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Rings of Power: A New Thread to Rule them All


Ser Drewy

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5 hours ago, TheReal_Rebel said:

In terms of Lore, the show suffers from the Tolkien Estate holding tight-fisted-ly to the Silmarillion.  I understand their many reasons, but it is why I’m giving the show a lot of latitude.

Which isn't the Tolkien Estate's fault, I'd say. If you don't have rights to the 2nd Age parts of the Silm, you just don't make a TV series about the 2nd Age, specially covering its main events. You simply cannot do that, you can only do mediocre fan-fiction. I mean, they basically have 5 pages from LOTR appendices. So you do something else.

Where I'd blame the Estate is that they should've flat out refused the entire project and tried their best to stop it - it's not because you bought rights over LOTR that you bought rights over the whole of Middle-Earth, you just can't make out entire stories out of a handful of sentences in a book. If they actually felt ok with the project despite Amazon only relying on the Appendices, then the Estate is trully a bunch of greedy idiots.

 

9 hours ago, IFR said:

Also, in episode 1 it's mentioned that there is no heat from the fire because of evil (as much as I shudder to quote that line in any form). It's also noted that heat cannot be felt from the fire around Meteor Man.

Oh, of course. Because dragon fire doesn't emit any heat and doesn't burn and kill. It is known. Dagor Bragollach was just the Elves having a bbq gone wrong.

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2 hours ago, Clueless Northman said:

Which isn't the Tolkien Estate's fault, I'd say. If you don't have rights to the 2nd Age parts of the Silm, you just don't make a TV series about the 2nd Age, specially covering its main events. You simply cannot do that, you can only do mediocre fan-fiction. I mean, they basically have 5 pages from LOTR appendices. So you do something else.

Where I'd blame the Estate is that they should've flat out refused the entire project and tried their best to stop it - it's not because you bought rights over LOTR that you bought rights over the whole of Middle-Earth, you just can't make out entire stories out of a handful of sentences in a book. If they actually felt ok with the project despite Amazon only relying on the Appendices, then the Estate is trully a bunch of greedy idiots.

 

Oh, of course. Because dragon fire doesn't emit any heat and doesn't burn and kill. It is known. Dagor Bragollach was just the Elves having a bbq gone wrong.

The rights to LOTR don’t belong to the Tolkien Estate, only the Silmarillion and other works by JRR & Christopher Tolkien do. If they had, it is unlikely Christopher would have allowed Peter Jackson to make the trilogy, as he did not like the films.

All adaptations from literature to film or tv are changed.

Even when the original novelists write, produce and over see the VFX for a television series, as is the case of the Expanse science fiction series, adapted by Ty Frank & David Abraham from their novels (writing together under the name James SA Corey). Much gets changed to accommodate the television series or film format.

If you do not like the Rings of Power, don’t watch it.

The books in their pure form will always be there. 

 

 

 

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I never expected it to fail in its premier, though I'll argue that 25 millions globally is not that impressive, how much did they do in the US alone? Probably less than 10 million otherwise they would have posted that number in order to present that they managed to surpass HotD premier numbers. More importantly, how many new subscribers did they gain?

It'll be interesting to see how much the rest of the season will do cause personally I thought it was more boring and generic than outright bad.

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29 minutes ago, Deadlines? What Deadlines? said:

The Anti-woke, cynical, pearl clutching assholes can fuck off too.

They are pathetic. The Hollywood Reporter is calling it what it is.

A Racist Backlash to ‘Rings of Power’ Puts Tolkien’s Legacy Into Focus

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For a time, it seemed as though a great shadow had passed over the world, and then faded — still present, though not quite as ominous. There were those who could confidently believe they were seeing progress. A fantasy? Perhaps. But not one without value. Yet, there were those who sought the cover of that shadow to hide from their own insecurities, failings, uselessness. They could not conceive of the endless potential of progress. Miserable little trolls left stewing in their own ugly ignorance and hatred, who sought regression, but proved too incompetent to succeed, even when emboldened by the lies from their weakened leader.

I could very easily be discussing Middle-earth, but I’m not. What I’m discussing is our very real world, and social media as an extension of that world. For the past week, I’ve been bombarded with messages of hate, called the N-word, told to go back to Africa, and called on to be executed. The reason? The Lord of the Rings. It would almost be laughable if it wasn’t so profoundly sad. A wealth of stories, and a willingness to believe in wizards, Balrogs, giant spiders and magical swords. But allow people of color to exist in Middle-earth? Well, that is an affront to all that’s good and decent. At least that’s the primary argument for those ruinous trolls apparently review bombing and harassing fans of color over Amazon’s Rings of Powers series.

 

 

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5 hours ago, TheReal_Rebel said:

The rights to LOTR don’t belong to the Tolkien Estate, only the Silmarillion and other works by JRR & Christopher Tolkien do. If they had, it is unlikely Christopher would have allowed Peter Jackson to make the trilogy, as he did not like the films.

Amazon got the rights for the TV series from the Estate. Apparenly the stuff Tolkien himself sold in the 60s did not include the rights to make a TV series, so the Estate auctioned them off and Amazon was the highest bidder. They had the whole of Lotr (and the Hobbit?) at their disposal. They could have chosen to make a series about the Kin-strife, the Fall of Arnor, the Adventures of Young Aragorn or even do a new version of Lord of the Rings itself. They instead chose a time period where they would be extremely limited

5 hours ago, TheReal_Rebel said:

All adaptations from literature to film or tv are changed.

Even when the original novelists write, produce and over see the VFX for a television series, as is the case of the Expanse science fiction series, adapted by Ty Frank & David Abraham from their novels (writing together under the name James SA Corey). Much gets changed to accommodate the television series or film format.

Nothing about what people complain about was necessitated by the change in medium. Galadriel's character for instance, much like Gimli, Faramir, Denethor, etc . from the Jackson movies, could have been much more accurately replicated in the series and the character would have been better for it.

5 hours ago, TheReal_Rebel said:

If you do not like the Rings of Power, don’t watch it.

If you do not like people complaining about it, do not read the complaints. You can still watch the series.

39 minutes ago, Deadlines? What Deadlines? said:

Watched the first two episodes. I have never read a page of Tolkien. [...]

The Tolkien gatekeepers who blanch at the slightest bit of artistic license can fuck off IMO. You have Tolkien. Go read a book why don't ya?

Sorry, but you do not get to complain about gatekepping if you are too lazy to walk to the door yourself. It is not even gatekeeping. Nobody is keeping you from reading Tolkien.

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I have finished writing up a blog review and analysis of the thing. I am definitely warming towards the thematic potential of the Southlands.

https://phuulishfellow.wordpress.com/2022/09/04/saved-by-the-dwarves-a-review-and-analysis-of-the-rings-of-power-episodes-1-and-2/

As a heads-up, the review is pretty long. As in 7,700 words long.

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Telling people to shut up and forget about the books, and telling people to shut up and read the books is both unacceptable. You can have a civil conversation without descending into the worst kind of Twitter rhetoric.

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Just looking at the numbers a little … rotten tomatoes has 15,365 user ratings and is at 38%. So 5,838 of those users rated it lower than 3.5 / 5. Even if we assume those are all racists review bombing (which they clearly wouldn’t be) that’s 0.023% of the viewing figure of 25m that Amazon reported. OK, that’s just RT. But it seems like all of these figures are similar, 4 figures ish. 

I tend to think we need relearn that early Internet adage: don’t feed the troll. It just isn’t news that such a tiny number of people are being dicks online, or are being racist on Twitter. All of those articles about a ‘backlash’ never seem to quantify what it actually is, it’s just not expected in that kind of journalism to put any sort of context to it. ‘A social media backlash’ is enough to write a clickbait article on, irrespective of the actual scope of such a backlash. As Gaiman put it when Sandman was about to air and asked how he felt about the backlash:

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It’s not a backlash. When someone grumbles about Sandman being woke and they get 10 likes, and I point out they’re being idiots & get 60,000 likes there isn’t a backlash going on. There’s a few people grumbling performatively on Twitter, & thousands of people waiting for Friday.

 

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What a wild ride… I do follow reviews and articles and ratings and I honestly can’t decide if it all makes me cry or laugh.
It was comforting to see that Washington Post and EW (after promoting the hell out of this production) both had backbone enough to publish an honest review about the show itself as a piece of entertainment, rather than the real or imagined political warfare most of the mainstream media is reporting. 
And after the promo budget Amazon put behind this project, it’s only fair that they would sweep in 25 million views globally for the premier. I do still have hope the views will decline and the show settles on a downward trajectory.

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For what it’s worth, if you look at the Google trends, interest in this show is high in the heartland states—places that aren’t exactly renowned for wokeness. It makes me think this is more of a gamergate-style internet war than something the general audience is interested in fighting over.

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I like how the Wikipedia entry says "an Internet phenomenon in which a large number of people or a few people with multiple accounts".

The latter is obviously an issue (although you'd think sites have measures against people using multiple accounts to vote), but the former is just, you know, a lot of people not liking it.

Starting to think "review bombing" might be one of those propaganda terms that Amazon and Disney use.

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I liked how Young Ned and his buddy fast travelled to visit the dwarves by cutting to a shot of the map followed by cgi landscape shots followed by a shot of the two of them in front of an LED screen. Exactly like a video game.

Just kidding, I didn't like that. It sucked! Where are the horses? Most expensive show of all time my ass!

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