Honestly I think if you tossed this whole thing in a frying pan and cooked it up like grilled cheese it would improve by several orders of magnitude.

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While it’s definitely PRESENT in Lord of the Rings, one could argue Frodo himself is a subversion of it. Giving the ring to someone powerful would almost inevitably result in corrupting them and (depending on just how powerful they were) would just make a new big bad. Hobbits work as ring bearers explicitly because they’re not “special”.

I’d argue the Balrog was more Durin’s people’s doing. Fellowship pretty much just wandered into a clusterfuck already in progress there.