fandomsecrets | [ SECRET POST #3108 ]

[ SECRET POST #3108 ]

⌈ Secret Post #3108 ⌋

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Gandalf and Galadriel

For Gandalf, he's really manipulative at times. I mean, he's doing it for the right reasons but I dislike how he meddles in the affairs of Men, and he's always morally right. He's willing to sacrifice pretty much anything to achieve his ends. But his path does lead to the end of Sauron and he does seem upset a few times by endangering the Hobbits. I guess it's just not enough. It's hard to see if he really can see humans and hobbits (short-lived creatures) as anything but pawns or charming toys. I have this sense that he wants to end Sauron more so he can go back to Valinor than anything else.

For Galadriel, I feel like I should like her more than I actually do, and I have a hard time articulating why. I want to support a great female character but I guess I dislike the way that everyone who meets her in LOTR says you can't speak evil of her, she's so great, you don't know what you're saying Eomer, etc. And reading more of her back-history doesn't help; I still feel ambivalent about her. She just rubs me the wrong way but I wish I did like her.

I'm not sure how much I agree with you on Gandalf. I mean, he is most decidedly manipulative, but I didn't see that much of it in relation to Men. Hobbits moreso, I would have thought, with railroading Bilbo onto the Lonely Mountain quest being a big example of that. Most of his major meddling with Menfolk (Gondor, Rohan) happened after the shit had already hit the fan in a BIG way, if I recall correctly, and in most instances he didn't seem to have a lot of choice. Things were usually already in crisis by the time he arrived.

Even before that, though. Almost all his major meddling that I remember happened after he discovered Thrain and Sauron at Dol Guldur. The Enemy was already moving. That was his motivation for setting up Thorin on his quest (get rid of the dragon, prevent Sauron from having a northern flank), and all the arranging he did with Aragorn and the White Council. Sauron moved first, building his armies, collecting rings of power, things like that, and Gandalf only majorly got into gear after he realised that. I don't think it's particularly manipulative, or a sign of him trying to move things along in order to get home faster, when he was mostly reacting to a looming crisis that was already underway. Sauron was planning to steamroll Middle Earth with Gandalf in it, which is around the point where most people would want to kill the guy ASAP, I think.

(Putting Bilbo into the line of fire was still an odd and manipulative choice, of course, but I think in that case he mostly wanted a non-dwarf on the quest in case of, say, gold sickness rearing its head, and hobbits were about the only folk out there that the dwarves didn't currently have a grudge against or suspicion of, and also a people he was particularly fond of and inclined to trust. Frodo and the others were mostly an accident, stemming from Bilbo somehow, in all of Middle Earth, having managed to stumble on the one bloody thing everyone and their dogs had spent centuries searching for. Frodo has to take the Ring to Rivendell because it came from his house and Gandalf can't afford to touch the thing. Frodo himself chose from that point on, and the others chose to go with him. Gandalf didn't have a lot to do with that choice, beyond trying to keep them alive after it).

I don't know. Manipulative implies to me that he was doing for his own goals primarily, and while there was an element of that in that he was actually sent to fight Sauron in the first place and he is always working towards that goal, by the time we see him actually acting in any major fashion, he's mostly responding to the situations on the ground. He spent two thousand years knocking around Middle Earth before that, and most of what he did was explore, keep his eye on things, and semi-regularly try to fight the Evil in Dol Guldur and figure out what the heck it was. He turned down leadership of the White Council, never seemed to stay in any one place too long, and doesn't seem to have taken that much of a political stance in any one place. He's more of a roving troubleshooter than anything.

I also do think he cares for individuals, short lived though they might be, and sometimes even at the cost of larger goals. Minas Tirith is the big example of that to spring to mind. In the middle of a massive battle for the historical main bulwark against the Enemy, he chose to leave the main fight and go with one hobbit to save one man from essentially his crazy father. He chose Pippin and Faramir over pursuit of the Witch-King himself and potentially a large number of lives if the battle turned worse on them in his absence. In the most ruthlessly pragmatic sense possible, Pippin and Faramir were not important lives at that point. They're not important to the battle, they're not really important to the future after it even if everyone does survive (Gandalf has the true King incoming, he doesn't necessarily need the Steward), and Faramir is already mostly dead at this point. Gandalf goes to save him anyway, mostly, as far as I can tell, because Pippin asked him to, and because he always liked Faramir himself. So. I think he does value individual lives, regardless of their relative importance to the cause.

... And that was a long comment. Um. I apologise.

When looked at properly, like you have, one can see the truth in Gandalf's actions. The problem comes when you put yourself in the mindset of the characters, especially those in The Hobbit, like Bilbo or one of the dwarves. Gandalf does not let them know what he's up to, even later when he makes it to Erebor, and it comes off as feeling a bit manipulative due to lack of information.

I say this from the POV of my RP character, who in one timeline, is there through the quest to Erebor and knows just as much as anyone else in the Company about what Gandalf is really up too. All she could do is try and mitigate the danger she could see the Company facing, not the larger plot Gandalf was involved in.

I think for me, on the issue of Galadriel, it's that I am so used to faulty characters and feel there is more interest in them having faults that a character as idealized and faultless as Galadriel feels... annoying?

I've seen it said that Tolkien tends to put female characters on pedestals, and the one who has the highest pedestal of the lot is Galadriel.

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[ SECRET POST #3108 ]

Re: Characters you have complicated feelings about

Re: Characters you have complicated feelings about

Re: Characters you have complicated feelings about

Re: Characters you have complicated feelings about