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Lord High Hullabalooster
Senior Contributor
Join Date: 11-23-04
Location: Columbia Heights, MN
Country: 
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[quote=Low-tech;361353]
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we dont live in a world of absolutes,
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I do.
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so why should some folks living in some fantasy realm? im not saying there is no emotive substance/emotive depth here, its just its all way to predictable and has become a cliched formula<granted by imitators and hacks>. archetypes,pet characters, stoic antiheros, bad guys who look evil,act evil and couldnt possibly be mistaken to the contrary, contrived, composite stereotypes<dwarves dont like elves, elves disdain humans>its like, nick nolte and eddie murphy not seeing stuff eye to eye in the movie "48 hours", total re-hash,formulaic stereotypes from which characters...individuals...relate to one another, everyone pretty much does the honerable thing, says the rights things, for the most part.
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Well, LOTR is an epic and ultimately heroic story. The good guys mostly prevail - such is the way of much heroic fiction.
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so what i look for in any book regardless of genre, is tangable,realistic human emotion, dialogue and actions, no matter how far fetched the context. the grey areas portrayed reflect the subjective way in which characters...individuals....relate to the story, relate to one another, relate to the world as presented to them. tolkien employs a formula thats very absolutist,spoon-fed, unmistakable is as presented. i want to be forced to second guess the guys im rooting for, i want hidden metaphor thats run contrary to whats being presented, i want to re-evalulate the morals,principles,ideology of my own when i analyze the context of problems,conflicts presented in a novel. i dont get much of it with tolkien........i do, however, get a whole hell of alot of it with frank herbert with the dune series.
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That's fair, we just have different tastes (I disagree that there is any real "formula" with JRRT though). What you describe above as "realistic", I describe as vacillating and weak. An author like Herbert leaves me cold precisely because he claims no center, no foundation, from which you can measure his characters - it's just muddle and "maybe if could be". I can't stand people like that, and I don't want to read about them either. 
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im not denying there is good stuff there, its just his writing style has already been made cliche' by countless hack movie directors and fantasy novelists, its not tolkiens fault, but its hard to look past.
i swear, man, im down with tolkien, make no mistake, was a huge D and D geek in my childhood and love fantasy/sci-fi movies/comics/books to this day. tolkien is like the jimi hendrix of fantasy.i just hold my favorite books to a high standard, the LOTR series i hold in high regard, it just reads like a comicbook in book form, nothing wrong with that, but im more used to more complex stories in which not everything is revealed and explained, where everything isnt supposed to be revealed and explained and where you are still left with questions afterwards.
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I think it's incorrect to equate "complexity" with "vagueness". LOTR is very complex, but it does have an ending that is relatively unambiguous.
-dale |