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avelera · 7 years ago

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Avelera’s epic “Why I Love Boromir” post aka

Boromir. So much more than a meme.

Agarlandoffreshlycuttears asked me to talk about my love of Boromir since I have a few Aragorn hate posts out there and boy does this topic of discussion take me back.

(For the record, a lot of my earliest opinions of Boromir was formed as an impressionable 14 year old experiencing her first head-over-heels male crush (I mean seriously, look at this guy:

) but people aware of my love of Thorin have probably noticed I tend to have a thing for complicated characters who experience a fall from grace. I find them much more interesting than characters who never need to struggle with morality or see a serious risk to their soul. I don’t hate Aragorn as such, but I have a lot of issues with the way his character was handled, so I hope the negative stuff comes across as more tongue-in-cheek and critique-oriented rather than bashing.)

So let’s begin from the beginning with some very Nuanced and Intellectual™ reasons to love Boromir.

- In Rivendell, Boromir first shows us how awesome he is by riding in on a horse like a goddamn Disney prince *swoon*

(damn-you-why-can’t-i-find-a-gif-of-this.jpeg)

With that out of the way, let’s list his many virtues:

Boromir is practical.

During the Council he proceeds to bring up some rather valid points about the risk of the whole “the Hobbits are bringing the One Ring to Mordor” thing. We, as viewers, know they’re the main characters so the hobbits will probably succeed. But from an objective viewer within the Middle Earth universe, this plan to destroy the Ring is batshit crazy from the outset and it only gets worse when we decide hobbits are the ones to do it. We’re literally going to take some of the weakest, smallest, least experienced creatures no one has ever heard of in the world, give them a super weapon, then have them go with an honor guard of 5 effective fighters (including Gandalf who has been known to fuck off at random intervals when escorting hobbits on dangerous quests) to the only place in the world where, if the Ring goes there, Sauron wins. Game over. He gets his lich-y phylactery back and gets super powered like it’s goddamn Mario Star Power. Everyone dies. Boromir’s people in Gondor (and Aragorn’s people, if he ever gets around to it) will die first. Horribly.

But, y’know, the power of love and friendship will somehow win the day so once literally 4 guys decide that this admittedly horrendous plan is the only one they’ve got, Boromir gamely comes along. He can’t even pledge his sword because Aragorn took that line already, thanks Aragorn.

Why not just take my kingdom I’ve been training to rule my whole life while you’re at it. OH WAIT.

Boromir is kind.

As the Fellowship cross Middle Earth, climb the mountain, the shots of Beautiful New Zealand are endless, we get the freakin adorable scene of Boromir training Merry and Pippin to fight (thanks for nothing Aragorn, I guess giving them swords was as far as you thought out how helpless these guys are). If this smile doesn’t melt your heart I’m not sure we can be friends anymore.

But seriously, everything about the friendship of Boromir with Merry and Pippin gives me happy smiley tears.

Boromir is human.

They climb some more mountains, Boromir has one of the most freaking amazing scenes in the whole movie where he picks up the Ring and is clearly hypnotized by it, illustrating its danger and the danger he poses to the Quest as a result.

I’m going to leap ahead here and say why I love this scene, and that’s because Boromir actually faces the threat of the Ring, unlike Aragorn. We do have a moment between Aragorn and the Ring later when Frodo (recently traumatized by Boromir’s freak out) asks Aragorn if he can protect Frodo from himself. The fear of being like his 2,000-years-dead ancestor flashing in his eyes, Aragorn sends Frodo along (to almost certain death).

But the thing is, the Ring was never really a threat to Aragorn, we never really got a scene of him struggling with it at all. It’s what makes his “fear of being like Isildur” so baffling and annoying. At no point does Aragorn actually struggle with that risk. Unlike Thorin (and I’m gonna have to Thorin-stan here for a moment because my love of Thorin is intimately tied into my love of Boromir) who fears the hereditary madness of his family for good reason because he does succumb to it and then break free, Aragorn’s fear comes across as whiney (and even carrying borderline internalized hatred of Men given to him by movie Elrond) given its lack of justification within the films. Told to us as Aragorn’s main emotional motivation and fear, besides that of annihilation if the Ring isn’t destroyed, it ends up being extremely weak that he supposedly fears this ancestral corruption which never has any tangible impact or risk to him. Frankly, the only time it really comes up that Aragorn is related to Isildur are both times pretty freakin’ awesome for him because they involve raising a ghost army to Deus Ex Pulverize Sauron’s forces and becoming king of a frickin’ wedding cake of a multi-tiered beautiful city that Boromir had to talk him into liking in the first place.

*Ahem*

But anyway, that scene on the mountain is super creepy and gorgeous and I love it.

Boromir is hilarious.

Boromir is empathetic.

Boromir is the one who spots the trauma that the Fellowship has just gone through by losing Gandalf (and Gimili is no doubt still reeling from the revelation of his family members’ deaths in Moria) and calls for a quick rest now that they’re out of the mines. If I hadn’t already been in love him from the training scene with Merry and Pippin, I probably would have fallen even harder at that scene. He’s empathetic in a way a good leader should be. While Aragorn’s point is valid about the arrival of the orcs and their lack of time, he comes across as kind of a dick about it and I can’t help but be uncharitable in my view of him as a result. It feels like the threat of the orc’s pursuit is set up just to make Aragorn right and Boromir wrong, since without that threat Aragorn would very clearly be the bad guy in that scene. Would 5 minutes have really made that much of a difference?

Boromir loves his people.

Probably THE moment that won me over about Boromir was the moment in Lothlorien when he gives his worshipful account of Gondor to Aragorn. In the extended edition the scene continues to one where he chastises Aragorn for not showing more interest in Gondor.

(Also, look at him in that scene, GAWD)

I think this pinged me at a young age for several reasons.

- First, a love of the wider “off screen” world. LotR is a sprawling book, but a film can’t always show what’s going on outside the narrator’s view. Through Boromir in this scene and several others, we get a sense of what our characters are fighting for. It would have been easy for the stakes of LotR to remain the lives of the Fellowship members, certainly they are the ones in the most immediate peril. But Boromir’s speech reminds us of the wider world and the threat it faces, the nations that will fall and the lives that will be ruined if Sauron wins. It re-frames his reasons for wanting to use the Ring - he feared the argument against using it was just a matter of moral purity, at the risk of Gondor falling and with it that everyone he knows and loves will die.

Can Boromir truly be blamed for not understanding the threat of the Ring? I think even the most ardent fans are sometimes puzzled over exactly what the Ring does, and what it would do should it fall into the wrong hands. Throughout a story based around the threat of the Ring, the Ring itself and its powers remain strangely abstract. So I don’t think Boromir’s view of the debate as an unconvincing one between the very tangible threat of lives lost vs. the more abstract risk of moral corruption that even Elrond and Gandalf never clearly express is understandable. We as the audience have greater perspective on the threat of the Ring, and by the end Boromir understands that threat too, how at the very least the Ring will turn friend against friend in the pursuit of its power, and he fully repents.

- Second, Boromir’s love for his people highlighted Aragorn’s failing, which lead me to the heart of much of my dislike of Aragorn’s character. As someone who read the books before seeing the movie, I was rather annoyed by the whole “reluctant king” trope that was shoved onto Aragorn for a modern audience. It is a rather cliche moral imposed by PJ that we see throughout his Tolkien works, that those who want to be king will be necessity be bad kings, and that tropes annoys the fuck out of me throughout fantasy in general.

(Certainly there is the risk of the power-mad, but I think that puts us at risk of one of our current issues, the paradox that those who want power in order to good are therefore under suspicion and those with greater experience at governing are seen as a threat so we should only allow the incompetent BUT ANYWAY)

Aragorn in the books wanted to be king. He worked hard to be worthy of the people of Gondor by serving in various militaries such as Rohan’s throughout his younger days. He wanted to be king in part to be worthy of Arwen, but also because he loved the people of Gondor. His avoidance of the throne was about building up the necessary skills to be worthy of it. By throwing out that aspect of his character, and replacing it with a nebulous fear of being like Isildur, an ancestor that died two thousand years ago (which is like someone fearing they’ll be just like their ancestor, Julius Caesar, or Elizabeth II fearing she’ll be just like Henry VIII if we want to take Numenorean life spans into account by which I mean completely batshit crazy example of a fear BUT ANYWAY). This alteration to Aragorn wreaked quite a number of consequences.

For example, it kinda makes his attitude towards Arwen seem kinda shitty because instead of working hard to be worthy of her he’s kinda just a smelly ranger who is actively avoiding his responsibilities in order to traipse around the wild and serve in random militaries like Rohan for funsies and while I respect Arwen’s choice to love whoever she wishes, it kinda makes Aragorn the deadbeat in that relationship.

But the major consequence of reluctant king Aragorn is that, yeah, I kinda gotta agree with Boromir - his lack of interest in the people of Gondor is really troubling. It wouldn’t be hard to see Aragorn as someone who prefers the elves (who raised him) and generally from his actions and his words sees Men as a lesser people. That’s not someone I would want as my king, quite frankly, if I were a Gondorian.

In addition, we have the fact that Boromir’s family the Stewards have been ruling Gondor for centuries. It would literally be like the aforementioned descendant of Julius Caesar showing up in Rome today and saying they have an ancestral right to rule there, ie it’s batshit crazy but we’re living in a fantasy world SO ANYWAY. Boromir (and Faramir) have more experience and arguably a better claim that Aragorn in the films. Denethor was a good ruler until he got his hands on a Palantir, but even if Denethor is now a poor ruler, I still have a lot of sympathy for him because this was done to him by evil forces beyond his control (in parallel to what happened to Gollum and to Bilbo and Frodo through the One Ring. Literally. The Palantir and the One Ring are both connected to Sauron who is actively corrupting them. So anyway, all the Denethor hate makes me sad and I’m probably the only person in the whole fandom who actually has a soft spot for him.)

So to recap, that conversation in Lothlorien to me showed that Boromir 1) cares about a wider world than the Fellowship, and that the Fellowship isn’t the only thing going on. 2) That he’s a pretty damn good leader who cares about his people, in contrast with Aragorn. Even if we accept that “Learning to love the people of Gondor” was part of Aragorn’s character arc, and Boromir’s fridging death demonstrably pushed him in the direction of “learning to love the people that he’s “destined” to rule” can I just point out Holy SHIT Aragorn why do you need your friend DYING to figure out why maybe you should care about the people you’re supposed to rule????

But back to Lothlorien: Boromir feels the increasing presence of the Ring. He is shamed by Galadriel’s scrutiny, she scares the shit out of everyone, particularly him but the reason she so quickly identifies the threat Boromir poses is because she feels that threat as well. Both Galadriel and Boromir share the quality of protectors of their people who have a Ring freakout in front of Frodo (though Boromir gets a lot more flak for it than Galadriel).

I don’t think that point can be overstated. Boromir’s vulnerability to the Ring comes from his love of his people, not from personal ambition or love of power, except in how that power can protect others. It’s one of the evils of the Ring that it takes that which is good in people and twists it to evil purposes. (One could even argue that the Ring did this to Frodo as well, using his love and protectiveness of the Shire to make inroads into his mind and heart, when as a result of agreeing to carry it to Rivendell to get it out of the Shire he ended up being that much more exposed to it.)

Boromir is remorseful.

To be honest, the scene of Boromir succumbing to the Ring’s call is one of the greatest emotional beats in the films. I don’t feel any need to defend Boromir’s actions, they’re obviously terrible there, but godDAMN do they drive home the threat of the Ring. And here’s the thing, that threat wouldn’t be nearly so scary if it didn’t happen to such a demonstrably good person who clearly cared so much about the hobbits that he was willing to die for them. Even without his guilt over his attack on Frodo, you know he still would have gladly died saving Merry and Pippin’s lives.

Let’s not even go into how fucking heartbreaking everything about his death is because I might burst into tears right here. Suffice to say, Boromir’s death was heroic. He didn’t need to die to redeem himself, he deserved to live, that argument in general is stupid. His death is tragic because of what a great person he was, and the Ring is terrible because of what it did to such a great person.

Boromir was a hero.

We do get that one shining, gorgeous moment in The Two Towers EE with the retrospective on Boromir. Standing by his brother, surrounded by his men, we get a glimpse of the leader he was before he faced the corruption and deprivation of the quest. For all that Boromir is often used as an example of the corruptibility of Men in the narrative, it is clear that he was always a hero, and that the reason the threat is so fearsome is because of the heights he fell from in his moment of doubt, and how brief that fall was speaks to the strength of his will.

Boromir for me into the category of fascinating Tolkien characters who truly struggle with evil. Frodo, Bilbo, Thorin, Galadriel, Theoden, Denethor, and Boromir all go head to head with the corrupting powers of Sauron (and Sauron-like forces) and risk losing their soul to them. Some fail. Some do terrible things while they’re fighting off that influence. But for them the risk is real, what will happen if they don’t throw the influence off is clear, and the avenue into their hearts is often their love of their people and those dear to them in life. That makes them complex, interesting characters. It’s the reason I find Aragorn’s flirtation with corruption to be unconvincing, because he never seems truly at risk and there was never a real moment where it seemed he might give in or what the consequences would be if he did. By contrast Boromir did show us the risks. He was complex, he showed us the world beyond the narrow scope of the nine members of the Fellowship, he showed us what was at stake both on a global scale and on a personal one. As a result, he was one of the most fascinating characters in the film trilogy and I love him to this day.

Some Boromir fic recs, if you made it this far

(Both are non-shippy/Gen because the only person I ever wanted to ship Boromir with was me, and goddamn the LotR fandom had some great gen fics)

Boromir’s Return, by Osheen Nevoy - in which Boromir returns to life and must struggle with his own redemption, and the strange creature that resurrected him (not a Mary Sue), one of the most complex and well-written fanfics I’ve ever read.

Veiling of the Sun, by @thegraytigress - Boromir succumbs to the Ring for more than a few moments, joining forces with the orcs sent to collect Frodo, and everything that can go wrong does go wrong. He eventually wakes from the haze to see with horror what he has done, and must set out on the road of his own redemption while the Fellowship tries to put back together the broken pieces of a quest gone horribly wrong. Heart-wrenching, one of the greatest LotR angst fics I ever read.

And the greatest gif ever made:

#boromir #lotr #fellowship of the ring #my meta #boromir meta #aragorn hate tag #i mean it's pretty mild I just think Boromir is better

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