January: Beauty is in the Ai! of the Beholder

Discussion of performing arts, including theatre, film, television, and music.
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Frelga
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Post by Frelga »

I know what we need. We need the art from those doctored covers for romances is what we need. I'll try to dig it up when I get home.

I'm sure we'll be able to find something along the lines of "Green Hill of Passion", depicting the first tender moments between Aragorn and Arwen, and "The Wall of Desire", exploring the romance between Éowyn and Faramir.
Thank goodness, nobody wrote:Éowyn - abandoned by her uncle, spurned by her first love, frustrated in her career aspirations, an ice maiden who no longer believes in love.

Can Faramir - still reeling from loss of his beloved brother in whose shadow he grew up, embittered by his father's demented attempt on his life - melt this ice when the two come together on the walls of the White City?

Find out in

The Wall of Desire
If there was anything that depressed him more than his own cynicism, it was that quite often it still wasn't as cynical as real life.

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vison
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Post by vison »

Frelga wrote:I know what we need. We need the art from those doctored covers for romances is what we need. I'll try to dig it up when I get home.

I'm sure we'll be able to find something along the lines of "Green Hill of Passion", depicting the first tender moments between Aragorn and Arwen, and "The Wall of Desire", exploring the romance between Éowyn and Faramir.
Thank goodness, nobody wrote:Éowyn - abandoned by her uncle, spurned by her first love, frustrated in her career aspirations, an ice maiden who no longer believes in love.

Can Faramir - still reeling from loss of his beloved brother in whose shadow he grew up, embittered by his father's demented attempt on his life - melt this ice when the two come together on the walls of the White City?

Find out in

The Wall of Desire
Nobody wrote it............yet. =:)
Dig deeper.
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truehobbit
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Post by truehobbit »

*jumps up and down excitedly* :D

Frelga - :rofl:

For inspiration here's another Angus McBride:

Image

That's from the time when Éowyn dyed her hair and dressed up as a Ranger to stalk her first beloved and take bloody revenge for having been so cruelly jilted!
but being a cheerful hobbit he had not needed hope, as long as despair could be postponed.
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Alatar
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Post by Alatar »

"Assassins of Dol Amroth" if I'm not mistaken.

God I'm such a geek....
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Post by Jnyusa »

Pf! It's NinjArwen of course.


A Ranger is about to be caught off his guard! You can tell by the way her breasts are all perky, even though she's holding that big pointy knife.

:scarey:

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vison
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Post by vison »

Wow. You geeky types sure know everything!

It is the most peculiar picture. Is it REALLY meant to be an LOTR picture? Like, REALLY?

I don't remember JRRT writing one single word about perky breasts, but hey, maybe I missed that part............ :D


Oh, this is stirring me up! One friend of mine has named her muse Brunhilde, which is entirely fitting as my friend writes great, sweeping sagas.

My muse is named Lavendar Miriam van Swellegance, and she prods me to write quite unsweeping sagas..........

Lavendar is, at present, reclining on a chaise longue, sipping on tea that her henchwoman served her in a delicate Sevres cup. She is wearing a mauve negligee, fetchingly left open to reveal much of her perky breasts and the enticing shadow between. Her slim, pale legs are langourously stretched along the chaise. Her cloud of sable hair is caught in a loose knot at the base of her swan-like neck, and perched upon her charmingly retrousse nose is a pair of gilt reading glasses. They are for show only. Her great dark-lashed green eyes see perfectly well, but Lavendar has noticed that gentlemen will be more.....uh......restrained when in the presence of a woman wearing glasses.

Just at this moment she is reading the first draft of the latest romance to fall from one of "her" author's pens. She frowns, but the frown cannot mar her loveliness. She turns the pages with a delicate finger lightly dampened by having been inserted between those full, kissable lips...........

It is best, perhaps, to draw the veil of discretion over this scene. Suffice it to say that Lavendar is not quite in raptures just yet. There is some tweaking needed, some editing. The addition of yet twenty more cliches.....etc.
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Post by Jnyusa »

Her cloud of sable hair ...

vison, I cannot tell you how thrilled I am that your muse has sable hair instead of being one of those blousey blondes who winks and whistles.

:bow: to sable muses.

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Post by Alatar »

Ok, just to clarify once again. These pics are not intended to be Tolkien artwork per se. They are illstrations for MERP, Middle Earth Role Playing and as such have to cover all the stuff Tolkien didn't, in order to allow others to game in Middle Earth. ICE really put a huge effort into this material and it rings extremely true to Tolkien and (more importantly) never contradicts with his work. Occasionally they had to make a judgement call on things like Glorfindel (was there one or two) but for the most part their immense respect for the source material was obvious. It truly was a labour of mlove for most of tyhe people involved.

To create a valid world for Roleplaying they had to extrapolate from Tolkiens material. So, for example, Assassins of Dol Amroth takes a place mentioned briefly and builds it into a thriving place with it's own social structure and all the elements that go with that, both legitimate and unsavoury.

Here's the blurb from the back:
Three low-to-mid level adventures which each stand on their own and can be set up in minutes.

A knight of great renown is slain on the quays of Dol Amroth before your eyes. His attacker, a tall man cloaked in grey, flees into the abandoned warehouse at his back. Are you bold enough to avenge the Murder on the Docks?

Mysterious, grey-cloaked bandits chase you through country lanes to the gates of a deserted manor house. But is it deserted? A ghostly warrior with a pack of hounds and an ancient saber paces the cobwebbed halls. Can you survive the dangers of A Home by the Sea?

A raid on Dol Amroth's Castle Quarter costs a titled courtier his life - despite two strong bodyguards. The city's nobles want the killers in grey captured and brought to justice. Will you brave their stronghold upon the eerie Hill of Shades?

Death lurks in every shadow, but fame and fortune follow peril in these 3 exciting adventures!
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Post by Jnyusa »

That's cool, Alatar.

Have you done the roleplay yourself? I wasn't aware there there were actual set-ups for people, with plots and illustrations and such that they could step right into.

(Hope you don't mind if we poke fun at this artwork as well. It feels like pretty much everything is going to be fair game in this thread.)

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truehobbit
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Post by truehobbit »

A Ranger is about to be caught off his guard! You can tell by the way her breasts are all perky, even though she's holding that big pointy knife.
:shock:

:rofl:
A knight of great renown is slain on the quays of Dol Amroth before your eyes. His attacker, a tall man cloaked in grey, flees into the abandoned warehouse at his back. Are you bold enough to avenge the Murder on the Docks?

Mysterious, grey-cloaked bandits chase you through country lanes to the gates of a deserted manor house. But is it deserted? A ghostly warrior with a pack of hounds and an ancient saber paces the cobwebbed halls. Can you survive the dangers of A Home by the Sea?

A raid on Dol Amroth's Castle Quarter costs a titled courtier his life - despite two strong bodyguards. The city's nobles want the killers in grey captured and brought to justice. Will you brave their stronghold upon the eerie Hill of Shades?

Death lurks in every shadow, but fame and fortune follow peril in these 3 exciting adventures!
This is a gem in itself! :rofl:
(Sorry!)

Very much like Frelga's cover text above! :D
and it rings extremely true to Tolkien
I hope I'm not offending when I doubt that! ;)
but being a cheerful hobbit he had not needed hope, as long as despair could be postponed.
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Post by Alatar »

Feel free to doubt it, but I'd advise you check it out first.
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Primula Baggins
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Post by Primula Baggins »

You both know Tolkien vastly better than I do, which is why I'm taking Alatar's word on this. Hobby, of course, has better grounds for forming her own opinion!

Though I just found my printed Sil—and got my real computer back so can finally load the audio book onto my iPod—so look out! :D
“There, peeping among the cloud-wrack above a dark tor high up in the mountains, Sam saw a white star twinkle for a while. The beauty of it smote his heart, as he looked up out of the forsaken land, and hope returned to him. For like a shaft, clear and cold, the thought pierced him that in the end the Shadow was only a small and passing thing: there was light and high beauty for ever beyond its reach.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Return of the King
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Post by Alatar »

Primula_Baggins wrote:Though I just found my printed Sil—and got my real computer back so can finally load the audio book onto my iPod—so look out! :D
Yay!!
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Post by Sassafras »

Double yay!!

This means we can expect you in the Sil thread, right? Right?

:D
Image

Ever mindful of the maxim that brevity is the soul of wit, axordil sums up the Sil:


"Too many Fingolfins, not enough Sams."

Yes.
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Primula Baggins
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Post by Primula Baggins »

If I go on feeling this good, I might actually post within, say, three weeks. :)
“There, peeping among the cloud-wrack above a dark tor high up in the mountains, Sam saw a white star twinkle for a while. The beauty of it smote his heart, as he looked up out of the forsaken land, and hope returned to him. For like a shaft, clear and cold, the thought pierced him that in the end the Shadow was only a small and passing thing: there was light and high beauty for ever beyond its reach.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Return of the King
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truehobbit
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Post by truehobbit »

Alatar wrote:Feel free to doubt it, but I'd advise you check it out first.
Well, I've just had the doubtful pleasure to read the intro text for it in your post and to see an illustration made for it and I feel that is all the checking out I want, I'm afraid. ;)

Edit: But I must say that RPG is a lost cause on me anyway. :)
but being a cheerful hobbit he had not needed hope, as long as despair could be postponed.
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Post by Alatar »

Even when recommended by a fellow fan? I'm surprised at you!

Actually Jnyusa, I've never had the opportunity to use the MERP system in any meaningful way. Part of the problem is that Tolkien's Middle Earth is inherently difficult to RP in. Magic is practically non-existent and because it's a "realistic" roleplay environment it's actually very hard to keep a character alive long enough to grow attached to it. The combat system includes "critical hits" which basically means that a low level hobbit with a lucky roll can accidentally nick the jugular vein of a Dúnedain ranger with his knife and kill him. It requires an extraordinary amount of luck and coincidence, but I've seen it happen.

Dindraug is very well versed in MERP as far as I know and used it as the basis for many of the RP scenarios played out on TORC and on B77. It really is incredibly thorough and a remarkably academic work. The quote above was for a beginners starter adventure and is deliberately simplistic as a "hook" into the larger hobby.

If anyone is interested I can share more info, but perhaps in another thread. :)
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Post by Jnyusa »

Alatar,

Feel free to start a thread about it if the discussion interests you. Din is a member here so I imagine he would like talking about it too.

Sounds like a cross between game and role-play, which must be very different from collaborative writing. But you're basically playing across the internet with people whom you don't really know, right? Like Myst or something? (I've never even looked at those games so I don't know anything about them.)

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truehobbit
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Post by truehobbit »

Even when recommended by a fellow fan? I'm surprised at you!
Well, there's the evidence of the recommendation versus the evidence of my own eyes just now in the pic and cover text. ;)

What do you expect me to do if even reading something like your post makes me cringe at the idea?
Can't friends simply have different tastes?
Did you go and get some Mozart music to listen to, after reading my enthusiasm about it in the other thread here?
Would you want me to expect it of you if the very idea of Mozart made you cringe?
I'm surprised at you, really!
but being a cheerful hobbit he had not needed hope, as long as despair could be postponed.
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Primula Baggins
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Post by Primula Baggins »

Myst isn't RP—just a very absorbing and beautiful computer game.

Alatar, aren't these games often played face to face? My sons have both played D&D and some Star Wars RP. From what I've seen of the games, it's collaborative storytelling—the characters decide their actions in response to each new development—but the overall plot and the setting are under the control of one person, who describes what a character sees when coming to a new place and who introduces twists in the plot. If there's a fight, you roll dice to see what the outcome was.
“There, peeping among the cloud-wrack above a dark tor high up in the mountains, Sam saw a white star twinkle for a while. The beauty of it smote his heart, as he looked up out of the forsaken land, and hope returned to him. For like a shaft, clear and cold, the thought pierced him that in the end the Shadow was only a small and passing thing: there was light and high beauty for ever beyond its reach.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Return of the King
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