all of the people doing "lets do real leftist critique of pop culture" suck at it and are bad except my friends
i wanna listen to a thing about tolkien because i really love lotr and i wanna hear interesting analysis of it but i want that analysis not done by a bunch of shitty grognard nerds who suck ass i want it done by actual leftists, and nobody is good at that except my friends. anyways if you have any recommendations for people who talk about random media and are actually fucking smart let me know
lotr is good and everyone's fucking stupid about it. he's been copied 1000 times and none of the copies have the catholic guilt he had or his weird obsessions and so the main things they copy are his fashy qualities and that's why dnd sucks forever
@junebug I was saying this to my friend last night that maybe the reason so much fantasy bounces off of me is that rather than being Tolkeinian it's really Gygaxian.
@chimerror THIS IS EXACTLY IT
@chimerror the thing about dnd is it is a fundamentally individualist game, the entire game is wrapped around You The Hero, you are the coolest biggest guy who will save everything
@chimerror but with tolkien, the whole story is focused around one shitty hobbit who, at the end of the story, fails. he can't do it and it's only fate that saves him. i say "fate" but i mean "god" because tolkien was sooooooooooooooooooooooooo catholic
all of the big important characters who have immense power are declining, leaving, falling apart, etc
in the end it's mostly a story about doing what you can and trusting "fate" (god) to maybe help, and if it doesn't, you did what you could
@junebug imo there's also a strong bent towards trusting in the strength of friendship + love + mutual support. "i can't carry it for you, but i can carry you and it as well", but we also see the strength of the bonds between other members of the fellowship! boromir falling in a desperate attempt to protect merry and pippin, aragorn and gimli and legolas devoting themselves doggedly to a desperate attempt to save their friends- hell, the scenes in the houses of healing between eowyn and faramir!
