Thoughts on "His Dark Materials" trilogy? Book and show

Edit: Frick it, I'll link the Black Book of Arda for any Tolkien nerds, it's pretty cool but terribly translated, two Ruzzian chicks with a lot of background in Philosophy and Linguistics wrote it. Tolkien would have had a stroke if he read it, though. He probably wouldn't be surprised that a Russian had this take.

https://archive.org/details/the-black-book-of-arda-english-v.-001/The%20Black%20Book%20Of%20Arda%20English%20v.001/mode/1up

Looks like definite fedorashit. Might be entertaining but probably not as much as a actual inspired book not developed by pure sneed.

Reminds me of a Russian book called the Black Book of Arda which was a rewriting of the Silmarillion from the perspective that Morgoth was trying to help the world. Kinda interesting although Tolkien would have likely despised it.

Asked about the crimes committed by atheistic totalitarian regimes, Pullman responds that 'they functioned psychologically in exactly the same way,' with their own sacred texts and exalted prophets: 'The fact that they proclaimed that there was no God didn't make any difference: it was a religion, and they acted in the way any totalitarian religious system would.'

So he's a /pol/theist

You've said you're not a huge admirer of C.S. Lewis or J.R.R. Tolkien, both of whom have written fantasies that in some ways resemble The Golden Compass. Is it fair to say those books have a somewhat didactic relationship to readers?

Ackshully, these books that were written decades prior resemble the Golden Compasa

They're often bracketed together, Tolkien and Lewis, which I suppose is fair because they were great friends—both Oxford writers and scholars, both Christians. Tolkien's work has very little of interest in it to a reader of literature, in my opinion. When I think of literature—Peepeeens, George Eliot, Joseph Conrad—the great novelists found their subject matter in human nature, emotion, in the ways we relate to each other. If that's what Tolkien's up to, he's left out half of it. The books are wholly male-oriented. The entire question of sexual relationships is omitted.

Tolkien was Catholic, which meant that for him, there were no questions about religion. The church had all the answers. But Lewis was different. He was a Protestant, an Irish Protestant at that, from a tradition of arguing with God and wrestling with morality. His work is not frivolous in the way that Tolkien is frivolous, though it seems odd to call a novel of great intricacy and enormous popularity frivolous. I just don't like the conclusions Lewis comes to, after all that analysis, the way he shuts children out from heaven, or whatever it is, on the grounds that the one girl is interested in boys. She's a teenager! Ah, it's terrible: S*x—can't have that. And yet I respect Lewis more than I do Tolkien.

Yeah, well His Dark Materials is facile subversive slop (what if God was le villain because bad things happen to good people) with Bears in armor and the LOTR series are voted as the best novels of the 20th Century and the best selling novels of all time

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