(no subject)
Is Christmas depression finally catching up with me?
Woke up in a very melancholy mood...
Sometimes I feel very alone. Not so much in the big ways - (:: shrugs ::) I've kind of got used to it and If I were to be honest more often than not I like it that way - but in small, stupid ways, like when I find myself picking up on aspects of things that no one else seems to notice or attach the same importance to as I do. Wanting to share something and finding no one who feels the same way; ending up posting a wordy lj entry that is as much self-assurance as message in a bottle. Sometimes it feels like I've constructed this elaborate universe for myself to live in and it's entirely subjective... and there's this lingering fear it might easily collapse again, because it's only a figment of my imagination, after all...
I don't even know why this should matter.
[After encountering your typical goth horror-obsessed Clive Barker fan (and nothing but that type) over and over on the internet I had this intense moment of, not even so much satisfaction, but reassurance and relief that I wasn't entirely imagining things, when I read this D.Winter's Clive Barker biography.]
Oh, and... this was not triggered by every one else's gushing over the RotK movie (even I am not that insecure), but my own reaction and criticism were rather symptomatic. I never really fit in anywhere, with any group. Not with the fangirls and not with the Tolkien nerds, for that matter. (Even during my Tolkien fan days I never made it through the Simarillion, because I couldn't really be bothered with the pseudo-mythology of a fictional universe.) And while I'm aware it's unrealistic hoping to find someone with whom you'll agree on everything (or even on most of the major points) - the whole soulmates kind of thing -, especially when you're not 18 any longer, but have lived your own life for more than a decade longer, going to places, some obscure or at least not exactly popular, collecting memories and experiences, still lacking a lot of others that might be considered prerequisite... sometimes there's just this irrational need I can't quite help.
Is there even a point to all this? I usually don't have a very strong sense of wanting to belong, but sometimes it catches me unaware... and yes, there's a world out there beyond the internet... but if it comes down to it, it's even harder meeting similar people there... ?
:: headdesk ::
...yet *another* thing I didn't like about the LotR movie-verse: Arwen...
I see - really see - the point of the people who demand that the movies should be seen as a work of art (even though work of art is maybe not quite the term i'd have used myself...) in their own right, rather than always be measured against the books. But for me it was simply impossible to do so: with book canon still too present in my memory, some things were just too jarring and they always, always happened when the movie did have me intrigued for for a few minutes.
I'm trying not to be too nitpicky, but it's not always details either, or things that were left out, but what I felt to be major distortions and over-simplifications of characters.
Arwen. I know she is rather elusive and hasn't much to do in the books, as opposed to Eowyn, who seems to be a much more popular character with both readers and movie-goers. More generally speaking, the lack of women in Tolkien's world is something a psychologist might find interesting. But. But. Arwen is a major, the defining driving force in Aragon's life. She's as inextricably linked with his fate as he with hers. If not for her, and her father's condition that he would not give her to anyone less than the king of Gondor, Aragon would probably have stayed up in the north and never realised his destiny and the whole fate of Middle Earth might have turned out differently. His destiny is not fulfilled, even after he'd been crowned king of Gondor, until the sapling is found to replace the withered tree, the sign of, one guesses, some supernatural recognition of his king-ship and he is - finally -allowed to marry Arwen.
... and the tale of their long waiting and labours was to come to fulfillment.
In Tolkien's universe, despite her elusiveness, Arwen is not negligible, she's not the token female, the token love interest, because a story must end with marriage or death. Tolkien didn't make Arwen more or less redundant, Peter Jackson did.
I realise how in this day and age especially when working in a medium that obeys laws very different from those of the novel, it would have been difficult to convey the gravity of this epic, bittersweet love; how it must have been tempting to give her a little more scenes, make her a little more active, if only not to have movie-audiences go all Who the fuck is *that* in RotK. But it diminishes the mystery, and both her and Elrond's eternal indecision and wavering take away much from the powerful drirving force the love between Aragon and Arwen is in the books. Might it not at least have been worth trying to capture that?
I'm sorry, but a couple of blurry visions, exchange of tacky jewelry and the obligatory you-may-now-kiss-the-bride closure don't quite succeed in conveying this IMnotsoHO.
In book canon Arwen had renounced her immortality and set her fate even before the events of the books start. In the movies even in RotK(!!) Arwen is about to leave Middle Earth until she has some kind of vision of a child of her and Aragon. They were presumably aiming for suspense, but lost so much more in the process.
Will go my nerdy ways now & read a bit, then watch the next couple of B5 episodes.