Moments when a piece of entertainment completely lost you.

Kaelik · Post by **Kaelik** » Wed Dec 31, 2014 5:17 am

I watched it with my siblings, and we made a lot of jokes, but my favorites are:

1) The Orcish Army from the gateway to Angmar fortress comes down south to the Mountain to Conquer it, because from there they can conquer Angmar. Wait what?

2) The Battle of Five Armies must be the single biggest reason that Gondor doesn't fall, because this pile of dwarves and elves kills more trolls and siege trolls, and presumably siege worms in one battle than exist in the entire LotR series of movies.

3) Instead of doing something not stupid, like opening the gate, and bringing the vastly outnumbered dwarves in to defend a small choke point against the orcs they add 13 dwarves to the fight, and this magically makes them go from certain defeat to certain victory.

4) WTF are goblin mercenaries? No really. Mercenaries get paid by multiple factions, that is what separates them from just paid soldiers. So why didn't the goddam 13 dwarves pay the goblin Mercenaries to join their side? Does anyone imagine there are a bunch of goblins that are ever hired by elves or dwarves or men?

5) The shield wall sets in place, so that elves can jump over it before it breaks the Orc charge, thus completely defeating the purpose of a shield wall. (Also the elves where hundreds of yards away when the orcs where feet away, and then because their leader changed his mind, they all teleported to be right behind the dwarves to jump the wall. WTF?)

Shatner · Post by **Shatner** » Wed Dec 31, 2014 5:53 am

Goblins are independent from the orcs so they can and do get hired by various orc-groups at various times. The fact that no one else ever bothers hiring them is, well, Tolkien didn't like his good races mingling with his evil races even when that'd be a smart thing for the good guys to do.

Yeah, the elves jumping over the shield wall so they could ginsu some orcs was really stupid. I was actually kinda excited to see the unstoppable charge meet the immovable shield wall, but like all things in a fantasy setting, the elves show up and ruin it.

Prak · Post by **Prak** » Wed Dec 31, 2014 5:54 am

Because remember, Kaelik, elves are better than everyone else.

Shatner · Post by **Shatner** » Wed Dec 31, 2014 5:55 am

Prak wrote:Because remember, Kaelik, elves are better than everyone else.

To be fair, in the actual Tolkien setting, they are. I'm pretty sure Tolkien wasn't just a member of the Elf-Wank for Men club, he was also the president/founder.

But still, stupid tactics are stupid, even when ageless mary sues are doing it.

shau · Post by **shau** » Wed Dec 31, 2014 6:14 am

Shatner wrote: Latest Film
"Goblin mercenaries, no more than a hundred." - a dwarf
"You two, go scout out that tower; we'll deal with these." - Thorin
[Two dwarves proceed to kill 100 goblins and then kill another 100 orcs before some rival named characters proceed to shut that shit down]

This part just killed me. Also, the vast majority of this fight happens off screen. Fifty to one odds is not even dangerous enough to bother watching. I also don't even know which dwarf that was supposed to be. I don't think anyone has said his name since the first movie.

Prak · Post by **Prak** » Wed Dec 31, 2014 6:38 am

That was a weakness of the book too. 12 fucking dwarves a ridiculous main cast, and in effect there were really two main characters for most scenes, Bilbo and The Dwarves. If I'm remembering correctly, which I may not be.

On the subject of goblin mercenaries-- weren't there at least a few tribes of men that weren't part of the good guys who might have employed goblin mercs?

Maxus · Post by **Maxus** » Wed Dec 31, 2014 7:30 am

In the book, most of the dwarves don't really interact with him. He normally had stuff to do with Balin, who was always pretty cool with him. Followed him in the Lonely Mountain a ways, all that.

(Now, I will say I liked a lot of the scenes with Bilbo and Thorin in the movie. That was pretty good.)

Count Arioch the 28th · Wed Dec 31, 2014 8:15 am

There was also Bombur, who was very fat. In the books Bilbo has somewhat more interaction with Bombur than most of the other dwarves, I don't know why they made bombur silent in the hobbit moives.

Josh_Kablack · Post by **Josh_Kablack** » Wed Dec 31, 2014 8:25 am

Bah, you guys are being too harsh. This was the best Pirates of the Caribbean movie yet, and I can't wait to go on the boat ride at Disney next year.

Kaelik · Post by **Kaelik** » Wed Dec 31, 2014 11:22 am

Shatner wrote:Goblins are independent from the orcs so they can and do get hired by various orc-groups at various times.

Uh, no. In Tolkien goblins and orcs are actually the same goddam thing, and there is no indication at any point that orcs infight, or have an economy, so pretty much any theory on mercenaries is inventing whole cloth more than Tolkien did, especially since you would be inventing a nomadic group who travels between locations that are very far away, ranging from Angmar to Mordor, taking payment in unspecified form to, apparently, fight other orcs.

Longes · Post by **Longes** » Wed Dec 31, 2014 1:21 pm

Kaelik wrote:
Shatner wrote:Goblins are independent from the orcs so they can and do get hired by various orc-groups at various times.
Uh, no. In Tolkien goblins and orcs are actually the same goddam thing, and there is no indication at any point that orcs infight, or have an economy, so pretty much any theory on mercenaries is inventing whole cloth more than Tolkien did, especially since you would be inventing a nomadic group who travels between locations that are very far away, ranging from Angmar to Mordor, taking payment in unspecified form to, apparently, fight other orcs.

Orcs explicitly have lush fields on the east(?) of Mordor, which is where all their food comes from.

About orcs and goblins. Tolkien had this to say:

Orc is not an English word. It occurs in one or two places but is usually translated goblin (or hobgoblin for the larger kinds). Orc is the hobbits' form of the name given at that time to these creatures, and it is not connected at all with orc, ork, applied to sea-animals of dolphin-kind.

He also realised later that "hob-" is used for smaller tihngs, not larger, but never corrected his mistake.

Shrapnel · Post by **Shrapnel** » Wed Dec 31, 2014 2:13 pm

Going back to the siege worms... I thought they were really cool, but they are severely underutilized; for instance, why didn't they have them borrow underneath the Mountain and pop up inside it, creating tunnels that the orcs could use to enter into the dwarf's stronghold and wreck havoc? But no, all they do is pop up out of the ground for two minutes and then disappear.

Kaelik · Post by **Kaelik** » Wed Dec 31, 2014 9:11 pm

Longes wrote:Orcs explicitly have lush fields on the east(?) of Mordor, which is where all their food comes from.

The existence of food that they eat does no indicate an economy that would have infighting and some form of payment to make to mercenaries. Everyone eats, Ants Eat. Nothing about having food indicates that orcs are anything other than a roaring proto-hivemind in which all the individuals subsume their interests to the good of the colonySauron, and in which payment is therefore nonexistent and meaningless.

Chamomile · Post by **Chamomile** » Thu Jan 01, 2015 3:28 pm

Shatner wrote:1) Gandalf knowing about Bilbo having the ring. WTF?!

I don't see the problem? Gandalf knew Bilbo had a magic ring of invisibility in Fellowship of the Ring.

2) Legolas being sent to recruit Aragorn.

Don't really see the problem with this one either.

3) Setting-destroying tunnel-worms of dooooom! How are these not used to win every siege ever?

Yeah, no complaints here. The Dune worms were stupid. Where did they go after digging the tunnels? They can't have gone back in the tunnels, because the orc armies march out of them immediately afterwards. Why didn't the orcs use them to tunnel up directly underneath an enemy position? It's every problem the Eagles have but ten times worse.

Re: Goblin mercenaries, I think it was mentioned at some point that the mercenaries came from Moria. Tolkien doesn't really go into orc politics but it doesn't seem like an unreasonable extrapolation that Moria and Gundabad might be different entities, even if they are both vassals of Mordor.

angelfromanotherpin · Post by **angelfromanotherpin** » Thu Jan 01, 2015 3:49 pm

Chamomile wrote:Tolkien doesn't really go into orc politics but it doesn't seem like an unreasonable extrapolation that Moria and Gundabad might be different entities, even if they are both vassals of Mordor.

They are different entities, but that justification kind of falls apart in the movie where the orc assault on Erebor is some kind of master plan of Sauron's, and not just one orc faction's blood feud.

Maxus · Post by **Maxus** » Thu Jan 01, 2015 5:10 pm

Not to mention Azog was the orc who took over Moria. Thror was slain trying to take it back.

Ancient History · Post by **Ancient History** » Thu Jan 01, 2015 5:14 pm

Chamomile wrote:
Shatner wrote:1) Gandalf knowing about Bilbo having the ring. WTF?!
I don't see the problem? Gandalf knew Bilbo had a magic ring of invisibility in Fellowship of the Ring.

And, more to the point, there were several different rings of power unaccounted for - including an unknown number of minor rings - he didn't know it was The One Ring.

Pixels · Post by **Pixels** » Fri Jan 02, 2015 5:11 am

Ancient History wrote:And, more to the point, there were several different rings of power unaccounted for - including an unknown number of minor rings - he didn't know it was The One Ring.

Gandalf knew the locations of the elven rings (Elrond, Galadrial, and Gandalf himself) and the human rings (the Ringwraiths). He would only be unsure about the dwarven rings, because he though he might or might not know that four were destroyed by dragons, he certainly didn't know the fate of the remaining three. However, the dwarven rings never granted invisibility, so Bilbo's ring could not have been a dwarven ring.

Nothing much has ever been said about the minor rings so I can't comment there, but as soon as Gandalf knew it was a Ring of Power he should immediately have fingered it as the One.

name_here · Post by **name_here** » Fri Jan 02, 2015 5:39 am

It should be pointed out that in the books, Gandalf totally did know Bilbo had a magical ring that granted invisibility and it took him literal decades to figure out it was the One Ring. Partially because Saruman kept telling him that the One Ring was most definitely permanently lost in the ocean.

Apparently the Seven might turn people who aren't dwarves invisible, and he wasn't sure it was a Great Ring until Bilbo lived an implausibly long time.

angelfromanotherpin · Post by **angelfromanotherpin** » Fri Jan 02, 2015 5:45 am

Gandalf does say that he knew Bilbo's ring was not a lesser ring from the beginning.

Now, there is some text which suggests that the dwarf-rings would have made non-dwarves invisible, but that dwarfy nature is too materialistic to be shifted even partially into the spirit world. Indeed, it's suggested that the Seven and the Nine were not particularly different in nature, and took their distinctions in function solely from the natures of their bearers. So that it made people invisible doesn't disqualify it from being one of the Seven. Also, the Nazgul don't wear their rings; it's mentioned in several places that Sauron personally had them, and they never appear in any description of the wraiths. So their location could easily have been indeterminate.

The thing is, Gandalf really was shockingly ignorant about the rings for a very long time. Ring-lore was Saruman's thing, and he seems to have been allowed to monopolize it. Dreadfully negligent from a perspective of modern espionage; sadly typical from a perspective of ancient scholarship.

Shatner · Post by **Shatner** » Sun Jan 04, 2015 1:17 am

I think I figured out why the thirteen dwarves went from running like Shaggy to soloing scores of orcs: The Hobbit operates on 1st ed. XP gain, whereby 1gp gained means 1xp gained.

When the dwarves assumed control of Smaug's horde they all instantly leveled up to obscene levels, allowing them to save armies and kill roughly one hojillion mooks.

Plus, they probably loaded up on +5 gear during their preparation montage.

Prak · Post by **Prak** » Sun Jan 04, 2015 3:15 am

I'm in favour of this explanation.

erik · Post by **erik** » Sun Jan 04, 2015 4:01 am

I dodged an opportunity for watching the last Hobbit movie due to my disgust of the first two. I could not risk watching another Jar-Jar shaking a droid around on his foot and killing all the surrounding orcs.

Did the dwarves actually fight competently, or was it just more deus ex machina each fight of weapons falling into their hands and scenery conspiring to aid them while dispatching their foes?

Maxus · Post by **Maxus** » Sun Jan 04, 2015 4:13 am

The only dwarves who really fight are Thorin, Dwalin, Fili, and Kili.

Bilbo does drop some orcs with thrown rocks bigger than his fist.

But you get lots of Legolas. Thranduil kicks some ass. You have a fight with Elrond, Galadriel, and Sauron versus The Ringwraiths.

The rest of the dwarves charge when the time comes, but don't...yeah. Their contribution is more in the way of morale. Dain kicks ass, though. The combat wasn't bad (except for Legolas throwing a sword and somehow impaling an orc with it. Just Legolas in general, really).

Occluded Sun · Post by **Occluded Sun** » Tue Jan 06, 2015 3:54 am

Pixels wrote: However, the dwarven rings never granted invisibility, so Bilbo's ring could not have been a dwarven ring.

The dwarven rings were probably never tried on humans, and certainly never on hobbits. It's not at all obvious that the ring was the Ring, and it was only clearly a major ring when Bilbo didn't age properly.

Nothing much has ever been said about the minor rings so I can't comment there, but as soon as Gandalf knew it was a Ring of Power he should immediately have fingered it as the One.

Not really. It took decades of research to be certain it was.