Fellowship Day

Yesterday was the 20th anniversary of the release of Fellowship of the Ring into cinemas.

If you don't know which movie trilogy Fellowship opens, first off, welcome to our planet - it's not always this messy, we're going through a rough patch and haven't had chance to clean up in a while. Second, you're going to need to get familiar with The Lord of the Rings if you're going to understand any of our culture for the last twenty years, not just as it relates to science fiction and fantasy (although definitely that), but just in general.

Daa, Daa, Da-Da Daaaa

There are obvious, close-by examples with which fantasy fans will be familiar. The video game behemoth Skyrim wouldn't have happened, or wouldn't have been recognisable, but for the LotR trilogy. Sure, the Elder Scrolls game series was already a thing, and Skyrim would probably still have been made, but the thing that always struck me about Skyrim was that it was a fantasy rpg that was played not just by people who might self-describe as fantasy fans, but also by people whose other gaming habits mainly involved sports games and Call of Duty - it always felt a bit like having jocks sitting at the D&D table, which is a testament to the game's popularity.

[Sidebar: I know that Oblivion, Skyrim's predecessor, postdates the LotR movies, but Oblivion never seemed to have the same kind of popularity. The point here is that the movies initiated a cultural process that created space for a game like Skyrim to exist somewhere down the line, which otherwise wouldn't have happened.]

Then there's the movie industry itself. The film trilogy wrought massive structural changes on how Hollywood financed and created movies, completely changing the landscape of film. Imagine you're a Hollywood exec in the 90s, and someone pitches you a screenplay adapted from an existing narrative property and its accompanying secondary world that many viewers will be vaguely familiar with, but very few will recall in any detail. These movies will run long, at least 2.5 hours each even for the trimmed down theatrical cuts, and on top of this, you have to go for all three at once - no waiting to see how the first one does at the box office before investing in a sequel, as is the usual tactic.

In the 90s, this was a really hard sell, and you can see why. But note that that exact same pitch also describes nearly every single movie (trilogy) in the "Marvel Cinematic Universe", a post-LotR-films invention, not to mention countless others. The LotR trilogy and its success made this format viable. You can see its fingerprints on nearly every modern movie in some way or another; if you want to know why we're currently living in a landscape (hellscape?) of superhero franchises and IP ripoffs, you know where to look. And I don't think it's at all controversial that you can't influence Hollywood in its entirety without having an influence on a load of other stuff besides, even discounting weird, super-direct stuff like the Hobbit Law.

For instance, when Game of Thrones first aired, it was described to me by a relative who said, quote, "It's like Lord of the Rings; if you like Lord of the Rings, you'll like Game of Thrones." Anyone who's seen ten minutes of each franchise will be able to tell you that this is almost hilariously incorrect. Or rather, anyone versed in fantasy will tell you this. But this is the point: The relative in question was a fantasy novitiate, conveying a new-found enthusiasm for a genre of which they were just now becoming aware. This may sound condescending, but it's meant with love; for most of fantasy's history as a fairly well-defined genre, it's been hounded, almost defined by an in-group, out-group mentality, and the division between those who are interested, and those who "don't get it", with its nonsensical rules and impenetrable lore. The LotR trilogy was fantasy that this out-group could "get" - it took fantasy mainstream in a way that had never been done before, and I regard that as brilliant.

And so, finally, to D&D.

D&D is old. Even recognising that the LotR films are now old, a weird realisation to be sure (I suppose things age well when everything that comes after, to which you would compare them, is made in their image), even by those standards, D&D is old. 3e D&D, the first edition that's really recognisable as modern D&D, was first published at the turn of the millenium, about 26 years after the original edition. It's now 21 years later, and 20 of those intervening years have had the Fellowship of the Ring movie in them. This means the LotR movies have been around for nearly half of D&D's published existence. And, although solid numbers are very hard to come by, I'd be surprised, because of the exponential growth of the player-base, if those 20 years didn't cover the introduction of about 80% of all D&D players ever.

Of the two points I want to make about this, the first is that those numbers, like Skyrim and the Marvel movies, wouldn't have been possible had the LotR films not hit cinema screens, and hit with the force that they did. 3e predated the movies (although 3.5 didn't), and so wasn't directly influenced by them, but the movies undoubtedly played an outsized role in creating the space in which it, and all subsequent editions, could thrive to the extent that the game currently is doing.

The second point is that the movies are the way into fantasy for many, if not most of the people who have come to D&D in the last few player-generations. I'm pretty sure that Peter Jackson's elves, dwarves and, maybe, hobbits are the versions most people see in their mind's eye when playing. I'm also pretty sure this is where the swashbuckling rhythm of fantasy action scenes was codified - compare pre-LotR films like Ladyhawke and Dragonheart to post-LotR ones like 300 or Clash of the Titans in terms of the rhythm and pacing of their fight scenes, especially ones containing CGI monsters, and you'll see a sharp dividing line. I think the new style has been absorbed into players' consciousnesses, if not even into the mechanics themselves.

The movies codified the fantasy clichés that these generations of players look to avoid too. When people look down their noses at gruff Scottish dwarves, blonde, haughty elves, tall beardy wizards etc., they're looking down their noses at the film-versions of those things. Consider that we could have had Irish or Welsh dwarves, wizened treelike elves, Saruman played by Tilda Swinton (you know she'd be good), etc etc.

I find thinking of where the clichés come from helps to make sense of the attraction of actively playing to some of them, e.g.: in editions of D&D with race-as-class. It makes sense that you wouldn't want to play a character whose main characteristic is "Elf" if you hear this as being asked to play a cardboard cutout of Orlando Bloom. But the archetypes as they appear in Tolkein's novels are less cut and dried, leaving more room to explore them on your own terms, if only because you have to bring your own personal imagined version to bear to fill in the gaps in description, rather than being shown an image that leaves no room for interpretation.

This isn't to call the movies out or anything like that, but rather to remind ourselves that they embody one version of these tropes, of which many versions and interpretations are possible - albeit I'm doing so by noting their status as definitive of fantasy for a lot of people, D&D players included.

That's about all I have to say on these movies. If you are an alien visitor, I'm afraid much of their significance will be lost on you unless you already know a lot about our culture - and if you're not, I suspect much of the above was already obvious. I'll leave with this: If you can, read or re-read a fantasy book from the late 90s, or watch a 90s fantasy film (or listen to some dungeon synth), and think about its context. Some of these works are languishing in a genre that appeared to be stagnating, while others hint at intriguing new directions that would never get followed up. A few almost seem to have some inkling of the storm that was about to hit and revitalise the genre in unforeseeable ways. Fittingly enough, it's like another world, lost to time.

Much that once was, is lost...