case: (Default)
Case ([personal profile] case) wrote in [community profile] fandomsecrets2014-01-02 06:49 pm

[ SECRET POST #2557 ]


⌈ 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.

(Anonymous) 2014-01-03 12:31 am (UTC)(link)
tolkien's elves are some of the worst people in his mythos tho...

(Anonymous) 2014-01-03 12:35 am (UTC)(link)
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) 2014-01-03 12:40 am (UTC)(link)
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) 2014-01-03 12:44 am (UTC)(link)
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) 2014-01-03 06:58 am (UTC)(link)
I am fond of this as a description of the Silmarillion.

(Anonymous) 2014-01-03 12:48 am (UTC)(link)
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) 2014-01-03 04:13 am (UTC)(link)
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: Cartoon squid reading a book (literature and misc. media)

[personal profile] feathercircle 2014-01-03 02:47 pm (UTC)(link)
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.

[personal profile] cbrachyrhynchos 2014-01-03 02:55 am (UTC)(link)
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) 2014-01-03 07:01 am (UTC)(link)
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.