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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?

I mean, every time the showrunners gave an interview, they just dug the hole deeper and deeper. Ten years working on scripts which never got made - but that was just down to mysterious causes no-one could anticipate, not because they were poor writers who only got work as script doctors and never had a credit of their own. And so then they decided "Hey, might as well try TV 'cos we're never gonna have our own movie" but they needed J J Abrams to pull strings for them even there:

“We had reached a point — we’d been writing movies for 10 years that should have gotten made,” McKay says. “Movies where the director was right, the cast was right, the script was right, the title was right and it was a big IP — and it still wasn’t happening. So [we thought] maybe we should try this TV thing.”

...The duo walked into their second Amazon meeting with full confidence. And then … well … “We did seven more pitches,” McKay says.

...At one point, Payne and McKay asked mentor and former boss J.J. Abrams to call Amazon to put in a good word, and he did. “We feel like that moved the needle,” says McKay.

...Amazon claims there’s been a coordinated effort to attack the show for daring to diversify Tolkien with strong female characters and people of color. “The hardest part was for people on the cast who have had things related to them privately that are just harmful,” Sanders says.

"Yeah, so we're talentless hacks who went for this project out of desperation, luckily we had an in with a guy who could get us hired because we sure weren't getting the job on our merits. But why people criticise our show, well that's just trolls and racists, you know?"

"Yeah, so we're talentless hacks who went for this project out of desperation, luckily we had an in with a guy who could get us hired because we sure weren't getting the job on our merits. But why people criticise our show, well that's just trolls and racists, you know?"

They don't care what we think. They're selling themselves to the industry as "we had experience, took us a while to get here, now we're here". You tend to see this a lot with actors who talk about their long struggle or how many rounds of auditions and screen tests they went in for a momentous role.

This usually works better when your movie /performance isn't a total flop (it usually happens on the promotional circuit before release) but, as you point out, they have a solution to that: hiding behind the alleged victims of racism and sexism.

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