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Message: <blockquote data-quote="EzekielRaiden" data-source="post: 9614498" data-attributes="member: 6790260">Tenacity is an admirable quality, but IMO by itself it is not really a heroic quality, though it is necessary in order to be heroic. Sort of like how being conscious isn't a heroic quality, but it is necessary in order to be a hero, or how intelligence by itself isn't a heroic quality, but it can facilitate heroic action. Sauron showed incredible tenacity in refusing to give up after Isildur cut off the Ring, but that tenacity objectively was not heroic in nature.Sure, but the claimed point was that nobody would have been able to endure the Ring at the precipice of the Fire of Doom. If Samwise is sufficiently defended against the Ring that it would take a long time for him to succumb to it, then it seems reasonable that even if the Ring twisted its screws as hard as it could, it wouldn't have stopped Sam from throwing it into the Fire of Doom, and thus proving himself a hero--someone able to overcome the Ring's temptations and willingly give it away (a feat specifically called out as being Extremely Unusual when Frodo offered it to Galadriel, and reinforced by how Bilbo was unwilling to part with it.)At the last, when his courage mattered most, Frodo failed. Sauron would have reclaimed the Ring, and the war would have been lost, had it not been for Gollum's greed and desperation driving him to try to steal back the Ring. That's something a classical anti-hero (in the style of Spider-Man) would do: falter, fall away from the trial of greatness at the very moment that that greatness would be achieved.Frodo isn't the hero of LotR, nor is Samwise. The hero is Aragorn. That's why it's so impactful in the films, when Aragorn speaks so highly of his hobbit friends: it is the objectively most heroic character in the story praising the tenacious mundanity of the hobbits.For a contrasting example, this is precisely what makes Death of a Salesman such a profound tragedy. It doesn't have a hero, not even a tragic one. Willy Loman isn't a hero, he's utterly mundane and the crazy dreams he aspires to are just that, crazy, unachievable nonsense. He grasps and grasps and grasps for things he can never have, ruins his life and his sons' lives through his desperate desire for Something More, and in the end his inability to accept his mundanity is his own undoing, the very thing that drives him to suicide rather than finding joy in the life he has. Willy Loman isn't a hero, and that's what makes him tragic.In exactly the same way, Bilbo, and Frodo, and Samwise are not heroes, and that's precisely what makes them brave, ordinary people attempting something even the extraordinary would struggle with. They fail, but Gollum's foolish greed manages to save the day--the Ring's own corruption causing its eventual destruction, a self-defeating evil, as is so often the case in literature--because as Gandalf said, “Many that live deserve death. And some that die deserve life. Can you give it to them? Then do not be too eager to deal out death in judgement. For even the very wise cannot see all ends.”It really is one of the most important themes of the LotR trilogy that Frodo isn't a hero. Sam is almost a hero--he comes across as a bit like a more wholesome, less-tricksome fairy-tale peasant boy--but not quite there. There's an argument to be made that Merry might be a hero, given his role in helping take down the Witch-King, but it's pretty clear he's a sidekick to Eowyn there so it's a bit murky.</blockquote>

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