Posted by jkm822 at michigan.mgmt.rpi.edu on July 28, 2003 at 13:41:07:
In Reply to: Yes! Shitty religious allegory posing as fantasy! posted by Übermenschİ on July 28, 2003 at 13:31:47:
: That's precisely what I wanna see!
: Tolkien owns Lewis, plain and simple. Narnia is mostly lame.
Y'know what? I didn't know it was a religious allegory until I got into college and they told me it was. And I personally choose to ignore that aspect of it, and accept it for what I always believed it to be - a damned good fantasy story.
And all you fucking Tolkien fanatics - fuck you! I'm sorry; I know that somewhere, buried within the exhaustive descriptions of the blade of grass that Frodo gets between his two smaller toes in the 186th chapter and of the wisp of smoke that comes from Gandalf's pipe in chapter 8,003, there is a good story. But it takes more patience than I've got to find it. I'm a voracious reader, most especially of fantasy and sci-fi fiction. I've picked up the Tolkien books on a number of occasions, and attempted to plow my way through them. I have, on every single, occasion, failed. THEY'RE SO BORING!!! Sure, if you CAN dredge your way through the unbelievable detailed descriptions of ABSOLUTELY EVERYTHING, there's a good story. I know this. But it's one of the few occasions I'm actually GLAD a series of books is being made into a movie; I'll finally get to see the action parts of the story, without having to force my way through a description of one hair someone's eyebrow that carries on for 6 pages.
The Narnia series were some of the first books that were ever read to me as a child. They were some of the first books I read on my own. And I still enjoy re-reading them. I'd say that makes them at least comparable with the oh-so-touted Tolkien, and they did it without putting me to sleep.