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PaperclipPerfector  11mo ago (text post)   3319 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?

LOTR is the exceedingly rare case where I prefer the movie adaptation over the book. I found the Hobbit and Fellowship books enjoyable, but the Frodo sections of Two Towers and ROTK were... difficult to push through. Movie Two Towers made the right decision to interweave Aragorn's story with Frodo's, instead of hitting you with it all in one uninterrupted block.

LOTR is the exceedingly rare case where I prefer the movie adaptation over the book.

For real, Peter Jackson made tons of canny revisions and cutdowns. I read the books first. The movies were better. So much of the LOTR screams "this author can't kill his darlings", with all the poetry and digressions into the Middle Earth history and Tom Bombadil sidestories. Furthermore, Jackson made the brilliant decision to add scenes from the villains' POV, creating opportunities for tense foreshadowing of the threats the fellowship will soon face.

The good professor Tokien of course remains a legend and a trailblazer, but only in the same way Newton is. Everyone respects Newton. No one thinks he was right about everything.

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