Getting a boner from Gandalf is natural.
Edit: sorry didn't read the body of the post.
Sir this is a Wendy's
formatting: learn it, use it, love it.
its the same with the books... you spend so much time with them that when its over it feels like its own, parallel journey.
Interesting critique. I do love formatting! This post is formatted as a paragraph, which contains one or more sentences referring to a central topic. I felt it was the appropriate vehicle for this collection of thoughts.
It's been so long since I read all the books in one continuous go. I should do it again, but there are so many books I still haven't read it's hard to justify the time. I guess that's also true for movies, but it feels different somehow.
this is what the literary world technically calls a 'fucking wall of text begging for formatting'
ymmv
Interesting. On closer inspection it still seems like a perfectly ordinary-length paragraph to me. Maybe a little garden-path-y because I didn't have a clear idea of the end of the paragraph when I started writing it, but overall a single cohesive point.
I don't think I've ever considered what the qualifications are for a wall of text, but I've always assumed that a "wall of text" was an unbroken line that (with word wraps) was too tall to fit in a single screen. I guess that definition formed when screen resolutions were much smaller.
How would you have formatted it?
dont worry about the clanker, seemed perfectly fine to me
Thanks! I do like getting feedback on my writing, especially writing that I just spit out and fire off as opposed to agonizing over the composition. I think if I'm ever going to write a novel I need to get comfortable with "just writing" and this is good practice. I don't think /u/originalucifer is a bot, I think they just use them, and even if they're not great at articulating their problems with this piece, I'm still interested in getting to the bottom of what they think. Someone who complains about the formatting of a post in the LotR comm is very much my target demo 😅
per gemini;
The first half of your text is about media consumption (vinyl records, planning, and ceremony). The second half shifts into the internal logic of the story (the Fellowship, the threat of Sauron, and the isolation).
The Break: You transition from talking about watching a movie to being in the world of Middle-earth. These are two different "modes" of thought that deserve their own space.
You start with a cozy, nostalgic tone ("part of the charm," "mini-ceremony") and end with a very dark, visceral description of being hunted and alone.
The Impact: By keeping them in one paragraph, the dark intensity of the ending feels rushed. Splitting the paragraph allows the reader to reset their emotional state as the stakes of your argument get higher.
The sentence "But it struck me that it's the kind of story that should seem like it takes forever" acts as a bridge.
The Logic: In a well-structured essay, this sentence would either end the first paragraph or begin the second. Keeping it in the middle of a giant block hides the most important intellectual "click" of your argument.
Ironically, while you argue that the movies should feel like a long struggle, a piece of writing should generally avoid being a struggle to read.
The Reader's Experience: Without a paragraph break, the reader’s eye has no place to rest. They might skim the middle sections, missing your nuanced points about the Fellowship breaking up or the feeling of being alone in a crowd.I'm glad that you cited your source, because this is nonsense and I'm happy to take it apart for both of us. But for the sake of all of us, please don't take literary criticism from an LLM seriously, that's not what they do. All they can do is generate free-association text-adjacent word salad with mostly valid grammar, which, in the case of literary criticism, means they can only approximate the mean of all criticisms for all similar texts. At best, this makes them inane; at worst, it makes them convincing liars. Do not trust them.
The shift from metaphor to narrative: It's kinda telling on how LLMs operate that it describes a simile as a metaphor (which is possibly technically correct in that you could consider similes a type of metaphor) but it completely misses the metaphor of the, as it calls it, "internal logic of the story". It misses how that particular description of LotR is related to the preceding analysis, and only sees them as two discrete thoughts that would be better served by being separated by a paragraph break. They are not and they would not.
Rhetorical Escalation: I am at a bit of a loss here. I guess being on a long, difficult journey is sadder than playing a record, and therefore the piece has "rhetorical escalation"? Is any tonal shift considered an escalation? Can a paragraph not contain two tones?
The "Theme" pivot: this is the most insulting one of all, I think, because it hearkens back to the most braindead "rule" of writing paragraphs: the topic sentence must be the first sentence of a paragraph. That rule is for journalists writing baby-food news mash for people who scan newspapers for interesting paragraphs and I refuse. I'll put my paragraph breaks where they make sense for the story I'm telling, and sometimes I'll throw a volta in the middle of a paragraph. I might even put it in the middle of a sentence if I so please. Finally and least importantly, "the most important intellectual "click""? ugh.
Visual breathing room: Funny that this point directly invokes the specter of readers skimming my work. maybe I should break each sentence out into its own paragraph so readers don't have to read in between the scary lines. Or, maybe it's just twelve sentences that form a cohesive point. If people can't handle that in one block, I think I'm at peace with them not reading it. I don't think I'm asking too much. Especially from the LotR crowd.
It's a lot quicker than reading it! It's nearly half a million words, over if you include The Hobbit/Silmarillion.
Someone was claiming that the early chapters (I think it was the Old Forest stuff, after they left the Shire) were purposely written in a dense, slow style to make the reader really feel the weary progress. I don't think I believe that, but it's an interesting possibility.
Great post and analysis. 👍🏻
that it’s the kind of story that should seem like it takes forever
I mean, that's literally the point of the books...
For all the talk of Sauran's eye, he had to have ring wraiths track them and rely on such primitive methods as harassing crotchety old hobbits at their turnip farms.
Throw Frodo on the back of an Eagle, fly over the volcano and toss it in before anyone knew what was happening or it started to corrupt Frodo.
Like, the big excuse was always Frodo needed the journey to toughen up, but the reality is the journey took like fucking years and in the time it would have taken to fly there he'd never have used it to or had it long enough to be corrupted. Because by the end of it Sam basically had to do it.
But if an eagle can carry armored Dwarves or a full grown Gandalf, Sam could have rode bitch on the same eagle.
The real reason the story is so long, is Tolkein was a linguist who made up a language to stay sane in WW1, then after the fact wrote some books to justify the effort.
Which meshes with the excuse. The books aren't so long because the story needed them to be. They're so long and vivid because Tolkein needed them to be. He dealt with the absolute horrors of WW1 by sinking into this fantasy world. Coping methods don't go away when the situation does, so after the war getting lost in Middle Earth was preferable to PTSD before we knew how to treat it.
He'd spend 10 pages describing a door, because that hyper focus on his fantasy world kept out the images of WW1 that were literally and figuratively haunting his entire generation.
the big excuse was always Frodo needed the journey to toughen up
No, the big excuse was that the eagles would have been spotted by Sauron and killed by the ringwraiths or shot down by his army. And they were also prohibited by Manwe from getting involved directly.
I don't think escaping the trauma was his intention, not when his books deal so intimately with the corrosive effects of power. I think he was processing the trauma by telling a story that describes the feeling of those traumatic events, and tries to make sense of how regular people can talk themselves into such senseless violence. I think it's fair to describe that as coping, but I don't think his cope was just ignoring it by describing a nice door for 10 pages. I also don't think it's really fair to say he just wanted "a" story to go with his fancy languages. He had a real point about what evil is, and he wanted to tell it in a story.
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