The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power

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enz
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23 Nov 2021, 1:19 am

https://www.westernjournal.com/amazons- ... its-actor/

I think diversity is usually a good thing but this is a little forced.

Inclusion is relevant now but might not need to be relevant in 30 years time. Lord of the rings doesn’t need 2021 values placed on it. It’s stood the test of time on its own



DuckHairback
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30 Nov 2021, 10:37 am

I just don't get why anyone gives a crap. It's an interpretation, it doesn't change the source material. If you don't like seeing black and asian faces in your TV programs, stick to the books and you can imagine whatever colour people you prefer. I don't get people's reactions to this stuff at all.

The show will either be good or bad and it won't have anything to do with the racial heritage of the actors they cast.


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30 Nov 2021, 12:26 pm

Oh no the horror!

:roll:


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shlaifu
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02 Dec 2021, 7:40 pm

ten bucks "Harfoot" is going to become a racist slur.


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31 Dec 2021, 10:48 pm

DuckHairback wrote:

The show will either be good or bad and it won't have anything to do with the racial heritage of the actors they cast.


Agreed.

Now, sidestepping the issue of racial heritage entirely and focusing instead on the question of whether the show will be good or bad... Historically, Tolkien wrote the Silmarillion (the source material upon which this show will apparently be based) well before he penned LOTR, and was absolutely unable to convince anyone to publish it. Because it's freakin' boring. That's why he went on to write LOTR instead, and only after the trilogy was written (a process that took him a full ten years) and proven successful did the publishers deign to print Silmarillion.

...And having tried valiantly and failed utterly to struggle through the damn thing myself--I have serious doubts about whether a show based on its dry and pedantic pages could be successful. Here's hoping the new storytellers will prove me wrong and dazzle us all with an excellent tale/interpretation. Guess we'll see.



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21 Jan 2022, 8:16 am

The series takes place in Second Age. I don't even know if hobbits existed in that time period according to Tolkien's legendarium.



Aspiegaming
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10 Feb 2022, 7:39 pm

The people behind this new show are attacking fans and calling them -ists and -phobes for not liking the new decisions. Stick to the film trilogy. Do not watch this series. They don't deserve my viewership since they're doing the exact same damn thing Ghostbusters 2016 did.


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11 Feb 2022, 4:08 pm

It's definitely shaping up to be a preachy wokey-diversapocalypse.

https://arkhavencomics.com/2022/02/11/y ... e-rings-2/

This whole catastrophe started with Jeff Bezos saying he was determined to have his own Game of Thrones. Which means that this abortion is going to be a derivative work of George R.R. Martin, not JRR Tolkien. The producers are denying this with tears and oaths but the fact that they hired an Intimacy Coordinator (AKA Sex Arranger) tells you what books this show is based on.

...

While the contract they had with Christopher Tolkien had some very strict limits with regards to what they couldn’t do with regards to JRR Tolkien’s overall story arc, it had a major loophole in that they could create new characters. And boy, did they ever.

Image

The Dwarf Princess Arondir. You are racists for wondering how she got that tan in the Mines of Moria.
Image

Elfy, the Elf. Honestly, who gives a s**t what his name is? He ain’t in the books.
In addition, they have undeniably altered established characters significantly.

Image

Galadriel, Commander of the Northern f*****g Armies. No, I’m not kidding they got her that wrong.

...

The producers also decided that it ain’t Lord of the Rings without Hobbits. Again, they were blocked by Christopher’s contract with them, but they could use one of the clan names, “Harfoot.” I don’t know what proto-hobbits are going to be doing in this war-torn world but I’m sure that whatever it is, it’s going to be awful.

Whatever, says I, if there really are black and asian proto-hobbits I can at least have some fun asking the right people if the white hobbits of the third age are more evolved versions of the blobbits and hobbasians or perhaps descendants of colonialist hobbits who, through genocide, built the apparent ethnostate that is the Shire.


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Mikah
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14 Feb 2022, 5:49 am

Trailer dropped.



In case you are wondering what is being spammed in the comments in multiple languages, it's a Tolkien quote:

"Evil cannot create anything new, they can only corrupt and ruin what good forces have invented or made."

Youtube commenters on the ball as usual.


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Jono
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18 Feb 2022, 7:47 am

Aspiegaming wrote:
The people behind this new show are attacking fans and calling them -ists and -phobes for not liking the new decisions. Stick to the film trilogy. Do not watch this series. They don't deserve my viewership since they're doing the exact same damn thing Ghostbusters 2016 did.


No, not all Tolkien fans are disliking the fact that the series has black and asian faces in it. I don't see what the problem is, it's not really contradicting much of the source material at all, it's set in a time period that Tolkien didn't write much about except for the short stories in part 4 of the Silmarillion and the chronological timeline in the appendices of Lord of the Rings. No, it's not at all like Ghostbusters 2016, it's a story that hasn't previously been adapted to the screen and it's brand new. In the Ghostbusters, the simply remade the original movie with female characters. Since Amazon is working with the Tolkien Estate, I doubt that they'll let them deviate too much from the source material.



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18 Feb 2022, 8:12 am

Mikah wrote:
IGaladriel, Commander of the Northern f*****g Armies. No, I’m not kidding they got her that wrong.


Decided to go over to Deviantart and compare that Galadriel to the fan art, which you can reliably expect to run close to the author's intent.

Yep, going by this, they certainly did get her that wrong, https://www.deviantart.com/erwyne20/art ... -530641547

:wink: :D


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18 Feb 2022, 3:41 pm

Playing *rsehole's advocate here and say that Middle-Earth was very much a european setting (based directly on Britain I believe) and the diverse casting is just an effort at being progressive to score social justice points and generating interest by way of deliberate political controversy.. They don't care about being progressive for the sake of being good people, mind you, they just want money.

IMO, if they wanted to be diverse they ought to depict the easterlings and haradrim and all those. That way they could have many actors of colour and show a prevously little-explored side of Middle-Earth. Not to mention that non-western tolkienesque fantasy is rare to begin with. And it would've been an opportunity to depict those people positively/more neutral in contrast to their villainous role in the original stories which admittedly had racist overtones at times (but remember those were different times, and Tolkien certainly was no Lovecraft).

I've been pondering the idea of casting little people actors for the hobbits. It'd be cliché, since they're pretty much always playing fantasy species, but they don't get an awful lot of opportunities to play main characters.
(And then there's Snow White and the Huntsmen, where the little people playing the dwarves had their faces digitally replaced by normal sized actors. Seems like that ought to have been more controversial than it ended up being)

But yeah, it's been known for a while this is just going to be Amazon's Game of Thrones.
So above all expect a lot of graphic, incestuous, pedophilic but still eroticised rape and excessive violence for the sake of it. The casting is inconsequential to how much I'm not interesting in seeing this.



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21 Feb 2022, 8:44 pm

Kerch wrote:
Playing *rsehole's advocate here and say that Middle-Earth was very much a european setting (based directly on Britain I believe) and the diverse casting is just an effort at being progressive to score social justice points and generating interest by way of deliberate political controversy.. They don't care about being progressive for the sake of being good people, mind you, they just want money.

IMO, if they wanted to be diverse they ought to depict the easterlings and haradrim and all those. That way they could have many actors of colour and show a prevously little-explored side of Middle-Earth. Not to mention that non-western tolkienesque fantasy is rare to begin with. And it would've been an opportunity to depict those people positively/more neutral in contrast to their villainous role in the original stories which admittedly had racist overtones at times (but remember those were different times, and Tolkien certainly was no Lovecraft).

I've been pondering the idea of casting little people actors for the hobbits. It'd be cliché, since they're pretty much always playing fantasy species, but they don't get an awful lot of opportunities to play main characters.
(And then there's Snow White and the Huntsmen, where the little people playing the dwarves had their faces digitally replaced by normal sized actors. Seems like that ought to have been more controversial than it ended up being)

But yeah, it's been known for a while this is just going to be Amazon's Game of Thrones.
So above all expect a lot of graphic, incestuous, pedophilic but still eroticised rape and excessive violence for the sake of it. The casting is inconsequential to how much I'm not interesting in seeing this.


nah, sorry, for diversification purposes the "hero peoples" have to be diversified. There's no use putting BIPOCs in the show and then making them "other" again, which also bears a large risk, in the case of fantasy literature, of mystification and orientalising of that other people.

I'm really happy right now I consider all of these children's books, be it Lord of the Rings or Song of Ice and Fire, and therefore this all doesn't matter because the content doesn''t change in any meaningful way, it didn't mean anything to begin with. so, yeah, go ahead. Why not cast a little woman to play Gandalf, who cares.


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22 Feb 2022, 9:17 pm


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31 Aug 2022, 11:53 am

And.... it's terrible. Who'd have thought.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/a ... Power.html

Turkey is not the word. No turkey, however bloated and stupid, could ever be big enough to convey the mesmerising awfulness of Amazon's billion dollar Tolkien epic.

This is a disaster dragon – plucked, spatchcocked, with a tankerload of Paxo stuffed up its fundament, roasted and served with soggy sprouts.

The Lord Of The Rings: The Rings Of Power (Amazon Prime) is so staggeringly bad, it's hilarious. Everything about it is ill-judged to a spectacular extreme.

The cliche-laden script, the dire acting, the leaden pace, the sheer inconsistency and confusion as it lurches between styles – where do we start?


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01 Sep 2022, 7:23 pm

I'm pretty much a Tolkien geek going back to 1975, and I don't have a problem with them creating new characters and having actors who are POC playing them. I'm not expecting this to be entirely faithful to Tolkien's writings. The Lord of the Rings movies weren't and the Hobbit movies were even worse when it came to that. I'm hoping like those, it will have some really cool depictions that really are part of the story (like when Gandalf fought the Balrog) and that will be good enough for me. I'll probably wait until it concludes, and if it looks like it's worth it, I'll get at least a one month subscription to Amazon Prime. I can watch the Top Gun sequel on that as well.