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Comments
welp
winter's here
NOT ONE
Brace yourselves.
Tactful use of nudity is coming.
Seriously though, I'm still loving that show. Peter Dinklage continues to be the best part of the whole thing.
I'm really curious how they're going to handle the Battle of the Blackwater. I'm sure it won't be as totally fuckawesome as anyone who's read the books will expect it to be, but there was a scene in today's episode that started getting me excited for it again.
@Legionnaire: Challenge the juniors to mon battles.
@Headphones: Normally I tape a small section of the cable onto some solid part of the headphones so as to relieve stress from the part that's connected to the headphones themselves.
Is that code for "throw the little bastards off of the third floor balcony"?
History repeats itself.
Is anyone else a fan of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy?
No, Legionnaire. Don't you understand? If you beat them all in Pokémon battles, then they'll automatically warp out of the area, never to be heard from again.
In other news, I am vaguely amused at how not even a megapost can re-rail my own thread.
Well I am
For some reason I woke up wanting to create a Music Tropes website, spun off from TVT.
For some reason, I hated it. But I'm like the only person I know who feels that way, so I should probably reread it in the summer, since I honestly don't remember most of it.
Used to be a fan of hitchhikers, got tired of it and would probably hate it if I read it now.
^That, pretty much. At the time, I thought it was awesome. Thinking back on it...pretty okay, I guess.
fucking disowned, all of you
I love Hitchhiker's!
I saw the movie and was decidedly meh toward it.
It seemed like a series of in-jokes. They were vaguely amusing, but I'd need to be forewarned about them to really appreciate them.
Not the books?
Haven't read the books.
Don't worry, I haven't read LotR either.
Ah, yeah, LotR. Another series whose accolades I don't fully appreciate. I'm still not in the mood to tackle the last two books. I couldn't even stay awake during the first two movies, when I tried watching them. Then again, it was around midnight when I tried to watch the second one. I just had better things to do during the day, y'know?
Or Harry Potter, either.
I am one lazy bum when it comes to geek fiction.
Or maybe I just really enjoy having soundtracks to go along with my fiction.
LotR is a series that I appreciate more than I actually like. I mean, from a historical perspective, it's extremely important, but from a sitting down and reading it perspective...:/
^ Pretty much. An amendment to my previous statement: I can see that it was influential. I just . . . don't know what was so likable about it, in the first place, that so many creative (and not-so-creative. Mostly the not-so-creative people, that I've seen, actually) people are now drawing upon it. Detailed worldbuilding was really the only thing that I liked about it, and that's not even a requirement for good storytelling.
I should note that I like the overall story and stuff, it's just...Tolkien's actual writing isn't very interesting.
The prose itself, and the pacing, are easily the worst parts that I remember, but I don't remember the story or the characters being exceptional enough to match the acclaim of the series as a whole.
Well, they aren't exceptional from a modern perspective, but bear in mind that at the time, everything you're accustomed to about fantasy was completely original.
Well, sure. I just disagree with the people who think it's held up well, on its own merits. Setting aside the context of the work (as I prefer to do with anything I read; I dislike books that require outside context to be fully understood or enjoyed properly, on principle), I wasn't enthralled. But it bears repeating that I was only able to slog through the first book before losing motivation, so maybe the story picked up later. The characters were mostly unexceptional, too, as I recall.
LotR certainly has its dragging sections (see: anything to do with forests), but I find a lot of people miss the really clever or humorous stuff in there, too. In fact, the factor that comes up most often in such discussions is the pacing, but no-one seems to pick up the really cool stuff. For instance, The Council Of Elrond is a pretty large chapter, but at the same time it's where we first get the big picture and the setup for the War of the Ring. We discover that the Ringwraiths have been active for longer than we anticipated, for instance, and we get a lot of insight into what some of the major characters were doing at the time. The films show us what happened to Gandalf, for instance, but they didn't show us Aragorn's side of the story -- understandable, giving time restrictions, but it's not often discussed how he was, prior to the events we read, on a tracking mission against Gollum.
Some find it slow, but I find that particular chapter very atmospheric and intriguing because we suddenly discover that there's more going on than we could have imagined. It's also a point where LotR more powerfully links up with The Hobbit; prior to this, we got Frodo's comparisons of his own adventure against Bilbo's and how much more grim his own turned out to be, but this comes down to the other characters. Balin's fate is foreshadowed, too, and actually going to Moria after getting that sitrep from the Council was very satisfying.
Where the pacing drops off is halfway into The Two Towers when we move to Frodo and Sam's story, but it picks up at the end and Return of the Ring gets pretty fast with the exception of Pippin's excursion around Minas Tirith. And while the expansion of the whole Helm's Deep part worked really well for the second film, the book gives a lot more gravitas to the siege of Minas Tirith, and the spaced pacing really makes it feel like a doomed hope. In the film, we essentially get constant fighting, but the book gives us downtime behind the front lines.
And I think that's the strength of the books. They work the imagination with atmosphere and space. Tolkien isn't really comparable to modern fiction writers who typically keep a more even pace; he's a unique blending of Romantic era writing, Norse sagas and chivalric romance. The latter two are genres that tend to have the reader fill in the blanks themselves, and it shows through with Tolkien's sparse writing style. While there are jokes about him spending many paragraphs describing something, I find these are mostly unfounded exaggerations -- he describes the general shape of things. Aragorn himself is described in one or two sentences upon his introduction, and everything else comes from bits of description tied to what he's doing or saying. The same holds true of other characters, environments, objects, whatever. Despite his reputation (which might be unfairly gained through association with later imitators), he's an efficient writer when he's not waxing poetic about trees or smoking.
I've read these books a lot and some chapters are always difficult to trudge through, I'll give you that, but I feel as though those sections have become generalisations when most of the writing actually says a lot with quite a little. The whole battle for Helm's Deep was a single chapter, which included every relevant point one could mention from the film. On that note, the battle scenes in the books are so ridiculously badass that I don't think PJ really wanted to match them. When Aragorn jumps down into the Uruk ranks with a ladder? Pales in comparison to some of the bullshit the heroes accomplish in text, such as Aragorn and Eomer fighting back to back against an entire tide of Uruk Hai and coming out unscathed. It's not even necessary, basically coming down to, "Hey, dude, how about some warrior bonding over the blood of our enemies?".
Anyway, I'm getting off track.
But yes, for all the flaws of the books, I simply find them more interesting than the films. The films have better pacing, are much more fun and have some good changes in them, but the way the books feed you bits and pieces of story and lore with such a deliberate nature creates a more effective build up.
Also, Pippin kills a troll single-handedly.
I don't think the LotR movies were that good either. They felt epic but boring. Perhaps had I known what I was getting myself into, and gotten like a character listing with background info, I'd have enjoyed them more, but I spent a lot of time trying to figure out who was who, what they were doing, and why they were doing it.
TLDR: the Lord of the Rings movies are not good introductions to the series.