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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.
Firstly, I'm laughing with Eric Kain. He started off rosy optimism, then when the show turned out to be every bit as shitty as we critical ones were saying, he still defended himself with a snide remark about 'he could have made more money with the haters' (where is all this free money, Eric? how do I turn my 'hate' into cash money?)
But now he is every bit as disillusioned as anyone else, and it's cold comfort for the likes to me to say "Well, where were you when we were complaining about the bad writing, pissing on the lore, and using 'anyone who doesn't like the show is a racist' as a general defence?"
I think Amazon are desperate to sell the narrative that the viewership figures are good enough, certainly a lot better than they really are. Because I noticed that, despite living in a region where previously I couldn't access Prime video content (Republic of Ireland, not UK, and lots of times it was 'oh sorry, you can't see this show, you're not in the correct region'), suddenly they are (a) offering me free trial of Prime including everything and (b) now I can watch Rings of Power even though I don't live in that region. How convenient to bump up viewing figures.
I availed myself of the free trial and watched the finale, since it cost me nothing but my sanity, and yikes. They had six weeks of nothing happening, then had to cram everything in at once.
What I liked: the opening, with rain falling on forest plants and Meteor Man silently holed up under a tree. Unfortunately, then the rest of the episode commenced. Celebrimbor and Halbrand-Sauron being forge buddies, once they remembered Celebrimbor was the guy who forged the rings, the rings of power after which this entire show is named, the forging of those rings being the reason for the plot, those rings. As little as could reasonably be expected of the Harfoots. Adar (though he wasn't in this episode). Galadriel getting her nose rubbed in how yes, this is all your fault because actions have consequences.
What I didn't like: everything else The Númenorean scenes continue to be pointless as Nothing. Ever. Happens. The weirdly slow pacing. The surprise revelations that were anything but, since they spent the entire previous seven episodes nudging us in the ribs with "guess who this guy really is, go on, guess, you'll never guess, could he possibly be....?" Yes, it turned out that Halbrand was Sauron, as everybody had been saying since the teaser trailers (dammit) and they're shoving hard to have it be that Meteor Man is Gandalf (dammit part deux). Galadriel only remembering her husband in the seventh episode, and not saying a word about how or even if she had been searching for him all this time. Elendil's invented daughter continuing to be useless; whatever the point of her bit with the palantir was, we're not going to see that pay off until season two (if then), and when is season two going to be broadcast? Whatever happened to the Southlanders, or don't we care about them anymore? The continuing terrible writing. The continuing having Galadriel being Mary Sue (now it's her idea to create three Rings). Rushing everything - we should have had Annatar and Celebrimbor over several episodes, the forging of the rings over a couple of episodes, the white cloak mystics and Meteor Man over several episodes. Instead, everything got wrapped up in fifteen minutes, with little to no explanation, because they needed to tidy up the plot threads for the finale and lead into the second season. That warbling end credit song (who is Fiona Apple and why should I care?)
Payne and McKay said in one recent interview that the second season would take a couple of years to make. A different interview after that had the studio contradicting this and that season two would be out as quickly as possible.
I think Amazon have a turkey on their hands, and calling fans who raised reasonable objections trolls, racists, and just plain durned bad think thought criminals pissed off the hardcore lore fanbase, but didn't do a thing to draw in casual viewers. And it serves them right.
there is absolutely a section of youtube which is just people pumping out long-winded rants about contemporary "woke" media. Which whether or not the criticisms are correct (and they often are because much of it is dire), it's nevertheless just an endless sea of performative negativity, at its heart not much different from the ones who are playing the reverse game with the algorithm by endlessly fêting the newest Disney/Marvel/whatever product. It can't be mentally healthy to just watch an endless stream of videos bitching about the casting of The Little Mermaid
Sure, there are Youtubers etc. who churn out that kind of stuff, just as there are Youtubers etc. who churn out the opposite (see the Amazon 'superfans' hired on to do that trainwreck event video to market the show; turns out none of them have posted a single comment about this show that they are all allegedly 'superfans' of).
But Kain was making that remark in the context of everyone who had been critical of the show, and it's unfair. A lot of us were going by the teaser trailers, the already obvious inventions ("we can't have Hobbits, so we're going to have Harfoots who are ancestors of the Hobbits", "the Harfoots can be black because Tolkien said they were brown-skinned" (ignoring what that means in an English context of being fairer or darker, not meaning oh yeah these are black Britons) and the publicity about how wonderfully diverse and egalitarian they were.
Then the show aired, and it was poor. And yet people like Eric Kain wrote glowing reviews for the first two episodes.
And then when they realised that hey, it was trash, somehow those of us who all along had been pointing this out and backing it up with more than 'I hate black people which is why I hate this show' are still the bad guys, even when Kain himself is talking about how he gets criticised and insulted for watching the show if he's not going to give it rave reviews.
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