Hello world, it's been a while.
I know, I know. I haven't written a blog post in over two months. I have lots of excuses for that, but rather than wasting any time telling you what they are, I'm just going to get into a rant about my feelings. Because, well, let's be honest, that's what I do best.
Over the past few weeks I have been having serious Lord of the Rings nostalgia. The Hobbit movie came out last week and I've already seen it twice. If you knew me in middle school, this won't surprise you. Because in the middle of middle school, Middle Earth was my home.
Those who have only known me since college might find this surprising because of my love of Harry Potter. I think a lot of people believe that if you like Harry Potter you can't like Lord of the Rings and vice versa. They expect you to pick sides. But I love them both, and believe it or not I love them both equally.
I cannot deny that Harry Potter has shaped my life in a way that nothing else ever will. As Harry grew older, so did I and because of that nothing will ever truly match the kind of love I have for the series. But when I was a seventh grader, my golden three were Aragorn, Legolas, and Gimli, not Harry, Ron, and Hermione. Middle school was hard. I mean, I know it's hard for everyone, but when you're an introvert that intensely loves fantasy fiction...well...you tend to be the girl who gets asked out as a joke. So in middle school it really wasn't safe to actively love Harry Potter the way I do now.
In middle school everything you loved as a child is suddenly labeled as stupid. It's that awkward period in everyone's life when they desperately want to be adults, but end up becoming even more immature in their attempts to seem older. I think that's why I fell in love with Lord of the Rings. It seemed like the sophisticated version of Harry Potter, so it was safe for me to love openly. A lot of people probably still think that LOTR is the sophisticated version of HP and while I understand that some people will simply like Lord of the Rings better, I also believe that a lot of those people are still stuck in that middle school "I-am-trying-really-hard-to-impress-people-with-my-cultured-and-sophisticated-interests" stage. Now of course I find it pretty funny that I ever believed that because though both works of fiction are undoubtedly similar, it is only because they share the same genre. Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter are not trying to accomplish the same things and therefore should not really be compared.
That being said, I absolutely adore both series. Even though my love for Lord of the Rings may have spawned out of desperation to seem cooler than I was (and let's face it, an unhealthy obsession with Orlando Bloom) I still believe that Lord of the Rings is brilliant. I think the books are written uniquely and brilliantly, I think the intricate details of language, culture, and history of all the characters is brilliant, and I think the movies are the most brilliantly perfect movies ever to be made....That's right, if it wasn't clear already, I think the LOTR movies are about a thousand times better than the HP movies.
I don't think this is interesting to anybody else, but I find it sort of fascinating that my obsession for Harry Potter came after my obsession for LOTR. I mean, I've always loved HP, but my outward passion for it only became more pronounced close to the end of my high school career, when I finally felt it was safe again to openly be myself. A lot of me wonders if this is simply because as people grow older, they yearn more and more for their childhood. Am I just trying to hold onto childhood as long as I possibly can? Is that why my loves have become Harry Potter, Percy Jackson and the Olympians, Avatar: The Last Airbender, and One Direction instead of Lord of the Rings? Maybe a little bit. But I'd like to think it's just because I'm becoming more accepting of all kinds of entertainment and all different sides of myself. I'm not in middle school anymore and I've realized there's nothing to be gained from crapping on any kind of entertainment. All that does is make you seem pretentious and hurt the feelings of the people who DO like the thing you're crapping on.
Anyway, although Harry Potter is more in my life now than Lord of the Rings, I know that LOTR is never going to leave my life completely. I'm glad that The Hobbit came out so I could remember that. If you haven't seen The Hobbit...GO DO IT NOW! It's so good. I had really low expectations for it since I didn't think they would be able to transform one 300 page book into three movies, but I thought all the stuff they added from the appendices was really entertaining. And somehow they did a really great job giving the movie the epic feeling of the LOTR movies while at the same time capturing the silly, whimsical feeling of the book version of The Hobbit.
I seriously can't wait until part two comes out on December 13th next year. It's my sisters' birthday, so I'm pretty sure I know how we'll be celebrating. :)
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