[quote="Bloodspill"]True, but you gotta admit they made him interesting joke character. You can understand his personality on many different levels; he is full of opposites himself. Sometimes he seems to be eternal optimist, sometimes he becomes sarcastic.
Sometimes I wish TLK3 was all about lions, but I like Timon's story. He's one of the most humanized characters in LK. I mean, not many people are wise and strong and loved by everyone like Mufasa, but I know many people can relate to Timon.[/quote]
Now this is something I can 90% agree on in the last few posts made by other members, because it's thankfully not really biased at all. This is something that mostly does define him from the films.
He can actually be eternally optimistic and sarcastic at the same time when you really look at him. I've always noticed myself that it's hard to lose hope with him. It really is, because the sarcasm of his is harmless and intriguing and his comedy especially from TLK 3 is meaningful and you can sense that hope from it and he's all still sensitive. But if you don't have a good sense of humor, then I can see that this is where some take Timon hard to the point that they see he's actually a bad person. But then again, that would easily be taking him out of context too.
And with the humanized thing, great work on saying this. He pretty much is too and it's really hard to look at him as "just a meerkat", you could say. But even so, it doesn't matter because it's still all good and he Is a person.
On a side note, I'm pretty sure there's some out there who don't like Mufasa as well. The majority probably does. But not every single person will.
[quote="Julie Skywalker"]^ None of that disproves my post that you quoted. Of course all of the characters have bad qualities and no one is all good. But you can't expect everyone to like Timon, just like I can't expect everyone to like Nala or Vitani. You can't take everything people say about your favourite character so personally, that's why there's mudslinging. Regulus has not been bashing Timon, he's been explaining why he doesn't like him. I don't even dislike Timon, I like the character and admit fully that both Regulus and AnnaM had solid points.
But at the end of the day, everything is perception. You can perceive something as noble where another will perceive it as selfish and only the person who committed the act knows for a fact which it is. You perceive Timon in a highly positive light. That's great! You have a strong connection with the character and you like him. But not everyone can see it the way you do. Different upbringings and different life experiences will show people to interpret things in different ways. Everything that anyone has mentioned in this thread has been their opinion, their perception, their interpretation based on the specific facts the film gives. You can't prove that Timon wasn't selfish anymore than Regulus can prove he was.
Everything in the human experience is based on perception. That's just how it is. Somethings are facts, other things we can only guess at. The true character of a person (or in this case, character) is not definitely provable, it's all subjective. Not a single person in this thread is right or wrong about their judgments of Timon's character.[/quote]
I'm sorry, but the only real thing I can see from everything you wrote here is the simple fact that either you believe everything you've said is correct and/or after I wrote the post before yours, you did this in order to help yourself feel better after everything I pointed out in the post before. It's basically the same action Regulus did after he saw Zonofon's response in the beginning of this topic. You can't also expect me to automatically agree with your statements, just because you completely said so in just your own words and nothing else. I would like to see some kind of proof even just a reference and not just hard-on opinion or personal experience.
Think about this when it comes to perception, perceiving things completely in one's own way is the reason why we have people, for example, behind bars. They have ill-conformity to moral standards and believe that what they know is right is what led them to jail. The only way they can truly get out of there is by changing themselves and conforming more to the standards of morality.
Eventually, the truth or realties of this life catches up to everyone. And so this goes hand in hand with the realities of Timon's character. It doesn't mean that his intentions are bad at all. But eventually people are forced to change themselves when life really comes down on them.
You can also claim all you want that Regulus didn't bash Timon. But if you look at these two quotes of his from page 1 (and there's a lot more of them than just these), they show otherwise. He even said it himself in the second one:
[quote="Regulus"]He didn't even get exiled, so it wasn't like that. He left his family because of the severity of his acute cranial rectitis. He was too absorbed in himself to do any job or contribute to his colony in any way, but he couldn't see it. He was incapable of fathoming the idea that he was wrong to think the way he did.[/quote][quote]Besides, Timon isn't real, so I can be as biased and harsh as I want with my assessments of his thoughts, actions, and intentions without any moral or ethical repercussions. Such character assessments are an integral component of rhetorical analysis for just about any story.[/quote]Again, the first quote is blind to the evidence of Timon in this scene from his film
because this part proves otherwise that Timon is sensitive to thought and considerate to others around him, and both quotes are just completely biased in general. If you don't see a fictional character as real in anyway, then how can you cherish them or even value anything about them in this life? The imagination is what allows characters like Timon to
exist in the first place. But I'll leave this part as that since I've already talked about this on the forum already.
Everything I've written in this post isn't something I'm ever going to back away from because I know it is correct about what I've already said about Timon. It's not about perception or opinion, that I want everyone to like him, *Very honestly, I would actually love to see others give more support on here to their favorite characters instead of bashing one they don't like which is just completely wrong, no matter how someone else sees this*, or that I let myself take what others say about him personally. When people say such inaccurate things about someone (even a fictional person), you can expect that it's not always going to remain silent for what they said.
On the contrary, I
could give less of a thing about what negative things people have to say about him. But that's not who I am. I do look at what others have to say if they have valid reasoning. And true, like you said, not everything can be made clear about a main character from a film. That, I've already realized is truth. But since Timon is a central LK protagonist (because of TLK 3), a lot of it is. People need to try and take a little more time to look further into these things and also because he's not a simple comic relief character at all, but seriously a heck of a lot more than that because of TLK 3.
With me, it's simply about what
is clear about him from the films and nothing else. You may also want to consider looking at the comments on this before replying to see how these recurring negative responses in the past have personally made me feel:
http://www.animationsource.org/lion_kin ... id_film=15. It's been like a wildfire that never gets put out, but I can surely leave it all behind for the better.
All in all, reply again if you must. But for someone to deny for example that he is a good person, is simply failure to accept who he truly is from the films (especially TLK 3). A scene
like this, gives No indication at all that he is truly selfish. It just doesn't because one of the intents of this film's creators was to show that Timon truly isn't a bad person (even when he tells
us, yes Us,
like in this part about what he's experiencing/thinking in a sensitively intriguing way) and so this is where my evidence is going to always come from, because it's official with the original TLK. People can short-stroke this all they want, but it doesn't change any of the numerous facts from TLK 3 about Timon that I've already stated here. That evidence never changes. It never does from a film. So I'm done with this.
"I found a place that was beyond my wildest dreams. But..., it still wasn't home." - Timon; Lion King 1 1/2 (3)
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- If you were to die today, where will you spend eternity?