I was just talking with my other half… what has she been in where she doesn’t do her over-the-top character? runs to IMDB
I love her, tho!!! So excited!!!
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Amazon just announced they aren’t doing season 2 of Paper Girls. Hope someone else picks it up. It was one of the best shows I’ve seen it a while. You couldn’t predict what would happen next.
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The LOTR is about very different people, from very different races, overlooking their differences and coming together together to stop power hungry assholes. If it was written today, they’d complain that was woke.
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I love her.
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Of course. Bastards.
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On that subject- why is it that the elves insist on calling themselves immortal? They are clearly very, very mortal and seem vulnerable to everything except maybe old age. And given the constant state of strife it’s not like many humans in middle earth get the opportunity to die of old age anyway.
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In Tolkien’s original source material they have unlimited respawning ability.
Elves are immortal, and remain unwearied with age. They can recover from wounds which would be fatal to a Man, but can be killed in battle. Spirits of dead Elves go to the Halls of Mandos in Valinor. After a certain period of time and rest that serves as “cleansing”, their spirits are clothed in bodies identical to their old ones.
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Because Valinor.
The theory is that if an Elf’s body is killed in Middle Earth, they are reincarnated in Valinor, where the Two Trees were. (The Two Trees leads off into a whole other set of Lore, leading eventually to the White Tree of Gondor).
Once upon a time, it was possible to travel back from Valinor to Middle Earth, and Galadriel is one who had done that. (Which leads to a whole lot of other Lore about the Elves of Light who had seen the Trees and the Elves of Darkness who either refused to travel or were born too late to be able to.) And Valinor was in the same realm as Middle Earth, so it was theoretically possible for any ship to get there. But because of the Fall of Númenor, the world was bent so that you couldn’t sail there except on a special, magical ship which could sail the straight sea (that is, before that Middle Earth was flat, but afterwards it was made a globe, so the ships of Cirdan were basically spaceships).
But still: any Elf who died on Middle Earth was grieved, because they would never be seen on that world again, but they were physically reborn in Valinor to live forever in the company of the Valar, and their fellow Elves would eventually meet them there.
But Men, when they died, went to the Halls of Mandos, and then … no-one knows. Like, not even Tolkien really knew what happened next, and he wrote that if Eru Ilúvatar, the Creator, knew what happened next, he wasn’t telling. Men weren’t re-incarnated. Nobody ever travelled back from the Halls of Mandos, except one (Beren). (Although the Army of the Dead shows that you could delay your travel there under certain circumstances.) And nobody knows where they go from the Halls. Just that it was a special gift, even if people didn’t appreciate it.
So: Elves are immortal because when they die on Middle Earth, they wake up in Valinor, in their bodies. When Men die, they go somewhere else where nobody can follow and return.
IIRC, only two Elves have died, like, died and gone to the Halls of Mandos: Lúthien (the mother of Elrond, and ancestor of Arwen), and Arwen herself.
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Ok, well that knowledge sure lowers the stakes for some of the characters in the new show. Also makes Galadriel‘s long, obsessive vendetta to avenge her brother seem a lot more pointless and petty.
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An Elf being killed was never taken lightly, even when they knew they’d turn up in Valinor again eventually. There was still their time in the Halls of Mandos, and I imagine it was traumatising.
Look at it this way: the last ships to leave Middle Earth, the ones that were carrying Galadriel and Elrond. The ones that Elrond was telling Arwen to get on. Technically, they didn’t need to do that: they could have just died and ended up in Valinor anyway. But they didn’t, they really went out of their way to avoid doing that.
You get the impression that dying is still not a trivial thing, and if they were going to have to die (like the Elvish troops who died in battle), then they made sure it was for a reason. The stakes may be lower in terms of outcome on an eternal timescale, but it was still seen as a massively traumatic event to be avoided if at all possible.
Also: Galadriel was the niece of Fëanor, and if there’s any summary of anything involving Fëanor at any point, “long obsessive vendetta” would seem appropriate. (For Galadriel, it was a phase, and she grew out of it. As far as Fëanor went, though, it’s been said that a summary of large swathes of the Silmarillion can be summed up as “Fëanor, no!”)
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So, Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. 2.0?
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They need to resurrect Phil.
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Coulson died again?
(Didn’t watch AoS at all, for some reason.)
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Think Picard.
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Ugh.
I did watch the first two seasons of that show; so I know exactly what you mean.
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I thoroughly enjoyed AoS, but I think I’m in the minority. 
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I don’t know why it never piqued my interest, when I’ve watched all the other Marvel shows that have come out.
It just didn’t, and I’ve never watched even a single ep.
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