>Interestingly,he loathed the major fantasy touchstone of

>>55009423
But what were his tax policies?

>>55009423
The story can be dull and still have things in the setting that it's worth drawing inspiration from

>>55009423
Yes. I'm convinced nobody actually enjoyed the LOTR books and anyone who says otherwise is just bullshitting. The Hobbit was okay.

LotR wasn't 'the major fantasy touchstone' of the late 60's and early 70's, Sword and Sorcery stuff was

So what if Gygax liked Sword and Sorcery stuff better?

>Gygax was a meathead pleb
Who's surprised at this point?

>>55009423
Pretty sure he was autistic.

>>55009665
My African brother

>>55009869
he wrote and played rpgs. of course he was. and a curious hypocrite considering how much stuff he lifted from LotR wholesale.

I always figure Tolkien's aversion to war wouldn't jive with a guy like Gygax who's in it for the roaring adventure

>>55009923
the way I've always heard it is that he only put the LotR stuff in because his friends/players wouldn't quit begging him to do so. No idea if that's true or not of course.

>>55009665
I thought I was alone.

>>55009423
The first half of Fellowship is definitely the worst example of pacing i've ever read, and is definitely a dull slog. However beyond that point I find the sense of adventure really kicks into gear and makes it very compelling. But as with everything taste is subjective.

>>55009727
Get the fuck out. LotR had become explosively popular by the 1960's, and its popularity didn't wane for decades (rather, it spread internationally). It would be the single closest anything Fantasy had come to becoming well-known and acknowledged at a remotely mainstream level, until first the Lord of the Rings movies, and then, arguably Game of Thrones.

If you're ONLY talking about the united states, then maybe Conan pulps too, sure.

I love LotR, but Tolkein was a better world builder than fiction writer. I'm sure Tolkein knew this, as LotR seemed to exist as a vehicle to share his world. You can tell by the way he describes every piece of scenery, giving far more information than is relevant to the plot at hand, and more than the characters "on screen" would even know.

>>55009999
>dubs followed by dubs followed by trips
digits tell the truth anon

>>55009999
Hey, Conan and Lankhmar are my jam. I love that pulpy scifi fantasy.

>>55010042
Those are quads, anon.

>>55010056
Dude it's sweet as hell

>>55010081
They do certainly seem far more DnD than Tolkein, but Tolkein is vastly more known.

>>55009665
Everybody thinks LotR is so awesome. My old girlfriend was in love with the thing. I made three attempts--years apart--to get through it. Each time it was The Two Towers that did me in. The first time I made it maybe a third of the way through it. The second time I made it maybe half way. The third time I gave myself permission to skim through shit I found boring or pointless, but that still only got me about two-thirds of the way through. I started from the beginning all three times, so The Fellowship of the Rings posed no obstacle (I'm not saying it didn't have issues, and I may have stumbled once or twice, but I never fell). And I had no trouble making it through The Hobbit. But The Two Towers is where boring-as-fuck crashes into stupid-as-crap. Tolkien does have an interesting setting with a rich history--you have to give him that--but he's a terrible storyteller. He's boring and the plot is almost peripheral, and contains plenty of nonsensical bullshit.

>>55009423
Frodo was indeed a pain. It's a shame that so few people ever admit to disliking LotR and treat it like some kind of fantasy Dead Sea Scrolls.

>>55009990
>The first half of Fellowship is definitely the worst example of pacing i've ever read, and is definitely a dull slog. However beyond that point I find the sense of adventure really kicks into gear and makes it very compelling.
Fellowship definitely has its issues, but it's a fuck cakewalk compared to The Two Towers. In fact, every single person I've talked to who failed to make it through LotR, but who at least made a decent go of it (and didn't stop 30 pages in), was defeated by The Two Towers.

>>55009665
>can't stand the serious story but could get engaged with the fairy tale written for schoolchildren
Really jogs me nog it dogs.

>>55010179
The Hobbit isn't as lost up its own ass and reads less like an agronomy report.

>>55010104
D&D is undoubtedly sword & sorcery. Wasn't too long ago that I dove into some old D&D stuff and I'm pretty sure I read something in Gygax' hand flat out stating it pretty much flat out.
I'll be damned if I can remember where it was though.

Honestly, whether Gygax preferred it or not, Sword & Sorcery was probably better suited as a starting point for the genre anyway. It sets very clear character goals that translate into gameplay easily, without too many headaches and tough questions.
"Go into the evil snake cult's temple and steal the giant ruby out of the eyesocket of their idol" sets up a focused gameplay experience much better than "there's an evil force to the east that wants its ring back, and for now we have to go talk to an elf dude who lives pretty far away about what to do about it."

Plus, the first is easier to come up with. Pulps were always initially about gripping the reader quickly (or people wouldn't take them home with them.)

LotR isn't a fantasy book, at least not in the modern sense. It's an artificial ancient text, a pseudo-Beowulf. If you actually pay attention to the meta-narative just about all of the book's faults are intentional.
The fictional history of the work is that it's based on the journals of Frodo, Bilbo, and Merry (Red Book of Westmarch). This was then translated and added to by later fictional editors (including a post-Aragorn Steward of Gondor, iirc). Tolkien is only supposed to be the most recent translator/editor, hence the "Concerning Hobbits" bit.

Ever wonder how Gandalf could translate ancient elvish into modern English on the fly and have it rhyme? He couldn't, but Tolkien, or one of the fictional editors, did or for us so we as modern readers could understand it better. Just like Beowulf, which has pieces missing in the oldest copies we have, we don't see that aspect of the book when we read it since an editor filed in the gaps.

If you read it out loud the tone and style actually change. Parts sound like a journal, others like epic poetry, and others like a fairy tale.

It's a fantastically brilliant work designed to be read by philologists and other literature professor types. It would be pretentious as shit, except he succeeded.

Regular people, like you and me, only know about the damn thing because hippies at Woodstock passed around illegal bootleg copies like they were drugs. Apparently this disappointed Tolkien.

>>55010221
The hobbit instead keeps singing because it's afraid the assumed 8 year old reader will get bored otherwise.
And lotr reads like a history book.

>>55009423
>>55009665
Different strokes for different folks.
Personally, I also liked the Hobbit, read it when I was a wee little lad. Comfy as fuck.

Doesn't surprise me one bit.
The dungeon delving of D&D is straight out of howard's Conan stories.
The alignment system of Law vs Chaos (as it originally was, Good and Evil weren't alignments) was lifted directly from the Sword and Sorcery of Michael Moorcock's Elric stories and others of his work.
The feel of having buddy adventurers and a "party" seems to stem a lot from Fritz Lieber's Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser stories.
Sword and Sorcery is better for telling stories at the D&D table than epic fantasy is.

>>55010311
No, you're thinking of the Appendices. No history textbook is written narrative style.
It reads like historical fiction written be a man obsessed with historical accuracy.

>>55010359
It is supposed to be an actual written historical account being translated from Westron to English so it was probably intentional.
Children of Hurin is better

>>55010016
That sort of applies to every writer, though, at least if you want something anyone's going to enjoy. You have strengths and weaknesses, and you play to your strengths. The world of ASOIAF doesn't make much sense unless you look at it as a vehicle for drama and character moments. Kushiel's Legacy is carefully crafted to justify intrigue tons and tons of boning. The world of Gentleman Bastard exists for heists and profanity to happen in. It's only a real flaw when writers can't recognize their limitations and try to be all things to all people, like Patrick Rothfuss does.

>>55010399
Exactly.

>>55010359
>No history textbook is written narrative style.
Look up "narrative history." It is a way of writing history books that used to be common, before you got spoonfed the bland history books that you're used to in academia now.

>>55010441
About the writing style or Morgoth making Hurin watch his son fuck up in life being a better book than a midget's year-long stroll?

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>>55010259
You're not wrong about LotR, but The Hobbit suits a D&D campaign pretty well.

>>55010464
>What's nuance?
>What do you mean the world is complex and reality doesn't fit into easily digestible narratives without ignoring large important chunks of it?
>I'm going to call everything new I don't like spoonfeeding even if it's literally the opposite of that

>>55010016
>>55010439
As far as I'm concerned, the missy quintessential example of a great worldbuilder but a mediocre writer/storyteller is Frank Herbert.
The ideas in Dune are amazing, but fuck me the guy needed a better editor, or at least someone to tell him that spoiling shit 100s of pages in advance is bad.

>>55010259
D&D used to be sword & sorcery before AD&D 2e. (Arguably the change already happened during 1e's lifespan) Since then, it's (trying to be) LotR-style epic fantasy.

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>>55010498
Get pissy if you want, I'm just telling you it already exists and it's been done well before.
When I say spoonfeeding, I'm referring to the way schools show one view of history and one way that history can be reported and treat it as the only way. It was a criticism of the current system.
Maybe analyze why you take things so personally on an anonymous image board about games lol

>>55010554
I'm not pissy or taking things personally. Just explaining the real reasons no one takes narrative history seriously anymore

>>55010500
The key to Dune is to stop with Dune. Everything after the first book is a dim reflection at best.

>>55009423
so his creation of Greyhawk was a "how middle earth should have been done" sort of take on things? "I'll take your badly executed idea, AND FIX IT"

>>55010311
>reads like a history book.
and there in-lies why it's so dang boring.

>>55009665
>If I didn't enjoy it myself then there's no way that anybody else could have

Hard incurable autism. Someone with this level of self-absorption is probably That Guy in-game too.

And I don't even r8 LotR.

>>55010497
Matt Colville even used the two as an example of good and bad DMing.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EkXMxiAGUWg

>>55010311
>And lotr reads like a history book.
Yeah.. boring.

>>55010638
it takes incurable autism to enjoy them.

>>55010626

Dawg it sure as fuck doesn't read like a history book. Pretentious agronomics report fits it best.

People pretending to like it are 90% masochistic posers imho.

>>55010554
>"u mad" plus carefully selected image macro
>accuses others of trying too hard on the 4chins

lol kys

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>>55010673
>if you like what I don't you must enjoy pain
Are you gonna cry about echidna wars next?

>>55010016
That gets thrown around a lot, but Tolkien's writing was usually alright. It's just that his worst prose is in his most popular novel. It also has frankly terrible pacing. See The Hobbit, Farmer Gilles of Ham (both of which, as far as I'm aware, were pretty critically acclaimed which isn't something you can say of LotR outside of the fantasy community) and Children of Hurin.

It's just that his idea in LotR about writing a faux-national epic using a constructed world while mimicking several forms of literature from fairy tales to the sagas each chapter was not only too ambitious for his actual writing skill, it bored contemporary critics and flew over the heads of the general public (who enjoyed it anyways).

Now, Tolkien's most relevant contribution to academia is a series of lectures about Beowulf, but even a lot of Tolkien nerds don't know that.

>>55010658
or rather a bit of intelligence and patience. something i'm sure you're lacking a great deal of.

>>55010589

>not liking God-Emperor

It's like you missed the whole fucking point you mongoloid.

>>55009423
As influential as the LOTR books were, I don't begrudge anyone who didn't like them. The series is definitely not for everyone.

If you really want to know the story, just watch the Peter Jackson films. They changed a bunch of things in the adaptation, and not all for the better in my opinion, but I feel that most of the story's themes and message survived intact. Watch them, then if you feel like finding out what you missed, go back and read the books.

>>55010704

>It's just that his idea in LotR about writing a faux-national epic using a constructed world while mimicking several forms of literature from fairy tales to the sagas each chapter was not only too ambitious for his actual writing skill,
>>55010717

This anon said it. Tolkien had a huge and fantastic idea but overreached. He is important as an innovator opening up a whole new field but his actually work is somewhat mediocre. Pacing and storytelling are weak imho.

People sucking tolkiens dick are the ones obsessed with authenticity. The same cancerous crowd hyping vinyl.

We can all agree that the hobbit movies are actually harmful to your health.

>>55010311
>>55010626
>>55010656
As somebody with a bachelor's degree in history, I don't think LotR reads that much like a history book, at least not a good one. A good history book doesn't meander like LotR does; it doesn't spend so much time on superfluous bullshit; and any narrative it might have holds together better. I enjoy a good history book. I did not enjoy LotR.

>>55010747
Not him, but I hated God-Emperor until things finally started clicking together. After that, I hated it a little less, and it's grown on me over the years because from a high-level conceptual perspective it's definitely a great conclusion to the story arc of the first 3 books. I sure as hell wouldn't read it again though.

>>55010797
Fuck.
Those.
Movies.

>>55010626
>>55010673
It reads like a novel from a time when popular fiction could expect more patience and literacy from its readers.

You don't have to like LotR, there's no shame in not having any time for 1000 page epics that ease you into the story with mushroom picking and fireworks displays, but it's always embarrassing when people that don't like it try to pretend Tolkien just couldn't write fiction and the whole thing reads like a textbook. It's just a straight up lie. His prose is always at minimum readable and sometimes quite pretty and in LotR he manages the trick of switching between its different registers, from heroic to hobbit-talk, quite deftly. It's a downright odd mashup of a book even among the genre of fat fantasy tomes and technically it's executed about as well as it could have been.

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>>55009423
Yes, he was right: Tolkien may have been a fantastic worldbuilder but he either couldn't or made no effort to hold the attention of his readers unless they were expected to be children (see: Hobbit.) It feels like the literary equivalent of a literal autist (not meme autist) explaining their specialized interest in excruciating detail, totally oblivious to, or totally uncaring of, whether or not you are actually interrested.

This isn't an uncommon problem in the novel form actually, but the author literally gave me no incentive to keep reading. For books meant to entertain the emergent middle class during the winters before mass media was a thing, most of whom COULD afford novels, but COULDN'T afford the expensive pastimes of the old gentry, eating time was itself of value, and so eating extra time without adding extra value was fine. However, in 2017, that makes no sense: there's more media out there than can possibly be consumed in a lifetime, so the value to filler/padding text is negative rather than positive. This is actually why I generally see the Novel as a literary form tailored to a particular point in time that's NOT this one. Just ask yourself, of almost any novel you've read "what would have been lost in shortening it to a novella and/or short story." For the overwhelming majority, the answer is "nothing but time." There are of course exceptions; Philip K Dick comes to mind, as do the "trashier" pulp-fantasy novelists who inspired the original creators of D&D (at-least on their good days... sometimes you could feel the financial obligation to imitate Tolkien's filler/padding text seeping in.)

But back to Tolkien: the thing is, I get the distinct impression that he genuinely didn't CARE if his work was compelling or able to hold the attention of readers, except when he was specifically hired to write for children. He had a world and a plot, and wanted to describe it in excruciating detail to people.

>>55010807
I saw the first movie in the theater. "Well, I'm not paying to see another one of those."

I watched a pirated copy of the second movie that my friend had. "Well, I'm not wasting my time watching another one of those."

So I never saw the third movie. I'm pretty happy about that.

>>55010839
>>55010734
>spends a solid 50% of its time talking about literally nothing, almost as bad as moby dick
>lol just be patient inferiorbrain

First rule of editing they ever taught me is, if you can remove it and it doesn't matter, you're just wasting the audience's time.

>>55010839

>could expect more patience and literacy from its readers
> His prose is always at minimum readable
>It's a downright odd mashup of a book even among the genre of fat fantasy tomes


>muuh the reader back then was smarter and more patient
>he could write I mean LoTR had a weird not really functioning premise and his prose was okay most of the time

Why the fuck would you invest the time ?

There are tons of authors who picked up the premise and who were just better writers.

And tolkien fags should be ashamed of playing the its okay if you can't read a 1000 pages. Niqqa i read dry af military history in my free time. The question is if a book is worth it and for LoTR thats just not the case.

>>55010889
>shitting on moby dick
if you're an editor, it's an embarassment for the whole fucking industry.

>>55010889
Everbody can do compelling world building with a 100000 words. Making it short and compelling is the art. Subtile hints encouraging ones fantasy and not two centuries of harvest reports.

I am not a NEET ffs. Give me something that is worth wasting time on.

>>55010910
there's tens, if not hundreds of thousands of people that disagree with you.

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>>55010972
There are millions of people watching honey boo boo. Thats not a strong argument.

>>55010862
>Yes, he was right: Tolkien may have been a fantastic worldbuilder but he either couldn't or made no effort to hold the attention of his readers unless they were expected to be children (see: Hobbit.)
Ok, I'm not picking on you for any particular reason, as opposed to any of the other anti-tolkien guys in this thread, but seriously, what the fuck?

Why do you think he starts off his novels, and rarely strays the point of view narration from the stand ins for a late 19th century/early 20th century British reader, and not the archaic and exotic worldviews that his other characters hold? Why do you think he consistently plays up modern dilemmas and moral stances in a dark ages sort of setting where they're wildly anachronistic, but not the the people whom he expects to read the book? Why do you think he spends so much time interlacing plot lines through, and not just telling things chronologically, if not for the reader that he hopes will appreciate these sorts of touches?

> I get the distinct impression that he genuinely didn't CARE if his work was compelling or able to hold the attention of readers, except when he was specifically hired to write for children
You would be completely wrong, and you'd know this if you bothered to look through things like his drafts.

>>55010889
Please, cite to some of these "wasted" passages talking about "literally nothing".

>>55010910
I'm curious as to what you think the "premise" of LoTR is. I can pretty much guarantee it's not what Tolkien intended.

>>55009423
Exactly what I thought of LotR 3 and most of 2. Atrocious, like British people and their super retarded banter
>great thread!
No this OP thread is a huge <spoiler> </spoiler>

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>>55011000
What Tolkien intended? Probably some autistic way to make his magical realm more real too him.

What I meant with premise: Fictional worlds built with high detail.

>>55010862
I do feel that many, if not most novels are longer than they need to be. Not that I mind long books, mind you, but they shouldn't be longer than their story demands. At some point in most novels, I get the distinct impression the author is padding things out--treading water until it's time to actually bring things together. Either that, or there's just more space than the author knows how to properly manage. So I would prefer that novellas were the standard rather than novels. But until recently at least, I think novels worked better commercially, and at this point they have tradition behind them. But regardless of this, there are plenty of good novels that absolutely need to be as long as they are, so Tolkien can't escape so easily.

>>55010956
>Everbody can do compelling world building with a 100000 words. Making it short and compelling is the art. Subtile hints encouraging ones fantasy and not two centuries of harvest reports.
So you mean, like how you derive most of the culture of Rohan and Gondor, not from exposition, but from the juxtaposition of the Faramir interrogating Frodo and Sam to the Eomer interrogating Aragorn and co scenes?

>>55010889
Moby Dick is fucking fantastic, the chapters that are just whaling trivia in particular. Novels don't have the same constraints as screenwriting or technical writing or a bunch of other formats - who gives a shit if this chapter doesn't advance the plot as long as it read well?

>>55010910
>There are tons of authors who picked up the premise and who were just better writers.

Are there? There are plenty of other good fantasy writers, but they're all doing something quite different. I can't think of anyone who's written an epic-war-against-evil novel that doesn't just come off as a cheap knockoff of Lord of the Rings.

I don't mean to suggest either that if you don't enjoy it then you're a cretin that doesn't have the attention span for long novels. I know plenty of people who are better read than me who couldn't get into it. It's worth investing the time only if you find bumbling hobbit adventures entertaining for their own sake, but it's just wrong to claim those adventures are clumsily written.

>>55009423
Partially?

Tolkien was at times so utterly rammed up his own ass when it came to world building that you could get entirely lost in paragraph after paragraph explaining just how shitty the swamp is that Frodo is in at the moment.

But on the other hand, there's some genuinely iconic stuff that came from the ridiculously detailed myth-construction, and he literally caused a ton of fantasy archetypes to become a thing (for good and bad reasons).

I fell asleep reading some sections in Two Towers, and the acid trip of Bombadil's shenanigans, but by and large I think my life was enriched by spending the time reading LoTR and Bilbo for that matter.

Fuck Silmarillion though, that thing is impenetrable and unreadable. I've only kept it in my bookshelf for aesthetic reasons and 'nerd cred'.

>>55011051
You do realize that none of the LoTR books are novels, right? A novel is something distinct from "A long book".

>>55011081
This goes for you too. (If you're a different anon). None of the LoTR books are novels. I don't know why you'd call them such or judge them as such, unless you think any prose work above 200 pages is a novel or some nonsense.

>>55011000
>Why do you think he starts off his novels, and rarely strays the point of view narration from the stand ins for a late 19th century/early 20th century British reader, and not the archaic and exotic worldviews that his other characters hold?
Probably because he was an early 20th century British man, and you write what you know.
>Why do you think he consistently plays up modern dilemmas and moral stances in a dark ages sort of setting where they're wildly anachronistic, but not the the people whom he expects to read the book?
Probably because he, himself is an early 20th century Brirish man and you write what you know.
>Why do you think he spends so much time interlacing plot lines through, and not just telling things chronologically, if not for the reader that he hopes will appreciate these sorts of touches?
Maybe he was genuinely on the spectrum and mistook structural divergence for compelling action. Plenty of modern authors make that mistake as well.
>You would be completely wrong, and you'd know this if you bothered to look through things like his drafts.
Jesus, the original was long enough. If the text themselves aren't interesting enough to justify their time sink, why would I go even further and go through his drafts on top of that to compare them? Dear god.

Let me ask you this: what can you get from an actual Tolkien text that you can't get faster and better, in 2017, from the Middle Earth Wiki?

Like I said his world was brilliant, but we live in a world where SOMEONE has already read it and made a Wiki out of it, and we live in a world where filler/padding text just takes time out of your life where you could be having fun. Tolkien, and the Novel in general, are relics of his time.

>>55010956
One of the unique, I'll call them strengths, of LotR is that it does in fact leave out the reams of detail that the author had actually spent decades writing about his imaginary world and just shows us the world as experienced by characters that don't know much about it.

It's fairly easy to hint at a rich history by dropping some names without knowing exactly what they're referencing. It's much more restrained/intriguingly psychotic to write your complete mythos first and then start a commercial novel that draws on it.

>>55011091
>A novel is something distinct from "A long book".

Uh, sure. It's a long book that is a continuous work of prose fiction. What's your definition?

>>55011091
>You do realize that none of the LoTR books are novels, right?
How do you figure?

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>>55011090
>He can't figure out the Silmarilion
Have you tried the Cat in the Hat?

like are you complaining because it;s sometimes published in three volumes? because serialising a novel is not exactly an unorthodox concept.

In this thread: People who never bothered to look at Appendix N.

>>55009423

Gygax wanted a game, Tolkien a story. It's apples to oranges.

It's also a matter of your audience. You could play a slice of life RPG where the goal was to be valedictorian of high school, with absolutely no violence or action, and some people would love it.

Compare it to, I don't know, video games. For example, I like Stardew Valley. You can't lose in SDV. You're always making forward progress somehow, but the means and speed of it is up to you. There's no ultimate risk of failure. But I still love the comfy atmosphere and growing my farm day over day. It contrasts the stress I have over the 9-5 and lets me unwind. Others might think that it's boring bullshit with no action and no risk. They're not wrong, since it's a matter of opinion, but our needs differ.

>>55011116
>Maybe he was genuinely on the spectrum and mistook structural divergence for compelling action
Maybe he didn't think that you need blood and sex every 10 pages to hold a reader's attention, which I'm getting the impression from with you. That things like character and cultural development are worthwhile things for their own sake.

>Jesus, the original was long enough. If the text themselves aren't interesting enough to justify their time sink, why would I go even further and go through his drafts on top of that to compare them? Dear god.
Because it's fascinating, and an incredibly good study in how to use words effectively.


>Let me ask you this: what can you get from an actual Tolkien text that you can't get faster and better, in 2017, from the Middle Earth Wiki?
The psychology, and for lack of a better word "class" of any given character, which is usually apparent from 1-2 lines of dialog. The ambiguity of power and evil. The question as to what sorts of values are actually worth holding onto in life or death struggles.

>Like I said his world was brilliant, but we live in a world where SOMEONE has already read it and made a Wiki out of it, and we live in a world where filler/padding text just takes time out of your life where you could be having fun
Show me a wiki article on the nature of evil and speculations thereof in a Tolkien wiki.

>Tolkien, and the Novel in general, are relics of his time.
You are an idiot, since none. Of. The. LoTR. Books. Are. Novels.

>>55011211
It;s not remotely apples to oranges. Gygax loved fantasy fiction and was explicit about the stories he saw as inspiration for his game.

>>55011216
>You are an idiot, since none. Of. The. LoTR. Books. Are. Novels.

Ok but you've got to actually explain where you're coming from with this.

>>55011171
>>55011186

>What's your definition?
Of a Novel? A fictitious prose narrative with a clearly defined protagonist whose psychological study defines the work; the climax intersecting with the fulfillment of that character's potential and the reader's understanding of it.

So for instance, Joyce's Eveline is a novel, even though it's 6 pages long. To shift over to something more resembling Tolkien: Don Quixhote is a novel. Le Morte De Artur is not.

If you're asking as to the definition of LoTR's genre, it's either a romance or a mythological text, depending on how you take the frame tale.

>>55011188
>Have you tried the Cat in the Hat?
I'm not the guy you're responding to, but I thought The Cat in the Hat was terrible. There's absolutely no explanation given for how a feline biped like that could have evolved alongside Homo sapiens. Convergent evolution is one thing, but The Cat in the Hat pushes it way beyond the realm of credibility. (And don't even get me started on the hat.) Also, I'm not sure if you noticed, but the author's vocabulary seems to be severely limited.

>>55011255
See
>>55011262
Novels, by definition, have central protagonists whose mental states, and the unriddling of such, are the primary arc the narrative is asking you to grapple with. The closest thing you get to that is Frodo, and while he does have considerable character development over the course of the work, his mental state is not critical to it. The War of the Ring and the Hobbits shaking the world to its foundations aren't hinged upon Frodo realizing that he can no longer function due to the stress of the adventure he so impetuously agreed to.

It's (if you believe the tale at face value and we don't go into frame tale stuff) a chivalric romance, which is a completely different genre.

>>55009665
I dunno the way a lot of LOTR is written make it one of the comfiest adventures ever made.

>>55010610
No, that's not at all what it was. How could you possibly come think that's what it was?

>>55011262
Well that's not the common usage of the word in English and you just look like a jackass by trying to be pedantic about it.

>>55009665
I enjoyed them, and I've read them multiple times through in my life, most of those times being when I was a child.

But then again I'm also the sort of person who adores the Waterloo chapter of Les Misérables, so I suppose I'm just the kind of autist who enjoys tedium and excruciating detail.

>>55010839
Thank you for writing this. I just didn't have it in me to tell another fucking millennial that maybe people had a different idea of what qualified as a good book in an entirely different age, where people had more spare time and a lot of them spent a lot of it reading fucktons of books.

>>55011297
>Well that's not the common usage of the word in English
It is, however, the usual use of the word in a literary environment. And since we're discussing a work of literature here, it is apropos. What's next? Telling astronomers they're wrong when they call Carbon a metal in spectroscopic graphs?

>>55011262
These are the first half dozen results I get when I type "define novel" into google:

>a fictitious prose narrative of book length, typically representing character and action with some degree of realism.

>an invented prose narrative that is usually long and complex and deals especially with human experience through a usually connected sequence of events

>a long, printed story about imaginary characters and events:
literary/romance novels

>A novel is any relatively long, written work of narrative fiction, normally in prose, and typically published as a book.

>A fictional prose narrative of considerable length, typically having a plot that is unfolded by the actions, speech, and thoughts of the characters.

>an extended fictional work in prose; usually in the form of a story

He was right about Frodo, at least. Such an empty, pasty little character. I'd throttle him too.

>>55011262
Use a fucking dictionary you insufferable knobgobbler

>>55010135
The Two Towers is the best of the books you nun
It's even better than the good parts of the Silmarillion

>>55011262
Here is the very first line from each of the Wikipedia entries for the three LotR books.

>The Fellowship of the Ring is the first of three volumes of the epic novel The Lord of the Rings by the English author J. R. R. Tolkien.

>The Two Towers is the second volume of J. R. R. Tolkien's high fantasy novel The Lord of the Rings.

>The Return of the King is the third and final volume of J. R. R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings, following The Fellowship of the Ring and The Two Towers.

Notice how two of the three contain the word "novel".

>>55011364
LotR is a single novel of six books, usually printed in three volumes. It's not a trilogy of novels.

I'm not the same guy but whoever is complaining about "filler" clearly never read any classical literature.

The most important scene in War and Peace is where a bunch of characters dance and go sledding. The whole chapter is just long descriptions of this scene.

The scene has a symbolic meaning. The other anon is right, LoTR's length and prose are similar to other works from that time and aren't objectively bad.

I personally think Tolkein wasn't the BEST writer in terms of prose & dialogue, but he was certainly above average. He's a worldbuilding god-emperor tho.

>>55011413
Not that guy but this has gotta be trolling. The silmarillion was probably one of the worst books I ever attempted to read.

All of Tolkien's shit is so overblown and pretentious, and I feel like the people who suck his dick only do it because they don't understand the books so instead of admitting they're bad they pretend they thought they were brilliant to try and fit in with the other pretentious fuckwads.

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>>55009423
>Was he right?

No?
Gary Gygax should be celebrated for what he did: make Dungeons & Dragons, but he in no way should be considered a man of taste, context, or great wisdom.
He was a smart guy, just a really fuckin' smart, intellectual, kind of guy who knew all about the numbers, the dice, etc.. But he didn't know fucking ANYTHING about world building, narrative, context, or anything else of the sort- he was a very unclever, boring, man. Have you seen what the original Dungeons and Dragons setting was? It was a messy, dumb, nonsensical, region the size of the state of California where absolutely nothing makes any fucking sense and everything is entirely rigged towards combat and fighting shit and getting money. Gygax's original Dnd setting was literally just him shoving every single medium or what-have-you into a single poorly cobbled together kitchen-sink-fantasy where everything can happen and nothing makes sense, so, just, like, "turn off your brain dude and play the game, fucking lol!!"
You need to remember that Gygax was the sort of person who cared so little for home-economics or consistency that he'd put convenience stores or whatever into dungeons impromptu to get his players to shutup about "food & water", so they'd get to the next encounter. Gygax didn't and doesn't appreciate the game he's made as a venue to tell a story, but as a game to simulate interesting combat situations.

So, no, Gygax wasn't right, Gygax couldn't and wouldn't be able to understand what made Tolkien interesting or appealing, especially because in Gary's time the popular western fantasy was more in line with Conan the Barbarian and Sword & Sorcery type settings and in his mind he probably didn't given two-shits about the world it inhabitated and just wanted to see people kill each other or fight things.

Gygax at the worst of times was just a really successful metagaming 'that guy', who managed to make something bigger than himself.

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>>55011216
>none. Of. The. LoTR. Books. Are. Novels.
>1178 page count

They're sure as shit not fucking novellas.

> and an incredibly good study in how to use words effectively.
Alexander Pope is a study in how to use words effectively. Not a single word is misplaced or unnessecary. Every line has genuine meaning independent of its rhyme pair. Each rhyme pair genuinely has meaning independent of its stanza. Each stanza has genuine meaning that none of its composite parts brought to the table. Tolkien is a study in how to use words wastefully with the assumption that that readers will trudge through literally any drudgery for the promise of one day reaching SOMETHING.

>The psychology, and for lack of a better word "class" of any given character, which is usually apparent from 1-2 lines of dialog. The ambiguity of power and evil. The question as to what sorts of values are actually worth holding onto in life or death struggles.
Look, I'm sure there are some gems there, but they're burred in thousands and thousands of wasted words that add nothing but time to the experience of reading it. Full disclosure: I didn't finish any of the books other than The Hobbit, because I frequently got bored, and occasionally literally fell asleep, or forgot the content of entire pages after finishing them because none of it added anything of value. Sure you could argue that if I HAD finished, maybe I would have found the gems of philisophical/psychological discussion, or it would have reframed all of that wasteful word swamp into something of value, but the fact that I and so many others can't be bothered because of how boring it is UNTIL that point is a big black mark against it.
>Maybe he didn't think that you need blood and sex every 10 pages
Not necessarily sex and violence...GRRM tries that and suffers the same wasteful wordage and "boring outside of screen" problem, like most novelists. It's not my job as a consumer to say what flavor to add, just that there wasn't any.

>>55011345
It's great that you're enjoying your literary studies but it's thunderingly gay to insist everyone use critical jargon when they want to chat about a book they've read.

And it's not even accurate. Not I nor any other anon were using 'novel' to make a statement about the literary genre of LotR, but rather we were referring to the form it was written in in the terms any publisher or consumer of fiction would use.

>>55011500
The Silmarillion was intentionally written in a style that could have been archaic. It's supposed to resemble some holy texts or similar. That may put some off, which is too bad, because the plot (once you get more than 1/3 in) is not only great, but also explains a lot of stuff that happens in LotR and even the Hobbit, that you just miss out on if you haven't read the Silmarillion.

>>55011543
>Tolkien is a study in how to use words wastefully with the assumption that that readers will trudge through literally any drudgery for the promise of one day reaching SOMETHING.
No, it isn't. You're just missing the point repeatedly.

For instance, you SHOULD be able to tell, immediately, that the Gaffer Gamgee's advice is useless from the way that he talks, that Aragorn is incredibly charismatic and adaptive from the way that he mimics every conversational style that he's exposed to, and that Isildur is fucking *OLD*, because he uses an anglo-saxon style sentence structure "This I will take"

You can pick up an enormous amount in a very few amount of words, if you pay attention.

>but they're burred in thousands and thousands of wasted words that add nothing but time to the experience of reading it
There are no such words that I'm aware of. Maybe you can point to a passage that "adds nothing".

>Sure you could argue that if I HAD finished, maybe I would have found the gems of philisophical/psychological discussion, or it would have reframed all of that wasteful word swamp into something of value, but the fact that I and so many others can't be bothered because of how boring it is UNTIL that point is a big black mark against it.
Funny, when I read them I found no such thing.

>>55011538
D&D evolved out of war gaming. It wasn't (initially) trying to be the sort of fully-interactive story that we've come to associate with RPGs.

>>55011500
What's pretentious about making things up? It's pretty damn nerdy to write your own language and associated myth cycle but hey, it's a hobby.

I guess there's something a little pretentious about setting out to write a "national epic" but you would have to read fairly extensively outside of the work itself to know that was part of the author's goal.

>>55011470
>'m not the same guy but whoever is complaining about "filler" clearly never read any classical literature.
>The most important scene in War and Peace is where a bunch of characters dance and go sledding. The whole chapter is just long descriptions of this scene.
>The scene has a symbolic meaning. The other anon is right, LoTR's length and prose are similar to other works from that time and aren't objectively bad.
I am one of the anons mentioning filler, and I believe I've specifically said, many times, that it's not objectively bad, just a relic of the time from which the form sprung: the time in which the novel was.... novel (hence the term.)

During a certain pocket of history, the true middle class was emerging, but mass media wasn't a thing yet, and winters were still OPPRESSIVE. You needed to fill up time with something, and so reaching the same point you could in 100 pages in 600+ pages instead actually added value because it took up six times as much time. It no longer adds any value in 2017, and while the ultimate point being reached has just as much value, the format tradition of wastefully burring it in unnecessary words is nothing but a deterrent to modern readers, myself included, actually reaching said point. This unfortunate trick of changing time is objectively bad, not the works themselves.

>I personally think Tolkein wasn't the BEST writer in terms of prose & dialogue, but he was certainly above average. He's a worldbuilding god-emperor tho.
While I will agree he was good at worldbuilding, possibly one of the best, calling him above average at writing dialogue is the ultimate participation trophy for the bench-warmer. He had his strengths, and he had his weaknesses. Pretending the weaknesses weren't there helps nobody.

>>55011467
Now we're getting into a level of semantic nitpickery that's frankly ridiculous. There are overlapping definitions here where words have more than one meaning. For instance, The Fellowship of the Rings is definitely one book. I hold the bound thing in my hand. Thus the LotR consists of only three physical books. But "book" can be used to indicate a mere division of a literary work as well, and need not be a distinct, bound thing complete in and of itself. So LotR could be said to consist of six books.

Regardless, LotR was published in three volumes of novel-length, so it definitely qualifies as a trilogy of novels. But you could also argue that it's a single work that was written as a cohesive whole, and that it was actually originally intended to be a single volume. And both viewpoints can be valid.

Where it gets tricky is when you get pedantic and start correcting other people.

>>55011900
Well, as it is a single story, it cannot be a trilogy of novels. It's a single novel. But yes, "book" has at least two meanings.

>>55011855
>I am one of the anons mentioning filler, and I believe I've specifically said, many times, that it's not objectively bad, just a relic of the time from which the form sprung: the time in which the novel was.... novel (hence the term.)
And while I am not that anon and I haven't read War and Peace, the point he and I would almost certainly agree on is that these scenes are not filler. There are actually very important things going on. You might be missing them, but they're still important.

Would you call the scenes in the tavern with Falstaff and Hal in Henry IV part 1 filler because they're not connected with Hotspur's rebellion?

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>>55011625
>There are no such words that I'm aware of. Maybe you can point to a passage that "adds nothing".
I will use your own instance, since it's early enough that I actually reached it before getting bored and moving on.
>For instance, you SHOULD be able to tell, immediately, that the Gaffer Gamgee's advice is useless from the way that he talks
If you can get the point IMMEDIATELY, then why the fuck does Tolkien fill so much space with his Dialogue.

You know how annoying it is when someone totally already got their point across, but they keep talking. They already said enough that you know what they mean, but they keep telling it to you different ways. They told it to you one way, and you understood, but then they told it to you another way, and then they decided to keep trying new ways, even though the first way was good enough. You know, when someone's point is legitimate, but they won't shut up about it, and they just keep going on and on, either circling the issue, or hammering it repeatedly like a dead horse. Just imagine someone had already communicated their comparison, but they kept filling up time in your life with slight variations on the same theme that might add something if they hadn't already communicated it effectively the first time, but they did communicate it effectively the first time, so the second time, and all the times after that, they were just communicating ideas you already knew and/or accepted. It's really annoying when people say something in a repetitive and circuitous fashion, when they could just get to the point and tell you what they're thinking, especially when they already DID get to the point, but then they act like you're stupid or something and didn't get the point the first time they made it, so they keep making the same point over and over, with new words coming out of their mouths in a new order, but the idea behind those words doesn't change, no matter how long you wait.

>>55012079
>If you can get the point IMMEDIATELY, then why the fuck does Tolkien fill so much space with his Dialogue.
Because he has more than one point he's making? I know that's a crazy notion, but it really is there.

>>55012079
You're stupid.

>>55011855
This person is also stupid.

>>55011855
Jane Austen wrote witty, shortish novels with no wasted words in the 1810s. Thomas Pynchon has been writing sprawling, convoluted novels with nonsensical plots for the pasty fifty-odd years. They've both been pretty successful in their own time.

There probably is a general tendency towards more concise styles of writing in fiction but whatever, that's a market trend. Good writing is good writing no matter your period.

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>>55012002
>Would you call the scenes in the tavern with Falstaff and Hal in Henry IV part 1 filler because they're not connected with Hotspur's rebellion?
Well, I was specifically talking about long-form prose, which I generally reject as a form by default unless there's a reason to doubt, and this is a perfect example of how Theater can accomplish something that long-form prose can't in the modern age. The amount of time taken out of your life by the added runtime from Falstaff scenes can be measured in minutes. The added time taken out of your life from word inefficiency by novelists like Tolkien can be measured in hours and hours. Second, Falstaff is fucking funny and independently entertaining. In a vacuum, independent of whether or not these scenes add meaning (which they incidentally do) these scenes are bloody entertaining. If the word waste in Tolkien, and dare I say MOST novelists, were as entertaining as Falstaff scenes, I wouldn't care, but they are not The Bard, and their extra wordage usually comes from wasteful usage of the English language, and not a separate but meaningful and independently entertaining scene.

>people waffing about length and people talking lots.
Bet none of you pedantic niggers even read The Three Musketeers.
Go ahead and come back and whine about the middle chapters with the bitch in prison because in your mind it didn't advance the plot.

Fucking retards up in here. Can't even read books no more.

Don't forget the parts where he just starts literally listing fucking names that you never hear again and don't matter.

>>55012201
>Teenager with an inflated opinion of himself.
>Reaction images as if they help make a point.
I can tell by the way you write you're 18-22.

>>55011996
>Well, as it is a single story, it cannot be a trilogy of novels.
Define "story". There are many different stories, smaller and larger, being told in LotR. Is Star Wars all one movie if each installment furthers the same overarching story? What if all the episodes were shot at the same time but released separately? What if the original intention was for it to be a single long-ass movie, but the movie execs decided that was stupid and released it as a trilogy instead?

What's the difference between three books in a trilogy and three volumes of a single novel? What if the first two books of the trilogy end in cliffhangers or merely don't make much of an attempt to wrap things up for that individual volume? Is it wrong to call them a trilogy? What if they were written years apart? Does when they were written really matter or is it when they were published? Or does that not matter either? Because I'm seeing six of one thing and a half-dozen of the other.

>>55012201
>The amount of time taken out of your life by the added runtime from Falstaff scenes can be measured in minutes.
A usual production of Henry IV takes about 3 hours. If 40% of it is on Falstaff stuff, that's almost an hour and a half. I can read through The Fellowship of the Ring in about 5 hours; I strongly doubt that you're losing that much time, even if you're a slower reader than I am. It still does not reach the underlying point. Important scenes are not "filler", and you've provided no metric for what is filler and what isn't beyond your own subjective prefereneces. Similarly, you've offered no reason that "long-form prose" is wasteful, other than that you don't seem to like it.

>Second, Falstaff is fucking funny and independently entertaining. In a vacuum, independent of whether or not these scenes add meaning (which they incidentally do) these scenes are bloody entertaining.
And I find many scenes in Tolkien independently entertaining and meaningful. What makes you OBVIOUSLY RIGHT and me OBVIOUSLY WRONG?

>>55012201
"I don't give a shit about what's happening in this scene" is a different reaction than "whatever's going on here is poorly communicated in too many words" and you seem to be throwing them both under wasteful usage of english.

I genuinely enjoyed the LotR books. I haven't seen the movies. I liked the "filler". I often worldbuild my own world, and enjoyed reading about Tolkien's, and this great legend from his world. I like "filler" in other things, too. Story progression isn't all there is to a good book.
Just my two cents.

So in short, some people read books for extremely detailed insight into past cultures, studies on language and its construction, and the origin of mythological imagery, other people want to read about a total badass who tears off a monster's arm, and some people switch between them depending on mood.
There is nothing wrong with this.

>>55009665
>Yes. I'm convinced nobody actually enjoyed the LOTR books and anyone who says otherwise is just bullshitting
Yep. As usual, the world is a grand conspiracy, targeting you specifically, and we're all in on it. Even Tolkien himself didn't like LotR, as it turns out. He just wrote it to fuck with you. Said so in one of his unpublished letters.

>>55009423
He wanted to throttle Frodo? Hahahaha

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>>55012264
>you're 18-22.
Wrong, but thank you. I wish I were still 22. Though, that is the age-range in which I realized that I didn't in-fact hate literature, I just hated novels, novelists, and long-form prose in general.
>>55012339
>"I don't give a shit about what's happening in this scene" is a different reaction than "whatever's going on here is poorly communicated in too many words" and you seem to be throwing them both under wasteful usage of english.
I guess because Tolkien is guilty of both. If I'm being more precise, it's not just words that aren't meaningful, it's words that don't make an effort to ENTERTAIN. Many readers, particularly modern readers, need to be entertained or we won't keep reading. This, I think, is why The Hobbit is still readable to many of us, because Tolkien made an effort to make sure his readers were always entertained, so they wouldn't lose interest, because he assumed they were children. Personally, I wouldn't consider needing to be entertained to keep reading a fantasy novel childish, I would call continuing to read something that's not making an effort to entertain you tantamount to self-flagellation.

>>55012275
I guess see above. Fallstaff is a perfect example of an author making an active effort to entertain the audience and give them a reason to stay and keep watching. There's a difference between expanding upon a point and providing perspective and entertaining your audience
>you've offered no reason that "long-form prose" is wasteful, other than that you don't seem to like it.
Because most novels don't need to be novels. The overwhelming majority of novels, could be shaved down to short stories and lose literally nothing of value, while now having an appropriate entertainment/enlightenment ratio. You want an example? Compare Ender's Game the novel to the original Ender's Game short story. The short story is simply better by every metric, except marketability, and that's with one of the novels I actually like.

>>55012201
OK, but what in Tolkien would you even scrap? Almost every passage in LotR adds something to the story or helps flesh out the background... hell, if anything, the usual complaint is he doesn't provide ENOUGH detail if anything (which is why we're still arguing about what a balrog looks like, among other things).

It's not like Tolkien is even particularly dense or verbose... to use a current example, GRRM generally uses a lot more words to say a lot less, on average. And it's not like you have the weird conventions and sequencing you get with something like Joyce or Faulkner where you find yourself reading the same passage three times to try and wrap your head around it. Unless your entire experience is with the YA section of the bookshop, I can't see ranking Tolkien in even a Top 100 for word inefficiency.

>>55010952
>half the chapters are just teaching you the finer points of how a ship works and whaling, completely unrelated to plot progression or any character development.

It's bad, chief.

>>55009423
Yes, basically.

>>55011000
>Please, cite to some of these "wasted" passages talking about "literally nothing".
Any moment of landscape prose that lasted more than three sentences.

>>55012716
I don't think the fact that we have dozens of fucking songs but not one physical description of a huge monster in one of the scenes speaks much for Tolkien's ability to write a sensible piece of work.

>>55011216
>Maybe he didn't think that you need blood and sex every 10 pages to hold a reader's attention
No, but something relevant to a core or side conflict might be nice.

>>55011262
>>55011282
So.. a novelization of, say, PHantom Menace would be impossible, because the story has many protagonists, multiple plot arcs, and none of them related to a character's emotional growth?

>>55012804
>I don't think the fact that we have dozens of fucking songs but not one physical description of a huge monster in one of the scenes speaks much for Tolkien's ability to write a sensible piece of work.
You're just giving examples that prove the point. The songs and poems add backstory and texture to the world in fewer words and with more emphasis than just flat exposition. And the balrog in fellowship is described in exactly as much detail as is necessary to create the right atmosphere for the scene. Describing the creature for a movie storyboard was not the point, and doing so would have been a waste. These are arguments in favor of the man's efficiency, not against it.

>>55012877
>So.. a novelization of, say, PHantom Menace would be impossible, because the story has many protagonists, multiple plot arcs, and none of them related to a character's emotional growth?
It would be possible, it's just that the end result of said novelization would not (ironically) be a novel. There's a reason that the sub-genre star wars inhabits gets referred to as "Space Opera" or "Epic Scifi".

>>55011270
I doubt it did evolve alongside. It clearly has paranormal powers and a penchant for wreaking havoc on well-behaved suburbanite children and summoning in other such hellions.

My guess is it's some kind of extraplanar being.

>>55012701
>There's a difference between expanding upon a point and providing perspective and entertaining your audience
And you've yet to connect this to Tolkien, either in intent (Tolkien did not think his prose was entertaining) or in reaction to a reader other than yourself.

>Because most novels don't need to be novels. The overwhelming majority of novels, could be shaved down to short stories and lose literally nothing of value,
You keep saying this. You keep offering jack squat except your own assertion as to why this is the case. And why stop there? Most short stories could be rendered as bullet points. Most novellas could be boiled down to short stories. Why have written literature at all?

>Compare Ender's Game the novel to the original Ender's Game short story. The short story is simply better by every metric, except marketability, and that's with one of the novels I actually like.
And things like humanizing Ender by giving him a fucking family, which is kind of important when you have the whole "who really deserves to live in this fight to the death that may or may not actually be necessary?"

>>55012776
Why? The landscape is pretty important, considering that these are pressed heroes and not people willingly entering adventures (well the focal hobbits anyway), and is actually their principal opponent.

>>55012845
Considering the core conflict is that of the Hobbits attempting to come to terms and contribute in a setting that is enormously out of their normal mileau, I'm having trouble coming up with stuff, even the travelogue, that is "irrelevant.

>>55012877
This anon nailed it.
>>55012948

>>55009423
Ever read The Moonstone? It's the first English language detective novel and it basically defined the genre. It's also a terrible book. The Lord of the Rings is similar, it defined whole swaths of the fantasy genre but it's not a fun read. It's necessary to the history and evolution of fantasy literature but it's also a shackle upon it.

>>55011288
I was interpreting the implications of OP's statement?
He hated LotR, he felt as a series they were dull and actionless.

But then his own system/setting contained much of the same races and story archetypes. just now with more action and adventure, in many cases just by turning immortals with reasons to sit around and do nothing (elves and wizards for instance) into mortal men with ambition.

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>>55012948
>>55011262
>>55011216
>>55011282
OMG, you are being unnecessarily pedantic and semantic in your definition of "novel" with a weird fixation on having a single protagonist. You know damn well that when the overwhelming majority of people say "novel" they mean "long form narrative prose" an by arguing definitions of the word Novel you're just dragging the argument into a semantic rabbit hole rather than discussing the topic at hand

>>55011330
>>55011330
My 61 year old mother couldn't get through it when she was my age either.

It's just dull.

>>55011470
Symbolic meaning is still contributing to the story.

There are pieces of LotR that just don't bother to contribute period.

>>55009423
He was a pleb, is what he was.

>>55011538
sounds like a fun game to me, I'd play. Speaking from experience, DMs like Gygax are way more fun than "muh story" DMs who are like Tolkien.

>>55011543
>Tolkien is a study in how to use words wastefully with the assumption that that readers will trudge through literally any drudgery for the promise of one day reaching SOMETHING.
To be fair, so is Homestuck and people loved it up until the very moment at the end that he revealed it wasn't actually leading to a something.

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>>55013026
>Compare Ender's Game the novel to the original Ender's Game short story. The short story is simply better by every metric, except marketability, and that's with one of the novels I actually like.
>And things like humanizing Ender by giving him a fucking family, which is kind of important when you have the whole "who really deserves to live in this fight to the death that may or may not actually be necessary?"
Please tell me how a sexually repressed mormon lovingly describing the glistening effect the light has as it reflects off of the hairless soapy testes of a prepubescent boy humanizes Ender in a way that the Short Story didn't.
>>55013026
>Tolkien did not think his prose was entertaining
Then why the ever loving shit would he expect anyone to read it? Why would anyone read anything that wasn't either entertaining or required for some other task?

That's kind of what I've been getting at. Many authors, PARTICULARLY novelists, just plain don't bother entertain their audience, and still expect their audience to finish to reach "the point," and readers keep doing the literary equivalent of self-flagellation and suffering through walls of non-entertaining non-functional text and then retroactively justifying it through the sunk cost fallacy.

In college, after I finished Ulises, despite the fact that I had to begrudgingly admit that it was admittedly a demonstration of genius, I realized that all value I was giving it was from the sunk cost fallacy, and I promised that I would never read through something that wasn't either entertaining or useful again. What good is genius, even literary genius, if it doesn't make the world a better place, or at-least a more fun/pleasant place for a few hours? All of these novels that make no effort to entertain are just lesser versions of Ulises, and Ulises is shit... shit crapped out by a genius but shit nonetheless.

>>55012150
>Jane Austen wrote witty, shortish novels with no wasted words in the 1810s. Thomas Pynchon has been writing sprawling, convoluted novels with nonsensical plots for the pasty fifty-odd years. They've both been pretty successful in their own time.

They're both enjoyable the entire way through. It's similar to what they call Gameplay First in gamedev. If you're enjoying every little moment, you don't care if it takes hours or days. Meanwhile, if you just want things to get on with it, every delay is agonizing.

>>55012701
>Though, that is the age-range in which I realized that I didn't in-fact hate literature, I just hated novels, novelists, and long-form prose in general.
>"I haven't GROWN since 22"
Ah. gotcha.

>>55009665

Nerds don't like it because it's literature, not whiz bang sploshun shit

>>55013219
>Please tell me how a sexually repressed mormon lovingly describing the glistening effect the light has as it reflects off of the hairless soapy testes of a prepubescent boy humanizes Ender in a way that the Short Story didn't.
Please stick to the point. Why is Ender's surprise at Carn Carnby's scores relevant to the story?

>Then why the ever loving shit would he expect anyone to read it?
Are you stupid, or just dishonest? What I said was

>And you've yet to connect this to Tolkien, either in intent (Tolkien did not think his prose was entertaining)
Not a flat "Tolkien did not think his prose was entertaining". You, deliberately or otherwise, completely changed the meaning of my statement by leaving out half of it. Try again, and this time, answer the fucking question: On what basis do you claim that Tolkein did not think his prose was entertaining?

>>55013219
Sounds to me like you translated that passage in a much more sexual manner than the author who wrote it did.

>>55010439
did you guys actually like the Kushiel's series? I made it like 50 pages in before i dropped it, bored out of my mind.

>>55013281
Because the only book in which he made an effort to keep readers, rather than just assuming they'll just read whatever he gives them, was The Hobbit. In everything else, it's just an endless stream of dry descriptions, dry geneologies, and dryer dialogue. Like, I'm not saying that most Novelists don't ALSO make the same mistake: the overwhelming majority almost certainly do, but personally, I put a lot of blame on Tolkien (and Dickens) for enshrining that sort of thinking while writing. Is it ultimately a matter of taste? Yes.Are there people who are capable of being entertained by pay-by-the-word Dickens? Yes. Are there also people who can be entertained by grown men repeatedly turning left for 4+ hours on end? Yes. The modern reader needs to be entertained to be kept engaged. Does this mean that perhaps the average modern reader has a similar attention span to children in the 1920's? Yeah, probably, that's what access to more information at an earlier age does to the brain: attention span and memory go down as processing speed goes up. I'm saying that Tolkien's writing isn't, in a vacuum, independent of all the middle-earth wiki or silmarilion crap, entertaining, or at-least not entertaining enough to keep the average modern reader engaged, save for the occasional aberrant with a larger memory and attention span than average. GRRM is the same way: most people, including yours truly, just watch the show, and only those same aberrant read the books.

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>>55013302
there was more than ONE little boy soapy shower in Enders Game. Orson Scott Card wants to fuck some hairless little boys, and it's very plain to see.

>>55013478
Anon, I don't know if you've ever been in the military, but I have, and people sharing communal showers is a fairly-common thing.

>>55013430
>Because the only book in which he made an effort to keep readers, rather than just assuming they'll just read whatever he gives them, was The Hobbit
No, that's another stupid fucking assumption you've made. PROVE your stupid claims.

> In everything else, it's just an endless stream of dry descriptions, dry geneologies, and dryer dialogue
No, it's interesting descriptions, not a genealogy in sight (but you do get them in The Hobbit! We know that Bilbo is half Took and inherits his "queer" liking for adventure from there, along with a lot of his money.), and interesting dialog, and the occasional running in terror.

>Like, I'm not saying that most Novelists don't ALSO make the same mistake: the overwhelming majority almost certainly do, but personally, I put a lot of blame on Tolkien (and Dickens) for enshrining that sort of thinking while writing. Is it ultimately a matter of taste? Yes.Are there people who are capable of being entertained by pay-by-the-word Dickens? Yes. Are there also people who can be entertained by grown men repeatedly turning left for 4+ hours on end? Yes. The modern reader needs to be entertained to be kept engaged. Does this mean that perhaps the average modern reader has a similar attention span to children in the 1920's?
No, you're saying that your personal opinions are OBJECTIVE FACT. Since you did not find The Fellowship of the Ring entertaining, clearly it was not written to entertain. You're a fucking dumbass if you think that's the case.

>>55013478
Sounds to me like you're a closet pedophile actually.

>>55013430

> I'm saying that Tolkien's writing isn't, in a vacuum, independent of all the middle-earth wiki or silmarilion crap, entertaining, or at-least not entertaining enough to keep the average modern reader engaged,
I'm saying it is. Why are you OBJECTIVELY RIGHT and I'm OBJECTIVELY WRONG?

In fact, I'm going to go one further. You're confusing reading carefully with issues of length and pacing. You don't necessarily want a short book. You want a book that you don't need to read carefully. And if someone does write a book that needs to be read carefully to understand what's going on, and why words are put in where they are, you miss the point, and in your colossal ego, decide that nobody would be entertained by it and it's not entertaining to anyone besides maybe a few weirdos.

Fucking hell, you couldn't even spare the time or energy to read a sentence properly, coming to literally the opposite of the stated conclusion, presumably because you're just skimming along and only taking in a third of the words or so.

>>55009665
Fucking this. I've read the trilogy, but goddamned if flotsam and jetsam as well as EVERYTHING with Tom Bombadillo is just painful. Frodo is the ultimate Mary Sue, and while some parts are breath taking, no one likes to read that shit. It's like Middlemarch or Cantenbury Tales. It's fantastic, but goddamned if it isnt too long to be enjoyable.

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>>55013513
And taking shits is a fairly common thing, but unless you're talking about Jonathan Swift writing Gulliver's Travels, the author choosing to lovingly describe each and every one is telling.

>>55009423
Not really.

Gary Gygax was not a paragon of taste. He could math things out and write encounters but he was, to be blunt, something of a pleb in terms of stuff like fiction. Even his own 'fiction', the original D&D setting, is awful, mostly because he wasn't interested in anything but simulating action sequences.

He was not capable of grasping what made something like The Lord of the Rings special. I mean, just look at his primary complaint - "there's not enough action!" is, frankly, something you expect to hear from a child. There's not much action in Dubliners or The Third Man, but these works are still incredible, and rightly considered masterpieces.

Gygax had very specific, kinda low-brow tastes, that's all.

>>55009665
I wouldn't say it was bad, but it failed to grasp my interest enough even to find out how it ends. I actually still have no idea how LOTR ends.

>>55013589
He described a few, all of which were character moments for Ender.

Allow me to pre-empt your next "point" by attempting to predict the one in question you're likely to bring up: the fight in the shower. See, a guy like you would probably characterize this as "a gay wrestling match between underage boys". However, as someone who made his living by learning how to kill people, I can tell you that said scene was unequivocally in-character for anyone else who has undergone similar training. There's a reason this book is still on the Commandant's Reading List, you know.

>>55012901
>And the balrog in fellowship is described in exactly as much detail as is necessary to create the right atmosphere for the scene.

bull
shit

>>55013029
I mean, Poe did detective fiction before that.
And the genre itself dates back really far.

I'll give you it technically because it was the first of full novel length, but there were definitely better examples of detective fiction that predated it, and were more definitive.

>>55011116
>Tolkien, and the Novel in general, are relics of his time.

You're one of those dumb fucks that things light novels are the future because they use less words, aren't you?

>>55013542
>No, you're saying that your personal opinions are OBJECTIVE FACT. Since you did not find The Fellowship of the Ring entertaining, clearly it was not written to entertain.
I'm claiming that because LOTS of people in the modern age find Tolkien to be dry beyond measure that it is a trend, and that "entertaining" adults during the 1920's and before took a lot less stimulation, perhaps because part of the cultural definition of adulthood was learning to cope with boredom, which most of us have grown up never having to do.
>Why are you OBJECTIVELY RIGHT and I'm OBJECTIVELY WRONG?
You're not objectively wrong, it's just that your taste in "recreation" would likely be closer to the majority opinion in the 1920's and before.
>You don't necessarily want a short book. You want a book that you don't need to read carefully.
While that IS a gross oversimplification, unnecessarily obfuscating your content, and expecting your readers to "work for it" is a huge problem in modern literature. Might be mistaking complexity for depth, and obfuscation for having been entertained because of sunk cost.

>>55012719
>>half the chapters are just teaching you the finer points of how a ship works and whaling

And it's beautiful and fascinating. If you're just reading for the suspense of finding out what happens next, the crudest way that a story can engage you, you're not going to get much out of any literature.

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>>55009665
>>55013576
>Frodo is the ultimate Mary Sue

frodo fails in his mission and lives the rest of his life in terrible pain and sickness knowing that he failed. he didnt even really have the energy or drive to write about his adventures like bilbo did, sam wrote most of it

the power of friendship fails in the end and doesnt save the day. a villain (who didnt have a turn a heart and was still just acting like a crazy crack head) saved the day. not the good guys

its funny how common it is that people who shit talk tolkien have obviously never read the books (or the watched the movie apparently)

bilbo was a mary sue but its a comy dragon fighting book for kids

also
>tfw to intelligent too enjoy one of the best works of fantasy ever

its better than not liking it but claiming that you did though i guess

>>55013029
YOU MOTHERFUCKER name me one detective novel written in the past 100 years that's better than The Moonstone

>>55013690
While I'd prefer they follow more the example of Philip K Dick's novellas than Japan's light novels, a general reduction in length, or more frequent marketing of collected short stories rather than EVERYTHING being a fucking novel, would be a step in the right direction.

>>55013727
Drop Shot

>>55013664
to be fair, the military, wrestling, football, and basically any other butt-slapping display of masculinity tend to be pretty gay period.

>>55011100
>None of the LoTR books are novels
But that's wrong you retard. A novel is any work of fiction whose word count is in excess of 40,000. All three of the LotR books break 120,000 and The Hobbit breaks 95,000.

>>55013629
So Gygax was the Michael Bay of fantasy?

It was a big moment of personal growth for me as a young lad when I admitted to myself that reading a lot of fiction doesn't actually make you smart and people who don't read for pleasure are still capable of taste and discernment.

This thread is making me reconsider all of that.

>>55013690
The film industry is acknowledging serialized television is the future.

I don't see why it isn't also true for books.

>>55013748
The Corps is the gayest organization of straight men in the U.S., mango. You ain't wrong.

>>55009999
Can't argue with those quads

>>55013759
Pretty much.

Look at his naming conventions if you want to know how intellectually bankrupt he was.

He wanted to play a game. Not play a role in a fictional world.

>>55013737
>Drop Shot
looks like some Dick Francis bollocks and probably doesn't even have a comic servant character who does the sortes virgilianae with a dog-eared copy of Robinson Crusoe

>>55013771
>The film industry is acknowledging that making decisions based off of political correctness and making movies no one wants to see doesn't sell tickets

obviously just need more niggers and cunty women in lead roles

>>55013703
>I'm claiming that because LOTS of people in the modern age find Tolkien to be dry beyond measure that it is a trend, and that "entertaining" adults during the 1920's and before took a lot less stimulation, perhaps because part of the cultural definition of adulthood was learning to cope with boredom, which most of us have grown up never having to do.
Ok, based on what? Because so far you've offered nothing but your personal experience. I've met lots of people in the modern age who find Tolkien fascinating.

>You're not objectively wrong, it's just that your taste in "recreation" would likely be closer to the majority opinion in the 1920's and before.
Again, what the fuck are you basing this on, besides your personal tastes?

>While that IS a gross oversimplification, unnecessarily obfuscating your content, and expecting your readers to "work for it" is a huge problem in modern literature.
I thought you wanted "efficient" writing, compressing the most meaning into the fewest words? It's what you've said upthread. >>55011116 >>55011543 You made an unfavorable comparison to Pope where "not a single word is misplaced or unnecessary". If you want to pack a lot of meaning into as few a words as possible, you're necessarily going to have to go outside the direct route of long description of one item at a time, which makes it difficult to read.

Which do you want?

>. Might be mistaking complexity for depth, and obfuscation for having been entertained because of sunk cost.
No, because I've actually looked and I've actually found depth. That's why I can actually cite to passages in the book that contain such depth, although I've just been referring to them in this argument so far.

>>55013771
I has been like that for books for over a decade and a half. Where the fuck have you been?

>>55013792
I feel more pretentious just from reading this post.

>>55013770
>He thought reading fiction made him smarter.
Jesus christ.

>>55013726
Bitch, I quoted an obscure chapter and specific instances of bullshit. Do you know why Frodo is a Mary Sue? The whole hamfisted Jesus narrative. Sure, he didn't throw the ring into the mountain but he's the whiney crux of the story, particularly when compared to Bilbo and his badass adventures with his dwarf buddies.

I was so upset that Frodo wasn't Bilbo during my first reading that I almost gave up. He's clearly an allegorical tool used to show the strength of the meek, and I don't have time for that shit in a giant puddle of overindulgent worldbuilding.

>>55013375
The beginning of the first book is very weak. It picks up once you start getting into the superspy-hooker antics, but there's a lot of boring, unnecessary crap you have to sit through to get there.

>>55013759
You've gotta admit, though, he got a few things right. I actually enjoyed some of the fight scenes he did for Transformers for slating the bloodthirsty bastard inside me.

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>>55013780
SECOND gayest, after /fit/

>>55013839
Bay, I mean, not Gygax, shit.

>>55013849
There are more people in the Corps than broswe /fit/.

>>55013826
>Do you know why Frodo is a Mary Sue? The whole hamfisted Jesus narrative.
Not him, but Frodo is almost certainly more based on Frothi the "failed Jesus" of northern myth than he is on Jesus directly.

> He's clearly an allegorical tool used to show the strength of the meek, and I don't have time for that shit in a giant puddle of overindulgent worldbuilding.
I don't think you know what an allegory is. Nor is Frodo particularly meek.

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>>55013826
>overindulgent worldbuilding

you seem to be throwing words around that you dont understand. the only world building there really is are the languages which im sure you didnt take any time to learn or think about

one of the criticisms of tolkien is that he didnt do much world building and tolkien responded basically saying that he didnt have the time or space to because he has a story to write and everyone wants to see something different in the world and he would never be able to make everyone happy anyway

try hard pseudo intellectuals are the worst. not even going to waste my time with your dumb religious allegory complex shit

>>55012701
> Compare Ender's Game the novel to the original Ender's Game short story. The short story is simply better by every metric, except marketability

I suppose I can believe that. Ender's Game is worthless as a novel and a film but for all I know it could be a great short story. All the best science fiction is short stories, so it's plausible.

It;s hard to take anything you might say about novels seriously though, when you say up front you hate the form and call anyone who might want to be challenged by a novel a flagellant.

>>55013789
Eh, given all of his players were essentially new players and not used to creating fantasy world OCs on the fly, suggesting rearrangements of their names isn't an egregiously bad idea. I've seen it used before. Heck, Recess made a reference to the practice in one of its episodes, when TJ joins the nerds.

And it's not like they all were anagrams. Mordekainen for instance. I've used that same portmanteau of two references technique myself for like, four different characters.

>>55013770
>I admitted to myself that reading a lot of fiction doesn't actually make you smart
This is right.

>people who don't read for pleasure are still capable of taste and discernment
This is wrong.

Someone who has watched an extensive collection of movies will be more readily able to accurately critique them. The fact that he has seen a breadth of movies will give him more insight into what has and has not been done before and what does and does not work. Most people are readily able to accept this. The same is true for all forms of media, someone who reads more books will be better equipped to see what is better in a technical sense and therefore will naturally have more discerning taste.

>>55013869
he said gayest, not largest.
the corps have more people, but /fit/ is gayer.

>>55013882
>>55013906
>I don't like thing for obvious and brief reasons
>"Ya well you're stupid and wrong based on semantics"
You both seem like the type to enjoy the trilogy, that's for certain.

>>55013882
>Nor is Frodo particularly meek.

Not him but the whole reason Frodo can carry the Ring to Mt. Doom is because he has no ambitions for the Ring to tempt him with. He's literally hard to corrupt because he's so humble. All the big dick heroes like Boromir, Gandalf, Galadriel etc. are a billion times better than him at everything but they have ambition, and that makes them vulnerable.

>>55013952
I disagree. I find it a point of pride how gay the Muhreens are. I could personally out-gay any nigger from /fit/, any day of the week, and I'm not even the gayest straight guy I know.

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>>55013219
>In college, after I finished Ulises, despite the fact that I had to begrudgingly admit that it was admittedly a demonstration of genius, I realized that all value I was giving it was from the sunk cost fallacy, and I promised that I would never read through something that wasn't either entertaining or useful again. What good is genius, even literary genius, if it doesn't make the world a better place, or at-least a more fun/pleasant place for a few hours? All of these novels that make no effort to entertain are just lesser versions of Ulises, and Ulises is shit... shit crapped out by a genius but shit nonetheless.

Honestly, dude, this sounds like more of a problem with you than any of the fiction you're reading. You just prefer instant gratification and don't like certain types of prose. A lot of other people do.

I think you're projecting your personal inability to find enjoyment in this sort of thing onto the work itself. Ulysses is, quite frankly, a marvel of writing. It entertains not through a vexing plot twists or suspense (though there is a little of that) or the like, but through the beauty of the prose itself, and the way it interacts with the reader's memories, impressions, and ability to place themselves in the situations of the narrative. LotR is similar in that the 'action' of the plot isn't necessarily what fixate; instead it's the impression of the text, the sense of learning about this vast world and discovering it alongside the characters - it's the same itch we scratch when we read something like The Epic of Gilgamesh or the Ramayana. The prose is designed specifically to deliver this.

If you don't respond to either of these, then you don't respond to them. You prefer a different kind of narrative. Neither is invalid, though.

Here have a beard nuking itself.

>>55009665
I like the books.

>>55013799
Yeah, sometimes I want perfectly efficient writing like Pope, and sometimes I want straightforward writing like the Pulps. I'm vast and contain multitudes. No matter what it is, however, in a vacuum, independent of any other context, the work itself has to remain consistently entertaining the entire way through, or I WILL put it down and never pick it up again, and that's pretty normal.

As for "what evidence do I have other than my own experiences" how about the experiences of all these people
>>55009464
>>55009665
>>55009986
>>55010135
>>55011500
>>55010016
>>55010221
>>55010276
All of the above seem to agree that, while Tolkien might be the boss of world building and fantasy-linguistics, his writing style, in a vacuum, leaves something to be desired, and that's just what I could find 1/5th of the way through the thread before I stopped reading, because it was boring to read through all that.... just like Tolkien.

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>>55013974
i actually said that it was good that you admit you didnt like it

im just calling you an idiot and pointing out you complained about imagined nonsense

like if you said you didnt like broccoli because it puts spider eggs in your belly or something

i bet youre the type of person to see "toxic masculinity" and "the patriarchy" in everything too

>>55013816
It can, it depends on how you read it.
If you're doing it for analysis, it can make you a better writer, both in terms of rhetoric and structure.

If you're just doing it to enjoy the ride, then no it's not gonna do much. You may eventually gain an intuitive sense of effective v.s. not but you won't necessarily know why, though you'll probably have a lot of poorly informed opinions on such.

Same is true for any media. Music, film, etc. If you are studying their techniques in action, you learn. If you're just smiling and clapping, you're only having a good time.

>>55013837
do you think it was worth slogging through the beginning, or should i move on?

>>55013978
>Not him but the whole reason Frodo can carry the Ring to Mt. Doom is because he has no ambitions for the Ring to tempt him with.
But that's completely wrong. He even asks, directly to Galadriel, why is it that he cannot see (and control) the hearts and minds of others with the ring that other ring-weilders do. Sam is the one that is truly without ambition, (well, except for a subsumed kind of ambition to be a good servant to Frodo) Frodo has sensible hobbit ambitions, and undertakes his mission out of love of middle-earth, and he's weak, unfit for power. But he's not particularly spiritless.

He undertakes the mission because he's the one who volunteers, because he has the ring, not because they went through some kind of selection process and determined he was the best ringbearer they had.

>>55014049
ill have to tip my hat at this

i also guess this is why movie critics are so informative and correct in their assessment of movies...

>>55014038
But it's not imagined nonsense, it's blatant. Seriously anon, it may have different mythological baking, but 9/10 people are going to read Frodo as Jesus because the entire story is about the futility of being a badass.

Anyways, how does that make Bombadillo or Flotsam and Jetsam anymore enjoyable to read? You're more upset at the Mary Sueness of Frodo than the actual criticism: the books are too goddamned long and boring.

>>55013857
I mean, I'm sure Gygax had some thirst-slating fight scenes too.

>>55013882
>Not him, but Frodo is almost certainly more based on Frothi the "failed Jesus" of northern myth than he is on Jesus directly.

Dang, their names are even similar. That's definitely my vote for inspiration. Just like how Gandalf is the name of a Norse king that means "(magic)-staff elf."

>>55014035
>Yeah, sometimes I want perfectly efficient writing like Pope, and sometimes I want straightforward writing like the Pulps.
Then why are you criticizing Tolkien for providing the former and not the latter? Because it is actually amazingly efficient writing, if you bother to pay attention.

>No matter what it is, however, in a vacuum, independent of any other context, the work itself has to remain consistently entertaining the entire way through, or I WILL put it down and never pick it up again, and that's pretty normal.
And again, all those people who do find something like Tolkien consistently entertaining? Do they not exist? Do their opinions not count? Why do your personal reading habits mean anything in terms of evalutaing a literary work?

>All of the above seem to agree that, while Tolkien might be the boss of world building and fantasy-linguistics, his writing style, in a vacuum, leaves something to be desired, and that's just what I could find 1/5th of the way through the thread before I stopped reading, because it was boring to read through all that.... just like Tolkien.
And what about the opinions of everyone else who enjoys the books, who have created a community of fans such that they were willing to try to put them onto the silver screen, not once, but several times, even when some of the earlier adaptations were commercial flops?

>>55013987
>If you don't respond to either of these, then you don't respond to them. You prefer a different kind of narrative. Neither is invalid, though.
That's basically what I'm saying, but with the added caveat of "hey, we're living in a society where each generation has smaller memories and attention spans, but faster processing speeds due to early exposure to information technology.... I strongly suspect there's going to be a shift towards different kinds of narrative entertainment" and while I myself might not be one of those "raised on smartphones" kids, my father and I were some of the early adopters of personal computing in the EARLY 90's during my childhood brain development, and I'm pretty sure I just have a predisposition for lower attention spans and faster processing speeds in general. This coupled with the fact that I actually teach the "raised with smartphones" generation, and, am often better able to relate to my students than my peers are, leads me to believe that that shift could well be away from the Tolkienesque, and towards... well... the sort of things that my ADD ass can appreciate. That's not good or bad, that's just a thing.

As for Ulysses: I fully admit it's a genuine work of genius, but every time I think about it, I want to walk up to Joyce, smack him across the face, give him a great big cookie with "genius" frosted it, and say "congratulations, you're a fucking genius, you've proven it, now use that genius to produce something that actually entertains and enlightens." Though it's not as bad as Portrait.... which instead of being a masturbatory work of genius, is just a masturbatory work about BEING a genius.

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>>55014115
iv literally never seen anyone compare frodo to jesus and im willing to bet a pretty penny you see jesus and religion in a lot of the characters you read

there a plenty of badasses in the story, there is just more to the story than that.

i liked tom, he was funny and i thought it showed how the powers of the world dont give a shit about the mortals of middle earth and arent going to help in their struggle

>>55014133
>Just like how Gandalf is the name of a Norse king that means "(magic)-staff elf."
It's actually not a norse king, it's even weirder. It's an Alfar name contained in a list of dwarves, some of whom are directly lifted into the Hobbit.

Gandalf the LoTR character probably had his first origins by Tolkien looking over at the eddas, and wondering "Why is this elf with a staff or a wand included in a list of dwarves? Is he related to them in some fashion? Does he hang out with them? "

>>55014049
Usually people like this get lost in their own pretentiousness.

Just look at red letter media.

>>55014075
I can't tell, were you calling him a fedora and sarcastically calling critics incompetent or are you actually supporting him?

Cause I'll be the first to agree academia and critique have been flooded with pretentious know-nothings that equate being esoteric with quality, but that doesn't mean the bare concept of analysis is flawed, just their vapid, ego-stroking approach to it.

>>55009423
i liked the hobbit movies better. i felt they were more fun than the LOTR movies

>>55014228
I thought they all sucked and peter jackson is a hack.

>>55014186
You saying Neon Genesis Evangelion doesn't have any religious imagery?
Or that Kamina didn't die for your sins, then his gospel wasn't carried on by a follower named Simon?

>>55014144
>yeah, sometimes I want perfectly efficient writing like Pope
>Then why are you criticizing Tolkien for providing the former and not the latter?

Tolkien told a story in 455,125 that could have been done in a third the space wile losing nothing of value. You can't take a single word away from Pope.

Tolkien may have tried for depth of meaning, but he did NOT hit efficiency, by any stretch of the imagination. If there is any "boring part" that you have to trudge through to get to the "good part" then it's not efficient. Yes, I know that YOU don't find any part of LoTR boring, but even among Tolkien fans, that is not the majority opinion. They're always trying to tell me "oh you just have to get through X part to get to Y part which is so awesome" which, to me, is the mark of a bad writer.

>>55014170
>now use that genius to produce something that actually entertains and enlightens

Ulysses does both of these though. It just didn't entertain or enlighten you.

>>55014213
>just their vapid, ego-stroking approach to it.

which that post was drenched in, hence my post

also i wouldnt really consider any movie critic worthy of the five minutes it would take me to read their review

>>55014186
There is literally a giant Wikipedia segment about Frodo and Jesus and if you Google it, various scholarly articles. But none of that matters because your entire argument can be summarized as "nuh uh, you're dumb and are probably a christfag". You're telling me you don't see RoboCop as cyborg ultraviolence Jesus?

Anyways, Tom is a cunt but could have been entertaining beyond providing context of middle earth He just had the misfortune of being at the very beginning of the first book for like 100 pages and disappears.

>>55014192
I mean... norse often didn't differentiate between elves and dwarves.

Though if we're being technical, a lot of cultures kinds of start mixing up all their spirit creatures. Is it a demon? A fairy? An angel? a ghost? All the same. Some culture like japan even have a unified term for all such magical weirdos.

>>55009423
>"I'd like to throttle Frodo.'
Kek'd hard.

>>55014269
NGE's imagery was wholly and completely there because Anno thought it looked cool.

>>55014294
It did enlighten, but it didn't entertain. It took its enlightenment, and hid it behind artificially generated hours of tedium, drudgery, and unpleasantness. This saw-like literary torture machine set at the reader was skillfully crafted, arguably more so than any other literary torture machine, because Joyce is a fucking genius and won't let anyone forget it, but REACHING the enlightenment was more unpleasant and time consuming than some Cenobite Tantra shit.

>>55014310
No, I see Robocop as an attempt to cash in on a turbo-grittier version of Inspector Gadget, which came several years prior, and has nearly the exact same premise.

>>55014331
Anno is a liar though.

The imagery clearly serves a purpose in terms of atmosphere, and everything even remotely kabbalistic shares too much in common thematically with the plot elements of the show for this to be a coincidence.

>>55014310
>You're telling me you don't see RoboCop as cyborg ultraviolence Jesus?
No? You're making your argument increasingly worse. Unless that was sarcasm, in case shut up.

>>55014355
I'm sure you know more about a Chinese cartoon than the Chinaman who wrote said Chinese cartoon.

>>55014341
>>55014359
hes saying it because the directer literally said that was his goal. but of course as you pointed out no normal human being would watch robocop and think fucking jesus

hes a fucking try hard idiot spazing out

>>55014341
>literally gets shot in both hands and the head, "crucified" for being a good cop
>Comes back to life as a god, inspiring the average citizens with his benevolence and dick shooting
>society fights against the Roman tyranny of mega-capitalism with nothing more than his desire to be human
Come on anon.

>>55014359
Shh, you aren't supposed to notice.

>>55014389
Well, he is correct about Anno. The guy will literally say anything he has to to make people stop talking about Eva.

>>55014310
>"nuh uh, you're dumb and are probably a christfag"

no i actually think youre an atheist constantly looking for something to attack and overlay your weird complexes over

also
>wiki article

not really going to waste my time responding to the dumber bits of your posts

>>55014271
>Tolkien told a story in 455,125 that could have been done in a third the space wile losing nothing of value
I vehemently disagree. You maybe can cut a passage here or there. You cannot cut 2/3 of it without eliminating most of the actual content of the book.

>You can't take a single word away from Pope.
Sure you can. Take the first 3 lines of Rape of the Lock. Outside of a self-referential note to the theme of the poem which is obviously apparent from a reading, what exactly do they add?

>Tolkien may have tried for depth of meaning, but he did NOT hit efficiency, by any stretch of the imagination.
Yes, he did. Long does not mean inefficient. Tolkien packed a colossal amount of content into his work, so much so that despite the fact that we never visit more than small corners of it, we can tell an enormous amount of how his world works, mostly from picking things up in dialog, or the odd poem or chant.

>If there is any "boring part" that you have to trudge through to get to the "good part" then it's not efficient. Yes, I know that YOU don't find any part of LoTR boring, but even among Tolkien fans, that is not the majority opinion. They're always trying to tell me "oh you just have to get through X part to get to Y part which is so awesome" which, to me, is the mark of a bad writer.
I have never heard a "Tolkien fan" say this. I doubt you have either, and you're just making up a quasi-sockpuppet to agree with your point from the "other side".

>>55014313
Alfar, Svartalfar, and Dokkalfar were three very different groups.

>>55014355
>>55014444
>thinks anime is le exdee deep
Read a book nerds.

>>55014503
>Alfar, Svartalfar, and Dokkalfar were three very different groups.

It should be noted also that some of these aren't even likely to be 'legit' Norse folklore. Snorri invented a lot of pseudo-Christian shit when he compiled the Prose Edda.

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>>55014509
Anime can be deep. Deep as any other medium. And this is coming from a person who has been reading ever since he picked up his mom's college psych testbooks when he was six.

Get out.

>>55014538
>psych
>that pic
wew
lad

we got a pseudo intellectual here boys.

>>55014389
Death of the Author, kiddo.

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>>55014509
>>55014575
(You)

>>55014444
as expected from the master

>>55014610
You definitely have autism, and your pics aren't helping you seem less autistic either.

>>55014503
what of Ljósálfar?

>>55014463
The fuck even is this?

No punctuation anon, what's your end game? I'm just making an obvious parallel for the justification of Frodo's Mary Sue-ness, you're going on some sort of tirade about how I'm atheist projecting my Jesus delusion as a source of anger. It's okay to disagree, it's not like I don't like Lord of the Rings and a lot of its content, I just don't particularly want to read the books because they're too long and boring. And I've read some boring shit in my life.

>>55014503
>Svartalfar, and Dokkalfar were... very different groups.

Black elves and dark elves were different? That seems really silly if true.

>>55009423
As far as material for inspiring a D&D campaign he is correct
You'd be better off with pulpy sword and sorcery stuff like Conan
I mean, they're blatant adolescence power fantasies, but that's what you usually want for a TTRPG

>>55014538
>college psych testbooks when he was six.
what an early age to go astray. you poor thing, you never had a chance.

>>55013849
Thank god that didn't give me an erection

>>55014503
>Tolkien packed a colossal amount of content into his work, so much so that despite the fact that we never visit more than small corners of it, we can tell an enormous amount of how his world works, mostly from picking things up in dialog, or the odd poem or chant.
When I chose narrative fiction, I do so to be told a story. I don't read narrative fiction to pick through the overdescription, linguistics professpr masturbation, and dialogue hints in a sub-par story to piece together a setting. If all I wanted to do was explore a world, I would buy an RPG setting book or go to a setting wiki.

The fact that the world he chose to obfuscate the exposition of behind a second rate
narrative jut so happens to be one of the best and most well thought out fictional settings to date, does not negate the fact that the narrative within which the puzzle pieces are buried is sub-par: almost like an afterthought serving to expose the world rather than drive the story. And make no mistake, I will admit that the setting is indeed one of the best and most well thought out fictional settings to date, but why I would chose to absorb it in such a, quite frankly, painfully boring way, is beyond me.

>>55013145
>DM who wants to play a game is more fun than a DM telling a strict story
No shit, retard. You have any more platitudes to share? Water being wet or ice being cold?

>>55014864
Ice is relatively warm, on a cosmic scale.

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>>55013906
>the only world building there really is are the languages which im sure you didnt take any time to learn or think about
>literally browbeating people for not learning Elven

>>55014886
>literally browbeating people for not learning Elven

you misunderstood. i meant that seriously. as in, of course you didnt learn another fucking (fake pointless) language just to read a fantasy book

anyway the only language i would be interested in is the language of numenor which wasnt really developed one bit

>>55014838
>When I chose narrative fiction, I do so to be told a story.
You are being told a story. You're actually being told numerous stories packed into one, each with their own beginnings, middles, and endings. There's the "hobbits" storyline, the "war of the ring" storyline, the "aragorn trying to fix all the shit Isildur broke" storyline, the "Elves are fading and dying" storyline, the "ROhirrim are the quasi-vassal of Gondor and trying to retain their own culture while being semi-assimilated by Gondor" storyline, and of course it's all wrapped up in the meta-storyas to how you are holding a piece of in world mythology that is being edited frequently and you can't completely trust the narrative as presented.

>I don't read narrative fiction to pick through the overdescription, linguistics professpr masturbation, and dialogue hints in a sub-par story to piece together a setting.
Too bad, because that's where story is usually contained, in dialog, wordplay, and description. That you miss them and find them uninformative do not negate them being there. It's true in other authors too.

>The fact that the world he chose to obfuscate the exposition of behind a second rate
narrative
What obfuscation? Obfuscation is when you deliberately set it up so that the reader is mislead. Tolkien just sets things up where he doesn't blindingly obviously tell you things. You're supposed to be paying enough attention to realize that Denethor's last despair comes when he sees Frodo captured in the Palantir, or the Nazugl skittering across Frodo and Sam's position as they make their way through the dead Marshes is the same one that's being sent to deal with Saruman. They're not obfuscatory, as it's clearly within the work with observation.

> almost like an afterthought serving to expose the world rather than drive the story.
Then why doesn't he do that? Why is so much of the world, Dorwinion, Rhun, Khand, the Ettenmoors, Lindon, Forochel, Beleriand, etc. barely alluded to?

>>55014978
>You are being told a story. You're actually being told numerous stories packed into one, each with their own beginnings, middles, and endings. There's the "hobbits" storyline, the "war of the ring" storyline, the "aragorn trying to fix all the shit Isildur broke" storyline, the "Elves are fading and dying" storyline, the "ROhirrim are the quasi-vassal of Gondor and trying to retain their own culture while being semi-assimilated by Gondor" storyline
Maybe he should have told one story well, instead all of those stories poorly, as an afterthought excuse to:
>meta-storyas to how you are holding a piece of in world mythology that is being edited frequently and you can't completely trust the narrative as presented.


>I don't read narrative fiction to pick through the overdescription, linguistics professpr masturbation, and dialogue hints in a sub-par story to piece together a setting.
>Too bad, because that's where story is usually contained
Which is one of the reasons I generally find Novels to be an inferior form that grew out of a very specific need during a specific point in history, and maintained popularity due to ease of monetization: having very little to do with actual quality. If anything Tolkien is the reason so many authors, ESPECIALLY fantasy authors have a plot that only serves to expose their setting, rather than having a setting that serves to drive their stories forward.

>What obfuscation? Obfuscation is when you deliberately set it up so that the reader is mislead.
Now you're just being pedantic and semantic.
>You're supposed to be paying enough attention
Then maybe he should make more of an effort to hold my attention, beyond the assurances of fans on the internet that if I just get through X part, or just dig deeper, there's be something good.
>Then why doesn't he do that? Why is so much of the world, Dorwinion, Rhun, Khand, the Ettenmoors, Lindon, Forochel, Beleriand, etc. barely alluded to?
Maybe because it's a whole goddamned world?

>>55014509
>muh animoo has no value b-becuz weebs r dumb
The delusion that good writers with interesting and deep stories to tell will somehow be allergic to particular mediums is a particularly fun one.
It must be fun to conveniently forget the truly staggering amount of trite garbage literature out there when you point and laugh at Naruto.

>>55015105
>Maybe he should have told one story well, instead all of those stories poorly, as an afterthought excuse to:
I thought you were saying that there wasn't a story at all? Admit it. You have no idea what you're talking about. You've admitted you've never even managed to finish the series. You're mostly going on what other people have said, and you can't even follow a 4chan post from beginning to end. You have completely contradicted yourself on several occasions, and it's clear you harbor some bizarre grudge against Tolkien.

>Which is one of the reasons I generally find Novels to be an inferior form that grew out of a very specific need during a specific point in history, and maintained popularity due to ease of monetization: having very little to do with actual quality.
And once again you're mistaking your opinions as some sort of objective fact.

>If anything Tolkien is the reason so many authors, ESPECIALLY fantasy authors have a plot that only serves to expose their setting, rather than having a setting that serves to drive their stories forward.
This is also wrong.

>Now you're just being pedantic and semantic.
No, I'm making a point. There's a hell of a difference when a detective story throws a red herring your way than when an author expects you to be paying attention to stuff clearly stated in order to get what's going on.

>Then maybe he should make more of an effort to hold my attention, beyond the assurances of fans on the internet that if I just get through X part, or just dig deeper, there's be something good.
Missing the point, again. If you can't even follow 2 sentences, why do you read literature at all?

>Maybe because it's a whole goddamned world?
But it isn't a "whole goddamned world". It's the IMPRESSION of a whole goddamned world. There's another difference, even though you'll cry semantics.

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>>55015212
>muh kino cartoons
>best current anime is one punch man and umaru

>>55013086
There's plenty of shit like that in War and Peace or other Russian novels. Getting to know all of the characters / the setting is part of the experience. Also seeing the characters in non-"plot advancing" moments helps the plot feel natural and earned when those scenes do come around.

>>55015105
i used to think shorter works were innately superior to longer works if there were otherwise equally good but youre making me change my mind

>>55013219
I'm the War & peace anon and I see your point about a lot of stories being better as a novella. Never read the Ender's Game novella though. But that doesn't mean longer-form stories aren't still good in their own right, it's just the story has to justify the length.

>>55014635
>>55013826
>Mary Sue
SpainardSwordsmanCanConceive.gif

>>55010797
>>55010807
Such a bold opinion

>>55015212
>My waifu is srs business you mean person! ;_;
The state of your "life"

get help

>>55015246
>I thought you were saying that there wasn't a story at all?
I said the story was boring and sub par.
>You've admitted you've never even managed to finish the series. You're mostly going on what other people have said
I didn't finish it, and I'm going off of the bits I did finish, and heresy, because doing otherwise would require me to try reading through LoTR again, and it was unpleasant enough the first few times, why would I try again?
> and you can't even follow a 4chan post from beginning to end
I said I WON'T read through an entire 4chan THREAD to find everyone else who thinks Tolkien is boring, because doing so would be boring.
>If anything Tolkien is the reason so many authors, ESPECIALLY fantasy authors have a plot that only serves to expose their setting, rather than having a setting that serves to drive their stories forward.
>This is also wrong.
So you're saying that modern fantasy isn't garbage that puts the author's needless exposition of their setting before telling a compelling narrative? Come on.>>55015246
>If you can't even follow 2 sentences, why do you read literature at all?
Nice hyperbole bruh. I love literature, I just hate Novels, and the fact that people like Tolkien and Dickens helped define the form helps shape it towards being something I loathe.
>But it isn't a "whole goddamned world". It's the IMPRESSION of a whole goddamned world.
So he sacrificed all the quality of the narrative, and could even exposition an entire world into being? So he's not just a failure at storytelling?

>>55015315
>I'm the War & peace anon and I see your point about a lot of stories being better as a novella. Never read the Ender's Game novella though. But that doesn't mean longer-form stories aren't still good in their own right, it's just the story has to justify the length.
I completely agree with this. When I'm being a trollish dick, I'll say things like Novels are inherently inferior, but they're not, they're just overused, and frequently used for stories that don't need to be novels. Sometimes I feel like if we lived in a world where it was as easy to make money off of novellas and short stories as it is with novels, and thus the choice would be made based on what's appropriate for the story rather than making everything a novel always, literature in general would be better.

>>55015431
>I said the story was boring and sub par.
>>55014838
> If all I wanted to do was explore a world, I would buy an RPG setting book or go to a setting wiki.
You do realize I'm capable of looking up through this thread and pointing out what you've written not very long ago, right?

>I didn't finish it, and I'm going off of the bits I did finish, and heresy, because doing otherwise would require me to try reading through LoTR again, and it was unpleasant enough the first few times, why would I try again?
I expect you won't. My question though, is why would you act like you know what you're talking about when it comes to the book?

>I said I WON'T read through an entire 4chan THREAD to find everyone else who thinks Tolkien is boring, because doing so would be boring.
You also said that Tolkien didn't try to make his work interesting based on a sentence fragment that is clearly taken out of context.

>So you're saying that modern fantasy isn't garbage that puts the author's needless exposition of their setting before telling a compelling narrative?
I am saying that yes, most modern fantasy is attempting to tell a compelling narrative first, and creating a setting second. They might do that badly, and many do, but it's not because they're trying to imitate Tolkein, and it's not because they're not trying to tell a story. It's because they're shitty writers, and even if they wrote things the way you seem to want to, they'd still be shit. Know how I know this? Because there are a lot of shitty short stories too.

>I love literature, I just hate Novels, and the fact that people like Tolkien and Dickens helped define the form helps shape it towards being something I loathe.
I very much doubt this.

>So he sacrificed all the quality of the narrative, and could even exposition an entire world into being? So he's not just a failure at storytelling?
Nope, try again.

>>55015431
>this person unironically reads 40k books

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>>55015477
what the fuck are your definitions of novella and novel?

are novellas not extremely popular? is the difference between 40k and 50k words that much of a fucking difference to you?

you just sound like someone whos mad at game of thrones and harry potter, which i completely understand, but those shit piles arent the norm. normally the shit pile is much smaller and more compact in a novella like form

lose your irrational hatred of 40,001+ word count you insufferable twat

>>55015578
What if you're taller than 2 meters?

>>55014616
Which anon? You seem to think we're both the same person. Being the Redditor you are, I can understand the confusion.

>>55015578
ASoIaF is a good series mate. It's the TV show that's pleb trash.

>>55015477
>When I'm being a trollish dick
Stop doing that or leave.

>>55015431
>I love literature, I just hate Novels, and the fact that people like Tolkien and Dickens helped define the form helps shape it towards being something I loathe.

oh i think i get it now. its this like some meta crossboard memery from /tv/?

you love kino and cinéma but hate flicks and movies?

>>55013041

Greyhawk grew out of Gygax making the dungeons of Castle Greyhawk, and then the players needed a nearby town, so he created the town of greyhawk. And expanded and expanded and expanded forever.

>>55015516
>If all I wanted to do was explore a world, I would buy an RPG setting book or go to a setting wiki.
>Implying this mean I'm saying Tolkien literally doesn't have a narrative at all
Hey look, you can badly misinterpret a sentence too. We've already established that, at least to me, the narrative of LoTR is boring garbage, or at least the beginning is too boring to get me to the rest, which is just as bad. Ergo, I CLEARLY wouldn't be reading for the story. This isn't rocket science, or even very difficult reading comprehension.
>why would you act like you know what you're talking about when it comes to the book?
We're talking about Tolkien's quality of writing. You can't just declare that only people who've finished LoTR can talk, because then, by definition, only people who liked Tolkien enough to finish it, or who were assigned it as part of some literature class, would talk (unless you assume someone would willingly finish an entire trilogy that they found boring.. which... why?)
>You also said that Tolkien didn't try to make his work interesting based on a sentence fragment that is clearly taken out of context.
In all fairness it was a pretty obtuse sentence that I fragmented and misread
>And you've yet to connect this to Tolkien, either in intent (Tolkien did not think his prose was entertaining) or in reaction to a reader other than yourself.

>I very much doubt this.
I know this is just internet bullshit, but I have a Masters Degree in English Lit (specializing in Theater) that would disagree. In all fairness, I wish I'd specialized in something more practical, then I probably wouldn't be teaching.

>>55013430

I think Martin's work is just engaging because every chapter has a hook at the end.

Like.

Character wants to be reunited with her family. That's the goal, that's what the reader is hoping for.

Chapter starts - > blah blah blah blah blah -> I KNOW YOU, YOU'RE CHARACTER! I CAN TAKE YOU TO YOUR FAMILY! -> chapter ends.

This literally happens with an arya chapter. But a good chunk of the boring ASoIaF chapters can be summarized by boring shit boring shit boring shit HOLY FUCK NOW WE'RE GETTING SOMEWHERE end.

>>55015578
>what the fuck are your definitions of novella and novel?
Length
>are novellas not extremely popular?
They don't sell as many physical copies, and they tend to go for less money.
>you just sound like someone whos mad at game of thrones and harry potter, which i completely understand, but those shit piles arent the norm. normally the shit pile is much smaller and more compact in a novella like form
I actually quite enjoyed Harry Potter, though I agree that ASoIaF is garbage... though GRRM did a good job of writing a detailed instruction manual on how to create the series: a boring instruction manual I will never try to read again.

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>>55015690
>I know this is just internet bullshit, but I have a Masters Degree in English Lit (specializing in Theater) that would disagree. In all fairness, I wish I'd specialized in something more practical, then I probably wouldn't be teaching.

i dont think you understand. its painfully obvious you are trying to justify a shitty degree. i was actually going to use it as an insult earlier but i thought it was too easy

your posts read exactly like the try hard film school fucks in /tv/ trying to remember to use every film vocabulary word they can remember

>>55010874
>>55010807
The Hobbit movies are an important object lesson in why it's a bad idea to change directors, then not give the replacement director time to properly storyboard out everything and get everything properly designed, so the replacement director has to essentially make it up on the fly in large parts.

>>55013629

>autism

Dude, he wrote pulp. His fiction fits in with most other pulp only his ideas aren't so good. The point of pulp is that the fighting and action is the point.

>children's fantasy
"HAHAHA I HAVE SURROUNDED YOU WITH A HUNDRED OF MY DEADLIEST WARRIORS, WHAT SAY YOU, HERO?"
>thinks of some clever workaround, uses wits and cleverness
>"NOOOO YOU HAVE OUTWITTED ME! I WILL NOT FORGET THIS!!"

>modern fantasy
"HAHAHA I HAVE BLAH BLAH A HUNDRED DEADLIEST WARRIORS"
>fights some, uses some bullshit magic power or plot device to blast a hole in their defenses and run down a hallway and shut the door
>"I can't use that bullshit magic or plot device again for awhile, we'll need to sneak out of here."


>PULP
"HAHAHA, A HUNDRED AMAZING WARRIORS, WHAT U DO NOW?"
>"welp. guess I better kill them"
>kills them all, really badly wounded and tired after, "wow we're fucked. Let's keep walking until we die though"
>typically another character will show up and give them food or something

>>55015642
>oh i think i get it now. its this like some meta crossboard memery from /tv/?
>you love kino and cinéma but hate flicks and movies?
>What is Drama?
>What is Poetry?
>What is Short Story?
>What is Novella?
>What is the entirety of literature before bored European middle class in the 1800's made long-form prose the premier form.

Literature =/= Novels

>>55015783
your posts are becoming comical

>>55015744
I genuinely don't understand. I get that you are trying to insult me, but are you trying to imply that I do have a lit degree or that I don't have a lit degree?

>>55012776
>setting the stage for more than 3 sentences is bad!
credibility = lost

>>55015690
>. You can't just declare that only people who've finished LoTR can talk, because then, by definition, only people who liked Tolkien enough to finish it, or who were assigned it as part of some literature class, would talk (unless you assume someone would willingly finish an entire trilogy that they found boring.. which... why?)
On the other hand, someone who has actually read it, especially someone who has read it carefully, would presumably know more about what's going on than someone who wouldn't. And since you do seem at least to try to be claiming objective facts and not just your own personal opinion about the quality of Tolkien's writing and the influence it has on the rest of both fantasy authors and novel writers in general, the fact that you haven't read it and very clearly get important things about the book wrong is very relevant. I'm not even talking about themes; for instance, you've claimed that The Fellowship of the Ring has extensive, boring genealogies, and the Hobbit is better, it lacks such things, when it's the latter, not the former, that contains genealogies.

>In all fairness it was a pretty obtuse sentence that I fragmented and misread
It was not. For fuck's sake, you put things in parenthesis to indicate that they're clarifications.

>know this is just internet bullshit, but I have a Masters Degree in English Lit (specializing in Theater) that would disagree.
How did you get a Master's degree when you're so patently unable to follow an argument? I mean I've lost track of how many times you've claimed that you can't justify a book by saying that you'll get through the bad parts and the good parts make up for it, when I've never once claimed that and it doesn't even address the claim I have been repeatedly making, namely that you need to read these books with a fair amount of attention to catch what's going on under the surface: a criticism that you should be reading better, not reading longer.

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>>55015805
that you do have a (worthless) lit degree and that you actually think that means something

hey why not just write a best selling book if youre so objectively superior at the written word and make a lot of money? its simple right? youre right and everyone else is wrong (including world famous legendary writers)

you wasted your college time on the old school version of gender studies, dont take your anger out on internet strangers

>>55015805
He's implying that you have a shit lit degree from a shit college and don't actually know anything in spite of your degree.

>>55014610
What's a Moot?
Is it a mod rank?

>>55015916
its like a bellhop but you dont have to pay it

>>55015941
Why would someone do that for free?

>>55015853
>On the other hand, someone who has actually read it, especially someone who has read it carefully, would presumably know more about what's going on than someone who wouldn't.
You don't have to finish a whole book to realize "wow, the story is moving slow, and people keep mentioning bullshit details about the setting I don't care about... it's almost like the author cares more about his stupid setting than making this story good."

>I mean I've lost track of how many times you've claimed that you can't justify a book by saying that you'll get through the bad parts and the good parts make up for it, when I've never once claimed that
Because that's the most comon argument I hear from people trying to get me to try and read it again. They get annoying

>you put things in parenthesis to indicate that they're clarifications.
no, you put things in parenthesis because they are unnecessary to the overall meaning of the sentence, but you still need to make the sentence flow both with and without the parentheses.
>that you do have a (worthless) lit degree and that you actually think that means something
I'm alrady aware of the low earning potential of my degree (See: teacher) and the only thing i implied it MEANS is that I do in-fact love literature, which you implied I do not.
> you need to read these books with a fair amount of attention to catch what's going on under the surface: a criticism that you should be reading better, not reading longer.
Why would I go beneath the surface if the surface is boring? THAT'S the core of what I've been tring to get at. That's another problem that lots of fantasy novelists have these days. If you bury something wonderful beneath the surface, no matter how wonderful it is, if the surface isn't compelling, then barring assigned readings, why would you bother?

MAR Barker had the right idea about his detailed world.

>>55015865
>that you do have a (worthless) lit degree and that you actually think that means something
I'm alrady aware of the low earning potential of my degree (See: teacher) and the only thing i implied it MEANS is that I do in-fact love literature, which you implied I do not.
Well, I never claimed to be objectively superior at the written word, just that Tolkien is boring garbage. Even if I were some sort of writing genius, I hate novels, so it would stand to reason I wouldn't be very good at writing novels, and novels are what make money.

>you wasted your college time on the old school version of gender studies, dont take your anger out on internet strangers
Teaching isn't a bad gig. I'm taking the fact that I hate Tolkien out on internet strangers.

>>55016107
>Why would I go beneath the surface if the surface is boring? THAT'S the core of what I've been tring to get at. That's another problem that lots of fantasy novelists have these days. If you bury something wonderful beneath the surface, no matter how wonderful it is, if the surface isn't compelling, then barring assigned readings, why would you bother?
To get to the good parts, you dummy.

Also, so many seem to like Tolkien; thus, there is no point in asking "why bother?" since it seems that his style of writing worked.
What you should ask is "what am I missing?"

>>55013826
>He's clearly an allegorical tool used to show the strength of the meek
Tolkien didn't use allegory, he was against the use of allegory because it tells the audience what they should take from a work instead of letting them take what they want.

>>55009423
Yes.

The movies were better than the books in that I could get past the bit about fireworks without falling asleep.

If you read American reviews of LotR when it first came out in the 50s they were all calling it a cheap copy of Lord Dunsany.

It wasn't until a brief copyright error led to a mass market paperback version getting snapped up by hippies in the late 60s and 70s that it became popular.

I liked American fantasy better when 90% of it was cynical Isekai satire written by Polish-american engineers.

>>55010353
Law vs. Chaos was actually from Three Hearts and Three Lions by Poul Anderson. Also The Dragon and the George by Gordon R. Dickson.

>>55016544
Tolkien wasn't American though

>>55010497
>TFW every print of this at Gen-Con was sold out.
I don't even like the Hobbit.

>>55013063
Oh I get it now.
It's congenital.

>>55016572
Yes, but he corrupted it. Modern fantasy isn't nearly as playful as it used to be.

>>55016454
>To get to the good parts
And we finally get to the "druge through the boring parts to get to the good reward" argument, only in this slight variation "the boring part" is a slow deep reading, cross referencing all the cultural allusions and back-cover indexes necessary to generate context. If you have to self-flagellate to "reach the good part" the it's not a good work.
>Also, so many seem to like Tolkien
And there are at-least just as many who tell me it's boring dribble that's not worth the effort. The thing is, most of the people who tell me it's great are the sort of on-the-spectrum who genuinely gain satisfaction from obsessing over a setting (I.E. the type of D&D guys who LOVE FR and the Great Wheel because there's so much material and everything fits.)
> since it seems that his style of writing worked.
But for so many, it abjectly did NOT work. Just in this thread, almost half of the posters admited to giving up at-most by The Two Towers.

Furthermore, if the setting is so rich and deep and wonderful when exposed, then why not read one of the many Middle Earth Wikis, and get all the fruit, without having to eat the banana peel?

>>55016618
>But for so many, it abjectly did NOT work. Just in this thread, almost half of the posters admited to giving up at-most by The Two Towers.
Okay maybe not half.. but at-least two

>>55015620
>it's too mainstream for me
kys

>>55015620
Series is unironically better and you know it. Yeah the book "has more" but more content doesn't mean better content.

>>55016708
>>55016778
Game of Thrones is a laughable pile of shit. Even if it was well written everything about the costume design, action scenes, and general aesthetic is actively vomit-worthy to watch lol

>>55016641
>hyphenating "at least" and "at most"

>>55013576
Frodo gets his ass kicked constantly & even fails at the end

>>55016778
What has the show gotten right which wasn't from the books? Between fucked up characterizations like Stannis, teleporting people, absolutely implausible Dany wank, it's a fanfiction made into TV.

>>55015777
I honestly prefer the children's fantasy method here. It ironically feels more mature. The other two are just a thinly veiled Deus Ex Machina and "lol action for the sake of action, lets have a power fantasy wank."

Like... the child fantasy bothers to solve its posited conundrum, rather than writing themselves out of it by bullshit or wankery.

>>55015847
there are much better ways to set stage than blathering on about how pretty the trees are.
If the landscape isn't the only thing on stage, why should it have 100% of the attention?

>>55015865
>hey why not just write a best selling book if youre so objectively superior at the written word and make a lot of money? its simple right? youre right and everyone else is wrong (including world famous legendary writers)
Getting published is actually super easy.

Even writing something of a quality that the masses will read it isn't super hard. Normies watch Big Bang and read Twilight. They're not known for high brow or complex tastes.

It's all the marketting that's a huge pain. You have to get noticed in the sea of other people trying the exact same thing, of which comparative quality only really plays a small part in boosting.

>>55015847
While 3 sentences might be a bit of a hyperbole, Tolkien goes a LOT longer than 3 sentences when describing landscapes.... oh dear god the landscape descriptions.

>>55016593
She's a librarian. Her life has nearly always revolved around books, from the moment she could read.

But not the Lord of the Rings books. Enjoyed the Hobbit. Tolerated Fellowship, but gave up somewhere in the middle of Two Towers.

Which, appears to be a pretty common dropping point, judging by other posters in this thread.

>>55015847
How many pages does it have to reach before it starts being a credible critique? Because I'm sure he crossed it several times.