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So, after all these weeks, Amazon's Rings of Power wraps up its first season. A section of mainstream media is still defending the show while others are somewhat calling it, we have a 2nd season coming, several retcons to the lore, and a very predictable Sauron reveal. Now we're supposed to expect a certain special someone from Galadriel's past that I'm shocked even exists in this canon. If there's one bit of character development in this whole debacle, it would be Erik Kain's diminishing confidence in the show.
I'm gonna nitpick a line from this piece:
I don't know if Amazon Studios will face a crisis as was reported earlier, or if they intend to trot out a slightly less expensive season 2 before axing it altogether, or drag it all the way. But it seems, as several others had stated in last week's thread when I brought it up, this is really just a billion dollar gig for Bezos' ticket to the ultra-woke Hollywood clique to maximise his elite status after all. To that end, he likely has succeeded many times over.
I know the article doesn't bother but: has the mainstream come up with a coherent theory for why HoD - which was coming off a controversial Game of Thrones finale and it's own "woke" PR problem - is doing vastly better than RoP in audience ratings?
Sexists are more motivated than racists?
Did you watch HoD? It's genuinely amazing. Not sure how to put it exactly but its treatment of power and tragedy makes GoT look one-dimensional. And there are some scenes that took my "#1 Tv/movie writing" spot. For example king Viserys' ruminating on the nature of his rule and what it means to be King to his Hand, if you've seen it.
This show deserves more cultural spotlight than GoT had, imo. And I love GoT.
The problem with HoD is honestly not the show itself, it's GoT. GoT had an amazing first season too! But after how abysmal the ending was, I'm not going to watch HoD until after it's over and we know if it wound up going to shit the way GoT did.
The GoT problem was that the show runners were counting on GRRM to finish the series and wrap up all of his plot lines. They would have only needed to adapt and simplify what GRRM wrote.
GRRM didn't publish enough adaptable material and D&D were left to come up with a conclusion on their own.
HotD is based on material GRRM has already published. It's adapted from about 120 pages from a book on Targaryen history.
So it won't have the depth and twists of the early seasons of GoT but there is a complete arc for the show runners to follow.
GRRM purportedly told the showrunners exactly where the show was going. But because he didn't flesh it out at GRRM levels of detail, the showrunners had to fill stuff in and didn't. Why did Daenarys turn evil? Clearly GRRM told the writers it's because all the people she loves get killed and she suffers a lot. But if he were to actually write it, he'd realize that Missandei getting killed isn't narratively sufficient.
It's the same reason that a lot of "software architect" type people are kind of disastrous - if they actually sat down and wrote code instead of making diagrams and saying "fill in the details", they'd realize where the actual hard parts live.
GRRM could probably have made it work, though maybe 2 books would have become 4. The TV writers couldn't.
Could you give more detail? In my (biased) experience, they're normally competentish (if given to trends and overcomplicating things). Generally they've been developing for a decade+ before taking the role, from what I've seen. There are however many PMs or such who misrepresent/get overly stuck to diagrams and i've met some people who managed to become architects without coding at all. At my work, I make architectural mvps with seniors with chunks of the functionality and low effort piping, then tell other juniors how to make everything production ready while seniors work on hard parts we aren't quite sure about.
But fundamentally it's an organizational issue. 10 experts alone could very well be better (and in some projects, I'm able to give parts each to domain experts who write their parts in a week and it's all done (waterfall can work!)). But engineers are normally at the behest of non-tech people coming up with stupid features, who change their minds, or the domain space isn't even properly explored with exploratory test models (so we can't do good engineering practices). But this can be justified, since the tech is supposed to automate away concrete tasks and processes, for people who are paying for it. Path of least resistance etc.
So I'm referring to software architect types who probably are competent, but also aren't doing a lot of coding anymore. The net result is grand plans that often fail, or succeed but overbudget, due to a lot of stuff just getting bogged down in bad ergonomics and day to day tasks that are harder than they should be. As a concrete example, I once worked on an ETL task run by a high level architect plus a bunch of fairly junior folks.
ETL tasks just dragged on, took forever, had lots of errors. One of the biggest errors was simply importing stuff to the wrong column, because the developer actually mapping json -> SQL had to manually map "input field_name -> integer column position in CSV file -> SQL loads the CSV". After about a year of delays due to transposing columns (
return [...20 columns...row['foo']['bar'], row['baz'][0]...]when it should have beenreturn [...row['baz'][0], row['foo']['bar']...]), a clever (new) junior dev finally figured out developers should just doreturn { 'foobar': row['foo']['bar'], ...}and wrote the system to translate 'foobar' -> column 23 by just checking the column order in SQL. Another example would be days added to any ticket just because setting up a testing env is a lot harder than it needs to be.The key point here is that in neither case did the architect actually spend much time actually doing the task that was dragging on and slowing the project. If they spent a month doing that, they probably would have just fixed it without much notice. And once we got that one clever guy, it did get fixed.
As it relates to this example, from what I've read, GRRM is actually good at the details of writing. But since he's retired from writing, he's put into the "clueless architect" role, and the actual people doing the implementation are just not able to actually fill in the details.
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I have only very rarely worked with an architect who is competent. Most of the time, it's someone with little to no experience actually doing the technical work, who gives these high-level pie in the sky statements like "the system will take in lead, and output gold" with no indication whatsoever of how it should do that. Then they dust their hands off, go "OK your turn now" and leave it to the technical people to figure out how to actually make that happen.
I'm not saying competent architects don't exist, I've actually worked with some! But they are very much not the norm in my experience.
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