Thank you :)

Ooh I'll have to try to dig that out, that sounds really worth a listen

I think this bit is what I was aiming at in my thought - alongside the way I often see that prose style (and the effect it has on the reader) held up as the goal? It's a perfectly fine goal, but I think it's at odds with word-by-word criticism, and maybe that's part of the... not problem? Situation?

Yeah I think it's not so much "immersive less good/complex" as "immersive makes me less easily prompted to do the stopping and thinking that helps me appreciate text-as-words". I've got better at... forcefully intervening and making myself do that as I got older, I think, as well.

Half-formed thought rattling around my brain in response to this about immersion being a high goal of a book and how I sometimes really enjoy (possibly prefer?) un-immersive books precisely because they make it easier to pay attention to the words on a page.

Today has finally been a big jumper day. It has been so long. Joy returns at last.

It's not going to be the best case scenario though, really. It'll be terrible. But it's £15 terrible so I am /almost/ tempted.

Someone (M&S) has apparently decided that what the world needs is Percy Pig scented perfume. It can't be good, surely? Even in the best case scenario, where it actually smells like them, surely you're just going to make people around you hungry? Or yourself?

I think the second one is actually my favourite of the lot (though caveat, not reread it in a few years). It's a banger series all told but something about that one especially worked for me.

Frodo went to the very edge of his ability and it wasn't quite enough. He failed, and is a hero in the failure. And this is a story arc I want more of. A duty too vast. A person who can endure no further. I had never put these two things together in my head before.

I play RPGs in a way that gives me what this chapter of LotR does - the person right at the very end of their endurance who can endure no more, and so they fail. I love stories about duty, but some of what is interesting in duty is that it can ask too much.

Of course I am not here suggesting that my RPGing is on par with Tolkien's storytelling skills. But I think Pechaček's post I think made clear to me why I think what Tolkien was doing was good, and why it's clearly something I crave in stories more broadly, especially the ones that let me choose.

It's not available in every game, but definitely enough that it's something I think of as a trope of how I play computer RPGs. Mass Effect 3 is the obvious best example for this, if you know the story of it - my goodest girl Shepherd picks Destroy rather than Synthesis, because she wants to live.

Wherever it is possible for that to happen, I have ended up with a character in these games who is good, good, all the way good, upper left blue as you like. Except... at the very last possible moment, they make the selfish/wrong/insufficiently good/complicated choice.

Which is Tolkien discussion I entirely agree with, but more to the point of this thread, made me realise something about RPGs, and specifically my "canon" in all the Bioware RPGs I've played.

Specifically, he says: "But the complete picture of heroism in The Lord of the Rings has to include him turning aside from his goal at the very edge of accomplishing it. This story wouldn’t mean anything otherwise. Just a good guy who was good to the end."

As is my wont, having just finished writing up my LotR post, I read Jared Pechaček's on the same section. And specifically for the purpose of this thread, the one on the chapter Mount Doom, in which he talks (quite rightly) about how Frodo fails at the last hurdle of the quest.