PoV, you’ve just invited a Bosmer to dinner:
2 Likes
Remade my Inquisitor for the third and final time. Needed to remake to properly link my past save and went back to human.
Luckily I wasn’t super far in.
1 Like
I have prepared a crushing response to your argument, which, once you have read it, will leave you no choice but to agree with my position. Here is it, in its entirety:
You’re right.
Good. The Tolkien fandom is one of the most obsessively pedantic fandoms on the planet. They will count every blade of grass. They would rather have a derivative work that mechanically conforms to the exact words Tolkien has written throughout his decades of refining Middle-earth, even if it preserves practically none of the themes.
(I don’t know how else to explain Shadow of Mordor)
2 Likes
Christopher, my son, did I ever tell you the full story of Shelob? You know, the monstrous spider - descended from the vile Ungoliant! - which I used to read aloud of in our Oxford meetings of the Inklings? Well what I didn’t mention back then was Shelob could also transform into a totally hot babe: all pale and dark and wan like Rebecca in Ivanhoe or what will later come to be known as the goth subculture. In fact she looked very much like the pornographic actress Stoya who will be born 13 years after I die. Christopher, I will be entrusting you with my estate. If there is ever a videogame adaptation of my work you must make sure they get this Shelob right - make sure she is what the Anglo-Saxons would have called a hæða ecge.
8 Likes
Pretty sure they hated that too, to be honest. Literally every review of the game when it came out was pretty much “mechanically very solid, but has very little regard to the lore and serves as more of a Middle Earth power fantasy.”
People like Shadow of Mordor and War in spite of being very lore weird, not because it’s lore weird. It has sprinkles of fanservice here and there, and the end of War has you running around as a good guy Nazgul which will undoubtedly turn people away as you recreate scenes from the movie with your undead army.
Dangerously based Tolkien tbh.
3 Likes
writing yet again about how elves in our mythology have been basically deities or nature spirits
i dab on tolkien elf purists
4 Likes
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FXnmQLWWIAEdQ-1?format=jpg&name=large
Seems Rings of Power will feature the characters going to Mexico.
2 Likes
Middle
Earth
x
i
c
o
1 Like
Since German lore stuff isn’t the greatest at truly differentiating stuff you can at least locally call dwarves elves. Oh and they sometimes eat dreams? Or cause nightmares. Kinda. At least some kind of relative does.
There are the Divinity elves too.
They eat people.
WotR DLC3 coming August 11th, the ‘enhanced edition’ dropping a month and a half later on September 29th (PC gamers who already own it get it upgraded for free).
Though doubtless it’ll be a week or so after it drops before all the mods catch up.
I remember that in a lot of the behind the scenes footage for the LOTR movies Weta workshop were adamant not to make their designs too derivative of real world cultures (with the exception of Rohan who themselves filled the idea of a mythological folklore on par with many Germanic countries that Tolkien felt England did not have) in order to enhance the feeling of Middle Earth being its own world.
Shadow of Mordor, meanwhile
Incredibly subtle stuff, it’s a true blink and you miss it homage.
1 Like
China isn’t real, silly skincap man. They made that up for Dynasty Warriors.
7 Likes
me when people say china is real
1 Like
3 Likes
Oh, Zhang Jiao is a Templar? Very cool.
The problem with today’s conception of elves, I find, is that the word is overloaded beyond reason to refer to all kinds of very different creatures. Even in mainstream culture there is confusion between (the pop-culture image of) Tolkienesque elves, and Christmas elves. I know what kind of mental image I have in mind when I type the three letters e-l-f, but I’d prefer if there was a label for it that wasn’t easily confused with other fantasy and folklore concepts.
I suspect contemporary fantasy may be better off just doing its own thing and creating its own original races.
When this does happen, people end up describing them as not-elves, not-dwarves, not-orcs, etc. For me, it’s easiest to just not fuss over names.
3 Likes
Original races means original races, not renaming orcs and dwarves to orken and dwerrows and calling it a day.
GW2 has completely original races. Well, three completely original races plus humans and tall viking humans.
I don’t think Loras is proposing we just rename a bunch of pre-existing fantasy races, rather that the fantasy community is filled to the brim with pedants who’ll happily call any race with a vaguely warrior culture “not-Orcs” and the like.
4 Likes