Rings of Power: A New Thread to Rule them All

[IFR]

49 minutes ago, Ran said:

You can read the text of Letter 210. It is a doozy, especially when he basically just gives up commenting.

That was a joy to read.

[Heartofice]

1 hour ago, RhaenysBee said:

 The entire broader point was that people’s animosity toward Rings of Power is not about inclusivity itself. Nobody has a problem with that, or maybe there’s .001% of people with minds stuck in the 50s who do. People have a problem with bad storytelling and worse PR that does disservice to everything else (entertainment value, audience, cast, source material, and yes inclusivity and representation too).

100% this.

Sure there are a tiny number of nasty people doing nasty things on the internet but it’s not helpful to try and paint a picture that these are the majority of people with a negative view. Maybe the answer is to ignore them or block them, honestly even Twitter doesn’t seem to know what to do at the moment. 
 

Yes I’d say the overwhelming majority of people are for inclusivity and diversity in media, what they don’t tend to like so much is heavy handed, preachy, modern political lectures, and Hollywood has a bad habit of placing those at the forefront of their storytelling. It doesn’t help that this is happening at a time where most big budget movies and shows have been commercially driven to the point of blandness, unable to tell a coherent or compelling story. 
 

Plus what does inclusivity even mean? From Hollywoods perspective it has a very narrow definition of how you do that, from highly idealised strong female leads, token minority characters from very select racial backgrounds that aren’t all that diverse, pushing certain storylines with modern sensibilities. Audiences react to that, rather than inclusivity. Most just want to be told a good story with a bit of escapism, not be constantly lectured. 
 

Now is RoP doing any of that? Hard to say at this point, but you’d be forgiven for thinking it from the trailers, seeing as there is a much wider trend towards these things. 

[Derfel Cadarn]

3 hours ago, Ran said:

He suggested dropping Helm's Deep from the script because it was done very badly (i.e. was not portrayed properly) and in any case the script proposed to make a single film of the entire trilogy and he rightly pointed out that it reduces the excitement of Pelennor Fields to have the Battle of the Hornburg before it.

You can read the text of Letter 210. It is a doozy, especially when he basically just gives up commenting.

He had very strong opinions about his published work being faithfully adapted. His unpublished stuff, well, he never would have offered it to anyone to adapt in the first place.

 

ETA: Actually, here's two bits on the Weathertop scene where he would explicitly have disliked PJ's films:

 

To be fair, book Strider was rocking about Middle-Earth with a broken sword. Was he even armed? 
 

[TheReal_Rebel]

22 hours ago, ASOIAFrelatedusername said:

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

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.

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

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.

In 2017, the estate of author J.R.R. Tolkien, along with executives from Warner Bros., was shopping the television rights to “The Lord of the Rings.” While both Netflix and HBO were interested, Amazon won out with the backing of Jeff Bezos, paying nearly $250 million.—wsj

Everything else you’ve said is a  “Boo hoo! I didn’t get what I want!” or a refusal  to accept the demands of the medium on the story being told and a general resentment of others enjoying the show as is.

Book accurate happens in the books.

[SeanF]

1 hour ago, Heartofice said:

100% this.

Sure there are a tiny number of nasty people doing nasty things on the internet but it’s not helpful to try and paint a picture that these are the majority of people with a negative view. Maybe the answer is to ignore them or block them, honestly even Twitter doesn’t seem to know what to do at the moment. 
 

Yes I’d say the overwhelming majority of people are for inclusivity and diversity in media, what they don’t tend to like so much is heavy handed, preachy, modern political lectures, and Hollywood has a bad habit of placing those at the forefront of their storytelling. It doesn’t help that this is happening at a time where most big budget movies and shows have been commercially driven to the point of blandness, unable to tell a coherent or compelling story. 
 

Plus what does inclusivity even mean? From Hollywoods perspective it has a very narrow definition of how you do that, from highly idealised strong female leads, token minority characters from very select racial backgrounds that aren’t all that diverse, pushing certain storylines with modern sensibilities. Audiences react to that, rather than inclusivity. Most just want to be told a good story with a bit of escapism, not be constantly lectured. 
 

Now is RoP doing any of that? Hard to say at this point, but you’d be forgiven for thinking it from the trailers, seeing as there is a much wider trend towards these things. 

A film like Mad Max Thunder Road is how you handle diversity well.  At heart, it's a great story.

A film like Ghostbusters is how you don't.

[SeanF]

3 hours ago, IFR said:

That was a joy to read.

"He may think he knows more about balrogs than I do, but he cannot expect me to agree", always makes me laugh.

It would have been an atrocious film, had it ever seen the light of day.

[Ran]

58 minutes ago, Derfel Cadarn said:

To be fair, book Strider was rocking about Middle-Earth with a broken sword. Was he even armed? 
 

He didn't draw it to fight anyone, far as I can recall.

[Crixus]

On 9/4/2022 at 12:30 AM, Zorral said:

Varus and Pullo adrift on a raft of human corpses in Rome HBO. (At least NOT Uhtred in the enslaved eps of The Last Kingdom that was a horror show.)

I think you mean Vorenus and Pullo? 

[ASOIAFrelatedusername]

1 hour ago, TheReal_Rebel said:

Everything else you’ve said is a  “Boo hoo! I didn’t get what I want!” or a refusal  to accept the demands of the medium on the story being told and a general resentment of others enjoying the show as is.

Please demonstrate how any of these things were necessitated by the "demands of the medium"