pockysquirrel | Topic Meme: Day 10 (Reply)

punkpinkpower requested that I talk about a favorite story or song from my childhood and what it means to me now.

Some of you may remember a fic I wrote a ways back, in which the nerd father of a very young Chip Thorne kindled his love of all things fantastic and magical by reading The Hobbit to him as a bedtime story. As self-indulgent as this may seem, I wrote that because it was something that happened in my own life.

I spent a lot of time reading when I was little, and my parents spent a lot of time reading to me. One of the most vivid memories I have of my early childhood is of my sister and I sitting on opposite sides of my dad's lap in an easy chair in the front room of our house while he read The Hobbit to us, aloud, one chapter at a time. He read in such a way that I was able to clearly envision Middle-Earth in my mind's eye. He did all of the character voices, and to this day, whenever I read certain lines of dialogue from that book, I hear his voice. Without getting into too much detail, my dad and I have had a fair number of problems over the years. I don't agree with a lot of stuff he's done, and at a pretty fundamental level we just don't relate to one another. This was probably the point in my life at which I felt closest to him.

Suffice to say, that book means an awful lot to me.

I fangirled hard for Lord of the Rings when I was in high school and college, book and movie alike. Hell, I saw ROTK in the theater a total of seven times. They're still among my favorite books, and bar none my favorite movies. Peter Jackson and the team did a phenomenal job bringing the books to life, adapting them into successful movies while honoring the heart and soul of Tolkien's words and the world he built and loved. And wouldn't you just know, the thing that sold me on Andy Serkis's Gollum was when I heard him speak his first lines onscreen and it reminded me of the voice my dad did for him all those years ago.

So what of The Hobbit, then? What about how I feel about that story today, now that it's been adapted to film itself and making headlines on a daily basis?

I still love the book. I always will love the book. The movies...disappoint.

IDK. Maybe it's just that the combination of how much sentimental value The Hobbit has for me with how much I loved the LOTR movies that built the new films up to a level of hype in my mind that the film just couldn't live up to. Or maybe it's that Tolkien's soul has been lost in the shuffle of high-frame-rate filming and Elf/Dwarf interracial romance with a random OFC and Orlando Bloom's out of place but absurdly pretty visage. Truth told, I haven't seen the second one yet, but I'm already disillusioned with it. There were moments of magic in the first one, but not the same amount of magic as the books, and not the same amount of magic as the LOTR films. And I'm a little sad about that.

I guess to a certain extent, you can't go home again.

Won't stop me from keeping that old book on my shelf, though, in the hopes that it might one day catch the fancy of my own hypothetical future child.

Tomorrow's post is on the best and worst mentors of PR, as requested by

thesecondbatgirl . And Day 12 will be general headcanon rambles as requested by

tsukino_akume