Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.
Rocket your D&D 5E and Level Up: Advanced 5E games into space! Alpha Star Magazine Is Launching... Right Now!

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Salthanas" data-source="post: 1215935" data-attributes="member: 9689">You can say that messages can be delivered unintentionally but you also have to accept that messages can be totally misinterpreted. If an alien comes down from planet Melville and reads LoTR he might, based on Melvillian interpretations of literature come to the conclusion that Tolkiens work obviously was about the political situation back on planet Melville. In the context of what some people seem to be saying we would have to consider this to be as valid as any other interpretation particually if we are using only the book as a reference point. However we can conclude that this interpretation is in fact bogus for the simple reason that Tolkien has never in fact visited Planet Melville (at least not to my knowledge), this however requires us to look outside the book and consider the context in which it was written in. The aliens conclusions from his particular perspective might seem entirely logical and accurate but that does not change the fact that they as near to meaningless as can be. Simply put trying to argue that any message is somehow relevant without considering the context of the work itself is IMO quite pointless unless the author has made it  overwhelmingly clear which Tolkien obviously has not, otherwise there would be no disagreement on what the message actually was  <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" /> There surely would have to be a reason for the author making his message vapid though unless your saying that he arbitarily made it subjective which would strike me as pretty meanlingless  <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" /></blockquote>

Verification