Discussion of The Two Towers, Book Three, Chapter Two

Join Cam and Maggie for our first big adventure with the new company – Aragorn, Gimli, and Legolas! Their gruff, decidedly un-magical perspective gives us a wonderfully rugged new look at Middle-earth. Mud, blood, and dead orcs abound, but Gandalf still manages to echo through the chapter. Hints of eagles, strange narrative jumps, and the appearance a mysterious Old Man lead us to wonder about Gandalf’s continued involvement – and influence – within this story. Cam develops a theory about Two Towers being the villain showcase of The Lord of the Rings and Maggie leads us through a compare / contrast segment making sense of Gandalf and Saruman. The White Wizard is everywhere in these pages, as a passive threat and possibly another active theological meddler. Legolas even discusses him as being “a will” acting upon Middle-earth, so Cam gets all excited about that. We also break down some fresh political critique in the company’s dealings with the Riders of Rohan and reflect on the progressive streak we keep finding in Tolkien’s work.

In our Second Breakfast, we try to figure just why we hated Zack Snyder’s Justice League so much. On paper, it is an extended cut of a genre epic that follows a fellowship driven by magical objects and threatened by a criminally underdeveloped villain – we should love it! We move past our subjective opinions of the film to have a conversation about genre adaptations, the innumerable pressures placed on fandom movies, and the crushing difficulty of making movies like this comprehensible to viewers who aren’t familiar with the source material. Hey, we even end up bashing Harry Potter, Game of Thrones, and all the Marvel movies. Everyone except Peter Jackson, blessed be his name.

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