Isle Of Skye, Scotland

Keep this in mind the next time you are about to repeat a rumor or spread gossip.

In ancient Greece (469 – 399 BC), Socrates was widely lauded for his wisdom. One day an acquaintance ran up to him excitedly and said, “Socrates, do you know what I just heard about Diogenes?”

“Wait a moment,” Socrates replied, “Before you tell me I’d like you to pass a little test. It’s called the Triple Filter Test.”

“Triple filter?” asked the acquaintance.

“That’s right,” Socrates continued, “Before you talk to me about Diogenes let’s take a moment to filter what you’re going to say. The first filter is Truth. Have you made absolutely sure that what you are about to tell me is true?”

“No,” the man said, “Actually, I just heard about it.”

“All right,” said Socrates, “So you don’t really know if it’s true or not. Now let’s try the second filter, the filter of Goodness. Is what you are about to tell me about Diogenes something good?”

“No, on the contrary…”

“So,” Socrates continued, “You want to tell me something about Diogenes that may be bad, even though you’re not certain it’s true?”

The man shrugged, a little embarrassed. Socrates continued, “You may still pass the test though, because there is a third filter, the filter of Usefulness. Is what you want to tell me about Diogenes going to be useful to me?”

“No, not really.”

“Well,” concluded Socrates, “If what you want to tell me is neither True nor Good nor even Useful, why tell it to me or anyone at all?”

The man was bewildered and ashamed. This is an example of why Socrates was a great philosopher and held in such high esteem.

It also explains why Socrates never found out that Diogenes was banging his wife.

“Let someone love you just the way you are - as flawed as you might be, as unattractive as you sometimes feel, and as unaccomplished as you think you are. To believe you must hide of all the parts of you that are broken, out of fear that someone else is incapable of loving what is less than perfect, is to believe that sunlight is incapable of entering a broken window and illuminating a dark room.”

— Marc Hack

I’m not really sure how script-writing works. Do writers leave certain reactions from characters out of the script in order to maintain mystery? Like on the script we don’t get to see much of Bellamy’s feelings/thoughts while walking towards Clarke since it’s mostly in her POV, but from Bob’s acting we can tell he’s really emotional. For scenes like that, when certain feelings aren’t yet canon, do writers purposely leave out any potential hints to them and tell the actors how to act it out?

Well, I’m not a script writer either, but I’ve been around a lot of actors, and I’ve studied it a little bit. The thing about plays or tv or movies? They’re a collaborative art.

As a novelist, I write the whole thing and then the reader finishes the story in their brain.

With a screen play. The writer writes the  basic scaffolding, the dialogue and the stage directions, then the director figures out the direction to go, then the actor adds in their humanity and artistry, the costumers and set designers create the world the characters go through, the cinematographer captures the best images to tell the story, the editor cuts it and puts it together to sculpt the story, the composer adds the music to give emotion to it all,

So. what you see is all those people working together to tell the story. Each artist puts their touch to create this larger world, and ALL of them contribute to the thoughts and feelings you have when you watch.

We see the actors faces and hear the writer’s words, but it all goes into it. If there’s something that they want the actors to act towards, I’m sure the show runner or director will talk to them about it. But there’s been a lot of emotion that we’ve seen on screen already, and the actors are building on all those character choices they’ve already made. For all we know, Bob’s already gotten the direction that Bellamy’s in love with Clarke. It didn’t have to be in that scene. It could have been another, or not in the stage directions at all, but spoken to him by JR or another director. The scripts aren’t for us at all. They are behind the scenes.

Lord of the Rings was published in the fifties, and largely written in the forties. Tolkien’s opinions on society and morality and technology are at some points genuinely more conservative than what I’m comfortable with. And yet, the more I think about it, the more sure I am that Tolkien actually deconstructs most of the clichéd fantasy tropes he supposedly originates. Some examples.

The long-lost heir is not the hero, he’s a side character who deliberately uses himself as a decoy.

The real hero actually fails in his quest, his goodness and determination and willpower utterly fail in the face of evil, and the world is saved by a series seemingly unrelated good deeds.

The central conflict is not between destroying the world and preserving it. An age of the world will come to an end, and many great and beautiful things will perish, whether the heroes win or lose. The past may have been glorious, but preserving it is impossible, and returning to it is impossible, time has passed and the world has moved on. The king returns, but the elves are gone and magic fades from the very substance of Middle Earth. The goal is not to preserve the status quo, the goal is the chance to rebuild something on the ruins.

Killing the main villain seems to instantly solve the problem, eradicate all enemies and fix the world, except it doesn’t, not wholly, since the scouring of the Shire still has to happen.

Also, the hero gets no real reward, and what he gets, he cannot really enjoy. He is hurt by his ordeal, and never fully recovers.

There is a team of heroes, a classic adventuring party, except the Fellowship is together for less one sixth of the series. The Fellowship is intact from the Council of Elrond to Gandalf’s death, four chapters. The remaining eight are together until Boromir’s death, an additional six chapters. This is nothing compared to LOTR’s length of sixty-one chapters, if I count correctly.

Tolkien is not classic high fantasy. If you actually think about it, there is very little magic. The hobbits’ stealth is not magical, most elven wonders are not unambigously magical, wizards are extremely rare, and even Gandalf hardly uses magic if you compare him to the average DnD wizard. Most magic is indistinguishable from craft, there is no clear difference between a magic armor and a very good armor, between magic bread and very good bread, between magical healing and competent first-aid plus a few kind words.

TLDR: Stop praising recent fantasy for deconstructing Tolkien if they’re “deconstructing” something Tolkien has never actually constructed.

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“If you’re the smartest person in the room, you’re in the wrong room.” - Marissa Mayer, President & CEO of Yahoo

“It’s so difficult to describe depression to someone who’s never been there, because it’s not sadness. I know sadness. Sadness is to cry and to feel. But it’s that cold absence of feeling— that really hollowed-out feeling.”

— J.K. Rowling