> > And another thing: Shelob's delay is nothing, but what about this rumor I hear about Arwen showing up at Rohan and the battle of Helm's Deep?
>
> Peter Jackson and Liv Tyler wanted to increase Arwen's role in the movies, so therefore you'll see her running around Middle Earth.
>
> El_Di"Not that I mind, really"ablo

I mind. I have two reasons for not liking the idea of Arwen as a warrior woman. Number one, it goes against everything Tolkien wrote about the character. She's a very ethereal, feminine Beautiful Princess stock character who is basically just there as Aragorn's motivation and reward. OK, so she has about one second's appearance in the book, and doesn't exactly have a ton of personality, but she is very clearly not meant to be a feisty action heroine.

The second reason, which I think is the more important one in the context of drama, is that if you make it seem like warrior princesses are perfectly normal in Middle-earth, you completely destroy the impact of another character, Eowyn. I think Eowyn is one of the strongest and most deeply drawn characters in the trilogy. Her motivations are complex and quite tragic, and above all, her actions gain most of their dramatic power from being UNEXPECTED -- both to the reader and to the other characters in the book. Now, if we put Eowyn into a new context in which aristocratic ladies are more than welcome to gallop around with drawn sword rescuing people from Black Riders, this interesting character gets reduced to "Eowyn = another warrior princess".

I'm not really all that worried about the second movie, considering the wonderful things Jackson managed to do with his source material in the first installment -- it's more a case of being interested to see how he deals with the Arwen/Eowyn contrast and fits that into the expanded role he's given Arwen.