I’d agree about the Shire, but I was thrilled that Tom Bombadil was left out of the movie. His presence didn’t even make sense in the book, and would have been worse in the movie.
I disagree. I though the point of the Scouring was to show that evil still exists and just because you destroy an evil, magical ring it doesn’t mean that evil will go away. Even the hobbits could be corrupted with or without a ring.
The entire “Avengers Dissassembled” storyline seemed to be one big FU to the fans IMO. Okay, the team has a history of abruptly shaking up the roster and featuring totally new characters while downplaying others. But none of the Avengers seemed even remotely in-character, the team sat around doing nothing while non-member Dr. Strange has to step in and save their asses, Hawkeye & Ant-Man’s deaths were gratuitous, and a cornerstone team of the Marvel Universe is ignominously swept away to make way for the ‘new’ Avengers - a shabby JLA facsimile filled with the most overexposed characters in the Marvel Universe and tired “espionage” stories. That smacked me as an enormous FU from the writer.
I’ve said this before, but if you read the beginning of Book I and, maybe when they leave Bree, skip to the end of Book VI, when they return to the Shire, there’s a marked similarity in tone, that of an older children’s adventure book.
I’ve always thought that perhaps Tolkien wrote the beginning and the end as a worthy sequel to “The Hobbit”, which was a children’s book, and left a note for himself in the middle, saying, “Insert epic ring-destroying adventure here”, sometime after which things got quite out of hand in terms of narrative.
The alternative is to assume the jarring change in tone going into the Scouring was deliberate, in which case it’s simply ham-handed writing.
(I reread the trilogy after seeing the Fellowship movie, and found my opinion of it had lessened somewhat in the many years it had been since I’d perused it last, to the point that I’ve considered starting an “Epics Suck” thread here in CS.)
If the journey demanded superhuman levels of indulgence for the guide on the part of the travelers, then yes, the end had better be good.
I stopped reading King after Insomnia, because I was sick of his constant noodling around with nothing happening, obsession over minor details, third-rate elementary science lessons, etc. etc. ad nauseam.
Biggest “fuck you”?
NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!
I predict that the ending of “Lost” will not please anyone.
Although the ending of “Carnivale” was more an affect of having been canceled more than it was a ‘fuck you’ from the creators of the series, I still felt plenty fucked by it.
I always assumed that End of Evangelion was the fuck you. Fans were pissed at how Anno ended the series, so Anno gave them the perverted, ultra-violent conclusion that they all wanted, while answering virtually none of the questions remaining from the series and posing dozens more.
My brother’s a big anime fan, and his opinion of End of Evangelion was that it didn’t make much sense and wasn’t very satisfying, but that it made the final episodes more enjoyable because at least now he could re-watch them without having to ask “but what the hell is going on in the real world?” Because now he knew what was going on in the real world, namely some confusing junk about them all merging into goo and restarting the world. (I haven’t actually seen it, and I may be mis-stating what he said about it.) But at any rate, he didn’t seem to see it as a fuck you, as it at least served the purpose of transfering his confusion from the end of the series to the movie.
Season 7 of Buffy. Well, actually, that comes right after killing Tara. My wife and I will never forgive Joss for that.
Re: LoTR.
I’m apparently one of the few people who likes Tom Bombadil, but agree that there was no reason to have him in the movie.
Now, I happen to adore the Scouring of the Shire, and occasionally reread it by itself, as it works quite well as a short story. And I was pissed when I learned that it wasn’t going to be included in the movie. However, after I watched the movie, I realized that Jackson was right to leave it out. As it is, the denouments after the destruction of the ring drag the movie down. To add an entire new story and the end would have had audiences groaning. This is just one of those times when what works in a book doesn’t work onscreen.
::Pulls Stephen King’s flacid penis from mouth::
And just how could you have ended it any better?
::Happily replaces Stephen King’s flacid, fan-fucking penis back into mouth::
um wasnt that april fools day…wtf would you expect from those 2?
Unfortunately, I have to nominate one of my favorite shows for biggest Fuck You Fans.
The series finale of The X-Files. Although the last two seasons were not nearly as popular as the earlier ones, there were still millions watching faithfully, actually enjoying it still (usually).
And how did Chris Carter end it all? In the last four episodes he gave away Scully’s miracle baby to some hicks in Wyoming (somehow, giving him to an unsuspecting couple would make him “safer” than staying with his knowledgable parents. Makes the couple cannon fodder, imho), killed off all three of the Lone Gunmen, and then, in the last episode… spent nearly the entire two hours talking about/showing clips of the last two damn seasons. But he left just enough time to commit character assasination by insiunating that Mulder is such a pussy he spent a year in hiding over the fact that he knows the invasion date - which was 10 years from then- and is now a broken man. :rolleyes:
That should have been:
Mumfuh juth ohw ooo ud mumf–
::Pulls Stephen King’s flacid penis from mouth::
And just how could you have ended it any better?
::Happily replaces Stephen King’s flacid, fan-fucking penis back into mouth::
Written the books naturally over the course of your career rather than taking a 7-year hiatus, writing the fourth, taking another seven-year hiatus and then rushing out numbers five, six, and seven in the space of one year.
Yeah, that’s pretty cool in a dandelion and butterfly kind of way, but it doesn’t always work like that. As prolific as Stephen King is, he is human. It takes a tremendous amount of patience and skill to write a story at all, let alone a colossus like the Dark Tower Series. Books are rarely written in a natural way, and ideas do not come to you in even slivers over a set period of time. A great writer of fiction is nothing more than a court reporter, taking it all down as fast as he can when it comes. Sometimes nothing happens for a very long time. You’d be surprised how little control a writer has over his own work.
Yup.
Major character killed off stupidly; his friends don’t seem to notice; it all happens so another character can make a speech; dumb subplot; series hijacked by presence of characters from another series; character assassination of the dead character, and so much more.
Oh, and a slightly earlier episode apparently establishes that another major character is destined to die in a eugenic purge. Like finding out that Heidi died in Dresden, or something. :mad:
And I’ll second Chris Carter’s “scorched earth” job on the X-files. (I must have blotted it out of my mind.)
Which one?