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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.

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.

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