#anceline rambles

In Fellowship, people mostly deal with this by cutting out most of the first half, (goodbye Tom Bombadil and the Barrow Downs) and making the confrontation with the Nazgûl at the Ford of Bruinen part of the rising action instead of the climax. This is relatively manageable although I think it sells the story a bit short since the Hobbits are very much the main characters of the whole thing, even when it steps aside to focus on other characters.

In Return of the King, by nature of it being The End, a lot of threads are coming together and it is a bit easier to weave them together into something that makes sense.

The Two Towers though. That’s just two fully separate stories. The story of what’s happening to Merry and Pippin in Rohan and Fangorn and Isengard, and the story of what’s happening to Sam and Frodo on their journey to Mordor. Furthermore these are two stories that are tonally pretty different whilst still being part of the same overall story. The Merry and Pippin story has a political/military focus, and of course the battle of Helm’s Deep and the destruction of Isengard. The Frodo and Sam and Gollum story is more or less a road trip relationship drama. That’s funny, but the point is that its focus is very much on those three characters, their relationships, and the strain they’re under. It’s very personal in a way that the Merry and Pippin story isn’t, simply because there are so many more events happening in the Merry and Pippin story. It is difficult to weave these two together in a satisfying way! In fact, Tolkien doesn’t! He tells the Merry and Pippin story right through to the end, and then switches over to Sam and Frodo’s and tells that straight through.

(Except Eowyn, because she IS the sister busy doing the cool shit, she’s just doing it front and centre where everyone can see her, like a boss. Eowyn deserves an awesome sister but I fear than any sister of Eowyn and Eomer would have also pulled an Eowyn and secretly fucked off to murder a Nazgûl too.)

Pippin canonically has three sisters, and I firmly believe they are just as much of a menace(affectionate) as he is, and spent their time in the Shire making things properly miserable for Saruman. Tooks are just Like That.

Yes, I’ll probably pick up the Lockwood ones eventually too, but I’m even less interested in the premise of Lockwood than I am in Bartimaeus.

It’s just that Scarlett and Browne is sort of perfectly, exquisitely tailored for my specific tastes and interests in fiction so it’s going to be hard for other things to measure up. Also it’s criminally underrated, frankly.

I am obsessed with Chet Sapphire today cuz he’s great, but also because I was raised Very Religious(TM) (specifically Christian) and sometimes I am really very struck by religious parallels in media. Even ones that I’m almost certain were not intentional.

Do I think Haley and Gus and Dillin and Dylan and Aram and John set out to make religious parallels in the Off the Rails Story? Absolutely not. I still see them.

Because I see the parallel between Chet, who has to stare his new god in the face before he’s really able to acknowledge that she’s real, and Thomas, the discipline who had to see and touch Jesus after his resurrection to really acknowledge that it is his friend/god risen from the dead. And yeah that’s a fairly obvious connection. But what I appreciate about both the story of Thomas and the story of Chet is that neither of them are deemed lesser for this. Scenda does not love Chet any less than the others once he decides he actually does believe in her. Thomas is not a lesser disciple because of his need for assurance. We all need assurances sometimes.