Discussion Main / MindScrewdriver

Personal opinion: The Lost(series) is so irrelevant to my brain that I promptly forget the ending once somebody tells me. I can remember details from Firefly, Babylon 5, The Walking Dead (that I don't even enjoyed that much), but the freaking Lost is instantly wiped. If they made a decent explanation ending chapter on the series itself, perhaps I would not forget it. On the other hand, if you have to explicitly explain a work of fiction, that work completely failed as Entertainment. If you manage to explain the whole thing with subtlety, in an engaging manner, with little or no obvious Exposition, then it is a great work of Fiction.

Take Half-Life, for instance. They don't tell you anything per se, but the events through Half Life 1 and Half Life 2 are self-explanatory, and the little exposition at the start of Episode 1 and 2 are Alyx recapping you on the previous events of the game itself, assuming the actual length of time between the releases.

Sometimes you are better off with a winded exposition than a Gainax Ending.

I took out this entry:

• JRR Tolkien's The Silmarillion is very much a Mind Screwdriver / All in the Manual for The Lord Of The Rings.

I think it's not even a little of a Mind Screwdriver for it (I'm not going to discuss the All There in the Manual aspects, that's another trope page). To begin with, there are no Mind Screws to speak of in The Lord Of The Rings. Second, while some backstories (mainly Sauron, Elrond, and the Numenorean people; to some extent characters like Galadriel, Shelob, and Gandalf) are fleshed out in The Silmarillion, very little of that actually deepens the understanding of the characters in The Lord Of The Rings. The "sailing into the West" business is the only thing I can think of about The Lord Of The Rings that is really explained at length by The Silmarillion, and IIRC it was fairly clear in the original book what it was about. The Silmarillion is a nice read and a good background source for The Lord Of The Rings, but you certainly don't need to read it to understand the latter.

I think the entry should be left out.

ETA: I may not get back to this page anytime soon, and I'm not watching this discussion. If you think the entry should be reinstated, preferably having a good argument for doing so, please do it yourself.