Uncyclopedia:Pee Review/Gondor
Gondor[edit source]
Just your normal Pee Review please, but maybe a bit of emphasis on how to make it better or if there are any things I could add to it. Thanks. Some Idiot 02:49, July 3, 2010 (UTC)
- Jeez! Please someone review it!!! I'm dying here! --Some Idiot 02:02, July 6, 2010 (UTC)
I'm on it. --—John Lydon 08:13, July 6, 2010 (UTC)
| Humour: | 7 | Believe it or not, prior to this weekend, I had never seen the Lord of the Rings. Or read them. But, being the consummate professional I am, I hopped on Netflix this weekend and watched The Two Towers to try and get a feel for what this article was all about. I still don’t understand 90% of it, and I lost 2 ½ hours of my life. But I’ll try my best to work through this. Just be forewarned that my knowledge of the Lord of the Rings is pretty much non existent. Now on to the review.
I think that you have quite a few things working pretty well in this article. For starters, the tone of the article, if you polish it a little, is very well done. I really liked the dry sort of humor you have mixed in. I don’t know if it was intentional, but it works well. The flip side of that coin is that you tend to bounce between dry humor, insult humor, and random humor. For instance, the line, “Minas Tirith is the capital of Gondor, and is conveniently located right next to Gondor's worst enemies, with no escape routes. And the city has practically no army, either. Yet somehow this stronghold defeats the armies of Mordor?” This line is fantastic. In fact, it actually made me laugh. It’s a perfect example of dry observational humor. You took something that was in the book or movie and simply connected the dots for the reader to show how ridiculous it really is. But you follow it up with the line “Sorry, Tolkien, but this is getting way to unrealistic.” That line is purely opinion, and written from the first person POV. It just throws the whole vibe of the article out the window. What I would suggest for you to focus on would be choosing a set style of approaching this topic and sticking to it religiously. You have quite a few examples of different styles mixed throughout, so your options are obviously open. I would strongly recommend the kind of dry satire like whats used in the line I referenced. Another thing I keyed in on is that your subject matter tends to get thin at points in the article. For instance, in the first few paragraphs you do a great job of staying on topic with your humor with lines like “It tends to fight orcs heaps and somehow always seems to defeat the dark forces of Mordor, even though all their soldiers suck” and “Gondor is very large, but most of it is full of hicks whose diet consists soley of paint chips, and most are named Cleatus. The only real civilized place is Minas Tirith, as such most Minas Tirithians refer to the hicks as Cleati” In these two examples, you do a good job of mixing some random humor with a healthy dose of fact to keep it grounded. Then you seemed to hit a point in the article where you abandoned that formula and went with complete fiction, which usually isn’t funny. For example, “In the Spring of 1972 a complete idiot named John Lydon ate a hamburger. The toxic waster extracted from his/her/wanker's backside was so horribing messed up in burned through the earth and landed in Middle Earth. This putrid landscape was named Gondor by a group of poor farmers and they eventually built it up to be the lamest thing the J. R. R. Tolkien ever invented.” I actually checked the page history to make sure someone else didn’t write that bit. It just seemed really out of sync with the rest of the article. Try to keep in mind that something is only going to come across to the reader as funny if it has at least a grain of truth to it. Complete randomness comes across as, well, complete randomness. You actually have a unique oppurtunity in that Gondor’s history was never really explained (at least in the Two Towers it wasn’t). That facts allows you to take a little creative license with the subject but it has to be done cleverly for the humor to work. Take a look at this article. Look at the childhood section. Notice how the author makes up random things like “A popular tale holds that Vespucci's first act on earth was to point to himself and exclaim "Amerigo Vespucci," thereby naming himself.” And “This was a largely a consequence of his habit of renaming all his classmates "Amerigo Vespucci.” This works well because the author played on the well known fact that Vespucci named things after himself. This is the goal you should be shooting for. Try to find some facts about Gondor that you can twist into a humorous history. The last thing I’ll touch on in this part is the info box. I noticed that it was last edited by an IP adress and I’m not tech savvy enough to figure out if that was some random person or you did it without signing in. Either way, the info box needs some work. Honestly, most of it is pretty good if you would cut out the Epic Fail parts. Removing the random stuff section at the bottom would also be a big help. |
| Concept: | 5 | The idea of poking fun at Lord of the Rings, or any blockbuster movie in general is not exactly earth shaking. Some concepts can get by with being mediocre simply because of their origianlity. This is not the situation in your case. You’re going to have to really focus on making an extremely witty and well written article in order to make it stand out. I would definitely suggest tightening things up by making sure they relate to the Lord of the Rings books or at least some realistically plausible to the reader. That will do wonders for your article.
The next thing you need to focus on is expanding on each section. I think you have plenty of good topics for the sections. They seem to be what you would expect to see in any article about a location and they don’t seem to be excessive. They do seem to be pretty short however. As I stated previously, I’m not really versed in The Lord of the Rings series so I’m kind of limited on suggestions. I would like to see a recount of one of the battles that take place at Gondor, perhaps in the military section. Maybe the military bumbled there way to a victory through sheer luck or something. Another thing that will really help your article is to pick a POV and run with it. I know this is more prose and format stuff, but its 6 AM and I want to get this on paper before I pass out and forget about it. I felt like you started out with a sort of encyclopedic feel and then kind of got mixed in the middle. I thought you really hit your stride towards the end when you went to more of a first person commentary feel. Lines like “Navy - Never actually had a Navy, really, because they never thought of a threat coming from water. Well it did. Twice. What dumbarses” and “Gondorians either walk or ride on their horses. I mean, why don't they train a dragon or something? It happened in Eragon so why not here? And what about those fricken' eagles? What dumbfucks.” Had me rolling. This ties into what I said in the humor section about the dry humor and connecting the dots for the reader. This is where you’re going to find the real humor. I’m guessing you’re somewhat familiar with the Lord of the Rings world, so use that. Think of all those things that seem pretty ridiculous in the story and put them under a microscope for the reader. |
| Prose and formatting: | 3 | This is the most harmful part of the entire article. Bad spelling and grammer are pretty common but in this case it’s bad enough to actually hurt the article. The easy fix would be to head over to the PRS for some help. If you don’t want to do that, I found a trick that I use (and am using now). Copy the source code of your article and paste it into a Word document. Spell check should take care of the rest, but you’ll have to look through because it will want to change links and different words that may actually be spelled correctly.
At first glance, I thought about commenting on the amount of sections, but after reading this article a few times, I think that if you beef each section up with an extra paragraph or two, it will balance out nicely. Just make sure that you’re not adding stuff just to fill space. You really have to focus on making it all tie into the Lord of the Rings world. I wish I could offer up more than that but my knowledge of this subject is pretty much nill. |
| Images: | 6 | The first image is a great fit for an article on a location. No problems there. The second image is where I have a problem. Okay, it’s funny. It really is. But it has absolutely nothing at all to do with the subject. Even though you tried to tie it in with the caption about how Gondorians are racist, it still is one hell of a stretch to make. There are sooo many goofy Lord of the Rings images that pop up with a quick Google search, I’m just a little confused as to why you would try to force this image in. I would highly recommend replacing it.
The third image is more along the lines of what I would expect to see with this topic. A random Lord of the Rings image with a funny caption underneath. You should check your spelling on this caption though. I know what you were shooting for, but the spelling error botches it all up. The last image is my favorite. That is a great example of taking an image that probably wouldn’t fit in with the topic and tying it together well. Plus, I think it’s a funny image on its own, even without the caption. Is that an alien with a rake?! Good image. Don’t change it. |
| Miscellaneous: | 5.3 | Averaged Socre |
| Final Score: | 26.3 | I really like the direction this one is headed in. The connect the dots dry humor worked really well for me and I would like to see you be a little more consistent with that. I wish I had more background on Lord of the Rings to give you some help with expanding but, that’s sadly not the case. I think if you can smooth out the consistency and beef the whole article up a little, you’ll have a seriously funny article on your hands. |
| Reviewer: | --—John Lydon 11:46, July 6, 2010 (UTC) | |