#sorry if this is roundabout or repetitive I'm writing it on the tube & hsve not proofread it at all

[fluentisonus]

So I saw your Denethor post and I honestly at this point think that there’s just a deep and fundamental truth when it comes to his character, which is that some people are going to read him as abusive and some people aren’t.

I’m not even talking about the Jackson films here, just the actual text of the books - a lot of people read RotK, look at his interactions with people, and go “wow that’s a lot of abuse and manipulation” because of various things that they bring with them into their personal reads. I’m one of them; the way Faramir interacts with Denethor is exactly how I interact with my abusive father and as a result I’m personally not capable of looking at him as if he’s a noble or good person just because I see too much of my own past in how he behaves.

I’ve since realized that this isn’t a universal experience, and that a LOT of people genuinely don’t understand how anyone could see Denethor as abusive. It could be that they’ve had tense or toxic interactions that weren’t abusive, it could be that they see their own familial situation and that wasn’t abusive, or it could be that the abuse they’ve experienced doesn’t look anything like how Denethor treats both his sons - at the end of the day all that really matters is that this is just something they don’t see, and the people who DO see it wonder how anyone could see anything else.

I know that post is a few days old but I only just now saw it and I wanted to say something because I think a lot of people who don’t read him as abusive think that it’s got something to do with the Jackson films or with a bias against Men or whatever? But for a lot of us it’s just… we see him that way because that’s what the text literally says, in our reading, it’s not reaching or wanting to hate him or trying to twist the narrative into knots.

Hey,

So firstly, I wanted to say I see where you're coming from and I definitely understand how it can be read that way. The post wasn't meant to invalidate people's interpretations or experiences & I'm not going to disagree with your interpretation here because one of the joys of reading is that everyone has their own interpretation.

However I think for me the frustration is not about these readings on an individual level, but rather the fact that they've somehow become accepted as the only reading of the character and even that it was Tolkien's intention to write the character that way, which I strongly disagree with. I think there is a lot more nuance than people are giving it credit for and it frustrates me that this goes largely unacknowledged amongst readers who otherwise pride themselves in their analysis of characters and relationships.

Again this is not to say that this is a happy situation or any of these relationships are healthy or happy. But that's because these people have quite literally been on the front lines of a defense against essentially total destruction for years and years. We're seeing them for the first time at the absolute end of their rope. People are not going to be nice or considerate or accomodating in this situation, and I think it's a mistake to read this as their baseline state of being rather than a group of people who are absolutely going through it.

I think also it's complicated by the fact that this is not a parent/child relationship in a neutral setting. Yes, this is a father and his son, but the father is also the Steward of Gondor and the son is a Captain of the army, they're in the middle of a war, and they are having a fundamental disagreement over the state of that war and view of the world as a whole -- as the world is practically ending around them. Does this make for a healthy relationship? Of course not. This makes for an extremely fucked up relationship. But I'm a little tired of the fact that this is taken as inherently abuse rather than like. Two adults (to be clear Faramir is 36 at this point) who are both trapped into (inherented) roles commanding a country that's on the brink of destruction and having a disagreement over how they and their people could possibly survive. In fact I would say part of the tragedy is that they quite literally couldn't have a normal relationship divorced from this context.

I think both these characters are really well written and complex and deserving of a nuanced reading. I think their relationship is very interesting. Unfortunately that's not what I see with people's approach to Denethor. Very nearly everything I see is about him is extremely two dimensional and often explicitly treats him as a black-and-white villain, and likewise analysis of his character that embraces his full complexity is often met with denial by readers, which I find really frustrating.

So anyways. The point of my post was not to say that you can't interpret characters the way you want, I'm not against a variety of readings and perspectives based on people's different experiences. It was to say that there are huge swathes of this story that people on tumblr would be really interested in, thematically, in terms of characters, and in terms of relationships, if they could get past their determination to read Denethor so flatly, because I think to a lot of them it simply hasn't occurred to them to read him any other way.

#sorry if this is roundabout or repetitive I'm writing it on the tube & hsve not proofread it at all #thoughts #tolkien #ask #anon