The little riff about the key and the dam was amusing.
The Fates seem to have jarred the Stranger out of his cognitive and linguistic stupor.
Galadriel suffers from the same problem as professionals who get seduced into illegal activity, then are manipulated and silenced by playing on their shame. They then isolate rather than taking responsibility and bringing others in to help solve the problem.
Returning to this - Fate, a Valar, whatever … surely not mere chance brought them together, and Sauron could not have connived to make it happen. It seems strange thing for whatever Forces may be in this world to make happen. Did they just decide that Middle Earth needs more suffering?
She’s like the person duped by a Nigerian Prince scam who is afraid to admit it because of her involvement.
Eru does like dissonance. In order to bring his song to the climatic finish he desires, there’s going to need to be some suffering along the way.
Except she did all the work of the con herself, but she really did believe that he was royalty of a foreign nation.
One of the biggest themes in Tolkien’s writing is that God allows evil to exist because it will lead to a greater good in the end. Arda basically exists because Iluvatar is demonstrating to Melkor that it is impossible to truly rebel against Him because everything he does to try to defy His will only serves to bring it to fruition.
Im trying to remember…was it a Lucifer comic where he railed that every time he seemed to have some sort of triumph, God would just gaslight him with “all part of my plan son.”
Do you have the same problem with … every action movie and TV series? Because bad physics is standard to those.
It is, however, in keeping with her freakout in the Peter Jackson movie, which they explicitly called back to when Sauron was tempting her…
And we see her in the book primarily through the eyes of Frodo, whereas in Gondor and Rohan her woods are feared and shunned. So ‘kind’ is in the yes of the beholder even then.
Maybe it’s carbonatite: “the lava erupts at relatively low temperatures of approximately 510 °C (950 °F). […]It is also much more fluid than silicate lavas, often less viscous than water.”
Although that temperature isn’t going to be good for smelting precious metals (unless mithril lowers the eutectic by, like, a whole lot. Which seems unlikely but hey:… a(n elf-)wizard did it.)
Didn’t know about that. Neat. Still–it’s black, not orange, due to the low temperature (i.e., blackbody emissions are in the deep infrared). The problem with being surrounded by orange lava is that there’s an immense amount of radiative power. There’s no way around that; the amount of power received by each patch of your body is a function solely of the solid angle of the visible lava and the temperature.
The Sun is about 1200x more intense per square degree than lava would be ((5800 K/1000 K)^4), but it only covers a solid angle of 0.2 degrees^2. If half of the lower hemisphere is lava (i.e., standing on a rock in the middle of a pool or something), that’s about 10,000 degrees^2. So about 40x as intense as the Sun, continuously.
Also: wasn’t the whole deal with Mount Doom that it was hotter than any forge, and thus the only place the One Ring could be destroyed?
This should really be more like (5800 K/1400 K)^4 = 295, which makes it ~170x as intense as the Sun.
I had thought it was more “where it was born it must and can only die” but that makes sense too.
That may be. I guess I was thinking of this passage:
‘Your small fire, of course, would not melt even ordinary gold. This Ring has already passed through it unscathed, and even unheated. But there is no smith’s forge in this Shire that could change it at all. Not even the anvils and furnaces of the Dwarves could do that. It has been said that dragon-fire could melt and consume the Rings of Power, but there is not now any dragon left on earth in which the old fire is hot enough; nor was there ever any dragon, not even Ancalagon the Black, who could have harmed the One Ring, the Ruling Ring, for that was made by Sauron himself.
‘There is only one way: to find the Cracks of Doom in the depths of Orodruin, the Fire-mountain, and cast the Ring in there, if you really wish to destroy it, to put it beyond the grasp of the Enemy for ever.
For the other Rings of Power, it seems it was just a matter of just getting it hot enough. Perhaps it’s also true of the One Ring, except that even a dragon could not do it.
I wasn’t being serious in suggesting carbonatite. Carbonatite lava looks like molten chocolate, there’s no mistaking it for what we see on-screen.
Just wanted to spread the trivia that there is, in fact, a lava people can fall into, that won’t vaporize them in short order.
There was a spiderman show i found unwatchable, due to the angles being so very wrong when spidy swung from webs.
But in general, i don’t take action shows very seriously, and I’m not a huge fan. Maybe that’s one of the reasons, I’ve never really thought about it. Whereas the Lord of the Rings is engaging in part because it feels real. And the scale is so vast. The scale of this show is tiny and compressed. But… Why are those ships sailing without regard for the wind? Where did they put all the horses? Or the men, for that matter? Where are the hobbits that they are being struck by random bits of lava? This is not a world i can believe in.
Aah, that might be the difference - the LotR has never felt real to me. It’s always been mythic, which IMO necessarily entails larger-than-life everything.
But the flying, fire-breathing, talking lizards, homicidal walking trees, and the literal flat Earth, you’re OK believing in all of that?
Yup.
.
Ah, the old “In fantasy anything goes” notion. Even a fantasy world should have pretty firm rules for how things operate. Cheat and cut corners a few too many times and you lose that kind of verisimilitude, which even in a fantasy milieu risks alienating the audience.
Well, everything is smaller than life in this version. People travel hundreds of miles in a few hours. By foot.
To quote G.K. Chesterson;
It’s easier for me to believe that an angel in human form, armed with a magic sword and ring, could battle a giant devil made of flame all the way from the bowels of the earth to the top of a mountain, kill it, die, and be resurrected, than it is for me to believe that a batallion of horsemen could cross an ocean and ride over a mountain range in a day or two, even if their mounts are special fancy horsies that imprint on their riders.
No, firm rules are not actually required. Surrealist fantasy is a thing. And also, you’re talking about a particular fantasy universe where a literal Deus Ex Machina has already occurred once. You desire firm rules, that doesn’t make them necessary.
But “anything goes” is not the argument I’m making, anyway. I’m not saying “anything goes” in fantasy, I’m saying if you are going to complain about breaking physical laws, it’s hypocrisy to complain about some law breaking but not other, even more egregious ones.
It’s like people complaining about ships banking in space when they don’t care if those same ships go FTL.
They are both equally fantastical to me. Hell, invisible Maiar could have picked up the gees-gees and flew them. I don’t particularly care. Like I said earlier, I didn’t care that the volcano wasn’t realistic, why should I care about picayune horse logistics?