There is no one hero in LotR because the hero is God's Plan. Seriously.
Tolkein's work is all veiled Catholic parables. In Middle Earth, God's ultimate triumph is inevitable so long as everyone plays their assigned parts. That's what makes Sauron and Morgoth evil, they chose to defy their Eru-appointed stations within the cosmic heirarchy.
:so-true: God's cool plan to have a bunch of random shit happen for no fucking reason!
it made the worldbuilding seem so fucking boring when i finally read the Silmarillion only to find out the pantheon is monotheistic, the lesser gods basically archangels, and even worse in stupid trad roles. no warrior sex goddesses like ishtar or even a freya.
i was raised catholic so definately got some flashbacks to CCD and the lore.
Micheal Moorcock wins again as the dopest old school fantasy guy. and he's a comrade. law vs chaos, no good or evil. chaos can be fucked (like 40k) or awesome (communism/anarchism), law can be fucked (unyielding rigidity) or tolerable (law gods that fight lovecraftian chaos entities).
For me, Tolkein's work has a timeless, life-affirming, childhood bedtime story quality that the WH / WH40K stuff can't really match. That's all more like a saturday morning cartoon, great for when I want to just get high on a weekend and watch some big pew pew lasergun space fights.
moorcock is the inspiration for 40k but he's an OG (1960s-80s) fantasy author. you'd be surprised how much modern fantasy came from his stuff.
it's just the more mind bending, multi-dimensional questing kind of fantasy. the stuff that inspired not just 40k but D&Ds planescape, hell most of D&D in general, and any fantasy that abandons the standard human-elf-dwarf and also says fuck you to monarchies and hierarchical systems.
but i still like tolkien his stuff is more cozy def.
I was raised by atheists, so this was totally fine by me and being a Tolkien nerd has made me able to wrap my head around some of the weirder metaphysics of catholicism.
catholicism did have some interesting worldbuilding for a christian religion
That's basically how I take it. I'm a Tolkien nerd cause I like mythology. I'm generally super not into the fantasy genre so to speak. And since I don't believe in it, catholicism is also a mythology and it's interesting enough to check out. I literally thought people took god as seriously as Santa Claus or the tooth fairy until I was like...6. Until you get to my great grandparents my family are atheists, so I'm coming at all this from a pretty outside perspective as well.
Calmly putting down my seltzer water and drafting a forty-page essay about how Shelob is the most important character in the LotR cycle
Christopher, my son, did I ever tell you the full story of Shelob? You know, the monstrous spider - descended from the vile Ungoliant! - which I used to read aloud of in our Oxford meetings of the Inklings? Well what I didn't mention back then was Shelob could also transform into a totally hot babe: all pale and dark and wan like Rebecca in Ivanhoe or what will later come to be known as the goth subculture. In fact she looked very much like the pornographic actress Stoya who will be born 13 years after I die. Christopher, I will be entrusting you with my estate. If there is ever a videogame adaptation of my work you must make sure they get this Shelob right - make sure she is what the Anglo-Saxons would have called a hæða ecge, a real sexy bitch.
Christopher, my son, did I ever tell you the full story of Shelob?
It's not a story the hobbits would tell you
what the Anglo-Saxons would have called a hæða ecge, a real sexy bitch.
this part always gets me
Her mom killed the Two Trees, an event that shook the entire world and still has consequences to the Third Age.
"... And that's why Alatar and Palando the unrepresented blue wizards from the Lord of the Rings canon had to go to Rhun and Far Harad; because otherwise Sauron's 32nd Lieutenant Bothrog Ballsack revives the corpse dragon to..."
Everyone loves the blue twin Maiar who only get mentioned like once.
They just noped out east and spent the war of the ring smoking pipeweed and playing video games
There's a theory out there based on one of J.R.R. Tolkien's letters that they start a new cult of Morgoth in the Fourth Age.
The excerpt (from letter 211):
I think that they went as emissaries to distant regions, east and south... Missionaries to enemy occupied lands as it were. What success they had I do not know; but I fear that they failed, as Saruman did, though doubtless in different ways; and I suspect they were founders or beginners of secret cults and "magic" traditions that outlasted the fall of Sauron.
He also says they maybe rallied forces against Sauron in those places much like Gandalf did in Middle Earth. He never really settled on what they did.
They were convinced to attack by seeing the dead corpses of their huorns that Saruman had killed.
Merry handled that a bit more. Pippin saved Faramir from being burned alive.
They are the same person. Has anyone even seen them both in the same room?
They're pretty distinct in the books. The movies did my insert character of Merry dirty.
And also Wormtongue in the books and I think it was Legolas who killed him in the Jackson movies?
The Lord of the Rings is just a story about 9 dudes being guys in magic times and how two are epic dope fiends
Gandalf pulled apart Frodo's cheeks and said "I want to be the lord of this ring."
The magical elf sauna is also just for immortals for a reason and short dude lives the last of his days feeling like he's aging rapidly as the world moves in slow motion around him. Bittersweet but Mostly Bitter is the general vibe of all Tolkien.
Pretty sure everyone of the fellowship does something important to the plot of the books.
Yeah, this seems like the long, scenic route of saying that "good triumphs over evil so we should try our best to bravely stand against evil."
Like when Legolas is at the battle for Helm's Deep and rides a slain uruk hai's shield down the stairs like a skateboard while sniping child soldiers!
Acrually in the books Legolas is probably the least important member of the Fellowship. Like, they probably could have done without him.
me, who has never watched or read LOTR: :live-slug-reaction:
This was me until my partner made me watch them all
The extended editions too
I know, she's pretty great
Well, I probably would have been okay with the theatrical version, but she was insistent on showing me everything that was different than the books
Are the extended editions recommended? I was thinking of playing some version of LotR as background noise while I pretend to work.
Oh yeah, any LOTR fan worth their salt would recommend the extended editions.
ehhh the theatrical cut of return cuts a ton of chaff at the expense of 2 just good scenes
saruman dying & gimli getting drunk. the rest of the cuts are very justified
I really liked Aragorn singing the Ley of Leithian in Fellowship. And also "how many did you eat?"
The scene that stands out to me as one that needed to be cut was anything with Gimli in the Paths of the Dead. Really, the whole movie trilogy did Gimli dirty.
I always watch extended editions but I will say that as films the cuts are better
You two would probably get along swimmingly
I mean, you'd get along with me too, but you'd have to be fine with me being a little high and cracking jokes during the movie
My favorite bit so far is just asking "Is that Tom Bombadil?" every time someone new shows up
I really like how in the movies Merry and Pippin literally stumble across Frodo and Sam, immediately have to hide from a guy that looks like Satan and just fuck right off with them not even knowing what's going on at all.
We don't need 900 meme formats for the same meme, just use :jesse-wtf:
And honestly this one should just be a screenshot of a tweet in the first place
We don't need memes to convey information at all. Turns out they're just fun to make and share. Weird.
Totally unnecessary, and honestly, even using the original of this wouldn't have made sense here. The point of the original was to present a load of obscure subcultural jargon that the reader was familiar with to highlight their distance from mainstream understanding - this is just an opinion dump made to seem like a "lol so random" conversation.
Not really a hot take, the Jackson films are almost universally considered the best adaptation of any Tolkien work. The only mainstream debate is whether its LotR trilogy > Hobbit trilogy > RoP series or LotR trilogy > RoP series > Hobbit trilogy.
There are all the other adaptations, but those are pretty niche to even know about now:
- the Bakshi LotR film
- the Rankin/Bass Hobbit TV special
- the Rankin/Bass RotK TV special
- Khraniteli (the Soviet LotR miniseries)
- the Soviet Hobbit tv play
- the Finnish LotR adaptation
Rings of Power is so far removed from the source material they could have made the same show and not paid for any rights by changing a name or two.
Oh okay that's less common. Most people find the trilogy fairly even in quality, with the 2nd being best regarded if anything.
The Jackson films were more or less produced simultaneously as a single mega-film and divided into 3 so it's not that the first one had more time to be made, if anything you could say it had less in terms of post production and reshoot type stuff.
