This is the Quality Contributions Roundup. It showcases interesting and well-written comments and posts from the period covered. If you want to get an idea of what this community is about or how we want you to participate, look no further (except the rules maybe--those might be important too).
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These are mostly chronologically ordered, but I have in some cases tried to cluster comments by topic so if there is something you are looking for (or trying to avoid), this might be helpful.
Quality Contributions to the Main Motte
Contributions for the week of March 30, 2026
Contributions for the week of April 6, 2026
- "I think Terry Pratchett is the atheist version of C. S. Lewis or J. R. R. Tolkien."
- "But Halo... Halo was magic."
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Notes -
Aww I wish I'd seen this when it was originally posted. I'm an atheist. Terry Pratchett is my favorite author. The only books I've ever managed to read twice. Your thought that he has such anger at the world feels so totally alien to me. It wasn't anger it was hope. And it wasn't an empty hope. The world of terry pratchett does in fact get better!
Ankh-morpork is a rotten, polluted, cesspit of a city. Its main defense against invaders is to allow them in and corrupt them so completely that they stop being invaders. The river can be walked on, when its not on fire. The magic university suffers accidents constantly that leave the surrounding areas of the city steeped in weird magical effects. But over the course of many novels it gets noticeably better to live in the city. Crime becomes more restricted to the darkest and worst places of the city. Races of all kind can go there and leave their old world prejudices behind. Material wealth is skyrocketing. New mail systems like the telegraph (clacks) are sweeping the city, trains are being developed to shorten the travel distances, and culture is booming enough for new music styles to be born.
The aggressive conquering religion of the Omnians is softened from something like Islam to something more like modern christianity.
Death learns to care about life in the form of his apprentice.
A wizard and his travelling luggage get to visit Australia and other interesting cities.
A war for a silly island is averted.
etc etc.
The stories of discworld are undeniably hopeful. Its in some of his other stories where he shares authorship that I realized hoe much the hope of his stories shines through. If you've ever read "The Long Earth" series, co-authored with sci-fi author Stephen Baxter you'll see what I mean. Terry Pratchett had failing health and eventually died before the full series completion. The story gets darker and more depressing as each book passes. What starts as kind of a hopeful series about new lands and places to explore, ends with self-sacrifice to thwart a species that appears to be a paperclip maximizer type threat. I thought this was maybe Stephen Baxter just being depressed about losing his co-author. But I read one of his other books, and no that is just how Baxter is.
I want to piggyback on your reply and disagree with @Amadan's take:
I think there's still an important difference. A Christian can read Lewis and interpret the book as a direct moral lesson, a form of guidance. An atheist steeped in Christianity will read the same book, understand that it's intended to provide moral guidance to Christians, but it won't affect him in the same way. The message for him is not "here's how you might turn away from God and here's how redemption and forgiveness might follow", it's "here's what Christians think turning away from God would look like". Which is useful knowledge if you have to deal with Christians, but not directly applicable to the reader himself.
Pratchett's message is different. "How do you survive in a world where amoral beings more powerful than you do things for shits and giggles? How do you do the right thing when doing the selfish thing is easier? What even is the right thing?" are questions for which a Christian has easy answers, but an atheist doesn't.
Just like an atheist might fight Lewis interesting and useful, so can a Christian find Pratchett useful. But it's a different impact. "Oh, so that's how they justify doing the right thing! Good thing you can just follow the word of the Lord IRL."
I think it depends on how much you believe people are able to empathize with a mindset different from their own.
An atheist steeped in Christianity because he has an intellectual understanding of it but never believed probably will, as you say, only read it as a description of how Christians think. But an atheist who used to be Christian, especially an atheist who used to be devoutly Christian, will actually remember how it was to think that way. While obviously he's not going to read Lewis as a "direct moral lesson" since he no longer considers turning away from God to be something that requires redemption and forgiveness, he still knows what it is like to feel that way.
I think the same is probably true of atheists who become converts. Your Christian who used to be an atheist knows how an atheist deals with the unfairness of the world and what an atheist thinks about the Problem of Evil and what an atheist thinks is the reason to do good and not evil. And so will probably understand and even feel the satisfaction of Pratchett's lessons even if he thinks Pratchett got it wrong by excluding God.
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Do you think regular normie movie goers know that Narnia and LotR are related to Christianity? I'm curious, because to me this was not obvious at all. It's just fun adventure stories in the cinema.
Narnia, even the heavily secularised film version, is obvious enough that I don't think you could miss it. Even before seeing the film itself, Narnia is famous as a Christian series of children's books, and C. S. Lewis is extremely widely beloved by everyone from Catholics to evangelicals, despite being neither. The first Narnia film was trying to imitate the Jackson LotR and go for mainstream appeal, but by the sequels my impression was that they had realised they were making films for a niche, mostly-Christian audience.
LotR hides it a bit better, especially the films, which tend to strip out Tolkien's ethics in favour of generic fantasy action. It was, of course, Tolkien's intent to be less direct, but in this case the films take out most of the moral worldview, and I'm skeptical much made it through to audiences.
I disagree that the films take out most of the moral worldview. I will grant that it is less obvious than it is in the books, but one of the reasons I think both the books and Jackson's adaptation was so successful was that they successfully capture the essence (or "vibe") of Tolkien's very traditional Catholic worldview and why it might appeal to someone without being "preachy" or in your face about it. Gandalf's conversations with Pippin, Théoden's speech at Helm's Deep, Aragorn at the Black Gates, and the entire character of Samwise Gamgee, are all faithfully represented and carry what I understood to be Tolkien's thesis well.
By rights we shouldn't even be here, but we are... Is a good speech in it's own right but hits even harder in context of having been written by a veteran of the Somme who was looking down the barrel of WWII.
Sean Astin definitely does a good job, though I'll disagree with some of your other examples and characters. In general I think Jackson's films tend to emphasise martial achievement too much, while mis-casting or mis-portraying characters like Aragorn, Gimli, or even Denethor.
For the most part I just don't like the Jackson films, and I feel somewhat vindicated in the Hobbit trilogy, which show the same flaws, only now it seems that the scales have fallen from the audience's eyes and they can see them.
In general I think there's a solid case that the Jackson films are, for the most part, competent Tolkien-inspired action films, but I do not think Tolkien himself would approve, or that they capture much of what he wanted to say. I think they are probably the most overrated films of the 21st century thus far, and there is a lot of competition for that title.
I agree that the absence of both Tom Bombadil and the Scouring of the Shire makes Tolkien's commentary on the nature of good and evil much less explicit than it is in the books, and but I have to disagree with the allegations of miscasting or that they didnt capture the core themes of Tolkien's work.
My issue with the Hobbit trilogy is that it is abundantly clear that the studio wanted more LotR movies but the Hobbit is a very different work from Lord of the Rings in both tone and content.
Much of the WTF-ness of the Hobbit trilogy is explained by Del Toro noping out less than a year before the shooting started with the result that Jackson didn't have the preproduction or script finalized by the start date and the problems only got worse for the second and third installments with Jackson essentially having to go "Fuck this, let's just shoot something and hope we can edit it to something coherent".
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There are some castings I really like - Sean Astin's Sam, Christopher Lee's Saruman, and John Rhys-Davies' Gimli all stand out as inspired castings. (I think the films do Gimli dirty, but Rhys-Davies is not the reason why. Fantastic choice.) Sean Bean as Boromir is a good choice as well. Ian McKellen is quite serviceable as Gandalf, and I like Karl Urban's Eomer. Cate Blanchett is a fantastic choice for Galadriel, as is Ian Holm for Bilbo.
Holm brings the role that hapless charm that he also brought to roles like Arthur Dent.Never mind I am a dummy.There are a couple that I also reluctantly acknowledge as good but not to my tastes. Andy Serkis as Gollum is not how I pictured Gollum, or would have played him, but I acknowledge that Serkis knows what he is going for and does it extremely capably. I think that's just a reasonable difference of taste on my part. Miranda Otto's Eowyn is one that I can't quite make up my mind on - it's not how I would have portrayed Eowyn, I think, but I can see what they were going for.
At the same time, there are plenty that I think are bad. Elijah Wood as Frodo and Viggo Mortensen as Aragorn are just obviously not up to the role - Wood plays Frodo as a beatific victim and largely nothing else, while Mortensen is completely unable to evoke the majesty or nobility that Aragorn needs to. Orlando Bloom never manages to rise beyond the level of a handsome blank. David Wenham's Faramir and John Noble's Denethor are disappointing as well, which is a shame because I know Wenham has given good performances elsewhere (I liked him in Molokai). Hugo Weaving and Liv Tyler are just bad - the films in general just cannot do elves. Blanchett is probably the only elf role in the films that I have praise for, and even that is dragged down a bit by the temptation scene.
In general, I think the films lean too much into being heroic war films, in the face of Tolkien's reflections on the horror and futility of such things, and the theological substrate of the story is pretty much entirely lacking. I don't mind omitting the Scouring or Tom Bombadil, actually, and some choices like that are necessary, but Jackson generally favours bombast over silence, and inserts fake drama whenever he's getting bored. In the book, Faramir's temptation by the Ring takes only a few seconds; Jackson adds a whole sequence. In the book, Frodo and Sam's travel through Cirith Ungol is unnervingly silent; Jackson adds a whole bit where Sam abandons Frodo.
Meanwhile he also cuts many of the book's quiet moments, such as Aragorn looking out to see the dawn at Helm's Deep, or Sam reflecting on the stars. I feel like Jackson hates quiet, whether it's a chilling or terrifying quiet, as in Cirith Ungol, a tense anticipatory quiet, as at Helm's Deep, or even a consoling, reassuring quiet, as at other times.
Anyway, re-doing LotR as just a war story is arguably viable, but there I think the films are undermined by, well, their war being total nonsense? They are full of logistically impossible movements (the elves at Helm's Deep! why?), or maneuvers that range from the physically impossible and suicidal (the relief charge at Helm's Deep) to the physically-possible-but-stupid (the Rohirrim at the Pelennor). I would be able to just enjoy the fighting more, I think, if the fighting were done well. I can suspend disbelief and ignore dodgy fight or battle choreography if the story and character writing are solid, but here they're not, and also Jackson spends so much time on the battles. Helm's Deep is a relatively short section of The Two Towers as a book, but it's half the film, and the Pelennor is inflated as well. If you're going to blow up the battles and spend so much more time on them, at least do them well?
Liv Tyler / Arwen simply shouldn't have been featured in the films beyond perhaps one short scene in Rivendell and another at the end. Expanding that role was a prominent example of how the film series was completely needlessly hollywoodized.
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I do think that the lack of the Scouring of the Shire is a major weakness in the Peter Jackson adaptations. Yeah it takes time, but it's an essential part of the story. Without that, we never get to see the heroes come home, changed by their adventures in the wider world, finding that their home is a bit smaller than they remembered it being. I definitely think that it should've been in the extended edition of ROTK even if it got cut from the theatrical version.
The biggest weakness, though, was his willingness to flat out ignore Tolkien's story themes in an attempt to drum up cheap drama (as you mentioned). I remember once watching the commentary on The Two Towers, and someone (I think Fran Walsh) said that they had the whole Faramir detour because Tolkien's account of the character undercut the story they were trying to emphasize of how potent the Ring is, and how much of a threat it is. Which, to me, sounds like they missed Tolkien's point entirely. Yes, the Ring is powerful, and yes, it's a threat. But it can be resisted, and there are virtues in the world which are stronger than the temptation that the Ring offers. This is seen most clearly with the Frodo/Sam changes in ROTK: in the book, the Ring tempts Frodo but the deep friendship he and Sam share is enough to overpower the Ring's influence. But in the movie, Jackson had to have a dramatic moment, so he guts one of the major themes of the book in order to gin up conflict. It really rubs me the wrong way.
I have long been of the opinion that, whatever their virtues as movies (and to be fair, I think they are excellent in their own right as movies), the Peter Jackson LOTR movies are pretty flawed adaptations of the source material. It's a real shame, because we are unlikely to ever see better than that, as people consider them definitive. C'est la vie.
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Sorry, was there an other adaptation of the HHGTTG I missed, or did you get Ian Holm confused with Martin Freeman who played Bilbo in the Hobbit movies and Arthur Dent in the recentish hitchhiker movie?
The other role I mainly remember Ian Holm for has him a lot less hapless charm; Ash in Alien.
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Narnia was so blatantly obvious that I got it as a kid. LotR is a more nuanced story, I agree, you have to dig into the lore first to see the references. Maybe it's different if you're raised Anglican.
Well, Tolkien was Catholic, not Anglican...
In general he resisted too obvious readings. He once admitted to a reader (Letter #320), "I think it is true that I owe much of this character [Galadriel] to Christian and Catholic teaching and imagination about Mary", while clarifying that Galadriel is a penitent rather than direct analogue. Here's a bit more of Tolkien on the subject.
Letter #142:
Letter #213:
That said there are definitely elements of LotR that can be read along other lines. Though it was Tolkien's intent to not depict any positive 'religion' in the text, because he thinks that a metaphor cannot include the very thing that it is a metaphor for within itself and still function, a Protestant or atheist might note that, when it does appear, organised religion in Tolkien's works is always evil. He removed most references from LotR, but in The Tale of Adanel the first demand Morgoth makes of humanity is that they build a temple to worship him:
In the Akallabeth, Sauron also establishes a temple where sacrifices will be offered, which is contrasted with the simple, austere purity of earlier Numenorean worship:
Perhaps two instances are not enough to make a pattern, but one cannot help but notice that in Tolkien's world, the good guys never make temples or churches, and never have priests or monastics or any kinds of religious official. Nor do they even make prayer very often; perhaps the closest example in LotR is Faramir and his rangers taking a moment of silence to face west, towards lost Numenor, before a meal. In general it seems that heroic characters, though very much of aware of their dependence on providence and implicitly trusting in God, do not build mediating institutions. On the contrary, building a temple or establishing a religious hierarchy is an activity seen only among the villains. It is a form of idolatry, born of fear and showing a lack of genuine faith, and which only enslaves them.
Adanel again:
It's easy for a Protestant, especially an evangelical or someone descended from the Radical Reformation, to read this and say, "Aha! Idolatry! Rome!" For that matter one might be tempted to link it to the Temple in Jerusalem, perhaps echoing Jesus' criticisms of the Temple hierarchy. (Or one might take it in a more anti-semitic direction, but I see no need to encourage people like that.)
An author may end up sending messages he never intended, and this is one where I think there is a tension between Tolkien's writing and some of his own life and convictions.
I wonder sometimes about how this applies to Tolkien's very many atheist fans, to the extent of defacements like Palantir and Anduril. I suppose it's not fair to tar atheist fans of Tolkien with those abominations. Those are examples of a culture that simultaneously adores Tolkien's work, at least on the superficial level, while despising his ethics. But an atheist - perhaps indeed like Pratchett - might appreciate Tolkien's work and his ethics even while believing him to be, however understandably, in error about the existence of God or the truth of Catholicism.
The interpretation that seems obvious to me is that Tolkien wrote his fantasy as though it were the ancient history of our world, and being a Christian, he wrote it to be spiritually compatible with the Christian understanding of the spiritual history of our world. The Numenoreans don't build temples because in the early chronology of the Bible, God very explicitly doesn't want a temple, and they don't have churches or hierarchical religion because there's no Christian (or Jewish, or Islamic) basis for it at that point in the chronology. Sure, you can make something up, but then if you're actually describing it to the reader, you're implicitly saying "this form of worship/church/Temple/institution that I made up out of whole cloth is totally theologically valid." Tolkien can't roll his own temple or church because he doesn't perceive himself to have the authority to describe such an institution and say, by authorial fiat, that this is a proper form of worship that God finds pleasing; doing that sort of thing is generally perceived to be deeply unchristian by Christians. None of this applies to paganism; it's fine to describe all sorts of fantastical methods of being wrong about God, because from a Christian perspective there's an infinity of false theologies but only one true one.
Here, he's directly copying biblical descriptions of religious practice in era that ends with Abraham and the Patriarchs, which is roughly where these stories would presumably happen. Simple altars in a high place are an apparently-acceptable method of communion with God prior to the Abrahamic Covenant, so it's what he uses as well. The obvious corollaries for the temples of Morgoth and Sauron are Dagon and Baal.
Yes, and that's consistent where, though I see the anti-semitic or at least anti-Judaic reading of an evil deity who demands people make a 'House of the Lord', acknowledge him sole god of the world, and worship only him, I think in context Tolkien is plainly criticising idolatry in a manner consistent with biblical convictions. Morgoth, and later Sauron, set themselves up as false gods, appropriating and perverting the imagery associated with the true god.
I don't think Tolkien's refusal to depict any religion, even primitive religion, was wholly because of his setting being framed as prehistoric Earth. He says directly, in Letter #131, that he thinks that containing 'the Christian religion' is 'fatal' to a fairy-story. This was the reason for his dislike of Arthurian legend.
That said I do also think he has a paradox in his First Age writings that he never quite resolved, which is that, quite apart from being Christian or even Catholic works, Tolkien was also heavily inspired by what he called 'Northern' myth. Turin is a Germanic hero, and his story occurs in the atmosphere of Germanic or Anglo-Saxon (or to a lesser extent Scandinavian) mythology. That means, for instance, things like Fate or Doom as powerful forces in the text. These are, for lack of a better term, 'religious' concepts. Tolkien's chronology does not allow for Christian or Jewish characters - the closest he comes is a sort of ethical monotheism. However, it would allow for pagans, but he does not allow himself to have pagan protagonists, even when the whole story he's writing is derivative of a fatalistic pagan spirituality.
To an extent Lewis has a similar issue, except that Lewis is more of a classicist and his great pagan loves are Greek. Even so Lewis allows himself to speak about Christianity and our world's religions more explicitly, so he does a bit more explicit work in trying to find points of harmony.
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