Saving the Shire

After far too long, I've started to watch the Lord of the Rings (extended editions) again. I'm still very early in the films (one hour, roughly, when they're just arriving in Bree,) but I was thinking about how the series works at setting the stakes.

Fantasy is one of those genres where you can really ruin a story by sacrificing clarity for spectacle. Lord of the Rings, despite being the real codifier for the entire genre, has a few things working for it that some pieces don't. First of all, despite its taking place in a world filled with magic, very little casting of spells takes place. Basically, Gandalf occasionally shoots light out of his staff, and the Ring itself has a corrupting influence on those around it. Most of the stuff that takes place in the series (ignoring the ghost soldiers) is basically just armies clashing in a standard medieval fashion (well, a romanticized version of it.)

But that's not as important as the Shire is. The films spend a full hour with the Hobbits just existing in the Shire (well, ok, some of that is Gandalf doing research on the Ring and getting beaten up by Saruman.) Before we even see Rivendell or Gondor or any of these grand fantasy locations, we get the Shire, which is the absolute embodiment of "goodness," a land of people whose chief interest is basically just having a good time, dancing and drinking with their friends.

Throughout the films, that's the thing we're rooting for. We want the Shire to survive. It's the world we'd all like to live in (though I wouldn't mind if my Shire were a little closer to a major city with a good library or something - whatever the Middle-Earth equivalent of a movie theater and array of foreign restaurants is.)

In a sense, "Hobbit-ness" is innocence. If I recall correctly, in the mythos of Middle-Earth (and Tolkien wrote reams and reams of this stuff,) the Hobbits are actually just an off-shoot of humanity. The "men" humans like Aragorn have a more complicated world that involves political backstabbing and heavy suits of armor, but the Hobbits are basically humanity with all the unpleasant complications taken out.

Now, obviously, Lord of the Rings being such an influential series has led many to use it as a target for deconstruction. But as an original piece, it's very effective.

Second Run at a Game of Thrones Post

Ok, my first post was way too long, and had me sputtering off in different directions. This time, more focus. Instead of doing a review of the latest, shocking episode, I figured I would do some speculation, both on how the show is going to adapt stuff that is already written and where things might go in the rest of the book.

Spoilers for all the Books Incoming