The Hobbit Character Elimination Game

{{{I thought the bird that Thorin sends to Dain and that turns up on the battlements right before Dain turns up doing his best Billy Connolly impression was meant to be Roac, the thrush was, well the thrush, mute but sort of present I suppose, and the Lord of the Eagles I assumed was the one carrying Gandalf}}

{{{That had occurred to me, but the raven that goes flapping out looked a little speedy and sprightly for 153 years old IMO. }}}

Eldorion wrote:

{{{Y'know guys, I specifically include book characters who got left out of the movies in this, and left out movie-only ones. Don't let PJ cloud your minds too much! }}}

What about characters who are in both but differ enormously in each? As I've made clear before I like Thorin in the book, but have no great love for his film counterpart...

Use your best judgement I guess? Or, since most people seem be basing their decisions on the movie versions, just go along with that I suppose.

Eldorion wrote:Use your best judgement I guess? Or, since most people seem be basing their decisions on the movie versions, just go along with that I suppose.

In that case

Thorin-100.

The funny thing is, and I'm girding myself up to say this: I actually liked the movie Thorin better than book-Thorin. Book Thorin started as a bit of a fuddy-duddy and ended up as an arrogant git; the only reason we like him is his final good-bye to Bilbo.

Well yeah, book!Thorin is a pretty unlikeable character. That's how he's written to be. He doesn't so much as descend into madness towards the end as he simply succumbs to his pre-existing arrogance and self-centeredness. But he does get a redemption at the end (literally at the cost of his life), and who doesn't like a good redemption story?

Movie!Thorin is, IMO, presented as a blandly heroic leader figure while rarely do anything to justify the hero worship that most of the company direct towards him. His main claime to fame in the movie-verse is that he failed to kill Azog at the Battle of Azanulbizar (which everyone seems to know, but they just glance sidelong at each other rather than challenging him on this). He did have some nice scenes in DOS though which were probably the highlight of the movie character for me.

Book Thorin is 1000 times more interesting than the cliché Armitage version. I couldn't be more bored of film Thorin.

Women! You go through all this trouble to be a complexly brooding, sexy dwarf, and this is the thanks you get.

he is just Aragorn lite.

Aragorn's brood game too stronk. Thorin just can't compete.

EDIT: typical Forumshire that it's the spammy forum game thread that results in our longest Hobbit discussion in a while.

Lord of the Eagles 8 (+1)
Great Goblin 1 (-1)

GG's face when

I like it! Although usually in these games the negative votes are worth more points, and the positive only one. This speeds up eliminations and makes infinite ties impossible.

Here is an updated list of comprehensive votes. I added in my own in green and red. For future clarity, please simply Copy>Paste the list with your votes made. This will allow every poster to see what state the list is in.

+1 to Smaug the Magnificient! 
-1 to Thorin Poopy-pants

Contestants: 
Balin  9
Bard  5
Bolg  5
Bombur 6
Bilbo  5
Dain  5
Elrond  5
Fili  3
Gandalf  5
Gollum  6
The Great Goblin  1
Kili  4
The Lord of the Eagles  8
The Master of Lake-town  4
Roac  9
Smaug, the Chiefest and Greatest of Calamities!  6
Thorin  4
Thranduil 5
Thrush  5


Eliminated: 
Beorn

Forest is back!

Might be a good idea to use the whole list each time, Forest. I'll give it a go.

+1 to Roac, son of Carc 
-1 to Fili the sexy dwarf

Contestants: 
Balin  9
Bard  5
Bolg  5
Bombur 6
Bilbo  5
Dain  5
Elrond  5
Fili  2
Gandalf  5
Gollum  6
The Great Goblin  1
Kili  4
The Lord of the Eagles  8
The Master of Lake-town  4
Roac  10
Smaug, the Chiefest and Greatest of Calamities!  6
Thorin  4
Thranduil 5
Thrush  5


Eliminated: 
Beorn

Eldorion wrote:

Movie!Thorin is, IMO, presented as a blandly heroic leader figure while rarely do anything to justify the hero worship that most of the company direct towards him.

Armitage is clearly a great actor, but for me personally Jackson and co tried so hard to make Thorin oh so tragic and likeable it only ended up annoying me and being obvious what they were trying to do-reworking a flawed, aged and regal king in exile into a tragic warrior in his prime, whilst Thorin in the book is self centered, arrogant and tactically clueless most of the time and rarely acts like the hero, personally I found him a much more forceful, morally grey and intriguing protagonist both Thorin and Bilbo really have to earn the audiences trust and their friendship during the course of the story in the films they felt far too chummy almost immediately for me.

In the appendices to LOTR (or it might have been Quest For Erebor) Tolkien writes (paraphrased) that the 'embers of vengeance in his heart' were growing dull', he's quite old for a Dwarf and the last in a long line that mostly met tragic fates so I think alot of his bluster and arrogance comes from the weight of his age and failure weighing down on him.

I could be a and also argue that Aragorn in the films is a more interesting and likeable protagonist than the Aragorn in the books for similar reasons-in the films he's the self doubting action hero reluctantly facing up to his destiny and awkwardly dealing with his relationship with Arwen, in the book he's more or less fully formed and eager to reclaim his Throne...

Mrs Figg wrote:Book Thorin is 1000 times more interesting than the cliché Armitage version.  I couldn't be more bored of film Thorin.

malickfan wrote:I could be a and also argue that Aragorn in the films is a more interesting and likeable protagonist than the Aragorn in the books for similar reasons-in the films he's the self doubting action hero reluctantly facing up to his destiny and awkwardly dealing with his relationship with Arwen, in the book he's more or less fully formed and eager to reclaim his Throne...

You could, but it's kind of a weird criticism to make since book!Aragorn isn't a protagonist in the conventional novelistic sense in the first place...

Eldorion wrote:

malickfan wrote:I could be a and also argue that Aragorn in the films is a more interesting and likeable protagonist than the Aragorn in the books for similar reasons-in the films he's the self doubting action hero reluctantly facing up to his destiny and awkwardly dealing with his relationship with Arwen, in the book he's more or less fully formed and eager to reclaim his Throne...

You could, but it's kind of a weird criticism to make since book!Aragorn isn't a protagonist in the conventional novelistic sense in the first place...

Touche, you got me there

LOTR isn't a conventional novel anyway...

It definitely isn't, although I think it still fits into the definition, just near the fringes.

Sometimes I think the single biggest change in the movies was turning Aragorn into a typical protagonist. Not so much in terms of giving him more of the narrative spotlight, although they did that too, but in terms of telling so much of the story through his point-of-view (as opposed to none of it), and having his choices be the ones that drive the story forward at many points, even moreso than Frodo's choices do (especially since Frodo is made so passive by the movies).

There's only 3 times that Aragorn seems fully human in the books: when he doubts himself at Cair Andros; when he smokes on the ruins of Isengard; and when he tells Merry in the Houses of the Healing that he'll just have to deal with losing his backpack. It would have taken an awful lot of self-confidence on the part of the-movie makers to keep him unfathomable between those brief glimpses through the chinks of his armour. I still feel Daniel-Day Lewis could have pulled off book Aragorn, but it would have faltered in other actor's hands.

{{{{I would add telling his tale of Luthien at Weathertop to that last, remembering pledging his love for Arwen when they enter Lothlorien, the pain with which he rejects Eowyn before the Paths of the Dead and when the mood of battle that is on him when he meets Eomer on the field, there's probably more, but I suppose my point is that there are more 'human' motivations and elements in Aragorn than Tolkien chooses to draw huge attention to, they are there, they are just emphasised the way a modern writer would- its not a matter of having to alter the character, its a matter of finding ways to draw greater attention to those aspects of him, to bring them more to the fore and to the audiences attention}}

We get glimpses of Aragorn's emotional life, albeit brief ones, but because the story is told from the Hobbits' perspective it's not until we get into the Appendices (which draw from primarily non-Hobbit sources of lore) that we really get a sense of what's going on. In addition to the ones already mentioned, I always thought the passage below was very telling, both for indicating that Aragorn was not an utterly assured automaton, and for highlighting the distance between him and our POV characters:

FOTR, II, The Ring Goes South wrote:Their farewells had been said in the great hall by the fire, and they were only waiting now for Gandalf, who had not yet come out of the house. A gleam of firelight came from the open doors, and soft lights were glowing in many windows. Bilbo huddled in a cloak stood silent on the doorstep beside Frodo. Aragorn sat with his head bowed to his knees; only Elrond knew fully what this hour meant to him. The others could be seen as grey shapes in the darkness.

The neat thing about Aragorn is that you never understand him until the second reading.