tbh nothing is weirder to me than manly grimdark dudebro lord of the rings bc it’s just??? the epitome of light and love to me???? no narrative embodies hope and gentleness and healing like lotr does why must you insist on talking to me about badass aragorn vs. useless frodo. that’s not the point brad
I feel like this is also why so many of the post-LOTR Tolkien ripoffs are so terrible! It’s people pulling from Tolkien when they fundamentally don’t understand what makes Tolkien work. You get all these stories written by people who don’t think Frodo was worthy of his plotline and so they give it to their Aragorn expy instead, and it’s dull and boring and totally lacks the themes and the heart that make LOTR an important, enduring story.
#lord of the rings is about beauty and love and good and hope and gentleness in the face of overwhelming sadness and darkness#less about the battlefields and more about frodo and Sam holding hands through Shelob’s lair#and Galadriel’s star-glass in the darkness of mordor#overwhelmingly the point is beauty and love#even though those things are tinged in sadness#the reason I can never get into any other fantasy stories is because they focus on the battles and the hardship#and not about the beauty and the love and the sadness#‘I will not say do not weep for not all tears are an evil’ (tags from @greyacedipperpines)
when Aragorn shows up in Gondor no one cares who he is until he gets to the Houses of Healing, because the proof of true kingship is not being able to fight real good, it’s having “the hands of a healer”
so Aragorn calls his friends back from the darkness with little more than a gentle touch and a loving voice (and some plants, but it’s pretty clear that the plants alone aren’t enough) and that’s when the rumors spread through Gondor that the King has returned because the love of a king has this great power
like… that’s the big moment. washing his friends’ wounds and telling them they’re going to be okay. this is not macho! it’s not badass! I mean… in a way it’s actually really fucking badass that someone can get stabbed by a knife made of evil and Aragorn doesn’t even have to raise his voice when he says “not today,” but it’s not, like, standard fantasy badass.
Tolkien lived through a war. War is not entertaining and epic, it’s horrifying and terrible. That’s why all the climatic moments of LOTR aren’t battles, but decisions of love: Sam going back for Frodo, Bilbo giving Bard the Arkenstone, Aragorn healing Merry and Eowyn…
Where modern fantasy falls short is they think a war setting is the key to Tolkien’s success, so they describe warrior-man and the gorey, rapey, traumatizing things he does/sees (looking at u, SOIAF). But it’s not about fighting the war, it’s about living through it and loving despite it. Bilbo Baggins slept through his battles, Frodo and Sam (arguably, the main heroes) never fought or killed, a woman & hobbit defeated the witch-king out of love for their lord, not for power or fame. LOTR isn’t a story of war bc Tolkien had already seen that, it’s the story of hope.
The most telling and terrible moment for me in all of LotR is nowhere in the main quest. It’s the Scouring of the Shire. What must it have been like to come home from the war to blitzkrieg-ravaged cities, to continued rationing? What must it have been like to see the occupied territories while he fought and know this was someone else’s home?
The Hobbit and LotR were written by a veteran and incorporated his own experiences of what was possibly the war with the largest death toll in human history in its time. The violence is realistic, but it’s not the point. Like the rest of his generation, Tolkien was writing about what happens to the survivors.
Why do you think Aragorn forgives Boromir? Why does Boromir get a heroic death and funeral? Because he’s not an antagonist. His only guilt is to wish for an easy way out for his people, to spare them. Yeah, it wasn’t going to work, but it’s hard to blame him. It disturbs me how many characters in modern fantasy appear to be twisted homages to Boromir – traitors who only think of power for themselves.
Glorifying war and atrocities in Tolkien’s name is one of the grossest elements of modern fantasy. He would be appalled, I think.
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