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Notes -
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.
But the race-bait makes a lot of "Strong" sense given plot and the difference between reading and watching.
Warning Spoilers: Who the real father of the king's daughter's children is and appears to be is a key plot point. In the show the real father is white, while the guy who is supposed to be the father is black so it's extremely obvious to everyone what is going on. The king ignoring what is going on makes him either a fool or someone playing a deep game where pretending can make something real if you are the king. While I haven't read the book, someone who has says that in the book both men are white and people infer what is going on from less obvious phenotypical features. Mathematically, the race change makes its 99.99% likely in the show that the kids are bastards but, say, 95% likely in the books and the plot of the show does reflect this extra 4.99% likelihood. The race change also makes it extremely salient to we the viewers that the kids are bastards.
If you're talking Lost in Space (which fits), that daughter is actually adopted, and ends up meeting her father, who is black, so it works in-world quite well. It was weird at the beginning, I grant you.
RoP has no such excuses. I found it okay for the elf (in the army, people come from all over, and he was more elf-like than most of the community-theater-roman-senator elves anyway), but for the Harfoots it's very distracting and weird.
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