My reaction is: So?
As a fan of both Tolkien and Evangelion, I find this sentiment to be pointless and tinged with misplaced agression.
You wonder why you should care about Tolkien? Why should we care that you care?
As a fan of both Tolkien and Evangelion, I find this sentiment to be pointless and tinged with misplaced agression.
You wonder why you should care about Tolkien? Why should we care that you care?
I object to the content and tone of the button. Whether or not I support Chris Tolkien's actions is immaterial to that. I do not support it, and I support the button maker's freedom of speech. But I also feel compelled to speak out, that the message itself is snide and stupid. Really, do we need to encourage the fragmentation of fandom?
(1) - Whether you support someone's freedom of speech, and whether you think much of what they're saying are entirely separate. Please use your brains and comprehend principles and get beyond simple tribal loyalty.
Yes, I've been long aware that the esoteric power of reading comprehension is beyond the reach of many net denizens' psyches. (That's a drink in the stcredzero drinking game.)
How about this for a clue -- I referred directly to the button's content.
Subsequently insulting the intelligence of readers is uncalled for and fails to acknowledge a possible failure on your side. I would argue this is not about our reading comprehension: you failed to make clear that you were deviating from the subject under discussion to make some remarks about a related issue, because you were assuming people would understand that you were not arguing in favor of Tolkien's behavior. That assumption has been proven unwarranted: people don't understand that you won't argue nonsensical things. Which is entirely understandable, considering the amount of people that do argue nonsensical things.
tl;dr^2 - We are lazy and have poor reading comprehension.
I'm very sorry, if it taxes your imagination that someone would want to talk about what was written on the button. It's not like that would be at all relevant to the article, I guess. (My apologies to the sarcasm impaired.)
To explain the confusion better: You say you "referred directly to the button's content," but you didn't. You referred to it obliquely. The grammatical subject of your comment was "this sentiment." That is as specific as you got. The most obvious antecedent is "the sentiment expressed in this article" — which is what people assumed. In order to get your true meaning, the reader has to actually ignore the grammatical structure of your comment and read in a subject which you didn't explicitly mention anywhere and which is actually off-topic for the current discussion (people will generally use the overall topic as context when trying to determine the meaning of ambiguous phrases).
At any rate, insulting people who are confused by imprecise wording is kind of rude.
As for the button's actual content: I think you're taking the jokey posturing too seriously. As he explained in the OP, the reason he liked the phrase is because it reflects an actual divide between the two cultures — almost any fantasy fan will have read Tolkien, whereas many (probably most) sci-fi fans are focused on present series and haven't read, say, Heinlein. Depending on your school of thought, it could be making fun of fantasy fans for being stuck in the past or it could be making fun of sci-fi fans for being ignorant of their own.
If it taxes your imagination
On a more general note: you are often terse to the point of becoming cryptic. Removing ambiguities and room for interpretation are also effective usages of language. Merely expressing an idea in the shortest possible way is often not as effective in communicating the idea.