[ SECRET POST #2562 ]

[case]

⌈ Secret Post #2562 ⌋

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

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Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 02 pages, 044 secrets from Secret Submission Post #366.
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

[truxillogical]

I can't blame him for it.

LotR did really well for a lot of reasons, but I think Hollywood people were really surprised by how absolutely INTO IT girls got, especially teenage girls, even the sorts of teenage girls who would never have read a book like LotR. I got a chuckle out of the Foxtrot book "Orlando Bloom Has Ruined Everything" but it made a point. Less about the "ruining" of things, but more because having a really, really pretty guy playing the beautiful Elf princeling suddenly made LotR more accessible to people who would initially think, "This story has nothing for me."

Hollywood does it for dudes so much it doesn't even register. Just put some pretty girls in. Did the script call for the main woman to be plain? Heck no, Hollywood plain! It's kind of nice to see that same consideration going towards the women of the audience, even if it is purely mercenary. Heck, I'm fine with it being mercenary--there are some media companies that act as if pink dollars have cooties on them or something. It's nice to be acknowledged as a target audience and maybe thrown a little fanservice.

I can't fault Jackson for making Kili the "pretty one." For one...he is very pretty, and does the puppy eyes quite well. For another...it doesn't really hurt anything. Heck, it doesn't even change anything except that now Kili and Fili aren't two dwarves with yellow beards and blue hoods. But when he had thirteen dudes in the party, and this time all of them are dwarves, and one is pretty interchangeable with another, and they all stay on the same quest (as opposed to, in LotR, having nine characters of various race, each with distinct personalities, who wind up branching into three/four/five different directions), well...what harm with making one of them pretty? Before, the absolute only dwarf who stood out was Bombur, by virtue of being "the fat one." That's fine in a book, where you can just say "the company" but in a visual medium like a movie, you need more than that.

Don't get me wrong. I think the movies are still pretty bloated, and I look forward to the day when all three are released on DVD and some enterprising fan makes a "non-directors cut" of just book or book-compatible scenes and whittles it down to a pleasant 1-and-a-half to two hour movie.

But the movies really aren't the books. They're not even really trying to be. Some of the changes made have made the story stupider (look, seriously, dude, Radagast?), but some of them make a reasonable entertaining narrative of the movie. Kili and Tauriel's relationship adds a little personality to characters who were, in the fairy-tale nature of the actual text, even more flat.


I'm just saying, I see why he did made Kili pretty, and I think it was a sound business decision, and shows that he takes into accounts a wide audience that includes the sort of people (read:women) than other companies (ie: DC) often deliberately ignore, and I appreciate it, even if I didn't need it to be interested.

[(Anonymous)]

What makes it even better for me, is how the fandom has widely (and gleefully) decided that, yes, to us Kili is The Hot One, but amongst Dwarves he's probably considered very plain, if not actively unattractive. (as the lady dwarves swoon at Bombur's beard and Dori's braids, and think that it's really a pity that the royal family should all have such pitiful beards and flat little faces)

[truxillogical]

Heh. I kind of like that interpretation. Though I read somewhere that Thorin's lack of beard isn't because he can't grow a massive, braid-y one, but because in Jacksonverse (at least), short beards are a sign of mourning among dwarves, and Thorin keeps his short until he can take back his throne, in mourning of what he and his people lost. Kili I figured was just younger, and maybe it takes time for a beard to grow proper? Same with the flat faces. Human noses and ears grow larger with age, so maybe with dwarves it's just more pronounced and happens more quickly, and Kili just hadn't grown into his yet?

Or he's plain. I like either one. (Him being "plain" means that all the happy-verse fanart that takes place in the future can keep his hotness too.)

Also, I guess, it can't possibly take that long to grow a proper beard. A regular human dude with beardly abilities would have at least passed the perma-scruff after the time they've been on the road. Maybe he keeps it that short on purpose. Maybe it has something to with his weird thing for elves.

[(Anonymous)]

Yeah, I have heard that movie-verse has Thorin keeping his short in mourning...and I guess it wouldn't be quite proper for Fili to have a fine long beard when his uncle the king has a short one, and as an archer it would be VERY inconvenient for Kili if he had a long beard (ack, imagine his mustache hair getting yanked out every time he anchors the string near his mouth then looses it, ouch ouch)

It's still my favourite headcanon that they're funny-looking, right up there with the headcanon that Legolas is a butterface by elven standards, lol