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orthoxerox  I realized I can change my flair color to Barbie pink  1yr ago (acoup.blog)   1808 thread views

Collections: Why Rings of Power’s Middle Earth Feels Flat

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Submission statement for Southkraut: Bret Deveraux discusses everything The Rings of Power creators did wrong other than the culture war stuff. TLDR: they understand neither geography nor economics nor anthropology. Also, they are racist towards the Irish.

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I think there's a lot of reasons there, but the main reason is simpler. This is a thing made by people that aren't in love with Tolkien and his world. They are doing it for money, or for culture war reason, or for any other reason - but their primary goal seems to be something other than to cherish and enhance the Professor's legacy. This is the only way I can explain the decisions that were made and the approaches that were taken there. Dissecting the details can have its own fascination, but for me the main reason stays the same.

This is why, as a long-time (since the 80s, probably?) Tolkien fan, I am not even mad at them. As noted above, and I agree, it's just not Tolkien. It's using Tolkien for... whatever, I can't even care about it. Best thing that can be done about it is to file it to a dusty shelf of history where the weird curiosities are stored, and only take it out when we need to feel better by looking at something extremely cringe-worthy.

They are doing it for money, or for culture war reason, or for any other reason

They're doing it cause they're not that important and helming a major IP like LOTR could make their career (like Game of Thrones put D&D on the map)

The real question is why studios continually favor hiring not just mercenaries but mercenaries with little experience, either with the direct IP itself or - more unforgivably- with big budget film-making at all. This was supposed to be Bezos' baby and he just defaults to industry standard practices that either failed (in the case of Star Wars) or only work because of very strong producer control (MCU).

Would he build his yacht or megamansion this way? Find relatively cheap builders with little experience or concern for the project as such?

Maybe there just aren't that many mercenaries with experience [left]? Are the showrunners unionized?

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