[ SECRET POST #2103 ]

[case]

⌈ Secret Post #2103 ⌋

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

01.


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02.
[Derren Brown - Trick of the Mind]


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03.


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04.
[Quantum Leap]


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05.


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06.
[Necessary Roughness]


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07. http://imageshack.us/a/img811/3861/tumblrm9siebsjna1rym8lc.jpg
[nudity which is possibly sexual? / illustrated]


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08.


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09.
[Team Starkid]


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10.
[Teen Wolf]


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11.
[Evangelion]


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12.
[High School of the Dead]


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13.


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14.


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[ ----- SPOILERY SECRETS AHEAD ---- ]












15. [SPOILERS for Teen Wolf]



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16. [SPOILERS for Everything Burns/Journey Into Mystery]



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17. [SPOILERS for To Boldly Flee]



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18. [SPOILERS for Lord of the Rings]



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19. [SPOILERS for Homestuck]



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[ -----TRIGGERY SECRETS AHEAD ---- ]













20. [WARNING for rape]



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Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 00 pages, 000 secrets from Secret Submission Post #300.
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

[fscom]

18. [SPOILERS for Lord of the Rings]
http://i.imgur.com/IxB8O.png

[anonymouslyyours]

Gollum looks like he has a boner under that loincloth. It's creeping me out.

[yeranonnyharry]

Do you think he says "gollum" when he comes?

[dragonimp]

Great, now I can't unsee that >_

[greenvelvetcake]

Lot of boners around here today.

[(Anonymous)]

[(Anonymous)]

Yeah...Tolkien wrote in a letter that Gollum was one of the great tragedies in the story and if he had been treated differently by Sam Gollum would have deliberately taken the ring and thrown himself into Mount Doom on purpose.

That's one of the things that bothered me about the movies how they just made Gollum straight-out evil and Sam purely selfless in the last movie. They even took out the scene where Gollum looks like a "sad, weary hobbit" and is about to stroke Frodo when Sam wakes up and yells at him, and Gollum reverts back to his old self. Or the line at the end where Frodo tells Sam that they should forgive Gollum because the whole thing would have gone kaput without him at the end.

[(Anonymous)]

Idk, I thought there were some scenes where we were supposed to sympathize with Gollum and where it was clear that Sam was overreacting/misinterpreting, or treating him badly, and the part where he falls off the edge, when he's holding the ring and looking happy for a second, I felt super sorry for him at that moment and I think we were meant to. I do wish they'd kept that line about "I couldn't have done it without him" in there though.

[arcadiaego]

Er, they made Sam basically a comic idiot and were obsessed with Gollum.

[truxillogical]

They even took out the scene where Gollum looks like a "sad, weary hobbit" and is about to stroke Frodo when Sam wakes up and yells at him, and Gollum reverts back to his old self.

That was one thing I absolutely loved about the musical. Michael Therriault gave a very nuanced, touching portrayal of Gollum, and they even added on to the scene a bit--it was one of the best parts of the whole play.

I hated that they put that lembas scene in there. WTH, PJ?

[nursethalia]

Interesting! It's been at least five years since I read the books, I will have to dig them back out and explore this concept of Gollum's potential redemption, because I seemed to have forgotten it!

[(Anonymous)]

Tolkien also said Sam was the true hero of the story. :P

[dragonimp]

I thought that was kind of the point, though. That no one was wholly good or wholly evil.

[arcadiaego]

And if Gollum hadn't been Gollum Sam would have trusted him. Think of how long Frodo had the ring before he succumbed to it, and how long it took Smeagol to kill his friend. One mistake of Sam's which he immediatly apologised for can't be blamed for what Gollum does no more than one moment where he wanted to be good means he could have been redeemed. And Sam did save the entire world by showing mercy to the little bastard, something Gollum couldn't understand. Tolkien wrote that Sam was the real hero of the books, and rightly so, but he also knew no one is perfect.

[visp]

Sam's loyal and brave and strong, but he's not good at faking friendliness, and he finds the creepy guy who tried to kill them... creepy. And he's kinda on a camping trip from hell, which is making him extra irritable.

[(Anonymous)]

That's really sad. I could never bring myself to hate Gollum, i always just pitied him.

[al28894]

Agreed for the most part .When I saw the movie, I always thought that Gollum was fighting between the two personalities of his mind and the evil one won in the end. But then again, they were on a camping trip to Mordor, and that means less bonding, more destroying, and a creature that's bound to do some damage to them in the end. Can't help but pity Gollum now though...

[(Anonymous)]

Eh, I think Sam's supposed to be the most Hobbit-like of them all - so a lot of good nature but also a bit narrow-minded and maybe a bit petty... So Sam's flawed, which is usually a good thing. Besides, he has good reasons not to trust Gollum very much. Yes, Frodo has a lot more empathy, but he's older (in the book anyway) and wiser (mostly) and he knows the effect of the Ring - he's the exception.

[intrigueing]

It's not that simple. It's most likely true (certainly true in the books) and it's a bitterly ironic, tragic state of affairs and I LOVE that fact, the way your actions have consequences you can't foresee, but:

a) that doesn't mean Sam should have magically seen into the future and somehow known that if he treated Gollum kindly, Gollum would've redeemed himself. He had no way to know that. He wasn't fair to Gollum, and that came back to bite him just like a good many unfair actions come back to bite people in the reverse of the Androcles' Lion effect, but he's human, he makes mistakes, he does bad things with good intentions (protecting Frodo), and b) how about a great big NOPE for implying that it's someone else's fault for why an evil person doesn't redeem themselves. Even if circumstances would have changed that person's behavior, it's no one else's fault if they're evil. No one's.

Very few people are irredeemably evil right from birth, pretty much every giant scumbag in the world was once a perfectly innocent kid and has been shaped by his or her life to become the scumbag s/he is today, but that does NOT mean other people should be blamed for the horrible things they do. They should be blamed, or in Gollum's very specific case, the ring should be blamed for corrupting him (and btw, the speed with which he was corrupted isn't a ringing endorsement of his character. It took a couple of decades and an extended period of stress and psychological hell to corrupt Frodo, it took one glimpse to corrupt Smeagol). If he had the potential to become good, it's not Sam's responsibility to somehow know that and turn him good.

Now, feeling guilty for indirectly making him stay bad and feeling bad about treating him unfairly? Wondering what could have happened if he'd just been nice to him? Certainly, but Gollum's redemption wasn't on him and he can't be outright blamed for its failure.

The whole reason that subplot is so good and so tragic is that it's highly unlikely that they would have ever done anything differently: Gollum's personal failings meant he wouldn't have turned good without different circumstances, Sam's personal failings meant he wouldn't have acted differently unless he knew that, and he couldn't have known that. Sometimes, life is just plain unfair and some things can't be blamed on anyone except random luck.

[lunabee34]

I think Gollum is a pitiable figure, but (solely basing this on movieverse; I haven't reread the trilogy in about ten years) I don't see how Sam could have behaved much differently. Not only did he want to protect himself and Frodo, they had a whole world to protect.

Also, while I find Tolkien's letters and commentary on his own work fascinating (srsly, thanks for the excerpts, Nonnies; I've never read any of his letters), I think Tolkien's opinion about what he wrote or his idea of what he meant to say bears very little significance on textual analysis.

[rbhudson]

He really said that? UGH. In my Tolkien seminar, everyone was saying Sam was the true "hero" of LOTR. I'm like, excuse you? Aragorn.

[(Anonymous)]

I hated Sam in the movies because of the way they pushed his Gollum hating to the extreme.

[(Anonymous)]

You say "fat" like it's an insult.

[(Anonymous)]

Sam is easily the most well-written character in the entire book series. Would YOU've been nice to a creature that obviously wanted to use your best friend for its advantage and probably get him killed? I wouldn't.

Not everyone can be a char like Frodo. Frodo had a completely different personality than Sam and also, Sam was simpler.
Tolkien did good in having him act cruel towards Gollum when FRODO was supposed to be the one to see something else in the little shit. There needed to be a conflict.

[(Anonymous)]

Why is this a spoiler? Book came out decades ago. *rolleyes*