The White Council

Re: "Hey you with the pointy ears!..." [warning: long rant about purists]

Tolkien and Inklings Discussion

[snip] : Secondly, whenever I have voiced a concern over the movie it hasn't been about hobbit feet or medievalness (both of which don't matter all that much to me in the movie) but about mincing up the story in ways that seriously affect it like the idea (which I hope was rumor) about cutting Eowyn out and making Arwen into Xena the warrior princess. I have no problem with cutting out bombadil or giving Arwen an expanded role but there has to be some limits :)

And an additional point I could have made (though I didn't for space reasons) was about how people jumped to all sorts of conclusions having heard nothing more than rumors. Both of these concerns (cutting eowyn and making Arwen a Xena character) were founded on nothing but paranoia and baseless accusations. But they became widespread and sometimes overpowering and accepted as virtual fact. When I debate, I want to debate on real issues and what's really going on, not on "what might possibly be happenning somewhere sometime maybe kind of."

: thirdly when we discuss stuff like this we are discussing ideals... obviously I'm going to see the movies probably many many times and I'll probably like them alot... but does that mean I can't dream about if I had the money and influence to do it all my way :) after all what would be the point or the interest of a message board were everyone repeatedly said "the movies look good so far, I'm really excited and I can't wait" "did you see the new tidbit pj released last week?" "of course I saw it!!" I mean really, does anyone want to post on a board like that?? for more than a couple of days anyway?? : You can rant about purists and their arguements and demand for the ideal perfect portrayal and so on but if it weren't for them this and all the other boards would grind to a halt and become stale boring and abandoned. If it weren't for the arguements and discussions fueled by purists and their counterparts you would have nothing to talk about... you wouldn't even have had anything to do that rave on! :)

[snip]

Ah, only if! ;) I don't really like ranting. But in any case that's not entirely true. It's not as if for a debate to occur, one party has to create this way-out-there wacky position in left field and defend it. The best debates are when both sides know what's going on and defend their positions until (a) they come to an agreement, or (b) one has won over the intended audience. Debates become confusing, insoluble, and pointless when hypothetical and imaginary stuff starts getting tossed about as fact.

A second point I might make is a clarification. When I was ranting about "purists," I didn't mean to criticize anybody who disagreed with or would have made different choices than with PJ. As I said in my post, I myself would have done some things differently. The ones I was calling purists are those who see Tolkien through a particular lens, and won't allow for even the possibility that there are other interpretations. They read that Strider took 13 steps to the right, and if Strider doesn't take 13 steps to the right in the movie, well then PJ is a @(&^%@#$ and so is his dog. They denounce PJ and the actors and their mothers at the slightest hint that something is deviating from their own narrow visions, and make the whole lot of us fans look like stupid, spoiled 12 year olds with nothing better to do than through tantrums at accomplished artists for the sin of disagreeing with us. (Like I said in my post, those of us on the WC are the least of the offenders, though there are some. I posted my rant here because I felt that it would recieve the most rational discussion; on other boards, I can only imagine how my mother, my wife, and my dog would be brought up in all sorts of less than printable situations.) ;)

Cheers.

Dave C-Q