Lord of the memes

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But first they would need to invent some tape (i.imgur.com)

submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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They could have fitted the whole ring / tape / mouse assembly into a small paper bag Aragorn could have kept it in his jacket and fed it little bits of lembas on the way how lovely x

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[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Nope. Sauron isn't even aware of when someone wears the ring. The ring basically only has a handful of effects:

(Slightly) bends fate to favor Sauron's interests (e.g.: bouncing in a particularly fateful direction, shining in a particularly noticeable way at a specific moment). This is basically the only thing it can do without an owner.
(Slowly) amplifies the wearer's worst personality traits (e.g.: greed, powerlust, paranoia, hatred). The ring has enough agency over which traits it brings out to subtly favor Sauron's interests, though this varies by individual and the extent of exposure.
Grants the owner wraith-like powers such as: invisibility, unnaturally long lifespan, and understanding of black speech.
Grants Sauron (or an equally skilled warlock) immense infuence over the owners of the other rings, including mind reading and partial control.

tl;dr: The ring exists as a tool to control the other wearers and is functionally useless to Sauron when he's not wearing it. The other properties of the ring basically amount to a contingency plan... though it's not actually well established just how intentional vs. accidental some of these auxiliary effects were.

[+] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (1 children)

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

I'd love to... but unfortunately that's more-or-less the extent of what Tolkien has ever written about the One Ring. Tolkien was ultimately writing about Sauron (i.e.: the lord of the rings) and the evil miasma besetting Middle Earth which the lord personally embodied. Viewed through that perspective, the ring is merely a storytelling tool for imposing Sauron's shadow upon our heroes without compromising his dramatic weight as the big bad.

With that being said, the One Ring became foundational in shaping the modern incarnation of what TV Tropes has dubbed the "Artifact of Doom", though I'm more partial to the OSP classification of "Cursed Artifact" which focuses more on specifically malevolent & varyingly sentient magical artifacts (e.g.: the Monkey's Paw, the Picture of Dorian Gray, Nightblood, Gonne, SCP-055). One of the curses (heh) of this particular trope is that it's quite hard to stake the dramatic weight of a full narrative upon them, since they tend to lose their mystique as the audience gets more familiar -- this works very well for short stories, though!

The concept of "fate warping" power, on the other hand, has caught on significantly less in western fantasy. This is actually kind of odd by historical standards because we can see similar explorations of the concept in both eastern and western mythology (e.g.: the (Chinese) Red Thread of Fate vs. the (Greek) Thread of Human Fate). It's actually a bit of an unexplained mystery as to why the theme only fell out of favor in the western traditions!

Weeb that I am, I would be remiss not to mention the intricate mechanical and thematic power of fate in JoJo's Bizarre Adventure -- specifically in the context of Araki's (fantastically bizzare) commentaries on justice, power, truth, and inequality which take center stage in parts 4-6. One of my favorite stories of all-time is the weighty JoJo Part 5 epilogue -- "Sleeping Slaves" -- because it makes such an eloquent and powerful statement about the roles of fate & heroic self-determination in the preceding story.