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zchaotic · 5 years

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Finished my US Mono Fairy Type Run. Now it is time to review.

I just beaten Giovanni and ended RR.

Replaying the Ultra Games have given me a pretty good perspective on Gen 7′s Alola games.

The Ultra games are as their names implied, better versions of SM in every aspect to me. Keep reading if you are interested.

The Pro’s. The Story changes.

Lillie’s arc may have not been given as much focus as SM. But it dawned on me what her story really was. It wasn’t about an abused child standing up to her abuser. It was about a timid girl being inspired by those around her to become brave enough to protect those close to her and to become strong enough to do it. That is what her Z Powered Form represents, her getting over those doubts and anxieties, becoming her own while she takes on the world.

That is why she wanted to save her mother in SM. To try and save that woman from herself. I personally believe that Lillie’s arc, while losing some of that focus from SM, had a better trade off in USUM due to how it ends, instead of Lillie going to Kanto to help Lusamine recover and essentially going back to her.

Through out both games, Lillie kept admiring trainers for the things they do and breaks out of that shell. Once we get to the end of the Necrozma plot, Lillie settled things with Lusamine and only went to Aether Paradise with that woman to see Nebby recover. Once that happens, the two parted ways and if you go to Mahalo Trial after beating Gladion, we see Lillie do the last thing needed before becoming a trainer, giving the same emotional goodbye to Nebby.

Once you beat the league and start RR. We see Lillie at the start of her carrier as a pokemon trainer. Kicking a grunts butt and fighting along side you. She becomes for feisty even against freaking Ghetsis and for those picky about Lillie’s confession at Exeggutor Island, that girl has what is pretty much the same confession towards you at the end of RR.

In addition, Lillie’s story ends with her living with Kukui, at a more healthier environment and her wanting to become you Battle Tree Partner.

Gladion’s motives are more fleshed out in USUM, with him stealing Type:Null and running to A. Get away from Lusamine and Aether Paradise due to the toxic controlling environment... much like in SM. And B. So he can become strong enough to protect those close to him once the moment is needed. To keep his family from falling apart more than it already had.

The change between SM and USUM doesn’t hurt his arc and dare I say USUM is a bit more realistic in this regard.

I also liked how his story ends in USUM compared to SM. In SM, he was forced in an adult position in the place he was abused in and wanted nothing more to do with. Because a certain adult close to him couldn’t take the job herself.

In USUM however, because Lusamine didn’t get sick, he got more freedom for the next step of his arc. To get more of that strength, he went to Kanto this time... had a pretty cute goodbye to his reforming mother and spend a whole month training. He comes back in a month with a full team of six and is the toughest of the title defense matches in USUM. He is needed to trigger the games true ending.

Finally, the seemingly biggest change in USUM’s story.... Lusamine.

I liked the changes to her character. In SM we had no reason to care about her, she was an unrepentant cunt and the hints that she wasn’t always that horrible came from the mouths of other characters. We got a good villain, but the bigger picture of her was written very badly.

In USUM. We still have Lusamine go nuts due to trauma from Mohn’s disappearance and as a result of her not wanting to let things go, became more controlling of her kids and obsessed over the Ultra Wormhole and the things beyond to try and get Mohn back.

This resulted in her allowing and doing messed up stuff in her desire for vengeance. Including allowing the creation of Type:Null and being willing to have Nebby go through all sorts of horrible stuff. Gladion was the first to find out about this, took Null and left. Which resulted in Lusamine being more grief stricken and while not mentioned in USUM, resulted in her becoming more controlling over Lillie.

Eventually, Lillie couldn’t stand Nebby’s suffering, stole it and ran.

Leaving Lusamine alone and with nothing left... in SM this resulted in her becoming focused solely on the wormhole and the only beast that she has clues on. Nihilego. But in USUM, something changed in the ripple that prevented her from getting to the levels seen in SM. The Ultra Recon Squad showed up and went to the Aether Foundation for help on their problems, they told this woman about the beasts and about something for her to focus her objections on... Necrozma.

In USUM, we see Lusamine as someone who develops a messiah complex. If she can go beat Necrozma, she would live up to her position as a protector of pokemon and people along with having the resources needed to find Mohn. She still has Mohn as an objective in mind, but she is still pretty crazy due to how she was conducting reckless things with Ultra Wormholes. (The point of the scene in Aether Paradise in USUM.) Froze her pokemon. (Not wanting to lose those close to her.) and was bitter/ nasty to her kids when it was time to confront her.

Lillie is scared of Nebby getting killed with little she can do about it and Gladion is more scared due to how if Lusamine crosses that wormhole, the family will likely lose another parent. But this woman is so stuck up in her ambitions that she refused to listen to her kids and do it anyways.

This is pretty real in broken families where the adult acts like it is their way or the highway and those not them are to shut up.

In USUM, Lusamine is still a horrible person... but it actually gives her some onscreen humanity. While she is less scary of a villain compared to SM, she is better as an actual character in USUM. A woman who has gone off the deep end in her ambitions to get a loved one back and keep the family together, but is so blind in how she done it that her kids ended up suffering.

This was always what Gamefreak intended to make with her Character. But they messed up badly in SM and instead created a caricature of an abusive parent. This one was so chilling in that regard that the fanbase are often only seeing that aspect of her character and believing that is the intention of her character. An abusive parent to get toppled over.

This is why the fanbase are not a fan of USUM’s Lusamine, who is made more human and have more going for her that people are confused in figuring out whether or not she is evil and even more, this version of Lusamine shattered the fanbases head canons on what kind of person this woman was. People don’t want to admit they are wrong and instead lash out.

Especially towards the end of USUM where Lusamine got curb stomped by Necrozma and had a heart to heart talk with Lillie while you were busy. Lillie told is at Vast Poni Canyon what she wanted to tell Lusamine about.

"The president... My mother is— She's selfish. She decides all by herself what she thinks needs to be done to make other people happy, not even caring what it is they may want... But people ought to help one another out! That is what I have learned here in Alola! And that is what I'm going to teach her, too.”

This combined with Necrozma knocking Lusamine off her high horse, gave this woman a self reflection and realization on what she was doing and started her turn around for the better.

Apologizing to Lillie by admitting the girl was right to take Nebby and run. (Admitting that Gladion was right to do the same with Null.) Making it up to Nebby by tending to it with Lillie. Then letting the girl go off back to Kukui’s

Making it up to Gladion by seeing him off when he went to Kanto...

Letting her kids go, is the first major step to Lusamine making it up to her kids.

Then in between the Champion ending and RR, she has an identity crisis from the realization of how awful she was. This gets resolved after RR when she vowed to love her kids from a distance, without interfering with their lives anymore. All the while, trying to understand her kids better.

After RR, you find that same employee who talked about the frozen pokemon and we got implications that Lusamine is having those ready to be thawed.

Then once Gladion comes back, we got a scene where Lusamine meets an amnesic Mohn. Knowing that the man would be hurt for the rest of his life if he knows the things his wife has done for him, along with the new life he has... Lusamine treats it like an ordinary conversation and lets him go off to his life. Letting... Mohn...go.

This is pretty good character development despite how the juicy bits of her turn around happen after the main story is over and how you have to really look to get it.

I appreciate the closure and resolution of this family in USUM since SM ended this story very messily when it should have continued.

While I give a lot of praise to this portion of the story, other character like Hau are more fleshed out. Mina’s trial gave a bit more world building to the Captains. The Ultra Warp Ride in itself is good lore on the UB’s, for we see their world and learn more about them. We also know more about Z Power and where it all comes from.

Alola’s lore was expanded upon in this game.

We also get to see Guzma go through a redemption arc in RR and all the good that came out of it. Colress got to contribute more in the main story as the guy who helps with Necrozma.

Don’t even get me started on Rainbow Rocket. That is where we see Lillie’s grow into a trainer, fight past villains, see more from Colress and Guzma, along with adding into the concept of alternate realities. It was a better post game than SM in every aspect.

Con. What was added into the story and how it affected the changes.

However, there is a few things story wise that I would say are striking flaws.

Before anything, this is still mostly the same story as SM and it doesn’t change drastically until the end of your second visit to Aether Paradise. Like most third games, it is going to take a while before you get to the biggest changes. If you didn’t like what was in the base games... you are not going to like what is in this game.

The new characters added to the plot, the URS... their deeds are mostly background and they don’t do much besides build up on Necrozma. Sometimes appearing in places that they are not needed.

The things they do add does make sense in changing the story from SM. (It is established they only used their Solgaleo and Lunala for travel. If they used them for Necrozma, they would have their way to get help eaten and as explained, it causes Necrozma even more pain. They let Lusamine use Nebby because they need a safer way to send trainers over to confront Necrozma.... but then Lusamine went Leeroy on them.)

But they themselves... could have been done better. In addition, Necrozma served more as a looming threat that motivated the actions of the regions villain teams and their goals. Rather than a looming threat that could have been used much better to give the urgency and doom. He showed that the URS and those scared of him were NOT wrong to be scared of him, but that is all at the climax. Poor build up, but amazing pay off.

Even more, Lillie and the narrative focus on her lessened when you go fight Necrozma. Exeggutor Island was removed, though I get the reasons. Lusamine being less of a bitch and Lillie’s scene at the end of RR made it redundant. This along with Lillie calling her mother out off screen made some moments with her weaker compared to SM. (It isn’t any worse than how Lillie and Lusamine resolved things in SM though. Where Lusamine recovered somewhat and Lillie was eager to not only forgive her... when it wasn’t earned, but go to Kanto to help her recover.) Even though I believe the things that happened with Lillie after Necrozma more than made up for it.

Some would come to conclusions and say this cost Lillie her character development... the thing that made SM’s story good. But personally, it didn’t really hurt her development, it just lost focus and we got our pay off to the build up in the post game.

However, if you liked Looker, Anabel and Nanu... those three got the shaft completely due to their post game story being cut out for Rainbow Rocket.

Pro. The Gameplay.

USUM added a lot into the game compared to the bare bone SM game.

With Mantine Surf, the Photo Club, Ultra Warp Ride, quality of life changes, (move tutors.) more pokemon and the SOS system being more controllable. You will be picking up Ultra Sun and Ultra Moon over Sun and Moon in a heart beat, just for these things.

The battles are more challenging compared to SM, the Totem Pokemon were better realized as actual bosses and Ultra Necrozma is the highlight of your main campaign.

Not to mention Rainbow Rocket and all the joys I got out of playing that. This is the game to play if you want to do challenge runs... like a Mono type run or others. It feels satisfying to beat the game and see the closure to our characters stories. Not to mention all the side quests and visuals that make Alola feel more alive as a region and not die over when you finish the game.

Con. What stuck from SM in a gameplay perspective.

Unfortunately, USUM didn’t fix all the issues from SM. Multi Battles are laggy, Festival Plaza stinks and with how many cut scenes are in this game still, it is going to be a while before you can actually play the game.

In addition, Alola is a linear in its pathway and what you fight still. If you just played SM... you are going to get bored really quick. In addition, the focus on Gen 1 is going to get old here as well.

Final Verdict.

Ultra Sun and Ultra Moon are the last games in the handheld era and Gamefreak did a fantastic job in making this game a hurrah.

With most of what made SM good going over into these games, getting polished out and turned into a funner game, I strongly recommend getting it while holding yourself over for Sword and Shield.

It has fantastic battles, an amazing sense of closure to the characters from Sun and Moon you came to know and love. (Lillie is my favorite of this generation and I hope to see her again with more development as a trainer.)

It hits a lot of good beats for me and I am still rather shocked that people give so much bile to what these games have to offer. The changes to the Story were not bad in the slightest, it isn’t perfect but we have a lot of good trade offs to what we did lose from SM. (Example. Lillie’s two big moments are either moved over to RR or provide a better resolution to her story arc.)

The games give a good challenge for anyone who are fans to the series and it makes Alola stand out as a region.

I honestly hope Sword and Shield is able to continue where these games leave off. Maybe give us a story that is built by exploring Galar and still giving us a challenge with a wide variety of pokemon.

#Ultra Sun and Ultra Moon review.

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lawyernovelist · 7 years

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The Master

Every now and then something really petty just gets to me, like when I decided that the world really needed to hear me dismantle the dialogue in the Stars and Moons scene. This is another one of those times.

I've talked about the Master of Laketown in passing a few times, but have never really focussed on him just because I've always had bigger fish to fry. He's ultimately a completely unnecessary character, who for some reason the movie seemed to think needed to get a disproportionate amount of attention. And when I was thinking again about death scenes, trying to get a good handle on what I actually think of Thorin's, I decided that enough was enough and I had to talk about this guy and all the niggly little overlapping problems he represents.

Spoilers for the Hobbit Movies, The Hobbit, and Lord of the Rings (book and movies).

What was the point of this character? I can tell you in the book: he provided some local flavour, gave the dwarves a stepping-stone on their journey, and also provided an aesop about avarice and selfishness in the way that he died. In the movie... well, I guess the stepping-stone point still holds? He does give the dwarves supplies and a boat. But what would have happened if he hadn't? After all, because those movies are allergic to maps, the dwarves seemed to take about five minutes to get from Laketown to the Lonely Mountain, and then they were inside within half an hour. They didn't really seem all that reliant on anything they got from Laketown. They weren't negatively physically affected by their journey that far, as they were in the book, so they didn't need recovery time (caveat for Kili, but the Master might as well never have existed for all the effect he had on Kili's recovery - that was all Tauriel and a little bit Bard for providing the venue).

The stop in Laketown really has very little purpose and effect, and what purpose and effect it did have (introducing Bard, providing an action setpiece for the opening of Battle of the Five Armies, giving Tauriel and Kili some alone time) were completely unrelated to the Master.

What about local flavour? Well, in the book he and Bard actually had a political relationship in the days after the destruction of Laketown (yeah, days - movies, you had triple the time you needed, why did you need to temporally compress everything?). He actually made points about the qualifications required for rule, which gave us a window into what was important in his society: Laketown is unique in Middle-earth as a mercantile city-state and that's awesome.

PS: Another sad simplification for the movie: Laketown and Dale remained separate in the book. It is not the case that that city-state was just turned into another hereditary monarchy at the end of The Hobbit.

In the movie? Well... there's kind of an abortive subplot about Laketown being an oppressive police state, and... OK, I need to get this off my chest a bit.

What the hell is that?

I'll tell you one thing it bloody isn't: an artistic style that fits with the rest of this world. Look at the rest of Middle-earth. Look at it. We're hitting each other with broadswords and burying the dead in barrows. This is, like, Saxon period, maybe early medieval. You want to know what Saxon royal portraiture looked like?

(Source)

Quite nice, I think. A frieze of that sort of thing around the room would have looked great. That wretched thing up there looks more like a Vermeer.

(Source)

And that's not a criticism, by the way; I actually really like Vermeer's paintings and the theories for how he achieved such photorealism are fascinating. However, it does not fit in this setting. It just doesn't, even when I remember that this is a fantasy story and historical accuracy doesn't fully apply. I snorted when I saw that in the movie because it just looks like a photo with an 'oil painting' filter applied in photoshop. The vivid colours look like something out of a cartoon, especially with how dark and monochrome everything else in these movies is. It does not work. People more knowledgeable than me have placed it (and the style of dress it shows) as William III: mid-late 17th Century.

Fail!

But OK, that's a silly nitpick, especially with this beautiful Alan Lee watercolour on the wall in Rivendell. It just really irritates me because it's an example of how they put making the stupid point they want to make right now above actually fitting anything together so it made sense and it's not the same as the Rivendell picture because that actually looks like a mural, the colours blend in, and it fits the flowing and naturalistic style of the large amount of other art we see around Rivendell so it works in its setting and I hate that picture of the Master, I hate it a lot.

Moving on.

No, not moving on. I said they were making a stupid point with that picture. Well, that and a stupid joke where we see that picture of him looking like a seventeenth-century fop and then we see that he's actually got the grooming skills of a toddler. Solid joke, too: excellent setup, quality punchline, raising a lot of questions about where the hell they got that volume of realgar (used as orange pigment and also rat poison - I learned a lot writing this post!). It's the rule of three.

OK, I really am going to rein it in; I promise this whole post is not going to be about that picture, even though it annoys me more the more I think about it. I do have a point.

The Master's entire characterisation was as this avaricious democracy-hating despot who would be defeated by the plucky underdog Bard. And that's... acceptable. I mean, you could have done something with it, and it wouldn't have completely derailed the plot the way the added socio-political commentary that nobody asked for did in Last of the Mohicans, which, for anyone curious, made me angrier than any other movie in the world until Battle of the Five Armies. I hate that movie, and the added socio-political commentary that nobody asked for was a major factor (others include the added romance subplot nobody asked for, the decision to render most of the main characters utterly unrecognisable including swapping the plot roles of the two women because, hell, they're interchangeable I guess, and the fact that my favourite character escaped that fate because they cut him completely). But I digress.

Presenting the Master as an avaricious democracy-hating despot would not in itself have been a problem. They did have a lot of extra time, they could spend some on the political situation in Laketown in order to set up Bard for later. However... OK, first of all, being against democracy does not in itself work as a flag that the character is evil or an attitude to be overcome when your beloved hero - by which I mean Thorin - is only of interest to anyone because he's the hereditary ruler of a kingdom. Just sayin'. Also, it doesn't count when you don't do anything with it. There's the one throwaway about an election, then it's never mentioned again unless you count the fact that Bard becomes king through popular acclaim, which I don't.

Let's talk about Bard as a foil of the Master and the beneficiary of this aesop about democracy good, monarchy (as in rule by one person, not necessarily hereditary) bad. Bard says some stuff about the people starving and seems to be setting himself up as a champion of the common folk - he's even referred to as such - but it doesn't work. First of all, the stuff about food supplies only comes up when he's trying to smuggle the dwarves into Laketown, so we don't know if this is a regular thing that he genuinely cares about, or if he was just using it as a convenient excuse to stop the dwarves being found. It never comes up again and, in fact, we never even see him arranging for the fish to be distributed or anything like that; he just uses them as a bribe for the dock-keeper who saw the dwarves disembark. This suggests that it's not actually something he cares about on its own, just a means to an end.

The Master apparently does consider him a threat, but we're given no real idea why; he and Alfrid discuss the fact that there's discontent in the city and people are speaking against the Master's rule, but we never actually see that happening and we certainly never see Bard's involvement in it. The only reason I can see for the Master to guess that Bard is the ringleader of revolution is that... oh, would you look at this for your aesop? He has royal blood. After all, the Master does know that about him, even though he himself seems determined to keep it quiet.

When Bard is later proclaimed king by popular acclaim, he doesn't do anything with it. In fact, he almost entirely rejects it; while he takes on a leadership role, it's visibly unwillingly and he almost entirely defers to Thranduil upon Thranduil's arrival. The only person who acknowledges him as king is Alfrid, and we're clearly supposed to find that annoying; Bard certainly does. Even the movie never acknowledges him as a king, since it constantly shows him as less powerful and less respected than the two kings and we never see him crowned or treated as a ruler. As far as we can tell from the theatrical release of the movie, after the Battle of the Five Armies Bard shrugs and goes back to plying his trade as a bargeman. Him being proclaimed king means nothing.

Overall, Bard actually appears to be startlingly apolitical. The one exception is also the one time he actually challenges the Master himself: over whether they should help Thorin. He is promptly shot down and goes home to sulk. If anything, Bard seems to be fighting for the status quo while the Master is aiming for things to change and improve for the town - I don't think that was what you meant to be going for, Movie!

This was a mistake on the part of the movie, and one that Tolkien didn't make because Tolkien didn't frame Bard vs The Master as the champion of the common people vs a democracy-hating despot running a police state for his own enrichment. Once you have that set up, Movie, you have to do something with it.

But OK, it was one thing that the movie just threw in without any apparent thought beyond "Hey, if we frame Bard as the champion of the common people and the Master as wanting to prevent free and fair elections, the American audience will know who to root for". Let's look at the aesop they beat into the floor when it came to the Master: "Gold is worth less than people".

Now, this is actually an important aesop because not only does it come from the book (and I'll come back to how Tolkien handles it) but in the movies it's presented via no fewer than three characters - four if you count Alfrid and the Master as separate characters. It appears in Bard's last scene with Alfrid, the presentation of Thranduil and his motivations, and Thorin's arc with respect to Dragonsickness. This is clearly a big thing, and with the Master his prioritisation of gold over human life is beaten in to the point where he's really carrying the characterisation beat of "avarice makes you evil". It comes right from his first introduction with that wretched painting - see, I told you I had a point - showing his ostentatious wealth in a manner that almost makes me think of Louis XVI -

(Source)

Just to bring back that political thing that died on arrival to the point where I'm still not sure it was intentional

- and his last act is trying to evacuate the town's treasury while announcing that it's such a shame that that means there's no room for any people. It's then continued with Alfrid, whose last act in the movie is deciding to disguise himself as a woman to escape the battle and then flee with a load of gold that was in Dale for no reason except to set up this resolution. No, really, what was it doing there?

Anyway, I said this was an aesop from the book, and it is. In fact, in the book the Master is even the clearest example of the aesop playing out: Bard, as king of Dale, sends a large quantity of treasure to the Master to help with the reconstruction of Laketown. The Master steals as much treasure as he can carry and flees into the wilderness, where he dies of hunger and cold, abandoned by his companions, in an action explicitly blamed on Dragonsickness. His avarice and selfishness directly leads to his death, and this is contrasted with the heroic characters who share treasure to enrich people and the land about - even Thorin acknowledges on his own deathbed that his selfishness was wrong and renounces his deeds and words at the gate. Note that the Master being greedy and selfish was a trait that Tolkien had established, but it wasn't hugely overt; he was selfish, sure, and kind of manipulative and not terribly interested in doing the right thing for its own sake, but he was presented as a human being with his own motives and interests, not a caricature.

OK, so I was going to just make a sneering remark like "Pfft, complex characters with human failings? That's kids' stuff", but the difference in the way this character is handled is actually symptomatic of a lot of problems.

First, and most obvious... Movie, what age is your target audience? Because this tastes like a movie for twelve-year-olds, but the characterisation would be simplistic in a story for toddlers. You position yourself as a serious and mature story, in opposition to The Hobbit, which was written as a bedtime story for children, but by every metric I can think of you are significantly more childish. Note 'childish', not 'suitable for children'.

Second, I mentioned that in the book the Master's death is treated as a consequence of his actions. The causal relationship is very clear: if he had stayed in Laketown and used the treasure for its intended purpose, he would not have died. This means that the aesop is clear: if you're greedy and selfish, you'll suffer consequences.

So... the movie. In the movie, they changed how and where the Master died: Smaug fell on him as he was escaping Laketown. The Master is greedy and selfish, and because the movie thinks we're stupid it really makes it clear that he's greedy and selfish and that's bad, not only showing him literally kicking someone in the face when they try to climb onto the boat, but also showing his barge almost running down Tauriel and co. after Tauriel has consistently been shown as the angelic personification of goodness and light. It could not be clearer that the Master is a bad guy. And then he dies on his way out, so we're good, right? Karma worked itself out, bad things happen to bad people, all is well.

Problem one: It doesn't count when there's absolutely no causal relationship between the Master's actions and his death. In the book, the one was a direct consequence of the other. In the movie, his death was pure accident. If his boat had been filled with the occupants of the orphanage and all the puppies and kittens they could carry, Smaug would still have fallen on it.

Problem two: They gave themselves a second chance with Alfrid.

That's it. That's the problem.

I'm kidding, I just really hate that character. From his first appearance I assumed he was going to get eaten by Smaug and I was bitterly disappointed when that didn't happen because I was genuinely looking forward to it.

Anyway, They kind of pass the baton of "avarice and selfishness make you evil" to Alfrid, but the avarice angle is actually almost entirely dropped while the selfishness angle is treated as a running joke. To an extent the avarice angle is shifted over to the conflict between Thranduil and Thorin in that we've kind of got the "Thranduil wants treasure" thing hanging around, but... it doesn't work.

Unlike in the book, you're completely failing to examine Thorin's flaws and are treating his avarice and selfishness as not his responsibility.

Thranduil can't carry this moral because you may be jumping around talking about how he's evil, but his iconic line is still "I came to reclaim something of mine" - he wants one specific item which is his by right; this isn't about greed and, in fact, Thorin ends up looking greedy and petty by declaring he'd rather fight a war than toss out one necklace that isn't even his.

Bilbo isn't carrying the moral either because you've made his motivations about personal loyalty to Thorin rather than generosity and selflessness.

The only people around here who seem to actually want treasure generally are Thorin and Bard, both of whom are a) heroic and b) justified in that desire: it's not Thorin's fault, and Bard actually needs money for a specific purpose.

In fact, I'd like to take a moment to dwell on Thorin. I've covered elsewhere the fact that the Arkenstone wipes away all Thorin's flaws by taking the blame for his behaviour; without that, the movie has actually opened itself up quite badly for comparison between Thorin and the Master. Think about it: for a good chunk of Battle of the Five Armies, Thorin is sitting on a pile of gold, thinking more about how he can defend and keep his gold than about how he could spend it to pay his debts and help the starving people camped outside. That's Dragonsickness, and really the behaviour that the movie was decrying in the Master just a little while before. But Thorin has the excuse of the Arkenstone.

Incidentally, the Master's been living outside the mountain that contains the Arkenstone for some time. Why doesn't he have the excuse of the Arkenstone? We don't know how that thing works, but if we're gong to blame Thorin's behaviour on it, you clearly don't have to be in sight or touch of it. Your double standards are showing again, Movie. You should have taken the time to do character flaws and examine them properly.

Anyway, the aesop is pretty much dropped for most of Battle of the Five Armies. If I were feeling malicious, I'd say that it was precisely because they couldn't risk the audience applying it to Our Heroes and maybe thinking that Thorin isn't a shining beacon of goodness and light.

Of course, I'm not feeling malicious; when have I ever been malicious towards Thorin except for every time I talk about him? My point here is Alfrid.

Alfrid is clearly not a character to be taken seriously in any way whatsoever, and for most of this time he just comes across as slimy. He's not a threat, and he actually doesn't come across as that greedy for gold either; he's just selfish and slimy and makes me want a shower just from being in his proximity. However, he also strikes the last note on the "avarice and selfishness makes you evil" moral in his last scene, which is also the only time he and Bard are actually positioned in opposition to one another after Bard gains power.

Yeah... that last bit is a big problem, by the way, because Bard has just spent the entire movie letting Alfrid get away with whatever he wants. He's not the only one, but he's the one for whom it's a big problem because the interaction between these two has been set up and now it's not going anywhere. This could have been the way Bard shows himself as different to the Master - the Master allows Alfrid to hang on his coat-tails and use that position to bully those weaker than himself; not like Bard, who... glares at him from time to time while he hangs on Bard's coat-tails and uses that position to bully those weaker than himself.

Movie, did anyone ever actually look at you in production and ask themselves if any of the decisions they were making were good?

I'll come back to Bard and the Master as foils for each other; right now I'm talking about Alfrid. Alfrid continuing to get away with things is a problem on multiple levels (it's not funny, Movie, and no matter how many times you do it it doesn't become funny), but surely they're going to at least have the aesop come home to roost: Alfrid steals the money and runs away, just as the Master did, but this time that greed is going to bite him in the behind and he's going to get his comeuppance. Maybe he can't run carrying the gold and a troll catches him, or something.

Instead, Bard catches up to him, saving his children en route, they have a conversation in which Alfrid says he has gold and asks what Bard has, Bard looks meaningfully at the kids, and Alfrid leaves. We never see him again.

Now, I've complained repeatedly that Alfrid's the only one who gets a happy ending. He gets gold, which is apparently what he wants, and he leaves to go set up somewhere else. He faces absolutely no consequence for his actions. Bard looks down on him, but he's been doing that the whole time and Alfrid clearly doesn't care. Even Bard's last shot mocking Alfrid isn't commenting on him being greedy and selfish, it's mocking him for dressing as a woman.

Dammit, Movie!

You didn't even have Bard take the money away and send Alfrid away empty-handed. At least then he'd have been humiliated, lost his political position, and gained nothing. As it is? He's mocked by someone he holds in no esteem and walks away with what he wants. That means that you have this aesop you've been building up with the Master and which you actually explicitly hit by comparing Alfrid's and Bard's motivations in this scene... but then it all falls apart because Alfrid faces no consequence for his actions!

So it doesn't work with the Master because of lack of causality between action and consequence and it doesn't work with Alfrid because of lack of consequence. The movie tells us that avarice is bad, but doesn't do anything with it. The Master continues to be an entirely useless character.

So I was going to talk some more about the relationships and conflict between the Master and other characters, especially Bard, and I'm actually going to start with the ending because that also plays into the aesop.

In the book, Dragonsickness is basically avarice and selfishness - those two traits that we've been talking about this whole time. It's all about gathering together a big pile of gold just to have and to guard for yourself and never enjoying it, sharing it, or even using it. This is a trait that we see in the Master and he dies because of it, as I outlined above. However, in the book it's also a trait we see in Thorin, and the comparison is drawn through the motif of Dragonsickness; it's never explicit, but it is there.

Thorin redeems himself by ending his isolationist power-play against Bard and Thranduil and coming out to rally all three of the enemies of the goblins in battle. After his death, the hoard is distributed - Bard, the Master, Thranduil, and Bilbo all get some as well as a large amount being retained by the dwarves. In the epilogue, we see that Bilbo now leads a comfortable and wealthy life back in the Shire - his waistcoat is more extensive and has real gold buttons - but we also learn that he throws excellent parties and gives excellent gifts (tellingly, if I may look ahead to Lord of the Rings, the last of his share goes to Sam to help him get married and start a family). We also hear that Dale and the Lonely Mountain and their environs are now prosperous and life has returned to the desolation left by Smaug. This is how Smaug's legacy is broken and the Dragonsickness loses its hold. The message is that it's not that it's bad to be rich, it's that it's bad to just sit on money just in order to have it.

I really want to spin off into a ramble about the role of a lord as a giver of gifts in the Saxon societies with which Tolkein was highly familiar, but I really need to stay at least close to the point, which is that the Master is compared to Bard and Dain on a large scale and to Bilbo on a small one. The last three are presented as good and heroic in part because of their generosity, while the Master is bad because of his selfishness.

And this is yet another way in which the ending of the Hobbit movies fails: we don't see what happens with the hoard. Thorin dies, Bilbo goes home, he's sad about his bro dying, and we segue back into Lord of the Rings with no further mention of all the things that just happened. To all appearances, Bilbo doesn't get a single coin from the hoard. Nor does Bard. Thranduil doesn't get his necklace back. To all appearances, Dain just sits on that treasure like Thorin, Smaug, and Thror before him.

So why are any of these people better than the Master?

Well, for one thing the movies - and I include the Lord of the Rings movies in this - seem to have a really uncomfortable relationship with social hierarchy, especially among the hobbits, so I'm not surprised that they didn't want to deal with Bilbo coming home rich. The thing is... if you don't want to tell a story in which the hero comes home rich, don't tell The Hobbit. You could have got away with it - stick in a montage in which we see that he gave away lots of money to... OK, that would mean you'd have to admit that there's relative poverty in the Shire. And we don't want that sort of complication. Poverty only happens to bad societies ruled by bad people like the Master and if you just replace the guy in charge all those problems will just vanish.

I'm getting off-topic here, but I do have to address this because it's true that poverty is not a big issue in Middle-earth. Everyone seems to have enough to live off, even if not in any luxury; nobody seems to be homeless; you never see beggars even in large cities like Minas Tirith; and so forth. However, Tolkien does seem aware that there exist at least haves and have-lesses. The Shire does have a social structure and there are issues of class in play, most obviously between the Bagginses and the Gamgees. The Bagginses are gentry and the Gamgees are working-class and this is a clear split. It's ignored in the movies, in which there seems to be no class split between Frodo and Sam; it's just that for some reason Sam calls Frodo "Mr Frodo" and Frodo never takes a turn to cook dinner.

Anyway, I think that's part of why the movies didn't want an epilogue in which we see that Bilbo is now fabulously wealthy and can afford to give generous gifts to everyone who comes to celebrate his birthday with him.

To pull back up to wider scope, the Shire isn't the only society that gets hit by the movies' discomfort with social hierarchy. And I'm not going to pretend that I'm not guilty of this problem too - we're raised in this egalitarian Western society where, especially in American culture, everyone's supposed to be socially equal, and this is escapism, so we want to have the equality that we want to believe is present in society. However, fantasy comes with tropes like kingship which are hard not to write unless you're doing it on purpose, so it's easy to end up in this weird, uncomfortable halfway-house.

Especially if you're adapting Tolkien, you're not in a position to criticise or remove the institution of kingship even if you want to; Tolkien's work is a major reason these tropes exist in fantasy. However, that means that if you're this uncomfortable with writing about social hierarchy, you might not want to do Tolkien. Play in his world, have fun, study particular aspects, flesh out parts of the world he didn't write about, whatever, but you probably shouldn't adapt Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit and claim that you're doing a true adaptation.

This is relevant because I think this is part of what's going on with the Master, and to an extent with Denethor: these two men are definite forms of social authority which cannot be ignored, but they are not kings. Denethor is treated as a bad person, but the Master is not only treated as a bad person but also as an illegitimate authority because the movies straight up don't know what to do with a ruler who's not a king. They know what to do with Thorin because he's the rightful king. They know what to do with Thranduil because he's a king. They can't handle the Master (and didn't consider the possibility of just thinking of 'Master' as a synonym for 'President' and moving on with their day).

Incidentally, just to make my point a bit more? The movies are actually also not comfortable with Legolas and Tauriel. Their authority comes into the category of being possible to ignore, so they ignore it: Legolas is a prince and Tauriel is an extremely high-ranking military officer, but neither are treated as socially superior to anyone else. We never see them show authority or shown deference, right down to Tauriel never being referred to by title and Legolas being given the job of guarding the orc during the Interrogation scene despite the fact that that's the kind of job you'd normally give to a random soldier. Looking at it from this angle, I think this is part of the movies' discomfort with non-king authority and social hierarchy. These two aren't a king and a queen, so the movies don't want to show them in a position of authority. Admittedly, this hits Legolas way less hard than Tauriel; I don't know if that's a gender thing, a character role thing, or a royalty thing, though.

Anyway, my point is the Master. The movies can't ignore his high social rank as they do with Legolas, Tauriel, Frodo, Merry, Pippin, Faramir, etc., so they present his authority as illegitimate. This is another possible purpose for his presentation as a democracy-hating despot: it underlines his fundamental insecurity and the fact that he doesn't have a true mandate.

So... is the purpose of the Master to give us the message that hereditary monarchy is the only legitimate form of authority? Because if so... the movie has more guts than I give it credit for. Somehow, though, I don't think it's very likely.

It's not doing a bad impression of it, though, and this is where I finally have to drag myself back to those character comparisons. Specifically, the most important heroic character relative to the Master: Bard.

I already talked about how Bard seems to be pretty apolitical and the problems this introduces for his character, especially by comparison to the book; in the book he doesn't seem to have been a particularly political guy, but when duty called he stepped up, took the leadership role that was offered, and did something with it. He was going around making sure that people had food and shelter while the Master sat down and called for food and firewood to be brought to him. That's one of the few points of comparison between them, and it's very telling. Bard is actually seen alongside Thorin and Thranduil far more than the Master, but the comparison is still present because these two are rivals for leadership after Bard has shot Smaug and been proclaimed king. Up until that point, though, Bard and the Master seem to have had no friction.

The way the political subplot in the movies is presented means that the rivalry between Bard and the Master is personal. All that stuff I talked about earlier about the Master seeing Bard as a threat and Bard being framed as a populist leader of some kind (despite lack of actual evidence) mean that these two are set up as in opposition to one another from almost their first appearances - Bard is defying the Master by helping the dwarves; the Master is feeling threatened by Bard.

So maybe this is the answer to the question I set up at the beginning about the point of the Master as a character: a foil to and antagonist for Bard in particular.

Well, yeah, I spoiled this my post on Bard in Battle of the Five Armies, but here it is again: the personal antagonism between Bard and the Master goes nowhere because of the way the Master dies. Yeah, he was killed because Bard shot Smaug, but that's so indirect that it doesn't count; Bard doesn't even know he was there.

But OK, you could still do something with this by having them be foils - it's not that they actively go up against each other, but the characterisation of both is intensified by comparison. In particular, since Bard is the more important and heroic character, Bard's character should have been illuminated by comparison to the Master.

Well, I spoiled this earlier, but let me summarise. We've talked a lot about how the Master is presented as selfish, avaricious, and oppressive, keeping the people in poverty for his own gain and placing massive restrictions on their movements for really no reason at all. Bard has no power until after the Master dies, so the logical thing story-wise would be for him to demonstrate how he can do better than the Master.

The trouble is that Bard really doesn't demonstrate he's any better than the Master. He's not actively abusing the people under his rule, but he does seem unwilling to fight their corner. I'm struggling to think of a single time he argues with Thranduil, for example, let alone with Gandalf.

(Source)

But the biggest thing really is Alfrid. Bard takes no notice of Alfrid except when Alfrid is directly annoying him, despite knowing that this guy likes to throw his weight around if he thinks he has the power to do so and despite the fact that things like Alfrid dumping the things he had been given to carry on an old woman must have happened within Bard's hearing. The effect really is that Bard is so unwilling or incapable of taking command that he's prepared to just turn a blind eye to abuses of his power.

Now, the fact that nobody does anything about Alfrid doesn't say anything nice about any of the characters, but Bard is the one who really ought to have done something. From a craft perspective, this means that, once again, the Master hasn't contributed anything. In fact, the opposite: because we've seen no appreciable difference in actions between the Master and Bard, the Master's involvement actively damages our perception of Bard, who is clearly meant to be heroic.

So, to summarise:

What plot effect the stop in Laketown has is unrelated to the Master.

The Master doesn't provide any worldbuilding because he seems to be so isolated from the rest of Middle-earth.

More specifically, the political aspect of the Master's presentation goes nowhere unless the movie really did intend to suggest that hereditary monarchy is the only legitimate form of authority.

Comparison between the Master and Bard does nothing to highlight Bard.

The Master doesn't demonstrate the "Gold is worth less than people" aesop (nor does Alfrid).

My friends, behold a pointless character.

#hobbit movies #StoryCraft #characterisation #fictional politics #the Master

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