Lord of the Rings trilogy.
There’s so much to it, the relationship between Frodo and Sam, Gimli and Legolas, the kindness and openness of Aragorn, the everlasting joyfulness of Merry and Pippin, Boromir who stood by his brother and Faramir who saw the good in people.
I could joke about the fact that there’s essentially no interaction between female actresses in the LOTR trilogy, or social media’s crazy love towards this series, but this is honestly a great example of positive male bonding and friendship, acknowledging and working through one’s flaws, and achieving an goal despite overwhelming odds.
Agreed on the women’s part, not well executed. I stand behind the hype though, both the movies and books are my all time favorites but I grew up with them :)
It was weird to realize that the books and movies were about different things
The movies are about the characters and their struggles to try and beat Sauron obviously
But the books got a lot more interesting when I started looking at them as the stories of a world and its history and the way that that world handled to coming and going of another dark lord. The threats he posed to peaceful places, the peace broken simply by his presence, and also the people and places legitimately above and outside Sauron’s reach. The fact that Sam’s star or Tom Bombadil would look at this great and terrible evil, the worst ever known to so many in the world, and to them it would be but another passing of an era, the opening of a new story dated to end like all the rest.
The scale and perspective of it all is just so dramatically different that I can’t help but feel like reaching that perspective is half the journey for the reader.
Interesting for me the main motive always was - that power will always corrupt people. Which seems to be a nice summary of Tolkiens time and experience.