Re: Inaugural purist thread

[Lancebloke]

yes Lance you are a mellon, and sometimes you give me the pip.

I know it's small but come on!  

[Eldorion]

I've gone through a cycle of discovery, forgetting, re-discovering, losing the URL, etc. with this site for years, but it remains probably my favorite Tolkien purist site on the web because of the author's passion and the endless esoterica she brings into her analyses.  The site appears to have finally gone offline for good, but fortunately the Internet Archive nabbed a copy before that happened and I stumbled across a link to it entirely by accident this evening.

https://web.archive.org/web/20090613063540/http://arthedain.netfirms.com/

Aside from a few broken images in his storyboard sections, the site is just as I remember it.  Most of it was apparently written in 2003, between the releases of TTT and ROTK.  Her massive reviews of those films ("Broken Promses" and "Promises Kept", on the index page are probably her masterworks.  Her scorecard for TTT and the statistical analysis of Helm's Deep left a big impression on me when I was younger, and her analysis of the Scouring of the Shire is one of the best of its sort.  The page about the type of ships the Corsairs sail starts off sounding like another grass length controversy, but it turns into an interesting commentary on race and people's perceptions of Middle-earth.

I'm not too into the purist debates anymore (largely since they've wound down so much), but I was thinking about it cause of the GOT thread and rediscovering this site brought back so many fond memories of my early days in the fandom.  It's not that I agree with every criticism, but it's a hell of a read. I hope you guys appreciate it too.

[Pettytyrant101]

Had a quick look and bookmarked it Eldo- looks interesting- anyone who has a section about PJ's Lotr's films entitled 'Dog's Dinner' is a winner by me

[Forest Shepherd]

I would give a great deal to have had a worthy film adaptation, and initially I thought we were going to get a pretty decent job of it. But the problems that were there in FOTR-M, instead of correcting over time, or remaning the same, are like the smallest degree off course of an arrow being shot a great distance: halfway through the flight it is already clear that it is going to miss the mark, wihtout a miracle; and no miracle occurred. It only went farther and farther from where it should have ended up.

I love paragraphs like this one. It really is a well-written and thoughtful article and I really appreciate you posting it for us Eldo!

[David H]

Just read the Dromond one. A very good analysis.

It's refreshing to see these arguments made from back in a time when the end of the series still wasn't known and the outcomes inevitable.

[Pettytyrant101]

Oh I think the outcome was pretty obvious and inevitable long before the end, sadly

[Forest Shepherd]

[Forest Shepherd]

"Then again, he contradicts what he himself said before at a CHUD "round table" interview:
---
Question: I felt that the extended version of Fellowship was so much better than the already amazing original version. What can we look forward to on the extended Two Towers?

Jackson: A lot of people feel that way about the extended version. As for what will be on the next one, what we shot, I haven't finished that yet. I've been working on it. There's some good scenes. I think it's going to follow a similar sort of pattern with Fellowship, in that a lot of the scenes that we cut out are basically character development and dialogue scenes. There's not too much action. It's a weird sort of thing. You can almost add more, slower paced scenes and the film seems to run better, even if it's a half hour longer. (P@L - emphasis mine)
---
Perhaps he should have paid attention to that "wierd sort of thing" he noticed— "

Oh what cutting commentary! And how easily Jackson walks into it!

I'm very curious as to whether this same individual has written anything similar in response to the Hobbit Trilogy.

[Eldorion]

PJ is obviously not an idiot but he comes across as really clueless sometimes.

I'm glad you guys enjoy the reviews! I did find her LiveJournal but unfortunately it hasn't been updated since 2009. I too would be interested in reading her take on TH, though considering it's mixed reception I'm not sure it requires such a lengthy analysis (though it'd still be fun to read).

[Forest Shepherd]

I've continued reading those essays (they really are quite long!) and am really enjoying them still. Broken Promises is so deliciously crabbit while at the same time reminiscent of a time in my young life when I too saw the films not as completed products stuck in the frozen state of the past but living, breathing works that were to be anticipated and critiqued with an eye to what might be, or what could have been, or what will be to come.
Feel free to bring up more of these types of things Eldo!
I was not online and discussing anything back when the ring films came out, so these forays into the digital past are refreshingly new for me.

[Eldorion]

I wasn't around that long ago either, but I did know quite a lot of people who were, and spent a lot of time trawling through old forum archives when I was younger. TheOneRing.com had possibly the strongest movie debating community of the pre-movie period.  There's lots of formatting errors in their archives due to various technical transitions, but you can go back to 1999-2000 and read people's real-time reactions to stuff like the "wizard kebab" when that first leaked.

http://forums.theonering.com/viewtopic.php?f=13&t=2536

Or you can relive the controversy of "Xenarwen", which actually reached such a high pitch that it made PJ back off from that particular change (and Liv Tyler claimed that certain forum threads reduced her to tears).

http://forums.theonering.com/viewtopic.php?t=8541 (this was the earliest one I could find in a few minutes of searching just now)

NB the guy posting as "Kelannar" in both of those threads achieved a great deal of notoriety in the fandom back in that time, even though he left the fandom before FOTR was released.  His rants ended up being covered by Wired and The Independent back in 2001.

http://archive.wired.com/wired/archive/9.10/lotr.html (on page 4)
http://www.theonering.com/news/the-lord-of-the-rings-movies/newswire-the-campaign-for-real-tolkien-independent-co-uk

[Forest Shepherd]

Neat! Thanks!

[TranshumanAngel]

Like you Eldo I loved those essays. For some reason I always thought they were written by a dude They can also be found here:
http://www.minastirith.com/cgi-bin/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=get_topic;f=6;t=001478

This thread in itself is a great read too, but both those essays are reposted there verbatim.

[halfwise]

It's a shame that TheOneRing.Net basically took over from TheOneRing.Com, which was a much more open minded forum. In fact TORC actually resembles us most in that they have off-topic threads that would never be tolerated in most forums.

[TranshumanAngel]

The only other forum I visit is TORC. The one I linked to, Minas Tirith, is still operational but like most forums was busiest in the early 2000s. It was mostly very purist.

[Eldorion]

Like you Eldo I loved those essays. For some reason I always thought they were written by a dude They can also be found here:
http://www.minastirith.com/cgi-bin/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=get_topic;f=6;t=001478

This thread in itself is a great read too, but both those essays are reposted there verbatim.

Glad to know there were other people who enjoyed those essays too, THA. I've never registered on Minas Tirith but I'm somewhat familiar with their site, and I've read through their purist thread before. Some great stuff in there, and I love how much longer it is than the equivalent revisionist thread.

[Eldorion]

It's a shame that TheOneRing.Net basically took over from TheOneRing.Com, which was a much more open minded forum.  In fact TORC actually resembles us most in that they have off-topic threads that would never be tolerated in most forums.

I've only posted on TORC a handful of times, but I've lurked it quite a bit and it's definitely a cool forum, as are board77 and The Hall of Fire, which were founded by TORC members. TORC was part of the initial generation of Tolkien message boards that took over from the newsgroups in c. 1999, and while they had a reputation for being purist, I think that it's more fair to say that they simply had a balance between the two sides and didn't favor either with preferential moderator treatment. The preferential treatment issue is something that LOTR Plaza, which was a few years younger and displaced TORC before yielding in turn to TORn, struggled with for years. But by the late 2000s, almost all of the established forums were shrinking, and TORn was able to buck the trend in large part due to their special relationship with the filmmakers as well as their re-orienting towards The Hobbit earlier than anyone else.

[TranshumanAngel]

The barrow downs is another good forum
That still has a small community of regular contributors .

[Eldorion]

Agreed. I was really happy when they came back online recently after their extended technical troubles.

[TranshumanAngel]

Yup. Phil Dragash (he made the awesome LOTR audiobooks) posts there sometimes which is sweet, he's an awesome dude. You guys should check out his podcasts. He and his brother and cousin eviscerate the films there too, and they make a lot of good points.