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Notes -
I realise I'm a little late to the party, but I want to talk about Tolkien and RoP.
One of the themes of Lord of the Rings is the idea that the smallest, the humblest person can change the destiny of the world, and become a hero. The Hobbits represent small, humble, ordinary people. They don’t lust for power or fame, or aspire to do great deeds. Thus the Ring can’t corrupt them in the way that it would corrupt Boromir or Galadriel, although it can make them covet it as a possession. We see this when Sam willingly gives it back to Frodo, even though we have seen others kill for it having been exposed to it for far shorter periods. Bilbo manages to give it up, after having owned it and been subjected to its influence for 60 years, and Frodo manages to bear it right into the heart of Mt Doom, with the Ring fighting him all the way.
The Ring works by tempting its owners, offering them ways to get what they desire most. The Wizards want to make the world a better place. The Elves want to stop the decay of the world. Men desire power and the ability to defeat their enemies. Dwarves desire treasure. All of them want something they don’t already have, therefore the Ring has something to work with, something to offer them. While Hobbits are content creatures: “But where our hearts truly lie is in peace and quiet and good tilled earth. For all Hobbits share a love of all things that grow. And yes, no doubt to others, our ways seem quaint. But today of all days, it is brought home to me it is no bad thing to celebrate a simple life.”
Galadriel was never some paladin of light. She is the ultimate redemption arc. Someone who had many of the same flaws as Sauron, but who came back. Sauron had a chance for redemption, but couldn't follow through due to his pride. Like Galadriel he was told to come back to Valinor. He didn't want to leave his powerbase or his pride behind however. The character who some consider to be the ultimate hero of the tale, who gets the last scene is not Aragorn the King or an immortal elf. It's the family man with scars, who lost his friend, and who comes home to his family and does the best he can.
It seems Amazon Studios never bothered to understand when they decided they'll make Galadriel a sort of "girlboss" claiming to save the world but with the writers' focus being on her path to glory like most woke cape blockbusters these days. Given how literarily significant Tolkien is world over, its so bizarre that they'd try to pick apart his legacy and crap all over him. Within my reading circle in India, LOTR is a favourite. The supposed racism doesn't even register. The last RoP trailer in regional languages here also got ratio'd on YouTube. I don't know what Amazon was thinking. They said this is the most expensive show ever and that the future of the studio itself relies on its success, and yet they decide to check the woke quotas instead of giving Tolkien fans what they want. Did they really just not expect this level of blowback? Its so unfathomable to me that the answer is that simple, could it be something else?
Okay, but what’s actually wrong with Galadriel?
It’s one thing if her “path to glory” is too much like capeshit. I have no idea how one could make a Marvel movie in Middle-Earth, so if they really tried to do that, I wouldn’t be surprised that it’s trash.
Of course, that would be true regardless of the political slant.
“Path to glory” power fantasy isn’t new to the setting. It’s the default for video games, of course. Shadow of Mordor trampled all over Tolkien’s themes and worldbuilding, but after a few months of grumbling, the intended audience decided it was kind of badass. This suggests that the problem with RoP runs deeper.
On the political side, there’s a difference between woke casting and woke writing. Gender-flipping or race-swapping a character doesn’t necessarily change their arc (even if it pisses off fans). Writing the plot into a corner to score ideological points is a bigger problem. I have yet to see examples of RoP screwing the latter up.
So how much of the backlash is political, and how much of it is about general writing quality? Did wokeness somehow prevent a decent show, or was it incidental? What did Galadriel do?
Right now Galadriel (or the character with the name Galadriel) is an awful brat. We're three episodes in, out of what I think are going to be eight episodes for the first season, and so far she has scowled, snarled, and whined her way from Middle-earth to Númenor. She is such a pain in the backside that Gil-galad put her on a ship to Valinor, in the guise of a 'reward', to get rid of her. And at the last moment, as the ship was about to be brought into the Undying Lands, she jumped overboard to, apparently, swim her way back to Middle-earth rather than dock in Valinor. Just let that piece of show-writing sink in for a moment.
Even if this is meant to be Young Piss And Vinegar Galadriel, she is both immensely stupid (see: jumping overboard to 'certain death' as she puts it in a later episode) and immensely, well, stupid. She is arrogant, entitled, and driven by a personal quest for vengeance. Allegedly she is Commander of the Northern Armies, but she shows the leadership skills of a pot of yoghurt: she leaves her men (and yeah, men is the defining term here) far behind as she zooms her way up the ice waterfall, she shows no concern about morale or the issues they raise with her, she's perfectly happy to leave one behind if he falls in the snow, and while the ice troll is smashing them into the walls of the cavern, she then steps forth to dispatch it with a twirly-twirl of her sword in a fight that is over so fast, it is anti-climactic. Why does she have even a squad with her, she plainly doesn't need any of them and they only hold her back?
She is curt and rude to Elrond, she is rude to Gil-galad, she is rude to Tar-Míriel, she is rude to Elendil - you get the gist. We're supposed to sympathise with her being driven by her vengeance quest for the death of her beloved brother, and that she is indeed and in fact right about the danger of Sauron, but she's just too damn unpleasant and borderline unhinged for it to work. And I don't know how fair I am being to the actress, but she has about two expressions: Resting Bitch Face and Weird Eye-Twitch.
I just saw a funny (and very tongue-in-cheek with how it phrases the political elements) video about the real villain in The Rings Of Power.
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This may be hard to explain to somebody seeped in certain type of culture, but for other people the themes are grating and obvious to see. What did Galadriel do? As with all feminism Galadriel is perfect example of what if gender swapped would be seen as "toxic masculinity" only written badly. She is bitchy, disrespectful and overall pain in the ass. She constantly mansplains to everybody her point, like the "you have not seen what I have seen" to Elrond, a character who was literally out there fighting Morgoth. She is always angry and her solution to problems is either violence, or angry demands to speak to management to do her bidding. Her scene with Regent Murielle was one long cringe pissing contest. She is for some reason instantly liked by important characters like Elrond, Gil-Galad or Elendil for no reason despite her acting like a bitch - in case of Elendil even threatening him with dagger for which he conveniently shows her Numenorian secrets in their library or whatnot.
But there are other stupid and self-serving cameos in the show so far. One of the "original characters" showrunners invented was Elendil's sister (I won't bother looking her name), in their own words to "introduce some feminine energy into the family" or some such. And her main cameo in the show was bragging that they accepted her to the university or something like that. It is so on the nose and stupid beyond belief, but I guess for some people it is absolutely normal writing.
Thanks for elaborating.
That sounds absolutely abysmal, and definitely crosses the bar for blue-tribe pandering.
Even if we take out what I am being forced to conclude is indeed "Woman always right, Man always wrong" writing, the rest of it just dumps all over the character.
Take the scene in the audience hall of Númenor when she is speaking with Tar-Míriel. She recites a list of her titles, which should mean that she knows how to behave - both politically and as a matter of courtesy - when speaking to someone in that context. She should be diplomatic, she should be polite, she should behave like a civilised person. But instead she demands passage back to Middle-earth and manages to get everyone's back up with the way she does it. When it falls to the ragged guy pulled off a raft in the middle of the ocean to be emollient and diplomatic, then that's bad writing. It may be supposed to hint that Halbrand is not what he claims to be, that he too has had the training of a noble line, but it only works because Galadriel is so arrogant, rude, and flat-out stupid.
The writing is just poor all round. Fake profound statements that are idiotic (nobody is going to stop mocking the "do you know what the difference between a stone and a ship is?" speech) and too much jumping forward without explaining. If you know the lore, you know why Galadriel says "my family started this", but if you're a casual viewer who just tuned in to watch some fantasy TV and you maybe watched the movies years back, you have no idea what that is about, because the only mention of family you have seen so far is her brother, who was killed by Sauron. So how did they 'start this'? Did Finrod (and we don't even get his name mentioned) start this? What happened?
No time to explain who the Faithful are and why would they be considered traitors, but we got plenty of time for a slo-mo horsey ride!
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To be fair, I think a lot of fandom was primed by what is nowadays standard "fanbaiting" to look for "woke" stuff in the show. And it is there for sure, but it is overshadowed by bad writing, bad pacing and overall bad direction even. For instance there is a scene where a human woman meets black elf (they have supposed "forbidden romance" but with no chemistry) talking about attack by orcs on her village (where she decapitated an orc, slamming it on table in tavern proving the veracity of the threat). And when they get there to asses the situation the woman shows no emotion - she does not call out for potential survivors of her family or friends, she does not cry or anything like that. She just kind of goes around as if she was hardened mercenary surveilling yet another site of a massacre she got accustomed to.
What happens next is that all the elven garrison jump into a hole from which orcs came only to be promptly captured - and BTW by this point everybody knows that orcs are there. And then they make a plan - let one of them escape to alert nearby garrisons of potential threat. Because it did not occur to anybody to send a messenger back before jumping to fight orcs in a pit in the first place.
The reason why I am talking about all of this is that I think this is not a coincidence. It is not the fact that the show itself breaks suspension of disbelief by inserting some modern blue tribe/woke aesthetics into the programming. I think that the whole cast, directors, producers and above all else the writers are just sheltered blue tribe brats with no relevant life experience, seeped in their respective bubbles thinking that creating fanfictions where they insert their fantasies as well as their aesthetics is the pinnacle of fine art. It is kind of narcissist, it breaks the 4th wall where you can clearly see what characters the writers love or hate in their own life, there is no separation or thinking outside of the box. I think they seriously believe this and the result is what we see.
I think that this whole culture elevates incompetent writers and other professionals. And I am not even that opposed, for instance I quite liked the professionalism in Everything Everywhere All At Once - which had diverse cast and also some woke messaging, but it at least made sense (although ending was kind of cringe).
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What I found most frustrating about Amazon's 'girlbossifaction' of Galadriel is the undermining of what I believe to be one of the best mythological portrayals of femininity in modern literature (and cinema), something that is increasingly lacking in modern storytelling. This is actually a problem I have with even those who would criticize modern woke media, constantly pointing back to the 80s and their 'true strong female characters' like Sarah Connor and Ellen Ripley. Sarah Connor and Ellen Ripley may be female characters, but they aren't really feminine characters. They're just women inhabiting the archetypical male character. In fairness, they are good characters, but there's nothing really feminine about them other than are relatively aesthetic or superficial sense of 'motherliness' slapped on top.
Galadriel is the feminine archetype, or at least one of the feminine archetypes. She is the embodiment of ethereal beauty, not just in the sense of physical attractiveness, but also in the philosophical sense. She represents purity. This is also true of all the Elves, which in some sense are archetypically feminine as a whole, and Galadriel naturally being the most powerful of them all. We even get to see a glimpse of negative aspects, or the shadow of this archetype when she is tempted by the One Ring, where her desire to rule takes on a feminine twist, best represented by the line "All shall love me and despair!", that she (and the feminine archetype) could use her ethereal beauty to ensnare the will of men to worship her. Her role in the Lord of the Rings is similarly archetypically feminine. She does not play an active, overt role in the story, which is archetypically masculine but nevertheless her role is critically important to the narrative. She is the light out of the darkest hour the Fellowship had yet faced, the death of Gandalf. She provides the characters with much needed support, both material and spiritual, the consequences of which play out fully through the entire trilology. I think this is best represented by Gimli, who despite his fierce hatred of Elves, immediately is entranced and falls in (platonic(?)) love with Galadriel upon seeing her. Gimli is 'tamed' by Galadriel and her femininity. Upon leaving Lothlorien, Gimli asks for a single strand of her hair, to which she gives Gimli three. These strands of hair would become Gimli's most prized processions, and really is the beginning of Gimli's lessening of hatred/prejudice towards the Elves. To be a bit crass about it, this represents the purest and moral form of 'simping'.
Amazon has gotten rid of this wonderous portrayal of femininity and replaced with yet another essentially masculinized female character. Perhaps this is somewhat reflected in the source material. While I am a large LotR fan, I have never really delved into the 'supplementary' material, only sticking to the 'mainline' books (and films). From what I understand, in the Unfinished Tales, Galadriel is somewhat of a more masculine, sword-swinging warrior in her youth who leads a rebellion, before ultimately maturing to the feminine archetype we know later in her life. However, the Unfinished Tales are, in fact, unfinished and a more a jumbled mess of ideas than a coherent story, so I wonder if this was ever Tolkien's intention. Regardless, maybe Amazon with their girlboss Galadriel will have a character arc for her that results in her embracing this pure feminine archetype for her in the end. But I highly doubt it. Even if I believed that the writers for Rings of Power were capable of such good writing, the idea of actually embracing the feminine archetype as positive thing is anathema. Female characters can only be written as archetypically masculine now, usually with an additional, ironic element of snark towards men. This harkens back to some recent comments I've made both here and on the subreddit just before the move, that the female role is dead or dying and all there is left is for women to act like men and compare themselves to men.
If I were writing a LOTR prequel show and had "don't upset the fans" sticky-noted to my monitor, delving into what Tolkien actually had planned for is probably going to be my bible (over fealty to "are we correctly preserving the divine feminine" etc).
Funnily, the Sarah Connors and Ellen Ripleys [1] are more of an 80s-90s picture of "strong female characters", though that view gets regurgitated by the (mostly male) reddit/IMDb film culture -- usually to put down a female lead lauded as strong that may come off as too vulnerable or indirect or reliant on others. There is certainly a painful way to write these characters, most commonly seen in Disney's attempts to discharge its guilt in its live-action remakes [2], but most prestige screenwriting has much better developed and complex view of what strong female characters can be now, particularly in TV and four-quad, family media.
Yeoh's leading role in Everything Everywhere All at Once is probably one of the best characters and is interesting as a direct subversion of the strong female action star. She is given the capability for extreme violence, to shed the family she resents for true independence, and to live a thousand lives where she is successful in all the ways she wished for -- but it doesn't bring any success. She succeeds when she fully embraces the typically feminine virtue of kindness that she finally recognises as expressed, purely, vulnerably, bravely in her husband.
[1] For Alien, at least. In Aliens Ripley's character is more genuinely feminine-coded with both her and the big bad xeno cast as conflicting mother roles.
[2] An issue more of competing interests between fidelity and addressing problematic elements than anything -- either shrug and replicate it or go full on with the inversion. If Cinderella is criticised for being a bit flat and without agency, it'd be a more fun movie to make her and the prince a bit dim but destined for happiness if the godmother can only pull it all off against the odds.
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Its also worth noting that Galadriel was married to Celeborn in the First Age and their daughter Celebrian was born early in the Second Age, but looks like both of them have been retconned from the show. It may be one thing that the Elvish society has evolved beyond human borders of intimacy, and become far more comfortable expressing closeness in a platonic way, but the show doesn't sufficiently establish exactly what kind of relationship Elrond and Galadriel share, its just coming off like he's making googly eyes at her. They might as well be completely different characters then, given that Elrond is married to Celebrian in canon. So what then, Arwen and the Twins are "written out" too?
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Not really. Galadriel, in Tolkein's telling, is a failure as an elf, full of mortal fires and furies and ambitions. Instead of retreating to the west and eternal communion with Eru and the Maiar, she clung on to dominion in Middle Earth, willingly accepting the corrupting power of her ring (which, remember, draws its power from Sauron and The Ring just the same as the Nazgul's rings did) in order to keep Loth Lorien in a state of protected stasis. Her journey in the LotR is the story of finally learning to let go of earthly loves and trust in the underlying goodness of powerlessness and subsumption into communion with God.
Much of that isn't particularly relevant to the narrative being told in LotR. And the feminine archetype doesn't mean she's perfectly good or moral either, that's not what I was talking about. Her desire to to preserve Lothlorien is completely keeping in with her theme of purity, and definitely has aspects of the shadow.
Absolutely, in the context of the narrative of Lord of the Rings, she absolutely does represent femininity. That is not mutually exclusive with other, religious themes.
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I don't think it is any more complex than Amazon simply throwing money at a franchise which is universally known so that it is very likely to draw a large viewership and then producing some generic uninspired series which postures as part of the universally known franchise while pandering to whatever Amazon thinks is the current zeitgeist. On the level of the people who actually produce and write the series there may be some conscious ideological commitment, but on the corporate level where the decision to make this series was actually made, I doubt it is more than just pure indifference to franchise itself and a simple desire to make money.
Also, it is pretty ironic that a multinational tech giant is working with Tolkien material, when Tolkien himself was a bit of a Luddite and a localist.
It's not ironic, they had to wait for the man himself and his son to die to pull this bullshit off.
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But shouldn't they, in theory, make more money if they make something that's remotely high quality? Wouldn't someone be more likely to subscribe or keep their subscription 20 years from when this woke shit expires?
I'll push it further - the people who produced and wrote the serious do have a conscious ideological commitment, and the check writers were too cowardly to make the maximum amount of money possible. They said "OK... we'll make $100m instead of $300m but at least we won't have to have a tough conversation about respecting the source material".
I'd bet against the latter.
My assumption is that writing is hard. Cohesive or compelling writing is harder. "99% of everything is crap." Given a random TV team*, I'm expecting a starting point of mediocrity.
Now add the source material. Compelling worldbuilding, yes. Nail-biting plots and snappy dialogue, no. So they're required from the start to take some sort of liberties. Maybe in the hands of a bold visionary, that means subversion of tropes, detailed intrigue, a stylistic homage. We get a standard hero's journey.
Throw in some romance to hit one crowd, a couple "relatable" characters for others. Marketing is throwing in a demand for one or another actor. Are they running an agenda? Doesn't matter--it's not like the direction is going to conflict. Appeal to the diehard fans with a couple name-drops. Don't worry too much, they'll come back to Middle-Earth for anything. Fill in the stock characterizations and frayed plot threads with luscious set pieces and big-budget CGI, since money is flowing freely.
That's how you get something like this.
* As a side note, the two main writers are both practicing Mormons. Not exactly the first demographic I'd pick for woke ideological capture.
Bezos is only concerned with making money. This show is meant to be the flagship that hooks everyone into paying for a Prime subscription.
I think it's painfully obvious that Payne and McKay have no experience or track record in writing or creating a successful show or movie. They have, what, writing credits on the third reboot Star Trek movie? That's about it, and I have no idea how two guys with nothing to back up "yeah, we did this hit show, that hit movie, etc." could get hired just on the recommendation of J.J. Abrams. How Abrams can manage to get his mucky paws either directly or by proxy all over three beloved fandoms like Star Trek, Star Wars and now Lord of the Rings, in order to mess them up, is another puzzle for the ages.
So they're falling back on standard tropes and slapping an epic fantasy coat of paint on them, as well as borrowing the names of Tolkien characters. Strong Independent Woman who is (spins wheel) motivated by Revenge Quest to avenge (throws dart) her dead brother. Stomps and scowls her way everywhere, because she don't need no stinkin' allies to achieve her aims, she is so omnicompetent she can take down Sauron and his entire army all by her ownsome.
Unless they manage to pull off a heck of a lot of improvement all round in the remaining episodes, there won't be a season two. It's already veering on omnishambles, not omnicompetent.
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It's been my experience that Christians are the worst about wokeness in the racial division.
The racial angle is looking like the weakest criticism of this particular show. See this comment for examples of dumb characterization, Mary Sueing, and blue-tribe audience pandering.
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This is my thought as well.
The LotR appendices were, shockingly, not TV ready. A team applied them to what is by all accounts a fairly standard plot. Much budget was spent on CG and costuming. Casting was more diverse than Peter Jackson’s oeuvre, presumably in an attempt to hit a slightly broader audience.
All pretty vanilla decisions, but because of the brush with diversity, critics have a nice scapegoat.
If they'd spent less money on terrible wargs and more on finding somebody who knew how to write scripts for TV that involved credible dialogue, there would be less to complain about. Their inexperience is not helping them; if they had enough successes under their belt then they could pull off selling the woke stuff. But since their major idea of filling in the gaps in the Second Age seems to be "We have 1 black dwarf and 1 black elf, yay diverse representation!!!!" - no, it's not working.
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Yeah, there's functionally no difference with the Wheel of Time scenario. Or what happened to Percy Jackson. Or what happened to Dark Tower. Or Dragonball: Evolution...
It's simply a matter of magnitude: Tolkien is the most well-known fantasy author (except maybe JKR) and so doing it to his works correspondingly draws more attention
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More than a bit. He once resolved to speak in nothing but old Mercian as a protest for the conversion of the midlands from woods and villages to industry, and the intrusion of radio, television, and other mass-media
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I also find it a bit funny because two of their most popular series recently, Reacher and The Terminal List, were extremely successful acting as straightforward adaptations of their source material with all the problematic themes and messaging included.
Compared to the Jack Ryan TV series which seems to have plopped out two seasons and been largely forgotten, and as I recall it was because hardcore Tom Clancy fans picked apart the show's accuracy to real life and the plausibility of the plots (i.e. the things Tom Clancy was famous for) whilst the casual viewers found it too hard to follow and with too dour a tone.
Turns out, many popular things are popular because of certain elements that can be directly adapted to the screen, and trying to wedge in themes, ideas, characters, etc. that weren't present in the original poses a real risk of crowding out those elements and alienating the audience that actually likes the property.
I watched Reacher and I don't recall much "problematic" about it except in the sense that a huge white man in a mostly white small town was running around solving crimes.
Even then the show threw some "woke" stuff in by talking about how that town treated black inhabitants.
I mean, Reacher goes around on a vigilante rampage beating up on criminals of various stripes, including some PoC. Guns are treated as a generally useful affordance for protection rather than a dangerous item to be feared and regulated. Small town rural life is given an overall positive depiction (corruption by the local elites notwithstanding) and race relations are actually shown to be overall peaceful and genial.
I think by current standards Reacher himself represents many aspects of so-called 'toxic masculinity.' Doesn't talk about his feelings much, solves problems through application of brute force (precisely targeted, though), and demonstrates active contempt for authority figures or, indeed, anyone who tries to reign in his behavior. Oh, he also gets to rescue some damsels in distress at the end there.
Its not like it actively seeks to trangress current year norms, just doesn't pay them any respect, either.
But Reacher does end up being more about dumb entertaining violence than any real message whatsoever, which is actually quite refreshing in it's own right.
Meh, vigilantism is kind of a weird grey area where you can reason from first principles that "wokes" would be set against it but they aren't, necessarily. Super hero movies are hugely popular, including ones like Batman who are more grounded vigilantes with all of the problems that entails.
Vengeance and violence are also allegedly not progressive values but they sell well and with little controversy.
He doesn't talk about his feelings but there're flashbacks that humanize him.
As for brute force: Reacher in the show (and the Tom Cruise movie) uses brute force the way Batman does; after he uses his other advantages of
wealth andatypical intelligence to find the Acceptable Target.In terms of sexual dynamics...not really much there either. Reacher doesn't stick around to raise a family with one woman he does have a sexual relationship with but there's functionally no acrimony and romance doesn't even seem to be that important to the plot of the show.
I'm not saying that no individual "woke" person could take offense - I've seen criticisms of A Quiet Place for allegedly lionizing rural, red state values, whatever that means - but I'm also not surprised that this hasn't boiled up into something more.
Sure, it's not really "woke" I guess but it's also not anti-woke or "problematic" such that it would be one of the juicier targets.
I wouldn't necessarily enjoy it if it were 'anti-woke' either, is the thing. I don't crave entertainment that validates the opposite of everything SJWs believe, I just want entertainment that doesn't either cram SJW values in where they clearly don't fit OR cowtow to SJW sensibilities to the detriment of its own audience, who may or may not care about such things.
That is, I appreciate works that are 'politically neutral' insofar as the story is able to stand on its own and the messaging isn't overtly designed to push a given ideological lens.
I got a similar sense from Top Gun: Maverick. Somehow that film even managed to downplay the RAH-RAH AMERICAN PATRIOTISM angle! It just wanted people to be able to get some positive emotions and thrills in exchange for their money! And audiences have rewarded the hell out of it, in return.
If there's a reason Reacher isn't a juicy target, I suspect it is because it doesn't have the same cultural cachet of, say, Star Wars, Harry Potter, and of course LOTR so it isn't as valuable a vessel to control. If it does breach into wider popularity, not sure if that'll hold.
I'd argue that Rainbow Six is probably the more recognizable Tom Clancy IP, though maybe that's not fair to bring in a franchise that Ubisoft continues to milk to this day.
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A note on the "Jack Ryan" thing, I thought the first season was very solid and went into the second hoping for more, but it was a dumpster fire. I don't know or care what they changed, but it ruined the show for me. Season 2 was just shit.
Tend to agree. The few bits I liked about Season 1 were gone in Season 2.
I don't mind John Krasinski in the role, and you get the sense that they could have made something realistic, tense, and interesting, but I forgot literally everything that happened in Season 2 less than a week after watching it, and have no desire to follow up on it.
Oh wait, I didn't forget the part where they literally turned the government of the Venezuela-analogue country into a RIGHT-WING dictatorship with a heroic left-leaning female candidate as the country's hope for revival.
Jesus.
Oh god, you're giving me flashbacks. YES. They made not-Maduro a conservative. They couldn't even set it in Chile or something. Wild, wild stuff.
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...Yup, that was it for me. Doing it while executing a piss-poor retread of Clear and Present Danger, probably my favorite Clancy story when I was a kid, was just salt in the wound.
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I saw this video on reddit today that explains the phenomenon as "parasitic storytelling" and I've only watched it once, but I'm inclined to agree:
https://youtube.com/watch?v=gFxu3Q71NvE
Basically, the problem would be that people responsible for these shows care first and foremost about using a brand to subvert and attack what they see as some kind of oppressive status quo, and they tend to see the world through surface-level stereotypes.
Nice video. Thanks for linking it as I never would have watched it otherwise.
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It is just the left's version of Christian Movies. Quality, plot, hero's journey, none of that is as important as The Message.
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