Vanadium 50 said:
characters are either entirely good or entirely evii.
I wouldn't put it quite like that (although it is a fairly common--if IMO mistaken--criticism of Tolkien that he presents everything as morally black and white). I would put it that the way characters
end up, their final fates, are either entirely good (e.g., Aragorn having a peaceful reign as King for 120 years) or entirely evil (e.g., Denethor burning himself on a pyre and trying to do likewise with Faramir). But that doesn't mean everything they do has the same valence. Aragorn makes mistakes, and Denethor does some good things.
Vanadium 50 said:
There is relatively little nuance. Saruman was corrupted by using the Palantr (It's true! TV does rot your brain!) and not beause he intrinsically felt that the ends justify the means.
I don't agree with this. Saruman, for example, is not corrupted by the palantir. He is corrupted by Sauron
through the palantir, but he is only vulnerable to such corruption because he has already adopted the view that the ends justify the means, and done so long before. (To be fair, much of this back story isn't even brought out in the Appendices to LotR; you have to read Of The Rings Of Power and several of the pieces in Unfinished Tales to fully appreciate what happens to Saruman and how long it takes to happen. For example, he prevents the White Council from driving Sauron out of Dol Guldur for 90 years because he believes that the Ring will reveal itself and give Saruman a chance to take it for himself if Sauron is let be for a time.)
Denethor, similarly, gives way to despair only after decades of successfully holding off Sauron's threat to his realm. (And note that Sauron is
not able to corrupt Denethor through the palantir; all Sauron can do is affect what Denethor can see through the palantir, so he only sees the things that promote despair and not those that promote hope.) And what finally makes him give way is the apparently un-healable wound to his son; what father would
not be at least somewhat vulnerable to despair under those conditions? But if he were open to the possibility of a King coming again, he might have wondered if the tales about the King's hands being hands of healing might be true and might provide a hope of healing for Faramir.
Vanadium 50 said:
there is stll a sense of interchangability of his non-Man characters. What differences of opinion is there betweem say Dwalin and Oin? Dwarves is dwarves, and elves is elves and orcs is orcs and that's all there is to it.
To the extent this is true, I think it's just an unavoidable limitation of any storytelling--you can't possibly tell the full story of
every character you present. Many characters, just by the nature of the medium, will end up being supporting characters with much less development than the main ones. Dwalin and Oin are supporting characters and don't get the same development; there's no way around that.
But if you consider the
main characters of the different races, I don't think they're all the same. Gimli, and even Gloin in LotR, though his appearance is much briefer, are not the same as Thorin in The Hobbit. Elrond is not the same as Galadriel, or Cirdan, or Glorfindel. Even the main orcs are differentiated: Ugluk is not the same as Grisnakh, nor are either of them the same as Gorbag or Shagrat.
There wasn't a "groan" emoji so I did what I could.
