The current bane of my existence? Ersatz Andy Rooneys who can't understand that, yes, we may know fundamentally how a story ends but we don't want to hear the details that lead to that point.
I'll admit it, I'm one of the spoiler queens he speaks about. For the three years since The Fellowship of the Ring came out, I've made a determined effort to cover my ears whenever the subject of the books and movies was brought up. When the first movie came out, I had absolutely no interest in reading the books or even seeing the movie. Ben was the rabid Tolkien fan in our family and I was a reluctant participant. However, after seeing the first movie, I became immersed in the world. I made a decision to not read the books because I figured that not knowing what happens would make the films even more enjoyable.
For the past two years, I haven't read articles about the movies, haven't watched the trailers and haven't read the books (I began to read The Two Towers but decided to stop when the plots didn't quite match).
For the most part, when I saw The Return of the King on opening day, I was completely surprised.
** Spoiler Alert **
Going into The Return of the King, I had a pretty good feeling that the ring would be destroyed and all would be good in Middle-earth. But, I also believed that goodness would not be restored without a few or many members of the fellowship perishing. I figured that self-sacrifice would be a huge component of the plot and that there was no way the book/movie would end with nary a Hobbit dying. In my mind, Legolas certainly would have fallen to an Orc's sword and Gandalf -- well, there wasn't any way that Gandalf wouldn't have a second death scene. That no additional members of the fellowship (other than Boromir) perished was the one part of the ending that I didn't see coming at all. And though I found myself silently uttering mantras like "Don't die Samwise, the brave!" or "Watch out Legolas!", I do believe that I was a bit disappointed that I didn't have a chance to use the handful of Kleenex that I had brought in preparation for the floodgates.
Whenever Anil would hear me stop someone in mid-sentence at mention of The Return of the King, he found it incredibly funny to say "they all died." Well, while I figured that they wouldn't all die, I hadn't ruled it out. I wanted to watch the Return of the King and be surprised not at the ending but the process that got us to the ending. I'm glad no one told me about the ghost army, Shelob or Eowyn defeating the Witch-king. And, despite the fact that, months ago, someone had told me that Smeagol died a fiery death (I'm looking at you Becky!), I was incredibly grateful that Ben convinced me that "Smeagol dying really doesn't have much to do with the plot."
That I believed that whopper of a lie tells you about the world I want to inhabit.
Anil, I'll put my world in perspective for you: It's the sort of world where one can watch Under the Cherry Moon for the first time and not know that Prince dies at the end.
