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everything is gay and gay is everything, I have feelings, I just want everyone to be OK, I was aiming for snark but Feelings came out instead, LOTR
I was thinking about The Lord of the Rings last night, because of a twitter thread I saw in which someone was arguing with people who don’t like the new Star Wars movies via a LOTR analogy (it was a good thread, and unfortunately I can’t find it now, but the content isn’t actually relevant to this post). The point is, it got me thinking about how, IMHO, a lot of people misunderstand Tolkien because they read the tropes that come from the flood of derivative Tolkien-imitation fantasy that came out after LOTR back into the original (and also, probably, because of the movies, which I liked but also have some issues with). The point is, the things that are most important to me about LOTR are the things that tend to get lost in the way a lot of people talk about it (and let’s be real, by “people” I mostly mean “Fantasy Bros who think that Fantasy Is Ruined Now because there are women and POC in it”).
Perhaps most importantly: LOTR is not a chosen one story. LOTR is the opposite of a chosen one story. The heroes who save the world in LOTR are hobbits. You know what hobbits want to do? Sit in their cute houses and eat some fucking cheese.
(Note: I’m about to refer to cheese like 20 more times, but if you’re vegan or lactose intolerant or don’t eat cheese for any other reason, feel free to mentally substitute another delicious foodstuff of your choice. The cheese is a metaphor. Sort of. Actually not really, but hobbits are equal-opportunity eaters of delicious things and I chose cheese more or less at random)
So. Hobbits just want to sit in their houses and eat some fucking cheese. Frodo Baggins? Just wants to sit in his house and eat some fucking cheese. But instead he leaves his house and his cheese and goes to save the world, because he understands that if he doesn’t, no one is going to get to sit in their house and eat their cheese, because there will be no more houses or cheese or comfort or safety or any of the mundane things that are actually everything and that he’s been used to taking for granted. And then Sam comes with him because he’s a beautiful queer cinnamon roll who loves Frodo and also because he wants to ogle some pretty elves (in my head, Sam is kind of like a hick baby gay who’s just really excited to go to a gay bar in the city with his boyfriend, but also terrified because he’s never been that far from home) and ends up becoming the person who actually saves the world, because no one can really do these things alone.
My point is: this is a story about ordinary people saving the world, not because they are special or chosen, but because they are the people who step up, because they’re willing to accept that they might be giving up their own comfort and safety forever in order to save everyone else’s. It’s not about battles or big showy heroic gestures or macho dudes. It’s especially not about macho dudes, because literally zero of the dudes in LOTR are macho; every single dude in the book cries all of the damn time, which is the other thing that is super important to me, because I found that Very Relatable when I was 12 and also now. Tolkien was not awesome at writing women, but the fact that his dudes expressed their emotions pretty regularly was really important to me when I read the book as an impressionable preteen, because it went against everything I’d been socialized to believe about what dudes were supposed to be like.
Anyway, this is also why, though I understand that no one wanted the Return of the King movie to be any longer than it was, I think it was a mistake to leave out the scouring of the Shire. When you leave your home and your cheese to go and save the world, chances are that you’ll come back to find that someone has stolen your home and your cheese, or broken it in some way that you can’t completely fix. Things don’t just go back to normal. The sacrifices that you make are real, including the sacrifice of the mundane things you’d taken for granted. Hobbits are important, are the people who save the world in the end, because they understand that the little things like cheese and gardens and getting to sleep in your own bed aren’t actually little, and are in fact the very things that are most worth fighting for.