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Culture War Roundup for the week of October 10, 2022

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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:

As of this writing, House of the Dragon has an 86% rating on Rotten Tomatoes (with an 84% Audience Rating) and The Rings of Power has an 84% approval rating on the review aggregator (with a 38% Audience Rating, which should largely be discarded).

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.

As of this writing, House of the Dragon has an 86% rating on Rotten Tomatoes (with an 84% Audience Rating) and The Rings of Power has an 84% approval rating on the review aggregator (with a 38% Audience Rating, which should largely be discarded).

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.

I think it's still worth watching, more than anything I've watched over the last few years. It dethroned Better Call Saul as my favorite. It would suck if they cock it up but the writing, acting, and aesthetics are still so good that they stand on their own.

You're genuinely depriving yourself of something Great.

Besides, why would they cock it up again? Are the conditions for that happening even there? It's a finished story of a smaller scope. They know they fucked up. I'm not worried.

I mean, why would they cock it up the first time? If you went back in time and told someone after GoT S1 or S2 "this will end up sucking and the show's legacy will be how they ruined it", that person would think you were crazy. Back when GoT started, it was so good that nobody would have believed it could ever turn out so bad.

It wasn't at all obvious from the outset of GoT that they were going to fuck up so hard by the end. And if they do fuck this show up, it certainly wouldn't be clear now that they will do so. Now, maybe they learned their lesson at HBO and this will be great. But for myself, once bitten twice shy. Besides, if it actually is good in the end, then I will still enjoy watching it at that time. I'm not depriving myself of anything, I'm simply putting this off until we can assess the work as a whole.

Fair enough, they certainly might fuck it up. Personally I think it's much less likely than it was for GoT. Baseline probability for fucking up shows that start so great is low, smaller scope, and lessons learned are still my arguments.

But that's not the point. I just don't share the overall sentiment that GoT is not worth watching because they fucked up the last few seasons. It feels like you are substituting the legacy of the whole show for its overall quality.

Stories have endings. The narrative arc that has a identifiable beginning, middle, and end is what defines a given story. In general, stories that have a poor ending are unsatisfying in some way, linked to exactly how the ending was "poor." GoT S8 was widely panned for nonsensical/unexplained plot devices (teleporting armies, for example) that made the story intellectually unsatisfying, and character-arc reversals and betrayals of theme (Jaime's sudden un-redemption arc) that made the story emotionally unsatisfying. That's a massive double-failure.

Let's say I had a book, and told you, "Hey, read this, it's super good, but you'll want to stop after Chapter 15 of 20, the rest of the book's shit," would you want to start the book at all?

I wouldn't read that book because reading is much harder than watching a TV series but I do get your point. GoT is worsened by its bad ending, how can I argue it's not. I'm just saying it's not completely ruined and that I'll rewatch it no problem.

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