A Rich Fantasy Life

I have an obsession with knights, dragons, and high fantasy content, so Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit, are my bread and butter. I have yet to read the books unfortunately, and I really want to, I just have so little free time and what little free time I have I always end up dedicating towards working on my own stories, but I have every intention of reading them at some point. In the mean time I LOVE the movies. I feel bad that I can't compare them to the books, and therefore I kind of feel like I'm not a true fan of the series, but I try my best. I know The Lord of the Rings movies are highly regarded and widely loved, I have all three extended versions myself, but unfortunately a lot of people don't seem to be as into the more recent Hobbit movies, which is a shame because it's all the same universe and part of the same storyline, just before Frodo's story. I've only seen the first two Hobbit movies, I have yet to watch the third one, Battle of the Five Armies, but I really want to see it.

Having seen The Lord of the Rings multiple times, I can definitely speak more about these movies than The Hobbit, which saddens me a bit since the latter actually has a dragon, and dragons are probably one of my absolute favorite things in the world. I love all the fighting and violence, as you've probably noticed from my previous posts I'm really into that kind of thing, haha, but besides the violence I really enjoy watching all the interactions between the characters and how their relationships evolve over time. My favorite friendship is definitely that between Legolas and Gimli. I don't know how their friendship compares in the movies vs the books, but in the movies it always makes me smile, especially their competitions to see who can kill the most enemies. Anything fun like that that's comic relief but also helping their other comrades by getting rid of more foes is always entertaining to watch. I wish there were more dragons in LOTR and The Hobbit movies, I know there were many more in the history before the two timelines of these series, but I wish there were more live ones during these like in Game of Thrones. This is one of the reasons I love Game of Thrones so much, that and all the fighting again.
It's really cool just how influential these films and books are and how many different people's lives they touch. Things like this bring people together and I think there's a true beauty in that, especially when a lot of people would otherwise not have very much in common. Game of Thrones and those books by George R. R. Martin are partially inspire by LOTR, I'm not sure how much with specific characters or plot devices, but the inspiration to write a large fantasy work is there. When I wrote an essay about the fantasy genre last semester I found a quite from Martin that read, "They can keep their heaven. When I die, I’d sooner go to middle Earth," which in itself without much context goes to show how much Tolkien's worlds have inspired him and how much he loves and appreciates them. If massive hero's-journey epics in the fantasy genre can continue inspiring people like this to continue making more then I think it can be considered an extremely successful genre. 

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