Quote Originally Posted by Lvl45DM! View Post
What is this Japan you speak of?


Tolkien was part of the Department of Ungentlemanly Warfare with, among others, Ian Fleming and Christopher Lee. But I swear if they touch on LOTR in anyway I will stop watching mid-episode.
That seems astonishingly unlikely, given that SOE was a World War II organization, and Tolkien fought in World War I.

I sort of don't get using WWI as a setting for super-powered hijinks. In part because it's a severe tonal mismatch. Tolkien arrived within days of the first day of the Somme, where 20,000 British soldiers were killed, the meatgrinder of Verdun was turning men into sausage in numbers that make the Somme seem like a sideshow, Brusilov's offensive on the Eastern Front was working its way towards 2 million casualties on all sides and battering the Russian army ever closer to its eventual disintegration and revolution the next year, and the Central powers were pushed ever closer to starvation. World War I makes Batman V. Superman look like Disney World, and seems an odd choice for super-heroics.

Also because I find something oddly annoying about a subtext that goes "millions of people are dying horribly, but what's important are a couple of totally made-up people doing absolute nonsense things." WWI does this to me in particular, but I had very much the same reaction to the first Captain America. Probably would have objected more, but the first Captain America was so dull I simply couldn't muster the effort.

(I'm not saying I object to any use of World War I/II as a setting for a story. Only ones that use them as backdrop for magical nonsense because, you know, thousands of eighteen year olds marching into machine guns sure makes a gripping context for super-punching!)