LOTR: the new series comes like the in rushing sea to Númenor:

[Ser Scot A Ellison]

Prior thread closed.  Continue.

[mormont]

I'm entertained by the idea that a story inspired by Norse, Germanic and Finnish myths - myths that themselves changed with their audience, absorbed and updated older stories, syncretised characters, and even now inspire all sorts of portrayals aimed squarely at modern audiences - has committed some sort of sin by having any thought about what a modern audience might want and expect to see. 

That's how storytelling works, folks. A storyteller who idolises the original author and has no regard for the audience is a bad storyteller. 

[Arakan]

With Numenor, Amazon had the chance to create a meaningful and powerful work about the downfall and evilness of imperialism and colonialism, no matter how „noble“ or „good“ your initial aspirations were. This would have been a truly mature piece of fiction, the chance to go all out multi-ethnical regarding casting while still being faithful to Tolkien‘s worldbuilding.

Furthermore, warrior princess Galadriel is nothing more than psychological wish fulfillment for LARPers and it sends a dangerous and IMO mysoginist message: equaling a strong, powerful, independent woman who has her own agency with a generic fantasy trope action girl. What kind of distorted message is that? As long as you don’t know how to physically kick (male) ass, you ain’t a strong woman or what? Ridiculous.

The most powerful woman of the 21st Century, a woman with superb intelligence and personal integrity to the max, was Angela Merkel, wether you like her politics or not. And she sure as hell didn’t need to be a Ninja warrior girl to accomplish things. 

[ASOIAFrelatedusername]

18 minutes ago, mormont said:

'm entertained by the idea that a story inspired by Norse, Germanic and Finnish myths - myths that themselves changed with their audience, absorbed and updated older stories, syncretised characters, and even now inspire all sorts of portrayals aimed squarely at modern audiences - has committed some sort of sin by having any thought about what a modern audience might want and expect to see. 

That's how storytelling works, folks. A storyteller who idolises the original author and has no regard for the audience is a bad storyteller. 

So basically we cannot criticize anything the adapter does?

The audience will not understand how this random guy is able to resist the all-corrupting evil magical artifact, which you think will undermine the danger of said artifact? Let him take the characters carrying that artifact prisoner and only let them after the forces of evil come within a hair's breadth of taking the artifact for themselves!

[Rippounet]

I haven't really followed LOTR stuff, so I'm thinking about Foundation more here, but:

5 minutes ago, mormont said:

That's how storytelling works, folks. A storyteller who idolises the original author and has no regard for the audience is a bad storyteller. 

I would say a storyteller who is unable to do both is a bad storyteller.
This idea that you can't adapt a work of fiction for a modern audience while respecting the original author's work is really a false dichotomy.
If we're talking LOTR, I'm sorry, but Peter Jackson did just fine (I'll give him a 8,5/10 for his adaptation [with a 10/10 for the first movie]). If we're talking fantasy, I also think WoT is a perfectly acceptable adaptation (the flaws of the show lie in execution imho). Even GoT was amazing in its first seasons (though one could argue D&D had GRRM, so it doesn't count ).

5 minutes ago, mormont said:

by having any thought about what a modern audience might want and expect to see.

"Might"
Seems to me this "what a modern audience wants" argument is often an excuse to do shitty stuff. And all too often, when this is used as an excuse, the "modern audience" ends up shunning the adaptation anyway, because it's mediocre, and "modern tropes" aren't enough to make something worth watching.

[Arakan]

9 minutes ago, mormont said:

I'm entertained by the idea that a story inspired by Norse, Germanic and Finnish myths - myths that themselves changed with their audience, absorbed and updated older stories, syncretised characters, and even now inspire all sorts of portrayals aimed squarely at modern audiences - has committed some sort of sin by having any thought about what a modern audience might want and expect to see. 

That's how storytelling works, folks. A storyteller who idolises the original author and has no regard for the audience is a bad storyteller. 

That’s your perspective. The irony of course is that for decades Hollywood took the history and mythology of Non-Europeans and whitewashed them (John Wayne as Gengis Khan), something which rightfully was called out as bad and racist af. The last big example being the catastrophic live-action adaption of Avatar - The last Airbender. 
Why is it then ok to not show the same respect to European / European inspired mythology/fiction? For me that’s the very definition of hypocrisy. What happens here is that the internal Anglo-American cultural conflict is imposed on the rest of the world. Anyway I bow out of this discussion as it will lead nowhere. 

[fionwe1987]

Quote

This makes no sense. Tolkien based his stories, whether YOU like it or not, on Celtic and Germanic/Norse mythology. 

And if they wanted to go the multi-ethnicity route, there were multiple other possibilities. I am sure you know about the Haradrim et al..

One could have easily incorporated the evilness of latter 2nd age Numenorean imperialism and its effects on the people around the world, how it pushed many towards Sauron etc. That would have been great, nuanced story telling, not this woke culture tokenism. 

What Hollywood is doing is just lazy, checking all the supposedly needed boxes nowadays which of course leads to warrior Galadriel. 

Whatever, Hollywood is becoming a parody of itself. 

I don't particularly care about Hollywood's motives. Nor much for how they execute on these things. But Hollywood is also responding to the fact that they're no longer making art for a select audience, and acknowledging the reality that there is actual harm in constantly seeing just a single race/ethnicity/culture represented on screen. They're doing this badly, sometimes, without serious thought, and that's worth pointing out, but that doesn't mean the issues with the original do not exist, or that it's feasible or correct to just keep things as they are for the sake of fealty to the original.

Stories change when they're told in different contexts. This is the norm since well before printing was invented, so let's not all get huffy about something that's entirely normal. 

Quote

Strawman. Tolkien‘s works are best described as creating a pseudo-mythology for England. It’s still mythology, saga, legend, whatever you want to call it. My question for you: why not just accept it as what it is? Why the narcissistic, arrogant, egomaniac need of 21st century Hollywood to „improve“ on the source material? Why?

For the simple reason that a global audience doesn't care to continue seeing exclusively white characters on screen.

Yes, it would be ideal to come up with wholly new stories that are better suited to a global audience (and to be fair, that does happen), but tentpole projects that draw a lot of funding tend to focus on existing works, do it's pretty inevitable that you'll see more of this happening. Why not just accept that?

[Ran]

I really think that the right of technocapitalists to rifle through creative works for lowest common denominator optimizations for the purpose of increasing revenue share needs a lot more defending than it's getting around these parts.

[fionwe1987]

1 hour ago, Arakan said:

Why is it then ok to not show the same respect to European / European inspired mythology/fiction? For me that’s the very definition of hypocrisy. What happens here is that the internal Anglo-American cultural conflict is imposed on the rest of the world. Anyway I bow out of this discussion as it will lead nowhere. 

It is hypocrisy if you ignore context. The fury about the race of the characters in Avatar being changed had nothing to do with respect for the pseudo-mythology of the story and everything to do with the fact that in the context of a Hollywood that is strongly weighted towards white actors and creators, a story that was a golden opportunity for non-white actors to take center stage instead collapsed into more of the same. Of course, that a non-white director sat at the helm of this travesty only made it more infuriating. And pointed to how strong the forces in Hollywood were that kept marginalizing stories that didn't center on whiteness.

What you're seeing today is in part a response to that. A few decades from now, it is perfectly possible that we start seeing enough content that centers a variety of racial and cultural perspectives that we'll have plenty of movies with all white casts that will get no special mention.

We're very very far from that ideal, though, so calling hypocrisy doesn't make any sense. 

 

[polishgenius]

Everything fionwe said but also it ignores historical/cultural context too. There is a difference between a minority or outside culture being misrepresented or misused for a more dominant culture's gain, and a colonialist culture like the Germanic ones that form a large part of both Tolkien‘s England and Amazon's US updating itself to reflect the people and cultures it has meshed with, and in many cases overrun leaving their people no choice but to join it.

 

 

The argument that Hollywood should never cast PoC in roles reflecting Germanic folklore is essentially an argument that Germanic peoples can run roughshod over the world, but heaven forbid the people they oppressed see themselves brought into that culture as equals. It's an inherently imperialistic view of the world.

[Werthead]

Quote

Tolkien based his stories, whether YOU like it or not, on Celtic and Germanic/Norse mythology. 

Germanic and Norse influences, yes, although a distant second to his primary Finnish/Icelandic and Welsh influences (obviously some minor Celtic influences comes through there).

Tolkien was pretty pissed off whenever anyone raised the idea of a strong Celtic influence and teeth-grindingly wrote a letter to his publisher rejecting the criticism that the names were "too Celtic." Ironically, the only Celtic names he directly tapped were the very English-sounding ones for certain Hobbit families.

Quote

What Hollywood is doing is just lazy, checking all the supposedly needed boxes nowadays which of course leads to warrior Galadriel.

As noted previously, Galadriel's description by Tolkien lends her to the role of being a warrior and military commander better than, say, the depiction of Arwen in the earlier trilogy. The TV show will no doubt exaggerate this out of all reasonable proportion, but the inference that Book Galadriel was some kind of meek shrinking violet who never took up arms to defend herself or others, or was never in command of military matters, is simply erroneous, and suggests a reaching by those in search of something to get outraged about rather than a more legitimate area of concern, like the severe timeline compression.

Quote

 

Now, in 2022, there's no reason not to understand that God's first and chosen children all being white is a profoundly racist idea, and while no-ones suggesting Tolkien meant it that way, mitigating it in a modern show is a perfectly sensible step, no matter the other lazinesses on show here.

 

This is a good point. The Second Children were, in some ways, a reflection of the First Children, and as we see the Second Children come in a panoply of different colours and ethnicities, it stands to logical reason so did the First Children. Only the fair-haired and fair-skinned ones came to Valinor or remained in Beleriand, but there is no logical reason why different-hued elves did not remain behind in Middle-earth among the Avari and scattered widely across the continent, to reappear later on.

Quote

I would say a storyteller who is unable to do both is a bad storyteller.
This idea that you can't adapt a work of fiction for a modern audience while respecting the original author's work is really a false dichotomy.

It depends on the source material. The Sword of Truth was fundamentally unadaptable because the source material was so massively problematic on every single level, so the adaptation changed almost everything about it bar the character names, and was reasonably well-received by the general audience (not so much by hardcore fans of the books who wanted to see the hero kicking the living shit out of little kids and murdering unarmed peace protestors whilst visibly masturbating to Ayn Rand, but there you go). Wheel of Time and ASoIaF are both much more modern works than Tolkien without the seriously bizarre problems of Goodkind, and the source material has stronger roles for women and, in WoT in particular, people of colour.

Tolkien obviously does not have the Goodkind problem, but it does have the problems associated with being an older work where the author let their unconscious biases (and perhaps conscious ones) determine facets of the story that they simply would not have done in a later time period. I think even Tolkien himself noted that the sausage-factoriness of the Fellowship is somewhat at odds with his in-progress Silmarillion (where there are more and more important female characters, and in fact some major female characters there had their importance reduced in the published Sil due to CT not finding complete enough arcs for them, like Idril).

There is also of course the issue of worldbuilding credibility: the Mediterranean and the Black Sea inhibited mass migration of African and Asian peoples to Europe for some considerable time, limiting the number of people from those regions in Europe to relatively rare, well-off merchants and diplomats (aside from exceptional periods such as Imperial Rome, when you could find African legionnaires on the Scottish frontier). Harad/Africa directly connects to Middle-earth/Europe via the relatively wide-open, road-strewn lands of South Ithilien, so there should be more common intermixing of different ethnic groups, at least in that region, and there are some hints that is the case with Gondor, but oddly not beyond (given that 90% of mapped Middle-earth is unclaimed by any nation-state).

Accommodating modern expectations for a story whilst making logical changes to the source material, I think, is fine, if handled well. It is often handled badly. However, simply saying that works with problematic aspects should be left problematic is a limitation. A 2022 TV show is a 2022 TV show, not simply an animated version of a 1917 or 1954 book. All art - even corporate-driven, cost-benefit-ratioed adaptational art - is a reflection of the time it is made.

[SpaceChampion]

While early Tolkien lore had all the Istari arrive in Middle Earth in the Third Age, in The Peoples of Middle Earth recounts him changing the lore to have the Blue Wizards Alatar and Pallando arrive around the time of the forging of the One Ring in the 2nd Age, to undermine Sauron amongst the Eastern peoples.

So perhaps meteor man is one or both of them.

https://lotr.fandom.com/wiki/Blue_Wizards

[Myrddin]

We don't talk about Blue Wizards, no, no, no!
We don't talk about Blue Wizards... but

 

It was my birthday
It was her birthday
 

We were getting ready, and there wasn't a cloud Erid Luin
No clouds allowed over Erid Luin

 

Blue Wizards walk in with a mischievous grin-
Thunder!!
 

You telling this story, or am I?
I'm sorry, nin mel, go on

[Arakan]

2 hours ago, polishgenius said:

 

The argument that Hollywood should never cast PoC in roles reflecting Germanic folklore is essentially an argument that Germanic peoples can run roughshod over the world, but heaven forbid the people they oppressed see themselves brought into that culture as equals. It's an inherently imperialistic view of the world.

This makes absolutely no sense whatsoever. 

[mormont]

4 hours ago, ASOIAFrelatedusername said:

So basically we cannot criticize anything the adapter does?

No, not what I'm suggesting at all. That seems like a wild misread. Recognising that stories change doesn't mean that all change is automatically good. But the only critiques of this particular change being bad are a, it's a change and that's inherently bad and, b, something muddled about racebending.

4 hours ago, Rippounet said:

I haven't really followed LOTR stuff, so I'm thinking about Foundation more here, but:

I would say a storyteller who is unable to do both is a bad storyteller.
This idea that you can't adapt a work of fiction for a modern audience while respecting the original author's work is really a false dichotomy.

Would agree with that.

4 hours ago, Arakan said:

That’s your perspective. The irony of course is that for decades Hollywood took the history and mythology of Non-Europeans and whitewashed them (John Wayne as Gengis Khan), something which rightfully was called out as bad and racist af. The last big example being the catastrophic live-action adaption of Avatar - The last Airbender. 
Why is it then ok to not show the same respect to European / European inspired mythology/fiction? For me that’s the very definition of hypocrisy. What happens here is that the internal Anglo-American cultural conflict is imposed on the rest of the world. Anyway I bow out of this discussion as it will lead nowhere. 

The thing is, the audiences and culture this show is addressed to are simply not single ethnicity white Anglo cultures any more. And the way a Western (or any other) audience consumes entertainment about other cultures is not the same as the way it consumes culture about itself.

Look at any Japanese or South Korean TV intended for domestic audiences: they feature white characters, representations of Western culture, huge Western influences.

5 hours ago, Arakan said:

Furthermore, warrior princess Galadriel is nothing more than psychological wish fulfillment for LARPers and it sends a dangerous and IMO mysoginist message: equaling a strong, powerful, independent woman who has her own agency with a generic fantasy trope action girl. What kind of distorted message is that? As long as you don’t know how to physically kick (male) ass, you ain’t a strong woman or what? Ridiculous.

The most powerful woman of the 21st Century, a woman with superb intelligence and personal integrity to the max, was Angela Merkel, wether you like her politics or not. And she sure as hell didn’t need to be a Ninja warrior girl to accomplish things. 

You're conflating a couple of different issues here, IMO. The wider issue is that characters of whatever gender tend to get that 'action' portrayal to make them seem more interesting. I agree that's a lack of imagination, but that's where we are as a culture. You don't see Angela Merkel types as lead characters much, but you don't see Barack Obama types as male leads much either.

[Arakan]

As a side note…it’s really interesting how attitudes within the fandom have shifted over the last 20 years. When rumors came up that Arwen would get a fighting role in TTT at the Battle of Helm‘s Deep, at least 90% of the fandom was against it, regardless gender. Now with Warrior Princess Galadriel it seems much more of a 50/50 thing. 

[ASOIAFrelatedusername]

13 minutes ago, mormont said:

5 hours ago, ASOIAFrelatedusername said:

 

No, not what I'm suggesting at all. That seems like a wild misread. Recognising that stories change doesn't mean that all change is automatically good. But the only critiques of this particular change being bad are a, it's a change and that's inherently bad and, b, something muddled about racebending.

You ignored my example. You said that an adapter, who does not consider the needs of the audience over staying true to the source, is a bad adapter. I gave an example of such a change that was alledgedly done for the sake of the audience, but which is rather controversial.

Let me rephrase it: Do the needs of the audience trump staying true to the source material? When do they?

[DMC]

7 minutes ago, Arakan said:

Now with Warrior Princess Galadriel it seems much more of a 50/50 thing. 

Well, I think warrior princess Galadriel is pretty damn stupid.  But I also think whining about them having the gall to cast minorities for characters of fictional races in a fictional universe is really damn stupid.

[polishgenius]

22 minutes ago, Arakan said:

This makes absolutely no sense whatsoever. 

In what way?
 

 

5 minutes ago, ASOIAFrelatedusername said:

Let me rephrase it: Do the needs of the audience trump staying true to the source material? When do they?

 

That change was made because PJ assumed the audience was a bit stupid, rather than because PJ was trying to represent more of them. It wasn't a reflection of a cultural shift at all. But also, it lessened the story because it diluted one of the main points of Faramir's existence as a character at all, his incoruptibility..

More to the point, though, Mormont never said no change should be criticised. He said no change should be criticised just because it's a change. 
 

[Arakan]

4 minutes ago, DMC said:

Well, I think warrior princess Galadriel is pretty damn stupid.  But I also think whining about them having the gall to cast minorities for characters of fictional races in a fictional universe is really damn stupid.

Whatever. I couldn’t care less, so who is whining? Spare me your American culture wars language, I am expressing my opinion in a relatively polite manner. As I said, integrating token POC characters does nothing. It’s nothing more than self-aggrandizing self-righteousness. Why not integrate a whole people of POC with the Haradrim and show how fucked up Numenorean imperialism was from their perspective? How it basically pushed them into Saurons arms? 

This would have been brave, subversive, empowering story telling…but maybe too close to home, after all Amazon is one of the biggest status quo supporting mega corporations…