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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   35417 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 3, 2022

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I'm still wondering what got Amazon hooked to a billion dollar disaster. After all initial (imo misplaced) optimism, analysts are finally coming out and saying the quiet part out loud: it is not the ground breaking masterpiece they need it to be. Even HoD is performing better and is better received. Both are prequels to very popular IPs, but Rings of Power should be pulling enormous numbers given how expensive it is, and how extensive its marketing was. Despite worsening performance with every episode, they just renewed it for season 2. This wasn't a small and calculated risk, they literally staked the future of their whole studio on this show. What made them think hiring subpar writers, rewriting lore, rewriting characters of one of the most popular fantasy IPs while simultaneously drafting off of the brand was a good idea? It feels like the motive isn't even to make money but solely to push an agenda, but who would do that? Given the sheer scale of the project, I just cannot believe any studio would be so careless as to commit such a serious misfire.

How much of this is tied to the fact that Amazon got a fairly scattershot group of rights to Tolkien's work?

We have the rights solely to The Fellowship of the Ring, The Two Towers, The Return of the King, the appendices, and The Hobbit. And that is it. We do not have the rights to The Silmarillion, Unfinished Tales, The History of Middle-Earth, or any of those other books…We worked in conjunction with world-renowned Tolkien scholars and the Tolkien estate to make sure that the ways we connected the dots were Tolkien-ian and gelled with the experts’ and the estate’s understanding of the material.

To me, at least, that feels like trying to bake a cake with flour and chocolate, but no sugar and eggs.

Definitely part of the problem. They needed to make parts of the show noticeably different from Tolkien's work to show that they weren't using material the didn't have the rights to.

I imagine that they had to run major creative decisions by lawyers. That doesn't help the writing.

Thing is, they dropped fleeting hints in that only viewers who knew the lore would get and which would go right over the casual viewers' heads, but since they hadn't the rights to expand on that material, they never explained it.

So that made the starting episodes confusing and boring (nothing happens) for the casual audience while annoying the fans who do know what is going on (anyone else chuckle darkly at the opening episode CGI Elven fleet sailing off to Middle-earth in pursuit of Morgoth?)

Pick what you are gonna do, and stick to it. If you can't legally write about Morgoth or Valinor, don't introduce them. And stop copying the movies.

That would be a decent excuse if they were doing anything right, like getting themes right, character personalities right, or anything of the sort. That they have butchered the timeline is only sin #587 in the show.

Compressing the timeline is a venial sin. I do get why they're doing it, of course you want to have Galadriel and Elrond and Gil-galad and the Forging of the Rings and Tar-Míriel and Pharazon and the Drowning of Númenor all happening at the one time because that is big and exciting.

It's not the worst thing they've done by a long shot. The mismatch between the CGI (big impressive city) and the physical sets (main square that fits in about sixty people at maximum, side streets for recruit training and not a barracks, dockside set that can squeeze in three ships to be a mighty fleet) is the glaring kind of contrast that sticks out. The Southlands is something like four villages (including the destroyed ones) and they all hole up in one watch tower and then they acclaim their new 'king' and uh, this is it? A rabble of raggedy farmers is the entirety of the realm? It's too small for the story they want to tell.

I'd say compressing the timeline adds to the "smallness," though. In canon, many of the relationships among the immortal characters evolved over actual centuries or millennia; there wasn't a "we're on a clock here, get with the program" issue. Sauron does the whole captain of evil armies more than once, but a number of his big accomplishments put him in the insidious corruptor role, instead--Annatar in Eregion, "captive" Sauron in Numenor. Corruptor villains done right take time to develop, otherwise you get Palpatine's "Dew it" and Anakin's "guess I'm slaughtering children now, oh well."

I only realized reading this how better it would have been to cut a bunch of useless stuff from attack of the clones, and use it to build up the Anakin/Palpatine thing earlier. It's like they wasted #2 and tried to cram too much into #3.

Deviations from the source material are about problem #500 with this show. It's really shoddily made.

The writing is the big problem. When they try for the profound, or the aphorism, they end up like a lead balloon (which probably sinks because it looks down at the darkness, not because it's made of lead, right?) They try for 'Tolkien high style' and end up like - sorry any Mormons reading this - sounding like Joseph Smith's Bible fanfiction. They would do better to stick to plain and simple language, because they cannot do elevated speech for love nor money.

Give me the meat, and give it to me raw is the least of it.

I am really impressed by Joseph Mawle, even under the prosthetics and with this level of script to say, he can act in a convincing and affecting manner. I like Adar much more than the 'heroic' characters I am supposed to be cheering for.

Better writing (and better acting by some characters, naming no names) would make up a lot for cheap costumes, small scale, and 'everyone teleports over vast distances'. Maybe no deciding to swim home in a short trip of three thousand miles would help, too.

Ahh interesting point. We should just neuter copyright law at this point, the man has been dead for decades.

Making all the works free of copyright would do no good, I don't think this show could manage to write a decent story even if they had free access to all the material. They'd stick with the parts they've showed us in the prologue: Morgoth was the baddie who attacked Valinor, the Elves all sailed off to fight him - and leave out the awkward parts like "Soooo... how we got these ships we showed you? that involves the First Kinslaying. And then Galadriel and her kindred and their section of the Noldor were betrayed and abandoned by Feanor and had to cross the Helcaraxe. Oh, yeah; speaking of Feanor and his sons..."

They want a simpler "good guy Elves fighting Sauron" story. They're not interested in "death and the desire for deathlessness" or anything 'philosophical'. Diverse skin colours and genders all come together to overcome mutual distrust and beat the bad guy through the power of friendship.

Agreed on that. Still, theoretically others could try their hand and the best would rise to the top.

I kinda want to see the same crazy mashups you get for Cthulhu or Sherlock Holmes.

In fact that's my main argument against the very concept of copyright. We're missing out on so many possible works for essentially no reason.

To hell with canon and rigid control and back to when you could compile random tales into your own new ones and have some cultural evolution.

Hell, LOTR itself was made in this spirit.

I kinda want to see the same crazy mashups you get for Cthulhu or Sherlock Holmes.

Frogwares Games got you covered! Their first version of the game is good, they're remaking it now to fit in with their new version of Sherlock and eh, I'm waiting to see if they can pull it off.

Actually Sherlock Holmes' early adventures are in the public domain now. His later ones are not.

So you can publish your mashup, but it will have a similar mishmash of restrictions on material.

In a different era, I would've agreed. Now though, anything that throttles attempts to trot out atrocious works drafting off the brand name is a shield I'd rather not part with.

Tortured sequels are not unique to this era.

I choose to believe that the reason works are atrocious now isn't that no talent exists, but that no talent makes it to the places where they get access to the IPs, because you have to optimize for politicking to get there.

If anyone could make a Star Wars, you bet your ass we would get higher grade interstellar swashbuckling adventures.

How does one look at the current entertainment landscape and conclude we need even more remakes?

Sufficiently broadly inspired remakes are indistinguishable from novelty. In fact there is no such thing as novelty that isn't that, it always comes from somewhere.

The problem with copyright law is (right now) that it benefits corporations even more than the writer who hits it big like Tolkien. And I think it's major corporations that often get the criticism for being bland and formulaic.

Theoretically, if it was equitably removed, you would end up with a situation like we have for zombies : yes, a ton of corporate products since film is so capital intensive.

But there's a chance for original work with the concept cause anyone can use it. Zombie media are all variations on the same concept but aren't all soulless corporate remakes; they run the gamut in terms of budget and even geographic spread (one of the big shows of this recent Korean explosion in pop culture was zombie-based)

current

Rehashing beloved tales is ancient human behavior. It isn't a new thing at all.

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