#team frodo

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watching the siege of helms deep and all i can hear is the orcs yelling WITNESS ME

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the a&e tv edit of return of the king just cut to a commercial after sauron's horcrux melted in lava but before his lighthouse fell over, like they cut mid-shriek

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anyways we may never have gotten the proper scene where samwise thinks frodo is dead, and he picks up the ring and turns towards mount doom all 'i guess i have to finish this on my own', BUT we did get finn standing in the jakku desert surrounded by burning wreckage holding a jacket all 'i guess i'm poe dameron now'

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the problem with the hobbit trilogy™ is that the hobbit was a story from wwi about how war is hell, and then lotr was a story from after wwii abt how nazis are bad but lotr came along so much later that when jrr tolkien wrote the hobbit it was wholly bound up in 'war is bad', not 'war is a necessary, heroic thing sometimes' the battle of five armies, the glorious predecessor of the battle of pelennor fields, the hobbit's equivalent of the sequence where every major hero takes up a sword and goes heroically to fight for Civilization? bilbo gets hit in the head in minute one and the book SKIPS IT bc WAR IS HELL, NOT HEROIC GLORY so right away the movie trilogy™ failed because they spent eight hours building up to this epic battle of heroes standing against literally personified evil meanwhile in the book bilbo wakes up and the battle is over and half of his friends are dead and so are thousands and thousands of other people, all because everyone was trying to win control of this ultimately inconsequential bit of land, that at one time was a beautiful place, but now is a burned out mass grave and thorin lives just long enough to apologize to bilbo and then die, realizing he has killed his friends and family for a nothing he can't take with him, and he hasn't even really won them peace and a better future, on account of how half of them are dead now like the hobbit is unapologetically a critique of the grinding trench warfare of wwi where millions died for literally nothing and at the end bilbo, who agreed to the quest, woke the dragon, and brought smaug out of his cave, is forced to look on his dead friends in the fields of france erebor, and realize that in this analogy, he is, a little bit, gavrilo princip meanwhile in the movie, erebor is a crucial stronghold from which whoever holds it will gain a clear strategic advantage in the TOTALLY EPIC WAR COMING SOON IN 2001-3 like tolkien literally came in later with the appendices and tried to graft a kind of pre-wwii, the nazis are coming weight to the battle of erebor, i guess? and pj ran with that and turned the hobbit from a story about how War Is Bad to a story about how hitler is coming and everyone knows it a hundred years earlier but then when sauron returns everyone is caught by surprise, and that is why we have to stop voldemort from conquering poland now it doesn't work, is the problem, bc irl wwi and wwii were two decades apart, but in canon, thorin was actually, like, napoleon or, i guess azog was napoleon, or the necromancer, idk, maybe smaug point is, the necromancer being sauron was a good retcon for lotr, but the necromancer revealing himself as sauron **in the hobbit movies** was akin to napoleon taking off his mask to reveal baby hitler and saying 'literally a hundred years from now, look out' and then gandalf, who personally orchestrated the battle of five armies to stop sauron from getting control of erebor, spends a hundred god damn years after that doing FUCK ALL so anyways this is 90% of why the movies don't work, bc ultimately the hobbit / lotr connection only works one way. so all the shit with gandalf and tauriel fighting sauron is great, but all the bullshit with thorin doesnt really fit into lotr's worldview

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here's all the legolas haiku i did back in 2010

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nine companions. very well. #fellowship #teamfrodo #hewilltrytotakethering #notyou

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two towers is on they just cut from the orc hordes at the literal gates of allegorical western civilization to a bunch of blonde women and babies scared in the caves to old beard guy accidentally shooting the arrow that started the war of the ring to a bunch of helmeted orcs, with only their befanged animal jaws visible, raising their rough-hewn barbarian swords to come destroy all the white ppl legolas and gimli competing over who can kill the most brown ppl somehow is light entertainment, idk i don't think i like lord of the rings anymore, i haven't watched it in awhile but it's a fucking mess i know that, like, every major media property produced for five to ten years after //and before// 9/11 falls into that trap genre, but something abt peter jackson spending five years making this huge epic racist allegory and not ever noticing that was what he was doing feels ludicrous, even tho we were all right there with him all 'yes this is an allegory i can get behind and have been looking for since, idk, the persian wars' i mean treebeard is great and all but jesus, this just gets more obvious as the years go on at least nobody gets raped i guess god damnit game of thrones

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i know we shouldn't feed the trolls but... imagine being this crazy.