there's always the one exception but tbh i wasn't thinking about authors here but prominent reactionaries self-identifying as fantasy fans

i don't even think she's ever been a self-proclaimed fantasy fan (not least of all because it'd draw attention to all those questions about plagiarism)

Yeah but she’s not just an author but also politically active reactionary billionaire like Musk and Thiel

Or Italian PM Meloni, a huge Tolkien fan, who met with Morawiecki in Poland in a fantasy themed cafe/bar that my Warsaw SFF friends frequent with photo ops in front of Middle-earth map (and there’s Thiel naming all his cyberpunk dystopia shit after stuff from LotR as a crossover)

oh god, i didn't even know about meloni

Identifying as hobbits is a huge thing among post-WW2 Italian fascists www.atlasobscura.com/articles/hob...

ITs an big thing over all in italy for some reson www.youtube.com/watch?v=8HLy...

TIL 😦

While in Germany they have an wird thing for Native Americans.

Also in Poland to some extent due to Karl May being widely translated here and due to major influence of a Polish guy who claimed to be part-Native American for decades and only discovered to be a fraud posthumously en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sat-Okh

Not anymore really tho, mostly died out here while it’s still a thing in Germany

in hungary they had native american summer camps and everything tbf that was more a left-wing counter-cultural thing afaik and after a while they did some genuine research and tried to make it as accurate as possible still fucking weird tho and much yikes

Yeah, pretty similar here tbh

Karl May cast a long shadow onto our whole region

There are still some niche holdouts tho who maintain Sat-Okh was a “genuine Indian” and the book exposing him vicious slander

I think most of it in Sweden was inspired by Bonanza

gods, I saw this and had a violetn flashback to polish Tolkien fandom, esp elendili stuff (we had a panel about it on polcon this year but we didnt get to the real good tea, we need to repeat it as two hour long version)

f2 did a televised thing at paradox cafe as well, I'm crying ;DD

F2?

we called elendili forum "f2" as opposed to hobbiton forum being "f1", because it was the second one (elendili came into existence after one of numerous conflicts with admins of hobbiton)

ah; I was in Tolkien fandom back in the day too but tbh I tended to be more in English-language spaces than Polish ones, so I rarely visited either of these

that was probably wise ;D it gave trauma so big I needed to discuss it in public on convention, so (seriously tho, I have Stories. the worst fandom I've ever experienced and that's telling)

the first full book I read in English was the Silmarillion and later all of HoME, but I didn't care much for the weirdly right-wing and religious Polish Tolkien fandom

yea, makes sense I came into fandom at really low point in life and made good friends (some of them are still my closest friends), so the more normal people there were kinda upset about place they thought of as theirs becoming a dumpster fire, but we eventually moved away

the first more organized fandom community I was part of was POGF (Polski Oddział Gwiezdnej Floty), and Wrocław's somewhat more disorganized USS Browarek

clearly i've been moving in the wrong circles