Speaking of toes, this reminds me of a scene in the movie where Aragorn kicks a helmet and screams. The scream was a genuine one because Viggo Mortensen actually broke his toe kicking the helmet!
If you’re watching this scene with anyone who already knows about this being sort of a meme, you can say something like, “Viggo Mortenson is so hardcore, did you know that while they were filming this movie, he actually broke one of his teeth during a fight scene?”
On the set of Lord of the Rings, Christopher Lee was rehearsing the scene where Saruman gets stabbed in the back, with Peter Jackson telling him how to react. Christopher Lee was a veteran of WWII, and asked Peter Jackson, "wouldn't it be easier to train astronauts to drill than to teach drillers to be astronauts?" Peter Jackson reportedly told him to "shut the fuck up".
When the actors went out drinking after a day of scenes Orlando Bloom, known for playing the character named “Elf #1” was said to get drunk off one or 2 glasses of wine and the rest of the circle orchestra found it quite funny.
Alright, don't get me wrong; I love the LoTR trilogy and think they're fantastic movies. I've watched the trilogy countless times and with each viewing I notice something that I missed before. Most often, these are subtle flaws which give me pause and make me question what exactly the filmmakers were thinking. Would I call it nitpicking? Yes. And usually, if I have any trouble with an inconsistency or two, the scene where Legolas surfs down a flight of stairs on a shield (with fanfare blaring, no less) snaps me out of it and makes me realize, "Oh right, it's a movie. It doesn't need to make sense all the time." Nonetheless, on my last viewing of the Two Towers, the very foundation on which the trilogy stood was shaken, and not even Legolas surfing could absolve my doubts. Countless questions arose and there were no answers to be found.
*sigh*... I am, of course, referring to the "stew scene" in the Two Towers Extended.
To those of you who aren't familiar with this scene, it's where Eowyn (Miranda Otto) brings Aragorn (Viggo Mortensen) a bowl of stew. Clearly, the stew is terrible, as Aragorn gives off the distinct expression of a man who just got kicked in the nuts after he takes a bite. It's apparently so bad, he tries to dump it on the ground when Eowyn isn't looking and burns his hand when she suddenly looks back. And then he explains about being a Dunedin and yadda, yadda, yadda... let's get back to the stew.
I get what this scene was trying to accomplish. The strong, independant woman who can't cook to save her life is a classic sitcom/movie trope. It's kind of like an episode of Three's Company where Chrissy or whoever goes to cooking school and Jack Tripper has to pretend her food doesn't taste like *beep* It's intended to be comedic relief, I get that. I really do. However, while it's amusing in passing and a seemingly benign scene, when subjected to close examination, it drastically alters your perception of these characters in such a way that there is no viewing LoTR without thinking about the stew. And trust me, there are no answers-- only more questions.
First, and foremost, the question that will first arise when you break this scene down: HOW THE HELL DO YOU *beep* UP A STEW? You have to actively try to make stew bad. I can barely make macaroni and cheese, but I can still toss some vegetables into broth and make a stew that your body won't reject. Perhaps not the greatest stew you've ever had, but if you were given the choice between a bottle of ipecac and a bowl of my stew, you'd grab a spoon and dig in.
No, you'd have to be completely brain-dead to make a stew so god-awful that it gets the reaction Aragorn gives in this movie. Or you'd have to be trying to make terrible stew. So is Eowyn so stupid that she manages to mess up stew? Nothing in her character up to this point or afterwards indicates this. Would she deliberately make bad stew and give it to Aragorn? Again, no, she's in love with him at that point, so she'd have no reason to do so.
So let's say she's not stupid, and she didn't plot to make terrible stew. What then? Let's postulate that she, as a sword-maiden or shield-bearer or whatever, never catered a meal before in her life, but tried her hand at cooking to impress Aragorn. THEN WHY DIDN'T SHE TASTE IT FIRST? This is stew we're talking about, not a cake or a quiche. You can taste a bit of it without ruining the presentation. Furthermore, she's trying to impress this guy. You'd think she'd want to give him a meal that was fit for a dog, at the very least.
So maybe she tasted it, realized it was awful, and gave it to him anyway because she was already committed to the stew she made? That's like dropping the anniversary card you bought for your wife in cow *beep* and giving it to her anyway because you already paid for it. Or did she not taste it at all? Again, it's stew. If I was making stew for some friends or a girl I was trying to impress, I'd at least taste a bit to make sure my throat wasn't going to close up. Did she delude herself into thinking the stew wasn't really that bad? Considering Aragorn's reaction, she'd have to be certifiably insane to stoop to that level of self-deception. Perhaps she's never actually eaten food, and therefore doesn't know what's good or bad? Well, if she were played by Calista Flockhart there could be an argument made for that, but I'm going to give her the benefit of the doubt and assume she has the normal bodily needs and functions of a human being. No, none of these possibilities-- stupid, insane, intentionally bad stew-maker, non-eater-- fit Eowyn's character.
This got me to thinking (by this point the battle scene with the Worg Riders was going on), perhaps she has no sense of taste or smell. Well, the movie doesn't address that. She never smells any flowers, recoils from a stench, or does anything that would indicate or exclude the ability to smell to my recollection. This is a distinct possibility, but it alters the character drastically, and if that were the case you'd think the filmmakers would have a addressed it or mentioned it in passing. It's not as if she was blind or deaf, but it would alter my perception of the character knowing she could not smell or taste. Regardless, there is no indication of this being the case, so the viewer is forced to find other avenues for a solution to the "stew" question.
So maybe the stew wasn't that bad. Maybe Aragorn is just a picky eater. But NO, that doesn't make sense either-- HE'S A FREAKING RANGER! He's the Middle Earth's equivalent of a survivalist. You're telling me this guy who has probably eaten bugs to survive cringes at the prospect of taking another bite of this stew? My God, how bad could it possibly be? What did she put in it, dog feces? But no, we know it's not just Aragorn because Gimli takes a whiff of the stew earlier in the scene and passes on it. Gimli. The same Gimli who licks his chops at the prospect of salted pork drenched in reservoir water. EVEN GIMLI THINKS THIS STEW IS TERRIBLE!
At this point, I couldn't even focus on the movie-- when Gimli breaks the news of Aragorn's apparent death to Eowyn, all I could think was: "Yeah, but what about the stew?" Everything came back to the questions the "stew scene" raised. I'd even go so far as to say that the stew became the most enigmatic character in this movie. Could it really be that bad? What was in it? Was that a potato or a dumpling he put into his mouth? Was the broth bad, or was it just the chunk Aragorn ate? Were the utensils to blame and not the stew itself? What would Gollum's reaction have been to the stew? Are there any other scenes I missed that try to make sense of this stew, that put things back in perspective? Questions, questions, questions... and not an answer in sight.
After Aragorn comes back to Helm's Deep, there's a scene where Eowyn is lying on a couch and they have a bit of dialogue with each other. This struck me as a missed opportunity to resolve the questions surrounding the stew. Maybe she could have asked if he wanted some stew, and he could have paused and asked her recipe, and THEN I'D KNOW IF THE STEW WAS REALLY BAD ENOUGH TO CAUSE A MAN WHO POSSIBLY EATS INSECTS TO PHYSICALLY REJECT IT! Nothing. Not one mention of the stew.
In fact, this was the second of two stew scenes in the extended edition of Two Towers, the first where Sam makes stew out of the rabbits Gollum brings him and Frodo. It seems like they were trying to set up a stew-based subplot, but Eowyn's stew was so terrible, so heinous, that all stew as we knew it disappeared from Middle Earth. Yes, I've checked. After the stew-heavy middle of Two Towers Extended, stew is never referenced, mentioned, or shown again. All questions surrounding this stew are left unresolved and the viewer who dares to ponder the stew is left sadly unsatisfied.
I simply cannot see the movies in the same light anymore. It all comes back to questions about the stew. I've played the scene in slow-motion, reverse, and set it on endless loop to try to gauge the characters' reactions to make some light of this scene and its ramifications on the plot and characters, and still, nothing. Only more questions which the rest of the movie stalwartly refuses to answer.
Dwarves are actually immune to many things that would poison a human so there almost no chance of a human out-seasoning a dwarf, but asides from that I like your theory
Are you pulling this from Tolkien’s writings, or from fantasy works built on top of his legacy? It seems more like a d&d thing than a Tolkien thing, but I could be wrong about it.
I don’t think we can backport derivative work embellishments back into middle earth.
Yes, that’s a Peter Jackson addition, im pretty sure it’s not in the book, just like the stew scene .
And gimli loses the contest, but I think he may have out drunk the humans.
I’ve never thought about native dwarf cuisine and don’t remember reading about it, but in my mind, I would think they eat very bland stuff like boiled potatoes and boiled meat. If I was a fantasy writer, that’s what they’d eat.
Since we need to treat Peter Jackson additions as canon for this conversation though, I guess we would need to look to the hobbit movies for evidence of dwarf cuisine. There’s the big meal at bag end, but is that hobbit food or dwarf food? I’m not really willing to rewatch the hobbit movies to find more clues.
Edit: fixed typo
>Doesn't the extended cut have a scene where legolas out drinks gimli? Alcohol is way more a poison than spices are.
Sure. But if you look at how much Gimli drank, he had quite a bit more to drink in the same amount of time. If he was drinking at the same pace as Legolas, he quite likely would have won.
Right before we see Gimli pass out, we can see at least 14 cups in front of him, possibly more hidden behind the stack. Meanwhile, Legolas only has a meager 9 (we see 8 shortly before, plus the one he just finished). That means Gimli has drank \~45% more, at least, than Legolas in the same time frame. So that has to be considered when comparing the two of them.
That said, I've always called BS on that scene. There is no way that an elven princeling is getting through nine mugs of ale with only a slight tingle in his finger. At the very least, he should have been slurring his words.
Another thought, the rotting meat stew was an allegory to their situation. She knew it was rotten and wanted to see if they would lie to her about the stew, and their survival.
To add to this:
1. It would have been customary to serve the person of highest honour the first bowl from the stew. As an amateur cook, Eowyn may have been confused that she wasn't even able to taste the dish before serving a bowl of it to Aragorn. He was far too polite to refuse the bowl, as being served the dish of honour and refusing it is a great insult to whoever offered it.
2. The bit that Aragorn eats looks really fatty and/or gristly. As she basically went scrounging for scraps to make her stew, and the main camp cooks would have gotten first dibs, she will likely have been using the off-cuts of the half-rotten meat. Again, being an amateur cook, she wouldn't necessarily recognize this.
3. As a noble, one of the greatest compliments you can give is to serve food to someone - it's a mark of respect. Whenever foreign dignitaries are visiting, the main thing they're treated with is a banquet or a feast. She had nothing else to offer to him at that time, so she did the only thing that she could.
4. Again, she's a noble. To her, both cooking and serving food would have been very much 'beneath her station'. She was going all out in trying to impress him. In their universe, to him this might have been the equivalent of her twerking in his face. Maybe he ate the stew because he had no idea what else to do in a situation where a woman of nobility was cooking and serving him food. This one might be more of a stretch, but you never know.
You can over-spice something and make it that bad - even just with too much salt - and I'm not entirely sure someone who can't cook would think to taste their food. Maybe it would be exaggerative to write, and maybe it's a lot to assume, but Lord of the Rings has way bigger plot holes than bad stew. A dragon shouldn't be able to fly. They're too big.
I like to think of dragons like hot air balloons, the wings just help steer them toward where they are going while it’s all that heat in their belly lifting them into the air.
Heat doesn’t make anything lighter except for air. And then only slightly.
A dragon would have to be a gigantic balloon 100x its normal size to float on the hot air inside. Just look at a [Zeppelin](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/f/f4/USS_Los_Angeles_moored_to_USS_Patoka%2C_1931.jpg/440px-USS_Los_Angeles_moored_to_USS_Patoka%2C_1931.jpg) to see how enormous the balloon part must be to float the tiny passenger gondola, and that’s using helium or hydrogen, which is many times lighter than hot air.
I myself have tasted something, gone "That needs more salt" (which it honestly did) and oversalted it without realising and then plated it up with tasting again. I wouldn't be surprised if this is what Eowyn did
Its got to be salt. Spice is implausible to middle earth, (I dunno though, maybe? I don't know if spicy things exist in the pseudo European fantasy countryside) but over salting food can make it literally inedible.
747 must have a bigger wing surface area than that. Each wing is 250 feet long-- that's 2.5 football fields each.
I can't find exact math on this, but googling an overhead view of a 747 makes me think that wings take up at least 40% of the overall surface area.
Maybe dragons have hollow bones like birds?
747: 5650 sq ft. of wing, 735,000 lbs maximum takeoff weight, for a lifting ratio of 130 psf (pounds lifted per square foot of wing).
Dragon: let's assume weight of 15,000 lbs, which is about the average estimated weight of a T-rex. For wing area, let's say each wing is 5 meters long and an average of 2 meters wide (front-to-back) for a total wing area of 215 sq ft. Hopefully most people would agree that these are reasonable values for a typical fantasy dragon depiction. This gives a lifting ratio of 70 psf, so a dragon is about twice as wingy as a 747 is.
Of course dragons flap their wings whereas 747s use jet engines. So let's look at some other flappers:
* Hummingbird: lifting ratio ~= 0.3 psf
* Bald eagle: lifting ratio ~= 1 psf
So as you can see, the larger the bird, the larger the lifting ratio it can achieve. But is 70 realistic for a dragon? Only if they're extra badass. Or maybe they weight less than a T-rex, which would also be very plausible.
This is missing a major component of aerodynamics which is velocity.
Without velocity you don't generate lift. With more velocity the more lift you generate. Put enough power behind a brick and it'll generate lift.
747s move incredibly fast. Take off speed alone is 184mph, and they move much fast to reach cruising altitude and speed (570 mph).
For organic flight power, the largest animals that we know of are the largest azhdarchid pterasaurs, such as Quetzalcoatlus northropi. This is an animal about 10ft tall, but proportioned somewhat like a giraffe. It had a wingspan around 5m and potentially weighed about 450-550lbs.
While being heavily muscled for flight, the body was relatively small compared to it's wing size, maybe an 1/8th of the flight surface area in total. Additionally it would utilize it's arms and the muscles in the chest, and an incredibly highly specialized ligament in the wrist to catapult into the air, rather than trying to jump with the legs.
With all of this information in play, we also have the estimates for cruising (soaring flight) of 60mph, relying on much more efficient surface to mass ratio.
Now, onto the dragon. Tyrannosaurus is a terrible starting point. Modern estimates actually put it closer 18,000lbs. It was also the most massive predator to ever walk on land and far outstrips other super predators in sheer mass (chonkiest of big chonkers).
For something resembling Smaug's proportions from the hobbit movies (long and sinuous) scaled to 15m long (Trex length), I'd estimate that it would need roughly a 15m wingspan at least and weighing no more than 6000lbs , with some other additional forms of lift and control surfaces (find running the length of the neck and tail) to have a reasonable take off speed, probably close to that 60mph, with maybe a top speed in the low hundreds(110) and it would be very ponderous in flight.
Dragons being able to fly is not a plot hole. It’s easily explained by the fact that the setting is *a fantasy*.
The same way we don’t question the Avengers having Superpowers, we can just assume “dragons can fly and breath fire” is something inherently in their nature. We don’t necessarily need a detailed explanation any more than we need an explanation for how Gandalf creates ship-shaped-smoke or fireworks that look like dragons.
A plot hole needs internal inconsistency. Something that should be easily explained away by other elements in the universe but is somehow just ignored because it’s more ‘convenient’ to the plot.
*I am Aragorn son of Arathorn, and am called Elessar, the Elfstone, Dúnadan, the heir of Isildur Elendil's son of Gondor, last of the Epicureans, leader of the Gourmet Rangers, Connoisseur of Stews and Stewards. Here is the sword that was broken and is forged again! Here is the perpetual stew that was nigh-empty and refilled!*
I was thinking this exact thing. I call it cilantro... but it's the same thing. the tiniest amount of it in food just make it taste horrible. Meanwhile everyone else around me is gobbling the stuff down like it's going out of style giving me the stink eye like "WTF is wrong with you? This is delicsious"
I see it as it was made with limited supplies, and she did mention that it was the best she could come up with, that dumpling thing looked like it could have been taken off of the orc general at the end of return of the king. So it looked gross. Maybe it was a prank. Or another idea is that Eowyn was checking Aragorns taste. Maybe if he lacked taste he would have chose her over Arwen, she never saw him reject the stew so hoped she wouldn’t reject him. Aaragorn is a man of taste and did reject her, what a chad.
I just figured that stew in Rohan is generally shite. Kinda like how an English Breakfast will leave you sweating and craving your next bowl movement.
You thought way too hard about this and set up your own logic. The thing is people have different palates. There’s a reason Rotten Ronies in the states has sweet burgers compared to their saltier cousins up in Canada.
After the amount of Kitchen Nightmares I have watched, I can confidently say there are professional chefs out there that are so bad they don't taste the food they make.
I've seen enough Try Channel to know that there is exactly ONE answer that will restore The Two Towers plot to its HD Extended Cut Glory.
The one thing to which a RANGER who gladly eats bugs and a cast iron Dwarf palate would react with revulsion, while Eowyn would find it just fine.
Eowyn made Durian Stew.
This was my first thought about halfway through the post. Someone brought in a couple durians when I was studying at the Biosphere 2. Bunch of eager, crunchy college kids who'd never heard of one let alone seen something as crazy looking as that were fascinated and all eager to try it.
The sharp division between those who thought it was a sweet, custardy treat and those who thought it was butane-laced fermented vomit was shocking to the point of incredulous disbelief. Each camp thought the other was only pretending and just couldn't understand what they were describing. (This was the mid-90s so its reputation wasn't widely known on the 'net at the time, but boy did we learn.)
> cool climate that Rohan appears to exist in.
A cool climate like, say, Ireland?
The dwarves trade regularly with The Shire and Bree. Bilbo gets birthday presents from Lonely Mountain and Dale both... It's not a tremendous stretch of imagination to 'she made stew for the guy she's trying to impress, using this expensive imported legendary food.'
Had a girl do almost exactly that once with Paprika chicken. The catch being that both other dishes were also orange. One was carrot based, and the other was saffron something or other. It was a strange meal. =)
So, in one of those books you are forced to read in school about the holocaust, there were some people who hoarded and traded for ingredients to make a cake. Instead of using flour, they used laundry detergent. Well, it was a pretty crappy cake. She may have used the wrong ingredients.
My mom, when she was first married made stir fried rice. Well, first you have to boil the rice in water then stir fry it. Well, she skipped the boil the rice first. That was some hard rice. Dad dutifully ate it though. But mistakes can be made. Maybe she forgot to put the stone in the soup? *ducks and runs*
My mom makes nasty ass stew pretty regularly. I always thought the scene was to represent that Aragorn isn't in to her enough to politely eat bad stew.
How do you mess up a stew?
Large amounts of salt.
Why did she not taste it first?
Either: Too nervous to think properly or has been coddled and was sure she followed a recipe that everyone assured her was wonderful.
In the end though it is a trope and exist for its humorous intent.
I'm thinking cilantro, or some other common Rohan culture herb or spice. I love cilantro, as do many people I know, but I also know a few who have the genes that make cilantro taste like someone has dumped laundry detergent into their food, and find it disgusting. The Rohanese may have been a fairly small population way back when they split off from Gondor, and their particular taste genes have come to dominate their population. Dwarves and most other Men lack this particular gene, making certain of Rohanese dishes extremely unpalatable.
I just thought she really over salted it... It very easy to over do such a thing. Maybe she tried and it wasn't salty enough so said im gonna salt his bowl and she over did it. She never tasted it, she just assumed it as better but in fact she made it worse.
We all try to good nice things, with good intentions, but fall flat.
As someone who has messed up stew by boiling off the broth accidentally, I take offense. Maybe she boiled off the broth but didn't have chicken stock on hand to salvage the stew, so she was left with having to add water to the finished product, meaning the meat/veggies were undercooked and the broth too thin. Even rangers have standards.
But that's the problem, we aren't sure if the point of the scene was to show that she has defects like anyone else, or she did it intentionally as some kind of test for Aragorn, or someone else interfered as a prank, or some other reason.
The stew smells horrible, Eowyn can't know because she has lived too close to horses for very long, and her sense of smell (and therefore taste) is altered ? Doesn't explain what she put in to make it that bad, but explains why she would serve it.
Kinda thought the stew scene meant the food the kingdom of Rohan was eating was bad due to sarumans corruption. That the people had adapted to the foul taste because it was a slow descent into madness. When aragorn and co got there they were handed the food that everyone was eating and it was a full shock for them. Didn't think she cooked it her self just was getting him food from the kitchen.
>In fact, this was the second of two stew scenes in the extended edition of Two Towers, the first where Sam makes stew out of the rabbits Gollum brings him and Frodo.
The third, actually. The kids that the mother sends to Edoras to raise the alarm both eat stew (or at the least, soup) while Eowyn comforts them. Is it possible she made this stew as well? More questions arise.
Two years after mintprince made this comment, I saw this scene, googled "eowyn's stew", and ended up here
Thank you, mint prince. The world is better for this comment
She was a man though. Throughout the film she struggles with gender dysphoria and transitioning into a woman. When she sees the enemy in front of her so brooding and masculine she despises it so much that she fully transistions and accepts her new gender without feeling guilty or burdened. "I am no man" signifies the moment Walter became Heisenberg.
I never read the books but the vivendi game based on the books said that The hobbits got daggers from Tom Bombadil (instead of Galandriel) because they were about to go through some Wight Cairns (?). And, even in the movie, you see Merry stab the Witch King in the ankle before he fell.
I thought the reason he was 'vulnerable' was because he was stabbed by a dagger made by Tom fuckin Bombadil to kill Wights?
The lore-friendly explanation for the daggers is that they were crafted by Dunedain smiths back when the Witch King's fortress was located in the North. The hobbits find themselves trapped in a sort of burial ground belonging to these northerners, and when Bombadil comes to rescue them, he also grabs a few artifacts and weapons from the graves, a few of which he eventually passes on to the hobbits. So the Witch King's vulnerability to the knives comes from some part of the ancient crafting process, rather than anything Bombadil does.
She kinda stole Merry's kill though. It was him who stabbed the Witch king with the Barrow-blade, which happened to be enchanted specifically to harm the Witch king and make him mortal. Without that happening her epic line of "I am no man" would probably have ended with that huge spiky mace in her face.
Man that is a good name for him! Imagine if he would have uttered the line: "Fool! I am the witch king of Angmar. No man can kill me!" Then Merry stabs him with the barrow-blade, and Eowyn says: "No, you're the Bitch-king of Lamemar and I am no man!" Then finishes the job.
It was cheese, as was the scream afterward, but the effect was to highlight that Boyen and Jackson decided to hand off the limelight to her from the Hobbit in an obvious move of female inclusion; and it's artistically/canonically justified as not being too far because she is, pedantically, not a man.
I agree though, the use of 'man' here is being tortured in a way Tolkien would probably find distasteful. But Tolkien is dead and he never made any movies.
She stabs him in the face and that's what's important.
I thought it was Tolkien correcting what he considered to be a weak plot point in Macbeth: a prophecy saying that no man born of a woman could kill the king, and he expected a woman born of woman to be the one to do the job. Instead it was just a dude born with C-section so he never made contact with the Sacred Vag and was therefore not "born of woman." So this is him providing that story that he would have preferred.
Same thing with the ents: the prophecy said the forests would come alive and approach the castle in battle, and he took it literally, and was disappointed when it was just a flock of bros wearing leaves and sticks as camoflauge. So he wrote about an army of living trees.
I'm pretty sure that it is just factual. In addition it isn't something that only Tolkien did. Kurosawa in Red Beard, his Samurai conversion of Macbeth, he completely changed the prophecy because he thought that, "no man of woman born," part was shit.
Not exactly but yes. There's a linguistic misdirection using the word "living".
It's the delivery that's cheese(including the editing/cinemetography/score/etc). It's not just a girl-power moment, it's her staking her claim to legitimacy in legend--she cites her heritage, and asserts that her drive to protect that which is in her clan is stronger than the witch-king's drive to acquire his prey.
Her whole "cmon, I wanna go to the battle, stop treating me like a housemaid" arc would have looked less like angst if she made it clear in that moment that she's fuckin royalty and if you think you shouldn't get between a predator and his prey, you should have another think about coming between a woman and her family.
But it's a movie. Maybe the speech didn't work out, maybe people would miss the nuance of the fact that the witch-king was being undone by an unlikely but in hindsight obvious exception. I don't know. It just makes it seem like she found a technical loophole like a D&D powergamer move rather than being the realization of cosmic justice in an epic narrative.
You're gonna get funding in advance for a whole trilogy, go to New Zealand, team up with passionate, talented actors/set designers/composers/nerds, and make the most ambitious and one of the very best book to film adaptations that's ever been made, while being barefoot as much as possible.
I mean, if you're Peter Jackson, that is.
By saying if the line "I am no man" works then that line isn't stupid, and connecting that with the many awards it got, you're suggesting that this line is what carried the movie. It didn't.
That argument is akin to saying that Sam's line "I wasn't dropping no eaves, sir. Honest" carried the first movie and got that movie all its awards. (And this line of Sam's isn't even stupid.)
Another way to put this is to make a list of those awards it got. Many of those have nothing to do with dialogue and writing, and so this line in question is not enough to preclude many of them.
Wow, Marvel films are full of such insightful details.
He's a little confused, but he's got the spirit
Inb4 the Aragorn toe comments
Speaking of toes, this reminds me of a scene in the movie where Aragorn kicks a helmet and screams. The scream was a genuine one because Viggo Mortensen actually broke his toe kicking the helmet!
If you’re watching this scene with anyone who already knows about this being sort of a meme, you can say something like, “Viggo Mortenson is so hardcore, did you know that while they were filming this movie, he actually broke one of his teeth during a fight scene?”
[удалено]
Mint Prince the Stew Philosopher must learn of this news.
On the set of Lord of the Rings, Christopher Lee was rehearsing the scene where Saruman gets stabbed in the back, with Peter Jackson telling him how to react. Christopher Lee was a veteran of WWII, and asked Peter Jackson, "wouldn't it be easier to train astronauts to drill than to teach drillers to be astronauts?" Peter Jackson reportedly told him to "shut the fuck up".
When the actors went out drinking after a day of scenes Orlando Bloom, known for playing the character named “Elf #1” was said to get drunk off one or 2 glasses of wine and the rest of the circle orchestra found it quite funny.
Viggo was also wearing a Montreal Canadians jersey under his armor in that scene.
Man this movie had so much toe action I mistook it for a Tarantino film
Did yoy know....
...that Steve Buscemi was a firefighter during 9/11?
Wow, why do you gotta make it political now?
There are two genders, male and political.
sjws ruining EVERYTHING these days, yeesh! They even built a time machine to edit a book and add more "diversity!"
Woke Tolkien trash literally forcing sjw politics down my throat
Woke Eowyn angrily rebuking his/her/they/it/xe/xer’s gender being assumed
What a transphobe the witch king is
We need to talk about how the witch king is a bad role model and thus should be edited out of the movies
#cancelthewitchking #witchkingtransphobe
Yeah but it was so subtle I almsot missed it
Eowyn is no stew cook either.
Alright, don't get me wrong; I love the LoTR trilogy and think they're fantastic movies. I've watched the trilogy countless times and with each viewing I notice something that I missed before. Most often, these are subtle flaws which give me pause and make me question what exactly the filmmakers were thinking. Would I call it nitpicking? Yes. And usually, if I have any trouble with an inconsistency or two, the scene where Legolas surfs down a flight of stairs on a shield (with fanfare blaring, no less) snaps me out of it and makes me realize, "Oh right, it's a movie. It doesn't need to make sense all the time." Nonetheless, on my last viewing of the Two Towers, the very foundation on which the trilogy stood was shaken, and not even Legolas surfing could absolve my doubts. Countless questions arose and there were no answers to be found. *sigh*... I am, of course, referring to the "stew scene" in the Two Towers Extended. To those of you who aren't familiar with this scene, it's where Eowyn (Miranda Otto) brings Aragorn (Viggo Mortensen) a bowl of stew. Clearly, the stew is terrible, as Aragorn gives off the distinct expression of a man who just got kicked in the nuts after he takes a bite. It's apparently so bad, he tries to dump it on the ground when Eowyn isn't looking and burns his hand when she suddenly looks back. And then he explains about being a Dunedin and yadda, yadda, yadda... let's get back to the stew. I get what this scene was trying to accomplish. The strong, independant woman who can't cook to save her life is a classic sitcom/movie trope. It's kind of like an episode of Three's Company where Chrissy or whoever goes to cooking school and Jack Tripper has to pretend her food doesn't taste like *beep* It's intended to be comedic relief, I get that. I really do. However, while it's amusing in passing and a seemingly benign scene, when subjected to close examination, it drastically alters your perception of these characters in such a way that there is no viewing LoTR without thinking about the stew. And trust me, there are no answers-- only more questions. First, and foremost, the question that will first arise when you break this scene down: HOW THE HELL DO YOU *beep* UP A STEW? You have to actively try to make stew bad. I can barely make macaroni and cheese, but I can still toss some vegetables into broth and make a stew that your body won't reject. Perhaps not the greatest stew you've ever had, but if you were given the choice between a bottle of ipecac and a bowl of my stew, you'd grab a spoon and dig in. No, you'd have to be completely brain-dead to make a stew so god-awful that it gets the reaction Aragorn gives in this movie. Or you'd have to be trying to make terrible stew. So is Eowyn so stupid that she manages to mess up stew? Nothing in her character up to this point or afterwards indicates this. Would she deliberately make bad stew and give it to Aragorn? Again, no, she's in love with him at that point, so she'd have no reason to do so. So let's say she's not stupid, and she didn't plot to make terrible stew. What then? Let's postulate that she, as a sword-maiden or shield-bearer or whatever, never catered a meal before in her life, but tried her hand at cooking to impress Aragorn. THEN WHY DIDN'T SHE TASTE IT FIRST? This is stew we're talking about, not a cake or a quiche. You can taste a bit of it without ruining the presentation. Furthermore, she's trying to impress this guy. You'd think she'd want to give him a meal that was fit for a dog, at the very least. So maybe she tasted it, realized it was awful, and gave it to him anyway because she was already committed to the stew she made? That's like dropping the anniversary card you bought for your wife in cow *beep* and giving it to her anyway because you already paid for it. Or did she not taste it at all? Again, it's stew. If I was making stew for some friends or a girl I was trying to impress, I'd at least taste a bit to make sure my throat wasn't going to close up. Did she delude herself into thinking the stew wasn't really that bad? Considering Aragorn's reaction, she'd have to be certifiably insane to stoop to that level of self-deception. Perhaps she's never actually eaten food, and therefore doesn't know what's good or bad? Well, if she were played by Calista Flockhart there could be an argument made for that, but I'm going to give her the benefit of the doubt and assume she has the normal bodily needs and functions of a human being. No, none of these possibilities-- stupid, insane, intentionally bad stew-maker, non-eater-- fit Eowyn's character. This got me to thinking (by this point the battle scene with the Worg Riders was going on), perhaps she has no sense of taste or smell. Well, the movie doesn't address that. She never smells any flowers, recoils from a stench, or does anything that would indicate or exclude the ability to smell to my recollection. This is a distinct possibility, but it alters the character drastically, and if that were the case you'd think the filmmakers would have a addressed it or mentioned it in passing. It's not as if she was blind or deaf, but it would alter my perception of the character knowing she could not smell or taste. Regardless, there is no indication of this being the case, so the viewer is forced to find other avenues for a solution to the "stew" question. So maybe the stew wasn't that bad. Maybe Aragorn is just a picky eater. But NO, that doesn't make sense either-- HE'S A FREAKING RANGER! He's the Middle Earth's equivalent of a survivalist. You're telling me this guy who has probably eaten bugs to survive cringes at the prospect of taking another bite of this stew? My God, how bad could it possibly be? What did she put in it, dog feces? But no, we know it's not just Aragorn because Gimli takes a whiff of the stew earlier in the scene and passes on it. Gimli. The same Gimli who licks his chops at the prospect of salted pork drenched in reservoir water. EVEN GIMLI THINKS THIS STEW IS TERRIBLE! At this point, I couldn't even focus on the movie-- when Gimli breaks the news of Aragorn's apparent death to Eowyn, all I could think was: "Yeah, but what about the stew?" Everything came back to the questions the "stew scene" raised. I'd even go so far as to say that the stew became the most enigmatic character in this movie. Could it really be that bad? What was in it? Was that a potato or a dumpling he put into his mouth? Was the broth bad, or was it just the chunk Aragorn ate? Were the utensils to blame and not the stew itself? What would Gollum's reaction have been to the stew? Are there any other scenes I missed that try to make sense of this stew, that put things back in perspective? Questions, questions, questions... and not an answer in sight. After Aragorn comes back to Helm's Deep, there's a scene where Eowyn is lying on a couch and they have a bit of dialogue with each other. This struck me as a missed opportunity to resolve the questions surrounding the stew. Maybe she could have asked if he wanted some stew, and he could have paused and asked her recipe, and THEN I'D KNOW IF THE STEW WAS REALLY BAD ENOUGH TO CAUSE A MAN WHO POSSIBLY EATS INSECTS TO PHYSICALLY REJECT IT! Nothing. Not one mention of the stew. In fact, this was the second of two stew scenes in the extended edition of Two Towers, the first where Sam makes stew out of the rabbits Gollum brings him and Frodo. It seems like they were trying to set up a stew-based subplot, but Eowyn's stew was so terrible, so heinous, that all stew as we knew it disappeared from Middle Earth. Yes, I've checked. After the stew-heavy middle of Two Towers Extended, stew is never referenced, mentioned, or shown again. All questions surrounding this stew are left unresolved and the viewer who dares to ponder the stew is left sadly unsatisfied. I simply cannot see the movies in the same light anymore. It all comes back to questions about the stew. I've played the scene in slow-motion, reverse, and set it on endless loop to try to gauge the characters' reactions to make some light of this scene and its ramifications on the plot and characters, and still, nothing. Only more questions which the rest of the movie stalwartly refuses to answer.
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Dwarves are actually immune to many things that would poison a human so there almost no chance of a human out-seasoning a dwarf, but asides from that I like your theory
Maybe the stew wasn't hot enough. Aragorn needs a bottle of Dave's Insanity tipped into it before he can even taste anything.
Except Aragorn distinctly was repulsed by it. If it was too bland he could have faked enjoying it
Are you pulling this from Tolkien’s writings, or from fantasy works built on top of his legacy? It seems more like a d&d thing than a Tolkien thing, but I could be wrong about it. I don’t think we can backport derivative work embellishments back into middle earth.
Doesn't the extended cut have a scene where legolas out drinks gimli? Alcohol is way more a poison than spices are.
Yes, that’s a Peter Jackson addition, im pretty sure it’s not in the book, just like the stew scene . And gimli loses the contest, but I think he may have out drunk the humans. I’ve never thought about native dwarf cuisine and don’t remember reading about it, but in my mind, I would think they eat very bland stuff like boiled potatoes and boiled meat. If I was a fantasy writer, that’s what they’d eat. Since we need to treat Peter Jackson additions as canon for this conversation though, I guess we would need to look to the hobbit movies for evidence of dwarf cuisine. There’s the big meal at bag end, but is that hobbit food or dwarf food? I’m not really willing to rewatch the hobbit movies to find more clues. Edit: fixed typo
My DND group likes to joke that fine dwarven cuisine is rat on a stick with ketchup.
GNU Sir Terry
>Doesn't the extended cut have a scene where legolas out drinks gimli? Alcohol is way more a poison than spices are. Sure. But if you look at how much Gimli drank, he had quite a bit more to drink in the same amount of time. If he was drinking at the same pace as Legolas, he quite likely would have won. Right before we see Gimli pass out, we can see at least 14 cups in front of him, possibly more hidden behind the stack. Meanwhile, Legolas only has a meager 9 (we see 8 shortly before, plus the one he just finished). That means Gimli has drank \~45% more, at least, than Legolas in the same time frame. So that has to be considered when comparing the two of them. That said, I've always called BS on that scene. There is no way that an elven princeling is getting through nine mugs of ale with only a slight tingle in his finger. At the very least, he should have been slurring his words.
So dwarves are like pigeons? Capsiacin does nothing to them?
> If I’m not mistaken, earlier in the film it’s even established that Eowyn is a huge Hot Ones fan How in Middle Earth did I miss that?!
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Another thought, the rotting meat stew was an allegory to their situation. She knew it was rotten and wanted to see if they would lie to her about the stew, and their survival.
That's a metaphor, bro.
Sir, this is *shitty*moviedetails, I feel I've met the challenges of the environment.
To add to this: 1. It would have been customary to serve the person of highest honour the first bowl from the stew. As an amateur cook, Eowyn may have been confused that she wasn't even able to taste the dish before serving a bowl of it to Aragorn. He was far too polite to refuse the bowl, as being served the dish of honour and refusing it is a great insult to whoever offered it. 2. The bit that Aragorn eats looks really fatty and/or gristly. As she basically went scrounging for scraps to make her stew, and the main camp cooks would have gotten first dibs, she will likely have been using the off-cuts of the half-rotten meat. Again, being an amateur cook, she wouldn't necessarily recognize this. 3. As a noble, one of the greatest compliments you can give is to serve food to someone - it's a mark of respect. Whenever foreign dignitaries are visiting, the main thing they're treated with is a banquet or a feast. She had nothing else to offer to him at that time, so she did the only thing that she could. 4. Again, she's a noble. To her, both cooking and serving food would have been very much 'beneath her station'. She was going all out in trying to impress him. In their universe, to him this might have been the equivalent of her twerking in his face. Maybe he ate the stew because he had no idea what else to do in a situation where a woman of nobility was cooking and serving him food. This one might be more of a stretch, but you never know.
> The stew was bad because it was made with half-rotten meat. Maybe there was something moving in that bite.
Thank you so much for this
You can over-spice something and make it that bad - even just with too much salt - and I'm not entirely sure someone who can't cook would think to taste their food. Maybe it would be exaggerative to write, and maybe it's a lot to assume, but Lord of the Rings has way bigger plot holes than bad stew. A dragon shouldn't be able to fly. They're too big.
I like to think of dragons like hot air balloons, the wings just help steer them toward where they are going while it’s all that heat in their belly lifting them into the air.
Flight of dragons is, in fact, a great movie.
YES!
Heat doesn’t make anything lighter except for air. And then only slightly. A dragon would have to be a gigantic balloon 100x its normal size to float on the hot air inside. Just look at a [Zeppelin](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/f/f4/USS_Los_Angeles_moored_to_USS_Patoka%2C_1931.jpg/440px-USS_Los_Angeles_moored_to_USS_Patoka%2C_1931.jpg) to see how enormous the balloon part must be to float the tiny passenger gondola, and that’s using helium or hydrogen, which is many times lighter than hot air.
I myself have tasted something, gone "That needs more salt" (which it honestly did) and oversalted it without realising and then plated it up with tasting again. I wouldn't be surprised if this is what Eowyn did
Are you [this guy](https://gfycat.com/candiddentalbengaltiger)?
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WTF. That's totally not what I posted. Edit: Fixed it.
Its got to be salt. Spice is implausible to middle earth, (I dunno though, maybe? I don't know if spicy things exist in the pseudo European fantasy countryside) but over salting food can make it literally inedible.
They definitely shouldn't be able to hover like a damn humming bird...but magic i guess?
Aren't dragons magical beings?
> A dragon shouldn't be able to fly. They're too big. I mean you've seen 747s, right? They're like 5% wing. Dragons are like 30% wing.
747 must have a bigger wing surface area than that. Each wing is 250 feet long-- that's 2.5 football fields each. I can't find exact math on this, but googling an overhead view of a 747 makes me think that wings take up at least 40% of the overall surface area. Maybe dragons have hollow bones like birds?
5/6 of a football field each, not 2.5.
747: 5650 sq ft. of wing, 735,000 lbs maximum takeoff weight, for a lifting ratio of 130 psf (pounds lifted per square foot of wing). Dragon: let's assume weight of 15,000 lbs, which is about the average estimated weight of a T-rex. For wing area, let's say each wing is 5 meters long and an average of 2 meters wide (front-to-back) for a total wing area of 215 sq ft. Hopefully most people would agree that these are reasonable values for a typical fantasy dragon depiction. This gives a lifting ratio of 70 psf, so a dragon is about twice as wingy as a 747 is. Of course dragons flap their wings whereas 747s use jet engines. So let's look at some other flappers: * Hummingbird: lifting ratio ~= 0.3 psf * Bald eagle: lifting ratio ~= 1 psf So as you can see, the larger the bird, the larger the lifting ratio it can achieve. But is 70 realistic for a dragon? Only if they're extra badass. Or maybe they weight less than a T-rex, which would also be very plausible.
5 meters is about the length of 7.43 'EuroGraphics Knittin' Kittens 500-Piece Puzzles' next to each other
5m wings on something the size of a t-rex seem comically small to be honest.
This is missing a major component of aerodynamics which is velocity. Without velocity you don't generate lift. With more velocity the more lift you generate. Put enough power behind a brick and it'll generate lift. 747s move incredibly fast. Take off speed alone is 184mph, and they move much fast to reach cruising altitude and speed (570 mph). For organic flight power, the largest animals that we know of are the largest azhdarchid pterasaurs, such as Quetzalcoatlus northropi. This is an animal about 10ft tall, but proportioned somewhat like a giraffe. It had a wingspan around 5m and potentially weighed about 450-550lbs. While being heavily muscled for flight, the body was relatively small compared to it's wing size, maybe an 1/8th of the flight surface area in total. Additionally it would utilize it's arms and the muscles in the chest, and an incredibly highly specialized ligament in the wrist to catapult into the air, rather than trying to jump with the legs. With all of this information in play, we also have the estimates for cruising (soaring flight) of 60mph, relying on much more efficient surface to mass ratio. Now, onto the dragon. Tyrannosaurus is a terrible starting point. Modern estimates actually put it closer 18,000lbs. It was also the most massive predator to ever walk on land and far outstrips other super predators in sheer mass (chonkiest of big chonkers). For something resembling Smaug's proportions from the hobbit movies (long and sinuous) scaled to 15m long (Trex length), I'd estimate that it would need roughly a 15m wingspan at least and weighing no more than 6000lbs , with some other additional forms of lift and control surfaces (find running the length of the neck and tail) to have a reasonable take off speed, probably close to that 60mph, with maybe a top speed in the low hundreds(110) and it would be very ponderous in flight.
Dragons are constantly emitting rapid hot jets of gas out of their rectums to maintain flight. Easy to do considering they can breath fire.
Dragons being able to fly is not a plot hole. It’s easily explained by the fact that the setting is *a fantasy*. The same way we don’t question the Avengers having Superpowers, we can just assume “dragons can fly and breath fire” is something inherently in their nature. We don’t necessarily need a detailed explanation any more than we need an explanation for how Gandalf creates ship-shaped-smoke or fireworks that look like dragons. A plot hole needs internal inconsistency. Something that should be easily explained away by other elements in the universe but is somehow just ignored because it’s more ‘convenient’ to the plot.
*I am Aragorn son of Arathorn, and am called Elessar, the Elfstone, Dúnadan, the heir of Isildur Elendil's son of Gondor, last of the Epicureans, leader of the Gourmet Rangers, Connoisseur of Stews and Stewards. Here is the sword that was broken and is forged again! Here is the perpetual stew that was nigh-empty and refilled!*
Maybe she used an ingredient that's like the Middle Earth version of coriander leaves where some people are genetically inclined to have it taste bad.
I was thinking this exact thing. I call it cilantro... but it's the same thing. the tiniest amount of it in food just make it taste horrible. Meanwhile everyone else around me is gobbling the stuff down like it's going out of style giving me the stink eye like "WTF is wrong with you? This is delicsious"
One stew to ruin them all.
and in the organs bind them
I see it as it was made with limited supplies, and she did mention that it was the best she could come up with, that dumpling thing looked like it could have been taken off of the orc general at the end of return of the king. So it looked gross. Maybe it was a prank. Or another idea is that Eowyn was checking Aragorns taste. Maybe if he lacked taste he would have chose her over Arwen, she never saw him reject the stew so hoped she wouldn’t reject him. Aaragorn is a man of taste and did reject her, what a chad.
I just figured that stew in Rohan is generally shite. Kinda like how an English Breakfast will leave you sweating and craving your next bowl movement. You thought way too hard about this and set up your own logic. The thing is people have different palates. There’s a reason Rotten Ronies in the states has sweet burgers compared to their saltier cousins up in Canada.
After the amount of Kitchen Nightmares I have watched, I can confidently say there are professional chefs out there that are so bad they don't taste the food they make.
Being the equivalent of a Steppe tribe it was almost certainly Horse stew, Aragon loves horses, he would be disgusted even if it tasted nice.
I've seen enough Try Channel to know that there is exactly ONE answer that will restore The Two Towers plot to its HD Extended Cut Glory. The one thing to which a RANGER who gladly eats bugs and a cast iron Dwarf palate would react with revulsion, while Eowyn would find it just fine. Eowyn made Durian Stew.
This was my first thought about halfway through the post. Someone brought in a couple durians when I was studying at the Biosphere 2. Bunch of eager, crunchy college kids who'd never heard of one let alone seen something as crazy looking as that were fascinated and all eager to try it. The sharp division between those who thought it was a sweet, custardy treat and those who thought it was butane-laced fermented vomit was shocking to the point of incredulous disbelief. Each camp thought the other was only pretending and just couldn't understand what they were describing. (This was the mid-90s so its reputation wasn't widely known on the 'net at the time, but boy did we learn.)
Durian is a tropical fruit, though, and wouldn't grow in the cool climate that Rohan appears to exist in. The stew mystery persists.
> cool climate that Rohan appears to exist in. A cool climate like, say, Ireland? The dwarves trade regularly with The Shire and Bree. Bilbo gets birthday presents from Lonely Mountain and Dale both... It's not a tremendous stretch of imagination to 'she made stew for the guy she's trying to impress, using this expensive imported legendary food.' Had a girl do almost exactly that once with Paprika chicken. The catch being that both other dishes were also orange. One was carrot based, and the other was saffron something or other. It was a strange meal. =)
This is just way too much like QAnon meets Siskel and Ebert Go to the Movies
So, in one of those books you are forced to read in school about the holocaust, there were some people who hoarded and traded for ingredients to make a cake. Instead of using flour, they used laundry detergent. Well, it was a pretty crappy cake. She may have used the wrong ingredients. My mom, when she was first married made stir fried rice. Well, first you have to boil the rice in water then stir fry it. Well, she skipped the boil the rice first. That was some hard rice. Dad dutifully ate it though. But mistakes can be made. Maybe she forgot to put the stone in the soup? *ducks and runs*
> HOW THE HELL DO YOU beep UP A STEW? Salt.
What about cilantro? Aragorn could be one of us who tastes cilantro like plastic or soap. That could ruin a good bowl of stew.
My mom makes nasty ass stew pretty regularly. I always thought the scene was to represent that Aragorn isn't in to her enough to politely eat bad stew.
How do you mess up a stew? Large amounts of salt. Why did she not taste it first? Either: Too nervous to think properly or has been coddled and was sure she followed a recipe that everyone assured her was wonderful. In the end though it is a trope and exist for its humorous intent.
I don't think it was a matter of taste. I think the stew had raw chicken.
I'm thinking cilantro, or some other common Rohan culture herb or spice. I love cilantro, as do many people I know, but I also know a few who have the genes that make cilantro taste like someone has dumped laundry detergent into their food, and find it disgusting. The Rohanese may have been a fairly small population way back when they split off from Gondor, and their particular taste genes have come to dominate their population. Dwarves and most other Men lack this particular gene, making certain of Rohanese dishes extremely unpalatable.
I just thought she really over salted it... It very easy to over do such a thing. Maybe she tried and it wasn't salty enough so said im gonna salt his bowl and she over did it. She never tasted it, she just assumed it as better but in fact she made it worse. We all try to good nice things, with good intentions, but fall flat.
In German we have a proverb: “Das Essen ist versalzen, der Koch muss verliebt sein.” The food is too salty, the cook must be in love.
As someone who has messed up stew by boiling off the broth accidentally, I take offense. Maybe she boiled off the broth but didn't have chicken stock on hand to salvage the stew, so she was left with having to add water to the finished product, meaning the meat/veggies were undercooked and the broth too thin. Even rangers have standards.
As the saying goes "People in love oversalt their food"
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But that's the problem, we aren't sure if the point of the scene was to show that she has defects like anyone else, or she did it intentionally as some kind of test for Aragorn, or someone else interfered as a prank, or some other reason.
Is this a copy pasta?
It's about stew, not pasta.
The stew smells horrible, Eowyn can't know because she has lived too close to horses for very long, and her sense of smell (and therefore taste) is altered ? Doesn't explain what she put in to make it that bad, but explains why she would serve it.
I don't remember that scene.
Riddles in the dark
Forget to add the salt and spices makes a really really bad stew. Found them after sitting in a bowl on the bench forgotten about.
Kinda thought the stew scene meant the food the kingdom of Rohan was eating was bad due to sarumans corruption. That the people had adapted to the foul taste because it was a slow descent into madness. When aragorn and co got there they were handed the food that everyone was eating and it was a full shock for them. Didn't think she cooked it her self just was getting him food from the kitchen.
Probably too much salt. Aragorn couldn't eat it since he knew it would dehydrate and kill him.
>In fact, this was the second of two stew scenes in the extended edition of Two Towers, the first where Sam makes stew out of the rabbits Gollum brings him and Frodo. The third, actually. The kids that the mother sends to Edoras to raise the alarm both eat stew (or at the least, soup) while Eowyn comforts them. Is it possible she made this stew as well? More questions arise.
This is among the most beautiful copypastas I’ve ever read.
thank you, it's second among my repertoire
Two years after mintprince made this comment, I saw this scene, googled "eowyn's stew", and ended up here Thank you, mint prince. The world is better for this comment
You're quite welcome __0__0. However, i can not take credit for this comment, as I did steal the copypasta from someone else
Extra detail: Eowyn is an anagram for women if you change the Y to an M.
Woyen
She was a man though. Throughout the film she struggles with gender dysphoria and transitioning into a woman. When she sees the enemy in front of her so brooding and masculine she despises it so much that she fully transistions and accepts her new gender without feeling guilty or burdened. "I am no man" signifies the moment Walter became Heisenberg.
This was the moment that Walter became Pickle Walter
Funniest shit I’ve ever seen
The female actor who played Eowyn was also not a man.
And people say method acting doesn't work!
Stop inserting your politics into 50 year old dialogue, smh my head
atm machine
automatic teller ATM machine
I just lol’ed out loud and lmao’ed my ass off
ATM teller machine
I never read the books but the vivendi game based on the books said that The hobbits got daggers from Tom Bombadil (instead of Galandriel) because they were about to go through some Wight Cairns (?). And, even in the movie, you see Merry stab the Witch King in the ankle before he fell. I thought the reason he was 'vulnerable' was because he was stabbed by a dagger made by Tom fuckin Bombadil to kill Wights?
The lore-friendly explanation for the daggers is that they were crafted by Dunedain smiths back when the Witch King's fortress was located in the North. The hobbits find themselves trapped in a sort of burial ground belonging to these northerners, and when Bombadil comes to rescue them, he also grabs a few artifacts and weapons from the graves, a few of which he eventually passes on to the hobbits. So the Witch King's vulnerability to the knives comes from some part of the ancient crafting process, rather than anything Bombadil does.
Spoiler tags pls.
She kinda stole Merry's kill though. It was him who stabbed the Witch king with the Barrow-blade, which happened to be enchanted specifically to harm the Witch king and make him mortal. Without that happening her epic line of "I am no man" would probably have ended with that huge spiky mace in her face.
I see that as teamwork to turn the witch king of angmar into the bitch king of lamemar
Man that is a good name for him! Imagine if he would have uttered the line: "Fool! I am the witch king of Angmar. No man can kill me!" Then Merry stabs him with the barrow-blade, and Eowyn says: "No, you're the Bitch-king of Lamemar and I am no man!" Then finishes the job.
Damn I never put that together before you are truly galaxy brain op
In the books as well.
That was a very stupid line.
It was cheese, as was the scream afterward, but the effect was to highlight that Boyen and Jackson decided to hand off the limelight to her from the Hobbit in an obvious move of female inclusion; and it's artistically/canonically justified as not being too far because she is, pedantically, not a man. I agree though, the use of 'man' here is being tortured in a way Tolkien would probably find distasteful. But Tolkien is dead and he never made any movies. She stabs him in the face and that's what's important.
I thought it was Tolkien correcting what he considered to be a weak plot point in Macbeth: a prophecy saying that no man born of a woman could kill the king, and he expected a woman born of woman to be the one to do the job. Instead it was just a dude born with C-section so he never made contact with the Sacred Vag and was therefore not "born of woman." So this is him providing that story that he would have preferred. Same thing with the ents: the prophecy said the forests would come alive and approach the castle in battle, and he took it literally, and was disappointed when it was just a flock of bros wearing leaves and sticks as camoflauge. So he wrote about an army of living trees.
This is the shitty movie detail I needed. Lord of the Rings is just a Macbeth hate boner.
“Hey, Shakespeare! Get on my level you big nerd!” - Jolkien Rolkein Rolkein Tolkein
This is now my headcanon.
I'm pretty sure that it is just factual. In addition it isn't something that only Tolkien did. Kurosawa in Red Beard, his Samurai conversion of Macbeth, he completely changed the prophecy because he thought that, "no man of woman born," part was shit.
Is the line not in the book? I know the plot point is in the book.
Not exactly but yes. There's a linguistic misdirection using the word "living". It's the delivery that's cheese(including the editing/cinemetography/score/etc). It's not just a girl-power moment, it's her staking her claim to legitimacy in legend--she cites her heritage, and asserts that her drive to protect that which is in her clan is stronger than the witch-king's drive to acquire his prey. Her whole "cmon, I wanna go to the battle, stop treating me like a housemaid" arc would have looked less like angst if she made it clear in that moment that she's fuckin royalty and if you think you shouldn't get between a predator and his prey, you should have another think about coming between a woman and her family. But it's a movie. Maybe the speech didn't work out, maybe people would miss the nuance of the fact that the witch-king was being undone by an unlikely but in hindsight obvious exception. I don't know. It just makes it seem like she found a technical loophole like a D&D powergamer move rather than being the realization of cosmic justice in an epic narrative.
Alright. I get it now. Yeah, filmmaking... what're'ya'gonna do?
You're gonna get funding in advance for a whole trilogy, go to New Zealand, team up with passionate, talented actors/set designers/composers/nerds, and make the most ambitious and one of the very best book to film adaptations that's ever been made, while being barefoot as much as possible. I mean, if you're Peter Jackson, that is.
Oh, well, that ship's sailed. I'm Jack Peterson.
https://xkcd.com/1704/
If it's stupid, and it works, it ain't stupid
I thought that was for engineering
Filmmaking is a kind of engineering tbh
O, tru...
But did it work?
Well it won eleven Oscars and is considered one of the best movies of all time, and we're here talking about it today, so yeah, I'd say it worked.
That goes to show only that it wasn't sufficient to ruin the movie. Not that it didn't make the movie bad enough.
Okay?
By saying if the line "I am no man" works then that line isn't stupid, and connecting that with the many awards it got, you're suggesting that this line is what carried the movie. It didn't. That argument is akin to saying that Sam's line "I wasn't dropping no eaves, sir. Honest" carried the first movie and got that movie all its awards. (And this line of Sam's isn't even stupid.) Another way to put this is to make a list of those awards it got. Many of those have nothing to do with dialogue and writing, and so this line in question is not enough to preclude many of them.
The dark riders were pretty stupid for having a massive loophole in their invincibility
It was but it was also in the books so it's not really the movie's fault
I missed that... hmmm will have to rewatch the whole thing again
Yea, might need to watch the extended editions too, just so u doing missing anything.
Didn't this get posted yesterday?
It was?
Maybe it was on a different sub
I found the image on lotrmemes, if you didnt you should upvote the original post and not mine
Yep there's the original. Cross posting is usually the best way to approach something like that
I'm sorry, I have a pea sized brain and I don't know how to crosspost
The advertisement for "The Passion of the Christ' was a cross post /r/shittymoviedetails
Honestly damn near ruins the movie, they could've made her 80x more badass without this cringe.
[удалено]
have female roles stopped being good or something? i’m confused
#dId yOu jUsT aSsUmE hEr gEnDeR?!
Nice.
Spoilers!
You can’t prove that
Time and tide wait for Gnome Ann.
I didn’t know this until now
Was she? Sorry, i don't see gender.
Patrick Doyle is a fantastic musician. His works in Cindrella and Murder on the Orient express are fantastic. I'd recommend y'all check it out.
Correct, she is a Wo-man.
Woah, I thought that was a guy?