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."
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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