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orthoxerox  I realized I can change my flair color to Barbie pink  1yr ago (acoup.blog)   1807 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.

I don't know if it's necessarily that - it's that writing a really well-crafted story difficult. I'm sure there are lots of passionate fans of Tolkien who couldn't replicate his genius. The difference is that they don't get (jesus christ) half a BILLION dollars to realize their terrible vision. To me, it's that lack of appreciation for the craft that is the issue. Peter Jackson is a born filmmaker. He appreciates the craft that goes into making something great - that 'scenes' and 'stories' are the emergent property of lots of tedious, difficult, practical work. That's why even though he heavily alters many key scenes and characters, his work stands on it's own feet. The writers of Rings of Power are unwilling to do any work.

I've seen some pretty grotesque Tolkien adaptations. And in some of those the lack of craftsmanship (and budgets) was obvious. But here I think the problem wasn't that.

The writers of Rings of Power are unwilling to do any work.

And the reason for that I think was that they weren't in love with the world and the story. If you are, you'd put in your best work, billion dollars or not - just because that's what you dreamt of doing for ages. But that didn't seem to happen here. It's like the parts of the story for them were just tokens which can be combined in any way or form and as soon as it looks passable to them, it's good enough. I think it's not because the lack of skill - but because they though whatever they did is good enough and they don't need to do better.

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