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Author Topic: Coming Soon  (Read 89967 times)

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teg

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Re: Coming Soon
« Reply #720 on: May 28, 2011, 10:57:53 AM »






NEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEERDS
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Friday

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Re: Coming Soon
« Reply #721 on: May 28, 2011, 11:58:05 AM »

There is actually no (or exceedingly little) action in Tolkien. Every fight is told as if someone was actually telling the story.

i.e. "Aragorn slew the orc."

This is starkly opposed to, say, Salvatore, who writes fighting like this:

"Drizzt brought both swords up in a quick flashing movement, slicing them by Artemis' face. In the moment Entreri was blinded, Drizzt quickly slammed both swords down, only to find Artemis had anticipated this ruse and had trapped both blades there with his own. Before Drizzt could react, Artemis lashed out with one boot, connecting squarely in the face. Drizzt's whole world exploded in red as he staggered back. He knew Artemis was moving in for the kill, and began to whirl his swords in front of him, expecting to feel steel on steel any second. But nothing came, and as Drizzt regained his vision only lost for a second, he saw Artemis moving quickly to the left. Too late, Drizzt began to turn to parry. The sharp bite of Artemis' blade, only partially dulled by Drizzt's mail, brought a sudden burst of fury to Drizzt's movements. He countered quickly, spinning his whole body as he slammed into Artemis' defenses too quickly for the assassin to do anything but parry."

I think the only time I can even remember Tolkien writing anything more complicated than "and then Gimli killed five more orcs" was during the fight between Eowyn and the Witch King.
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Friday

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Re: Coming Soon
« Reply #722 on: May 28, 2011, 12:02:06 PM »

I actually kept track, once: Salvatore spent almost three pages describing events that count not have taken more than ten seconds, while Tolkien will spend the same amount of pages describing the trees and then skip an entire battle in a sentence.
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Brentai

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Re: Coming Soon
« Reply #723 on: May 28, 2011, 12:02:30 PM »

The whole point of Gimli and Legolas comparing scores was to give the reader a sense of scale as to what was going on.

Which turned into a pretty funny moment in the movie when their scores turned out to be the exact same 40-something as in the book when they were clearly taking out like a fucker every two seconds for half an hour.
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Mothra

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Re: Coming Soon
« Reply #724 on: May 28, 2011, 01:14:28 PM »

Hughes walks out as director of Akira movie.

This is kind of a good thing, considering the man directed fucking Book of Eli.
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Thad

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Re: Coming Soon
« Reply #725 on: May 28, 2011, 01:54:06 PM »

Glorfindel was an elf lord named after the elf lord who killed a Balrog in Gondolin. That's... pretty much the extent of his background.

Also, he's the one responsible for the prophecy that the Witch King can be killed by no man.

Well, that or someone tells the character about what happened after the fact. Case-in-point: Gandalf telling Frodo about his battle with Saruman, or Boromir telling Aragorn in his dying breath about how he fought off six million orcs.

Gandalf also doesn't explain what the Nazgul are until Frodo makes it to Rivendell.

I actually quite like that storytelling device as it makes rereading the books a completely different experience than reading them for the first time; on the first read-through you're as in-the-dark as Frodo and just know that there are horrible things chasing him, while on subsequent readings you know what's really going on and it's a whole different kind of scary.

There is actually no (or exceedingly little) action in Tolkien. Every fight is told as if someone was actually telling the story.

i.e. "Aragorn slew the orc."

This is starkly opposed to, say, Salvatore

Martin has a very interesting mix of the two, because of his very deliberate choice of POV characters.  Tyrion ends up in the middle of a couple huge battles and so they're narrated as they happen; meanwhile, while the results of Robb's battles are very important to the development of the story, we generally only hear about them after the fact when someone reports them to Caetlyn, because she's a POV character and Robb's not.  Indeed, [spoiler]none of the eponymous clashing kings are POV characters (unless you count Dany)[/spoiler], and that's a very deliberate and very interesting decision.

Of course, TV is a visual medium and I expect we'll see a lot more of those battles next year than we "see" in the books.
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Friday

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Re: Coming Soon
« Reply #726 on: May 28, 2011, 02:05:04 PM »

Quote
Of course, TV is a visual medium and I expect we'll see a lot more of those battles next year than we "see" in the books.

Oh yeah. Looking forward to [spoiler]Beorn vs Bolg[/spoiler] assuming they don't change anything, or just simply have [spoiler]Thorin kill him[/spoiler] instead.
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Mongrel

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Re: Coming Soon
« Reply #727 on: May 28, 2011, 06:31:33 PM »

Now, I do shave only once a week, but I'll happily lay in with the neckbeards on Tolkien stuff.

That said, the fact that movie adaptations exist never bothered me in and of itself. I understand that a lot of things need to be altered for a movie adaptation and I generally try to be kind to them. Truth be told, Legolas being in Mirkwood doesn't bug me at all. It makes sense for pretty much the exact reason Thad mentioned and hell, it's something Tolkien himself might've added if he could have.

What always bugs me is not when scenes are cut or changed around or that the scenery doesn't look the way I want it too. I actually think the LotR movies do an excellent job of nailing most of the visual stuff: costumes, landscapes, etc. I'm not upset that Bombadil was cut, or things like that (though I think he's great and totally belongs, but hey, it's a blindingly easy thing to cut for the movie and a loss that easier to live with than many other things). What bugs me about book adaptations is when the whole theme and meaning is disrupted, undermined, or just thrown wholesale out the window; when characters' personalities undergo wholesale changes; and when the underlying tone of the writing is lost.

It bugs me ten times more with Tolkien, because the guy actually wrote a lengthy (but not THAT lengthy)introduction which is included with every copy of the damn book ever that explains his feelings and themes as clear as day. He was a man who longed nostalgically for a world he remembered from his youth and tried to capture that in a fantasy setting.

It's not something complicated or esoteric. You don't need academics to debate to possible intentions of a long-departed author. The man came right out and said it! Lord of the Rings is the story of the last hurrah of the fantasy world he's worked on his whole life, which doubles as a sort of metaphor for the loss of the supposedly more idyllic world of his youth. I mean, Friday already pointed it out - it's not about battles or swordplay, it's about lingering impressions of nature, about homely meals, and long voyages on foot in true wilderness, it's about the fading away of the last vestiges of fantastic and magical things that were once to great for imagining. It's not a fistfight, it's that last moment just before you completely forget a beautiful dream you had.

But instead we got a trilogy about comedy dwarves and surfing elves and a bunch of characters who kinda go through the motions without really ever having any of the depth that makes LotR more than just a bunch of elves and dwarves and other stock fantasy races beating the crap out of each other. It's why the loss of the scouring does bug me where Bombadil doesn't: It shows in the most visceral fashion that even for the isolated Hobbits in their idyllic Shire, the world has changed irreversibly. It's the clincher, the object lesson for the slow. It's a crucial scene for the theme of the books and a huge and final bit of character development.

The whole failure to understand is disappointing because it seems like no one really understands what fantasy used to mean, back before it was utterly fossilized in the 60's from tropes created in the 30's. They key here is that Tolkien is often lumped in with writers who came in in the 40's 50's and 60's (or later), but really, he fits much more with an earlier breed, with Mervyn Peake, with Kenneth Grahame, with TH Whyte. And even (in a way) with others like Lovecraft or R.E. Howard.

That doesn't mean I want to roll back time to the old Weird Tales pulp days, just that there was a time when all of this was NEW! When Lovecraft wrote of unspeakable horrors and no one had really done anything quite like it, when Hyperborean barbarians walked the dream lands of twisted ancient mythologies, when pixies and fairies were more commonly remembered as they are in say Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norell (ironically, one of the very few truly original fantasy works of our era) as house-spirits or dangerous creatures of active folklore. When goblins and orcs and elves and dwarves as we know them now were almost entirely new ideas - a massive feat of reinvention of Tolkien's, that is so enduring it persists to the degree that it has drowned out everything else. But it was once new! There was a lot of cross-fertilization between these guys in ways that most folks don't realize and they're similar in many surprising ways, but ultimately they each created worlds that were uniquely imaginative and deeply personal - and they shared them. Now that to me is true Fantasy.

What do we get now? D&D sourcebooks and Star Wars Novels, and stories so derivative it boggles the mind to think that there was ever a time when the word "Fantasy" could be taken at face value rather than as hideous mockery of its own meaning.

But I guess movie adaptations are not where you look for originality anyways.

:tldr: I like stories how about you.
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Thad

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Re: Coming Soon
« Reply #728 on: May 28, 2011, 07:09:45 PM »

Which I think is part of why Martin's such a breath of fresh air: he's NOT stock Tolkien/Howard/White fantasy (though there are a few recognizable bits of each), he pretty much took feudal Europe and threw in some extinct dragons and made the scary things beyond the borders of the known world literal.  And there's only one dwarf, and he's not a fantastical creature.
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Büge

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Re: Coming Soon
« Reply #729 on: May 28, 2011, 07:55:38 PM »

Yanno, it seems like Fantasy has supplanted Sci-Fi as the genre of choice for speculative fiction. Modern fantasy can usually be summarized as "It's like story X but with twist Y," or "What if culture A had magical thingy B?"
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Mongrel

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Re: Coming Soon
« Reply #730 on: May 28, 2011, 08:46:52 PM »

Which I think is part of why Martin's such a breath of fresh air: he's NOT stock Tolkien/Howard/White fantasy (though there are a few recognizable bits of each), he pretty much took feudal Europe and threw in some extinct dragons and made the scary things beyond the borders of the known world literal.  And there's only one dwarf, and he's not a fantastical creature.

See, I'm not saying Martin is a bad writer - I haven't read near enough of him to make that kind of statement anyway. But that's not what I'm looking for.

It's not realism per se I'm looking for, it's that pure unbridled imagination that fantasy once represented. Lots of magic can be just as keen as almost no magic (or none at all!). It's only crap like the magepunk worlds of Magic, D&D, WoW, etc. that are really stomach-churning.

Saying something is just like medieval europe... just makes me want to catch up on the real history of medieval europe. Say, on that subject, you know what's really cool? Medieval eastern europe. There's so much wildly untapped stuff there it's crazy.
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Brentai

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Re: Coming Soon
« Reply #731 on: May 28, 2011, 09:15:29 PM »

LotR struck a resonant chord in its time because it was about a massive worldwide war and its irrevocable effect on the world's innocence, nary a decade after that exact thing had happened.  It's never going to strike the same chord in this generation no matter how hard you try, because we were all born in the fourth age.  We can only think of  time when people could believe that legends existed as itself a legend.

Any attempt to write a similar story in the modern day is going to come out as a tedious cynical trudge through a gallery of once-respected entities now reduced to their true colors and generally being less than impressive.  In other words, modern fantasy.

Kick the emo out of Gen-X, Gen-Why and Gen-iPod and maybe you'll get your old childlike innocence back in your stories.  Or just learn to work in the context of what the world is.  Whatever, I'm gonna go watch TV.
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Thad

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Re: Coming Soon
« Reply #732 on: May 28, 2011, 09:51:02 PM »

LotR struck a resonant chord in its time because it was about a massive worldwide war and its irrevocable effect on the world's innocence, nary a decade after that exact thing had happened again.

You know, the Scouring of the Shire is based on Tolkien's feelings upon returning from the FIRST World War.

It's never going to strike the same chord in this generation no matter how hard you try, because we were all born in the fourth age.  We can only think of  time when people could believe that legends existed as itself a legend.

Maybe it won't strike the SAME chord, but it's proven pretty popular with the two generations since it was published.  There are a whole lot of other themes to draw out of it besides just "oh, right, it's like the War" -- as Tolkien said in the aforementioned introduction, it is not a damn allegory; it's INTENDED to hit on themes that are universal.

Any attempt to write a similar story in the modern day is going to come out as a tedious cynical trudge through a gallery of once-respected entities now reduced to their true colors and generally being less than impressive.  In other words, modern fantasy.

Kick the emo out of Gen-X, Gen-Why and Gen-iPod and maybe you'll get your old childlike innocence back in your stories.  Or just learn to work in the context of what the world is.  Whatever, I'm gonna go watch TV.

I don't think cynicism is responsible for what's wrong with modern fantasy -- indeed, my favorites of the last few years have been extremely cynical works like The Witcher and Game of Thrones.  (Hell, cynical fantasy was hardly unheard of even around Tolkien's time -- the first Conan story was published more than 20 years before LotR, and the first Elric story just a few years after.)  I'd say it's more that the genre's so incestuous, derivative, and repetitive.

Really it's the old "90% of everything is crap."
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Mongrel

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Re: Coming Soon
« Reply #733 on: May 29, 2011, 02:53:42 AM »

It's also worth pointing out the fact that Tolkien explicitly states (in that same introduction) that his book is not supposed to be an allegory for WWII, and even described how the plot would have been different if it was.
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Brentai

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Re: Coming Soon
« Reply #734 on: May 29, 2011, 11:55:43 AM »

Yes, guys, I read the foreword too.  Did I say that's what he wrote?
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Bongo Bill

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Re: Coming Soon
« Reply #735 on: May 29, 2011, 12:06:28 PM »

TV Tropes dot org slash Applicability
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...but is it art?

Thad

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Re: Coming Soon
« Reply #736 on: May 29, 2011, 12:56:27 PM »

Yes, guys, I read the foreword too.  Did I say that's what he wrote?

Did I say you said that's what he wrote?
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Bongo Bill

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Re: Coming Soon
« Reply #737 on: May 29, 2011, 12:59:14 PM »

Did I say you said he said that's what he said you said he wrote?
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Bongo Bill

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Re: Coming Soon
« Reply #738 on: May 29, 2011, 12:59:28 PM »

I honestly can't recall. Somebody help me
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Mongrel

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Re: Coming Soon
« Reply #739 on: May 29, 2011, 04:19:04 PM »



"Could you ah... could you repeat that, Chief?"
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