[ SECRET POST #3479 ]

[case]

⌈ Secret Post #3479 ⌋

Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS.

01.



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02.
[Lifetime's UnReal]


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03.
[X-Men movies. Charles/Erik]


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04.
[Andrew Zimmern vs. Anthony Bourdain]


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05.
[Secretary]


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06.
[Stardew Valley]


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07.
[Notre Dame de Paris (French Musical)]


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08.
[Erma]













Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 00 pages, 00 secrets from Secret Submission Post #497.
Secrets Not Posted: [ 0 - broken links ], [ 0 - not!secrets ], [ 0 - not!fandom ], [ 0 - too big ], [ 0 - repeat ].
Current Secret Submissions Post: here.
Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.

Comments

Re: Dumbest mistakes about a piece of fiction you've ever seen

[(Anonymous)]

Not as bad as the time I read an essay in the New Yorker that said LOTR had a "neat morality." (as in, tidy, uncomplicated.)

lolwhat

There are several things you could accuse Tolkien of being somewhat too tautological or simplistic about, but his treatment of morality is in NO WAY one of them. It's practically the diametric opposite of neat, given that the entire point and basis of the whole plot is that one's level of arbitrary goodness (and said goodness itself is examined and revealed to be a tangled puzzle - nobility of intentions? purity of heart? strength of virtues? selflessness? and how about the fact that the very things that make you capable of trying to do good are the same things that make you vulnerable to the corruption of evil? there's a dozen different metrics) has basically zilch to do with your ability to be uncorrupted by the ring etc. Even the movies don't have a "neat morality" by any stretch of the imagination.

Re: Dumbest mistakes about a piece of fiction you've ever seen

[philstar22]

Oh. Wow. No. That's just so wrong I don't even know where they got that from. Not even the movies have neat morals.

Re: Dumbest mistakes about a piece of fiction you've ever seen

[(Anonymous)]

I mean, it is neat in the sense that there is basically good and evil, and it doesn't really inquire into the bases of these things. I think probably the critique is not ultimately that different from Epic Pooh, although more coherent and explicitly political in Epic Pooh. And I've always felt that Epic Pooh is basically, more or less on track as a piece of analysis. It's just not the case that the things it identifies make LOTR bad.

Re: Dumbest mistakes about a piece of fiction you've ever seen

[(Anonymous)]

ayrt

Well, it does inquire into the basis of evil: All things were good in the beginning, but their virtues became unbalanced and suffered from a lack of restraint and perspective and self-awareness, and were corrupted over the course of time in a whole host of different insidious ways until they were so far gone they had become evil. This is the basis of all evil in the LOTR universe, including Sauron's.

It doesn't inquire quite as much into the nature of goodness, goodness is treated as more or less the natural/default state of things, though there are a few events that can serve as examples of "how to be a good person" (Galadriel's temptation, Frodo's choice, Faramir's spiel on what he wants Gondor to be, etc).

I would say a bigger problem with LOTR's morality is that the aforementioned stuff about how good people become evil isn't portrayed enough "onpage" as it were, it's more telling than showing.

Re: Dumbest mistakes about a piece of fiction you've ever seen

[(Anonymous)]

Sure, I think that's a more correct way of putting it. But my point is that I dont think the critique is groundless. It's not something that Martin does better, of course.