I’m sure an invisible mouse with an evil, human-level intelligence in its head and a total commitment to do the latter’s bidding would have gone much better than what happened
Doesn’t the ring sort of connect the subject to Sauron or something? On a Plot level, I thought that was the whole point (thematically, the sheer power is the real reason, of course).
Nope. Sauron isn’t even aware of when someone wears the ring. The ring basically only has a handful of effects:
(Slightly) bends fate to favor Sauron’s interests (e.g.: bouncing in a particularly fateful direction, shining in a particularly noticeable way at a specific moment). This is basically the only thing it can do without an owner.
(Slowly) amplifies the wearer’s worst personality traits (e.g.: greed, powerlust, paranoia, hatred). The ring has enough agency over which traits it brings out to subtly favor Sauron’s interests, though this varies by individual and the extent of exposure.
Grants the owner wraith-like powers such as: invisibility, unnaturally long lifespan, and understanding of black speech.
Grants Sauron (or an equally skilled warlock) immense infuence over the owners of the other rings, including mind reading and partial control.
tl;dr: The ring exists as a tool to control the other wearers and is functionally useless to Sauron when he’s not wearing it. The other properties of the ring basically amount to a contingency plan… though it’s not actually well established just how intentional vs. accidental some of these auxiliary effects were.
I’d love to… but unfortunately that’s more-or-less the extent of what Tolkien has ever written about the One Ring. Tolkien was ultimately writing about Sauron (i.e.: the lord of the rings) and the evil miasma besetting Middle Earth which the lord personally embodied. Viewed through that perspective, the ring is merely a storytelling tool for imposing Sauron’s shadow upon our heroes without compromising his dramatic weight as the big bad.
With that being said, the One Ring became foundational in shaping the modern incarnation of what TV Tropes has dubbed the “Artifact of Doom”, though I’m more partial to the OSP classification of “Cursed Artifact” which focuses more on specifically malevolent & varyingly sentient magical artifacts (e.g.: the Monkey’s Paw, the Picture of Dorian Gray, Nightblood, Gonne, SCP-055). One of the curses (heh) of this particular trope is that it’s quite hard to stake the dramatic weight of a full narrative upon them, since they tend to lose their mystique as the audience gets more familiar – this works very well for short stories, though!
The concept of “fate warping” power, on the other hand, has caught on significantly less in western fantasy. This is actually kind of odd by historical standards because we can see similar explorations of the concept in both eastern and western mythology (e.g.: the (Chinese) Red Thread of Fate vs. the (Greek) Thread of Human Fate). It’s actually a bit of an unexplained mystery as to why the theme only fell out of favor in the western traditions!
Weeb that I am, I would be remiss not to mention the intricate mechanical and thematic power of fate in JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure – specifically in the context of Araki’s (fantastically bizzare) commentaries on justice, power, truth, and inequality which take center stage in parts 4-6. One of my favorite stories of all-time is the weighty JoJo Part 5 epilogue – “Sleeping Slaves” – because it makes such an eloquent and powerful statement about the roles of fate & heroic self-determination in the preceding story.
We had an Xbox hooked up to a wall mounted TV in our company break room. I used to show up first in the morning and play movies and streams on it for people to breeze by and see throughout the day. I could easily see someone doing this in a game store or gaming cafe.
This is probably the real explanation. I’ve been in several local small businesses where they’re constantly streaming the same TV shows/movies every time I go in there.
My wife puts Harry Potter movies on for background noise. We probably play some of them 100 times per year if not more. We only watch maybe 2% of the time though.
It appears my earlier comments were difficult to understand. I thought I was clear and succinct. Perhaps read them again?
Then again it’s unsurprising that you are asking for a verification, given that you felt it necessary in the first place to inject a retarded complaint about a fictional story to a random comment, in shitpost, on Lemmy.
Was magic ring ever explained on a technical level? I thought all we know is it wants to be with sauron and it makes angels shit themselves.
For all we know putting it on a mouse gives everyone mouse nightmares and make them worship the mouse as mouse king before they take it straight to sauron.
On her side, she was much more of a Tolkien nerd at the time, though I think I’ve surpassed her (an indictment of myself, I assure you).
For my part, I was burned out from classwork and did not experience anything from Moria to Amon Hen. Like, I didn’t even remember that I fell asleep - or rather, waking up. So it wasn’t until I saw it again that I realized I missed Galadriel and a whole lot else. This exacerbates my confusion about what’s in the theatrical/extended, to say the least.
so, we are agreed, should an orc be injured on the job the employer is obligated to have his blood distributed amongst the fellow orcs in order if most seniority, while his work will be distributed by least seniority, unless none are qualified to do it, in which case the union shall create a new posting for all the register to…
lotrmemes
Top
This magazine is from a federated server and may be incomplete. Browse more on the original instance.