#critiquicism

The best (and I use that word gingerly) portrayal of a (pseudo-)atheist in The Chronicles of Narnia is Trumpkin. Now, I loved Trumpkin as a child and I still like him now – he’s a good character, a stand-up guy, and just ornery enough to be great fun. He’s also clearly supposed to be one of the good guys, which is why it’s so mystifying to me in retrospect how he gets absolutely chewed on by the narrative.

Like, Trumpkin’s position at the beginning of Prince Caspian is basically cheerful pessimism – the Horn doesn’t work, Aslan probably doesn’t exist or he’s dead, and we’re probably all screwed – and yet he’s willing to fight anyway, even to go all the way down to the ruins of Cair Paravel, just on the off-chance he’s wrong, instead of sending an over-excitable squirrel who would just get lost. (Which would make him more of a doubtful agnostic than an atheist, but let’s be real: the sort of Christians who create condescending and insulting atheist allegory characters do not care about those distinctions.) Not only that, but Trumpkin is able and willing to admit that he’s wrong when he’s proven to be. He’s pretty gracious about it, too – when Susan beats him at archery, she goes, ‘Oh, no, your shot was as good as mine, there was just a wind’ and he says, ‘No, you beat me fair and square and we both know it, good shooting’.

So the way that he gets slammed, again and again, by the narrative, for doubting, for wondering, for simple ignorance – not wilful ignorance, but ignorance of things he couldn’t possibly know – is unpleasant and disconcerting. Like, the Pevensies have met Aslan. Trumpkin hasn’t. Aslan hasn’t been in Narnia for hundreds of years, the asshole. It is very reasonable for Trumpkin to wonder if he wasn’t just an ordinary, if impressive, talking lion who died. It is perfectly understandable for him to suggest that maybe Aslan’s gone wild and that’s why he hasn’t shown up (and it is, in my opinion, a far more charitable theory than the truth – that he just couldn’t be arsed to step in, or even encourage them). I understand why something like that would be laughable at best to the Pevensies, but the narration spells it out like he’s committed blasphemy. And then, when Aslan finally does show up, he deliberately terrorizes Trumpkin. FOR A JOKE. He growls at him, and grabs him by the shirt with his teeth, and throws him in the air – for… being wrong. And this is supposed to be funny. We’re supposed to think it’s funny.

First of all, it’s not, and Aslan is horrible for doing that (you see what I mean about C.S. Lewis having Aslan do things that he personally thinks are right and then saying, ‘Well, it must be right, because Jesus is doing it’).

But also, now that I’m older, I’ve seen this trope elsewhere. I’ve seen it in arguments. I’ve seen it in TVTropes examples and descriptions for things like Left Behind or Touched By An Angel. I’ve seen it in tone-deaf Christian fiction. I’ve seen it in Chick Tracts. (That should tell you plenty.)

I know all about the arrogant atheist, who is convinced he (usually he) knows everything but is wrongwrongwrong. Not just about Aslan Jesus, but about everything even remotely and tangentially related to religion, like whether children could possibly be the kings and queens how to prioritize your life or whatnot. And said atheist is proved wrong, again and again outshot by Susan and outfought by Edmund, but stubbornly keeps insisting that those things don’t mean he’s wrong about God even though they typically have no relation to religion like how there’s no reason Edmund’s fighting skill, or even the Horn’s magic, since it was a gift from Father Christmas and not Aslan, would necessarily mean Aslan was real/alive/still able to talk or coming, even if all those things were true. And then at the end there’s a miracle, or a direct intervention from God, and the arrogant atheist sees the error of his ways, and begs forgiveness, and believes, and is humbled, and then is magnanimously forgiven and accepted into the fold, and can you maybe understand why this trope makes me angry?????

I’m serious, though, from the time he leaves Aslan’s Howe Trumpkin is not allowed to be right about anything. Even things he would realistically be right about, like what route to take in a country he knows better than the others in this century, he’s made wrong about by a coincidence or bad luck or anything, basically. And this is frequently presented as him being arrogant even when it’s perfectly reasonable. Like, you showed up looking for four powerful rulers and got schoolkids instead? God forbid you express dismay, or suggest the fourteen-year-old in front of you isn’t a match for the king’s highly trained army!

And the fact that being deliberately terrorized by Aslan is supposed to be fitting, is supposed to be a deserved punishment for the heinous crime of doubting Aslan (not denying him, not mocking him, not even being unwilling to plan for the possibility he’ll show up, simply thinking it was possible he wouldn’t and that their plans should reflect that as well), that it’s supposed to be playful, that makes me furious. TRUMPKIN WAS GOOD, HE WAS KIND, HE WAS BRAVE, AND HE DESERVED BETTER. HE ADMITTED IT WHEN HE WAS WRONG AND HE FORGAVE PEOPLE FOR WRONGING HIM AND HIS ONLY CRIME WAS BEING PRAGMATIC AND OUTSPOKEN.

And you know what, Clive?

JESUS WOULD NEVER HAVE DONE THAT TO HIM.

Not the real Jesus. Whether you think real Jesus was a Jewish rabbi or the actual son of God – he wouldn’t have done that. And I mean – as an atheist, I try to stay away from things like ‘Jesus wouldn’t have done X’, just out of respect, but you know what, Clive? You made me do it.

Being wrong, being mistaken, or being atheist – none of them, separately or all together, merit that kind of treatment, not from anyone, not Aslan or Jesus or God, no one. So yes, I’m furious on Trumpkin’s behalf, but also on my own, because as much as I really believe that C.S. Lewis didn’t realize just how justified he made Trumpkin in a lot of ways – well, actually, no. Because of how clear it is that he didn’t realize that, because it’s clear that Trumpkin was supposed to be ornery and stubborn and arrogant and unjustified in his opinions, it’s also clear what he thinks of mine, what he thinks of me. At best I’m Trumpkin – not just Trumpkin, but what he intended Trumpkin to be: a stubborn, arrogant, unjustified strawman, who must be proven wrong and only then can be redeemed through humiliation.

Well, guess what, Clive? Fuck you.

Okay. Now we move on to the dwarfs. Well, Trumpkin’s a dwarf, but you know who I mean. The dwarfs.

The stubborn, arrogant, unredeemable dwarfs. The dwarfs who are for the dwarfs. The dwarfs who are so stubbornly, blindly convinced of their own superiority that token Good Dwarf Poggin has to sneak away from them to join the heroes. The dwarfs who are for the dwarfs. The dwarfs who stubbornly scorn every clear proof of magic they see as a ridiculous contrivance. The dwarfs who are for the dwarfs. The dwarfs who treat the battle between good and evil as entertainment.

The dwarfs who are for the dwarfs.

The dwarfs who are for no one else but themselves. The dwarfs who murder eighty sentient beings out of spite. The dwarfs who sit blindly in the dark despite the light around them. The dwarfs who would rather spend the rest of their lives cramped and damp and cold and starving than admit to seeing the beauty around them. The dwarfs who see right through the malicious hoax and yet still won’t join forces to end it. The dwarfs who are content to sit around praising themselves for not being taken in instead of taking action. The dwarfs who act however they see fit, with no moral compass whatsoever.

The dwarfs who are so pleased with their intellectual superiority that they can’t see that they’ve been taken in by themselves.

Yes, Clive, you’ve made your point very clear indeed. Very, very clear, to the teenage girl who loved your world, until you threw her out of it. Very, very clear to everyone like her. Very, very clear indeed, to her now, only now it hurts a little less, because she can see that you are, in fact, not even very good at what you do, and while that’s not relevant it is satisfying to know that the person who spent all that rhetoric on crushing her isn’t even a good writer. It hurts less, too, because she’s older now and has the skills necessary to eviscerate you, to decry what you tried to do and announce all the ways that if failed, and it hurts less because she knows now, oh, do I know now, that everything I ever loved that you made, everything good you ever made you made by accident.

(You want me to be nicer? Maybe when my eyes stop hurting from trying not to cry.)

I talked about the dwarfs in The Last Battle already in my disillusionment story, so I’m done with them here. Moving on.

It hurt, obviously, to grow up with those books and that world and then to grow up and realize that I was… that. But if it hurt, to realize that, I cannot begin to imagine what it must be like to be Muslim (or Hindu or even just Middle Eastern or non-white) and go through that same thing. And not just because it’s so much worse, but because the insulting and offensive parallels are much clearer and therefor accessible to much younger children.

My knowledge of Islam is not nearly as extensive as my (patchy) knowledge of Christianity, but what I said before is true: I don’t really need to know a lot about Islam here. All I need to know about Islam to see how offensive these books are is on this list:

1. Muslims don’t worship the devil.

WOW, ISN’T THAT A REALLY SHORT FUCKING LIST!! HOW DID YOU MANAGE TO FUCK UP SO FUCKING MUCH, CLIVE?? HUH?

I mean, the presentation of Tash is… it’s like he couldn’t decide what he wanted to do, so he covered all his bases and offended everybody. Tash is clearly set up, at least in The Last Battle, as Aslan’s opposite, or his nemesis, or both, which makes him, say it with me, SATAN.

But Tash is also the patron God of Calormen, worshipped by Calormenes, which means that Lewis’s pseudo-Arabic/pseudo-Islamic culture worships the fucking devil. Like, the capital city of Calormen is named Tashbaan, okay, this is not something you can wiggle out of, Clive.

And honestly, I could stop there. That’s more than damning enough. But there’s so much more, and I’m going to dig up every single bit of it I can reach, because somebody fucking has to. The thing is, Tash isn’t, say, a serpent (that would be the Lady of the Green Kirtle – how many freaking Satan metaphors are you going to have, Clive? That’s three! Stick to one!), or even some traditional enemy of a lion like a serpent like a… I don’t know, a jackal or something (bonus points for scavenger imagery). Oh, no. He’s a terrifying Babylonian-esque bird-headed thing with extra arms, because it wasn’t enough to mush the entire Middle East into one giant confused stereotype and just pick out the bits you thought were cool, or scary, or anti-Christian, or decadent enough, no, you had to throw in a shout-out to Kali just to get in a dig at Hinduism too.

To make matters worse, worshippers of Tash do give him human sacrifices. COULD YOU SLAM THE STEREOTYPICAL DEVIL WORSHIP EVEN HARDER, CLIVE? HAVE YOU TRIED? I DON’T THINK YOU’VE TRIED!!

(And even then, it’s not consistent. Aravis says she planned her suicide attempt by telling her father she was going to make sacrifices (non-human, presumably) to “Zardeenah, lady of the night and of maidens” who is… a goddess, because this is also paganism? Except for how every other time religion is mentioned, Tash is treated like the sole deity of Calormen. So maybe she’s a saint? But there aren’t saints in that world at all, and there aren’t saints in Islam anyway, I’m pretty sure. [ETA: This was incorrect! Mea culpa. However, Lewis’s fake Tashligion doesn’t really make sense as one which incorporates saints, tbh, so the basic point still stands.] Besides, it’s not consistent with Calormen culture for Tash to have saints. Somehow, the fact that he wasn’t even trying just makes the whole thing more insulting.)

I mean, the parallels are clear. The speech in Calormen in The Horse And His Boy is obviously modelled after the stylistically formal speech in Arabian Nights – while I’m sure Lewis didn’t read the same translation I did, there are enough similarities that it’s definitely not an accident. Even people like Arsheesh, a poor fisherman who’s been poor all his life and almost certainly never had any need for formalities like that (not to mention almost certainly being poorly educated), speaks the same way. Meanwhile, Shasta, who grew up in Calormen, lived there his whole life, thought he was Calormene, and believed himself to be Arsheesh’s son, has no discernable Calormen-isms in his speech with the exception of saying ‘may he live forever’ when he talks about the Tisroc. This makes no sense from an in-universe perspective, but it makes perfect sense if you remember that Shasta is Narnian, which is to say white and Christian, and therefore he simply doesn’t pick up all those oily, unnecessarily formal Muslim brown Calormene ways of speaking, because otherwise the audience might not know that he’s naturally righteous.

*shivers* UGH. I think I need a shower.

And it’s clearly shown that Calormene society is more decadent than Narnian/Arkenland society, and that this is a bad thing. There’s the description of the Tisroc’s palace, the way the marketplace is portrayed (with spices and so on), the litters that all the nobles ride on (blatantly contrasted with the Narnian Lords, who are walking, like decent, civilized, Christian non-decadent people), and particularly the portrayal of Lasaraleen.

Now, I won’t get into too much detail, since Lasaraleen’s treatment comes with a pretty heavy helping of misogyny, and I need to dissect that too, but she’s clearly played up as an example of high-class Calormene life – married (to… someone, who’s never around), surrounded by luxury (exotic luxury – silks and divans and a pet monkey), living a glittering, superficial life at the Tisroc’s court… not like how nobles live in Narnia and Arkenland. They do manly things like hunting, and useful things like governing, and they fight when needed, and they never arrange marriages like in Calormen…

Calormen, where women wear veils. Calormen, where women are forced into marriages. Calormen, where people have dark skin, and are frequently described as looking ‘cruel’, not of expression, but of features. Calormen, where they have slaves. Calormen, with its desert. Calormen, with countless evil, antagonistic, greedy, or downright Satanic people, and exactly two who are pretty decent. Calormen, where institutionalized brutality is shown multiple times to be the general order of business.

Not to mention the disgusting way Rabadash goes after Susan, and the way it’s racialized; overbearing, arrogant brown man wants to possess beautiful pure white woman who swoons in disgust and horror and must be rescued by strong white men… The Tisroc’s cold, pragmatic Lawful Evil outlook feels like a similarly unfortunate trope, but I can’t put my finger on it; I just feel like I’ve seen it before.

And the thing is, you don’t even have to be Muslim to be hurt or offended by this – I’ve pointed out that C.S. Lewis just grabbed bits and pieces from any culture that seemed ‘other’ enough, so he’s casting a pretty wide net at, at the very least, the Middle East, India, Egypt, and anyone who’s Muslim or Hindu – oh, yes, and if you’re one of the latter, you’re not just cruel, decadent savages – you also worship the fucking devil.

I’m going to pause here for a minute and do a comparison, again, with another, much better, famous fantasy author of the same period. Now, Tolkien’s not exactly blameless in his treatment of non-white, non-Christian people, but even leaving aside the Silmarillion (which includes at least two canonically non-white protagonist cultures), the way the subject of the ‘mysterious semi-antagonistic Middle East surrogate culture’ is handled in Lord of the Rings is far more palatable than Chronicles of Narnia. This is because:

-Tolkien didn’t make the non-white cultures monolithic. At the very least we have Rhun, Harad, and Far Harad, not to mention Umbar and Khand, which are in a different direction and have an entirely different culture, probably pseudo-Asia to Rhun etc.’s pseudo-Africa.

-Tolkien borrowed from non-white real life cultures to influence the cultures of his protagonists, not just his antagonists. (Numenor and Gondor, notably)

-Tolkien makes it clear that some if not all of these people who are antagonists have been tricked, forced, or otherwise coerced into serving evil.

-Tolkien didn’t have them worshipping said evil. (In fact, the only culture in Tolkien’s world that ever worshipped his devil analogue was protagonist-aligned, white-coded Numenor.)

-Tolkien used words in his own language or in English for the countries in question and for things like Oliphaunts, instead of making up words that sort of sounded stereotypically Muslim or Arabic, like Lewis did.

-Tolkien doesn’t use those cultures as primary antagonists, or even as primary mooks, and

-We don’t see many details of those cultures, which means that they aren’t bastardized and stereotyped like Calormen was (although they may not have been anyway, we can’t really say how he would have handled that)

Like, there’s still a lot of room for improvement, but the difference to me comes down to two things:

1 - Tolkien was developing a world. Lewis was shoehorning in parallels to ours.

2 - As far as respect, inoffensiveness, etc., goes, whatever his flaws, Tolkien tried. Lewis didn’t bother.

But as much as that sucks –and it sucks, and it’s inexcusable, nothing sets my teeth on edge more than C.S. Lewis’s one attempt at being conciliatory.

You know, the bit in The Last Battle where he says that well-intentioned Muslims actually are just worshipping Jesus but don’t know it, and also conveniently disowns every bad thing done by a Christian in the name of God ever.

Because when Emeth, after meeting Aslan, apologizes for all his time believing in and serving Tash (and doesn’t that just make you cringe, when he’s a pseudo-Muslim talking to actually-canon-at-this-point!Jesus), Aslan literally says that if you serve Tash with a good heart, you’re actually serving him, and you serve Aslan with a bad heart, you’re serving Tash.

So it’s okay, because Emeth has been serving Aslan his whole life, he just didn’t know it!

If that isn’t the most cloyingly patronizing, paternalistic thing you’ve ever heard I don’t know what to say to you.

I mean, let’s dissect it.

-good Muslims (and Hindus, and Jews, and Zoroastrians, and Buddhists, and pagans, ad nauseum) are just misguided! But their good acts are still inspired by Jesus. (*gag*)

-no non-Christian religion could ever inspire good works, or worthy acts, or admirable feelings! No, it doesn’t count, because it’s actually God doing it – our God, the right one (*gag again*)

-conversely, Christianity isn’t answerable for any of the bad things that might be done because of it! The Crusades? That was the Devil, it wasn’t for God. The Westboro Baptist Church? It’s the Devil, they don’t serve the real God. Someone bombed an abortion clinic and killed a bunch of people, while yelling things about Jesus? Jesus had nothing to do with it, it was the Devil’s work. This one is especially infuriating because people say this kind of thing in real life all the time, usually as an excuse to not take responsibility for their rhetoric. Real Christians don’t do that, blah blah. It’s some sort of hybrid No True Scotsman thing.

-and it makes things really convenient for Lewis, doesn’t it, since all the good Calormenes will have been serving Aslan unknowingly, and so they’ll get to go heaven Aslan’s country, and there won’t be any hard questions about good people being locked out. (I do know that not all Christian traditions, and not all individuals within those traditions, hold that you have to believe in God to get into heaven if you’re already a good person – but I am already at negative slack with this guy, and that’s about what I’m willing to cut him.)

-IT’S SO PATRONIZING AND PATERNALISTIC AND DISRESPECTFUL!!!

It’s probably possible to write a good Christian allegorical fantasy, although I don’t know that I’d enjoy it. It’s definitely possible to write a good Christian-themed fantasy, or Christian-influenced fantasy, or just a plain old Christian fantasy, and I probably would enjoy it. (I’ve certainly enjoyed Christian fiction, even sometimes when it was objectively rather badly written.) The Chronicles of Narnia, even purely from a writing perspective, is not any of those.

I think part of the problem is that C.S. Lewis is recycling parts of his beliefs wholesale into the story without critically examining them. And while no one is obligated to turn the Literary Criticism Lens on their religion (… that would probably be weird, actually), when you’re turning it into literature, it has to make sense as literature and not just as allegory.

(And to be honest? I kind of resent C.S. Lewis for putting me in a position where it’s difficult to criticize his writing without also seeming to be criticizing his religion. I mean, in fairness that probably wasn’t a deliberate attempt to fend off criticism, but I don’t really feel like being fair. For the record, all vitriol and ‘this doesn’t make sense’ is directed straight at Narnia and not at Christianity, etc., etc.)

It’s not my problem, or, really, my business, how one particular person/group explains or understands something about their religion that doesn’t make sense to me. I might have opinions on how much sense something does or doesn’t make, but I keep it to myself unless they’re interested in a friendly debate or an atheist’s perspective, and criticizing someone’s religion, unless it is actively oppressing you, is really shitty.

Books are different. (No points for the smartass who says, ‘The Bible’s a book!’) Novels demand justification for things. They demand consistent logic. They demand that the author look critically at the plot and the rules of the universe. And if they don’t have these things, then they can and probably should be torn the hell apart.

Actual scenario: I am eight. I’m fairly familiar with the Chronicles of Narnia, not yet particularly invested in my atheism (because I’m eight), and, oh yes, have no idea about any of the allegory. I like the books, but I always get annoyed during The Lion, The Witch, And The Wardrobe because ‘but if Aslan knew about the Deeper Magic, then he wasn’t really a willing victim being killed in a traitor’s stead, so he shouldn’t have come back, because it doesn’t count if he knew so the Deeper Magic shouldn’t have worked!’

Well, now I know that Aslan is Jesus, but you know what? All that is still true. All of that still bothers me. All of that still yanks me out of the story for the entire climax of the book, which sucks, by the way, because that part is kind of awesome. When it’s removed from the context of Christianity, Jesus’s sacrifice and resurrection loses a certain amount of justification, and C.S. Lewis’s half-assed attempt at re-justifying it is just that – half-assed. Besides, Christianity can get away with stuff like that, because

-there’s a certain amount of mysticism in religion that makes perfect sense there but immediately becomes handwaving if used in fiction outside the context of an in-universe religion

-Christianity contradicts itself a lot. Some people find a way to reconcile this, some people ignore the parts they don’t like, some people decide that it’s a mystery of God, and some people can’t reconcile it and don’t believe. This is fine in a religion. It does not work in a novel because it is not the reader’s job to reconcile contradictions, but the author’s; it is not the reader’s job to throw out half the novel so they can make sense of it, but the author’s to make sense of it for them; a ‘mystery of God’ in a novel translates to the author pulling a deus ex machina; and if the readers walk away from a novel because they can’t believe it, you have failed as an author.

-Partly due to the above and partly due to people being people, there are a lot of different versions of Christianity, differing about things like who can get married; whether God has a representative on Earth; who’s getting into Heaven; what language the Bible should be in, which translation thereof is correct, and what books should be in it… This doesn’t work for a novel. There is (generally speaking) only one version of it, and anyway, if you have to rewrite it for every different group who might read it, that is a huge failure as an author. If a work is only accessible to people with the exact same religious background (or any background) as its author, that is an epic fail.

The most direct allegory, and the one I’m going to tackle head-on, is clearly when Aslan (Jesus) sacrifices himself for Edmund (humanity) and then is humiliated and killed by Jadis (Pontius Pilate I guess) and resurrected by dint of the Deeper Magics and possibly the Emperor over the Sea (God).

This is dumb for several reasons.

1. Jadis was already The Serpent in the not!Garden of Eden in The Magician’s Nephew. It seems sloppy to give her two utterly unrelated parts like that, especially when everything else is so painfully on the nose. (Yes, TMN was written after TLTWTW, but I didn’t make C.S. Lewis write a prequel. It’s sloppy in either direction.)

2. C.S. Lewis seems to be trying so hard to get the surface details right (sacrifice, humiliation, resurrection, JESUS) that the actual messages are… scrambled. Here is where I have to lean on my tentative theology, so please jump in and correct me if I’m wrong, but… Jesus died for all humans. All humanity. For our sins. Aslan died for one preteen boy who fucked up. Like… ???? Isn’t that kind of… not it, really? (Also, since Edmund is from our world… and Jesus died for everyone’s sins … doesn’t that mean that Aslan has already died for Edmund? I mean, it doesn’t necessarily invalidate the second sacrifice the way the poor execution of the Deep Magics does but it’s just bizarre when you think about it.)

3. Why does Jadis get traitors? Why is she even written into the Deep Magic? She’s not from Narnia, and she’s not a magical spirit being of the world like Aslan – she’s a sorceress-queen from freaking Charn who stumbled into the world when it was starting. Why would she be written into the Deep Magic? It’s clearly her and not just evil beings in general, because the Deep Magic is never mentioned again in the next five books which fall chronologically after this, nor in The Magician’s Nephew which comes before but was written later and which, oh yes, is directly concerned with the creation of the world which is when the Deep(er) Magic(s) were set. And Aslan doesn’t talk about them like he set them himself, which means it’s incredibly likely they were made by the Emperor Over the Sea… you know, God. So why would God put in a Jadis-gets-the-traitors clause on the world? Is she supposed to be Satan? Because she’s kind of Satan-esque in a lot of ways, but dammit, Clive, make up your mind, is she the Serpent or Satan or Pilate? Not to mention that all the direct religious figures, like Aslan and his father, aren’t tethered to or of one particular world, and Jadis is, so it doesn’t make sense for her to be Satan or the Serpent (yes, I know they’re sometimes considered to be one and the same) since she’s just a sorceress-queen from Charn with a corporeal body and human(ish) parents and a sister. And the final nail in the coffin of Jadis-as-Satan – C.S. Lewis wrote a literal Satan into later books. Tash makes a direct freaking appearance in the last book, damn it!

4. Why is Aslan so terribly depressed on the walk up to Jadis’s camp with Lucy and Susan when he knows he’s not going to stay dead? It’s not even a show he’s putting on for them; they can tell he’s depressed way before they actually meet him. Like, he hasn’t been personally betrayed (like Jesus was), he knows he’s coming back, and Edmund has mostly learned his lesson by this point, so what is there to be sad about? Does he know they’re going to shave his mane? Well, it doesn’t really matter, because he also knows it’s going to grow back when he comes back to life.

5. Why does his sacrifice count when he knew he’d be resurrected???? It shouldn’t freaking count. It has to be a ‘willing victim’ being killed ‘in the traitor’s stead’. Aslan was never a victim willing to be killed instead of Edmund, because he knew he wasn’t going to really die.

6. No one who doesn’t know he’s coming back (aka everyone) calls Aslan out on the fact that leaving them and dying for Edmund? Is actually a really shitty thing to do. Yeah, he gets resurrected – but nobody knows that’s going to happen. As far as they know, literally their only hope just went and got himself killed, and how are the Sons and Daughters of Adam and Eve going to get to Cair Paravel to fulfil the prophecy without Aslan to protect them from Jadis. She can just swoop in and kill everyone now, which means, wait for it, Edmund will die anyway. Yes, it would be terrible to just sit around and wait for Jadis to murder a ten-year-old boy (or however old he was. Ten-twelvish.). But the call Aslan made was only acceptable because he got brought back. No one else knew that would happen, so they should have been angry. But not one person points that out. No one mentions that they’ll all get slaughtered (which they almost do, until he shows up with Lucy and Susan and all the unpetrifieds for back-up). No one suggests he’s being selfish, or short-sighted. I mean, yes, these people basically worship Aslan, but it’s not like no one ever criticizes him. The freaking plot of The Last Battle is based on Narnians criticizing Aslan, even if they’re wrong. URG. Lewis has a seriously bad case of protagonist-centered morality. Or, well, let’s be honest, Jesus-centered morality. The only problem is that Aslan isn’t real-life Jesus – he’s Jesus as interpreted by C.S. Lewis, which means that he is subject to criticism in a way that Jesus usually shouldn’t be, both in- and out- of universe.

So there’s that.

Ultimately, it weakens the story, instead of making it more powerful, which is probably the ultimate failure of a theme, let alone an entire allegory.

And here’s the thing – it’s an easy fix from a story perspective, if not an allegorical one.

Weaker option, still better than canon: Aslan doesn’t know about the Deeper Magic, so the Emperor tells him when he’s sending him back. Keeps the allegory (and the problem of ‘sending your only hope to die is a bad call’), but doesn’t break the entire logic of the universe.

Better option: Peter sacrifices himself for his brother, Aslan lets him (because he knows about the Deeper Magic), at cost to his own reputation/the army’s faith in him. When Peter returns to life, Aslan takes him (and maybe Susan and Lucy if they stuck around) to wake the statues and rescue the army. (Or, alter the Deeper Magic just slightly and have Edmund sacrifice himself in atonement.)

Anyway, on to the more general themes – here are some Aslan problems:

-he’s a Gary Stu. It makes me really uncomfortable, calling Lion Jesus a Gary Stu, but this doesn’t apply to real Jesus, I swear. Aslan is always right. I don’t mean because he’s Narnia Jesus, or because he’s usually factually right or usually morally right, but that disagreeing with him is always bad, even if you’ve got a good reason. Like I pointed out, no one calls him out on (what should seem to them) the utter illogic and selfishness of trading himself for Edmund. Not believing Lucy (not even Aslan, but Lucy) when she said she saw him for one second and just ~knows~ that means they should go down a dangerous cliff where there are no signs of a path instead of a route that appears to be much safer is wrong in this universe. Susan convincing herself she didn’t see Aslan because she didn’t want to die falling off a cliff is presented as a horrible sin instead of a momentary error in judgement. I mean, the scene where Edmund supports Lucy because he didn’t believe her and then lied about seeing Narnia in TLTWTW and learned from it and wants to make up for it is heartwarming, it really is, but it doesn’t justify all that… mediocre weak milk of a moralistic subplot. It is universally condemnable to disagree with Aslan, even if you obey him anyway, or even if it looks like he wants you to walk off a cliff. People are condemned by the narrative for being annoyed with Aslan, even if they have cause. At best, the narrative treats them condescendingly, like Trumpkin. At worst, they get shit on like Susan did. And that’s if they’re protagonists. The villains who criticize him are evil, greedy, utterly unlikeable, and always have an agenda to do so. Look at Shift and Ginger. No one ever criticizes him for real reasons. No one ever criticizes him for utterly delusional reasons that they nevertheless believe. They only ever do it as a complete lie to manipulate people. When they do make a valid point (like Shift saying he’s been gone for hundreds of years and why would he vanish like that if he cares about them) it’s clearly completely an accident on C.S. Lewis’s part.

-his symbolism is way too on-the-nose. In The Voyage of The Dawn Treader, he shows up as an albatross. Really? An albatross? Also, I really hated that poem, so you are not winning points with me, Clive. And then, at the end, they meet him as a lamb, before he turns back into his true self as a lion. The lamb turned into the lion. Groan. Aside from the fact that that’s actually basically the plot of Breaking Dawn… *ba dum tish* Anyway, as a kid I just thought both those things were weird (and I couldn’t figure out what the albatross was supposed to mean, let alone be), but as an adult? It’s like one of my dad’s bad jokes, except the point is Christian symbolism instead of humour. I don’t… what am I supposed to do with that, C.S. Lewis?

-Aslan expects way too much of children. I’ll get into this later because it’s probably more C.S. Lewis’s fault than Aslan’s, but oh my God. There’s a very effective and very moving quote from Criminal Minds that I’ve debated about putting in – I wasn’t sure it would be appropriate, but it's been going around in my head ever since I started writing this rant.“Your God expects way too much of thirteen-year-old boys.” The delivery is… everything I wish I could slam in Lewis’s face. Because it's true of him as well. (I also like that quote because it differentiates between the God of a specific religion and that God as interpreted by an individual, which is what I am trying to do here. He's not exactly making it easy for me, Jesus.) 

-a lot of it boils down to this: C.S. Lewis wrote a Jesus Expy into his books, but he was not Jesus himself, nor did he have Jesus as a consultant on his books, and therefore his Jesus Expy behaves not in ways that Actual Potential Real Life Jesus would have, nor ways that Actual Christianity Jesus would have, nor even in ways that are universally moral, but in ways the C.S. Lewis perceives to be moral or saintly, and this is a problem, because those actions are portrayed as the actions of Actual Christianity Jesus, and as universally moral, and, pardon my language, THEY ARE FUCKING NOT. See, Aslan expects way too much of children, Aslan disappears for hundreds of years because it’s plot convenient, Aslan lets imperfect humans fumble around without helping them and then shows up and judges them for failing.

-Actually, let’s talk about that. More specifically, how about let’s talk about Prince Caspian, The Silver Chair, and The Last Battle. Aslan is gone, here. In Caspian and The Last Battle, he’s been gone a long time. Yes, he probably does need time off from time to time, and, yes, iirc he does mention having other worlds that need his attention. But non-stop for hundreds of years? This gets uncomfortable again, because it’s something I would never say about Actual Christianity Jesus, or about any god(s), whether I thought so or not, because it’s really rude. But this is C.S. Lewis’s fault. Maybe Actual Christianity Jesus/God has been absent from the world for a while (bar minor stuff like talking to the Pope or sending people visions, etc., depending on your denomination, etc.) because he does have other worlds that need his attention, or maybe he doesn’t exist and that’s why, or maybe God’s just mysterious, or maybe *dozens of other possibilities which I don’t really know about because I’ve never been a practicing Christian*. But that’s fine, because that’s a religion. Clive, this is a book. You have to explain why your all-powerful character vanished and let his world go all to shit and then blamed, not whoever wrecked it, but the people trying to fix it because they didn’t do a good enough job. Like, why, exactly, did he just bugger off when the Telmarines moved in and subjugated all his people? It’s not even enough to say that it has to be a human triumphing because World Reasons (that bit doesn’t make sense and is uncomfortably reminiscent of British Colonization – ‘Narnia was never right unless a Son of Adam was king’ over all the sentient animals and the semi-humanoid beings and really? – but at least it’s established as a Rule of the World that Narnia’s part of.) But that still doesn’t sell, because 1.) Caspian, and 2.) when the Pevensies get back to Narnia, instead of helping them (or just going to the Howe and helping Caspian’s army, since Caspian’s like twelve and can’t run a campaign), he puts them through ridiculous tests of their faith (which is ridiculous, since Aslan-as-Aslan has never required faith; he’s tangible and active in the world and they’ve met him before, so why is faith so important) (Answer: it’s important to him because C.S. Lewis didn’t think about how the changes he made would impact that kind of thing, he just pasted on yey some Lion on top of Jesus and thought that was good enough) – tests which, honestly, in retrospect seem more like tests of their unthinking obedience to him, which is frankly a little frightening. Every single one of those kids would drop everything and follow Aslan and obey him if he just revealed himself and he knows that because they did it before. If he can muster up the whatever to appear to Lucy for ten seconds and turn up to talk to her and wake up the trees a day or two later with no difficulty, then there’s no reason he can’t just appear to them all, or better yet, just show up corporeally and help them out. In The Silver Chair, he sends Eustance and Jill to save Rilian instead of… doing it himself? Helping them? Going with them? Anything that would be remotely helpful? And when they fuck up – because they are kids with no context for the needlessly cryptic clues he gave them – he appears to Jill in dreams to scare her into doing better instead of, I don’t know, giving her some help? Like, clearly he’s not too busy to show up and be hard on her, so I don’t see how he’s too busy to show up personally, or just tell her something helpful in the dream (like ‘Green Kirtle bad’ maybe, that’s three words). The story wouldn’t have suffered if he’d been a little more specific in his instructions; they still could have had trouble in most of the same places. Besides, if he was so okay with them getting help from Caspian, why didn’t he blow them, oh, I don’t know, onto the deck of Caspian’s ship, where Caspian could see and recognize Eustace. I mean, I love Puddleglum, and all, but I would be fine with drastic revisions to the plot of that book as long as we still got a cheesy scene with Trumpkin mishearing everything through his ear-trumpet. But the sad thing is that the book doesn’t even need a total rehaul – all it needs is someone to say, somewhere, that the Lady of the Green Kirtle cast some sort of spell, or something, to keep Aslan from actually intervening himself. It’s implied Jadis did – it didn’t last forever, he's too powerful, but LoGK could have made it last long enough that Caspian would have died before seeing his son again, and Aslan didn’t want that. One freaking line somewhere, Clive! Then there’s The Last Battle, where Aslan literally can’t be arsed to do anything until literally everyone is dead. This is where the Christian imagery just becomes blatantly stated Christianity and switches from allegory to… parable? Moral story? I don’t know, whatever. But you still have to justify Aslan’s actions within the context of the book, and honestly in The Last Battle he’s just a negligent douchebag. Like, ever since I was a kid, I always felt like it was less that the world of Narnia faded because it was its time and that’s why Aslan was absent, and more that Narnia faded before its time, because Aslan was absent. I mean, we don’t even hear about it having a red sun. Old worlds have big red suns, younger worlds have smaller yellow suns, just-born worlds have very small, very powerful yellow suns, this is CANON from The Magician’s Nephew. (And that doesn’t even touch on why, say, Aslan needed to scare Bree and Hwin to death to get them to the hermit instead of just appearing personally to King Lune in THaHB or something.)

-Actually, let’s do some math about Narnia’s age. Generously we’ve got, say, a thousand years between TMN and TLTWTW; The Horse And His Boy takes place during TLTWTW; then probably about five hundred years is long enough for Cair Paravel to fall into ruin, but with other kings and queens (maybe?) before that, Prince Caspian is probably roughly another thousand years later, then maybe seventy-five before TSC, and then it’s like, what? Four or five hundred years before Tirian’s time in TLB? So a grand total of… it rounds up to 2600 years. Our world is way older than that. Our world is way older than that even according to creationists. It’s bullshit that Narnia was dying naturally. It wasn’t old, it wasn’t messed up anyway outside of the country of Narnia – Calormen, as I recall, was doing just fine, and we hadn’t heard anything bad going on in the Lone Islands. Archenland maybe, I can’t remember. (It is my least favourite book.) Besides, I am sure there are more countries in the world, we just didn’t see them. Like whatever Telmar is now, for instance. The real-world equivalent would be God throwing a shitfit when the Romans invaded Britain and blowing up the whole world. Or, to borrow from a much better devoutly Christian fantasy author, if when the kingship of Arnor failed Iluvatar had just drowned the whole entire world just like Numenor, but this time 1.) with no actual benefit (he only drowned Numenor as a side-effect of making Valinor unaccessible) 2.) with much less provocation, and 3.) THE WHOLE DAMN WORLD. Like. Seriously.

-lastly, this might be a minor personal thing, but when I found out that Aslan was Jesus? The one thing that really disappointed me was that all the mystery and excitement goes out of the Emperor Over the Sea. When I was a kid he was Aslan’s mysterious, exciting father – but what was he? Emperor, not king, that’s exotic, it implies a lot of power… and colonialism, for that matter. Is he human, Aslan’s father, or humanoid, rather? Is he a Lion who’s Emperor? Does he have a physical form at all? What kind of mysterious, enigmatic politics happen Over the Sea, and where is Over the Sea, and is it a physical or metaphysical place or both somehow? What kind of parent is he to Aslan – does Aslan even have a mother? What’s his relationship to his father – was he born/created fully aware, and what effect did that have on their dynamics? When I found out Aslan was Jesus, I was like ‘Meh, that’s weird, whatever.’ A few months later, when I thought to apply this fact to the Emperor, my literal reaction was this: *exasperated tone of disgust* “Oh, he’s God? That’s boring. DAMN it.” (I was about thirteen at the time, for reference.)

Now to talk about using fiction as a vehicle for other things. I’m going to give Lewis a break and chew up Ayn Rand for a while instead.

Fiction is wonderful and powerful and one of its many uses and values is to shine a light on various issues or truths. It’s risky using I book I confess I haven’t actually read but oh well: look at the cultural impact of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Or, hey, try Jaws – which the author regrets, because it had a devastating real-life impact on the world’s (largely non-threatening) shark population. (Did you know you’re more likely to be killed by a vending machine falling on you than a shark? And you’re more likely to die in a lawn-mower accident than a terrorist attack.) People have used fiction to great effect in good causes (and bad ones), and, usually, I have no issue with this… as long as I agree with them. :) Like, I’d really love to stab the author of Melanie’s Marvelous Measles in the eye with a fork. Although that’s more in the Rand/Lewis category tbh.

But the story – the story is important. If the story gets short shrift because of the message that is a crime. Fiction can be a powerful tool, yes, but it should never be reduced to only that. Storytime: when I was fourteen, my family went to St. Lucia with friends who had a timeshare there. While we were there, my friend Alex lent me one of her books she thought I’d like. It was Anthem, by Ayn Rand. I read it. I loved it. And then I got to the end. (Spoilers!)

The main character, Equality, finds an empty house full of books (God knows how they’re not completely rotted when the world’s been a heavily-regulated Communist dystopia for hundreds of years.) and discovers the word I (since the world’s so communist that they don’t have singular pronouns anymore) and also some Greek mythology. This completely changes his entire personality and voice (the book’s in the first person), something which falling in forbidden love, becoming disillusioned with his culture, recreating the entire concept of marriage with his lover/wife, and running away from the only society he’s ever known as an enemy of the state failed to do. He pontificates for most of the last three pages about how the word I has changed his life and how he thinks about things and how evil Communism is, names himself ~~Prometheus~~ and gives his wife a similarly symbolic name I can’t remember (dude, maybe she wants to choose her own?) and swears that their future children will know the power of the one true pronoun, I.

I’d never been more jarred in my life. I don’t think I have been since. It was very unpleasant. And it made me angry. Not just because Rand thought I was too stupid to get the point that Communism = bad. Not just because she didn’t care enough to make the final rant even consistent with the tone of the rest of the book. Not because the symbolism of Prometheus is terrible (again with the on-the-nose symbolism; Equality actually reinvents the lightbulb during the story and tries to give it to Mankind). No, I was angry primarily because Ayn Rand lied to me. She said, here, come read this dystopian story I wrote. It has plot and characters and worldbuilding because it’s a novel. And I did. I got invested in her characters and a cared about her plot and I paid attention to her worldbuilding. And then three pages from the end she said, “Actually… you’re here for a lecture.” And gave it. Through the unwilling mouth of one of those characters I’d gotten attached to.

That experience, along with the value I’ve always placed on art in general and fiction in particular, gave me a life-long loathing of the particular fiction-coming-second-to-the-message type of author tract, and a wariness of author tracts in general. Not only does it almost always compromise the quality of the work (if you want to hear about this from someone more organized and less shouty than me, read any of Limyaael’s Rants where she talks about message fantasy and why it sucks), but it’s always seemed to me to also be disrespectful to the art form. And I know that sounds super pretentious, but I can’t articulate it any better than that. Use fiction to tell a story, to build a world, to have fun, to work out your issues, to correct something you think was badly done, to illustrate a point, even – but if you want to lecture people, write a goddamn essay.

But the thing is, as much as I hate Ayn Rand (for any number of reasons), she’s two points up on C.S. Lewis.

1.) She was honest about what she was doing. When she decided to stop the story and tell everyone what to think, she stopped the story and told everyone what to think. From what I understand of her other books (I haven’t read them because I’m not that much of a masochist), even when the whole book is an author tract, it’s made abundantly clear that it’s a lecture disguised as a novel. Not to mention the fact that she makes it even clearer by stopping the story anyway in order to tell everyone what to think. (It’s not who is John Galt, it’s when will John Galt shut up?) This makes for uneven, hack-y writing, but no one’s getting conned, except into laying down money for an Objectivism Rant when they thought they were getting a novel.

2.) AYN RAND WROTE FOR ADULTS

Here’s the thing – it is shitty and dishonest to disguise propaganda as literature. It is appalling to disguise propaganda as literature and direct it towards young children who don’t have the experience or analytical skill to know what you’re doing or to make up their own minds. EVEN AYN RAND DIDN’T DO THAT.

Hell, forget Ayn Rand. Even Jack Chick didn’t do that. I mean, he has tracts for kids, which is appalling, but like Rand, he always makes it abundantly clear that you’re getting thinly veiled ideology, not a real story.

Lewis hides it. He sneaks it in under the radar, with parallels and shout-outs that kids probably won’t catch and certainly won’t understand, gets them invested in six and a half books worth of adventures and magical creatures and fantasy, and then at the end of the seventh literally confirms that Aslan is 100% Real World Jesus – and if kids have parents who are disinterested or areligious or don’t follow their kids’ reading habits or just don’t see the harm – whether because they’re Christian or because, like mine, they think the books are harmless because why wouldn’t you, you’re meant to think that – they just buy the whole thing.

And I mean, if you’re Christian and the books were meaningful to you, that’s great, especially if you knew what you were getting from the start. But I was lied to. Even ignoring the painful and offensive depictions of atheism and pseudo-Islam and the plot holes... even before I spotted any of that, I still felt lied to. C.S. Lewis promised me a magical lighthearted fantasy romp and then he took that back, and it's not irrelevant that those books hurt me as I grew up because of the hidden things. I can’t even imagine how much worse it would have been if I was, say, Muslim instead of an atheist.

Maybe I can’t really articulate why the dishonesty of it bothers me so much, why it tips it over the line from poorly-thought-out allegory into actual propaganda, but…

Alright. This section is a bit difficult to format because several of the problems intersect, and my solutions are even more interconnected, so bear with me. It’s… slightly and loosely organized.

Let’s start with Tauriel.

Tauriel and Kili’s romance: scrap it. If there really needs to be a romance, it should be in a different area of the movie. Play up a connection instead. They were halfway there with that bit of dialogue about Dis; have Tauriel get hit with the realization that this ugly smelly Dwarf has a mother who loves him and a brother in the next cell over and he cares about them; he has a parent who made him promise to come home safe; he’s a real person. A good thing to do would be to relate it back to her past – actually giving her a past would help give her an actual definable character. Have her remember that time when she was a preteen Elf and she went off walking farther than usual and was gone a whole day and when she got back her mother was frantic with worry, and suddenly realize that Kili has a mother who probably feels the same way. That’s so much more powerful than sudden clichéd sexual tension. And if it’s really necessary to keep that stupid line from Thranduil in there, use that to foster the connection – she sees the Dwarves getting a more extreme version of the prejudice she faces, which makes her question if her own prejudice against the Dwarves is right. Easy fix.

Tauriel and Legolas: Scrap the romance. If you absolutely have to insert some kind of unrequited crush, fine, but it should be subtext, not text. The main thing, though, is that Legolas should be following Tauriel, not travelling with her.

Legolas hates Dwarves. That should not change in any of the Hobbit movies. If anything, he should hate them more, because his friendship with Gimli is supposed to be in defiance of all odds and prejudices. Let him go after Tauriel with the intention of dragging her home in a sack. Let him hate and resent the Dwarves for ‘somehow bamboozling” his friend into helping them. Give him at least one argument with Tauriel where she makes compelling logical arguments and he doesn’t listen, because that’s how bigotry works in real life. Let him finish this movie – and this trilogy – with disdain and resentment for Dwarves at best instead of undermining an important aspect of Lord of the Rings. (And eradicate the poisonous notion that it’s just that easy to dismiss ingrained prejudice.) Easy fix.

Tauriel’s role and character in the movie: Well, first she needs one.

It’s really not hard, though – all you have to do is figure out how you would write a male character and do the same thing with a female one! It’s really easy, Peter!

In all seriousness, I’ll start from the beginning.

Tauriel should be either a real captain of the guard (meaning that she should be the one giving orders in any given scene and Legolas should be not in that scene unless it’s absolutely necessary) or an ordinary soldier/guard who happens to be a friend of the Elvenking’s son, if you still want Legolas swanning around giving people orders. In fact, making her the guard responsible for, say, feeding the prisoners every day would give her a good reason to talk to them and eventually bond with them.

Tauriel should not under any circumstances have a tragic past. She may have one dead parent who died when she was fully adult and not estranged from him/her whatsoever, or two loving parents still living. That said, she should mention a parent or a sibling or a non-Legolas friend or something from her past at some point, because she has a life beyond her plot purposes.She should have – let’s say dark brown hair. Chestnut, if you like. Gorgeous… not red.

Tauriel should be really invested in her position, especially if she is captain of the guard. (And especially if she got that position despite (ugh) prejudice.) Her conflict of interest should be about her duty vs. morality – and if she is a captain of the guard, she should not get that position back. That’s the sacrifice, and it’s also the only logical outcome. Characterization, motivation, a female character not 100% defined by men/romance – easy fix.

Now all of the romance elements are gone, and as much as I would be perfectly fine with a movie with no romance at all, I acknowledge that there is a trend of blockbusters ‘needing’ to have a love story. Lord of the Rings had two built in (one of which got entirely ignored…), but there isn’t any pre-existing romance in The Hobbit.

But there is a perfect person to attach the romance sub-plot to: Bard.

Movie!Bard is a widower with three kids. A second love would not only be kind of adorable, it would be a refreshing knock to the ‘only one true love!!!1!!1’ ideology that goes around in Hollywood sometimes. (Feanor, I am looking at you.) It wouldn’t be able to turn into a romantic plot tumor because Bard is a secondary character. And most importantly, the romance would be with someone he already knows; someone from Laketown. Someone he doesn’t fall in love with after having had a grand total of one conversation with. Easy fix.

But let me go into more detail, because I want to: Bard’s wife has been dead… let’s say three years. He’s poor, he’s a single dad, he’s disillusioned and doesn’t have a lot of friends. He’s clearly still mourning his wife and he’s definitely not out there looking for love.

There’s this woman. She’s older, probably unmarried (although she could be a widow with no children but I like unmarried better); around Bard’s age. She runs her bakery/vegetable stand/spice shop by herself, although she possibly provides for an elderly parent. Bard goes to her regularly to buy baked goods/vegetables/spices. (Of course, this model would require Laketown to be a real town with an actual economy where it’s actually possible to sustain yourself in something other than abject poverty and gloom. Which is what it should have been.)

This woman, maybe her name is Audhild or Frida or Gudrun, is friendly but not outgoing. She’s plump, with the kind of pleasant features that people call ‘homely’, usually not as an insult, and she’s never thought of herself as anything special. The thing is that ever since Bard’s wife died… she’s been really fond of him, that’s all. We, the audience, see Bard stop off to buy some buns in bulk for all the Dwarves he’s just brought to stay with him, and we see Audhild or Frida smile at him a lot, and we see Bard really not notice.

But then he starts getting frustrated with the Quest of Erebor and annoyed with everyone else’s wishful thinking, and Audhild is the one who listens and nods and says, “Actually, I think you might be right,” and smiles at him again and this time he notices. And that’s all we see before we cut back to Thorin or Bilbo.

But then Smaug attacks Laketown, and we didn’t see it but clearly there was some kind of conversation, because Bard asks her to be the one to get his children to safety, and they have one of those looks pass between them. And she does (the youngest girl tries to run off at one point and Audhild has to catch her and fetch her back while everything is on fire as part of the requisite ‘civilians almost dying’ disaster scene and we see that she’s terrified but she does it anyway), and they all think he’s dead and it’s awful.

And then Bard’s not dead… but all of a sudden he’s king, and that’s not what Audhild signed up for; she wanted her neighbour from six doors down, the devoted single dad in the cramped house who buys her bread, not some great man with a crown.

And if Jackson still really wanted to punch us in the feelings, maybe they’d end up not getting together. Or maybe they would. But either way it would be way more honest and way less superficial than the Kili/Tauriel bullshit we got – but would probably still take up less screen time.

There you go. There’s your requisite romance.

All right – the smushing and the oversimplification is requires a few separate fixes, but here is what should have happened in order to have room to deal with it:

Cut the Gandalf scenes at least by half.

Cut the barrel-chase scene by half, or better yet, two thirds.

Fuck this nonsense about Azog switching with Bolg; choose during the first movie which one you want to be chasing them and stick to it.

Cut the Lonely Mountain shenanigans down to five minutes or less (zero minutes if at all possible).

Easy fix. Lots of extra time to do things properly.

Now, earlier I mentioned a few ways to clean up Tauriel into a decent character, but the fact is, she didn’t even need to be included in the first place. If we needed more female representation, how about

-Oin

-Bifur

-Bofur

-Ori

and/or

-Nori

LITERALLY ANY ONE OF THE DWARVES COULD HAVE BEEN FEMALE, IT IS THAT EASY; JFC, female Dwarves are not short women with wispy chin-beards, THEY HAVE REAL BEARDS, DAMMIT. Want a strong, un-stereotyped female character who doesn’t derail the main storyline? Easy fix. It’s not even against book-canon.

Another quick fix: scrap the ‘Morgul shaft’ entirely. If we need that subplot, have Kili get hit with an ordinary poisoned arrow. Nori (who is apparently supposed to be a healer; I wonder why they didn’t actually characterize him in the movie instead of spending all their character points on the people who die in the end) could save him, not Tauriel – in fact, Tauriel shouldn’t even be remotely involved. For that matter, how about making it someone other than Kili who gets hit by the arrow, hmm? Someone who hasn’t already got 50% of all Dwarvish characterization? Dwalin or Oin, maybe?

Easy fix. For several things.

Of course, you still have some of the Dwarves stuck in Laketown, but they can get to the mountain easily enough by sticking to canon; Bilbo has a proper, intelligent conversation with Smaug while wearing the Ring. He steals the cup. Kili and Nori make their way to the mountain just in time to get trapped inside with everyone else when Smaug smashes the doors in. Then, if it must be in the movie, they can mess around with mining trolleys and molten gold – BUT NOT WHILE SMAUG’S INSIDE THE MOUNTAIN, FOR PITY’S SAKE!

Easy fix.

Speaking of Smaug, I refuse to believe that after that humungous hoard of treasure and after making the choice to make pretty much every background in the entire series CGI instead of scenery that they couldn’t manage a breastplate on the freaking digital dragon. COME ON!

Just… do what Tolkien set up for you. You can explain it to the audience through Bilbo’s conversation with the Dwarves. Give five minutes of screentime to Roac to explain how the thrush can talk. Let Bard take down Smaug with the real Black Arrow. Easy fix.

The Arkenstone should not be evil. IT SHOULD NOT BE EVIL. It should be an incredibly precious gemstone carrying a wealth of cultural importance to the Dwarves. If it’s sooooo important to have Thror’s instability be influenced by a magical artifact, how about his canonical Ring of Power? Just throw in a quick explanation that Thror had one of the Seven. Because he did. In fact, in the Appendices of Lord of the Rings, Gandalf specifically says that Thror’s drive to hoard gold was possibly the influence of his Ring. It says so right in the book. Easy fix.

Thranduil. Well. Pretty much everything set in Mirkwood needs to be changed. It’s not hard, though. First off, how about actually including the Dwarves making for the campfires several times over? Replace Thranduil’s demand for treasure with an interrogation of the Dwarves’ true intentions and BAM, he’s five times more sympathetic. Easy fix.

How about we scratch the nonsensical racism? Easy fix.

While we’re in Mirkwood, let’s cut down the barrel-escape scene to half or even a third of its length, like I said earlier, and ditch the overly-fantastic shenanigans – like Legolas standing on people’s heads, and Bombur rolling around on the shore in his barrel. This removes several jarring moments, and leaves us room to spend more time on the Dwarves’ entry into Mirkwood. Easy fix.

The reason we want to spend more time there is because it helps characterize someone who’s not Fili or Kili! Namely, Bombur. Yes, in the book Bombur actually had some characterization beyond ‘is fat’. For example, he resented always being reduced to ‘is fat’. This is pretty clear in the scene where they meet Beorn, and he gets some more development after he falls into the river and suffers enchanted sleep and dreams. Easy fix!

Speaking of Beorn, let’s scrap him entirely and start over. Gandalf leads the company to Beorn’s house like he did in the book. Instead of a contrived thirty-second threat of the rabid bear, focus on the deeper, canon threat of being refused lodging. Gandalf gradually tricking Beorn into accepting their presence (while Beorn knows what he’s doing but is too amused to care) is a good source for non-vulgar, non-OOC humour! Easy fix.

And how about we give Beorn back his actual personality instead. We can swap the scene where he angsts about his angsty past for the one where he jovially tacked up a warg pelt and goblin head outside his house. Easy fix.

Now, I already said to cut the Gandalf scenes. They should also be managed differently. Scrap the telepathy, ditch the stupid eye motif, and have him consult with Saruman. That way, if you really think the audience is too stupid to realize who the Necromancer is, you can introduce it naturally. The audience gets to see Gandalf’s relationship with Saruman before it went totally sour, and you get to put Christopher Lee in the movie. Win-win. Easy fix.

On the topic of Sauron, the Ring should come up only when Bilbo is using it to become invisible. Fighting spiders, yes. Sneaking around Thranduil’s halls, yes. speaking with Smaug, yes. (THE WHOLE TIME, PLEASE.) The scene where he considers telling Gandalf the truth can stay. But the creepy music goes. The horrible mini-scene with the spider and the battle-rage goes. And every single time he looked at it with suspicion and horror goes. Easy fix.

Okay. I think I’m almost done, so back to Laketown.

There’s no fixing Alfrid. Ditch him. The Master should indeed enjoy expensive and opulent things, but not at the actual expense of the town. Maybe Laketown has a curfew. Maybe there are bylaws about loud noises, from back in the days when the memory of Smaug was still fresh. Have the Master overrule Bard, or even someone else, about something in a high-handed way to show he’s not necessarily a Reasonable Authority Figure. But shine up the buildings a bit! Have some people smiling! No one hates living in Laketown! It’s not a poor city – maybe it’s a little restrictive, but let’s throw in some proof that they have an economy which can actually sustain trade with Mirkwood.  Easy fix.

Everyone who’s given a name gets one that originates from Norse languages or Old English. It took me literally two minutes on Behind the Name to find dozens of acceptable ones. Easy. Fucking. Fix.

We are also excising the hell out of that ridiculous prophecy. Instead, the lakemen will be singing songs about the return of the King Under The Mountain.  Just include a couple lines drifting in every so often. Look, here’s a great way to set up the roots of the eventual conflict between Thorin and Bard:

BILBO: What are those songs they keep singing?

BALIN the Infodump:  *in his slightly reverent voice* They’re old songs celebrating the return of the King Under The Mountain. They’ve anticipated it for a long time.

KILI: *frowning* But… all these songs are about Thror –

(FILI kicks him)

KILI: Ow!

(In the brief awkward silence, a lyric about gold flowing down the river to Laketown drifts through the open window. Someone clears their throat and changes the subject.)

Easy fix.

Speaking of Laketown…

Uggggggggh, I just hate this whole freaking thing so much! Let me itemize the major problems with this: Source. LotR continuity. Morgul. Shaft. Plot.

When the name of your plot device is two problems all by itself, that says a lot, don’t you think?

Right. Let’s get started. The first thing is there’s no such thing as a fucking Morgul Shaft!!

First of all, the only Morgul weapon we are familiar with was called a Morgul blade, not a Morgul Blade. It’s an adjective, not an official name for something. So this… thing should really be called a Morgul arrow, or maybe a Morgul bolt. Especially when you consider that, supposing  ‘Morgul’ means weapons that break off inside you and slowly poison you until you become a wraith, the shaft will be made of wood, because it’s the freaking ARROWHEAD that’s ‘Morgul’!

Now, there’s also the problem of ‘Morgul’ not actually meaning ‘will break off inside you and slowly poison you until you become a wraith’. Because it’s the blade of the Morgul-lord. It was quite possibly made in Minas Morgul. It’s not a specific type of weapon. It has that power because it was made for, you know, the Witch-king, and the Nazgul have weapons that just do freaky stuff to you, similar to their influence and their breath.

But aside from that, we’re meant to assume that ‘Morgul shaft’ means ‘like the sword Frodo got stabbed with, but an arrow’.

So why are Kili and Frodo’s reactions so different? Immediately after getting stabbed, Frodo’s moaning and shaking in pain. His eyes are rolling up. He’s not really able to talk or hold a conversation. He flops in front of Arwen in the saddle like a lump, and unlike in the books, he never has to sit on the horse by himself. After crossing the Fords (at most a day after he was stabbed) he faints dead away, succumbing almost entirely to the poison in his wound.

Now, he really should have been suffering symptoms more like Kili’s; in canon he made the long journey to Rivendell after being injured, and even though he was sick he was well enough to ride Asfaloth alone and to verbally defy the Nazgul at the Fords. But the fact is, Frodo’s grossly exaggerated symptoms were part of the movie. That is movie!canon for what happens when you get a ‘Morgul’ wound. KILI SHOULD NOT BE HOLDING UP BETTER THAN FRODO! I can give you almost as well, because Dwarves are very hardy, but he shouldn’t have a Morgul cold to Frodo’s Morgul SARS.

So even though Kili’s injury is closer to actual canon, it messes up the entire continuity of both movie series. Well done.

Where, by the way, did Bolg get a ‘Morgul shaft’? Nazgul weapons are used by the Nazgul, and they’re not going to hand them over to a bunch of Orcs, who are basically Sauron’s thuggish muscle. There’s also the fact that Orcs, to a man, are afraid, even terrified of the Nazgul; they loathe them, even while they enjoy being on the same side. They don’t talk. They don’t share information or whatever. They certainly don’t share weapons.

And even if they did, where did the Nazgul get the ‘Morgul shaft’? They’re not anywhere near Minas Morgul – and they’ve been hiding in a weird bunk-bed grave for the last several hundred years. There’s nowhere to make wizardy weapons in Dol Guldur – we know because we saw it. It’s all rock and orcs. There might be room for a forge or a fletcher, but there’s nowhere for intricate forging and spellwork. And even then, it wouldn’t be a Morgul shaft, just an enchanted shaft or a poisoned shaft, or – you know what, there’s something. It could have just been poisoned. That would have worked just fine.

Now for the plot. Why was this necessary? Why was leaving some of the Dwarves behind in Laketown necessary? There are two possible reasons.

The first is, for the same reason as the Arkenstone being evil and the Black Arrows being spears. Peter Jackson doesn’t think and he doesn’t care. He’s like a little kid who doesn’t realize that some things don’t go together  - even if they’re good by themselves. “Oh, I – I think dragons are cool and Superman is cool! I KNOW!!!! Superman can be RIDING A DRAGON!!!”

But some things don’t fucking work together. You can’t have Legolas randomly defend Aragorn at the Council of Elrond when they’ve never even met. You can’t have giant metal Black Arrows or telepathic Galadriel without thinking about how it changes the storyline. You can’t reuse a very specific weapon just to give the scene dramatic punch. He doesn’t understand that. He just throws everything in willy-nilly if it seems awesome, without giving it any thought.

The other possible reason is so that we’re more invested in Laketown. Because there are Dwarves there.

This makes me so incredibly furious. What, we can’t care about Bard? He has three kids, for God’s sake! That’s enough potential for heart-wrenching close calls and sympathetic crying children and nearly-vain heroics for any catastrophe scene, right there! Jesus, show some people we haven’t met yet if you don’t have enough characters to pull on the audience’s heartstrings – it worked in Titanic!

But I think it’s pretty likely, given his opinion of the audience, that he figures we won’t care about all the innocent people dying and endangered in Laketown unless the Dwarves are there. That’s just disgusting. And even if it were true – you couldn’t have devoted a few extra minutes to giving the townsfolk personalities? That would solve your problem.

And how the fuck are the Dwarves supposed to get to the Mountain now? That’s where they’re supposed to be.  Do they just wander off by themselves? Really? Will they go with Bard? Then I’d really love to know how Thorin let them in without letting Bard in too. And he won’t need an Arkenstone to bargain with when he’s got Thorin’s freaking nephews.

This is really clearly yet another case of Jackson going, “Oh, I want to do this cool thing!” and not bothering to think about how it impacts anything, so it ends up being solved in a way that is either

-shoddy

-even more uncanonical

-contradictory

Or, often, all three.

Obviously, the One Ring appears in this movie in a supporting role… and I’m pretty sure its agent has some pull, because it has way more lines than it was supposed to.

Let me remind you of some facts.

Bilbo owned the One Ring for more than sixty years. He gave it up willingly with moderate prodding from Gandalf. His personality was, save for the occasional brief moment, barely affected by it.

I have no idea how this happened, since judging by this movie he’s going to be halfway to Gollum by the time he gets back to the Shire.

But as of Desolation of Smaug movie!Bilbo also seems far more susceptible to the Ring. He’s in a blind rage that a creature who could not wear it and does not appear to want it accidentally stepped on it. And I’m supposed to believe this is the guy who will give up the Ring voluntarily after having it hanging around his neck or lurking in his pocket for sixty years? No, he’d be skulking around Bag End with no hair, talking to himself and stroking the Ring.

What only makes it worse is that he appears to realize that there’s something up with his insane charge at the spider. Look, Bilbo – Bilbo didn’t know what the Ring was. He sensed it was powerful, which is why he didn’t use it more often, but he had no clue about it being evil. He used it to hide from the Sackville-Bagginses, for God’s sake! He thought it would be a bit of fun to vanish in front of half the Shire by using his magical trinket! He had no idea.

How FotR Bilbo managed to convince himself it would be safe to use the Ring for a joke when DoS Bilbo is clearly already realizing that’s evil only Peter Jackson knows. (Or rather, I suspect, he never gave it any thought.) This makes his passing it on to Frodo downright malicious, or at best selfish and horrid. He’s not passing down a magical trinket as part of his legacy – he’s palming an evil artifact off on his unsuspecting nephew! GODDAMMIT, JACKSON, don’t you ever think??

So Bilbo being this susceptible to the Ring’s power is stupid. It affected Boromir more slowly than that, and he’s the best benchmark we have for how an ordinary person reacts. Bilbo is

-a hobbit

-strong-willed

-someone who began his ownership of the Ring by demonstrating pity and mercy

which are all things that mitigate the speed with which the Ring works. He should not be homicidally out of control just because a spider almost touched his ring. An in-character response would be desperation or near-panic – not because of the pull of the Ring, but because his (apparently innocuous) magic ring is the only thing enabling him to fight the spiders without being killed.

One of Bilbo’s defining traits was his long-term resistance to the Ring. Not only is that gone now, but this is discontinuity of the worst sort with the larger series. How does this jibe with what happens in Lord of the Rings????

Well, it doesn’t, but that’s fine because nothing else about it does either!

Bilbo is very obviously aware that there is something wrong with the Ring after the spider incident. Possibly he noticed the overwrought slow-motion and sound effects that seem to now be part and parcel with the damn thing even showing up on-screen. The Ring is not high-powered crack, okay? It’s a corrupter, not one of those plot-device turn-you-evil things on Charmed! I’m starting to feel like Peter Jackson has some kind of problem with mental illness – it has to be caused by some kind of magical artifact and have no resemblance to the person’s natural personality, or be else twisted into a complete exaggeration, like Denethor. (Whose instability, ironically, was caused by a magical artifact – Jackson just didn’t show it. Although it’s worth noting that his depression and madness was caused by what he was learning by magic, not by the magic itself.)

But we have a good fifteen seconds of Bilbo staring at the Ring in horror. He clearly knows it influenced him to act as he did! So why is he still carrying it around? Why doesn’t he ask someone for advice? Why does he think it’s a nice harmless present to leave his nephew?

Then there’s the problem of Bilbo apparently mistrusting the Ring enough after one incident when he’s owned it about two months not to use it when an actual fucking dragon is waking up right next to him, but after having it for sixty years and feeling its effects he not only doesn’t realize why he feels that way, he has no inkling that it would be dangerous or ill-advised to use the Ring to perpetrate an unnecessary prank entirely for his own amusement.

Jackson, you already made the Lord of the Rings movies. You are CONSTRAINED by what you put in them. Jesus Christ, did you even watch them before you started making the prequels? THAT’S WHAT THEY ARE. THEY ARE PREQUELS. PREQUELS HAVE RULES, JESUS FUCKING CHRIST.

Uuuuuugh. I’m thinking I might have to add a section now on mental illness in Jackson’s Middle-earth. Not looking forward to that.

Maybe it would be better as a separate project. Would anyone be interested?

Now, like I said, when Tauriel turned up in the trailer, I was afraid of some of the more pathetic possibilities. (Not afraid enough, as it turns out.) However, I thought about it for a while, and with a misplaced sense of optimism, decided that as long as they avoided those sorts of things (and here I laugh bitterly), there was potential. After all, nothing prevented there from being an important female elf. She could easily be a slightly-more-fleshed-out version of one of the Elves which canon assumed was male – maybe one of the ones drinking when the Dwarves made their escape, et cetera. After all, an all-male cast doesn’t have to stay all-male when being adapted this many years later.

And at first glance, Tauriel seems to be pretty decent in the girl power regard. She kicks major ass, and seems to have risen to her high position in the guard despite her dubiously ‘lowly’ heritage. Superficially, she’s empowered.

Except her portrayal is actually staggeringly sexist.

Here’s the crux of the matter: everything Tauriel does is driven by a man. Her motivating forces all trace back to men. And her entire purpose in the story revolves around men.

The only named woman in the story is dependant entirely on men for purpose, direction, and character growth. That is far more sexist than a story where there just happen not to be any important women. (Lobelia was a comic relief character in the book and has not, in fact, been named in the movie.)

So. Here we are.

Tauriel is apparently supposed to be the captain of Thranduil’s guard. When the Dwarves are captured, the other Elves seem to be taking orders from Legolas, instead. Fair enough; as the king’s son he presumably has higher authority even in battle situations. We never see her do anything especially authoritative, however, aside from leaving Mirkwood without having to prove she has permission.

This could probably be ignored, if it were by itself. However, Thranduil looks down on Tauriel for her heritage. (As incredibly stupid as it is, it’s moviecanon.) And yet, when they have a conversation about it, it is entirely about Legolas. There’s nothing about her holding a high position despite being a ‘lowly Silvan Elf’. He doesn’t question her competence because of it. She doesn’t even bring up her job in a tangential way, by saying “But I’m good enough to be head of your guard?” or something similar. It’s all about her romantic feelings for a man, and his for her.

After having her introduction entirely ruled by Legolas, everything else becomes entirely about Kili. Her first softening up is in the face of his unreasonably friendly humour, and it is HEAVILY implied her decision to defy her king and try to do something about Bolg is down to her feelings for Kili. Not deep introspection, not a realization that the Dwarves aren’t as bad as she’d thought, not a disillusionment in her people spurred by the fact that she faces a milder form of the same prejudice – no, her crush on a guy she met a day earlier and had one conversation with is more important than any other aspect of her character.

This makes me so incredibly LIVID. As a character, Tauriel exists to be pushed around by the writers into whatever position suits the more important men. She isn’t even a shallow character – shallow implies a small amount of depth, while Tauriel has no depth. Some characters are wells and some are puddles, but Tauriel is a picture – which might not matter, in a different story, but because she is the only woman in the cast, it matters a very great deal.

It honestly took me a little while to realize just how all-encompassing the sexism was in her portrayal, because it was hard to believe that something like that could make it into a blockbuster now. It was about two weeks away from being 2014, and the only important female character isn’t a character at all; she’s an accessory to the men, and their story. Because she fights and shoots and sets off a plot point, we’re supposed to think she’s feminist, or empowering, or even just badass. But she’s not. People who are truly badass don’t just revolve around other people. They have their own motivations and drives and character. In a weak character, these might be sublimated to what others want, but Tauriel doesn’t sublimate her self, because she doesn’t have one.

One of the things that makes me waver on whether or not Tauriel is, in fact, in love with Legolas is the… thing with Kili. I still have absolutely no idea what that was supposed to be.

So, the breakdown –

I don’t necessarily have an issue with investigating the idea of an Elf/Dwarf pairing. There have been several Elf/Human pairings in the LotR universe (at the time of The Hobbit, it’s at about two and a half), but no other interspecies relationships (other than Melian and Thingol). It could have been really interesting, especially given that both sides would have far more reason to be against the match, and that Dwarves are much more insular than Men. However, this was definitely not the way to do it, and I honestly doubt if this would have been the place to do it, regardless.

So the, um, romance was badly handled on more than one level. On the ordinary people-falling-for-each-other level, it falls down for a few reasons. The biggest is that Tauriel and Kili have so very little interaction. The only actual conversation they have – about his rock and then starlight – isn’t bad, as far as it goes. I can support it being enough for them to realize they had a bit of a connection. But that is literally the only conversation they have until Laketown, and it’s implied that her feelings for him were an important factor in her decision to go after the Dwarves. Again, she spoke to him once, and not only was she being hinted about ten minutes earlier to be in love with someone else, but she’s an Elf, not a human. She’s probably been alive for a couple hundred years at least, so a five-minute conversation would probably mean a lot less to her than it would to one of us.

The second reason it falls down. At first it seemed like the writers were going for more of a ‘they’re not such horrible people’ type connection, with maybe a vague romantic wistfulness about it. I wasn’t entirely sold, but I didn’t hate the idea. Even Tauriel’s decision could have been strongly influenced more by the idea of That Dwarf has a mother who worries about him, and he seems like a normal person with a sense of humour, and they are clearly people too, not just our enemies than Twu Wuv™. But then comes Laketown.

I have to stop here and take several deep breaths. The only thing that stopped me from jumping from my seat in an apoplectic rage and snarling “WHAT??” in the loudest voice I was physically capable of was that my mom would have been really embarrassed. (I honestly think my dad would have understood.)

So Tauriel shows up and saves Kili from the ‘Morgul shaft’ with athelas, despite that not really being an Elf-oriented skill like they seem to think. (Even Elves have to be trained as healers. They aren’t just automatically good at it, and Tauriel is a soldier, not a healer.) And he’s half-delirious, and says (and here I swallow back bile) “Do you think she could have loved me?”

Ugh, and I was already sick from all that ‘she walks in starlight’ crap.

No, seriously, WHAT THE FUCK? One conversation. A minor connection and mild innuendo and now you’re all, “Do you think she could have loved me?” What the fuck?

It is just such a no sell. That entire thing felt like a Big Lipped Alligator Moment. It was just so out of nowhere. I was actually embarrassed watching it.

Now to examine how it crashes and burns on an Elf-Dwarf level. First off, Tauriel goes from deeply and casually racist to tolerant and connection-having in about two scenes, even if we disregard the Laketown clusterfuck. Less than fifteen minutes before their conversation about her starlight and his trousers, she’s refusing to allow him a weapon in a dangerous situation (in which he appears willing to cooperate with her), casting aspersions on his trustworthiness on the basis of his race, and calling him ‘Dwarf’.  This is all very unpleasant, but it is the way Elves often think about Dwarves. However, that sort of mindset doesn’t disappear overnight. For comparison: in Lord of the Rings, Legolas had a better attitude towards Dwarves than Tauriel does, and it took weeks if not months travelling through dangers to lighten him up. He was still touchy on the subject of race when they got to Lothlorien (“A plague on the stiff necks of Dwarves!”), and wasn’t buddy-buddy with Gimli until they left there. Tauriel’s quick turn-around strains belief.

And Kili’s complete lack of prejudice or even hostility is almost as hard a sell. He doesn’t even seem annoyed that they’re locking him up. Not to mention that he has grown up hearing stories of how Thranduil abandoned his people – if not from his mother and/or father, certainly from his uncle. So while I can buy him being more easy-going and open-minded than the Dwarves who actually lived through that, I can’t see him being all friendly with Tauriel right off – especially after she’s just been calling him “Dwarf”. I can tell you right now, I’m not going to be all pally with someone who goes around calling me ‘woman’.

It’s also completely undeveloped – as I mentioned before, the possibilities of this kind of romance could be interesting. But it’s not explored. Kili’s gag-inducing love query seems to have more of a view to ‘could I ever be good enough for her’ than anything actually dealing with the complexities of the issue, and Tauriel certainly never discusses it. I suppose it might be marginally redeemed in the next movie, but guess what?

The last thing, and one that ties in very well to something I’m going to talk about later – Kili dies. He’s one of the casualties of the Battle of Five Armies. So even if they had addressed some of the potential issues and drama about the whole thing (and in a movie with a dragon, did we even need the extra drama? No.), it goes completely out the window. “Oh, we’ve addressed some of the potential issues, both internal and external, about this relationship, and gotten you to buy into it – it is, after all, the only romantic relationship in the entire movie – and made ‘good’ cinema. But you can forget about that now, because it turns out it doesn’t matter anyway! It was never really going to matter either way! Psych!”

TAURIEL AND LEGOMANCE

I do not hate Tauriel.

No, really; she seems like a nice person, and I might actually like her a bit.

I loathe the fact that she’s in this movie.

That’s the sum of it, more or less: she seems, as a person, to be tough, kind, and sometimes vulnerable. As a character, however, she’s a complete travesty.

When I saw the preview, with this random noncanonical elf girl running around shooting arrows, what I was most afraid of was that she would end up being Legolas’s sister. Because a heretofore-unmentioned relative is one of the easiest ways to add a female character to a mostly-male story. The other is love interest, but I mean, come on. I was never worried about that. Legomance is such a classic Sue thing, it’s almost a fandom joke by now. Even Peter Jackson isn’t going to pull that! And I laughed, in an honest, unsarcastic manner.

I’m pretty sure anyone who knows how I feel about the LotR movies would be shocked to hear that I overestimated Peter Jackson.

I am sure the third movie will make me froth at the mouth, but I really don’t think anything can top this. I mean – you Legomanced The Hobbit. There’s… pretty much nothing to say to that.

Now, it’s somewhat unclear if Tauriel has feelings for Legolas – it looks a bit like she does, but it’s entirely possible that what’s really upsetting her in those scenes is that Thranduil is saying nasty racist things to her, which would upset me too. It seems pretty clear, though, that Thranduil is intended to be right about Legolas having feelings for Tauriel. In which case… Does he just get over it? He doesn’t mention a wife, lover, or girl-who-rejected-him in The Lord of the Rings. But Elves, um… they typically don’t get over that sort of thing very fast, if they do at all. Indis carried around her love for Finwe for years (and for Elves that means… a very long time), even after he was married. Maeglin didn’t just put Idril out of his mind when she made it clear she was uninterested in him – or, for that matter, when she married someone else and had a kid. Elves do get over their first love sometimes – Finduilas, for example, fell out of love with Gwindor – but I am pretty damn sure it would take more than fifty- or sixty-odd years.

Is she dead? She could die in the third movie – probably in a horrible, passionate, tear-jerking act of self-sacrifice which will make me throw up. But then he would really, really not be over her.

Did he have just a mild, barely-more-than-friends crush on her that went away? Because if that’s it, his dad shouldn’t be pulling the ‘STAY AWAY FROM MY SON’ card. Not to mention, really? Really? Is this The Desolation of Smaug, adapted from J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit and also The Prince and The Guard by LegolasGurl79? IT IS ALMOST LITERALLY IMPOSSIBLE FOR THIS DYNAMIC TO HIT ANY MORE CLICHÉ LEGOMANCE SUE POINTS.

And on the note of the stay-away-from-my-son-card… I mentioned earlier that Thranduil was being racist. Well, I believe the exact words were that he wouldn’t be allowing his son to get together with a “lowly Silvan Elf.”

Well, despite Elves not really being all that controlling of their children’s marriages, I suppose it could be a nod to the (very complicated, very confusing) groups of Elves, and the occasional tensions that arose between them. Putting aside the fact that although Thranduil is a dick, he would probably let Legolas go ahead and marry one of the Avari if he really wanted to, it could be interesting… Um. But.

LEGOLAS IS A FUCKING SILVAN ELF HIMSELF!!!!!!

So, for that matter, is his father, at least culturally. They are also of Sindarin descent, but Legolas identifies as a Silvan Elf in LotR.

My mom’s mother’s maiden name was McCracken. We have an ancestor who was hanged by the English for running an illegal Irish newspaper. This is kind of like if I came home from Ireland with a girlfriend or a boyfriend, and she was like, “No daughter of mine is going to marry some no-good Mick!”

I mean, you don’t even have to read The Silmarillion. It’s on the freaking wiki. ‘Woodland Elf’, which equals Silvan. So not only is Thranduil

-being uncanonically controlling for an Elven parent (unless you’re Thingol)

-being uncanonically racist towards other Elves, and

-displaying severe signs of being from a Mary Sue fanfiction instead of Arda,

he also seems to have come down with a bad case of internalized racism. Maybe he just really wants Legolas to marry up?

It makes me kind of wish there was a Stereotypical Legomance Bingo. I think I would have won twice by now.