Why Can't Gay Dwarves Get Married in Middle Earth

[pegkerr]

Now THIS is interesting. . .

An article in Salon here by Katherine Glover discusses trying to balance the needs and requests and desires of players of a role-playing game with the overarching intention of the original author of the source material for the game (in this case, J.R.R. Tolkien).

I can vouch for my stepbrother -- he's a big supporter of equal rights for the gay and lesbian community. But when the issue of gay marriage came up at work, he voted against it. Same-sex marriage for U.S. citizens is one thing, but same-sex marriage for gay dwarves in Middle-earth is quite another.

Nik Davidson is a game designer at Turbine, the Westwood, Mass., company producing "The Lord of the Rings Online: Shadows of Angmar." The game has been in beta (a test version) since September, and during discussions of new features for the game, which was officially released Tuesday, the design team wound up in a heated discussion over what restrictions should be placed on marriage. They debated not only gay marriage but also marriage between members of different species. Finally, the game's executive producer settled the matter by pulling the entire marriage feature. Read more

It's particularly interesting, considering the huge number of slash fanfic writers who love the Lord of the Rings universe and some might presumably like to play the game. But although I, too, strongly support gay civil rights up to and including marriage, I gotta think I would probably have made the same decision that the game designers did. That surprises me a little.

Perhaps it's because, being a published author myself, I give extra (perhaps too much) weight to authorial preferences/intentions.

Thoughts?

Edited to add: Of course, it should be pointed out that if the object is to adhere to authorial intention, the computer game itself probably would not be invented at all: Tolkien used a typewriter and probably would have preferred quill and ink. I'll bet that he would have regarded personal computers with suspicion, if not outright loathing, as indicative of modernity, which he rather hated.

Comments

[bohemianspirit.livejournal.com]

Well, I know next to zilch about gaming -- my sister jemby is the one who would be far more knowledgable on that score -- but the question that comes to my mind is: How much do we REALLY know about Tolkien and his innermost thoughts? Not suggesting he had a Secret Gay Life, ala the tabloids (which, at my job, I get stuck seeing, will I or no), but I'm not sure the knee-jerk reactions of some fans -- "Of COURSE he wouldn't even THINK of anyone having same-sex attraction!!!" -- are warranted, either. We know what he said publicly, and what he said in the letters that survived and that his heirs permitted to be published. Even if it's reasonable to suppose he wouldn't approve of gay relationships, he surely had too much of a brain to fail to perceive that they existed; I mean, reading about the men of his generation, I sometimes wonder if half the population of Oxbridge was gay or "experimenting." ;-) And he may have been influenced subconsciously, even if his conscious intent was not to suggest any sexual connection.

Finally, I don't think male relationships of his generation can necessarily be so neatly delineated. Even without a specifically sexual component, there were still strong emotional bonds, including nonsexual displays of physical affection, that blur the lines considerably beyond our own culture's "straight-gay-bi?" market niche-ing.