling of hate and discrimination through the stories that everyone should be able to enjoy.

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Emma Baer-Simon

WORKS CITED

Amin, Shaan. “Why Attack on Titan is the Alt-Right’s Favorite Manga.” The New Republic, 16 Nov. 2020, newrepublic.com/article/160193/attack-titan-alt-rights-favorite-manga. Accessed 19 Dec. 2021.

“anti-Semitic, Adj.” Oxford English Dictionary, Oxford UP, 2021, www.oed.com/view/Entry/338644.

Bildhauer, Bettina. “Blood, Jews and Monsters in Medieval Culture.” The Monstrous Middle Ages, edited by Bettina Bildhauer and Robert Mills, University of Toronto Press, 2003, pp. 75-96.

The Book of John Mandeville, edited by Tamarah Kohanski and C. David Benson, Medieval Institute Publications, 2007.

Chaucer, Geoffrey. “The Prioress’s Tale.” The Riverside Chaucer, edited by Larry D. Benson, 3rd ed., Oxford UP, 1987, pp. 209-212.

Cohen, Jeremy. The Friars and the Jews: The Evolution of Medieval Anti-Judaism. Cornell UP, 1982.

de Kent, Thomas. Roman de Toute Chevalerie, fol. 60v, Gallica BnF, 1301-1400, https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/btv1b60002590/f134.item. Accessed 19 Dec. 2021.

Gluckstein, Fritz. “Jewish Badge.” US Holocaust Memorial Museum, 1941, www.ushmm.org/learn/ timeline-of-events/1939-1941/jewish-badge-decreed. Accessed 19 Dec. 2021.

Heng, Geraldine. “State/Nation: A Case Study of the Racial State: Jews as Internal Minority in England.” The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages, Cambridge UP, 2018, pp. 55-109.

Isayama, Hajime, creator. Attack on Titan. Kodansha US, 2009-2021. Attack on Titan, IG Port and Wit Studio/MAPPA, 2013-2022.

“Attack Titan.” Attack on Titan, written by Hiroshi Seko, directed by Yasuhiro Akamatsu, Wit Studio, 2019.

“Final Episode: Toward that Tree on the Hill.” Attack on Titan. Translated by Ko Ransom, vol. 34, Kodansha US, 2021.

“Grisha in the Year 817.” Attack on Titan Wiki, 2016, attackontitan.fandom.com/wiki/ Grisha_Yeager/Image_Gallery?file=Grisha_Yeager_character_image_%2528817%2529.png. Accessed 19 Dec. 2021.

“Night of the End” Attack on Titan, written by Hiroshi Seko, directed by Mitsue Yamazaki, MAPPA, 2022.

“That Day.” Attack on Titan, written by Hiroshi Seko, directed by Yoko Kanamori, Wit Studio, 2019.

Jackson, Gita. “Everyone Loves Attack on Titan. So Why Doe Everyone Hate Attack on Titan?” Vice, 22 Apr 2021, www.vice.com/en/article/7kvpj4/everyone-loves-attack-on-titan-so-why-doeseveryone-hate-attack-on-titan. Accessed 19 Dec. 2021.

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Lacerna, Michael. “Attack on Titan Pulls Eldian Armbands From Stores Due to Anti-Semitic Connotations.” CBR, 16 Nov. 2021, www.cbr.com/attack-on-titan-eldian-armbands-anti-semitic/. Accessed 19 Dec. 2021.

Langmuir, Gavin. Toward a Definition of Antisemitism. University of California Press, 1990.

Laquer, Walter. The Changing Face of Antisemitism: From Ancient Times to the Present Day. Oxford UP, 2006.

Martin, Laura. “Antisemitism.” Folktales and Fairytales: Traditions and Texts From Around The World, edited by Anne E. Duggan, Donald Haase and Helen J. Callow, vol. 1, ABC-CLIO, LLC, 2016, pp. 53-54.

Millar, Bonnie. The Siege of Jerusalem in its Physical, Literary and Historical Contexts. Dublin, Four Courts Press, 2000.

“Neo-Nazi Rally in Orlando Causes Outrage.” StopAntisemitism, 30 Jan. 2022, www.stopantisemitism.org/antisemitic-incidents-103/neo-nazi-rally-in-orlando-causes-outrage. Accessed 18th February 2022.

Perry, Marvin, and Frederick M. Schweitzer. Antisemitism: Myth and Hate from Antiquity to the Present. Palgrave Macmillan, 2002.

Price, Merrall Llewellyn. “Imperial Violence and the Monstrous Mother: Cannibalism at the Siege of Jerusalem.” Domestic Violence in Medieval Texts, edited by Georgiana Donavin, Merrall Llewelyn Price, and Eve Salisbury, University Press of Florida, 2002, pp. 272-298.

---. “Sadism and Sentimentality: Absorbing Antisemitism in Chaucer’s Prioress.” The Chaucer Review, Vol. 43, No. 2, 2008, pp. 197-214. Jstor. Accessed 19th Dec. 2021.

The Siege of Jerusalem, edited by Michael Livingston, Medieval Institute Publications, 2004.

Wauquelin, Jean. Histoire d’Alexandre, fol. 131v, Gallica BnF, 1452, https://upload.wikimedia.org/ wikipedia/commons/4/49/Wauquelin-histoire-bnf-fr9342-fol131v-peuple-de-gog-et-magog.jpg. Accessed 19 Dec. 2021.

Wright, Stephen K. The Vengeance of Our Lord: Medieval Dramatizations of the Destruction of Jerusalem. Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1989.

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THE PHILOSOPHICAL IMPLICATIONS OF THE ORVILLE’S MATERIAL SYNTHESIZER

Ally Zlatar

“I don’t want my last meal to be a twinkie.”

The Orville, “The Road Not Taken”

With the rise of Sci-Fi TV shows such as The Orville and Star Trek: The Next Generation, innovative ideas in robotics, transportation and technology have started to be explored. One of these is the creation of food and material synthesizers. However, there has been extraordinarily little discourse about the potential impacts this could have if we produced material synthesizers. Companies such as Nestlé have been working on technology comparable to synthesizers, with the goal of providing food tailored to an individual’s nutritional requirements (Hudson 1). Imperial College London physicists have discovered how to create matter from light and BeeHex has been working with NASA to develop spaceflight food 3D printing technology (Pike 434; Imperial College London 1; Rutland 1). They, alongside several other key players, are now building food printing robots aimed at public use (Rutland 1). With the realization of the potential direction toward this TV show conceptual item becoming reality there is a need to understand the implications of this notion.

The Orville’s Kelly Grayson stated to John LaMarr in the show: “Lieutenant, have you ever studied the history of money?... It became obsolete with the invention of matter synthesis.” (“New Dimensions” 1:11) This show’s cinematic universe provides unique insights into how a world which has control of material synthetization could function. This paper, therefore, aims to explore The Orville and various other Sci-Fi and literature and television series through a film-philosophy theoretical lens to examine how a concept such as ‘material synthesis’ can potentially impact individuals within our real-world context.

The framework of this paper follows a qualitative case study analysis of literary and film-based works to examine the implications of material synthesis through cross-universe investigation into The Orville, Star Trek and Venus Equilateral alongside other fictional pieces will provide contextual grounding and diversity of experiences with material synthesis technology. The paper aims to utilize fictional narratives to illustrate these real-world potentials, and is further supported by contemporary philosophical engagement of these theoretical premises. My analysis will draw on the work of philosophers ranging from German Philosopher Martin Heidegger and contemporary thinkers such as Fiona Ellis and Cara Fabre. Finally, these texts are analyzed through several real-world implications, particularly the closest technology currently available, 3D Printing technology. Cumulatively, my essay reaffirms the validity and potential concerns of the application to our society. The findings discuss some of these key themes, including unrestricted indulgence, exploitation, and personal development alongside systemic impacts, in

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hopes of shining light on the depths of material synthesis and the potential powers and harms of this plot device.

The Orville is neither the only series nor the only sci-fi work in which the possibilities offered by the advent of advanced replicating technology are portrayed. Robert A. Heinlein’s Future History (1973) employed a ‘Universal Pantograph’ that could scan and duplicate any object, and Will McCarthy’s The Queendom of Sol (2001) featured fax machines which could print copies of inanimate objects. Perhaps most famously, food replicator devices were depicted in the Star Trek franchise in deep space settings (Bell 1). The Star Trek cinematic universe featured particle synthesizers that were small scale with a “protein sequencer” that could only replicate certain foods for chefs on board. Additionally, in Star Trek: Enterprise the ship had a “bio-matter sequencer” to recycle waste products into usable material (“Breaking the Ice”). However, in most of these renditions of material synthesis the characters live seamlessly with these devices. Many of these portrayals of matter synthesis are inventive and fit easily into their narratives. Film Theorists Carmen Tu and Steven Brown reaffirm this notion through their examination of how a film’s plot is the abstract and overarching structure. It is often external to the protagonist and their actions are determined by the thematic goals of the plot (117). In accordance, plot devices such as material synthesis are both physical and abstract concepts that help move the plot forward (Ryan 56). Furthermore, Marie-Laure Ryan highlights how plot devices are employed when conflict arises between the character and the author’s objectives (58). Material synthesis is often utilized as a “cheap plot trick” that is a hackneyed device that is used to fix plot holes (Hollow 4). There is a lack of considerable thought and attention to the potential socio-and economic impacts of this adaptive technology (Hollow 7).

Looking more closely at how material synthesizers can be quickly abused, The Orville portrays a society in which the individuals do not have capitalistic tendencies or strong material need. In “Lasting Impressions”, Bortus uses his Food Synthesizer to produce cigarettes. When he and his partner Klyden first try them, they become quickly addicted:

[Bortus and Klyden smoking cigarettes]

Bortus: I have never experienced such a flavor.

Klyden: I feel as if I have been standing my entire life, and I just sat down.

Klyden: The tingles. Do you feel them?

Bortus: I do.

Klyden: We must have more.

Bortus: [Presses Material Synthesizer Button] 500 cigarettes. (2:11)

While the food synthesizer can appear to be merely a plot device, here the episode illustrates that overconsumption is not just an overly long gag. Instead, it highlights how both Bortus and Klyden struggle to overcome their addiction. Material synthesis can be a root cause not only for overconsumption but also can enable addictions far more easily. This episode centers around their “compressed vice” television trope for comedic benefit, strongly illustrating the potential harms of material synthesis. To further expand upon the role of “compressed vice,” it is a trope that focuses a plot line on a character developing an addiction when no previous indications were present. Often it is to set up for some sort of a gag, or character development (García-Ortega 8). In an episode of Futurama, Bender develops an obsession with being remembered that was heightened to the extreme of becoming a tyrannical pharaoh. He performs many acts, including massive monuments that were built under his opressive leadership. By the end of the episode, his vanity is subsided as he learns that he will be remembered for the terror he caused (“A Pharaoh to Remember” 3:17).1 The audience saw how difficult it was for The Orville’s characters to quit. Several scenes showed the pair fighting while trying to quit and even Bortus hiding cigarettes throughout his quarters. Jason Kosovski and Douglas Smith further explore this notion by looking at the portrayal of those who have addictions: “The narrative presented by the addict is often framed as clouded and distorted by drug and alcohol abuse,” while “the narrative presented by friends and family is coded as authoritative and honest” (852-853). The addicted individual

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is persistently framed as unreliable and unable to resolve their own difficulties or obtain critical insight into addiction.

It should also be noted that several other times throughout the series the crew indulge in and abuse behaviors such as with alcohol. Chief of Security Alara Kitan uses a Food Synthesizer located in The Orville’s halls to produce a shot of Xelayan tequila to calm her nerves (“Command Performance” 1:02). Gordon Malloy uses the Food Synthesizer to produce a glass of whiskey and Xelayan rum for himself and Chief of Security Talla Keyali (“Blood of Patriots” 2:10, “Command Performance” 1:02). Audiences quickly realize that humans are still flawed beings, and the temptation of food, alcohol and other “worldly” substances could remain with us, which could lead to abuse of material synthesizers. These examples illustrate that regardless of cultural and technological advancements, the same struggles with the potency of addiction, material goods and substances will always exist. Thus, with material synthesis the innate difficulties of overindulgence and developing an addiction to material goods are still going to be highly problematic. If such a device comes into existence the regulation and care for the individuals using it should be safeguarded.

Despite the aforementioned difficulties, the U.S.S Orville crew appears to mostly have a healthy relationship with food and material goods. However, this ease of access could cultivate unhealthy desires such as eating disorders and shopping addictions alongside other mental health issues if used irresponsibly (Fabre 25). Material synthesis poses questions about human desire. As C.S Lewis iterated, “Creatures are not born with desires unless satisfaction for those desires exists. A baby feels hunger: well, there is such a thing as food” (qtd. in Ellis 243). Charles Harvey further iterates how humans repeatedly throughout history have had insatiable desires (71). Everything is simply not enough. Our current domination and envelopment of consumer culture and industrialized capitalism has led to our “commodity canopy” (Harvey 70). While contemporary humans and characters in The Orville appear to have a lack of control around this device, could future humans thrive with it? To The Orville team’s merits, they rarely exploit the powers of material synthesis. The rooms are very minimal with some scenes showing Ed’s office only having some small personal belongings including a Kermit doll and a model plane. The crew partakes in occasional “shopping trips” to the material synthesizer ports such as when Chief Engineer John LaMarr created a stylish jacket for Helmsman Gordon Malloy (“Ja’loja” 2:01). Nonetheless, there is a potential for a world of hedonism when applying the device to realworld implications with unlimited access to material goods and worldly delights. One could argue that hedonism has always existed for the ruling classes and wealthy elite overtly and aggressively (Probst 1). As the middle classes are rising and the affordability of goods increasing, more people are developing hedonistic behavior (1). Despite the characters on The Orville choosing to live simplistically with minimalist rooms and the occasional outfit splurges, there is the potential of a world filled with desire for over-indulgence and material delights, and profound consequences of these desires.

The viewers are introduced to this established world where material synthesizers are fully integrated into society, no less common than a mobile phone today. While the history and development of material synthesis is not clearly explained in the show, there might have been a transitional period before The Orville-Universe achieved their current relationship with matter synthesis. In another sci-fi series, George Smith’s Venus Equilateral (1975), there is an exploration of the problems with authenticity and intellectual property with printing technology. The plot featured stories of 3D printed money and personal items such as priceless diamonds being replicated (Smith 26). In contrast, due to the desire to maintain narrative flow, most Sci-Fi series do not examine the socioeconomic impacts or potential collapses of the supply-and-demand chain. Venus Equilateral highlights the potential exploitation of matter duplicators in terms of the potential reduction in the value of current goods and services. It is just as easy to produce the queen’s crown jewels as it would be a ham and cheese sandwich, which poses

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puzzling questions for axiology theorists. While desire and commodity value are key issues that will need to be more deeply examined by social economists, the issue still remains. In the implementation of a similar device into the real world there will need to be immense consideration from governments, companies and societies to be able to adapt and handle the potential struggles of insatiable human desires.

With the unlimited potential of matter synthesizers and the complex psychology and emotional states of humans, it could lead to disasters. Drawing upon a real-world example in May 2013, a video was released of a man firing a single shot from a gun. This went viral because this gun was fully produced with a 3D printer (van Vugt 117). The digital designs of the gun were released online and downloaded over 100,000 times before the authorities shut it down (118). With the rise of 3D printer technology, it can lead to mass exploitation and potentially manufacturing of deadly weapons outside of regulated industrial channel (Biggs 1). Even this one real-world case illustrates clearly the harms of unmanaged synthesizer technology. Idealistically, the hope is that people would be able to have better judgment than to exploit material synthesis. However, similar events happened in The Orville series, where two adolescents (James Duncan and Marcus Finn) hacked into a Food Synthesizer to create a bottle of vodka (“Ja’loja” 2:01). While a fictional universe, this case parallels the current controversies over 3D technology. Not all people have the ethical standards and morality to be responsible for their behavior. As Luciano Floridi outlined, moral responsibility is highly subjective, and the allocation of responsibility can be dependent upon numerous factors of distributed moral actions (5). Floridi further argues that it is very difficult to separate autonomous actions from larger systematic structures for accountability and very few can understand the network of interrelated factors and what their individual impact is (6). To elaborate, corporate negligence is a prime example of the difficulties entailed in taking accountability for autonomous acts within the larger systemic systems and not using material synthesis for self-destructive or harmful practices (Soares 147). Within The Orville, when the boys hack the device, it is a clear example of how easily someone could exploit it. Another example is when Commander Grayson synthesizes hash brownies in the shuttle and eats it when she is trapped in the zoo (“Command Performance” 1:02).

Matthew Hollow explored how we could potentially incorporate mass 3D printing technology into a wider socio-economic framework through practical restrictions (9). He reaffirmed that it would require mass revision and measures put in place as there is a long way to go to fit material synthesis into our economic models. Hollow argues this notion of mass revision of the existing socio-economic framework, because they are based on a postulated mode of production. This Marxian postulation states that if workers are paid enough, they can participate within society and see value in it. 3D printing can become an essential contributor to equalizing access to resources while also potentially fostering cultural transformations through the emergence of mass replicating technology (Hollow 13).

These cases exemplify that although humans can develop predominantly healthy relationships to matter synthesis technology, there is still room for poor moral judgement, and that can be deadly. As easy as it was for any of these characters to order drugs, alcohol, cigarettes, or a slice of cake they could have just as easily created poisons, harmful substances or an assault rifle without proper governance and restrictions in place. German philosopher Martin Heidegger stressed that humanity is not in charge of technology, but that technology shapes humanity through forming our worldview (Heidegger 3; Seubol 32). What this notion highlights are that material synthesis is at its core a fundamental device in identity formation and social survival. We need to look more closely at how technology can or is altering our perceptions and engagements already in our society to evaluate the potential actions needed to address the concerns presented. When applying this philosophy to the show, the essence of technology is to frame the world and to make it quantifiable, rationalized and destructively instrumental. In order for material synthesizers to co-exist with humans, there needs to be temperamentality to account for the impaired

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judgment of humans. If not, material synthesis can become an agent of chaos.

More than any other device the material synthesizers helped form the foundation of The Orville The series developed major plot points through the social reality of the story world, incorporating the ease and accessibility of goods. Seth MacFarlane supported this idea when he stated in an interview that

With a show like this, there are certain concessions you have to make. I don’t entirely agree with that. I think the replicator was one of the greatest inventions because the replicator, more than any other device, allowed the philosophy of that show to exist. How is there no money? Of course, you wouldn’t need any money because you have f—king replicators. (Pascale 1)

These objects helped negate situations where story points could be written around limitations of what a crew could have brought along to the final frontier. In late 2419, Klyden orders a bowl of ice cream from his quarters’ Food Synthesizer to remedy his depression (“If the Stars Should Appear” 1:04). Just the concept of finding a meal has been the core focus of several cinema plots including 2004 comedy Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle and How I Met Your Mother’s episode where Ted and Marshall try for years to find Gazzola’s Pizza (Shapiro; “Duel Citizenship” 5:05). Despite the potential harms, there is evidence that a material synthesis technology can present immense positive impacts for creativity and freedom. Drawing briefly on Marxism, in class and exploitative societies, “personal freedom has existed only for the individuals who developed under the conditions of the ruling class; but under the ‘real community’ of communism, individuals obtain their freedom in and through their association (87). Instead of opportunities for individual development only being accessible for certain socio-economic groups, material synthesis eliminates limited supply and monetary barriers. Karl Marx further argues that in the future of “these non-class-based societies ‘community’ will provide each individual [with] the means of cultivating his gifts in all directions; hence personal freedom becomes possible” (86). Similarly in the show, the plot does not linger too long on the material needs of the characters but allows the shows story lines to focus on more philosophically challenging concepts such as personal fulfillment, belonging, and even Artificial Intelligence love (Innes 245). In short, material synthesis provides individuals with one of the most desired tools, a device that allows more freedom to focus on their developments as individuals and gives them unrestricted scope to explore their passions and talents.

When evaluating the possible benefits and harms of material synthesis, another science fantasy novel written by Liu Cixin shines light into the potential future. The Dark Forest features the story of human characters struggles with an impending war for Earth’s resources with the Trisolaris species (1). Liu iterates that there is life in every part of the universe and by each civilization’s exponential growth and limited resources, the incentive is very high for each galactic nation to preemptively destroy others to carry their one forward (58). The Fermi Paradox expands upon this notion and states that the roadblock from doing this is the lack of knowledge of other civilizations locations (Landis 163). Limited resources at any scale are stopping civilizations from growing. This is evident within The Orville, with the Kaylons (an AI species) and the Krill (an alien species) both competing with the Union for domination of the galaxy (“Unknown Grave” 3:7). Michael Wong and Stuart Bartlett further reinforce that limited resources and time will eventually lead to species burnout. The authors propose that if a species can predict their burnout they activate a homeostasis civilization wide to prevent such inevitable demise (1). Material synthesis at a small scale can create food, tools and medical aid to keep civilizations going. At a large scale, material synthesis could render spaceships, new bodies, and even mass weaponry technology. If such a device could come into existence it could save planets from mass extinction, by giving people the two things a species needs to survive, resources and time. Only the potential user decides on how to utilize synthesis technology.

The Orville’s material synthesizer has proven to have a substantial impact on both the crew and

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provides a depth of insight into the real-world implications. Although a device such as this could be used simply for ordering a McDonald’s chicken burger or a new Chanel bag, it comes down to analyzing how the user intends to use it. There is hope that a society with this power and unrestricted freedom from capitalist restraints can live peacefully with material synthesis. The aim is for people to use time, space, and access to resources for personal development, however, that is easier said than done. Both those in the show, and real-world similar cases illustrate how people are not always rational and could utilize such a device to cater to their desires. Whether it creates a weed-infused chocolate cake, copious pints of alcohol, or a weapon, material synthesis has immense potential for harm. Within a societal context, limited materials are some of the only restricting factors for space exploration and material synthesis, which could be highly impactful on the progression of our civilization. If such a device comes into being, there would have to be further research and precautionary measures put into place to prevent exploitation and corruption or else pandemonium could ensue. What I and many other fans of The Orville enjoyed about the material synthesizer was the countless remarkable things it could create, and that is what it remains, a device of unlimited possibilities and unlimited outcomes.

Zlatar

NOTES

1 This could be a recurring character trait tied to his ego and budding megalomania, but this episode exemplified the trope of compressed vice at the time of first airing.

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The Journal of Fantasy and Fan Cultures, Volume 2

Volume 2, Fall 2022

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