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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   3366 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for April 21, 2023

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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What's the appeal in Lord of the Rings?

I've recently been press ganged by my friends into joining a Lord of the Rings book club and it's one of the more significant Ls I've taken in a long time. We've finished the Hobbit and the Fellowship of the Rings and I'm actually not sure I've ever read fiction this boring. Gargantuan amounts of the plot are just them wandering through the woods. The characterization is borderline nonexistent and the dialogue is so stilted that I have trouble keeping the characters apart - why are there even two characters for Mary and Pippin when as far as I can tell they're the same character? Every page feels like a slog, the only decent part is Tolkien has nice descriptions of scenery.

I'm not trying to be a dick though, I want to enjoy these books, everyone tells me they're great. What am I missing? What should I be looking for / trying to get out of them?

"Seinfeld" Is Unfunny

"J. R. R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings: This book popularized most of the cliches found in fantasy today, but modern readers may well find it unspeakably boring, purely because everything in it has since been subverted, inverted, parodied, and otherwise done to death. Aside from that though, it also has lots of Unbuilt Trope which are actually not like what non-readers think the book contains."

It was first published in 1954 and has been very influential. The problem is that you won't find anything new there now if you've already read other fantasy books.

Yeah that's probably a huge part of it. I'm trying to experience it as though I'm someone encountering all these tropes for the first time but I'm probably so used to them that I can't experience the same novelty and wonder as a first timer.

It’s ironic that I’d been a lifelong lover of science fiction and didn’t read fantasy (other than Piers Anthony’s Apprentice Adept, which barely counts). LOTR was the first fantasy book series I read, and so I got it all firsthand.

I feel like the two genres get bundled together but for some people scratch different itches. I’ve never been a major scifi guy but always took to it more easily than fantasy, and I absolutely love the cyberpunk subgenre

My Triessentialist view is that SF/F as a mega-genre addresses three itches which realistic fiction has to try harder to scratch:

  • The What - The desire to see or imagine amazing and impossible things, and see other species or peoples in fascinating and unique garb - Science Fiction or Fantasy

  • The How - The desire to understand a world or a society which functions in fascinating yet logical ways - Science Fiction or Fantasy

  • The Why - The desire to have unique or intoxicatingly different feelings as members of or visitors to fantastic societies and their rituals, goals, and folkways - Science Fiction or Fantasy

Or, in familiar words, "to explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life and new civilizations, to boldly go where no man has gone before."

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