monstersqueen replied to your post “the lure of the One Ring is that it corrupts all who bear it” i think...”
yes it makes very difficult to actually FIND a character that might resist it, because what characterizes most good and pure protagonists is a strong sense of purpose and will. did you find any?
there’s a few that come to mind, but it’s hard thinking of them actually lasting for any length of time because one thing about Tolkien’s thoughts about the Ring’s corruption, that i’ve read about, more or less state that succumbing to it is inevitable
like i’ve heard that Tolkien stated, in a letter, that he regarded Frodo’s loss to the Ring as basically the same thing as if a boulder had fallen on him, and crushed him to death; he would be no more to blame for losing to the Ring then to getting all his bones and organs pulped. apparently Tolkien felt it was the same thing and that people will, pressed and stressed, inevitably be broken by evil. with the trick being, how long you can hold it off?
purpose, a strong will, are so very easily turned towards corruption.
one big example I see come up a lot is Sam Vimes of Discworld, and to be fair; ‘incorruptible’ became a personality trait of his through sheer force of stubborn willlpower. The fact that he had thoughts like ‘if you do it for a good reason, you’ll do it for a bad one’ does imply a level of stony resilience that the Ring would have a hard time getting through. So he might carry the Ring for a while, despite being human (and, by the nature of humans in Tolkien’s world, the most easily corruptible species), but it had better be a short while. We DON’T want a Vimes that has been hollowed out and had the idea of justice turned into a desire to punish.
One that may not be too popular because of my own view: Terezi from Homestuck. This might take a bit of explaination: Terezi seems like a happily draconian enforcer of Alternia’s cruel laws, and thus would easily be swayed by it, but a lot of her motivations, friendships and actions make absolutely no sense if you assume she is acting like an enforcer of the Condesce’s laws. She’s all but stated to know what Karkat is (or at least, suspect his blood color), her overall best and closest relationships wind up with aliens and lowbloods, and the ancestor she emulates died specifically because she was supporting lowbloods and the cause of the Signless.
If she was a proper and regular legislacerator, hunting down lowbloods and enforcing the rules of ‘the strong abuse everyone else’ that Alternia runs on, then she would have already murdered Karkat or at least sold him out, or MAYBE had some very complicated feelings, but she’s shown to never care that he’s a mutant, just mess with him a lot over it. Given Hiveswap, this is a HUGE deal; she’s not just being unusually compassionate by troll standards, she’s acting in accordance with a spirit of law that doesn’t EXIST on Alternia, though Signless did speak of something like this, and that Redglare enforced.
Consequently, Terezi could possibly carry the ring for a while. But given Terezi’s vulnerability... it had better not be too long, at all.
A random possible thought; how would some of the more detached AIs or robots do with the Ring? Those that have somewhat inhuman goals or at least don’t have obvious ‘i want this’ switches. Discworld golems, for instance, are humbler than hobbits by default, and it’s possible that the geth of MAss Effect could ignore it; a thousand voices can drown it temptation more surely than just one. (though the rage against the creators would be an easy access point for the ring)
