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PaperclipPerfector  5mo ago (text post)   4001 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for June 23, 2024

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

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So, what are you reading?

I’m on Wadsworth’s The Poacher from Stratford, a now somewhat dated academic book on the Shakespeare authorship question which affirms the orthodox case and studies the skeptics.

I had a lot of time this weekend to knock out Thomas Weaver's Artificial Wisdom (3/5) and Pierce Brown's Morning Star (4/5). I'm pressing on in the Red Rising series, a fun and action-packed space opera, with the fourth book, Iron Gold. I've read the fifth book, Dark Age, is the best in the series, by a mile, and I'm excited to get to it.

I'm reading China Miéville's Iron Council. He's a very descriptive author and I'm curious that more people haven't tried to copy this shtick of Industrial Revolution-set high fantasy. I feel this book is a bit more on-the-nose with respect to hitting the viewer on the head with Miéville's (anarchist) politics which is a bit unfortunate because in the other works I've read from him it's not bothered me.

I've read all of the Bas-Lag trilogy, and tbh I think that Perdido Street Station was one that hit you with the head with the politics the most. The Scar is comparatively apolitical.

The aspect of his politics that appears most throughout his books appears to be fucking xenos.

Ehh, again, I don't think this featured in The Scar, at least prominently. I don't remember that much about Iron Council, but in PSS this particular aspect came off as rather written for shock value.

I've only read three of his books and it featured in Perdido Street Station and Embassytown, but maybe those are the exceptions.

I started Master and Commander this week. I saw the film before, and it's both a perfect adaptation could not be better, and doesn't hold a candle to the book, at the same time. The sheer wildness of the book is amazing. I'm also kind of amused at the number of times Maturin calls Aubrey fat in the book, and I'm curious how everyone else pictures Jack.

After watching the films in theaters, I started the Fellowship of the Ring on Audible, the Andy Serkis reading was available free. What a majestic work. I hadn't read it in years, and I'm so happy returning to it. It's interesting though that Serkis' reading is clearly influenced by the films, when he voices the main characters at times it feels like Serkis-doing-Orlando-Bloom instead of an independent interpretation of Legolas. T

he film adaptation can really close in your mind, in some ways, like the visualization of the Nazgul becomes the canonical view of them. I'm really reconsidering them on this read/listen. When the hobbits raise the alarm in Buckland, the Nazgul scamper, clearly a bunch of farmers showing up with torches and pitchforks would have been bad for them in some way. Were they secretly kinda cotton candy under the cloaks?

and I'm curious how everyone else pictures Jack.

I've always pictured Jack as "beefy" in his frequent weight gains. Like imagine a boxer who has been retired for a year. Muscular and capable of immense violence but also a good 20-30 kg above normal weight.

When the hobbits raise the alarm in Buckland, the Nazgul scamper, clearly a bunch of farmers showing up with torches and pitchforks would have been bad for them in some way. Were they secretly kinda cotton candy under the cloaks?

I think according to Tolkien they just weren't very strong far away from Mordor, as none of them had their rings. Aragorn makes the point that they're physically not very capable and that fear and what they might inspire other ne'er-do-wells to do are their biggest concerns (while in Bree).

I was always a bit confused by how weak or timid the black riders were in the first book. Explained it as not wanting to draw the attention of the remaining powers in the north, either Saruman or Rivendell.

You don't want your guys to find the baggins and the ring, only to meet Glorfindel in a dark alley on the way home east, or Saruman in the gap of Rohan heading south. And that's exactly the sort of thing sauron would be worried about, especially because he knows the enemy knows something (if only because saruman's developed ring-mania and elrond is still around), but not how much.
So even once they find Frodo they want to grab him far from watching eyes and get home quietly (Aragorn says something almost exactly like that after they leave bree iirc).

But it could just be the power scaling of the first book vs the third, as we'd call it today.

Think of the nazguls as leaders and special ops. They're good one on one fighters, and can serve as force multipliers when leading troops (through inspiration or terror), but in the north, they're in enemy territory.

Our gamer minds have been infected by RPGs into seeing power scaling by orders of magnitude, your hero starting as a level 1 with tens of hitpoints and finishing at level 99 with tens of thousands of hitpoints and no reasonable numbers of lvl 1 characters could even come close to representing a serious threat to it. But Tolkien probably had something more like Dark Souls scaling in mind, where super powerful characters are a couple of times more powerful than starting characters, but even beginning trash mobs in the right situation and in the right numbers can still be a credible threat. Aragorn is a powerful fighter and would be almost guaranteed to win a 1 on 1 fight against any other characters weaker than the Lich King or an ancient elf. But I don't think Tolkien had in mind that if, say, 10 average gondorian guardsmen surprise attacked Aragorn their swords would essentially bounce off of him because they're too weak and he's too powerful. Or that he could solo the entire Shire in an open fight. Or think of Boromir's fate; he was supposed to be one of the most powerful human warriors out there, and I think it's probably fair to assume he would have been at least a match for one nazgul that isn't the Lich King, as that was the point of opposing 9 members of the Fellowship to the 9 riders. He was killed not in a fight against another "unique" named enemy, but just tens of orcs/uruk hai.

So your nazguls, if they didn't act covertly, would risk facing a couple of hundred strong hobbit militia, and that's just wasteful use of elite special forces or officers.

Even in the third book though, the Nazgul never actually do anything beyond instill terror in those around them. Near as I can tell, in terms of physicality, they're just dudes in cloaks (maybe even less substantial than that) who can be killed (at least for temporarily? It's implied in Fellowship that their physical forms can be destroyed but that their spirits endure and can eventually reconstitute, but the Witch King is killed killed by Eowyn, who's just a normal lady with a normal sword).

Pretty much every time a character actually stands their ground and fights back against a Nazgul, they either win or fight to a stand-still (see their skittishness early in Fellowship, Aragorn and Gandalf each on weathertop, Glorfindel scaring them away, Gandalf staring down the Witch King in Minas Tirith, Eowyn and Merry).

Merry hit him with the +1 Knife of Fuck Litches first though, which got rid of all his magical bullshit.

In the original Age of Wonders the undead had an expensive Wraith unit that was basically a black rider/witch king. They had mediocre stats but physical immunity that let them kill any number of normies. But since anyone with a magic weapon could kill them, you had to be very careful about when and where you revealed them, or next turn some methed-out hobbit riding a bird would fly out of nowhere and beat them with the purple-glowing stick a wizard gave him.
They were most powerful being everywhere and nowhere, strangling the opponent's economy by keeping him scared that ghosts would walk through the walls and murder everyone.

Thinking about it more, a few explanations jump out:

  1. They really aren't very tough, they're just spooks, scary, and if you're brave enough to face them they run off. One of the big changes they make in the films, in my mind, is that the Orcs in the films are brave and disciplined and self-sacrificing. Their commanders are brutal and have little care for their lives, but the Orcs are more than willing to jump right in and sacrifice themselves. Tolkien views courage, martial discipline, and self-sacrifice as inherently positive "good" characteristics; his villains are all cowards, they'll flee when the good guys stand up unless they have absolute confidence in their success. To a certain extent with respect to the Nazgul, this is probably a change that Jackson has to make in the film, terror aura probably doesn't really translate to film well. It's also probably a change in view from Tolkien's time to ours, we grew up on WWII dramas filled with Kamikaze pilots and last stands in Berlin, on VietCong and Contras, and the films were released (and edited) more or less coterminously with 9/11 and the war on terror stuff. We were very used to impossibly brave and self-sacrificing foes being not just on the side of evil, but a sign of evil itself.

  2. After sixty years of interpreters and imitators, and DnD/Vidya in particular, it's tough for me to realize that scientific knowledge isn't really something Tolkien does. Later authors and Dungeon Masters would have very precise rules about who has what power level, who beats who, and what does how much damage, and what happens to who when they're hit. There's a baseline of scientific laws that are pre-determined before combat starts between characters, deciding what will happen and why. We don't have that, and neither do the characters, in Tolkien. Tolkien's characters don't really know what happens when a ringwraith gets stabbed in the face, or lit on fire, or thrown down a stream. They have guesses based on gathered lore, they perhaps have similar cases they can deduce from. But even the Nazgul themselves don't really know what will happen to them, what can harm them and what can't, other than the Witch King who is pretty confident no man can slay him.

So can the Nazgul be killed by Bucklanders? Maybe, maybe not, but the Nazgul are giving the same answer we are, and they very much don't want to get got.

Aside: it's actually not entirely clear about the Witch King. She definitely disables him, but the last time they got discorporated (to use the Good Omens term) it was some months before we saw them again. The Witch King goes down just a few days before the Ring gets destroyed, so we're not really certain if he would have turned back up given enough time to get it back together. But he was out of commission when it all came down, so we'll never know.

Now on to Rivendell and the Fellowship Roster Moneyball memes

That scene in the special edition--where The Witch King shatters Gandalf's staff and is about to have his Felbeast eat him, until suddenly the Rohan trumpet spooks The Witch King and he flies off--really annoys me. Long time since I read the book but I don't remember that being there.

The Witch-King is apparently on a horse, and he doesn't shatter Gandalf's staff, but the horns of Rohan do interrupt his meeting with Gandalf and cause him to leave the city gates to meet the Rohirrim on the field.

Geoffrey of villehardin’s account of the fourth crusade. It’s interesting because despite the utter train wreck, our author believes that no mistakes were made.

I read Joinville's account of the even-more-a-shitshow 7th crusade in school, so thanks for recommending the prequel series

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