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Okay so this is four posts in one.
1/ YAY MUSIC. I need to listen to the original Russian version again, because I do not know this song very well, but the parts I could do off the cuff sounded good. I like the contrast between their instruments! I will try and record it... um... At Some Point, because:
2/ I'm still piecing my motivation to do anything about anything back together since the nasty orcses took my stuff. I have a story which I partially rescued, and I've rewritten like... three lines of the missing part. I've gotten through a couple of projects involving making things on actual paper, I think because my even my subconscious has to admit they're not going to get deleted, but doing anything digital has been a struggle.
(Unrelated but similar, Celebestel's had a rubbish time with the non-plague winter bugs, so she's not had the energy to try and master Heart yet. We haven't forgotten!)
3/ I am not at all sure why the videos are still up, because they're definitely linked to the account that's now gone. Maybe I had a Youtube account which was originally set up separate, and has now separated itself back out again? I don't know. At some point I'll move them across to a safer account, but, well, see point 1. It looks like the last comment on Minions was you saying "when it's finished"... yeah, looks like I was hoping to update the art a little on that one. I'll have a dig and see where I got to.
4/ I was going to post this a couple of weeks ago, but again see #1... my daughter has been watching Sofia the First lately, and spent a few days singing the villain showdown song. You know the style: hero sings about their defiance, villain mocks them for being weak, hero declares that they have Love and therefore win, end of story.
Which got me to thinking... the Zong doesn't do that. Finrod, the hero of the story, after whom the whole musical is named... loses his showdown song to Sauron. And then he just dies. No second confrontation: he dies, and Luthien has to pick up the pieces. That's true in the Silm & Lay, too: Finrod never wins a fight in Tol Sirion, and if Luthien hadn't shown up, Beren would just have been eaten by a different wolf.
Which is a really brave move by Tolkien, taking his most sympathetic character and making him one of the biggest losers in the Silmarillion (even Morgoth gets to stomp Fingolfin!). But it also highlights the message of the Zong for me, which is: duty isn't enough. It's better than vengeance, absolutely - but when you come up against it, duty won't get you through. For that (says the Zong), you need Love - and Finrod realises this, even though he still doesn't quite comprehend it. (In fact, I think Truth is largely him saying that it can't be comprehended.)
I mean, we've known that was their chosen message for a while, but it just struck me how well they worked Finrod's canonical loss into the theme.
(And Luthien's Showdown also breaks with the genre - because she flat-out doesn't let Sauron get a word in. He doesn't get to tell her how weak she is - she's not having any of it. "Light and Dark can both be damned / Love is the only law that counts!")
hS
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