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Hobbits are just short fat Men, so they get the secret afterlife of the Second Children of Iluvatar.
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Jan 31, 2017 06:52
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My rule of thumb is: it's not racist if they're an elf.
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Feb 4, 2017 21:53
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HFR was good, though, even if 3D isn't.
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Feb 6, 2017 16:39
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TildeATH posted:Can we get back to Steve Jackson and whether or not a big budget OGRE trilogy would be true to the source material? I think it would not, but in a way independent of quality.
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Feb 7, 2017 17:39
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Runcible Cat posted:Anyone got Beren and Luthien yet? Is it worth the money, or just a rearrangement of the Silmarillion material? It differs quite a bit from the Silmarillion, and so far it's definitely good poo poo.
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Jun 20, 2017 08:55
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Okay, so, I'm still going through it, but it's focused heavily on the evolution of the story itself. It starts with the oldest version of the story of Beren and Luthien, which is very different and much simpler than the version you know. Then it tells the full version, alternating between summaries drawn from earlier drafts of what would become The Silmarillion, and poetic treatments of important scenes in them taken from The Lays of Beleriand and other sources.
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Jun 21, 2017 09:28
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Annual Prophet posted:would love to see a complete version of the lay of leithian; is all of the partial material included? It's as complete as it can possibly be considering the work was unfinished.
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Jun 25, 2017 01:43
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Sauron was motivated, at least initially, by the appeal of laying the world out in an orderly manner. Black Speech was a constructed language in-universe, ostensibly invented by Sauron for the use of his servants (though in practice only the high-ranking ones used it; most orcs just spoke a pidgin of it and their native orcish), without any irregular terms. Unlike his boss, he never poured his essence into the very matter of Arda, instead deeming it sufficient to control it by means of minions. Industrialization, especially the bad, dehumanizing parts of it, was overwhelmingly associated with the Enemy in Tolkien.
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Jul 3, 2017 19:55
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butter isn't stretchy idiot
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Jul 12, 2017 05:09
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Are there transcripts available?
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Jul 22, 2017 05:02
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The Hobbit trilogy of films was pretty bad, but it can be interesting to interpret them as a satire of the Lord of the Rings trilogy of films.
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Jul 24, 2017 02:42
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Well, he also had the support of Elrond. He also played up Pippin's noble status, though I don't think it helped much.
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Jul 25, 2017 02:56
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PMush Perfect posted:Kinda like the theory that "The Eagles" are a propaganda replacement for "orcs not affiliated with Sauron". I like the idea that sometimes it does mean literal actual giant divine birds, and sometimes that's just the go-to lie for when the truth was too embarrassing (because it was actually free orcs). Nobody would believe in eagles if it hadn't actually happened a couple times.
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Jul 25, 2017 04:35
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Probably he would've been worried about encroachment from Erebor, so resettling those lands quickly would've been a priority. Declaring the reestablishment of Arnor is a strong move, regardless of the substance. Both the Thain and the Mayor of the Shire, and all the Dunedain, acknowledge King Elessar. The people of Bree seemed to have been distrustful of the Dunedain generally, but the Dunedain and the militia that Merry and Pippin raised were the only military powers in Arnor aside from goblins after the elves left, so they can loving like it.
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Jul 25, 2017 19:38
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Being descended from an ex-Elf does appear to give Men a touch of the ol' greatness, which is diminished by the passage of time.
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Aug 3, 2017 02:14
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The Ring is a severed and still-active component of the mind of Sauron. You know the experiments they've done on people whose corpus callosum was severed, separating the two hemispheres of the cerebrum from each other? Things like - cover one eye at a time and have them read different things, and then determine that the left and right hemisphere then know different information and make different decisions. In some cases they even had noticeably different personalities. You would still call such a case one person instead of two, in spite of that - even though it's clear that their personhood resides in neither hemisphere exclusively. In some even more severe cases, a person who had an entire hemisphere rendered basically dead managed to regain their faculties, and are regarded as having continuity with their pre-injury self, regardless of which hemisphere was the one damaged. Their personhood could never truly be destroyed as long as one or the other remained. But a person who loses both hemispheres, leaving only the cerebellum, brainstem, etc., is basically a vegetable. That's the Ring and Sauron. He inflicted a form of brain damage on himself, in a way that left his two parts susceptible to traumatic separation, and then they were separated, so that each part could observe and know things the other could not. The part left in the body, let's call it the Eye, was clearly still fully autonomous and intelligent, carrying on his agenda under such guises as the Necromancer, whereas it's very difficult to estimate the full extent of the Ring's awareness and independence, on account of its lack of physical capabilities except for changing its radius. On the other hand, killing the Ring also killed the Eye, whereas killing the Eye repeatedly failed to kill the Ring. The Ring could communicate by an apparent form of telepathy, but was generally not cooperative. However, we are aware of some other instances where the Eye also communicated psychically, and made a much more forceful and nuanced conversation. This might be a matter of what each part thought was most prudent under those circumstances, or it might also reflect the respective reasoning ability of each part. Was the Ring's failure to tempt Sam and difficulty in tempting Frodo, in comparison with the Eye's success at tempting Saruman and Denethor, and apparently successful provocation of Aragorn, entirely explained by Sauron's moral inability to understand the perspective of the humble? Or was it also the case that the Ring was not as intelligent as the Eye, less able to communicate or even think of comparably complex ideas?
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Aug 3, 2017 03:25
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Listening to wise advisors is an incredibly canny political move.
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Aug 3, 2017 17:58
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Gandalf knows Hobbits. Even if he begins to suspect what ring it is, he knows it'll remain inert there unless acted upon by an outside force.
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Aug 3, 2017 22:22
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Gandalf was a diplomat given wide latitude in his mission to ensure no power in Middle-Earth could oppose the hegemony of Valinor. Bringing down the second-world nation of Mordor was part of purging the last survivor of the faction of Melkor. He made sure that Gondor prosecuted the war in order to keep them occupied with their, well, occupation, and to ensure that Men had to deplete their resources in order to do it, rather than fill a postbellum power vacuum so profitably that they come to see themselves as rivals of the West. It's "let's you and him fight" backed up by three thousand years of religious dogma. The descendants of the kings of Numenor always seem to be susceptible to foreign prophets.
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Aug 4, 2017 06:59
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I deeply appreciate how this thread consists mostly of bullshitting about subversive readings.
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Aug 4, 2017 19:35
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skasion posted:Numenoreans clearly vaped This, I feel, is the answer.
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Aug 11, 2017 03:53
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Fear Fire Foes Fum
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Aug 27, 2017 20:41
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PMush Perfect posted:Not at all hot take: There's probably a slow-burn Thorin/Bilbo romance fanfiction somewhere out there that's better than the actual Hobbit movies. Wouldn't be too difficult for a sufficiently dedicated fan, I think.
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Aug 28, 2017 15:35
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Even before Bilbo came back with a load of treasure, he owned property and lived comfortably off the profit it brought him. However, "middle class" means something different in post-WW2 America than in pre-WW1 England, and I think that's worth examining.
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Aug 29, 2017 18:14
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chernobyl kinsman posted:that's badass. i don't remember that; is it in the Sil? It's in Beren and Luthien, at least.
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Aug 30, 2017 03:19
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If they want it to be the new Game of Thrones, they should adapt The Children of Hurin.
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Nov 10, 2017 00:37
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I feel like if they can make a TV serial based on the Mahabharata, they can do one based on the Silmarillion. However, I think it would require the audience to be known to have a greater degree of... reverence, I guess would be the term... than exists currently.
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Nov 11, 2017 21:11
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This could be good. This could also be bad. It could even be both at the same time. All things are possible. God help me, I'm actually interested.
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Nov 13, 2017 20:02
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Tolkien's work has inspired generations of artists. Some of them have had budgets. It's no big deal if another one sucks, I think.
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Nov 14, 2017 18:07
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It should be in the public domain.
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Nov 16, 2017 05:55
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Faithfulness is not the attribute that makes adaptations good.
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Nov 17, 2017 02:32
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sassassin posted:Wow Bongo Bill really blowing all our minds with this one. Sometimes obvious things bear repeating.
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Nov 17, 2017 20:36
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In the second age, they didn't know Sauron was even there until he was practically already beaten, and in the third, they were reluctant to intervene directly after things turned out so badly the last time.
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Feb 9, 2018 21:50
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The Silmarillion reads something like the juicy parts of the Old Testament.
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Feb 9, 2018 23:24
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The fact that the Hobbit movies ended up missing the point of the source material is not what's wrong with them. There's nothing that requires an adaptation to be anything like what inspired it. Brands are an illusion. Even for those who are fully on board with the idea of an anti-Tolkienian action romp through ersatz Warhammer, sort of a cynical and hostile caricature of the earlier Lord of the Rings films, these movies got problems. Individual scenes are campy spectacle that did land fairly often as such, and those ones I liked, but the ones that didn't were an undifferentiated mass of dwarves Scooby Dooing around the set piece, which is even more of a problem when they last for so long. The moments in between the action sequences, in which characters can do more than just allude to their single trait, tended to be arbitrary and simplistic, diminishing any challenge the characters might face (except for Thorin, who I think actually managed to be associated with some gravitas). The points at which original two scripts were cut into three movies, meanwhile, left us with one movie with no ending, one with no beginning, and one suffering from tonal and thematic disagreement with itself. I wanted to like those movies, and the production had all the ingredients needed to come together into something good. But all that talent and all those resources were gathered in service of something that was less "a story" and more "some things that happened." I still call it a shame that HFR didn't take off, though in hindsight maybe 48 was the wrong number of frames per second. At least try for 60!
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Feb 10, 2018 02:25
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sunday at work posted:If only there had been some kind of story they could have adapted, something with a point on which they could have hung all the exciting things that happened. The problem is not that it didn't have the specific story of the book with the same title, but that it didn't have much of a story at all, not even an original one. People come up with original stories for movies all the time. If they had done that, the movie would've been good even though it differed from the source material.
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Feb 10, 2018 03:37
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Of course, Aragorn had positioned himself as the heir of a dynasty that had been founded with the support and by the command of Manwe, not to mention Gandalf's own boss Aule.
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Feb 13, 2018 19:13
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Whoops about whom Gandalf was aligned with. Establishing a country hostile to Mordor right on Sauron's flank did end up dividing his forces during the war, even if that wasn't the intention. Removing the ambiguously Enemy-aligned Smaug from play was certainly a foreseeably useful move.
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Feb 13, 2018 21:41
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Tolkien was a linguist and a lover of language. He made a few conlangs for fun. He understood that languages depends on culture, which depends on history. You can't really understand English without knowing about the King James Bible, for instance. Most of what he wrote was the backstory for Elvish, and remained unpublished until after his death. However, all that practice gave the stuff that he actually did publish an unparalleled depth and a unique idiom. It's very distinctive as a result. In particular his use of language is unsurprisingly masterful. First rule of reading Tolkien is don't skip the poetry. Bongo Bill fucked around with this message at 20:22 on Mar 16, 2018 |
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Mar 16, 2018 20:17
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Let's say, I dunno, the translation of the Book of Jonah.
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Mar 28, 2018 03:12
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