Hello Everyone.

My name is Shianne, and I am a recovering Tolkienite. And despite my status of recovering, I have yet to remain sober from this deadly and dangerous addiction known as Lord of the Rings.

You see, my recovery comes not in the form of abstinence from this former obsession, but from a rather quiet epiphany that burst into a full fledged roar reminiscent of a five fingered prostate exam coupled with a hardy boot to the ass, and it is here that my subjective analysis of the fact that the LOTR movies are filled with cheese begins.

For those of you who do not know what a Tolkienite is, you can either go to Urban Dictionary [link] for a good laugh or take an educated guess as to what this 'Tolkienite' thing may imply.

Like the wonderful cross of a suffix for a chemical compound and a beloved icon of English literature that 'Tolkienite' truly is, the word unfortunately has much a much more dire meaning beyond its seemingly fancy-schmancy inane context, and in fact could apply directly to any of the following:

1. A drug addict of the literary sort; one who prefers their rocks a la Middle-Earth. (Guess what I mean by rocks...^^)

2. Replace 'crack' with 'Tolkien', and what do you get? Come on, everyone together now!

3. Some sort of horrifying Frankenstein experiment between a molecule containing three oxygen atoms and a one Legolas Greenleaf, resulting in a world full of tree hugging pansies.

But I digress. We must get back to the real root of this issue, the heart of the matter, and the reason why I suddenly have an aversion to cheese.

Not too long ago (i.e. this very week) I re-watched all three movies of the Lord of the Rings Trilogy, from the wonderfully pot-addicted hobbits living in a sticky-icky tolerant society right down to the end where our heroes (one in Dependables, the other dependant – see: Bilbo and Frodo, the two most fruity names in the universe) get to go on vacation for the rest of their life for all the good deeds they have done – i.e. the most exclusive retirement home in the universe – and I discovered something that was at the very least alarming, and at the worst, enough to shatter my oh-so-fragile psyche.

I like to think I have grown up a bit – maybe not as much as I should, but I have still matured past the point where I am no longer fully immersed in the Tolkienite hysteria that gripped me for the better portion of a decade, an obsession that lasted from early childhood to the age of sixteen. I no longer read every single book on Middle Earth like it was the inspired word of God (whose name happens to be Tolkien), and I no longer study Elvish like it was the Rosetta tablet and doodle in the margins of my math books all the nasty things I want to say to my teacher (but won’t) in a made up language they couldn’t understand just because I was too chicken to say it to their face. Nor do I search the newspapers and internet in a feverish attempt to cut out every single clipping that I can and past it on my walls until you can’t even see the walls anymore – or the ceiling for that matter - and I no longer dress up as my favourite character from Lord of the Rings.

Mind you, I never did dress up as a character from LOTR; I was never that crazy. However, I did walk a pretty thin line for a couple of years there, one which peaked around the theatrical release of the first Lord of the Rings movie, and has scarred my poor mother ever since.

Now that I am over that dubious/obsessive stage of my life, I decided – in all my infinite wisdom - to watch the trilogy and read some of the books one more time, simply because it was something that I hadn’t done in years, and despite having gotten over my obsession, I still had a fond $90 collector’s edition DVD box-shaped hole in my heart made specifically for those agonizingly long do-not-pee-during-the-movie-marathon creations that are Peter Jackson’s legacy: technically, they are Tolkien’s legacy, but Peter Jackson gets kudos for being the movie mogul that made them happen – I mean, lets face it – no one would know who the fuck PJ was if he made something like Maria Carey’s ‘Glitter’. (A visual holocaust in every sense of the word) We gotta give the guy some credit.

Anyways, I was under the impression that despite being level headed and mature (this is debatable) individual who could now look at a favourite movie from a subjective point of view instead of hysterical blind faith, I would still enjoy the film, and relish each and every moment like a piece of imported Belgium chocolate. You can imagine my horror, then, to discover that upon watching the LOTR trilogy without a zealot’s faith, the unsuspecting audience is treated to a royal helping of six-day mouldy goat cheese.

Many of you will now laugh, point, and say ‘HA HA, TOLD YOU SO MUTHAFUCKA! BITCH LOOKS LIKE HER PURSE DOG JUST DIED! YOU’RE FOUR YEARS TOO LATE!’ which is entirely, undeniably true. It has taken me just over four years to realize that the Peter Jackson adaptations are filled with cheese, and I am now paying for it in spades. The cheesiness of many LOTR moments notwithstanding, it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that I am not the sharpest crayon in the box.

Don’t get me wrong: Peter Jackson did an amazing job on the movies, and to date LOTR is the only time I have ever been pleased with the book-to-movie adaptation, but after watching Lord of the Rings without the glazed high of a addict, I noticed with dreadful clarity that there are parts of the movie that are really, really corny. I mean, there are some moments that are like the corncakes of Cheesutopia, they defy all conventional logic. Like the fact that Legolas has been turned from a moderately tolerable pansy-happy tree-hugger with a flair for musicals (re-read the books, you will notice he bursts out into song at the most inopportune moments), to a moderately intolerable pansy-happy pretty boy that is every hardcore fan girl’s wet-panty fantasy – and these aren’t just your regular run-of-the-mill closet-porn yaoi fanatics either.

I mean, in the books, Legolas was tolerable. Sure, he was pretty, and had a nice big shiny bow and could do all sorts of wicked shit with said instrument of destruction, but he was one of those characters where I found that – as the books progressed – I had to resist the increasingly violent urge to daydream about pushing him off a cliff just to hear him scream like a woman, because I SWEAR that dude has ovaries.

Legolas was, for the greater part of the books, an oxymoron to me – he’d be cool as hell one minute, kicking ass and breaking bones with his pretty-boy pecs, and then he’d go off, hug a tree, and start singing about the stars and shit, which is as far as I am concerned, reason enough to shoot anyone. So they turn this moderately tolerable character with cheesy lines into a mediocre pretty boy with bleach blond hair and contacts lenses that just don’t seem to stick, give him eight or so lines that rev up the cheese meter, add fangirls, then sit back and watch. Collect the money earned from fangirls obsessing over said pansy-happy tree-hugger, then repeat steps one through three. Oh, how different things appear, now that I view the world without the rose coloured glasses of blind Tolkienite faith!

Or how about Peter Jackson’s habit of zooming in on Frodo’s face and flicking the switch on the slow mo button whenever said hobbit is stabbed, assaulted, confused, angry, or just going plain bug fuck crazy? How about zooming in on Frodo’s face at 1/10th of normal speed for almost 75% of every film, no matter what his expression? Except happiness, of course – you should never zoom in on a happy person’s face, because that’s boring, and people totally dig miniature curly-haired Emos that are angsting 24/7 about how the world is against them and some dark lord wants to fuck up their shit. Depressed people are fun to watch, especially when their facial reactions are slowed down to 1/10th the normal speed, so everything seems more dramatic. Either Frodo Baggins is the original Emo of all time, or Peter Jackson really wanted to capture those turbulent emotions in Elijah Wood’s baby blue eyes.

Here a list I’ve compiled of all those riveting moments that you can glean from an extreme close-up of Frodo Baggin’s face through three hours of constant slow motion zooming:

Sad
Depressed
Downcast
Disheartened
Melancholy
Morose
Angsting
Woe is Me
Scared Shitless
Bringing ‘being Emo’ to an art form
Thinly veiled ‘hobbit-love’ that the yaoi fangirls just scream about

I mean, the number of slow action close ups on Elijah Wood’s face is fucking astronomical, and when they happen, 99% of the time this really cheesy music kicks in, - and when I say cheesy, I mean cheesy as in cheesier than 110% of Orlando Bloom’s lines. That, my friends, is cheese worthy of a God.

Taken out of context, this ‘cheesy’ music would be alright by itself – definitely wouldn’t appeal to some, but it wouldn’t be the downright ear-bleeding disaster that is country music, and the majority of us could sit through it without overdosing on codeine. However, dear ol’ PJ – who looks very much like an overgrown hobbit himself – combines this music with the slow motion close-ups of Frodo Baggins face; the hollow-eyed, oily and unwashed face that you would normally associate with the glazed stare of a crack addict sucking dick for five bucks on the corner of Queen St. West and Brock, and tops this off with crazy facial expressions that are made all the more ridiculous by the fact that everything is going at 1/10th the normal speed. It gives me this insane urge to slow down the voices too, so that everything is spoken in a really deep, electronic monotone. For example:

“tttttttttttthhhhhhhheeeeerrrrrrrrrrreeee eeeee arrrrrrrrrrrrrreeeeeeee appppppproooooximmmmmmmmmatteelllly ttthhhhrrreeeee Frrrrrrrroooooooodooooo clooooosssssseeeeeeuppppppps perrrrrrrr evvvvvveeeeeerrrrrrryyyyyyy ttttttttwwwwwooooo mmmmmmminnnuuutes"

Folks, that is a lot of fucking close-ups.

Before I go any further, I must address the absurdity that is the names Bilbo and Frodo. I mean, what the fuck was Tolkien thinking when he named them? Got sex, anyone? Obviously, our dearly beloved author had been smoking a little bit too much of that Hobbiton pipe weed the afternoon he coined their names, and when he came to he was too addled to remember just what the fuck he had named his protagonists. You might as well call them Dildo and Dodo Baggins: now in extra large and extra stupid! This brings me to my next point: hobbit love.

For those of you unaware of this travesty of smutastic proportions, hobbit love – in a nutshell – is a delusion created by hardcore yaoi fanatics and homophobes alike, that Frodo Baggins and Samwise Gamgee – because they are the best of friends and would die to save one another if ever the need occur – must instinctively be gay. I mean, there’s no other explanation – two guys going to the ends of the earth to save each other and relying on each other in a time of crisis? They just gotta be gay. No guy would ever care that much about 'just a friend'. Can’t you see all the sexual tension? Its just oozing from the big screen.

Fortunately (or perhaps unfortunately, depending on your view point), this ‘hobbit love’ did not occur until the movies made their grand premiere – why, until the point that they started printing promotional posters, LOTR was all about 100% pure heterosexual man candy in font-form. I cannot find a single instance of gay relationships, ‘hobbit love’ or not, throughout the entire LOTR series and background books on Middle Earth, and unless there is some obscure passage within those deathly dry folds of that monster known as the Simarillion that specifically states an instance of homosexual relations between two elves at the beginning of time, I don’t think there ever will be. Of course, the minute they start printing promotional posters six months in advance, the yaoi fangirls come out of the woodworks. Don’t believe me? What about this: [link]

Or this: [link]

And this: [link]

You know what would be easier? Typing in ‘hobbit love’ or ‘Sam and Frodo’ on Google Images with the safe search off. You will be much more successful that way.

Please keep in mind; I have nothing against homosexual relationships: what you stick up any of your three holes in your spare time is none of my business. But yaoi fangirls are corrupting a classic. A classic! And none of this would have happened if not for those darn promotional posters and certain people’s obsessions with ambiguous best-friend relationships. What should we do? Folks, only one think we can do in a situation like this: blame PJ.

To be honest, there are a lot more awesome moments in Lord of the Rings then there are corny ones, but the cheesy moments are just so glaringly obvious – to anyone not worshipping Tolkien as a god – that it’s hard not to notice them, especially in the movies. However, I would like to try and end my rant with a semi-positive note – something which will probably not last – and say that the only individual that came out on top looking more badass than ever was the Balrog.

The mouth of Sauron was pretty cool too, and the ringwraiths were done up to perfection, (actually, all the villians were fucking A) but none of them matched the sheer ass-kickery that is the Balrog: its like being treated to 2.5 hours of nothing but tree-huggers and pansy-do-gooders and then all of a sudden, WHAM! You are hit with sixteen tons of in-your-face uuber demon, and it’s like “HOLY SHIT, DUDE HAS A WHIP AND A SWORD! WHAT THE FUCK HE NEED THEM FOR?!’ Cuz let me tell you, that bitch don’t need ‘em; he’s so fucking sick, he can crush you with his pecks. How’s that for improving on a legend, eh? You have no idea how vast my relief was when the balrog scene still lived up to my expectations post-Tolkienite hysteria: if it had turned out as corny as Orlando Bloom’s lines or PJ’s close-ups on Frodo’s face, I think I might have died a small, quiet death inside, quietly slunk away from the computer, hid in the closet, and OD’d on stale Twinkies from the closest convenience store.

In closing, I would like to state that there are probably many corny things that I have overlooked, but – as I am not the sharpest crayon in the box, as previously stated – I think this is a forgivable error on my part, and that you are welcome to remember any other extreme moments of cheese that I have forgotten. Of course, if anyone makes another middle-earth movie, just follow these three simple rules, and you’ll be fine:

1.Never give Orlando Bloom any lines. He is there as the pretty boy of male titillation, and nothing more

2.Avoid zooming in on Elijah Wood’s face every five seconds

3.Delete all knowledge pertaining to something called a ‘slow motion’ effect. I suggest a couple shots of crack-cocaine topped off with a gallon of turpentine: it will wipe you clean.

And remember folks, if someone asks you to support Hobbit Love, Just Say No.