We could have had it aaallllll- pet peeve fandoms

For me his greatest sins are making the Arwen scenes so fucking boring. In concept I love the idea but christ. Those are my piss breaks.

Also I'm annoyed at movie only fans for a variety of reasons but ignoring Merry's contribution to stopping the Witch King bugs me. He couldn't be stopped by any man. So Eowyn's a woman but she's also a Man. Merry is a man but he's a Hobbit. This was like a double quadruple pun battle of the fates and we ignore this and just go AAAAA EOWYN.

Honestly fans talking about Eowyn in general tends to piss me off.

 

Eowyn is another character who I think PJ Did Not Get, but people are so busy putting her on the Strong Female Character (TM) "LOOK AT THIS WOMAN WHO DID THIS BATTLE THING!!!" pedestal that it doesn't get noticed the way it does with some of the others. Despite the fact that PJ then has her randomly have to run away from that one random orc commander and get rescued IMMEDIATELY after the thing with the Witch-King.

 

I FUCKING KNOW RIGHT? Urgh. Like I really love the films. I do. Especially the set and costuming design and such. A lot of care went into that shit and it's amazing. Some of the writing decisions made were very ERGH though. Eowyn sticks out in that regard.

 

...ct i think you posted ib the wrong thread.

 

I did, deleted! sorry and thanks!

 

I knooow

Like, all these people acting like "I AM NO MAN" is this super-awesome line, when it's WAY less awesome than what she said and did in the book. She LAUGHED IN THE WITCH-KING'S FACE. And the movies cut a huge amount of her character depth, particularly everything to do with her relationship with her family and her heritage and the fact that she's yet another character whose motivation is defined in large degree by grief and despair.

...PJ pretty much cut the entire theme of hopelessness and sorrow and loss from LotR, now that I think about it.

 

(Finally, I have found an audience that properly appreciates my DENETHOR RANTS(TM).)

 

There is one line. ONE LINE. That bugs me out of all proportion. It's when Sam yells at This-Cipher-Isn't-Faramir that Boromir had broken an oath to protect Frodo.

I don't mind that they left out the scene where Elrond expresses that he feels about oaths pretty much the same way Edna Mode feels about capes (and for much the same reason), time constraints and all that. Or the moment where Aragorn is thankful that there was no oath, because then he'd have to try to follow Frodo when that no longer seems like the best course of action. But they PUT IN an unnecessary line apparently JUST to contradict those things. RARGH.

 

somewhat offtopic, but holy shit that just clicked for me, and elrond baby noooooooo

 

The reason Denethor is the hill I will die on is that I can understand why someone would decide it was a good idea narratively to change Faramir's character like that, and screwing up Eowyn is the result of a shallow "GIRL POWER!!!" reading, and turning Gimli into a joke is because he wanted ~comic relief~ and both Legolas and Gimli's personalities are pretty understated in the text and I guess he didn't want to hurt the ~dignity~ of elves, but there is absolutely no storytelling reason for Denethor to act like a character-bash-fic version of himself. It doesn't help the story in any way, including "well, the movie script is easier to write this way" ones. I cannot think of any explanation for that choice except that the director didn't understand the point of his character at all.

(...Actually, I wonder if it might not be a coincidence that two of the characters PJ Didn't Get are ones who are clearly clinically depressed.)

 

I would not be surprised if that were part of it- he also turned Theoden's induced depressive episode into straight-up possession, so that's three!

Another thing he Didn't Get was the chain of knowledge- "who knew what when whence" as a friend of mine put it, is something that's very well and carefully detailed in the books, and chronically mishandled in the films. Denethor's character is especially tied up in that- part of his tragedy was the Enemy counterintelligence he was being fed through that palantir, his considerable intimidation factor owed a lot to him knowing things it didn't seem like he should be able to know...

 

also gripe gripe about the boring-ass stock folkloric christian demon looking balrog. a terror of shadow and flame that ain't.

 

Yeah, like, Gandalf cautions Pippin about all this stuff they shouldn't let Denethor know before they meet him, and then they get in and Denethor already knows all of it.

And that reminds me of another thing that got lost re: how Faramir and Denethor. Faramir figures the whole Ring thing out scarily fast from tidbits and reactions, and then next book Denethor draws information out of Pippin in exactly the same way Faramir draws information out of Frodo and Sam. PJ left out both the part where Faramir had figured out absolutely everything except what Isildur's Bane looked like before he got Sam to slip and how Denethor drew Pippin into talking all about himself and where he came from and what happened to him.

 

#balrogs don't have wings

 

ohhhh boy, here we go :P
(i'm a fan of keeping it visually ambiguous to go with the textual ambiguity, though)

 

That's probably a smart idea, yes. (I will grant that the movie design with skeletal wings does at least address the argument of "if it has wings how does it die by falling." Nobody said they worked. :::PPP)

 

!!! Are…are you telling me this is a place where I can complain about the LOTR movies without getting told "shut up of course they're different from the books GOD STOP BEING A PURIST"?

Because I have many many complaints about the LOTR movies! Starting with everything @LadyNighteyes said about the House of Denethor and how miserably mishandled all that was, and continuing to REDUCING GIMLI TO HA HA FUNNY SHORT FAT MAN IS A CRIME AGAINST DWARVES (some tie-in thing I saw for the Hobbit movies [separate rant omitted] had a joke in it about Gimli being dropped on his head as a baby which is offensive on all levels I can be offended on), with a detour into SAM WOULD NEVER HAVE LEFT FRODO EVEN IF FRODO TOLD HIM TO GO (apparently that was added because they wanted Gollum to "have a payoff"—because the audience will be upset if an antagonist doesn't succeed I guess?), and eventually becoming semi-coherent screaming about how if anyone in the books is primarily comic relief it's Legolas and making him Dramatic elf Prince is boring and annoying.

(…also, Legolas/Gimli has been my OTP since my dad first read me the books when I was nine or so and there was a terrible lack of them being adorable together in the movies. >:|)

 

Like the Glittering Fucking Caves! They clearly knew the scenery porn was a draw, what the fuck happened to Aglarond?

 

Also why the fuck would you skip the fucking fairy dinner in the woods and river of sleeping shit in the Hobbit if you're already packing in a bunch of extraneous bullshit???

 

Please do not omit this rant I have a whole bunch of salt about the Hobbit movies but somehow every one of my friends either likes it or is tired of me bitching about it

BECAUSE THOSE AREN'T COOL AND EPIC AND MAKE FOR BADASS ACTION SCENES WI!

Edit: I'm sorry, I was unfair. The Hobbit also has room for the occasional dwarf based comic relief of "man in beard makes funny face" and the odd college dorm room poster