Comments | elizabeth_hoot: Ranting Of More General Interest, Part I

elizabeth_hoot

Ranting Of More General Interest, Part I

Sep 20, 2006 20:59

This is old stuff to any of my friends and cohorts at Emyn Arnen and/or Brothers of Gondor.

To begin with a little anecdote. I took a "Lord of the Rings" class at my community college this summer. (I got an A. I made sure I got one, just because it would be so shameful not to.) Anyway, I was helping out a girl who was struggling, and we had a ( Read more... )

character: pelendur, character: aragorn, fandom: middle-earth, rl, genre: meta

Comments 5

jedibuttercup September 21 2006, 06:12:02 UTC

Clear to me, anyway; I don't have as many of the books as you do, but I also took a Tolkien class at a local community college and have read the trilogy obsessively.

IMHO, the movies are much more enjoyable if you sit down to them with this idea in mind: these movies aren't LOTR, they're LOTR-AU fanfic written along the lines of, "What would happen if the Ring were a lot more powerful than in canon?"

Granted, that doesn't explain Legolas going off the rails. =)

elizabeth_hoot September 21 2006, 14:24:48 UTC

Well, I tend to dislike fanfic that alters characterisation, so that is not a great comfort to me. My main problem with the movies is that so much was *good* that it makes the bad stick out like a sore thumb. And it doesn't explain Denethor or Elrond or Galadriel or ... etc. I have to be reasonable elsewhere; this is a comfy little home for all those who wish to complain and nitpick and generally enjoy their malcontentment.

cressida0201 September 21 2006, 15:20:11 UTC

I get it but...I'm actually not sorry they changed it for the movie. Trying to get in even a fraction of the whole Gondor/Arnor situation would have taken a lot of effort for relatively little payoff. And also, the fact that movie-Aragorn is unambiguously the heir to movie-Gondor is the only thing that makes their treatment of movie-Denethor even close to forgiveable. Because he's absolutely treated in the movie as the selfish old baddie who's meanly taking away Aragorn's rightful property.

elizabeth_hoot September 21 2006, 20:13:16 UTC

You're right about Denethor, to be sure. It only makes me angrier, though. What really bothers me is how much you see that phrase, 'heir to the throne of Gondor' -- it's everywhere. Not like Faramir or Arwen, which anyone who's glanced at the book can tell is changed -- in books, essays, of course fansites, everywhere, Aragorn's character blurb is almost invariably 'heir to the throne of Gondor' or *sometimes* 'heir to the thrones of Gondor and Arnor.' I truly detest it. Also in the context I think it alters the Boromir/Aragorn dynamics enormously, not to mention the role of the Stewards. Lesser men indeed! >:(

Let's be purists nestashouse September 30 2006, 20:45:41 UTC

Accepting PJ's version of LoTR, without bothering to read the books with any attention, is rather like accepting Cecil B. de Mille's films as the last word on Christianity. (I expect a lot of people do ( ... )