Artistic liberties – I love ’em, use ’em all the time, all over the place.

So who am I to criticize that unmentioned sculptor for the fact that his statue doesn’t resemble its nominal subject even in the slightest? He’s likely never even seen K’ip, and doesn’t know him at all – but he does know his boss, and he does know what his boss likes. And his boss likes statue groups that put him (just with extra muscle definition) in the center of attention, even if he wasn’t anywhere near the center, or even just the periphery, of the actual event. And pleasing your boss opens the door to a lot of good things happening to you, like praise or extra parmigiano for your spaghetti. I’m not defending his artistic choices, as such, I’m just saying that I can understand them. >_>

No idea how K’ip would react to seeing ‘his’ statue, and the fact that they didn’t even get his gender right. But, as Si’ri correctly states, there was a karma hit involved with it all, so perhaps he’d be happy that he isn’t entirely recognizable there. Plus, they made him kinda shapely, at least, if in the wrong way.

And, yeah, this one perhaps wasn’t the most important of loose threads, but I felt that that little excursion in the desert back then was just too substantial (mostly because it ended up longer than planned) to go unmentioned in the epilogue. So why not a look at the long-term legacy of that episode, and how little that legacy would end up having to do with the actual episode? (And why should that be in different in a fantasy world then in our own? The Gates of Argonath probably resembled Isildur and Anarion as little as that statue on Trafalgar square resembles Nelson. Perhaps that’s even the biggest difference between fantasy worlds and our own – in fantasy settings, myth and legends tend to be actually true, even after many generations have passed. In our world, they normally don’t make it even half a generation before getting distorted beyond recognition.)

More on Thursday.