She said that Aragorn was an ideal man, the kind of guy that every girl was looking for, unlike the Disney fairy princesses. She thought she was being funny. I thought I was being funny. I pointed out that Aragorn wasn’t a man. Aragorn was half-elven, descended from a line of kings that were older than the hills of the Middle Earth that he walked. Consequently he wasn’t anymore attainable as a male icon than the ink on paper princes of Disney’s fairy tales. She probably should set her sights a little lower still if she wanted to keep a boyfriend.
She knew she was funny, and she knew I wasn’t funny. Consequently she blocked me. Dear stranger; please learn to read emoticons. Or perhaps, take someone literally when they include them. Learn that just because you find something fucking hysterical, other people will not; and some will find it mildly amusing to riff off the ridiculous with some ridiculous of their own.
Learn that pedant is not an insult but a way of life. Learn to embrace it.
Don’t blame J.R.R. Tolkien or Disney for your unrealistic expectations of men. You should rather blame H.G. Wells, Sir Arthur Canon Doyle, Jules Verne and others, the historical creators of the modern heroic image. I’d be more inclined to target Siegel & Shuster since Superman is what women expect their men to be. Not just caring and compassionate, not just willing to talk about emotions but all of those things and also being willing and capable of instant annihilation when safety is what the woman requires of her man. What you want is Superman. Admit it and we can go on.
I was simply attempting to communicate a complex idea using humor; that the problem of comparing a visual communication medium, like film, with a textual communication medium, like a book, is an essentially flawed comparison. the characters established in the visual medium are largely external, based on appearances controlled by a crew of people working behind the scenes to make sure that you see what they want you to see and interpret it the way they want you to interpret it.
Whereas a book or a text message is interpreted entirely within the brain of the reader. Consequently the characters you perceive in a novel (like Lord of the Rings) are almost entirely created by the reader, shaped by the reader’s perceptions and expectations. The characters belong to the reader in a much more personal way and those characters mean more to the reader than the movie image means to the viewer.
Consequently, contrasting movie characters (like a Disney hero) with literary characters (like Aragorn) the individual will likely identify more readily with the literary character, even when the example given to represent that character is one captured in a film interpretation (this is why producers buy movie rights for books. Just FYI) because the character has more depth for the reader, has more meaning established in the reading public and this will lead to more butts in seats at the movie theater.
Someone who understands just how unfair the comparison is might find it amusing to point out that the depth of understanding given to the literary character lends an unfair advantage in favoritism compared to a cartoon fairytale crafted to be briefly viewed on a movie screen. What I learned from that particular exchange is that I was wrong to think that others would find that depth of perception amusing. Apparently.
Postscript
I have petulantly re-edited the above text so that the body of the text reads more like a narrative rather than the stream of consciousness annoyance I felt after being severed from a conversation that I was rather enjoying that day. Some people get very defensive about their ideal gendered delusions.
