Balrogs

i did archery with women.there's really little reason why women can't be good archers... on the other hand women use to have lesser weight and body mass than many men which can have severe influence on many types of close and horseback combat..

however the female archer has become such a chliche that one shouldt ry to avoid it.

not sure about balrogath and gender...

i pretty much imagine them to look like very tall and heavy burning corpses so if they ever had a gender one would probably not be able to recognize it any longer.

if we needed a female baleog i'd suppose we use ulbandi, the name of gothmogs mother in lost tales, but only if her character would make sense and add to the melkor clique we have at angband.

i suppose even a female balrog would be a close combat fighter using axe/whip/club/sword.. there would not be much dufference in power among them, and they seem to love destructiin and chaaos above all.
 
Ah, I should clarify. I did not mean that each balrog should have a distinctive feature a la PJ's dwarves (no). I was more hoping for a permanent injury which would be visible in later years, so that we see the balrog Gandalf faces is the one who killed x during the battle of blah.


But balrogs aren't archers. They can have flaming whips and whatever other weapons we want to give them, but they kill you by getting close and being a freaking balrog. Being male or female is rather irrelevant to strength or skill when discussing primordial fire demons.


As for female fighters - Haleth does what she wants and good luck telling her otherwise. We're not going to have too many other female fighters after Alqualondë (or at least we haven't discussed any yet).
 
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yeah... it's difficult to give someone recognizable features who is basically a bodyly form wrapped in shadow and flames..

personally i would prefer to have only seven balrogs like jrrt suggested in one of his late texts.. but we can have gothmog, lungorthin, ulbandi &durinsbane distinguishable characters...

however i do think only gothmog should have a role that actually has lines.he couls represent the baleigath who
 
...are a more or less faceless collective. the facelessness could add to their horror thinking about it...

if we need more demons getting killed i'd propose to invent some lesser demons instead of great balrogs.
 
i did archery with women.there's really little reason why women can't be good archers... on the other hand women use to have lesser weight and body mass than many men which can have severe influence on many types of close and horseback combat..

Yes, no one is saying that women cannot be archers. My point is that archery does not require less strength than swordsmanship.
 
Or put another way, there's really little reason why women can't be good at wielding a sword, either ;)

In the US, kendo competitions are divided by age and rank, but they do not always have a separate women's division. Women are expected to compete with men at the same rank as themselves. Granted, women do tend to be a bit slower, so winning against an equally ranked man is difficult....but unlike most sports men and women do compete together, which is saying something.
 
good question... i suppose some sort of shadow, ice and warrior forms, as far as they cannot be mistaken for balrogs.
 
hmm... but can you compare kendo to historical mass combat is the question.

Tread carefully, my friend. Meddle not in the affairs of dragons for you are crunchy and good with ketchup. And other such warnings.

But more to the point, neither of you are really wrong, but the same difficulties that face a woman entering mass melee combat are faced when she attempts to draw back a 120 lb. bow. Lewis is the only one who really gives this trope a fair excuse, in that Father Christmas wants Susan as far removed from the fighting as possible, which is fair.
 
Haakon, you read my mind. That's why I brought her up. We have at least one non-fallen female balrog. You wouldn't think she's the only one, as that would be a rather gender-lopsided group, and...send the message that the one girl in the group wasn't evil because, what, girls are too nice to be balrogs? That's just weird.

But it would be possible to have other female unfallen balrogs who then become....unrecognizable as male or female once they fall. Balrogs (our demons of shadow and flame without wings) could be essentially genderless, 'it' rather than 'him/her'.
I like the idea of the gender distinction vanishing when they become corrupted into balrogs, along with all sense of individuality (except battle scars). Modifying Haakon's verbiage, it very much so "de-personalizes" them.

And yes, women can of course be archers. But a dainty damsel in distress who earlier couldn't life a cast iron skillet isn't suddenly going to be a badass female warrior as soon as she touches a bow. If you're strong enough to be a bowman, you're strong enough to wield other weapons, and that is the point. Our real damsels in distress forced to fight in a battle should have a crossbow, anyway. That's the weapon professional knights tried to get the Church to ban because it was too easy/unsportsmanlike to wield one in battle. And even that requires *some* training and strength.

Every weapon we assign should have a reason behind it. Every martial skill, after all, has a philosophy behind it. It can't be just a gender, or even just a race, thing. {/rant}

Getting back to this particular thread, I agree that balrogs shouldn't have ranged weapons. Going back to a metaphor I've used before, they're Hulk, not Hawkeye or even Black Widow.
 
talking about crossbows..

do you think crissbows are appropiate for elves and atani or should be restricted to angband and dwarves?
 
talking about crossbows..

do you think crissbows are appropiate for elves and atani or should be restricted to angband and dwarves?

Ok, I think we need to do a bit better at keeping our threads organized. :) To be completely hypocritical, however, I'll just say this: crossbows do seem a bit mechanical for the elves, especially considering that they have lifetimes of men to perfect their skill in archery, mitigating the most obvious advantage of the crossbow. I do feel that men would be much more likely to pursue the technology, so I am going to recommend crossbows other than say, something like a gastraphetes (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gastraphetes), be a Third Age innovation. The complex internal mechanism of the gastraphetes seems to lend itself well to being a dwarvish invention.
 
I know MithLuin that you just meant that the Balrog of Moria should be recognisable. I take it you mean from pretty early on. I mean we have the opportunity to show how it escapes through a tunnel during the final battle of the War of Wrath, and that could do, but we could also put it in a special situation earlier on that leaves a mark on it. We could have it catch one of Ungoliant's legs with its whip but release it because Ungoliant gnaws its face with her beak. We could have it fight some Dwarves and get a crippling blow to the leg, giving it a permanent limp like Morgoth... Or we could just make the balrogs of slightly different sizes, and with different wing shadows. Whatever we choose, I suggest it is very subtle. Let's not make it obvious. I imagine die hard fans posting screenshots and speculations in obscure forums and arguing over which balrog will be Durin's bane and afterwards, which one it actually was.

I missed the talk about the ice balrogs. Makes me a bit confused, I must confess. Do Tolkien describe ice balrogs? In our conception of the transformation from Maiar of fire to Balrogs, it is crucial that the destructive and transforming force is the fierce fire within the Maiar themselves, even if some of the disfigurement is caused by the fire in the Lamps. Their ugly forms should be a reflection of their hate, not of their trauma.
 
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What I had suggested was a linear hierarchy, with each of them having a place in it. This way there is always someone in charge, no matter the size of the group.
I like this idea... in a way, it makes them more impersonal, because each is fully replaceable in Morgoth's eyes.
 
the term ice-balrog is misleading..

while lost tales briefly mentions some kind of ice demons or servants of melko of great cold as himself i think these are different from the (later) concept of the balrogs as fire entities.

doesn't mean we csnt have ice demons as a breed of their own. i think we absolutely should have them.
 
hmm... but can you compare kendo to historical mass combat is the question.

I would not compare them, no. Kendo bogu isn't exactly real armor, and a shinai is a far stretch from an actual blade. Like many martial arts, post-WWII kendo is just a sport/competition, not actual training for battle. It's Japanese fencing, more or less, though historically it was something else.

My point was simply that if you are trained how to use a sword...a woman has enough strength to use it to kill someone. So, yeah, in battle, too. Sure, in general, male soldiers are going to be better, everything else being equal. But since the 'everything else' tends to be training....it really comes down to the level of training. That is the advantage of learning how to use a weapon (any weapon) well - you can use it to compensate for your natural physical limitations. I would not want to get into a wrestling match with some huge 6' tall guy. Put a sword in my hand, and I have a chance (especially if he either doesn't have one or doesn't know what to do with it). You don't have to be River Tam for this to work.

Guns are (obviously) even more equalizing, giving both range and accuracy with less dependence on strength or lengthy training regimens.

 
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