Regarding the Council of Elrond

The Council of Elrond is one of the most important chapters in LotR. Up until then we've gotten vague warnings about the One Ring. This is where we finally find out exactly what is going on and what the characters can do about it. But there's a lot more going on than meets the eye.

Before I can talk about it all I have to digress into the cosmology of Middle Earth and how the rings work.

There are two worlds - the corporal and the incorporeal. Tolkien referred to the incorporeal world as the wraith world. The corporeal world was built by the inhabitants of the wraith world. They are beings of great power known as the valar and lesser but still powerful beings known as the maia. Even after they have taken corporeal form, they still have a presence in the wraith world and they can draw power from it to perform acts that seem like magic.

The most powerful of the elves have been taught by the valar and the maia to also exist in both worlds at once. This is a source of power for them.

At the end of the First Age the elves of Middle Earth were invited to return to the Undying Lands in the West. But the ones who remained were doomed to have their power fade. Tolkien never explained this but my guess is that without the presence of the Valar they would lose their connection to the wraith world.

Enter a being calling himself Annatar. He had discovered a way to infuse a ring with part of one's essence from the wraith world. This meant that the power would never fade.He persuaded  Celebrimbor, the grandson of the greatest elven smith ever and leader of a band of smiths. Celebrimbor saw the rings as a way of preserving the elves power and keeping them from fading. Together they forged 16 rings. Celebrimbor then forged three rings specifically for the elf lords while Annatar forged a special ring for himself. Annatar was really Sauron, a maia of great power and who desired to rule over all of Middle Earth. He infused a great deal of his own power in his ring so that it would allow him to control the other 19 rings and their wearers.

The elves kept their three rings secret but did not destroy them. Sauron seized the rest and gave seven rings to dwarves and nine to kings of men. The drawves used theirs to accumulate treasure. The men used theirs to extend their own kingdoms and lifespans. When wearing the nine rings, the men could transport themselves to the wraith world, becoming invisible to the corporeal world but still able to interact with it. Eventually, all nine of the men became trapped in the wraith world and existed only as invisible beings called ring wraiths or nazgul. Suaron was able to control them through their rings. Even after he took the rings from them they were still his slaves.

The dwarf rings were all destroyed or lost to Sauron. The elf rings were used as intended to extend the elves' power in Middle Earth. At first the three rings were given to Gil-Galad, the high king, Cidan, the lord of the Gray Havens, and Galadriel, queen of Lothlorien. After Gil-Galad was killed his ring was given to Elrond.

After the end of the First Age, the valar abandoned Middle Earth but seven maia came across the ocean to aid the elves and men. They took the form of elderly men and were known as wizards. When Gandalf arrived at the Gray Havens, Cirdan foresaw his needs and gave his ring to Gandalf.

So this is the state of things when Frodo brought the One RIng to Rivendell and Elrond called his council.

We first met Elrond in the Hobbit but he was a bit-player His role was analogous to a non-player character in a computer game. His function is to give the Dwarves some information. In this case, he reads the hidden writing on their map. We are told that he seems to combine all the best properties of men, elves, dwarves and wizards. That's it. We know that Rivendell is in a valley with lots of pine trees and a river at the bottom. That's it.

We learn a lot more about Rivendell in LotR. It is much larger than implied in the Hobbit. We also learn a bit more about Elrond.

The Council itself is where the book really comes together. Previously we've been told that the One RIng must be kept from Sauron but only in general terms. This is where we are finally told the history or the One Ring and some details about the others. We find out who the Nine are.

We find out a little about the three elf rings but not who possesses them. This is interesting because two of them are present at the council. Elrond has one and Gandolf has the second. Both keep their rings secret. Galadriel is the only one who reveals herself to Frodo before the One Ring is destroyed.

We do see the Three in use. Galadriel uses hers when invoking the pool. We don't know for sure but Gandalf probably used his ring for fire magic - either to accomplish it or to augment his own power. In the Hobbit he kills orcs with a thunderbolt and later sets pine cones on fire. In the LotR he uses lightening in a battle against the Ring Wraiths. He started a fire during a blizzard and set a stand of trees on fire during a battle with Wargs. Later he drove the Ring Wraiths away with beams of light.

As for Elrond's ring, presumably that's what gave him the power to flood the ford to RIvendell. We don't know for certain but no other elf ever had control over the water like that.

All three elvish ring-bearers were offered the One Ring at some point. Galadrial admitted that she was tempted but knew she would ultimately be corrupted and refused it. Gandalf also refused it. Elrond was not offered the ring directly but his reaction to it was "I don't care where you take that thing but you can't leave it here."

Note that Elron and Galadriel both offered assistance but were unwilling to give direct aid. Compare this with Gandalf who offered to lead Frodo into Mordor and ultimately gave his life in the process (even if he was resurrected).

Compare Gandalf with Elrond. Elrond complained about the One Ring not being destroyed by Isildur and cast aspersions on all men. But after that he was given one of the Three and spent hundreds of years using its power to nourish Rivendell. This seems a bit hypocritical to complain that the One Ring wasn't destroyed while enjoying power that was only possible because it wasn't destroyed. I've said before that this was a form of original sin by the elves - using the rings to avoid the doom of the Valar that the elves in Middle-Earth would fade and have to return to the lands in the West.

One final point about the Council of Elrond - this is nearly the last point that the LotR is a sequel to The Hobbit. The Council includes the biggest gathering of characters from the Hobbit in LotR and the Fellowship includes one character from the Hobbit (Gandalf) and two members who are the sons of characters from the Hobbit. After this, the book goes on its own course. The only other mention from The Hobbit was the tomb of Balin who was one of the 13 dwarves.

The Addams Family - What the Heck Happened?

An animated Addams Family movie came out in 2019. I skipped it in the theater and I'm glad I did. It had very little to do with the traditional characters and was just kind of boring.

The Addams Family began as recurring characters in cartoon drawings by Charles Addams. They were a bazaar set of characters employing black humor. What we think of as the Addams Family came from a 1960s TV adaptation. That's where the names and personalities came from. The Addams family was made into a pair of movies in 1991 and 1993 with some direct-to-video sequels and a brief revival of the TV show using updated versions of the 1990s scripts.

At presented in those versions, the Addams Family was a gentle, living family who make a point of not judging people. They assumed the best of nearly everyone. People might break into their house to rob them and still be greeted with open arms. If the kids wanted to do something that to the Addams's seemed strange and weird (like join the Boy Scouts), they went along with it.

The 2019 version lost all that. In the new version, the family was driven from Europe by ignorant villagers who thought they were monsters. They settled in New Jersey in an run-down mansion overlooking the town of "assimilation" that was being redeveloped into a place of forced conformity. But here's the twist, the Addams Family was presented as just as conformist. The children were miserable because they were expected to follow the family's traditions and values. In the TV show, Morticia wore a Boy Scout bandana to make her son happy. In the movie she had a fit when her daughter wore a colorful hair clip.

In the TV show and the live-action movies the Addams Family was presented as the ideal family once you got past their strange culture. Not so the animated version.

None of the character traits from the TV show or movie were present in the animated movie, either. It's like the writers looked at a few of the cartoons and watched the first movie then decided to ditch everything and write a movie about tolerance involving monsters. Hotel Transylvania did it better as did a bunch of other movies.

Did I mention it was boring?

There were some attempts at humor. They weren't very successful.

When you get down to it, it wasn't really the Addams Family. It was some people who looked like them but were completely different people.

LotR - Elves and Original Sin

Tolkien was a devout Catholic. He claimed that Middle Earth was compatible with Christianity but original sin is a huge part of Judaeo/Christian beliefs so where does that fit in? We never find out about men. They awoke in the East and refused to talk about where they came from. There were dark implications but nothing definite.

The elves are a different matter. We know what their sin was. Or sins because they did it twice.

The world was shaped by the Valar and the Maya but Iluvatar created the elves and men (and Valar and Maya) and he decided where and when they would awake.

When the elves first awoke they were innocent. The Valar were overjoyed to find them and invited them to live with the Valar in the Undying Lands in the West in their city of Tuna. Some elves decided to remain in Middle Earth. Some started to follow the Valar but lingered and were left behind. Some made it across the ocean but decided to live on the coast and become ship-builders and sailors. But a substantial number followed the Valar to Tuna.

Then Feanor was born. He was the greatest of the smiths. He created the palantir and other miraculous gems. His greatest creation were three stones called the Silmarils which captured the light from the two trees. That's where the trouble started. Feanor began worrying that someone would steal the stones. At the same time the Valinor felt that he was too possessive of the stones since the light they captured was someone else's creation.

There were also problems between Feanor and his half-brothers. Eventually Feanor was sentenced to life outside of Tuna for a period. It was during this period that Morgoth killed the two trees and stole the Silmarils with the help of a giant spider. They also killed Feanor's father.

Feanor swore to follow Morgoth, avenge his father and recover the Silmarils. He and his seven sons took an unbreakable oath on this, calling on powers to see that they would be tormented if they abandoned their quest. Feanor's brothers agreed to follow him as well as some others like Galadriel who wanted to rule a kingdom of her own.

First they had to get to Middle Earth. Feanor demanded the ships that the elves who lived along the shore had made. They refused and Feanor took them by force, killing some of the elves who resisted.

At this point the god of death who was acting as the messenger for the rest of the Valar appeared to them and told them to return and be forgiven. If they refused they would not be allowed back. Some of them did return, do penance and were accepted back. Most did not and carried on.

And that is the original sin for the elves - leaving the Valar. Nothing they had done until then was unforgivable but when they refused to return they were abandoned and unable to return. The Valar abandoned them with the exception of the sea god who gave them what help he could.

As it turned out, they were no match for Morgoth. They thrived for several centuries while Morgoth built up his forces but eventually he overran Middle Earth except for some scattered groups.

Eventually they were redeemed by the sacrifice of Earendil. His father was human and his mother was an elf. He married Elwing who also had mixed parentage (one of her grandfathers was human and one of her great-grandmothers was a maya who took the form of a female elf). Wearing a Silmaril that Elwing's grandparents had stolen from Morgoth, Earendil penetrated the storms and currents that had kept all other mariners from reaching the Undying Lands. He went before the Valar and asked for their mercy. They granted it and overthrew Morgoth but Earendil was not allowed to return to Middle Earth. Instead he was to sail the heavens with the Silmaril showing as a star.

After Morgoth was overthrown, the Valar told the elves that all was forgiven and they could return to Valinor, he Undying Lands. Here's the second sin. Many elves refused to return. They preferred to remain in Middle Earth. They were cursed that life in Middle Earth would grow tedious and they would eventually long to return to live with the Valar.

In both cases, the elves were punished for refusing to live with the Valar. That was the sin. The Valar were God's (Iluvatar's) instruments on earth and, by refusing to live under their rule, the elves were rejecting Iluvatar.

Here's where Sauron and the rings enter the picture. The elves didn't want to leave Middle Earth but they knew their power would fade and they would eventually be forced to. Enter a disguised Sauron who had a way of capturing some's power in a ring so it would be preserved. He convinced the elf-lord Celebrimbor to help him. Celebrimbor and some assistants forged the Three rings but then they learned that Sauron would be able to rule them through the rings so they hid them until Sauron was defeated and presumed dead.

After Sauron was gone the elves used the rings to preserve their power. The three great elf-kingdoms were Lothlorien, Rivendell and the Grey Havens were all protected and maintained by the rings.

That left the elves with a terrible problem when Sauron and the One Ring reappeared. By that point the elves (and later Gandalf had been using the rings for centuries. It was established that men who wore rings of power too long were under Sauron's control, even after the rings were taken from them. That might have been true for the elves, also.

The elves had spent an age defying the wishes of the Valar that they return to the West. A sacrifice was needed to redeem them. And this sacrifice turned out to be Frodo.

There are several character arcs in LotR but the main one is the sacrifice of Frodo. He starts the story content in his life until Gandalf tells him what the ring really is. From there it's one trial after another for Frodo. The journey starts pleasantly enough with nothing worse than a marsh and tiny bugs to worry them but Frodo is wounded before they get to Rivendell and his journey after that is excruciating (in the book it takes days and Frodo's only escape from the constant pain is when he passes out).

As the journey progresses Frodo realizes that he can no longer trust his companions nor can he lead them into certain death (except Sam who refuses to leave). The RIng becomes heavier the closer they get to Mordor and it dominates Frodo's dreams. By the time they reach Mordor proper, Frodo has been wounded again and can barely drag himself along. He's given up all hope of return and only hopes to live long enough to accomplish his mission.

And then, after all that, he fails. Frodo claims the ring for himself and it is only destroyed by an accident.

Frodo's mission is accomplished and he's saved. But he wasn't really. Frodo took the sins of Middle Earth on himself and could not stay. Like the elves, there was no comfort for him in the world and he had to go with them to the Undying Lands.

And, after Frodo's sacrifice, the elves finally submitted to the Valar and returned to Valinor.

Some Meditations on Lord of the Rings - Part 1

It's been almost exactly 49 years since I first read the Lord of the Rings. I've reread it several times since then including last year. I've lost track of how many times I've seen all or part of the movies. I recently watched a couple of Youtube videos examining the LotR movies and the Hobbit. And I saw the last part of The Return of the King. I also saw an exhibition of Tolkien's art and I've reread the Silmarilian, Beren and Luthian and The Fall of Gondolin in the last couple of years. All of that left me in the mood to write some thoughts about the books.

The book started as a sequel to The Hobbit but it morphed into a sequel to the Silmarilian. That gave it a lot of texture. Characters were constantly referring to events in the Silmarilian. This made Middle Earth seem like a real place with an established history that everyone knew.

For those who never read the Silmarilian, here's a thumbnail version:

When the world was created there was a division between the Valar. Morgoth, the most powerful of them, wanted to rule them all but the Valar followed Illuvitar, the being who created them all plus elves, men and dwarves. Both sides were assisted by the Maya, supernatural creatures of great power but not as powerful as the Valar. The wizards were maya as were Sauron and the balrogs.

The Valar lived in the undying lands - a continent to the west. Morgoth lived in Angband, a fortress in the northern part of Middle Earth.

The world was dark when the elves first woke in Middle Earth. The only light was starlight and they continue to sing praises for the Valar who created the stars (Elbereth).

The Valar invited the elves to live with them in the undying lands. They also took Morgoth prisoner for years until he convinced them that he had reformed.

One of the Valar created two glowing trees to light the world. The White Tree of Gondor is descended from these.

Feanor, the greatest of the elf craftsmen was born in the undying lands. He created the palantir and several other things before his greatest creation: the silmarils. These were three stones that captured the mingled light of the glowing trees.

With the help of a giant spider (the mother of all the giant spiders in the Hobbit and LotR) Morgoth killed the trees, stole the silmarils and returned to his fortress of Angband.

Feanor and his seven sone swore a powerful oath to follow Morgoth and recover the stones. They were accompanied by his two half-brothers and thousands of followers including Galadrial.

The Valar could not save the glowing trees but they managed to coax a single leaf from each of them. These became the sun and the moon and are pulled across the sky by a pair of maya.

Feanor was killed soon after the elves returned to Middle Earth. The elves found that Angband was too powerful then to conquer but the elves joined with the ones who had remained in Middle Earth and kept Morgoth's forces contained in Angband for centuries. During this time the first men migrated from the east. Many took service under elf kings.

After hundreds of years Morgoth's forces attacked in the Battle of Unnumbered Tears. The forces of elves and men suffered huge losses and most of Middle Earth was overrun.

Beren was the son of one of the leaders of men. He, his father and a small band escaped the battle but were hunted down and eventually Beren was the only survivor. Beren made his way into the realm of Thingol, the High Kind of Middle Earth and fell in love with Thingol's daughter, Luthian. Thingol did not want his daughter to marry a human so he gave him an impossible task - to steal a silmaril from Morgoth's crown.

Beren accepted the task and left for Angband. Luthien followed after him and, after several obstacles, they used stealth and magic to cut one of the stones from Morgoth's crown. During their escape a giant wolf attacked them. Weaponless, Beren held the silmaril in front of him, hoping the wolf would shy away from the light. Instead the wolf bit off Beren's hand and swallowed it and the silmaril.

Luthian and Beren returned to Thingol and Beren proclaimed that he had a silmaril in his hand and held up his arm to prove it. Thingol accepted Beren but shortly afterwards the wolf began ravaging Thingol's kingdom. They led a party to kill it but Beren was wounded and died shortly after the wolf did.

Luthian died of sorrow and convinced the god of death to return Beren to her. The Valor agreed provided Luthian become mortal. They were restored to life and lived separately for a few decades. Before they died they had a son named Dior.

With the death of Beren and Luthian, Thingol received the silmaril. He had it set in a jeweled necklace but the dwarves who did the work killed him and stole the necklace. Dior slew them and ruled as king for a while but the kingdom was overrun by Morgoth's forces and he was killed. His daughter, Elwing was taken to the coast by the survivors along with the silmaril.

The last elf kingdom to fall was Gondolin. It was hidden and the inhabitants thought that even if Morgoth discovered them, he could never conquer them.

The sea god sent a messenger, a man named Tuor, to tell the people of Gondolin to march from their city, gather the other elves and attack Morgoth . They refused but allowed Tuor to live with them and to marry Idril, the king's daughter. They had a child named Earendil.

While Earendil was still a child, Morgoth learned of Gondolin's existence and attacked it with overwhelming forces. Tuor led the survivors to the coast where the joined the other survivors.

Tuor and built a ship and sailed to the west with Idril. No one knows what happened to them but it's rumored that he was allowed to join the elves.

Their son Earendil became a great mariner. He married Elwing and they had two sons, Elrond and Elros. After many attempts to reach the west, Earendil finally succeeded with Elwing accompanying him and the silmaril tied to his brow. He reached the undying lands and convinced the Valar to help he people of Middle Earth.

There was a great battle Morgoth was captured and expelled from the world. Angband was destroyed but some of Morgoth's creatures were overlooked. The remaining two silmarils were lost.

It was ruled that Earendil would not be allowed to return to Middle Earth. Instead his ship could sail the heavens. The "star" that is mentioned several times in LotR is actually the silmaril he still wore. His sons Elrond and Elros were given the choice to live as elf or man. Elrond chose to be elf and Elros to be a man.

The humans who had been faithful to the elves were given a large island named Numenor to live on. On a clear day the undying lands could be seen from it. Elros was their king. Aragorn was distantly descended from Elros. The Numenorians were given a descendant of one of the glowing trees and it became the symbol of the kingdom.

As the centuries passed, the Numenorians became obsessed with death and convinced that the elves and Valar were keeping the secret of immortality from them.

Sauron gathered the remnants of Morgoth's forces and made his own fortress in Mordor. Eventually he tried to conquer Middle Earth but the Numenorians opposed him. Surprised by how strong they were, he surrendered and offered himself as hostage. He appeared to have reformed but actually he was corrupting them. Eventually he convinced them that they were powerful enough to conquer the Undying Lands and take the secret of immortality.

The Valor didn't take kindly to the invasion. Not only did they destroy the fleet, they also destroyed Numenor. Sauron was crushed when the island sank and could never again take a pleasing shape.

A few faithful escaped the destruction of Numernor. This is referred to in LotR in a poem recited by Gandolf:

Tall ships and tall kings
Three times three,
What brought they from the foundered land
Over the flowing sea?
Seven stars and seven stones
And one white tree.

The seven stars were the constellation of the Sickle - a constellation meant as a warning to Morgoth.

The Numernoreans had already established their rule over a large portion of Middle Earth. This group took control of that. They were led by Elendil, and his sons Isildur and Anárion.

That's enough for now. In my next installment I'll talk about how all of this relates to LotR.

Birds of Prey - What Happened?

Birds of Prey had a disastrous opening weekend. While it was #1 it only took in 60% of what it was expected to bring in ($30 million instead of $50 million). That's the lowest opening of a DC or Marvel movie. So what happened?

The trailers were a big, big problem. There were two official trailers. Here's the first, and the second. Watch them then, based only on what you saw in the trailers, tell me who the Birds of Prey are? What are their names. Do they have any powers. How many are there? Is this a superheros take down a bad guy movie or a heist movie?

If you are honest you can't answer any of those questions. All you know is that Harley Freak'n Quinn is in it, that she broke up with the Joker and got some allies to fight a bad guy who is after her some some reason. Plus there's some fight scenes and some singing.

So if your trailer isn't going to explain who the Birds of Prey are then why name the movie after them? DC realized that a few days after the movie opened and relabeled the movie "Harley Quinn:Birds of Prey".

From the trailer I assumed that Harley allied herself with a girl-gang of thieves or something. I was amazed when I read a review that said the Birds of Prey were good girls. Yes, I'm aware of the comic book and I watched the short-lived TV series but I thought they'd reused the name for different characters.

So that's problem number one and it's a big one.

Problem number two: Harley is a spin-off character. In fact she's a spin-off of a spin-off since she was created as the Joker's side-kick in Batman the Animated Series. It was only later that she made the jump to comic books. In the DCU she's a spin-off of Suicide Squad. Yes, when that movie came out she was considered the break-out star but, let's face it, Suicide Squad hasn't aged well. Now that Wonder Woman, Aquaman and Shazam showed that the SCU can have good movies, who needs a spin-off from one of their worst efforts? That was going to make the movie a tough sell regardless. It would have been better to hold the movie until the James Gunn Suicide Squad sequel comes out and, presumably, generates some good will for the characters.

Problem number three: It's rated R. A few comic book movies have been rated R and done well: Joker, Logan and Deadpool all made a ton of money with an R rating. But these were different. They were aimed at a different audience, particularly Joker which was separate from the comic books and Logan which was trying for a gritty, realistic feel. Birds of Prey is being marketed as an action film but it's lead character started out in a cartoon.

Quick, name one R-rated action movie about a bunch of girls with gratuitous violence. There have been a few in this category but they were flops.

This one is personal to me. I considered seeing it and skipped it because of the rating. Eventually I'll see it on TV where the violence will be cut back.

So, there's three reasons that BIrds of Prey failed to live up to expectations. You notice that none of these involved fanboys who can't stand to see strong women or any other reaction against the movie's wokeness. The movies was badly timed, the trailers didn't sell it and the R rating killed it. No other explanations are needed.

Cats, the Disaster

A few weeks after it was released, Cats is projected to be one of the biggest box office disasters of all time. What happened?

The biggest problem was the CGI. This was a huge mistake for several reasons. A significant amount of the brain is devoted to recognizing faces and interpreting expressions. When the face doesn't register properly it triggers signals that something is wrong. The closer you get to human features without getting them perfect the more it seems wrong. This is known as the Uncanny Valley and it's not a good place to set a movie. Cats removed the actors' ears and replaced them with animated cat ears on top of the head. That just screams wrong.

The stage production used makeup to achieve the cat look. Granted the costumes looked dated by the end of the 1980s, but the concept worked because you knew there was a human head under the makeup.

CGI isn't cheap, either. Probably a good bit of the movie's $95 million budget went for CGI.

But even if they had used actors in makeup instead of CGI, the movie would have been difficult to watch because of the next problem - it looks terrible. Go back and look at successful musicals, especially ones with a lot of dancing. They have long cuts and wide camera angles. Cats is very, very choppy with cuts every 2-4 seconds, often changing from a close-up on someone's feet to a head shot or something else jarringly different. The camera angles are also weird, looking up at the dancers. Possibly this was done to show the sets towering over them and give a sense of scale but it's backwards from how that usually works.

Regardless, fast cuts may be good for music videos but they are the wrong way to do a lavish musical with complicated dance numbers.Combine the quick cuts, the camera angles and the rest and you have a visual mess.

Then there's the stars. Casting a bunch of big-name stars only to cover them in make-up and CGI is self-defeating. I doubt that the star appeal added enough to the box office to pay the extra salaries.

And speaking of stars, there's Taylor Swift. The stage production is really a bunch of poems set to music and strung together with only the slightest suggestion of a plot. The movie tries to make the plot stronger by having Taylor Swift acting as a witness to the gathering of the cats. This was a mistake. She's almost unrecognizable and she's intrusive. The movie constantly cuts to her wide-eyed face. She's supposed to be a surrogate for the audience but she ends up being a distraction. The movie can't just show us the different cats, it also has to show us how she reacts to them. That makes the choppy editing even more distracting. In the stage production whichever cat is being presented takes center stage and the cat chorus simply becomes supporting players. As a narrative device, inserting Taylor Swift is a total failure.

Captain Marvel, Wonder Woman and The Feminist Journey

The Hero's Journey has been a staple of heroic literature dating back to when sagas were sung instead of written. Some modern examples include both The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings and the original Star Wars movie (which I refuse to call by it's revised name). In the classic hero's journey, the hero, who is often young and inexperienced, is forced to leave his comfortable life behind and undertake a quest. Along the way he meets a mentor who teaches him. Eventually the hero and the mentor are separated and the hero has to use his new knowledge to complete the journey.

In Tolkien's novels, Gandolf sends Bilbo then Frodo on journeys. He accompanies them for a while but in the Hobbit he has to leave to go join the fight against the Necromancer (Sauron). In LotR he is killed (although he recovers). For a while Strider replaces Gandolf as Frodo's mentor but, this being a more adult book, Frodo realizes that he has to leave his companions behind. In Star Wars, Obi-wan saves Luke and whisks him off on a quest. Along the way he gives Luke a bit of training before Darth Vader turns him into a Force Ghost.

The MCU has their own version of the Hero's Journey. Let's call it the Super-Hero's Journey. It's not used in every MCU movie but it's pretty common. The biggest difference is that instead of being young and inexperienced, the hero is flawed. Instead of being forced on a journey by external events, it's the hero's own faults that leads to the journey. The role of the mentor is reduced greatly. Instead of losing his mentor, the hero hits bottom before overcoming his flaws and learning from his experiences to overcome the villain.

Iron Man, the first MCU movie, is also the prototype for the Superhero's journey. Stark hits bottom fast. One minute he's a spoiled millionaire industrialist and the next he's being held hostage in a cave and forced to lug a car battery around or he will die. He has a mentor in the cave who dies pretty fast. He also has a father-figure who betrays him. I'll come back to this later.

In Iron Man 2, Stark is on a self-destructive path, eventually getting a a drunken brawl with Rhodey before Fury sets him on the proper path. In the third movie he's obscessed with making armor and suffering from PTSD after the Avengers movie and loses his home and armor before he once again pulls himself together.

Doctor Strange goes from talented neurosurgeon to bum before the Ancient One trains him to become the Sorcerer Supreme. Thor loses his hammer and his powers until he discovers self-sacrifice. Spider-Man screws up constantly until Stark takes back his Spider-Suit then finally gets his act together.

The Black Panther is a special case. He hit bottom as hard as anyone but he's not flawed. His problems are external. His father and his mentor lied to him. This is an important point. I'll come back to it later.

So, lots of MCU movies have the Hero's Journey. Even the DCU does it with Aquaman. But both Marvel and DC have a different journey for their women. I'll call it the Feminist Journey.

A huge pint is that the heroine is not flawed so there's no need to hit bottom. The Feminist Journey is always up.

The second point is that the heroine is much more powerful than she thinks but she has a mother figure holding her back (echos of the Black Panther's father lying to him).

Finally, the heroine seems to have a mentor but he's actually her enemy.

At the beginning of Wonder Woman, Diana's mother forbid her to even train as an Amazon. Eventually her mother relents with the instruction that Dianna is to be pushed harder than anyone. She's been told that she began as a statue that the gods brought to life and that the armory has a special sword and shield to be used to fight Aries, the God of War. After learning about The Great War, Dianna takes the sword and shield and leaves to go find Aries and stop the war. Near the end of the movie we discover that her mother lied to her. She is a demi-god, the daughter of Zeus and she is the weapon against Aries, not the sword. And, Aries is not the evil German general. He's the kindly English lord who's been helping her.

In Captain Marvel, Carol is a soldier fighting for the Kree. She is trained by Yon-Rogg, her commander and mentor. The Kree are ruled by the Supreme Intelligence who appears to Carol as a mother-figure and constantly warns her about controlling her powers. During the course of the movie she discovers that she is much more powerful than she thought and that she's fighting on the wrong side. She's been told that the Skrulls are terrorists but they are just innocent victims. She discovers that her real enemy is Yon-Rogg.

So the only two superhero movies featuring a woman have the Feminist Journey. But this raises the huge question, why was Wonder Woman such a better movie? The answer is that the Feminist Journey was the A plot in Captain Marvel but it was only the B plot in Wonder Woman. The A plot in Wonder Woman was stopping the German general from using nerve gas on the English and extending the war. The final denouement and CGI battle at the end almost seemed tacked on. In contrast, Captain Marvel put it's Feminist Journey front and center.

The biggest problem with the Feminist Journey is that flawless heroes (or heroines) are kind of boring. Its the flaws that make the heroes interesting.