marillaraina
Rohan
Jul 10 2012, 6:32am
Views: 23977
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Whateveh, I do what I want!(I hate having to fill in a subject EVERY single time:)
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It's also tragic when solid characters that look middle-aged, or even old, die untimely deaths. IMO, there's no need to "amp that up" by making Fili and Kili look like teenagers. I didn't say that, I said that no matter what they looked like, their probable "role" in the story would be the same so their role in the story really has nothing to do with what they look like. They look like they look for whatever reason, but their place in the story, IMO, was always going to be the same. It was always going to "amped up" - let's face it, almost none of the dwarves other than Thorin had much "face time" in the book, most of them were lucky if they had more than a couple of lines in the whole book. So IMO they were always going to flesh out Kili and Fili's roles in particular and their relationship with Thorin due to the fact they are his heirs and they DIE. It isn't middle aged dwarves or old dwarves who die(except Thorin), it's two young dwarves. I've often read that it was perhaps a little commentary by Tolkien, the whole idea of young men, full of promise and with their whole lives ahead of them, dying in "older men's wars" which was a big thing about WWI. That is what is usually the case, but due to the massive wholesale slaughter of millions of the young men of much of Western Europe in that war, it was a particularly big deal. How they look has nothing to do with whether or not they are "solid" characters either, which also means even if they don't have much in the way of prosthetics and look cute, if they are well written and well portrayed that should have no effect on whether or not they are solid characters. People judging the characters based on whether or not they look "dwarvish" enough(given the fact that they are in line for dwarf height and such) are just as guilty of being shallow as those who for whom the supposed fanservice was done for, IMO. And IMO Tolkien made a bit of a big deal in The Hobbit that Fili and Kili were younger and more agile, etc, etc so even if you don't like the way the film has gone about showing that, they were always IMO going to look like young adults(they certainly don't look like teenagers to me, I think that's a real exaggeration), given they were quite a bit younger than almost everyone else, the filmmakers were going to make them look that way. Not do the "all dwarves look the same age until they are 220". :) Because it's another tool for differentiating the character - the fashions and hairstyles and the ages are all ways of doing that. It seems to me all PJ did in that regards, leaving use of prosthetics aside for making them look or not look "dwarvish" according to some, was to increase the age a bit where young dwarves still look "young" as opposed to the "one size fits all" age that effects most dwarves after they reach a certain age until they get very old. So he's done it in such a way that you've young adult dwarves, middle aged dwarves of various shapes and sizes which make up the bulk of the rest and a couple dwarves perhaps bordering on an older age.
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