# Newsflash! Surprise of Century!



## Confusticated (Sep 18, 2010)

In _Underrated characters_ thread, TTFer YayGollum says "Gollum the Hero immediately springs to brain".


Discuss Gollum as hero...


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## Turgon (Sep 18, 2010)

Um...?

*scratches head*

He's not bad at riddles I guess, always a good skill for a hero.


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## YayGollum (Sep 18, 2010)

Exactly! The Turgon person touches a good point, but Gollum does not merely possess the wit of a successful riddler, he is composed of every secret herb and spice required to make a hero. Strength (for more than your average hobbit thing, granted to him by lots of association with a magical item, that, when evilly stolen, he still retained the awesome that it gave him via sheer force of will!), Dexterity (dude was plenty sneaky), Constitution (dude wouldn't quit), Intelligence (he certainly knew plenty of trivia), Wisdom (Wisdom is the weaselly character's primary stat! They know when to run away!), and Charisma (he was awesome at getting people to feel sorry for him). <--- according to one source for what makes a hero.


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## Confusticated (Sep 20, 2010)

Smeagol may have started out a bit of a rotten person, but he ended up being victimized by the One Ring of Sauron far more than the other hobbits who bore it. What happened to him was more comparable with what Sauron did with the 9 wraiths. The ring took away whatever humanity was left in Smeagol...reducing him to Gollum... and with nothing left in him but hate and obsession for the Ring. He lived decades of unimaginable torment... all because he had been a bit of a stinker? And in the end it was him who died from it... that was really the best thing that could have happened to him at that point... put out of his suffering. There may have been a point when Gollum might have found his humanity again, but it just didn't happen for him. he really had no choice but to be who he was, being the way he was. In fact I don't think he could be blamed at all. 

Smeagol was sacrificed. He didn't wittingly make sacrifice, but they were imposed upon him, and he lived it, suffered it until the end. It was his death, his falling into the fire with the ring that destroyed Sauron.


Was he a hero though? For me, a hero must act on his own free will... and Gollum was not capable of this.


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## YayGollum (Sep 20, 2010)

What you type is certainly one way of looking at it. A bit sadder than the way that I look at it, which would be ---> Unfortunately, we don't know much about what Smeagol was really like, at first. I see no reason to see him as a particularly rotten dude. He seemed like something that book nerds like ourselves would have understood. He had a decent amount of knowledge from the time when he grew up, so he could also have been a book nerd. Also, he was a nice enough guy to teach his apparently crazy grandmother how to suck eggses. 

Sure, that One Ring thing messed with him, but the evil sam, the most insidious villain of the story, was what prevented poor Smeagol from gaining more of a foothold in his life, and all because of that evil thief Bilbo Baggins painting horrible pictures of poor Smeagol. oh well. *sniff* People make a large deal when heroes display great strength of will, resisting evil and such. Why don't they make a much larger deal of poor Smeagol, who was under Sauron's influence for hundreds of years and still managed to shake it off, even while surrounded by nasssty hobbitses who hate him? Craziness.


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## Confusticated (Sep 20, 2010)

YayGollum said:


> He seemed like something that book nerds like ourselves...


 
Wait, stop right there. Who says I'm a book nerd. Now let me comb through HoME for relevant references for Gollum. :*D

Yay, I did get the impression he was a less kind fellow than Bilbo and the other hobbits. I'm not saying he was totally rotten.

Do you dislike Sam for the sole reason that he seemed to interfere with Gollum's betterment? If so, i can say that for once I could see why you do not like Sam, even though I disagree with you on Sam.

Honestly, I'm not sure anyone I know would do for me what Sam did for Frodo. And I've maybe known three poeple in life I would attempt (with failfure I'm sure) what Sam did for Frodo...one of them being my own son. Sam, and I also believe Merry and Pippin... any of them would have done it for any of eachother I think. 

Gollum was strong in his own way, he was unbelievably tough.


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## YayGollum (Sep 20, 2010)

Hmmm... Poor Smeagol, who we get very little information on before he gets that One Ring thing, was more rotten than any of the nasssty hobbitses? A crazy argument. As was typed, we know next to nothing about him, and what we do know is ofttimes colored by the Gollum that the more sympathetic characters are having to deal with. On the other paw, I could come up with plenty of horrible things to type about any nasssty hobbit, and they are given far more favorable lights. What horrible information are we given about poor Smeagol? The only evil thing that I can think of the guy doing would be messing with people while invisible, but anyone would do that, and he was just a little guy when he got the One Ring thing. 

Towards the evil sam, I am sure that there are other negative things to say about the guy, but the brainless notion that poor Smeagol was evil through as well as through is a disposition that should be reviled. Closed-mindedness? Sickening. Yay for reliable people, sure, but mindless devotion coupled with intolerance just makes him sickening and pathetic. :*rolleyes:


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## Confusticated (Sep 20, 2010)

Well I guess everything we know about his past was from Gandalf's guesswork... so I don't know that he was already a stinker. That is just how Gandalf had painted it out to be, and the fact of how the ring was able to currupt him faster and worse than it had with Bilbo also makes me think that.


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## YayGollum (Sep 20, 2010)

Everything that the evil torturer Gandalf got out of Gollum was gotten via torture, which is not always reliable, especially when the guy being tortured is as awesome as poor Smeagol. I don't understand why humans decide to believe the bad guy when he says bad things about himself, but if he tries to dole out less negative information, they are suspicious. Isn't it more sensible to never trust anyone about anything? And we don't know how long it took for poor Smeagol to grow a Gollum. We are told that he hung around the Gladden Fields to mess with people invisibly, then got banished, when someone overreacted, but we don't know how long all of that took, or how long he wandered around before gaining an allergy to light.


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## Confusticated (Sep 20, 2010)

Good points. But I still believe he had become a monster, not a hero.


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## YayGollum (Sep 20, 2010)

He never became a monster, just more monstrous. No character was pure good or pure evil, they just had their tendencies. Gollum had the tendencies of being an anti-social little nerd who hated elves and nasssty hobbitses. *sniff* My kind of hero! :*rolleyes: The evil sam is far more monstrous. I suppose that they both have their excuses, though. Poor Smeagol was messed with by the most powerful Maia, and the evil sam, uh, just wasn't raised correctly. :*rolleyes:


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## Confusticated (Sep 20, 2010)

He killed babies for food when could have found something else to eat. But perhaps you'll say it's not different from Sam killing poor little defenseless rabbits?


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## YayGollum (Sep 20, 2010)

Actually, I wouldn't have thought of that. My usual response to that argument is that, hey, nobody whines when Gollum eats incompetent goblin fishermen from the Misty Mountains. Why is that? Ah. Racism. An incompetent goblin fisherman is just about as helpless as a human infant, so Gollum isn't being any more evil to the human infant. Poor Orcses. Everybody loves babies more than, um, being corrupted to be killing machines. :*rolleyes: Killing goblins and humans is just self-defense, for a guy who plans to be immortal, and who everyone just can't help hating. *sniff* Poor Smeagol.


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## Confusticated (Sep 20, 2010)

I'm highly empathetic person towards humans and beasts but I have less empathy for goblins and beings who seem not capable of love.


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## Prince of Cats (Sep 20, 2010)

Well ...

Really ...

Who knows what Deagol would have done. If Smeagol wouldn't have done the deed and taken the ring, it might never have made its way to Rivindell


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## YayGollum (Sep 20, 2010)

I advise against empathy. You will run into plenty of your own problems, yes? You will encounter negative emotions at a number of points that you will deem too many, yes? So, why go looking for trouble? This message is sponsored by the YayGollum Preservation Of Mental Health Association. But oh well. :*rolleyes: 

I'll go from the different angle. The goblins seem incapable of love? They, just like poor Smeagol, are given few benefits of doubts. The story is against them, so of course they aren't easy to empathize with. I calls it highly unlikely, though, that they were incapable of love (Unfortunately. Everyone knows that love is bad). They came from elves, and why am I the only one who wonders how much elf is left in them? Are there Telerish, Vanyarian, and Noldorese versions of Orcs? Are there a bunch of storytelling, mountain spring-loving Orcs, were the Orcish descendants of some Vanyar the only ones that Saruman could get the Dunlendings to produce Uruk-Hai with, and do the only named Orcs that we know of come from the Noldor, since those are the only elves that people seem to care about? :*rolleyes: I'd like to know. But oh well. Why just think of them as stormtroopers for the villains? Also, to stay on topic, Yay, Gollum.


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## Confusticated (Sep 20, 2010)

Noldor are most like human, and they are the most interesting to talk about for a lot of readers but I wouldn't say we care about them more than the others. I mean I would rather live with one the Telerin cultures than the exiled Noldor. 


And why is love bad? To me it only seems so when you are deeply hurt because you allowed your heart to feel, sometimes not even then, or if so it passes. Without love would mothers raise their children to be good? Would anyone ever experience the euphoria of falling in love, and experience the spiritual high that love brings and which makes you feel happy and at peace no matter what happens.


Your whole thing with live Yay, I wonder if you have been in love before, and wouldn't you want it to happen again but next time without the pain.


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## YayGollum (Sep 21, 2010)

All of such leads into one of my favorite rants, which is quite off of this topic. Towards the Gollum eating human infants thing, it seems as if most people do not value goblin lives. It is many people's point of view that killing goblins is like killing roaches. To Gollum's point of view, everyone who is not Gollum is a roach. Hey, I disagree with both points of view, but I can still understand where the guy is coming from. I do not condone eating human infants, but I do condone living and allowing the goblins to live. :*rolleyes:


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## Confusticated (Sep 21, 2010)

What do you think makes a goblin kill, and do you think they could be good to eachother?


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## YayGollum (Sep 21, 2010)

Or we could make this a rambling thread. :*rolleyes: Goblins kill for the same reason any of the other races of Middle-Earth kill. They were raised to believe that the others deserve it, for various reasons. Goblins would be particularly driven to kill, due to being evilly as well as magically bent to enjoy it. Why did no character ever attempt to fix an Orc? It seems as if elves are just naturally repelled by them, which makes sense, since Orcs are made from them, but wouldn't some elf or some decent Ainu ever care? But no. Tolkien's universe is more black and white. Something's evil, kill it. Manwe thought that Mel could be redeemed, but that guy doesn't know from evil. The evil torturer Gandalf thought that the Hero Gollum could be redeemed, but the evil sam, who Tolkien saw as the biggest hero, had already decided that Gollum was evil, so he needed to die. *sniff* oh well. Poor idealism. :*rolleyes: 

Anyways, sure, why would anyone think that goblins couldn't be any kind of decent? They can't be pure evil. And what about what I typed before, along the lines of Orcs still having some elfiness to them? Gollum was hurt by the elfish rope and couldn't eat lembas, since he had been corrupted by that One Ring thing, but the contact with those things helped him out with getting some Smeagol back. Why no elfish rope and lembas therapy for Orcs? :*(


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## Confusticated (Sep 21, 2010)

YayGollum said:


> Or we could make this a rambling thread. :*rolleyes:


 
Why not? This place is so quiet who cares about on and off topic...its all Tolkien related so its on topic.



> And what about what I typed before, along the lines of Orcs still having some elfiness to them? Gollum was hurt by the elfish rope and couldn't eat lembas, since he had been corrupted by that One Ring thing, but the contact with those things helped him out with getting some Smeagol back. Why no elfish rope and lembas therapy for Orcs? :*(


 
If orcs were currupted from children of eru... then yes I would think they could be healed in some way. That their spirits could be cleansed or something, and then eventually be able to be rehoused in a normal body. But here is the thing: if orcs were elves then was each individual orc once an elf, or were most of the orcs born from other orcs? If born from other orcs (which seems to be the case), what the heck did Melkor do to transform a person into something that would give birth to the thing it had been transformed into and not what it originally had been? Its pretty bad isnt it? And I would think that that was time for Eru to intervene. And if elves in origin then they would have to need some way to redeem and heal.

Why would I think they couldn't be decent? I don't know if they can, but I do know I don't remember reading of any instance when an orc showed decency. But then again I wouldn't expect the people who wrote the histories to be aware of such things.


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## YayGollum (Sep 21, 2010)

Yes, the scenes that we get of Orcs don't show us a plethora of dimensions. It is understandable. But sure, I go with the ideas that Orcs aren't immortal, that they bred true, and that they are crazy fast at it. I figure that Mel took his time and did a really good job, since he wasn't a large fan of elves. Corruption was his thing, but he could never corrupt the Dwarves, which were just another random thing that the fickle Aule made. Normally, it is a lot easier to break something than it is to make something unbreakable. Mayhaps Mel's corruption isn't so great, after all. Mayhaps he injected a vibe into Orcs that would make people repulsed by them, so they wouldn't want to help. That is reminiscent of Sauron injecting a vibe into his One Ring thing that forced people to enjoy it.


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## Confusticated (Sep 21, 2010)

Because elves have such a harmonious and close relationship of body and soul, it may be that making an elf hideous of body is enough to drive them insane, but also there must have been long spans of torture that would make them go mad. But were orcs insane... or just cruel and wicked? he must have brainwashed them after, broke them down to nothing and then rebuilt them, Melkor could do this for sure.

I would find orcs from men more easy to understand, since we are already more similar to orcs than elves seem to be. I'm thinking of our inability to get along with our fellow humans.


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## YayGollum (Sep 21, 2010)

Well, not all elves got along with each other. And, anyways, the point has been made that elves don't fight amongst themselves too much because they're so sickeningly old and wise. :*rolleyes: Humans and Orcs have short lives. 

I muchly prefer the Orcs from elves idea, mostly because I like that elves get taken down a peg. :*rolleyes: I like that the elves have a natural distaste for Orcs. I like the stuff that they gave to help Merry and Pippin out, since it seemed like an Orcish version of lembas. I like that Mel took everything having to do with beauty away from them, since that's such a big selling point for elves, and he made them to be purely practical, slaves and soldiers. I see Mel as the god of creativity. He took Ulmo's idea of water and made snow. He took Varda's idea of light and made fire. Since he was jealous of elves, he showed them what the more mundane uses that could be found for such materials. Orcs from humans isn't as deliciously evil. Humans were supposed to be the race most like Mel, the most adaptable, and, without much guidance, they were easy for him to talk into working for him. He didn't have to bother with any magical corruption.


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## Confusticated (Sep 21, 2010)

You see Melkor as the god of creativity - yet Melkor was not able to create, just currupt. he was anti-create. The beauty of the elves was that they were master artists, also their voices and bodies... how is it creative to just squash those things. Taking away those qualities and leaving nothing but a twisted and Morgothized body? he ruined them Yay.

The temperature extremes... that is totally different. But elf to orcs is nothing to brag about. It is the worst thing he did if he did to it. And what he did to men was almost as bad, but at least we have a choice.

When the elves woke at Cuivienen, before even travelling to Valinor, what did they do to require being "taken down a peg"? And is that honestly the phrase you use to describe being ruined?


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## YayGollum (Sep 21, 2010)

Okay, so, I should call him the god of originality. It was quite sad that he wasn't allowed to come up with his own stuff, but he did plenty of good things with other people's ideas. Ulmo complimented him on the snow idea, although he mentioned that it was cold. And Yay Mel for coming up with fire. He stripped the elves of all of the little things that made the Valar love them and reduced them to just the basic working parts. At least in that The Silmarillion book, it seemed as if he even made their senses better than the elves. He was jealous and angry and took it out on the elves, which, yes, hadn't done anything to deserve it, but I can understand where Mel was coming from. The Valar didn't accept him, didn't like how he improved on their ideas, so he took what they loved and made it work for him. He was an artist whose work was scoffed at by his contemporaries, so he decided to get back at them. 

Also, no offense is intended. I wasn't bragging for Mel, was merely pointing out all of the reasons for why the Orcs from elves idea just fits the story better.


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