Forum - View topic

This Week in Anime - Middle Earth, Circa 1978

. I’m also sure that there’s a lot of equally fascinating and vast discussions to Tolkien’s view of heroism and masculinity and how they don’t find themselves at odd with emotions unlike a lot of older, more stoic heroes from his contemporaries. It’s especially notable when you remember a lot of Tolkien’s work came out the same time as the popularity of pulp fiction and their focus on stoic heroes who rejected overt shows of emotion. But I don’t think anyone is interested in a dissertation that big on a message board.

The perpetual question of what is classified as anime. With the mainstream popularity of anime, and everyone doing their own thing with it, the lines have blurred.
For me anime is what I watched in the Eighties and Nineties. If you deviate too much from that, it is not really anime (for me). Anime is no longer in its remote little Garden of Eden anymore, but is now in its Wild West phase on the open range. Where everyone can claim their own little piece of the pie. Debate is practical pointless now. There is no anime International Astronomical Union (IAU) to classify what is anime. Wouldn't matter anyway, cause anime is mainstream popular, and everyone wants the cachet of anime.

If you want to call Rankin Bass animated movies, anime, there is no one to stop you. There is only the personal opinions of the fans and the glazed eyes of those who want to make money.

It's a sort of platonic relationship that comes up very rarely (if ever) in modern fiction, compounded by the fact that Sam was Frodo's manservant, a concept that doesn't really exist anymore. (Our closest comparison would probably be the bond that forms between fellow soldiers who gone through inexplicable horrors together.)....

My Sam Gamgee is indeed a reflection of the English soldier, of the privates and batmen I knew in the 1914 war, and recognized as so far superior to myself.

I especially think it's interesting how Frodo's empathy and compassion arguably saved the day by allowing Gollum to be there so that he could fall into Mt. Doom with the ring.

Frodo deserved all honour because he spent every drop of his power of will and body, and that was just sufficient to bring him to the destined point, and no further. Few others, possibly no others of his time, would have got so far. The Other Power then took over: the Writer of the Story (by which I do not mean myself), 'that one ever-present Person who is never absent and never named'...