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ZorbaTHut  1yr ago (text post)   Edited 1yr ago   38207 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 12, 2022

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Right now, you all are probably sick to the back teeth of the discussion about Amazon's "Rings of Power", but I have to talk about this or I'll explode.

I haven't seen episode four yet, it's upcoming over here but it has aired in the US. I looked up some reviews (to see what is safe to skip if I watch this, because there's a lot of filler and not much plot in the episodes as yet) and I couldn't believe what the first one said, so I looked for a second one and yep, it's true.

The scriptwriters for episode four (apparently it's Stephany Folsom and J. D. Payne & Patrick McKay, yes our boys again) are introducing the reasons the Númenoreans don't like Elves. And - wait for it - it's because "they're going to take our jobs!". No, I swear, this is actually it.

Yes, ladies, gentlemen, and those of you who aren't too sure, a direct immigration reference. So I suppose I should take it that Pharazon is Donald Trump surfing to power on a wave of Númenorean populism which is racist and fascists, and Tar-Míriel is Hillary Clinton who is the true Queen from whom he usurps her power.

This episode, by the bye, is called "The Great Wave" because of the nightmare Tar-Míriel has about the great wave coming in to destroy Númenor, and by now it can't come fast enough for me. Excuse me while I run around screaming as though my hair is on fire, because I feel like it.

These - look, I don't want to be insulting about Mormons, but good Lord is it very, very hard to resist dropping one of the "m"s there - blond denizens of the Mountain West have not got one scrap of imagination above the banal. They cannot grapple with the deeper themes of death and immortality that Tolkien wrote into his work. Everything has to be something snatched from American political slogans. The Númenoreans don't envy and hate the Elves for the immortality they cannot have for themselves, it's because dey took er jerbs.

Let's go back to the source, shall we? From a very long and detailed letter of 1951:

The Downfall is partly the result of an inner weakness in Men – consequent, if you will, upon the first Fall (unrecorded in these tales), repented but not finally healed. Reward on earth is more dangerous for men than punishment! The Fall is achieved by the cunning of Sauron in exploiting this weakness. Its central theme is (inevitably, I think, in a story of Men) a Ban, or Prohibition.

The Númenóreans dwell within far sight of the easternmost 'immortal' land, Eressea; and as the only men to speak an Elvish tongue (learned in the days of their Alliance) they are in constant communication with their ancient friends and allies, either in the bliss of Eressea, or in the kingdom of Gilgalad on the shores of Middle-earth. They became thus in appearance, and even in powers of mind, hardly distinguishable from the Elves – but they remained mortal, even though rewarded by a triple, or more than a triple, span of years. Their reward is their undoing – or the means of their temptation. Their long life aids their achievements in art and wisdom, but breeds a possessive attitude to these things, and desire awakes for more time for their enjoyment. Foreseeing this in part, the gods laid a Ban on the Númenóreans from the beginning: they must never sail to Eressëa, nor westward out of sight of their own land. In all other directions they could go as they would. They must not set foot on 'immortal' lands, and so become enamoured of an immortality (within the world), which was against their law, the special doom or gift of Ilúvatar (God), and which their nature could not in fact endure.

There are three phases in their fall from grace. First acquiescence, obedience that is free and willing, though without complete understanding. Then for long they obey unwillingly, murmuring more and more openly. Finally they rebel – and a rift appears between the King's men and rebels, and the small minority of persecuted Faithful.

...In the second stage, the days of Pride and Glory and grudging of the Ban, they begin to seek wealth rather than bliss. The desire to escape death produced a cult of the dead, and they lavished wealth and art on tombs and memorials. They now made settlements on the west-shores, but these became rather strongholds and 'factories' of lords seeking wealth, and the Númenóreans became tax-gatherers carrying off over the sea ever more and more goods in their great ships. The Númenóreans began the forging of arms and engines.

From a letter of 1956:

The real theme for me is about something much more permanent and difficult: Death and Immortality: the mystery of the love of the world in the hearts of a race 'doomed' to leave and seemingly lose it; the anguish in the hearts of a race 'doomed' not to leave it, until its whole evil-aroused story is complete.

I don't know if swearing is allowed in our new realm of liberty and justice for all, but how the fuck do you, self-proclaimed huge Tolkien fans, read the above and come away with "Got it, the rebellion in Númenor was all about demagogues stoking fear of immigrant labour taking native jobs"????

The scriptwriters for episode four (apparently it's Stephany Folsom and J. D. Payne & Patrick McKay, yes our boys again) are introducing the reasons the Númenoreans don't like Elves. And - wait for it - it's because "they're going to take our jobs!". No, I swear, this is actually it.

I just watched it and had a different reading. That line about jobs was one part of the speech, but the broader polemic was much more racialized. The Númenoreans are depicted as racially jealous of the Elves, and this jealously has inspired disloyalty to and suspicion the elves. Furthermore it is heavily foreshadowed that disloyalty to the elves is displeasing to the gods (Valar) and is going to lead to the downfall of the Númenoreans.

I don't think you're giving the writers enough credit, they are smarter than you think. The general theme seems to be anti-racist, but anti-racist in a way that is fairly close to Tolkein's interpretation of his work as you described it. That theme is "racial jealously leads to non-cooperation with more gifted races, which leads to the downfall of the ethnocentric empire." That could be read in multiple ways.

Númenór is Hellenized in the show. Its downfall could harken to the downfall of Old Europe, which was destroyed in Tolkein's day because of its suspicion of the "gifted people" as Tolkein called them. It could also be a warning against anti-racism itself, for drumming up struggle against those more gifted in a way that's self-destructive. In any case, the messaging is more esoteric than criticisms of rote populism.

The general theme seems to be anti-racist

No, it's the Hollywood Liberal Woke Oscars notion of anti-racist. EDIT: I will give them this, they had a nicely multi-cultural all skin tones Númenorean crowd chanting a racist epithet. Progress!

Of course the Númenoreans are jealous of the Elves, that's part of the story. But a line about "The Elves are coming to take our trades"? Elf workers who don't age, sleep or tire? That's a dumb line to include, even if it's all a set-up to let Pharazon slide in with his "Númenor for Númenoreans" speech.

If Taemar (that seems to be the guy's name) is going to rile the crowd up over 'coming over here for our jobs', then he's got Halbrand as his A1 example: a Southlander, a Low Man (and did they swipe that out of Stephen King?) who is right now in jail for stealing Taemar's guild badge in an effort to get into a forge so he could do smithcraft. If he wants to rile them up about the Elves, he's got Galadriel and her "everyone jump when I say so" attitude. The Elves coming over to influence the Queen-Regent, acting as though they are the natural lords and masters of Númenor (and Galadriel didn't help when she said that line in the court about how the Númenoreans owe their island to the Elves) and persuading her to import cheap labour from the Men of Middle-earth - yeah, you could do that.

But Elves as cheap labour replacing the honest working men and women of Númenor? That's not anything at all in Tolkien, and it's not anti-racist in the sense you want it to mean, since Galadriel and every other Elf is white (except Arondir, and he's got white guys being racist to him back at home so that's covered). The writers aren't smart, this is just "hur hur see what we did there, this is MAGA country". Even favourable reviews think the dialogue is clunky.

Tolkein's interpretation of his work as you described it. That theme is "racial jealousy leads to non-cooperation with more gifted races, which leads to the downfall of the ethnocentric empire."

No, Tolkien's theme as he explicitly stated it was:

But they 'fell' again – because of a Ban or prohibition, inevitably. They were forbidden to sail west beyond their own land because they were not allowed to be or try to be 'immortal'; and in this myth the Blessed Realm is represented as still having an actual physical existence as a region of the real world, one which they could have reached by ship, being very great mariners. While obedient, people from the Blessed Realm often visited them, and so their knowledge and arts reached almost an Elvish height.

But the proximity of the Blessed Realm, the very length of their life-span given as a reward, and the increasing delight of life, made them begin to hanker after 'immortality'. They did not break the ban but they begrudged it. And forced east they turned from beneficence in their appearances on the coasts of Middle-earth, to pride, desire of power and wealth. So they came into conflict with Sauron, the lieutenant of the Prime Dark Lord, who had fallen back into evil and was claiming both kingship and godship over Men of Middle-earth. It was on the kingship question that Ar-pharazôn the 13th and mightiest King of Númenor challenged him primarily. His armada that took haven at Umbar was so great, and the Númenóreans at their height so terrible and resplendent, that Sauron's servants deserted him.

So Sauron had recourse to guile. He submitted, and was carried off to Númenor as a prisoner-hostage. But he was of course a 'divine' person (in the terms of this mythology; a lesser member of the race of Valar) and thus far too powerful to be controlled in this way. He steadily got Arpharazôn's mind under his own control, and in the event corrupted many of the Númenóreans, destroyed the conception of Eru, now represented as a mere figment of the Valar or Lords of the West (a fictitious sanction to which they appealed if anyone questioned their rulings), and substituted a Satanist religion with a large temple, the worship of the dispossessed eldest of the Valar (the rebellious Dark Lord of the First Age). He finally induces Arpharazôn, frightened by the approach of old age, to make the greatest of all armadas, and go up with war against the Blessed Realm itself, and wrest it and its 'immortality' into his own hands.

The Valar had no real answer to this monstrous rebellion — for the Children of God were not under their ultimate jurisdiction: they were not allowed to destroy them, or coerce them with any 'divine' display of the powers they held over the physical world. They appealed to God; and a catastrophic 'change of plan' occurred. At the moment that Arpharazôn set foot on the forbidden shore, a rift appeared: Númenor foundered and was utterly overwhelmed; the armada was swallowed up; and the Blessed Realm removed for ever from the circles of the physical world. Thereafter one could sail right round the world and never find it.

This is not anything as simple as "racial jealousy" and not having learned to play nicely together, this is an attempt to change by force the very nature of Mankind which they cannot do, since it is impossible, but the pride and arrogance of Númenor is now so great, and the minds of its people so corrupted by Sauron, that they think they can seize the land of the gods and become gods themselves.

Kadô Zigûrun zabathân unakkha

Êruhînim dubdam ugru-dalad

Ar-Pharazônun azaggara Avalôiyada

Bârim an-Adûn yurahtam dâira sâibêth-mâ Êruvô

azrîya du-phursâ akhâsada...

Anadûnê zîrân hikallaba...

Bawîba dulgî...

balîk hazad an-Nimruzîr azûlada

Agannâlô burôda nênud ...

zâira nênud

adûn izindi batân tâidô ayadda: îdô kâtha batîna lôkhî

Êphalak îdôn Yôzâyan

Êphal êphalak îdôn hi-Akallabêth

The writers aren't smart, this is just "hur hur see what we did there, this is MAGA country".

...

He steadily got Arpharazôn's mind under his own control, and in the event corrupted many of the Númenóreans, destroyed the conception of Eru, now represented as a mere figment of the Valar or Lords of the West (a fictitious sanction to which they appealed if anyone questioned their rulings), and substituted a Satanist religion with a large temple, the worship of the dispossessed eldest of the Valar (the rebellious Dark Lord of the First Age). He finally induces Arpharazôn, frightened by the approach of old age, to make the greatest of all armadas, and go up with war against the Blessed Realm itself, and wrest it and its 'immortality' into his own hands.

Does this mean that Sauron will be Steve Bannon?

I managed to make it to the troll fight the first time I tried watching it which made me cringe so hard I turned it off. I gave it another go and got a few episodes in, but sits firmly in the 'wavers from making me cringe to making me bored' territory.

I think part of the disappointment with Rings of Power is... well, take me. I read Lord of the Rings, which is a fantastic series of books. I actually read it when staying on a friend's property, so far out in the bush they only ran the generator for part of the day. I had a lantern in a bedroom I lit with a match and I read the Lord of the Rings by the light of that lantern, staying up later than I had before in my eight years of life to devour these novels. Absolutely enthralling stuff, and just a really good series of books. I reread them at twenty, and then at thirty-one. They're still great.

Then I watched the movies, which were by no means perfect adaptions but were just amazing movies. The sorts that you look back on and quote and talk about again and again. They hold up to the test of time well (crazy that Fellowship is now over twenty years old!), and even if you weren't a Lord of the Rings fan, the movies were just superb. At eleven I complained about them because they didn't seem to emphasise what the books did, but I think as a production designed to capture the magic of the books and make an entertaining spectacle to watch on-screen they hit the mark as well as was actually possible.

The Rings of Powers just aren't very good. Part of the problem with grand, sweeping declarations and weird philosophy and so on is that there's not a huge amount of middle ground. If these things aren't good, they're cringe. Mediocre fantasy is just cringe fantasy. You can have mediocre comedy where the occasional good joke saves the boring ones, mediocre action films where the gunfights save the awful dialogue, but mediocre fantasy is in the same unfortunately realm as mediocre sci-fi. You're not just trying to sell a story, you're trying to sell a world, and if you can't do that the story falls apart. If you fuck it up enough the whole world falls apart and you're done. It's weird and stupid and feels like someone's 16-year old fanfic. It's cringe.

Conversely, if my friends drag me out to see the latest Marvelman movie, the premise is I'm here to see some explosions, some witty one-liners, some scenes that just look amazing on the big screen, and if I happen to miss or just not care about what's actually happening I'm not going to be too disadvantaged. You can fuck those up some, deliver a mediocre product and it's still fine. It's not great, but eh. It's not particularly good, but I can chew on my popcorn, see the explosions and the punches, snooze through the exposition and still have a fine dinner afterwards where I mention how cool the fire god fighting the evil prison lady was at the end.

It's not great, but I don't feel the need to cringe away from it. Rings of Power (and Wheel of Time as a side note) is cringe. The 'rock or boat', the troll fight, the 'tek our jerbs' moments, it's just a bad TV show. Sure, it does the standard 'wheel out the five most racist trolls, imply these are representative of the entire criticism of the show and then suppress any thoughts that you might be making a hunk of crap with the sweet knowledge that only bigots hate you' move every sub-par show does nowadays, but this is just people who can't make a good show shoehorning their politics in clumsily which annoys people, but people always want to put their worldview in their creations. It's just these people are making bad television to begun with, so why would you expect them to be good at adding in politics subtly?

I don't doubt the showrunners/writers/etc are huge Tolkien fans. Nothing about the Rings of Powers says 'we hate Tolkien and want to make him spin in his grave', it just says 'we're not very good at making television and so we keep fucking it up and creating cringeworthy moment after cringeworthy moment'.

I mean, look at the difference between what is in original Tolkien is giving us and what the showrunners are doing:

Tolkien: There is no God, that is only a fiction by the greedy Lords of the West. We, the Men of Númenor, are so great, so powerful, and so daring that we deserve immortality. Come, let us set sail to seize by the might of our arms the lands of ambrosia and eternal bliss, and pull down those false godlings so that we may take our rightful place as the true gods of Man!

Showrunners: They're taking our jobs!

I love the idea of thousandyear old elves doing menial manual labor for low wages for the purpose of...sending the wages back to Valinor??

It makes absolutely no effin' sense at all. This rabble-rouser (who the show sets up is probably in cahoots with Pharazon to push a populist agenda and oust the Queen, and honestly that's about the most subtle and developed the show gets in how it does it - just shows Pharazon and Rabble-rouser exchanging Significant Glances after Pharazon takes the opportunity to come in and calm things down with a 'reassuring' speech about "Númenor belongs only to Men and we'll keep it that way", then calls for drinks all round and servants with trays of drinks come out and hand around glasses of wine to everyone, so clearly this was all set up in advance) was one of the blacksmiths' guild who got into a punch-up with Halbrand (currently languishing in jail) because Halbrand wanted to starting smithing something, was told he couldn't get into a forge without the guild badge, and stole the badge from Rabble-rouser, hence the punch-up.

So it would make more sense for Rabble-rouser to try and stir up the people of Armenelos about "bringing in Men from Middle-earth to replace us skilled workers" and recount the story of how Halbrand tried to set up as a smith and stole the guild badge, but no. The showrunners (and since they co-wrote the script, if not the greater part of it, I am laying the blame squarely on Payne and McKay) remembered the bit about the King's Men falling out with the Elves, but couldn't work out how to simply transcribe what Tolkien wrote. So they take something out of 2016 presidential election (and maybe, with all the Democrat speechifying still obsessing over Trump, what is current) and give us "Pharazon is setting himself up as head of a populist movement which is racist fascist anti-immigrant just like Donald Trump and MAGA".

Somebody in a comment on Youtube said they expected Pharazon to wear a red hat next, and that is what made me notice that in Pharazon's speech about "Númenor for Númenoreans", he is wearing a red cloak around his blue robes. Subtle!

It is So. Goddamn. Stupid. I'm not quite at the point of clawing at my face, but it's a near thing. As you say - why the hell are Elves going to come in and do this kind of "dey took er jerbs" work? If they want, they can trade with Númenor for high-quality products. If the Elves want, they can push on and colonise all of Middle-earth, because the Men still remaining there are in no position to resist them. There is no reason for them to try and migrate to Númenor to take over as cheap labour.

It's like the only thing the showrunners can understand is "King's Men = populist movement, populist movement = MAGA". I don't know if it's Hollywood Liberal brain rot or what, but it is NOT TOLKIEN.

The Númenoreans were long-lived, prosperous, and as time went by, they wanted to live longer and longer to enjoy their fortunate lives. They saw that Elves were immortal, and gradually they envied them, and fell out of friendship with them, and turned in on themselves and starting tyrannising the lesser Men of Middle-earth, setting up a mini-empire there. Their greatest point of power and achievement was also the point of greatest decadence, and they were seduced and betrayed by Sauron due to their pride, envy, and arrogance.

They did not try to invade Valinor because they were afraid of hordes of tireless, unsleeping Elves who could work day and night manufacturing products to undercut Númenorean wages.

Stupid, stupid, stupid. This is replacing mithril with cheap chrome plate that peels off in no time, the way they are replacing the themes Tolkien set out with their own themes. Bezos got taken for a ride with this production and while I don't regret him getting bilked out of a fortune, I do bitterly regret what they are doing to the work.

They managed to confuse Tolkien's Elves with Santa's Elves.

So not alone will they take the Númenorean jobs, they will then go on to do the most evil of all evil actions....

UNIONISE!!!!! 🤣

Damn it.

This is making me feel guilt for defending the show as apolitical tripe instead of political tripe.

Well, you couldn't have known they were going to pull this. Nobody could have known. I was wondering how they were going to introduce the King's Men and Pharazon, and I never expected this level of nonsense.

Pharazon, via his mouthpiece, is stirring up the populace to hate and fear the Elves - because the Elves are going to undercut their wages and replace them in not alone skilled but semi-skilled work. The Elves are not going to come in as their lords and masters (which at least would make some sort of sense as an accusation, given the entitled, patronising and bitchy attitude Galadriel has shown so far, making demands and throwing around orders and threats to the queen herself), they are going to come in as smiths and cooks and house servants. Your son won't be able to get a job swabbing the decks because an Elf will be doing it! Your daughter can't apprentice as a pastry-chef because an Elf will get there first!

What in the unfathomable depths of Utumno is this meant to be????? Are Payne and McKay really high-fiving each other about what a brilliant, subtle, Aaron Sorkin-style political commentary script they wrote?

Wow, even Brannon Braga was able to make this dynamic mostly work in Star Trek Enterprise between the humans and Vulcans (though proceeding on the opposite narrative arc ). Where are they finding these writers?

Do not mention the abhorred name of Braga to these ears. I hated what they did with the Vulcans in "Enterprise". Sucks to be me, because I never seem to sufficiently lower my expectations. I thought they couldn't go worse than "Enterprise" , and then they gave me Disco.

I thought this was going to be dumb, but basic dumb. Not this kind of "this is so dumb, it reduced my IQ by 50 points because this is like saying sheep are carnivores and strychnine is a healthy diet drink".

Well, you couldn't have known they were going to pull this. Nobody could have known.

I dunno, man. I can think of a lot of people who knew Rings of Power was going to be trash and said so quite clearly.

They don't come away with that, they're wearing Tolkien as a skinsuit prancing around demanding respect.

It was killed and gut long before this.

Just saw it, and I was covering my head in embarassment.

The worst thing is that every "normie" aound me is acclaiming this episode as "the best"

Unreal, am I living in a different world?

It's the best of the four, because (1) no Harfoots (2) something actually happens for once and (3) the visual effects of Tar-Míriel's dream really are impressive.

The Adar character might even be faintly intriguing. I had a wild thought that it might be Maeglin, who in canon has been killed, but this lot have already shown they don't care for canon. But I don't trust these bozos to be able to do anything right, so I think they'll just waste the opportunity.

So by comparison with the other episodes, it's the best. That doesn't mean much, just that it's fresh garbage instead of week-old garbage.

I don't watch the show but I saw a scene from this episode posted:

https://twitter.com/ZeroTwoMexicana/status/1570873687603281924

This is embarrassingly bad on every level.

The dialogue is horrible from a writing perspective, besides sounding unnatural. "Elf-lover" is the best they could come up with? It's not even a proper slur.

Acting is stupidly wooden, nobody seems actually engaged in this scene, not even the extras. The crowd starts chanting inexplicably but without an ounce of actual enthusiasm.

I have to assume this was a brief establishing scene that they crammed in there to make it clear who the bad guys are.

The set and costumes even seem like a fucking afterthought. These are tradesmen... all wearing spotless clothes without a single streak of dirt, grime, or paint to be seen?

And of course, WHO THE FUCK WATCHES HIGH FANTASY WANTING HAM-HANDED PLOTS ABOUT IMMIGRATION? Or is it about automation? Workers that don't tire, don't sleep, and don't age? The only real-world parallel to that is robots.

I think, I honestly do think, the "Elf-lover" chant is meant to evoke both the slur of "n-word lover" and "Lock Her Up".

I have no idea if Payne and McKay (whom from now on out I will refer to as The Ormons) decided on this all on their very ownsome, or if Bezos is meddling from on high asking for particular themes.

They may as well have a scene of a march for "Harris 2024" while they're at it. Indeed, I wonder if The Ormons have cast a black woman as Tar-Míriel for that very reason - ooh, what Strong Woman should we vote for as First Female Ever, can anyone give us a clue? I didn't think before that there was any political reason behind her casting, but I'm starting to think that now.

Is it really, really, really so hard to write Númenor as rich, powerful, gifted - and decadent? That it enters into the battle against Sauron for its own interests and not out of any alliance with the Men and Elves of Middle-earth? Or do The Ormons think of Númenor and their own Hollywood bubble as one and the same - the pinnacle of human achievement and creativity, so they can't be the bad guys in any way at all, and so the baddies come from outside, the redneck flyover states?

I don't want to start reading politics into this show. But it's getting harder and harder to assume good faith on their part.

FWIW I think "elf-lover" is more evocative of "jew-lover".

Fully repurposable slur. Insert your oppressed minority of choice in place of "elf".

blond denizens of the Mountain West have not got one scrap of imagination above the banal.

But boy do they make good FBI agents.

I suppose the only thing I can say is that of course they are pets and protegés of J.J. Abrams, who got them the job. Of course they are. Is there nothing J.J. cannot tarnish with his reverse Midas touch?

Are Mormons bad at scriptwriting, or just good at conscientiously following a script? Who makes decisions about the particulars of the ideological slant, really? Ultimately the power over the show lies with Amazon Prime execs I guess.

Can we talk about Sandman instead? Anyone watching that?

Or how about Cobra Kai? Though that one I admit is a bit dimwitted and downscale.

Cobra Kai is fun, not brainless, and sincere, and moreover it has competent storytelling and characterisation, which is an absolute breath of fresh air by the standards of a lot of current "rebooted" franchises.

Sandman was about as good as a TV adaptation could be, race-casting notwithstanding.

I enjoyed Cobra Kai at first for its unabashed 80s cheese, but after five seasons the cheese is starting to stink.

Cobra Kai fine but it said 95% of what it needed to say in the first season.

I thought Sandman was good, but a lot of the style has been pretty inevitably lost since there are not rotating artists like in the comics. I don't think the series truly starts transcending until things get nuts in the second half of the comics series, but they certainly pulled off the Corinthian climax and entire convention very well.

For the culture war adjacent points, I thought recasting of race and gender was a mixed bag. Death was fine; she was a 90s goth girl in the 90s, but the show is no longer in the 90s. Lucifer... I am not sure I really buy and will have to see if they pull off in later seasons; Lucifer in the show Lucifer (initially, heavily inspired by Sandman) was very well done, imo. I don't love that actress from Orange is the New Black in general, so I don't like that casting but don't think it was badly miscast. Overall, however, I would say that all Dream denizens (Cain, Abel, Matthew, etc.) lacked personality and depth.

only watched a couple episodes of cobra kai season 5, but its seems to have continued the trend of going totally off the rails. there are plenty of crappy teen high school drama shows, it was much better when it focused on johnny, miguel, and robby.

Haven't started season 5 but I've mostly enjoyed the rest minus season 2. Johnny and Daniel are both surprisingly positive portrayals of men that you don't see much of these days so I give it a lot of credit for that.

Yea. Everything is such an ensemble cast now. To tie this into politics, sure there's more minority representation but no given minority feels particularly represented. Everyone's getting drowned out by too many egos in the pot.

These - look, I don't want to be insulting about Mormons, but good Lord is it very, very hard to resist dropping one of the "m"s there - blond denizens of the Mountain West have not got one scrap of imagination above the banal.

...yeah, I'm going to have to second @RaiderOfALostTusken here. There are many things Mormons can be accused of, but having no sci-fi/fantasy chops just isn't one of them. Orson Scott Card is one of the sci-fi greats; Brandon Sanderson is one of the most successful and imaginative fantasy writers around. Twilight has a bad reputation, but I'll cop to thoroughly enjoying Stephanie Meyer's The Host. I've never paid much attention to Battlestar Galactica, but it seems close to the core of space-faring sci-fi classics. The list of successful, popular LDS sci-fi/fantasy writers drags on: Tracy Hickman, Shannon Hale, Brandon Mull, James Dashner, so forth. None of these rely on tired American political slogans to define their work.

I have no interest in or particular knowledge of Rings of Power, but I see very little to suggest Mormonism is the cause of its triteness. You'll have to look elsewhere for that.

Ooops, Brandon Sanderson is one of the writers I dislike, because of his style. It's very - functional prose, I suppose is the best way I can describe it. Same with Orson Scott Card, whose work I was never able to get into - to this day, I haven't read "Ender's Game", though I have read some other things by him.

Sanderson's problem, for me, or if you prefer the problem I have with his writing, is the "baseball stats" problem. So much work going into creating the magic system down to the last decimal point, and then once that is done, the writing doesn't rise above it.

I haven't read "Twilight" or anything of that series, nor seen the movies, but I did enjoy the suggestion that the Italian vampires are meant to be the Catholic Church or that Meyer is writing a Mormon version of vampirism in distinction to the previously Catholicism-influenced version.

As for the other writers you cite, I haven't heard of them.

To be more serious, I do think that fundamentally, Tolkien did have Catholic understanding of the world he created, and that as Mormons Payne and McKay do not share this or understand it, so they can't 'translate' the work. They can take the surface elements, but so far I think they're going on the movie versions (so we get Elrond and Dain as copies of Legolas and Gimli, complete with excruciating 'banter'), and where the movies can't cover them (as with 'why are Númenoreans pissed off with Elves?') going for the weaker, secular, political understanding - and of course, being Americans, they go with the American political situation.

Wasn't Sandy Petersen, designer for Doom 2 and Quake, also a Mormon?

Yes, he is. Also the designer of the original Call of Cthulhu RPG.

In The Expanse, the mormons are the ones to fund and launch a generation ship.

I wonder if there isn't a vault full of scripts somewhere entitled things like "High Fantasy Series #3" or "Sci-Fi Series #91" that are wheeled out whenever a big studio acquires the rights to a famous name, and the plot and characters of that script are retroactively wrangled to fit that script. It would explain whatever paramount did their rendition of Halo, in which the Arbiter is not an alien prophet but instead John Halo's human love interest and a heaping of necessary space politics so vast it puts the Phantom Menace to shame.

It does make one think, doesn't it?

I'm leaning towards "in the absence of a visionary, Sturgeon's law takes over." The big-budget default isn't carefully adapting themes and stylistic choices; it's regurgitating a bunch of stuff the writers once saw on TV, then filtering the resulting slurry through some focus groups.

I would like to actually read this vault of stories, or at least the summaries. Kinda wish it actually existed.

Definitely happens in one off scenarios. District 9 was originally gonna be a halo movie. The giant robot spider in wild wild west has an amusing story behind it of one of the director types being desperate for a giant spider in his next movie (it was originally gonna be a super hero movie I think). Kevin James tells the story on a panel at a con.

The giant mechanical spider in Wild Wild West was a calling card of producer Jon Peters, and was called to appear in not one, but two comic book adaptations that fell through. The first was the mythical "Superman Lives" which was set to star Nicholas Cage as Superman and Christopher Walken as Brainiac, culminating in Superman fighting a giant spider. That was in the early 90s. Then in the early 2000s, he attempted to produce a legendarily bad adaptation of The Sandman, that collapsed when Neil Gaiman leaked the proposed script online and it was ridiculed into oblivion.

The first was the mythical "Superman Lives" which was set to star Nicholas Cage as Superman and Christopher Walken as Brainiac, culminating in Superman fighting a giant spider.

That we didn't get that is an absolute crime, I say.

No lie, I'd watch Christopher Walken as Brainiac, but Cage as Superman? I can't believe that man ever saw so much as a lawn, let alone that he was raised as a farmer's son in Nowheresville. He's pure Big City. Now, as a gender-swapped Lois Lane, that I could believe.

Cage was well cast in The Family Man for just that reason, IMO.

That's what happened with Starship Troopers. They had a generic sci Fi action script that nobody wanted to make so they bought the rights to the book and changed a few details to match.

All I wanted from that was 90 minutes of hot actors shooting bugs while high tempo grunge played on, and I got an insane satire of a book I later found I really liked.

I saw the idea floated, possibly here, that they had just repackaged work done on a Dragon Age series.

Ok I have no knowledge of this show, but you mentioned my people - are these people members? They don't have wikipedia pages. If they're putting woke stuff in shows, it may be possible that like many a show-biz member, they've fully been subsumed into the successor ideology and calling them "mormon" is a stretch.

I only quibble (just a bit!), because my tradition has produced the Battlestar Galactica guy, Orson Scott Card, Brandon Sanderson (is he good? Feels like people like him). I'll admit to having little knowledge of fantasy or sci fi literature but at least my impression was that we typically punched decently well above our weight class, perhaps not so

I'm trying very hard to avoid religious controversy here, but there has been an amount of publicity around Payne and McKay as Mormons. I read one article about Payne, and Googling brings this one up about Payne and his wife, in what looks like an official Mormon website.

There's nothing about McKay, so he is either lapsed or isn't a Mormon.

Their writing so far for the show has been pedestrian, and when they try to go profound and meaningful, or copy what they think is Tolkien's high style, it comes out like a lead balloon. The difference between stones and ships? Fermenting wine? Dogs and the moon?

It's tushery, as in this extract from a letter of Tolkien; they're trying to copy, without really understanding, a particular style:

The proper use of 'tushery' is to apply it to the kind of bogus 'medieval' stuff which attempts (without knowledge) to give a supposed temporal colour with expletives, such as tush, pish, zounds, marry, and the like. But a real archaic English is far more terse than modern; also many of things said could not be said in our slack and often frivolous idiom.

...I am sorry to find you affected by the extraordinary 20th.C. delusion that its usages per se and simply as 'contemporary' – irrespective of whether they are terser, more vivid (or even nobler!) – have some peculiar validity, above those of all other times, so that not to use them (even when quite unsuitable in tone) is a solecism, a gaffe, a thing at which one's friends shudder or feel hot in the collar. Shake yourself out of this parochialism of time! Also (not to be too donnish) learn to discriminate between the bogus and genuine antique – as you would if you hoped not to be cheated by a dealer!

Twilight author is Mormon too.

If they're putting woke stuff in shows, it may be possible that like many a show-biz member, they've fully been subsumed into the successor ideology and calling them "mormon" is a stretch.

It seems far more likely to me that their personal beliefs had little to do with it and they wrote in whatever Amazon's audience analysis told them they needed to.

I think you're right except it was more likely an analysis of Amazon's executives than their audience.

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