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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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Notes -
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're already shooting the second season, so Amazon is committed to that. But unless it comes out in a year's time, there will be too big a gap between first and second seasons to hold interest. People will wait to see the second season of "House of the Dragon" because they want to see what happens next (it ended on a successful cliffhanger). Rings of Power? Ended with Sauronbrand taking a stroll over the mountains. They pissed off lore fans and I don't think enough happened to make casual watchers bother to keep up with it.
I don't think this will make five seasons. I think Amazon is desperately searching for a big hit to pump up the streaming service, it hasn't managed that yet, and Rings of Power was not Game of Thrones as Jeff wanted. Given that they're having to recast Adar (the one part pretty much everyone, even if they disliked the rest of the show, thought was good), and have cast a bunch of "who that?" actors for new parts in the second season, I wouldn't be surprised if the show was quietly let die. Maybe broadcast the second season, use lack of viewers as the excuse for dumping it, keep trying for that golden goose hit with other material (e.g. they're apparently going to do a show based on the game God of War: Ragnarok which has me rolling my eyes, and I haven't even played the games).
There's reports that Jennifer Salke scrapped a proposed Conan the Barbarian series and fired Ryan Condal, who then went on to be showrunner on House of the Dragon. So that turned out to be a bad decision. I wonder how long she can hang on to her role? Jeff wants a Game of Thrones for Amazon, and she hasn't delivered (and may have fired the guy who could have done it with the Conan series).
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