i just think it’s neat that odysseus gets put in a position where he has to kill his child to avoid going to war and he can’t do it and then agamemnon gets put in a position where he has to kill his child to go to war and he does it
I went to a bookshop and I got dizzy at the amount of books on stuff like “astrological feminism” “reclaiming womanhood through numerology” and all that shit…… One was called “cosmic fanny” or for my french speakers out there, “foufoune cosmique”. I think the fight against patriarchy is going really well
“But I didn’t and still don’t like making a cult of women’s knowledge, preening ourselves on knowing things men don’t know, women’s deep irrational wisdom, women’s instinctive knowledge of Nature, and so on. All that all too often merely reinforces the masculinist idea of women as primitive and inferior – women’s knowledge as elementary, primitive, always down below at the dark roots, while men get to cultivate and own the flowers and crops that come up into the light. But why should women keep talking baby talk while men get to grow up? Why should women feel blindly while men get to think?”
Ursula K Le Guin, from What Women Know
One night we had a thrilling summer storm… We hadn’t been in the house long, and it was the first time in this house we’d had to close all the windows. In the morning I smelled gas, strong, unmistakable. “I smell gas,” I said to my husband. “I don’t smell it,” he said. He had a friend come over. “Why are you having a friend come over,” I asked, “when it doesn’t matter if he can smell it or not, and none of us can fix it?” His friend didn’t smell it, either. I called the gas company. The gas company employee didn’t smell it, either. He waved his reader around and it blasted off in three places, substantial leaks behind the stove and in the basement. “Always trust a woman’s nose,” the gas company employee said.
Yes, I thought, believe us.
Then, No, I thought, I’m not a fucking witch. Believe anyone who smells gas. If someone smells gas, believe them.
One difference between the Lord of the Rings books and the Peter Jackson films that I find really interesting is what the hobbits find when they return to the Shire.
In the books, they return from the War, only to see that the war has not left their home untouched. Not only has it not left their home unscathed, battle and conflict is still actively ravaging the Shire. They return, weary and battle-scarred, to find a home actively wounded and in need of rescue and healing. All four launch themselves into defending their home and rousting those harming it, and eventually succeed. But their idyllic home has been damaged, and even once healed, is never quite again the Shire they set out to save.
In contrast, in the Jackson films, they return to a Shire shockingly untouched by the horrors of war. The hobbits of the Shire talk, in the Green Dragon in Fellowship of the Ring, about not getting involved with issues “beyond our borders,” and it seems those issues have not invaded their sanctuary. After having been bowed to by kings, dwarves, elves, and men alike at the coronation in Gondor, their only acknowledgment upon returning home is a skeptical head shake from an older hobbit.
One of the most poignant scenes to me in Return of the King (and there are a considerable amount) is the scene where Frodo, Sam, Merry, and Pippin are sitting in the Green Dragon. The pub patrons bustle around them, talking loudly, clapping excitedly, drinking cheerfully, just as they had in the beginning of the story. But the four hobbits sit silently, watching almost curiously at what was once familiar but is now foreign to them. Their home has not changed. But they have.
Which is the deeper hurt? To come to your home to find it irrevocably changed, despite all you did to keep it untouched and the same? Or to return home but no longer feeling at home, because it is only you that is irrevocably changed?
As an Australian, I can’t help but wonder if Jackson being a New Zealander affects this. Although he’s obviously too young to have done so, New Zealanders and Aussies fought in the two world wars that inform the writing of the Lord of the Rings. And where Britain was bombed during WWII on night raids, Australia and New Zealand were largely untouched.
A British soldier returning home in 1949 would have had a vastly different homecoming to a New Zealander returning home from a war half a world away.
(that said, the reason the scouring of the shire wasn’t included was legitimately just they had no time)
Yes they had no time, but how they played that was fucking masterful because they still made it poignant and it still worked totally with the overall themes and character arcs.
While I’m intellectually aware Palpatine is the brains behind the Jedi Genocide, I can’t help myself in holding Anakin very accountable for it.
Since I think that the temple could have defended itself better if Anakin hadnt stormed it.
And if Obi-Wan and Yoda (and maybe even Anakin) had been able to battle the Chancellor together, perhaps they could have stopepd the Empire from rising. [It would still be up to the galaxy and its citizens to straighten out their corrupt gov, of course. The Jedi weren’t in a position to help that and shouldn’t have to.]
At the end of the day, I think Palpatine is enough of a goddamn selfserving coward that he would have never dared to attack the Temple himself. He wouldn’t have dared to conduct the 20-year hunting down of Jedi either. It had to be a pawn. And if nothing else, Vader is a powerful pawn.
Anakin gave himself over and it granted Palpatine so much ease and efficiency for cruelty.
Padme lives aus are always good but it gets funnier when you consider that if padme lives the rebellion vs the empire will be just the messiest divorce in history featuring custody battle for the twins
padme leading the rebels and vader leading the imperials meeting in the battlefield and the fight stops for a verbal argument of galactic proportions
ALT
