[ SECRET POST #2557 ]

[case]

⌈ Secret Post #2557 ⌋

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

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Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 01 pages, 013 secrets from Secret Submission Post #364.
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

[(Anonymous)]

So we can keep with the trope that ugly=bad, beautiful=good? /yawn

[(Anonymous)]

But Thranduil isn't particularly evil? Not that he's necessarily the kindest of chaps either, but still...

[(Anonymous)]

Well I said bad, not evil. He's self-serving, uninterested in battling the forces of evil threatening the rest of the land, more than happy to imprison the dwarves indefinitely for no reason, and he was a dick to Tauriel because she ain't good enough for his precious boy.

All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing

[(Anonymous)]

Meh, okay. I guess I was still thinking more about the book's Elven-king, who is already an antagonist or at least an obstacle to the Dwarves but without much of the rest.

[(Anonymous)]

da

I thought the book Elven-king was worse what with him imprisoning Thorin for no particular reason other than "I smell treasure" and not telling him his mates had survived so he'd break easier.

[(Anonymous)]

I don't know what edition of the book you read, but Thranduil never imprisoned Thorin because he wanted in on the gold. Thorin believed Thranduil will want a share of the gold and thus refused to tell Thranduil anything but "we were starving". Thranduil is oblivious who Thorin is and what he was doing there.

Instead, Thranduil He imprisons Thorin because Thorin's company have trepassed into his lands, seemingly attacked Thranduil's people at their feasts and refuse to tell him who they are and what they're doing in his lands. And let's not forget that Thranduil's halls are situated amongst lands infested with giant spiders and next door to Sauron, and his people almost completely isolated and have a very poor history with dwarves, so he has every right to be suspicious of strangers - not even necessarily strange dwarves - turning up in his lands and refusing to tell him anything about why they're there. It's just common sense: if you're next door neighbours with Sauron, you're very careful unless you want to wake up one morning to find a Nazgul in your bathtub. Look at how many cities Gondor lost.

[(Anonymous)]

It's just common sense: if you're next door neighbours with Sauron, you're very careful unless you want to wake up one morning to find a Nazgul in your bathtub.

omg. I'm still laughing at this.

[(Anonymous)]

... if you're next door neighbors with Sauron, you're very careful unless you want to wake up one morning to find a Nazgul in your bathtub.

OMG I'm laughing so hard at this. And now I'm imagining a "If You Give a Mouse a Cookie" type situation, except substitute Nazgul for mouse, and maybe souls for cookies and it's taking place in either Thranduil's palace or maybe Minas Ithil ...

[(Anonymous)]

"Dad, there's a Nazgul in the bathtub."
"Dang it, Legolas! What did I tell you about leaving food out?"

[(Anonymous)]

Thanks for writing all of this so I didn't have to. And here I thought "Evil Thranduil" had been replaced by "Fab Thranduil" in fandom. Guess he's still around.

Also, LOL at the Nazgul line.

[(Anonymous)]

tolkien's elves are some of the worst people in his mythos tho...

[(Anonymous)]

AYRT

I haven't read the books *covers face in shame* but the movie elves mostly seem benevolent, with perhaps an aura of immortal smugness.

[(Anonymous)]

The movie elves are pretty benevolent. The elf-king of Mirkwood is pretty much a dick in The Hobbit, though, and in the appendices and The Silmarillion the elves get up to all sorts of fuckery.

[(Anonymous)]

Well, most Elves living at the time of the films are pretty benevolent, yeah. A few millenia earlier, though, some of them did have a knack for slaughtering each other over shiny things. Galadriel and Elrond are nice people, but they're basically among the few survivors of one big dysfunctional family that made the brilliant decision to rebel against the 'gods' and them murder each other.
While being very pretty, obviously.

[(Anonymous)]

I am fond of this as a description of the Silmarillion.

[(Anonymous)]

Yeah, the movies dumbified the moral status of the Elves a lot. By the time you get to the War of the Ring, the Elves remaining in Middle-Earth are aligned with the good guys, but they're not automatically good and benevolent by reason of their species, and a lot of them have awful things in their pasts. Plus, they're not always terribly interested in the fates of anyone other than themselves. Thranduil's Elvish beauty and whether or not he's a good guy have nothing to do with each other.

In the books, that is. I don't see any way you'd have known from the movies.

[(Anonymous)]

AYRT

Thranduil's Elvish beauty and whether or not he's a good guy have nothing to do with each other.

And that's the way it should be. OP seems to want the "bad" people to always be ugly.

[feathercircle]

Or they have their nostalgia goggles on too tight and just want it to look like the version they grew up with.

I'll admit, some of my dissatisfaction with Cumbersmaug's creature design probably has its roots in similar sentiments.

[cbrachyrhynchos]

I'm not certain whether Tolkien would recognize the parallels to the Silmarils that Walsh et. al. wrote into the movie Hobbit or roll his eyes at what might be the use of Thranduil as an allegory. There is certainly strong precedent in Tolkien's extended works for the elves to turtle-up and tell outsiders to go to hell. Bad blood between Elf and Dwarf goes all the way back to the War of the Silmarils.

The novel presents Thranduil as a bad guy, but The Hobbit is Bilbo's story and Bilbo is an unreliable narrator who has good reasons for playing favorites between Mirkwood and Rivendell.

[(Anonymous)]

I wouldn't say that The Hobbit presents Thranduil entirely as a bad guy. Bilbo likes him enough that at the Battle of Five Armies, he decides that if he has to make a desperate last stand, he'd rather die in defense of the Elven-King.