Driven by a need for revenge after his family dies in an unprovoked attack, Talion - much like the early U.S. As a ranger, Talion is both a career soldier and a special operator, trained to practice guerilla warfare deep in enemy territory. Breaking with Tolkien’s novels, Shadow of Mordor injects current politics into Tolkien’s largely apolitical world, filling it with the tactics, methodology and theory of counterterrorism.Ĭonsider our protagonist, Talion. Which brings us to Middle-earth: The Shadow of Mordor, which is a War on Terror story if ever I’ve seen one. That’s why they stay, for the most part, apolitical and broad. (He did, however, admit basing The Dead Marshes on the blasted mud of the Somme.) Tolkien wanted his books to be broadly applicable rather than representative. In fact, during his life Tolkien scorned the political allegories placed on his novels, stating that The One Ring was by no means the atomic bomb, that Sauron wasn’t Stalin, and that Orcs were neither Nazis nor inherently evil. Tolkien’s novels reject politics in favor of idealism. They fight monsters when necessary, but very few are professional soldiers, and there’s always the refusal to use evil against evil. Tolkien’s heroes overcome not through new technology or savvy politics, but through their innate goodness. The Lord of the Rings was a reaction to the slaughter he witnessed and the cynicism it imparted in a generation. The war made Tolkien deeply suspicious of violence, industrialization and the pursuit of power. While scholars can dispute individual elements - whether Sam Gamgee was inspired by Tolkien’s military aides, for instance, or that Frodo shows PTSD symptoms - the larger impact is thematic. It is perhaps not surprising, then, that World War I left an impression on the young scholar and his invented world. Historians still cite it as the day Victorian optimism died.Īnd as Tolkien recuperated from his ordeal, he wrote about a fantasy realm in what he called The Book of Lost Tales. The Somme was a watershed moment in British history, the first time the nation tasted industrial warfare. Only one of Tolkien’s close friends survived the war. There were 350,000 British casualties by the battle’s end. “Junior officers were being killed off, a dozen a minute,” Tolkien later wrote. Second Lieutenant Tolkien, as Battalion Signaling Officer, had to resort to handing written messages to runners who’d sprint them into enemy fire. Artillery bombardments made telephone lines difficult to maintain. The lines stagnated, with troops living in squalid trenches for months, drowning in mud and gnawed by lice. The British took 57,000 casualties on the first day alone. He’d served on the front line at the Somme, taking part in the assaults on Schwaben Redoubt, the Leipzig Salient and Regina Trench before disease knocked him out of the war. In 1916, Tolkien was in a military hospital recuperating from trench fever. As a result, Tolkien’s ideas fall victim to post-millennial cynicism and the game, while enjoyable, feels utterly wrong. While it plays well and has interesting mechanics, Shadow of Mordor falls flat thematically because it transplants a War on Terror mentality to a fantasy world inspired by World War I. You’d be forgiven for mistaking this for Afghanistan, but it’s actually Middle-earth: The Shadow of Mordor, a good game with an upside-down theme. Striking a training camp from the skies and destroying it in a fiery explosion. Image Source: (via )Īllying with enemies.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |