Suddenly, I don’t feel so bad about realizing at age 19 I was a has-been.
Yeah, I always thought he was pretty good in High Fidelity. He was playing Jack Black, but not crazy Jack Black. I liked Be Kind, Rewind too.
I was rewatching Lord of the Rings recently, and something that continues to bug me is the the Battle of Helm’s Deep. They whined about not having enough young, strong people, then they wouldn’t let the women fight. Why? Eowyn made it pretty clear that Rohan women were made of tougher stuff, and they made it sound as though they didn’t have anything to lose; why not let the women fight? It’s not even a matter of “teh wimminz iz weak!”, either; they were already scraping the bottom of the proverbial barrel by having old men and young kids fight. Any woman would be at least as strong as a 12-year-old boy or a 70-year-old man.
Even a “we need women for reproduction!” argument doesn’t seem to work, here…if all the men are dead, and the Uruk-hai aren’t planning on letting the women live either, reproduction and repopulation are kind of a moot point. And if it’s childcare you need, you’ve got old women for that.
This isn’t really meant to be a complaint about the lack of equality between men and women; Rohan is clearly a patriarchal society, and within the realm of the story, I’m perfectly okay with that. I just think it ignored or overlooked a rather large potential asset.
(Also, to be fair, I don’t think it was necessarily bad storytelling on Tolkien’s part–rather, it was just Theoden being stubborn and relying too much on tradition.)
Yes, but only if all the men are dead. It wouldn’t work long-term at a genetic level, but one man could do a pretty thorough job of knocking up a whole mess of chicks.
Personally, I think that’s the whole idea: it allows every man going into battle to fight like he might be the only one who’s going to survive and thus become sovereign to a nation of lonely poontang.
Middle Earth predates wimmin’s lib by a few millennia, ya know.
When AK-47s are widely available for very little money – aren’t they produced in staggering numbers? – why would you need to make one in a Mom-and-Pop shop when you could buy a few hundred with half an acre of poppies?
I never thought of it that way before…:dubious: