Shadow of Mordor is Nothing But Infantile Revenge Porn

[Ragnar47183]

You mean a Book/movie adapted game got it wrong? "GASP!! STOP THE PRESS!!!"

Seriously though, the game is by most accounts, fun. If the story doesnt match your expectations for a LotR adaption then dont accept it as canon. I dont even think the game is called Lord of the Rings. Isnt it just called Middle Earth? Maybe there is a reason behind that?

Games should put game play first. That is the only thing that sets games apart from books or movies. The fact that they have the game play down so well and even added a quite fun mechanic with the orcs is commendable. The story takes second fiddle in this case.


Also adaptions are almost synonymous with mucking it up in every industry. A book adapted into a movie, a movie adapted into a game, whatever. There are always issues that arise and it shouldn't be a surprise at this point.

 

[Falling_v1legacy]

Someone also mentioned the story of Turin Turambar, which is one of other major First Age tales of pride, revenge, and fall. That one, however, is a pure Shakespearean tragedy, with no happy~ish ending.

A minor thing, but I'm not sure pure Shakespearean tragedy is the best descriptor considering Tolkien's disdain for Shakespeare. It is an example of Northern courage- fighting on despite inevitable defeat (according to Northern mythology, the monsters win and the gods and men lose the final battle.) But yes, pretty much nothing goes right for Turin, although in death he is finally free of Morgoth's curse.

While you are right there are a lot of revenge in the Silmarillion, I didn't really get a Silmarillion vibe from the Shadows of Mordor. I got more of a Silmarillion vibe from Warcraft II- the invasion into Lorderan felt more like the destruction of the Beleriand kingdoms.

 

[Cid Silverwing]

Ok, Shamus, if you're gonna confess you don't know that much about Tolkien, then why do you claim with a straight face that Shadow of Mordor takes a shit on its source material? Smacks of hypocrisy to me.

 

[zumbledum]

And then they called it a Lord of the Rings game

No actually they got it right and called it a middle earth game.

It still doesn't feel like a game set in Middle Earth. It's total quibbling to think that the setting doesn't also come with the tone and expectations of the setting

why not? ill agree its a massive shift of tone from lotr , but what about the hobbit or MERP (middle earth role playing) , we have orcs , rangers, wraiths etc. Middle Earth is a mythos you can tell any story any way you want in it. not even Tolkien kept a consistent tone the hobbit is a simple childrens book full of comedic dwarfs dragons and treasure! LOTR is an epic saga, the silmarillian is a collection of 5 disparate works of varying tone and themes,including the author self insertion of beren and luthien which is clearly the the story of Tolkien and his wife. not to mention the unfinished tales or the history of middle earth which reads like a historic document of dates and facts.

Tolkien hated and i mean hated domination, he didnt even want to dictate the tone his own works were perceived in he wanted to create a living breathing world a substitute for England's lost mythology.

to quote the man himself

?I cordially dislike allegory in all its manifestations, and always have done so since I grew old and wary enough to detect its presence. I much prefer history ? true or feigned? with its varied applicability to the thought and experience of readers. I think that many confuse applicability with allegory, but the one resides in the freedom of the reader, and the other in the purposed domination of the author.?

if we are meant to decide for ourselves and draw our own conclusions of what things mean how can there be a set tone or expectation?

 

[camazotz]

Although I like your articles Shamus, I admit I think you're reallyu jaded/burned out on various genres. SoM is an interesting niche, and it's not purist....it's a blend of a gameplay genre with a literary/film source. It does what it sets out to do very well, but its not the sort of game that should confuse people into thinking it's going to hold to the pure spirit of Tolkien....it's an amalgamation of other parts, the movies especially. If someone had advertised this game as "like Dragon Age but in Middle Earth" I could possibly see your ire....but no, that's definitely not what it is.

As a total aside, I am a very, very dedicated Batman fan from the comics and have never been that into the Arkham titles, because of a similar complaint: the games ape all the least interesting elements of the character (endless hours of beating up nameless thugs and long periods of travel across the city), something usually given over to occasional transitional panels in the comics make up like 80% of the actual gameplay going on. But....I don't fault the game; it's the genre the title is representative of in terms of gameplay, and a format for the game that more closely stuck to the pacing and feel of the comics would have missed the point of the genre blend. Still wasn't for me.....but it's my "point of empathy" for imagining why you found such dissonance in your experience with SoM.

 

[RvLeshrac]

-The thematic angle is more understandable, but as assinine as the "title defence" may seem, I think it's still a worthwhile distinction. As someone who's also read 'The Silmarillion' (didn't like it that much either), I have to point out that if the premise that innocence is what defeats Sauron, it certainly isn't the cause of Morgoth's defeat. Morgoth was defeated by force of arms. Elves and Men outfought him, and had the aid of the Valar. In 'The Hobbit', in the Battle of the Five Armies, while the personal highlight is Thorin's last words with Bilbo, from the standpoint of the conflict itself, the Free Peoples win because they outfight the orcs, and they have the aid of Beorn and the eagles. There are plenty of cases in Middle-earth where good has triumphed over evil on the case that good simply fought better (e.g. the dwarf-goblin war - seen in 'An Unexpected Journey' for those who haven't read the novel appendecies). I'm not trying to diminish the themes listed in the article - it's telling that Frodo lasts as long as he does (far longer than Isilidur), and that indeed, Gollum is the one whose actions result in the ring's destruction. For a game that doesn't bear the title of "Lord of the Rings," I don't think it's obliged to be tied to its themes. I've repeatedly stated that context should not dictate content. 'Alien' and 'Aliens' exist in the same universe for instance, but approach the same subject matter very differently. Doesn't stop me from enjoying both films and considering them sci-fi hallmarks.

This is actually a good point, and ties into the a lot of the complaints about Talion being too powerful too. The Lord of the Rings featured magic as fairly subtle and low key compared to a lot of modern fantasy, with even the ring doing little more than granting invisibility to Frodo and Bilbo.

The Silmarillion on the other hand, had a lot of epic smackdown fights with high level magic getting thrown around, and depicts Sauron with the ring at full power as basically blowing anything shown in the Lord of the Rings trilogy out of the water power wise.

I agree with the point about themes too, the game should not need to be chained to only the trilogy, and the fact that the wraith is celebrimbor seems to indicate that the game makers were aware of this and consequently decided to bring in a character from a much earlier age in Middle Earth's history, an age where much more powerful magic was getting thrown around on a regular basis.

The Silmarillion is a book of myths and legends of Middle Earth, not a history. It is no more a 'factual record' of Middle Earth than stories of Odin and Thor flinging lightning around are factual accounts of the history of Northern Europe.


Mention was also made of "earlier battles" which were "won by arms." Except evil in Middle Earth was never defeated by armies. It was beaten back temporarily in some areas, sure -- but until the Ring was destroyed, evil flourished in the background. Had it not been for the Fellowship, in fact, most of Middle Earth would have fallen to Sauron within a few months of the climax of LoTR.

 

[Mikeybb]

I know someone who has had a similar reaction to the whole idea of Shadows.
Truly repelled by it simply because of how it treats the lore.

My reaction was lesser, willing to give the title a chance.
Mostly, I think it looks okay as a game.

The only thing I'm really unhappy to learn is that the main character does not carry the burden of using, or being used by, the enemy's power.
I know that seems like a trivial point, but it sits at odds with everything else in Tolkien's world.
Dark power corrupts.
Whatever it touches, carries that taint.
Even those who throw off the influence, remain scarred by their contact with it.

Perhaps it's something they want to touch on in sequels, but I'm more inclined to think they didn't even think about that.

 

[Therumancer]

Shamus, I think you need to seriously re-consider what your projecting onto Lord Of The Rings (which I will get into shortly)

For starters, any kind of side story is going to have to take certain liberties, because after all fiction tends to be very character driven, and in an epic storyline where all of the big heroes that do the important stuff are detailed, it can be tricky for other people to play around in the same world and recapture that epic feeling with new material. As such when you want to do something big an epic, like with Talion, you also have to work to some extent to explain why it wasn't a big a deal or didn't influence what was happening in the stories. Sure the character is simplistic, but in something like Lord Of The Rings you can't simply start throwing out more Princes Of Gondor or whatever especially given how the lineage works. In LoTR a lot of stuff is happening elsewhere in that world that pretty much gives you a blank slate, but if people want a LoTR game they want it to be like the stories they already know. As a result picking up with the two other wizards (the twins whose name Gandalf forgot if I remember) who went off to another continent and so on wouldn't quite satisfy everyone's cravings. Talion was a pretty good compromise overall, and likewise his power set was something that was theoretically possible within the setting and the storyline sort of explains why he wasn't exactly running around fist-bumping Aragorn.

You seem to mostly agree with that, but onto the meat of what I wanted to say, you seem to have totally forgotten what actually happened in Lord Of The Rings. To put it bluntly plenty of people were getting away with using flamboyant amounts of power without having bad things happen to them. It's just that most of this stuff all happened off scene, you only got some small tastes of what guys like Elrond were capable of, not to mention characters like Galadriel and Celeborn. The story pretty much focused on a very specific plan, which was pretty much that while the major good guys were being flashy and fighting Sauron's armies, they were going to send a team (The Fellowship) secretly behind the enemy lines to destroy the source of the bad guy's power and put an end to the threat forever. To be honest, they made it 100% clear they probably could have just flat out curb stomped Sauron like happened with Isildur and company when they took him down, the problem was doing it this way wouldn't have solved the problem, power was leaving the world, and who would be able to do it then? Don't forget they pretty much sat around and discussed giving the ring to Tom Bombordil to keep, which would have ended the entire "War Of The Ring" right then and there, the problem was that Tom would have eventually forgotten about it, had it slip away, and then in however many thousands of years they would be facing the same problems, but likely with less to work with. Tom himself is almost powerful enough to take a fully empowered Sauron head on, however it was feared Sauron would win such a battle unless "the power to defeat him lay within the earth itself". This is a key point of the story when they are strategizing. Of course given how sneaky Tom was, I always kind of felt they should have just had him dump it in the Volcano and called it a day, but they we wouldn't have had a story, even the greatest literature oftentimes has plot holes you can drive a truck through, and that's the one for this story. At any rate during the whole time the story is going on, and Bilbo and Sam are on their depressing whine-fest cross country to Mount Doom, consider that when you read what was also going on, Sauron was like losing four fingers of one of his hands (or something like that) trying to take on Galadriel and Celeborn... the good guys pretty much involved in playing Defense/Plan B while they work to end the threat for all time. Likewise while the books are short on descriptive action, it should be noted guys like Aragon are walking around with major artifacts on their hip, Aragon had Anduril which was the reforged Narsil, Narsil being the sword sufficient to strike Sauron (at full power) down and cleave the ring from his finger (albeit Isildur had other heroes of the age also fighting Sauron at the same time). It's doubtful if Anduril would have had the power to take out Sauron again, especially with less power in the age as a whole, but again that was the last ditch if the hobbits failed when Aragorn was making his doomed crusade (basically to see if the Shards Of Narsil could do what Narsil did). You didn't see Aragon going "wow, my sword is corrupting me and turning me evil" only very specific items could do that, which is why people like Borimir were caught by surprise.

At any rate the point of this rant is that yeah, some dude using powerful abilities to tear down Orcish warbands and harass Sauron does sort of fit in, it could arguably fit in as a contributing factor to some of the other battles going on where Sauron was eventually going to win, but was taking amazing amounts of damage (I believe he had 10 armies, split into two hands of five each, while they were on the verge of falling the elves were holding and doing tremendous damage). While Gandalf doesn't do much (mostly concealing his power so as to not be detected apparently), consider that "Wizards" are not the only ones using magic even if you don't see a lot of spellcasters strutting around doing their thing (but some are mentioned). Again Elrond was a part of dropping a river on ring wraiths. I'd imagine Galadriel and Celeborn were probably going good old fashioned D&D battle magic off camera, that many orcs and their supporting sorcerers probably wound up on the receiving end of some of that. A lot is implied, basically nobody ever says "and then Celeborn dropped a flaming mountain on a thousand orcs...", but then again the focus of the store is intentionally elsewhere from where stuff like that was probably happening.

As far as side stories go, it's not perfect, but it's okay. If you decided to do stuff about what was happening elsewhere, like say make a game focusing on the other big battles (other than Helm's Deep and Minas Tirith) the ones that were ongoing... it would probably involve good guys showing off a lot of crazy power, especially those that have no need to hide because they want Sauron to know where they are.

That's my opinion at any rate.

 

[angryscotsman93]

As I've been saying to anyone who'll listen, as much as I like Shadow of Mordor it's a game crying out for a different license.

Star Wars. It's a game begging to be a Star Wars game. The revenge as motivation would work fine in a game about a Sith lead character, or a rogue Jedi fighting against a colony world of Mandalorian Bounty Hunters who threaten the Republic.

ME: SoM is great fun. But I honestly don't feel like the license adds much to the game. And Talion (as much as I like Troy Baker) is just a boring lead to play. I have no problems with the voice over work they did for Talion, but they just did not make me care for him at all. He's just an empty vessel to me. I dunno, maybe that's the point?

I would actually love this as a Star Wars game, where you play as either a rogue Jedi post-Order 66 or a smuggler, or something. Imagine a game with several dozen worlds you can visit, where each world has multiple organizations, each with their own hierarchies and power struggles going on. On one world you might have:

-The local security forces
-The Imperial military
-Rebel Recruiters
-Hutt cartel forces
-Various street gangs

Each of which has dozens of characters, and with each character having their own personality, different wants, needs, and other things besides, and different opinions of you, based on your interactions with them and other people they know. That'd be AMAZING.

 

[Denamic]

It's a shame that Shadow of Mordor takes the setting and turns it into nothing more than a vengeful killing field.

Whenever someone says things like 'it's nothing but X', I take it pretty much the same way as I take 'am I the only one' posts. It's an extreme statement that is NEVER true.

 

[Odoylerules360]

The defining characteristic of Tolkien is hardcore racism.

 

[Drizzitdude]

AS a fan of both the books and the films I have to disagree with you. Is the plot a little thin? Sure, but calling it revenge porn is by far the dumbest thing I have ever heard. Also...really? Revenge porn? Did you make that up? Because last I checked that was a term the kids used nowadays when they leaked their exes nudes or some shit.

The plot is one of revenge, something that might seem thin on the outside but is really something that many people do not get to fully embrace. In your example of Superman, people WANT Superman to kill Lex Luthor, people WANT Batman to kill The Joker, it only makes sense and even if it breaks their morals it would likely result in good in most cases.

Talion did not want to become a wraith, he did not like the unnatural powers he possessed, did not like using the power of the enemy against them and most certainly did not like working beside uruks he enslaved. But he did, because it was the smart move. You have an endless army of evil at the doorstep to the rest of the world. They seek to destroy everything you once loved and kill or enslave everything on the planet that is not them. You are given an opportunity to make a dent in that army, to fight the horde and give the rest of the world time; but the only way to do it is with supernatural and morally ambiguous means. Do you do it?

Or do you decide feeling good about yourself is better and do the dumbest move since not killing the joker?

 

[thedarkfreak]

I personally find most of what's stated easier to swallow(even Talion's seeming change of heart about death at the end) if you consider the theory that Celebrimbor is not a benevolent influence, he's a corrupting one.

I'm going to C&P something from TVtropes that I found interesting. (On SoM's YMMV page, I'll avoid the direct TVtropes link to help those who would get lost)

Also: warning for WALL OF TEXT in the spoiler.

Spoiler: Alternative Character Interpretation

Alternative Character Interpretation: People generally seem to consider Celebrimbor a good guy, but is he really?

Let's see... He wants to use Sauron's own strength against him, like Boromir. He wants to build an army of orcs to fight in Mordor, like Saruman. He calls himself the Silver hand, echoing Saruman's moniker of the White Hand. Even the branding of the orcs with the hand print on the face is similar to the Jacksonian depiction of Saruman's orcs. He bends this orc army to his will by outright enslaving them with mind control, much like Sauron himself bends his ringwraiths and other servants to his will.

Remember how Galadriel said that yeah, she could take the Ring and defeat Sauron with it, but it would be a bad idea because she'd just be replacing one tyrant with another? Well Celebrimbor clearly has a different opinion on that, since that's exactly what he tried to do and he would have succeeded if the Ring hadn't betrayed him in much the same way it would later betray Isildur. He even echoes Galadriel's "all shall love me and despair" line with his own "all shall fear me and rejoice". The idea of ruling through fear is ever-present with him, he makes many remarks throughout the game about how all of Mordor will learn to fear him, etc.

Not only that, he lies to Talion about his true goals and his amnesia. Remember the Ithildin wall? The text you get when you complete it is Celebrimbor's declaration of himself as the Bright Lord of Mordor. It opens with "I am the Bright Lord of Mordor", or "Nan iChir Gelair Mordor". Which happens to be one of the lines Celebrimbor uses when dominating orcs, and he uses it right from the start of the game. Which means he knows who he is, or at least what he is, right from the start. He may or may not recall his own name and the precise details of his life and death, but at the very least he knows that he's supposed to be in charge and reigning through terror.

Furthermore, when you collect half of the Ithildin pieces, he comments along the lines that "the picture is becoming clearer, it shows what once was and what may be again if we succeed". Well what the wall shows is Celebrimbor as the Bright Lord, ruling through fear with the help of the One Ring and challenging Sauron for the position of the Lord of the Rings. So that's Celebrimbor's true goal, to get into that position again and come out victorious this time. How? Well the One Ring is lost to both Celebrimbor and Sauron at this time, safe in Bilbo's pocket in the Shire. So he'll need to make a new one, one that will be loyal to him alone and won't betray him the first chance it gets. He'll need his tools for that, so he feeds you and Gollum some bull about how these ancient elven artifacts power him up and give him back his memories. It might even be true but it's not the primary reason why he wants them. And sure enough, you recover the necessary tools for him during the course of the game.

But wait, what about the ending, when Celebrimbor says their job is done and it's time to pass on, and it's Talion who insists that they keep fighting? That's where the mind-control comes in. Celebrimbor may indeed be able to leave Talion at any time, but it's not like he's spoilt for choice when it comes to alternative host bodies. So he needs to make the one he has nice and compliant. When a dwarf offers Talion friendship and a woman offers him love, Celebrimbor harshly reprimands him and makes him turn them both away. Can't have any divided loyalties now. Even though Celebrimbor has his way in these instances, Talion's will contests with his. But as Talion gets killed over and over, he starts complaining that he can't remember his family anymore, that all he sees before himself is the Black Hand (a.k.a. Sauron). His own motive is fading away and is being replaced by Celebrimbor's.

When Celebrimbor says at the end of the game that it's time for Talion to pass on and be reunited with his family, which a free Talion would want more than anything, it's a final test, a make-or-break moment to see if Celebrimbor's hold over him is strong enough. And it is, Talion has accepted Celebrimbor's goal as his own. His will has been eroded away completely and replaced by Celebrimbor's. Seems like a stretch? Well, what is the most visually striking sign of someone being under Celebrimbor's mind-control? Their eyes turn light blue, right? Well guess what. (click link) [http://i.imgur.com/o4gwgjl.jpg] Bottom line? Celebrimbor is a Well-Intentioned Extremist at best and an outright villain at worst, and this game is Spec Ops: The Line in fantasy land. You think you're playing a stereotypical hero but you're actually not.

 

[elvor0]

Middle Earth has thousands of years of history, along with geography that has shifted around and been reshaped, most of which has barely been mentioned other than to note that Morgoth was the bad guy and various elves, humans and dwarfs were fighting against him and his minions as well as amongst each other. As long as a game is set a decent time before The Hobbit and not at the same time as one of the few major events actually recounted in other books, you have virtually free rein to do whatever you like without any fear of contradicting any of Tolkien's work.

I don't think the Tolkein Estate lets anyone use 'Silmarillion' material though. The only game that ever came close was 'The White Council'. I've noticed this in other works, where the boardgame manuals tried their best to reference Morgoth without actually naming him. 'The Third Age' is another example of limited creative license, where EA wasn't allowed to use any book material, only stuff from the Jackson movies. There's a great article on Polygon that documents the CDev hassles the game faced.

Third Age...kinda worked though. Or at least the writers sorta worked with what they had, true you're following the Fellowship and most of your characters are total expys, but they don't start having an effect on major historical characters or go beyond the scope of the lore, they're just played as another party trying to survive in The War of the Ring. (Barring that fight with Saurons Eye, which was just a silly bonus battle)

SoM story, reads like fanfiction. Especially when:

Spoiler: SPOILERS!

You knock about with Gollum and Saruman, have a fight with fucking Sauron and decide to forge a ring of power.

Not only that, although the Silmarilion has people with amazing powers knocking about, they're still few and far between and are Demi gods or would be gods; as such, the two main characters in SoM have no business being as powerful as they are. Even Gandalf barely does anything that powerful.

I don't know why they didn't just make their own universe, rather than use LotR when they clearly have no intention of sticking to or respecting the lore, no matter how great the gameplay is.

 

[Godhead]

>I'm not even a huge fan of the Silmirallion
Stopped reading there.

All joking aside this was a good article, I especially liked the comparison with Batman.

 

[Gennadios]

Every AAA game out there is infantile, most are revenge porn.

This is my third AAA purchase this year and the only one I don't really regret. As Yahtzee put it, nobody cares about the story, it's all about the Orkses.

I'm a little bit disappointed that the Uruk don't have a bit more life to them though, once you promote all your Warchiefs there isn't really much to do with them. I really wish unbranded subordinates would try to overthrow them in a power struggle, or for some sort of Dynasty Warriors event where you have to fight through a map sized battle between your own orks and some enemies.

Anyway, tl/dr, I don't know what people are expecting from AAA storytelling these days. I knew the story was gonna be tepid before I even knew the game existed. I'm just suprised the gameplay came through for once.

 

[Malpraxis]

It was a pretty fun game. It's not a Lord of the Rings game and doesn't claim to be one, so I took it the way one takes the Elseworlds comics and didn't care much for canon.

With that said, more like Middle Earth, I'd have preferred the Middle Ages with a touch of fantasy setting. Seems like the nemesis system would work perfectly to incite intrigue in that world. Give me a game where I can infiltrate the church, become pope and set realms against one another for arbitrary reasons, while my lowly peasant character rises in power, and I will personally buy it until it goes gold.

 

[Lupine]

For the record, I'd forgotten that "Revenge Porn" now meant "posting pornographic pictures of someone to get revenge on them". I was using it in the old-fashion sense, like "food porn".

I do that, too.

It really is disturbing though, this trend to vengeance-porn (shall we call it that?) Pretty much Quentin Tarantino's current career is based around "Oppressed minority vengeance-porn, as told by a middle-class white male." Which is admittedly its own kind of awful, but disturbing nonetheless.

In reality, there has been very little vengeance around these issues, though. Did Frederick Douglass seek vengeance? no, he became one of the first black intellectuals, and inspired a generation. The restraint and civility of these people is what should be celebrated, not this kind of raw vengeance-porn.

Really? Are we going to discuss art here or are we focusing on reality? If art, then we need to stay in art. If reality, then we don't need to start talking in generalizations and then trying to tie it not all that successfully to the individual. Fredrick Douglass was a great man and honestly the world needs more great men and the ideals that forge them. However the average man is not great, instead he is average.

We crack open history books and get caught up in the big names but almost never once has any of us considered really the people around them. All the smaller parts that make the larger stand out. By in large, people are self-interested. Most people are worried about what is good for them, what is bad for them, how things affect them. Even people that are sometimes thought of as selfless they tend to have an interest in the outcome of the events around them. What I'm getting at here, and I realized it has taken me a bit...is that revenge is a selfish and self-gratifying thing. It is as easily a part of average people's lives as anything else born of self-interest and while it isn't something to be glorified, it also doesn't really need demonizing. Works of art speak to people, and are born of the human condition, as such I don't feel like we really need to apologize for art being representative of parts of the human condition that we'd rather not be reminded of.

 

[Ryan Hughes]

Really? Are we going to discuss art here or are we focusing on reality? If art, then we need to stay in art. If reality, then we don't need to start talking in generalizations and then trying to tie it not all that successfully to the individual. Fredrick Douglass was a great man and honestly the world needs more great men and the ideals that forge them. However the average man is not great, instead he is average.

We crack open history books and get caught up in the big names but almost never once has any of us considered really the people around them. All the smaller parts that make the larger stand out. By in large, people are self-interested. Most people are worried about what is good for them, what is bad for them, how things affect them. Even people that are sometimes thought of as selfless they tend to have an interest in the outcome of the events around them. What I'm getting at here, and I realized it has taken me a bit...is that revenge is a selfish and self-gratifying thing. It is as easily a part of average people's lives as anything else born of self-interest and while it isn't something to be glorified, it also doesn't really need demonizing. Works of art speak to people, and are born of the human condition, as such I don't feel like we really need to apologize for art being representative of parts of the human condition that we'd rather not be reminded of.

Revenge is selfish, sure. However, it is actually far from self-gratifying. This is one of the many points Tolkien and others were making literally for centuries: that revenge is in-and-of itself destructive to the vengeful as much as it is to the object of that revenge. Take Dumas' Count of Monte Cristo, after singly the most elaborate vengeance in literary history, Edmund Dantes realizes that his obsession has in fact robbed him of everything he once held dear and everything he once believed in, even to the point where he attempted to murder innocent people and indirectly caused the death of an infant. It is Dantes' redemption at the end that makes the novel worthwhile.

I'm glad we agree that Douglass was a great man, but in reality he was not that exceptional. Few of the slave rebellions of the era had much in the way of an aspect of vengeance -as far as we can tell- and after their freedom, acts of revenge against former slave owners were virtually non-existent. While common, everyday former slaves sought nothing but freedom in droves, despite southern fears -mostly from former slave owners and handlers- that there would be mass acts of vengeance.

Our interpretations of history are shaped by literature and art. In this sense, the "Wild West" is a fiction becoming history. The medieval era as it is commonly thought of is largely a construct of Enlightenment and Victorian fictions set in that time, rather than being based in any fact. I don't think I'm wrong to draw some parallels here between art and reality.

As for the article itself, I'll add that Tolkien was a veteran of WWI, and as a result had no delusions of the grandeur of military force or acts of vengeance. Those things are literally a luxury of societies that have never experienced total war. After seeing atrocities that we can hardly even imagine, there is no way he would have the same thoughtless approach to storytelling that the writers of Shadow do.