Middle Earth Says ‘No’ To Gay Marriages April 30, 2007
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You may be able to lop heads off with gusto in the new online RPG, Lord of the Rings Online: Shadows of Angmar, but getting all Brokeback with the Hobbits is just not cricket.
Turbine, makers of the latest World of Warcraft contender, decided early on that taking male bonding beyond the realms of a bit of extreme violence was just not on. Gay marriages and inter-species mingling were therefore nipped in the bud, according to Turbine game designer Nik Davidson, speaking to Salon.com.
They felt that giving Middle Earth a kind of, liberal Second Life marital feature would have detracted from the game and ran afoul of millions of Tolkien booklovers – not to mention old J.R.R. himself who would have dragged his desiccated corpse back out of his grave at such blasphemy. Andersen explains:
“The rule that we tried to follow across the board was: if there's an example of it in the book, the door is open to explore it. Very rarely will you see an elf and a human hook up, but it does happen; the door is open. Dwarves don't intermarry with hobbits; that door is shut. Did two male hobbits ever hook up in the shire and have little hobbit civil unions? No. The door is shut.”
“Tolkien was a conservative Catholic. He went out drinking with C.S. Lewis every night, and the two of them had a worldview that was - well, let's just say it clashes a little bit with the sensibilities of East Coast liberals who make up the largest population of Turbine.”
If you think the fans wouldn’t have over-reacted then check this out. Fans noticed a grey squirrel in some early forest screenshots and promptly complained to Turbine that Tolkien once wrote in a letter that he hated grey squirrels. It was changed.
Just imagine the reaction to Gimli and Frodo skipping up the aisle?-Martin Lynch
games lord of the rings online
Editor and Contributor | Martin Lynch
Contributor | Tamlin Magee
Comments
ROLFCOPPTER!
quality writing dude!
It's interesting to me how a world based on honor (Middle Earth) would bow down to intolerance. This shouldn't be about what Tolkien would believe himself, it should be about what a honorable world demands...
If LOTR traditionalists are really that sad then – well – that's their problem. It shouldn't be up to a bigoted corpse and his fans (like the entirety of JRR's fanbase is heterosexual anyway) to determine whether or not a game should contain "liberal ideals".
More than anything, I expect the omission is just the prejudiced reflections of a sour developer team who once opened their doors to a group of rogering sixth formers and were as culturally open-minded as tapeworms from then on.
Get with the times, Turbine.
Nobody tosses a dwarf!
"Did two male hobbits ever hook up in the shire and have little hobbit civil unions? No. The door is shut.”
I can think of one rather important exception: Sam and Frodo! Did they ever SEE the film?! :-)
All those slash-writing fangirls will be so disappointed ^_^