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Spoilers
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willshetterly posted a set of rules for commenting in his blog/journal, including "no spoilers". Naturally, I had to post some.I've numbered them, to make it easy to guess what they're spoilers -to- -- some are easy, some trivial, some pretty hard.
drcpunk is ineligible because she guessed most of them already and was told the rest.- It's a sled. (fleetfootmike)
- He's a she. (easy, but arguably devotedbear. Ambug was the first to name it, though)
- They win. They win, but the king still dies. One wins, two lose, one doesn't play, all but one dies, and he's not the one that won. (kokoinai)
- After going to the moon, they come home. (stormsweeper)
- After going to the moon, they go into space and conquer the galaxy.
- The big bad guys lose. The big good guys have left the building.
- They do, in fact, find the promised land. And keep it for a while. Here are some rules for you to follow. (fiddledragon)
- He loses, but gets a new job, and so do all his friends.
- They win. But that's boring, so they start over again. (tirerim)
- They die and go to heaven. (fiddledragon)
- Five return, and one goes alone. (fiddledragon)
- Some go, two stay and rule. And two stay for a long while, and then go.(fleetfootmike)
- They live happily ever after.
(the last one's not worth guessing, but it's the only spoiler without a specific behind it)
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4 is Apollo 13
Is 12 RotK?
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4: Except in the "wow, there are a lot of stories like that, aren't there?", nope.
12: Yep!
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And shouldn't you be including Sam in the ones who stay for a long time, then go?
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Sam -is- the other one who stays for a long while, then goes. Those two are Frodo and Sam.
Merry, Pippin, and various others aren't really part of this, because they belong in middle earth, and they stay in middle earth; I'm not talking about the Fellowship, but those on the boundaries. Or I'd have mentioned Gimli as well.
So the elves, Gandalf, etc go to the west. So, eventually, do Frodo and Sam. Aragorn and Arwen might go to the west as well, should they choose; Arwen's half-elven and can choose to go either way, and Aragorn could arguably have made that choice as well, both through mercy (because of his true love with Arwen) and genealogy (Aragorn is, after all, of Elven stock himself, the first Numenorian king having been Elrond half-elven's brother -- though it seems that while descendants of half-elves who choose immortality might make their own choice and become mortal, that descendants of those who choose mortality do not have the choice presented again at every generation. Perhaps because the blessing of man (i.e., that of free will, or if you like, free destiny) is deemed so much greater than that of elves (immortality)? Hell if I know.
Regardless, yeah, if I were considering the -fellowship-, it would have been more like "one dies, four rise to greatness, three depart, and two write a book". (with Sam appearing three times, and Frodo twice, and leaving out G's death and return as not an -ending-, exactly).
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Aragorn, Arwen, and Arwen's brothers stay, all choosing to be human and to accept death. Elrond leaves, of course.
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So, she's not important at the ending of The Lord of the Rings. She might well be* the last named character from the novel to die, but that's not the same thing at all.
*Actually, I bet Tom Bombadil survives her, though perhaps his little bubble of story wanders completely out of Middle Earth before her death. It's unclear what happens to the other immortal magical characters who are not elves--the Ents, Radagast the Brown, and Gwaihir for instance. It's fair to guess that Shelob dies at the hands of Faramir and Eowyn
the Slayer, but that's also never stated.no subject
What, no "the bad guy is the hero's father"? :)
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Also, I knew that long before I actually -saw- the Star Wars movies; I never saw them until 1990, since my parents rarely took me to movies, growing up.
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Is 7 Camelot? No, that's the beginning of Camelot. 7 is Exodus.
10 is All Dogs Go to Heaven, isn't it?
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7. Got it in two. Exodus, it is.
10. Nope. Though that's an amusing answer.
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7 - Sounds like jewish history.. (Rules - 10 commandments)
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6. Babylon 5?
7. Old Testament
10. Narnia?
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11, too, below; a bit obvious, but I think a lot of my spoilers came in pairs (which made me surprised that people didn't get some of the second parts of pairs).
All the unguessed spoilers are books or series of books. I like books.
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2. The Crying Game
3. Hamlet?
4. Apollo 13
6. The Blues Brothers?
7. The Ten Commandments?
8. Office Space
9. Jumanji? Zathura?
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It's possible that part of the reason that nearly all (except for 1, 2, and 13) of my spoilers were for books was because I was writing in an SF writer's journal. Or it may just be how my mind works. Something of each, I think.
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some hints, kinda
Hint: 5 and 6 are paired (much more, internally, than 4 and 5 are). 5 is also distorted by my memory imposing a false symmetry with it and 4 -- a much more accurate spoiler would be "they go -around- the moon, then conquer the galaxy".
I'm somewhat surprised, for similar reasons, that nobody's guessed #8. #9's kinda obscure. Unless you've read it, in which it really isn't.
Now #3, well, that actually -is- obscure, though it might be helped if one understands that the three "endings" are of three different novels.
Re: some hints, kinda
Re: some hints, kinda
This is too much hinting, but 5 becomes -far- easier once you've guessed 6, as 6 is by far the more popular work.
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Is #13 The Princess Bride? (There are a lot of options here)
I've never read the entire 3 Musketeers trilogy, but I'd guess that for #3 based on similarity with the Paarfi novels (yes, this is backwards). I'd say the Paarfi books themselves, except the third one doesn't fit.
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The Princess Bride is an amusing answer for #13, and yeah, I should have encouraged people to give their own answers for it. Though that's not exactly the -real- ending to the Princess Bride.
That said, yay! Yes, #3 is a spoiler for the Three Musketeers, 10 Years After, and the Vicompte de Bragelone. It actually didn't occur to me that I was giving enough info for a canny Brust fan to figure this out, though of course I was.
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#6 (the good gods have left, the evil gods remain and normal people have to defeat them) is a pretty common background for books. A Fire Upon the Deep fits. So does the Godslayer duology (which I'd recommend to almost anyone who would read your lj).
I'm clearly firing in the dark here.
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(the clue I've given for #5 and #6 is pretty large, and I'm not going to expand upon it).
And yeah, the motif (though that's not exactly the one I'm getting at; both parts are a spoiler, not just one part) is one that appears in multiple works; that was actually one of the more fun parts of the exercise; some of the "spoilers" are fairly universal, but most are guessable despite this.
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(Scalzi, btw)
(Google feels like cheating, and is doubtful in is efficacy, but I now believe I have not read the books referred to by #5 and #6.)
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