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So, I watched the first two episodes of the Rings of Power -- and it wasn't that bad.
For the record, I thought Wheel of Time was pretty horrible, and while it was far from the only problem, the woke aspects (forced diversity, all men have to suck, all women have to rock) was definitely a big part of the issue. RoP has some forced diversity as well, but it's somehow not as bad. The black elf is one of the few elves who actually seems attractive and somehow beyond human -- the others come across as Roman Senator types.
Galadriel is a Mary Sue, but I guess she is in the books too. We'll see how her story develops.
I'm not happy with the proto-hobbits, and of course, the one who pushes the rules and is clever and daring is a woman, but that's mostly okay.
Dwarves -- well, of course the woman gives wise council to her buffoon husband, but it was still fairly well done I thought.
The visuals were great, and you did somehow get a sense of fleshed out, interesting and complex world. I'm very cautiously optimistic. Miles and miles ahead of Wheel of Time.
For the record, I'm /u/The-WideningGyre on reddit, but felt like grabbing one of the more common usernames I use on the new Motte.
I'm really disappointed by the weird groupthink shitshow I feel like 'normal' reddit has become, so I will do what I can to support this new Motte. Thanks /u/ZorbaTHut and other creators!
My abortive attempt to watch the new Wheel of Time ended when they gave Perrin (big, awkward, bad with words and women- Perrin) a wife to lose, and had Rand and Egwene (both young adults in a farming community with relatively traditional, rural values) fuck each other immediately. No will-they-won't-they, no nod to the traditional environment, no awkward fumbling or embarrassment or confusion (which is a reoccurring theme in the story until much later) just totally casual sex. It absolutely changed the characters, and not for the better. I'm a fan of casual sex as much as the next guy, but you can't just take 202x morality filtered through the personal experiences of writers in (presumably) a large city, assume it's a universal human experience and slap it onto a story about farm boys in a traditional, agricultural society with strong rituals and expectations around marriage and pregnancy, and call it good.
It was a train wreck.
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I'm personally strongly against "woke"-ism, but did Tolkien exclude black elves? Did he mention their colour at all?
He did: they are very fair skinned.
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In the books this works because Tolkien understands narrative. There's a clear plot point that prevents Galadriel from just orc punching her way to Mordor - namely that once she possesses the Ring, she may become ultimate warrior princess (which she was not in the books!), but it'll be warrior princess with Sauron-characteristics. As a result she's in maybe two scenes and primarily illustrates just how deep in over their heads the hobbits are - setting the stage for their heroic journey.
It's much the same reason why Superman sucks, but Watchmen was good. Superman punches people but can't hurt them cause also superman and - cue dramatic music and Henry Cavil emoting - finally punches the bad guy really hard and wins. In contrast, Watchmen made Dr. Manhattan a mysterious godlike figure and told the story through the lens of mortals. Manhattan could punch the Soviets really hard, but isn't doing that for his own reasons.
You can't make Galadriel, Gandalf or Tom Bombadil the main character in any kind of hero journey - it's too late, the journey is over for them. A story about them is a fundamentally different thing and probably too niche to justify the price tag.
Have you read Beware of Chicken (https://www.royalroad.com/fiction/39408/beware-of-chicken)? Or the One Punch Man manga or animated series? Because they're what you just described and I think they work really, really well. I found them immensely entertaining.
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Well, Second Age Galadriel is still on her journey - she did refuse to return to Valinor after the climatic battle of the First Age which resulted in the defeat of Morgoth. So Second Age Galadriel is as eager as any of them to believe in the peace, even if she is aware that darkness and danger are still out there, and she is still proud, still Noldor, still hoping to create and rule over a realm of her own.
But that's not the Galadriel we get (so far) in "The Rings of Power". They want to make her young, piss-and-vinegar, out there actively fighting Galadriel; not the mature pupil of Melian and great lady that Second Age Galadriel is. As you say, they want a character for the hero's journey, so they have to shape their version of Galadriel in that mould. That's probably part of why they make Celebrimbor much older, when canonically he should be younger than Galadriel: he's one of the 'old guys' who want to believe all the fighting is over so they can go ahead with their own ambitions. And of course, one of the 'old guys' who is wrong while Galadriel is right.
The disappointing thing for me is that a Galadriel focused narrative could be really interesting. She's someone who chooses political power over eternal bliss, and comes to deeply regret that choice. The last leader of a doomed rebellion against the gods, cursed to watch eveything around her diminish and decay while she remains forever unchanging. There's a lot of serious drama to be mined there.
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What you say about storytelling is true: to optimize for drama and thrills and edge-of-your-seat uncertainty, you're going to want to write an underdog story. Ooh, how's our hero going to get out of this one? You've only got the faintest clue, and you're watching with breath absolutely bated to see if you've guessed correctly or not.
The problem is that the Underdog Story may not be the best lens through which to view the world. Or at the very least, it shouldn't be the only lens through which to view the world.
The Underdog Story has its upsides in terms of life lessons, like self-reliance in the face of tough challenges, proactivity about doing the right thing, and so forth.
But it also has its downsides, and one of the most important is the plot-driven necessity that anybody powerful be somewhere between evil and useless, so never good. A heroic overdog would be boring, after all: no uncertainty about how he'll get out of this one.
But what happens when we marinate our minds in this narrative structure, over and over and over again, in a relentlessly-optimized fiction market? Maybe find ourselves inexorably associating "power" with "evil" and "weakness" with "good?" "The status quo" with "the evil empire" and "anything right and decent" with "us chosen-one rebels?"
Perhaps we'd end up thinking that way: living out a perpetual rebellion, as the only stories that matter are about the conquest, about supplanting the powerful. What happens after - the actual ruling, the use of that hard-won power? Well, feh, that's always just skipped over in the epilogue. "And they lived happily ever after." Once we win, there'll be utopia! Who cares about the details? They never need to in the stories.
So somebody with power who is not presiding over a utopia needs to be torn down. Every generation sends up its heroes to tear down the last generation's and be torn down by the next generation's in turn. Nice and dramatic: how's it going to go this time? And maybe there really is improvement ratcheting upward each cycle - either way, every generation can always imagine it's the chosen one that will really fix everything this time, and can always explain away their failures once they're apparently on top by appealing to some unseen ever-more-powerful foe that must be holding them back.
Not good for stability, though. No telling what hard-won good will end up as collateral damage in any given revolution. Our Heroes' victories don't tend to last long if there are sequels.
The tagline to 1978's "Superman" was "you'll believe a man can fly." With special effects these days, that's trivial; much more impressive would be to show us how someone can be both that strong and that good. Such a character's Hero's Journey may be over, but that just means that the really important part has begun.
Tougher to sell tickets to that, though, so maybe we're stuck this way.
(Hello, all! I've lurked since before there was a Culture War Roundup thread but never posted at all. Thought I would try to help get the new site running, but I don't expect my courage to last.)
I'm in the same boat, but I hope to continue posting. I realized that I want to become a better writer, and even if your comments aren't the best you can improve them over time. Heck, I struggle to write well for productive reasons so I might as well hone my skills in a place that rewards good writing, and discusses topics I find interesting.
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One can certainly write a story of this sort. But it's a quite different story.
There's an isekai called Worth The Candle that tells a story of this sort. Not sure how to spoiler tag things, but basically there's an evil villain who immediately surrenders because he can see he's underpowered relative to the ubermensch lead character. At this point he reveals that he rules a surprisingly populous society that he built around his particular variety of evil, one which will rapidly descend into starvation if you just switch it off, and with a population that is aligned with his values. Um, now what? And is handling this situation even a good use of ubermensch time and effort relative to the primary goal of creating a good magical singularity?
Unlike Tolkien, it was not rooted in medieval England. You could race swap the main characters with no issue and toss and hint that the isekai lead faced racism back in Oklahoma.
Also it's niche internet fiction written by a stay at home dad who is a big success by the standards of Patreon and earns maybe $1-2k/month from 444 subscribers. There's a reason Amazon didn't buy that and ruin it - it's utterly inaccessible to most viewers.
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You've made a very good comment and I encourage you to not let courage be the barrier to your further posting. Those of us making smaller, more mundane, comments can often be the magic catalyst that sparks off truly great comments and discussions. You will at the very worst be forgotten.
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You can't make Gandalf or Bombadil the protagonist. You can make Galadriel the protagonist, but only if you actually own the rights and your story takes place in the First Age. If you're doing a Galadriel story that does not prominently feature the Kinslaying, you are doing it wrong.
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I haven't seen it, but my objection to it even existing is that, if you're going to make up a bunch of stuff -which they had to do, because of licensing issues, why call it LOTR? I know it's for marketing, but it surprises (or maybe just depresses) me that people are going for it. It's like starting a taco restaurant, and calling it McDonaldo's because people like McDonald's. Savvy business, I guess, but also a sign that you don't care one bit about McDonalds, or tacos, or making sense. For this reason I see this as one of the worst signs of our cultural decline. The naked commercialism is one thing, but the corruption of beauty (in the grand sense) is another. The LOTR showed modernity the harmony between the pagan and Christian virtues that made the West great. Rings of Power has no such claim even to ambition, let alone greatness.
Yeah this is a real beef I have with a lot of modern "adaptations" of classics as well. If you're going to make something entirely new, that's totally fine. But then don't try to call it something it isn't! So many examples I can think of in recent memory: Wheel of Time, Star Trek, Star Wars, etc. Works where they set the expectation "hey we're going back for more of the thing you love" only to pull the rug out from under the fans in the most unceremonious way.
The Halo series is probably the most egregious example of this I can think of. Note I haven't seen it myself, so we're going full hearsay on this. But by all accounts the characters are completely rewritten, the story is completely rewritten, etc. It has only the thinnest veneer of Halo, so why the heck did they even bother making the show based on Halo? It grabs attention sure, but then it also alienates the same people you hooked in, who are then extremely pissed off at your show. So it would be better to not spend the money on the IP, and just make your own brand new IP. But somehow, nobody ever does this.
Now lets be fair, this tactic is approximately as old as mass media is.
Slamming out barely-coherent sequels to books that became unexpected bestsellers, producing a whole series of films based on one hit, and using completely unrelated scripts with the familiar character names swapped in, or making a spinoff TV show using some side character just so people might watch what would otherwise be a generic sitcom.
You'd have a much harder time naming a piece of media that sprang up and grew into intense popularity without having some recognized and respected name attached, be it an actor, director, beloved character, or an established series.
It probably does hit harder for media properties that have a long history and have mostly avoided being exploited or cheapened for years or decades upon decades. But those media properties will be viewed as untapped gold mines by producers, rather than precious natural resources where further development should be banned and tourism restricted to maintain their pristine condition.
I guess I'd say that I agree with you and yet the proven preference of the median consumer/viewer is that they just want to see more of [thing they like] produced and aren't too picky about quality, so given that there's no enforceable rule against slapping an existing franchise's logo on an otherwise unrelated work or spitting out a low-quality sequel, spinoff, or adaptation, it is all but inevitable that it will happen to a series that you love... unless said franchise just isn't popular enough to warrant such sequels, spinoffs, etc.
Harry Potter.
Yep, and then more recently The Hunger Games.
But then we see the point further proven with how heavily the HP franchise is being ridden by the rights owners.
Every piece of intensely popular media is either new, or "ridden by the rights owners", short of improbable edge cases. It's nearly tautological.
Yes, that's why the OP is observing the phenomenon we're discussing.
I just pointed out that this isn't recent.
One of the few pieces of media that has achieved massive cultural cachet and has not yet been immediately adapted and otherwise exploited to produce scads of content of varying quality is Calvin and Hobbes, and that is only because the creator is alive and actively protecting his work from legal reproduction.
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The reviews I've seen seem to agree that the visuals are great, but the writing - not so much. Slow to get started, keeps jumping from one character to another. I've only seen the trailers, and I didn't like them. Galadriel has been turned into a Mary-Sue, she can take down an ice troll all on her own with a twirl of her sword while her useless male companions just stand around. That's not good writing. They do seem to be taking the standard "bullied girl learns to stand up and fight back, and keeps going even when all the useless men around her tell her to stand down!" Strong Female pattern, which is okay if you want to communicate quickly to a general audience that knows nothing about the characters that this is Kick-Ass Important Lead. But it's not Galadriel.
They have five seasons (if this season is a hit). They have time to establish characters and plot. I hope it gets better from here on in, now that the two introductory episodes are over. I think the best way to approach this is as "Generic TV fantasy show with characters that have the same names, but have nothing to do with Tolkien's characters". That way, it will avoid raising the blood pressure of the canon-knowledgeable, and whatever Amazon does with the characters, we have the consolation of "Well, that's not really Elrond or Gil-galad or Celebrimbor, it's just guys with the same names". And they can appeal to general audiences who know nothing but maybe vaguely remember the movies and like the idea of a family-friendly escapist hour of TV/streaming service (no tits or much gore so far, as distinct from House of the Dragon).
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This woke plague kind of ruined many themes and tropes, and by extension many pieces of media that perhaps didn't deserve it, at least for me. My inner critic is always on alert, looking out for wokeness, ready to dismiss anything that sets off enough alarms.
I might exaggerate a bit, but it's at least partly true for me. Maybe that's my flaw, but the general instinct to use heuristics like that for quick judgement is sound and useful. So there's an ironic dimension to it - overflow of wokeness and focus on quantity, instead of quality of woke propaganda likely keeps a lot of people from treating it seriously. Well, I guess it's better than the alternative.
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I heard an interesting take on this. She is a universally loved character in the books and movies. Some say that RoP is changing her characterization into a standard victim narrative so that they can show her overcoming her oppression. People seem very offended by this since she’s coming off like a huge bitch in the first few episodes. Some sort of character assassination to further the modern feminist narrative.
What do you think?
The showrunners are woefully inexperienced so yeah, going for easily understood, largest audience engagement plot and motivations. "This is Galadriel. She is really important. This is why she is important. She is on a vengeance quest to get revenge for her dead brother. This is why she is going out fighting orcs and trolls".
They're also stuck in that they don't have the rights to Second Age material so they can't show her as the pupil of Melian or married to Celeborn or any of that. So they have to spin up a story of Warrior Princess Galadriel out of what material they have, and to make it easily digested by a general audience (because they can't survive just by getting the hardcore fans, they need as many people watching as possible to buy subscriptions to make Prime streaming succeed) they have to use well-worn stories like 'revenge quests'. Galadriel isn't Galadriel, that complex mix of Noldorin pride and belief in their own intelligence and ability, and slowly growing repentance for the decisions she made and how the entire return to Middle-earth by the Noldor was tainted by Feanor's mad quest for vengeance - she's Girl Power Heroine.
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It's just really boring. The dialogue is wooden and the actors don't help. They recite lines like "this place is so evil the torches give no heat". The peasants sit in bars and are racist against the black elf. I assume this is so we can learn a Very Important Lesson later on. The action scenes look like video game cutscenes. The elf soldiers wear identical uniforms and bitch about regulations like they're 19th century conscripts instead of immortal warrior aristocrats.
It's not so much that anything about it is actively terrible, it's that there's also nothing good about it. Not because it's not faithful to Tolkien but because the writers failed on their own terms.
I am disheartened by all this. Not because I disagree, but because I had really hoped my fears wouldn't be realized.
I am an embarrassingly full-on movie buff, and I have two young sons so I do a lot of casual watching of old favorites by way of indoctrinating them into my tastes, though it's true they have pushed movies on me that I wouldn't have chosen but I enjoyed (the MCU for example). And in watching WandaVision--finally--a month or so ago when I was quarantined, I had a frustrating feeling that the show really shoehorned subliminal and wholly unnecessary messages in, when it was otherwise brilliant. No white male was allowed any leadership role based on goodness, wisdom, or strength. It's to the point where if you do see a white male in a main role you can assume he will become an antagonist to one or all of the female leads (exactly what occurred).
The one exception was the character Vision, played with disarming non-campiness by Paul Bettany, who was nevertheless at best second fiddle to Wanda, though I could accept that based on the premise of the show.
Just a mild rant. But I can't see this going anywhere good. Building confidence in viewers or positive self-esteem or whatever they're calling it these days A)should not be the domain or primary role of film/TV; 2) is not a zero-sum proposition where one sex/race must be degraded to "build up" or empower the others, and D) has a fanbase that will, if time is any teacher, eventually turn on the concept viciously, leaving a lot of works parodied and reviled instead of held as beloved classics.
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Totally agreed. I really enjoyed WoT until episode 3 or so when I realized it was horrendous. RoP is waaaaay better.
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There's a certain degree of wokeness to all modern media of which must be tolerated, but RoP is where I draw the line.
I don't like series which disrespects its core material, its literary fanbase, which sneers on twitter and all of the fashionable places to mine for engagement eyeballs. It may be a perfectly servicable show but I hate the modern hype engine that intentionally turns up its nose at the nerds to try and gain cachet with an audience that doesn't even exist.
It must? Why?
Not only do you have all of old media to consume, not only do you have anime and k-drama providing modern alternatives, but you always have the option to drop out and walk away, as the Amish do.
Boycott people who hate you.
I'm all for it, but stuffing yourself in a obscurantist cubbyhole is a bad way to keep abreast of the trends of popular culture. Being aware of what normies consume is a great way to ascertain the valence of what is allowed to be believed.
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If you have any investment in your culture, in your people, in your society, do not tolerate those who subvert it; as he says, boycott people who hate you. Wield whatever power you have, small or great, against people who want to crush you and scatter your values to the wind. There is only ever one losing move: acceptance.
Intolerance is a virtue.
It's not about hatred, nothing as warm-blooded as that. For Amazon, it's cold pursuit of profit. Forget all the bullshit about Jeff Bezos being a YUUUGE Tolkien fan and the showrunners being big fans etc. That's publicity material for the trade weeklies. They want a big name production that will bring in new subscribers for Prime Video and make it profitable. If the show doesn't pull in the numbers, then it will be dropped (and forget about the five seasons). So they are making huge hay out of "first black dwarf! first black elf!" and all the rest of it to cast their net for the widest possible audience globally. Casual viewers will expect to see black/brown faces in the cast, or at least won't notice or care if there are. The appeal has to go beyond the fans and canon-knowledgeable, because that is not a big enough audience.
And they couldn't just write their own fantasy epic series, because that would have no ready-made fanbase or name recognition. They're competing with House of the Dragon, which is piggy-backing on Game of Thrones and its success. If they put up "Amazon presents 'Generic Sword'n'Sorcery' set in MadeupLand" against that, they'll sink like a stone (and not because they were looking downwards towards the darkness). They're trying to use the popularity of the movies and how that name recognition seeped into popular culture, hence why they bought the rights and why they're using 'Galadriel', 'Elrond', 'Hobbits/Harfoots' and so on.
(I begin to have my suspicions that Meteor Man might be meant to be Saruman, not Gandalf).
They're not one bit interested in being faithful to canon, they want to paste on the names of "you remember this person from the movies" to their generic fantasy story tropes. Not out of hatred, out of "what will fill our coffers with least effort? give the audience a story they've seen ten times before and which won't frighten the horses".
Sure. But on the other hand, they are also going out of their way to upset the people that they bring in with that. What good is a ready-made fanbase if you immediately drive them away?
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I'm not convinced. Time after time we see woke corporations take actions that seem more in line with ideology than profit motive; I believe "it's all about the benjamins" to be a comforting myth, told by people who want to think they can change things through good old fashioned capitalism rather than admit the cultural producers that dominate their society genuinely hate them.
It's not about money, it's about sending a message. We are in a war for the nation's very soul, and the creator class is best understood as combatants for one side.
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I would have assumed that you would have waited a week or so before taking off the mask. People don't "hate you" because they put a brown hobbit in their newest swordshit. Amazon is simply trying to appeal to the most number of people possible with their casting.
Is there a really cool, smart, badass straight white male to appeal to the large audience of straight white males?
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RE: dwarves, I didn't read that as a forced "woman smart, man dumb" moment. Durin isn't dumb, he's just peeved that his friend hasn't visited him in decades and he's clearly quite open to forgiving him.
I particularly didn't view it as a woke scene, because the wife is employing the soft power women have traditionally wielded in the home, while the "hard" power (i.e. the ultimate decision on whether Elrond should stay or leave) is Durin's. And in any case, it's more like Durin and his wife are playing out their roles so that Durin can both forgive his friend and keep his pride -- the man's clearly open to forgiving Elrond (note how Durin allows Elrond into his home, with predictable results).
It's the writing, there are too many examples of the script trying for "this is friendly banter, ho ho" but it comes across as weird or 'what did he just say?' or aggressive.
As well as the fake profundity which falls flat - what is the difference between a stone and a ship, indeed.
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The problem with Galadriel isn't so much her unrestrained ability but the form it takes. She's supposed to be a beautiful but prideful maiden who grows into the wise sorcerer-queen we see in the third age through experience.
Her skill is cunning, not strength. She's an enigmatic plotter with an inscrutable mind, not some formidable warrior.
Having her prancing around killing giant beasts feels like if you made a biopic of Talleyrand where he keeps shooting people himself.
Her being a warrior doesn't bother me too much. There are enough references by Tolkein to her Amazonian disposition and whatnot (I think one of her knicknames is literally "man-maiden" or something similar) in various versions of the Legendarium to justify that choice.
My problem is that she has the personality and motivations of a YA protagonist. She's been placed in the role of "plucky young hero who is the only one aware of the coming evil but is constantly belittled and looked down upon by the 'adults,' despite being right about everything." Even though at this point in the story she is canonically the oldest, wisest, most noble person currently present in Middle Earth. She's supposed to be an exiled revolutionary leader forbidden to return to Valinor because decided she would rather reign in hell than serve in heaven, but the character doesnt have any of that gravitas on the show.
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