{comparing various B5 characters to Lord of the Rings characters}

The characters and comparisons you made are basic archetypal characters
that have long been used in all kinds of sagas...the voice of the wise
master, the characters of action, the hero on a journey, the smaller wiser
folk...they extend far beyond Tolkein. We draw on the same archetypal pool,
but there's no intended parallel between them. What invariably gets lost in
this is that the LoTR saga was a *quest* story, that is the heart of
it...ain't no quest here. The characters are part of the saga-structure that
goes straight back to the Illiad and the Odyssey, Gawain and the Green
Knight, Jason and the Argonauts and elsewhere. The only common elements come
from the fact that we have our roots in the same literary garden of
archetypes and literary symbology.

I didn't fight for five years to get this show off the ground just to do
LoTR with the serial numbers filed off.


jms