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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Fast Learner" data-source="post: 1212833" data-attributes="member: 649">Which makes perfect sense and is a perfectly valid and understandable opinion. That's a very different statement from "it is the best fantasy ever written," something that you simply can't know without having read all of fantasy.It matters not whether they were intended to be analyzed or simply accepted and, as noted later in this thread by better communicators than I, JRRT need not be conscious about his messages to instill them. If you said "John, please rewrite the story so that Sam gets sick of Frodo telling him what to do and poisons his food, so the elves are in fact a cruel, corrupt group that only look high-minded and that their fading away is in fact a feint, so that Sauron is simply misunderstood and is doing good things for the world and the 'heroes' are in fact the villains, so that Aragorn says that it's wrong to lead and works to create a Communist collective, and then you'll have a good story," it seems very clear that he would have declined to do so, noting that he doesn't want his story to say that. That's meaning, and that's implied message, whether he was conscious about it or not.Again, he doesn't need to consciously mean to make such a statement in order to intend to do so on some level. When my mother, bless her heart, unconsciously lays a guilt trip on me she is in fact trying to control me, though I can guarantee you she never thought about it consciously for a second.You seem to have fallen into a trap here. I like Tolkien. I'm not deriding his work. There's nothing -- NOTHING -- wrong with meaning and message in fiction. I would argue that fiction without meaning or message is crap, and if I felt that JRRT didn't have a ton of meaning and message in his works then you can bet I'd be deriding it.Here we very fundamentally disagree. I and others here have described what meaning and message we see Tolkien as imbuing, and you have clearly stated that it doesn't matter what anyone says, you simply won't believe it, LALALALALA. That's fine, as you're fully entitled to your opinion. That doesn't make us rude for seeing something different.</blockquote>

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