Well. There are a LOT of things in the appendixes; and Tolkien wrote ALOT more books about middle earth.

So much more, that in the silmarillion (encyclopedic format of middle earth lore), the entire story of LOTR is told in one simple paragraph.

So. No. The return of the king didn't "technically end" when the king dies a hundred years later. It ends when the king returns. Come on now.

I thought the title was about the scourging of the shire. In which case yes, that would've been cool to include. But a hundred years of politics?

Well that would do exactly nothing whatsoever to show the "bond" that frodo and sam had.

That bond is BEAUTIFULLY, AND PERFECTLY portrayed in the films.

No thank you to any of this.

When I was a kid aeriths death made me weep, and hooked me beyond belief. I had never before played a video game where someone dies and cannot be returned. And, I had yet to lose loved ones in real life. In some way, final fantasy vii taught me that death is final, and allowed me to reckon with that as a child, almost preparing me for real life in ways that my parents explaining it to me never truly could.

FF7 also taught me about poverty, slums, why people get stuck in loops of poor decisions, "it's like this train, it only goes where it's tracks take it" was another childhood lesson for me.

I have the original FF7 logo tattooed across my forearm in full color. That game taught me things that I simply did not know yet, as I was only 7 years old when it came out. And I never forgot them.

By the time of your late twenties, many people in real life must have ed, so I actually find it strangely immature that reckoning with the reality of death in a video game would turn you off to it for so long.

Everybody I KNEW was hooked on ffvii in my elementary school here in New Jersey when it came out. People were in the hallways asking others if they got to "the part yet" left and right. I don't know one SINGLE person who was turned off to the game based off of it.

On the contrary, we were gripped by it. We were ALL, as a community of young children, completely and totally sucked into the world of FFVII in a powerful and emotional way which we've collectively never forgotten.

First I'm hearing about someone who couldn't handle entertainment media giving them a difficult dose of reality, and quitting it until their twenties as a result. It is life. People die in real life. Seeing that in a game, done so raw and so cold with sephiroth telling a weeping cloud grasping her lifeless body that he is insignificant; was like nothing else I'd ever seen before.

It was....just incredibly beautiful. Profound beyond reproach.