Please do not read this! (Battles of The Lord of the Rings magazine ad)

[Bill Ferny]

The harshness of the following post is in response to the condescending tone of your last post. I know it is the Christian thing to turn the other cheek, but then again, chivalry does not turn its face from insult. I suggest if you want people to understand what you are saying, it would be a good idea to convey your thoughts clearly from the beginning. Of course, it would also be helpful if you stopped changing your mind so often.

Hmm, lets see shall we:

I have just seen an advert on the TV for A Battles of The Lord of the Rings magazine. I have never seen something so rediculas! It totaly destroys the meaning in the books, the characters look compleatly stupid…

Apparently you are talking about the game. Or at least you aren’t at all clear about what you are at odds with.

I HAVE NOTHING AGAINST THE GAMES!

Thank you for the much needed clarification. But do you mean war gaming? or Middle-Earth war gaming?

I have never liked those magazines.

You are definitely talking about the magazine here.

Not the gameing. The advert. I hate it how people make LOTR sound like that.

So, it’s the advertisement that you have problems with? I thought it was the magazine itself or maybe Middle-Earth war gaming?

I do not like this kind of thing because it makes the books look cheap, stupid and well, geeky.

Definitely said books. Now I at this point understood “books” as meaning the whole corpus of Tolkien’s work.

I know i said books, but what i really mean is the reputation of Tokien in todays world.

Thanks for that useless clarification. A clarification usually goes from the more general to the more specific. Here you went the other direction. His reputation as what? a writer? a linguist? a father? a husband? a neighbor? an Englishman? I took it from context that you meant his reputation as a literary figure. I won’t make the mistake of employing common sense when reading your posts in the future.

I mean Tolkien as a collective term for his works

Funny. That’s exactly what my understanding of “books” was before you brought up reputation.

I would like to know why you so passionatly defend this magazine. Why are you so eager to defend something that so clearly is lowering LOTR to the level of Harry potter?

Are you implying that there is some hidden agenda? That, maybe, I’m really a war gamer claiming not to be, or worse yet, the CEO of Games Workshop? Sorry, but no. That will come as a great pain for you, I'm sure… I know how much you would love to fit me and everyone else who disagrees with you into nice neat categories, like “geek” or “corporate cheeseba”.

In answer to your question, simply because I have all my life seen people ostracized by incredibly judgmental people just because of the things they like or the hobbies they enjoy. Yeah, I’m talking about “Trekkies”, HP fans, D&D gamers, historical re-enactors, war gamers, and video gamers, but let me tell you something, back in my day, the people in school who were ostracized for something they enjoyed, the kids who were called geeks, were the kids who read JRR Tolkien!

[ February 10, 2003: Message edited by: Bill Ferny ]