1. A brief thought on the Battle of Winterfell vs. Tolkien's major battles. One of the cliches of writing about Game of Thrones is the idea that its darkness and violence and shades-of-gray characters are a departure from "classic fantasy," meaning by implication JRR.
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4. And where this cashes out really effectively is in the final battles, Pelennor Fields and Black Gate/Mount Doom, where you have a sweeping good-versus-evil conflict overlapping with a struggle within a family, a company, a human heart.
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5. At the moment Sauron's armies are breaching the gates of Minas Tirith, the steward of the city is trying to burn his own son and himself alive. At the moment the armies of Gondor are making their last stand, in the Sammath Naur Frodo decides to claim the ring for himself.
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6. That kind of drama, the drama of Denethor burning Faramir and Frodo and Gollum struggling for the ring, was what was missing from the Battle of Winterfell. For all GoT's vaunted ambiguity, at the crucial moment everyone was united and heroic, the bad guys absent or killed off.
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7. No doubt we'll get ambiguity again in the last three episodes. But its absence here was an epic (literally) fail. And a reminder that the old master, old JRR, knew a thing or two about complexity that the GoT showrunners, at least, do not.
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Coda: Peter Jackson botched Denethor's arc in certain ways but this is still a useful tonic after last night's Avengers: Winterfell:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VAeDUYRmmPI …
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I will never forgive Peter Jackson for what he did to Denethor.
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Among other things! He also botched the ring's destruction.
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Ditto Feanor, Turin, Thorin, and others. All go bad in a ‘good cause’.
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When people say Tolkien can’t do tragedy I know them ignoramuses don’t know about my boy Túrin Turambar. May he arise in the dagor dagorath and get his justice.
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Have you ever read the malazan series?
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