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I am so sad there’s not more LoTR stories. Have written about this before: https://www.thecodedmessage.com/posts/tolkien/ https://www.thecodedmessage.com/posts/

I am so sad there’s not more LoTR stories. Have written about this before: https://www.thecodedmessage.com/posts/tolkien/ https://www.thecodedmessage.com/posts/tolkien/

tptacek 3y ago
Why? Write new stories.
- randombits0 3y ago
  Just keep them to yourself! lol! This is where free expression and intellectual property butt heads. Had our subject merely distributed his writings openly (free), it would be much harder to shut him down.
  - saalweachter 3y ago
    Eh, just 20 years to go.
- TillE 3y ago
  This is always my argument with "fangames", which frequently get nuked by the copyright/trademark owner. Like, you put years of effort into making a game from scratch, the code is all original, the design is new, why ruin all that by putting in Mega Man or whatever? LOTR is great because it's a unique product of who Tolkien was, with his background in linguistics and experience in World War I and his Beowulf scholarship. Be your own interesting person and make your own stuff.
  - deafpolygon 3y ago
    I never understood why people put so much effort into fangames, fanfiction, etc. I mean - great, they're inspired! No copyright infringement there. Share it with the world. I feel like these days, real creativity is punished, and only 'meme'-able things get rewarded.
  - progman32 3y ago
    Fun. Because it's fun. Because we, as humans, generally like to tell stories, especially about shared culture. Making a tribute of an artifact is another way to appreciate it. It's another take, an amateur singer sharing a moment with their friends, singing a song from fiddler on the roof. I myself love recreating props from movies and games. It connects me to the author and other fans. I appreciate small details of its construction more. I perceive the steps the original craftsperson took. I understand, through a small window, the monumental effort it took to create the original greater creative work. I'm not saying not to create something new. Simply that it's fulfilling to some of us to experience our shared culture by contributing our own point of view. A new thing is great, not saying it isn't. Certainly, tributes of recent works are not a good commercial strategy. I personally haven't truly appreciated a great work like lotr or Chrono Trigger or Jurassic Park or what have you until I've recreated a small part of it out of love. Of course, this rant is limited to fan derivatives made out of passion. Attempts to deceive are another thing. I'm sorry if I'm rambling and come off as angry, I'm not and appreciate your point. But I find this suggestion to leave out the tribute part in fan works to kinda be missing the point. For my stuff I'd rather have made it and have it taken down, over not having made it at all.
- lmm 3y ago
  LoTR itself drew heavily on existing culture, to the point that some at least hinted that Tolkien had plagiarised. Good cultural works don't happen in a vacuum, they build on what came before.
  - tptacek 3y ago
    You can draw on the same sources. You can do it the same way Tolkien did; nobody is going to stop you. You can't sell Aragorn slash though.
pdonis 3y ago
Unfortunately I think it's extremely difficult for any writer today to really capture Tolkien's view of Middle-Earth, because Tolkien's sensibilities were so different from those of today. I get the idea of making things more accessible, but if you destroy the essence of the thing in the process, have you really gained anything? For example, I do not think the Peter Jackson movies, despite the monumental effort that went into them and Jackson's genuine interest in the material, actually capture what Tolkien was trying to capture. I have written about this here: http://blog.peterdonis.com/opinions/tolkiens-ring.html http://blog.peterdonis.com/opinions/tolkiens-ring.html I have not even tried to watch the TV series (I didn't even watch Jackson's The Hobbit movies), because it just looks like an even worse job of capturing Tolkien's viewpoint.
- gwern 3y ago
  I wonder if even Tolkien's own works would preserve the 'essence' that people see in LotR... Imagine you took someone who had just read _The Hobbit_, and you gave them a copy of the _Silmarillion_ carefully scrubbed of any identifying information and all of the critical apparatus, just the barebones fiction itself, and with a cover story like 'I got this off Ao3, you might like it'. I wonder how many people would realize it was even in the same fictional universe, much less by the same author?
  - pdonis 3y ago
    Someone who had read only The Hobbit would have a hard time seeing the relationship, yes. That's because Tolkien himself didn't conceive it when he wrote The Hobbit, and even when he started working on LotR; the latter was originally just another story about hobbits, since people had told him they wanted more hobbit stories. But, as he says in the foreword to LotR, that story got irresistibly drawn towards the older world, and became a story of its ending and passing away before its beginning and middle had been told. (I don't know if I'm giving what he said in the foreword word for word, but I think I'm pretty close.) So someone who read the LotR in its published form would see the connection, if for no other reason than some of the same characters (Elrond, Galadriel, Cirdan) appear in both works. And of course anyone who read the Appendices in detail would see even more connections, because Tolkien put them there on purpose. (Btw, after the publication of LotR, Tolkien went back and reworked some parts of The Hobbit, notably the encounter with Gollum in Riddles In The Dark. That reworked version is what most people now have read. The really original version, published before LotR, is even less related to the legendarium.)
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
aragilar 3y ago
Have you seen https://rustbucket.net/leithian/index.html https://rustbucket.net/leithian/index.html?

I am so sad there’s not more LoTR stories. Have written about this before: https://www.thecodedmessage.com/posts/tolkien/ https://www.thecodedmessage.com/posts/tolkien/

tptacek 3y ago

Why? Write new stories.

randombits0 3y ago
Just keep them to yourself! lol! This is where free expression and intellectual property butt heads. Had our subject merely distributed his writings openly (free), it would be much harder to shut him down.
- saalweachter 3y ago
  Eh, just 20 years to go.
TillE 3y ago
This is always my argument with "fangames", which frequently get nuked by the copyright/trademark owner. Like, you put years of effort into making a game from scratch, the code is all original, the design is new, why ruin all that by putting in Mega Man or whatever? LOTR is great because it's a unique product of who Tolkien was, with his background in linguistics and experience in World War I and his Beowulf scholarship. Be your own interesting person and make your own stuff.
- deafpolygon 3y ago
  I never understood why people put so much effort into fangames, fanfiction, etc. I mean - great, they're inspired! No copyright infringement there. Share it with the world. I feel like these days, real creativity is punished, and only 'meme'-able things get rewarded.
- progman32 3y ago
  Fun. Because it's fun. Because we, as humans, generally like to tell stories, especially about shared culture. Making a tribute of an artifact is another way to appreciate it. It's another take, an amateur singer sharing a moment with their friends, singing a song from fiddler on the roof. I myself love recreating props from movies and games. It connects me to the author and other fans. I appreciate small details of its construction more. I perceive the steps the original craftsperson took. I understand, through a small window, the monumental effort it took to create the original greater creative work. I'm not saying not to create something new. Simply that it's fulfilling to some of us to experience our shared culture by contributing our own point of view. A new thing is great, not saying it isn't. Certainly, tributes of recent works are not a good commercial strategy. I personally haven't truly appreciated a great work like lotr or Chrono Trigger or Jurassic Park or what have you until I've recreated a small part of it out of love. Of course, this rant is limited to fan derivatives made out of passion. Attempts to deceive are another thing. I'm sorry if I'm rambling and come off as angry, I'm not and appreciate your point. But I find this suggestion to leave out the tribute part in fan works to kinda be missing the point. For my stuff I'd rather have made it and have it taken down, over not having made it at all.
lmm 3y ago
LoTR itself drew heavily on existing culture, to the point that some at least hinted that Tolkien had plagiarised. Good cultural works don't happen in a vacuum, they build on what came before.
- tptacek 3y ago
  You can draw on the same sources. You can do it the same way Tolkien did; nobody is going to stop you. You can't sell Aragorn slash though.

pdonis 3y ago

Unfortunately I think it's extremely difficult for any writer today to really capture Tolkien's view of Middle-Earth, because Tolkien's sensibilities were so different from those of today. I get the idea of making things more accessible, but if you destroy the essence of the thing in the process, have you really gained anything? For example, I do not think the Peter Jackson movies, despite the monumental effort that went into them and Jackson's genuine interest in the material, actually capture what Tolkien was trying to capture. I have written about this here: http://blog.peterdonis.com/opinions/tolkiens-ring.html http://blog.peterdonis.com/opinions/tolkiens-ring.html I have not even tried to watch the TV series (I didn't even watch Jackson's The Hobbit movies), because it just looks like an even worse job of capturing Tolkien's viewpoint.

gwern 3y ago
I wonder if even Tolkien's own works would preserve the 'essence' that people see in LotR... Imagine you took someone who had just read _The Hobbit_, and you gave them a copy of the _Silmarillion_ carefully scrubbed of any identifying information and all of the critical apparatus, just the barebones fiction itself, and with a cover story like 'I got this off Ao3, you might like it'. I wonder how many people would realize it was even in the same fictional universe, much less by the same author?
- pdonis 3y ago
  Someone who had read only The Hobbit would have a hard time seeing the relationship, yes. That's because Tolkien himself didn't conceive it when he wrote The Hobbit, and even when he started working on LotR; the latter was originally just another story about hobbits, since people had told him they wanted more hobbit stories. But, as he says in the foreword to LotR, that story got irresistibly drawn towards the older world, and became a story of its ending and passing away before its beginning and middle had been told. (I don't know if I'm giving what he said in the foreword word for word, but I think I'm pretty close.) So someone who read the LotR in its published form would see the connection, if for no other reason than some of the same characters (Elrond, Galadriel, Cirdan) appear in both works. And of course anyone who read the Appendices in detail would see even more connections, because Tolkien put them there on purpose. (Btw, after the publication of LotR, Tolkien went back and reworked some parts of The Hobbit, notably the encounter with Gollum in Riddles In The Dark. That reworked version is what most people now have read. The really original version, published before LotR, is even less related to the legendarium.)

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

aragilar 3y ago

Have you seen https://rustbucket.net/leithian/index.html https://rustbucket.net/leithian/index.html?