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Hm, how does this square with the works like The Witcher (2019), Rings of Power (2022), or Willow (2022) seemingly (I'm speculating due to only having watched the 1st 2 seasons of The Witcher out of these - I don't recommend even S1 due to S2 retroactively making it a waste of time) trying to ape GoT's aesthetic and stylings in an apparent effort to replicate its success? The Witcher was in production before GoT's self-immolation (though GoT was pretty clearly in the process of pouring gasoline all over itself and looking for matches for multiple years already), but the other two were being produced after GoT was well established as just a pile of ashes. Also, the sexual content in GoT is more associated with when it used to be good, and so it doesn't seem likely to me that the sexual content was specifically the part of GoT that show runners would avoid while trying to ape other parts of it.
I would be interested in well made adaptations of these, but as they were looking like total failures I avoided them. Looking less GoTy would be a good start for me.
And producers cared abound broad appeal not extreme nerds like me, but AFAIK RoP was failure in all aspects including financial one. Even ACOUP takedown was not interesting, that was like kicking 6 year old on wheelchair.
So for "how does this square with the works" I would say pretty well, at least for RoP.
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Rings of Power copied Game of Thrones because Bezos wanted his very own GoT hit show for the Amazon streaming service. I will lave with my kisses Melkor's scarred lame foot if I believe that Jeffy just wuvs Tolkien's writings so much his life-long dream as a superfan was to produce a show from them.
Nah, he wanted an epic success property based on fantasy novel series, and LOTR was the closest he could get. Since they couldn't literally remake the movies, they did the next best thing, and produced that mess. I'm waiting to hate-watch the second season if it ever gets delivered, because I want to see just how low they can go.
RoP doesn't have any sex scenes (just some coy hinted-at through the transparent clothing demi-nudity), thank all the Valar. Except for the Sauron/Galadriel romance, which eff you, eff the Nazgul-beast you rode in on, and eff those two idiot showrunners for that. If they'd even tried a sex scene out of that, I think my soul would have left my body like the wrathful form of Arien.
What monstrosity is this? Can't the Tolkien estate sue? Given what Christopher Tolkien is like in protecting their world I can't believe he'd be OK with this.
Christopher is gone to be with his parents, it's his idiot (by all accounts) son Simon who is the one in charge of flogging off the family silver. Again, all this is unverified rumour, but he apparently didn't get on with his dad, Christopher and so has a chip on his shoulder about the entire legacy thing; he may not be terribly, terribly bright; and the Amazon behemoth cleverly flattered him by making him some kind of 'adviser' to the entire shebang and shoved sackloads of fivers at him and the estate, et voilà! BIPOC members of every species, the Orcs are the good guys, and Galadriel/Sauron slowburn enemies to lovers except still enemies where he goes off to sulk in Mordor (which, in this version, he didn't even create!) as an incel once she brutally refuses his advances.
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Sadly, Christopher Tolkien died on Jan. 16th, 2020. The silver lining is that he never had to see Amazon's desecration of Middle Earth. RIP to JRRT's first and best editor.
The generation after Chris has been...less protective of their grandfather's literary estate.
Alas. RIP to a real one.
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Rings of Power was doomed to be bad. They wanted to do a prequel, but didn't have the rights to The Silmarillion. So they could use aspects that were implied by other works but had to change details to avoid infringement.
Naturally most showrunners wanted to avoid that whole mess.
Thanks be to Eru Iluvatar they didn't get their claws on the Silmarillion. I'm seeing a lot of rumours about season two, some of which I can't believe, but just imagine if they had done so. Given that they thought they needed to invent a whole stupid-ass* origin story for mithril, they'd have decided to polish up the original. Make it sexy. Make it diverse. What was it Southpark said? Put a chick in it, make it gay, and make it lame?
*Unbelievably stupid, dumb, ridiculous, nonsensical, crappy origin story. Mithril does not need an origin story, except if you decide to write it as magic power metal that is the life force of the Elves because it rips off the concept of yin and yang. Oh, which also requires you to invent a fourth Silmaril - look, I can't even be bothered to finish explaining this, the urge to kill is rising once more in me. No wonder Gil-galad is hard drinking in this version, I'd be hitting the booze too if I had to deliver these lines.
If you want to know why an Elf and a Balrog were fighting over a tree, it's that fourth Silmaril. And it has to be a new, fourth, Silmaril because we damn well know where the three Silmarils ended up, and none of them were in a tree. AAAH, MURDER! MURDERRRRRR! I CRAVE THE BLOOD OF THE SHOWRUNNERS!!!!!
The Silmarillion is my favorite book of all time (though I haven't read it in years now). I'm just kind of baffled now at what you just told me, I knew Rings of Power was bad but not that bad. Why did they have to bring the Silmarils into them at all? Their target audience obviously wasn't Tolkien nerds so what were they hoping to gain by bringing them up at all? The median Rings of Power fan has no idea what the two trees were, or who Feanor and Morgoth were. Meanwhile the median Silmarillion enjoyer avoids the entire series like the plague.
I have to keep one eye on the mods as I try to answer that, because a full and frank appraisal of the two Onlie Begetters will get me into trouble 😁
The selling point originally was that Jeff is a mega huge super-duper Tolkien fan, loves the books even more than he loves banging the hot chick next door, and it was his life's dream to bring a version of the legendarium to the TV screen.
The truth is that Bezos wanted to sell a ton of new Prime subscriptions via the screening service, sign up to see the must-watch shows of the year and now you have your subscription why not stick around and do some shopping?, and to do that he needed a big tentpole show. So he wanted his own Game of Thrones but unhappily they were already making House of the Dragon elsewhere. Where to next for fantasy doorstopper hits? Hey, there's that Tolkien guy and his books that got turned into movies that made a ton of money, Amazon sells massive amounts of merch from all of those. Problem solved!
Problem not solved, as they didn't have the rights to anything except the Lord of the Rings plus the Appendices, and if they tried remaking the movies, the rights holders there would come down on them like a ton of bricks. I think they wanted the Silmarillion but couldn't get the rights. They were hampered by only being able to use the material they had the rights to, so they couldn't make the changes or bring in characters mentioned in other works, so we only get very fleeting glimpses of Valinor and so forth. Instead, they took the book - and more so, the movie - characters and moved them back in time to the Second Age, then merrily pushed on with rewriting Tolkien.
They couldn't have Hobbits, for instance, so they gave us Harfoots instead. No these aren't Hobbits, don't be silly, they're the ancestors of Hobbits! and so on for their changes. Thus, they fell between two stools: they based early marketing on "gonna be so faithful to the writings, gonna tell the story of the Second Age" for the lore nerds, but they also had to do the DEI stuff, with rationales about 'writing the novel Tolkien never wrote' and 'representing the modern world'. After all, this was going to launch the streaming service globally, so they needed non-white characters for overseas audiences. They had to fix Tolkien's diversity problem.
That also meant they had a ready-made excuse when the show was downvoted to Utumno: it was being review-bombed by trolls and toxic white supremacist racist haters of strong women and non-white persons! It wasn't because of trampling on the lore or some really bad story decisions, no it was all racism, sexism, homophobia and whatever Waldreg is cooking up in that barn masquerading as a pub in Tirharad.
The fun (in a grim way) part afterwards was when the same media outlets which had been pouring praise on the show and selling the line that it was all Italian Fascists hating on it, then turned around and went "yeah, it was a bit shit". The one guy I respect on this is Eric Kain, who started out as "give it a chance, it looks good" but after a couple of episodes went "yeah, it's crap" and did entertaining reviews.
Now, to be fair, there was an element of the Italian Fascist sort amongst the criticism, and those who didn't accept that as a different medium television has to make a ton of changes to books, but it certainly was not the whole of it, nor even the majority. But say one word about anything less than awesome, and you're a far-right woman and minority hater, was the reaction.
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There's so much "it gets worse." On the one hand, they slip in references to at least medium-deep lore with no show-internal explanation, so only fairly invested Tolkien fans will even recognize that a point was being made, but on the other hand, you've got major lore-breaking points shoved in your face right and left that are obvious to more casual fans. (Was that a bit of casual flirting between Galadriel and Elrond? Did I just throw up a bit in my mouth?)
Like introducing a fourth Silmaril to support the 'origin' of mithril through philosophical dualism that is completely anathema to Tolkien and his works...and never once mentioning Feanor. Or the famous motto of the Numenoreans, "The sea is always right." Or the infamous teleporting armies problem straight out of GoT S8. Or the greatest smith of the Second Age having to be handheld through the concept of "this is an alloy," and the importance of (fuck me) and I quote "coaxing" metals together instead of "forcing" them.
They actually have disguised-Sauron describe his little "alloy" tip to Celebrimbor as "a gift." That only lands if you know that Sauron is supposed to be disguised as Annatar, the Lord of Gifts, BUT HE ISN'T! Who is that for?! The only thing I'm left with is that the Easter eggs hidden in the show are intended as calculated insults to fans of Tolkien's actual work. No presumption of charity can or should stand against the mountain of contrary evidence.
@FarNearEverywhere is welcome to her claim on the blood of the showrunners, but I would at least like to watch.
That's what had me banging my head off the desk; they throw in little snippets of lore that only the book nerds will get (the set-up for 'is this the Oath of the Feanorians?' in the trailers, the items in the King's tower in Númenor that have you going 'That's Dramborleg!!!!', the Bough of Return on the ships) so they've plainly done the reading, and they're trying to coax us in like laying a trail of breadcrumbs.
And then the cage comes down!
And we get Elrond "I'm nobody important, just the King's speechwriter, which is why I'm not even invited to the banquet" - what? This is the guy who has the blood of a Maia in his veins, the descendant of both the Mortal and Elvish noble houses, someone who if he wanted to cut up rough could lob in a claim for the High Kingship! Then to make up for this, they give all the best bits to him from what Celebrimbor should be doing (so no Celebrimbor and Narvi, now it's Elrond and Durin Jr.) so the greatest smith of the current generation has nothing better to do than wander around in a granny bathrobe and need to be taught about "alloys" by a scruffy Mortal.
Gil-galad at least looks like an Elf, this younger generation with their rebellious short haircuts, but his main purpose is to be pompous and anti-Dwarven.
It takes Galadriel five episodes to remember she has a husband. Maybe. If he's not dead. She has no idea, she was too busy wandering the world for centuries looking for Sauron and couldn't take six months out of that to see if her husband was alive or dead or off fathering kids in that Southland village (who is Theo's dad? we know Mom has an eye for the Elf boys, her and Arondir, the most unsexy, lacking in chemistry, bloodless 'forbidden love' grand romance you could hope to see). Against that, mangling the lore and character of Finrod is a smaller matter.
If I believe the rumours about the second season, they did give in to the loud complaints about WHERE THE ANGBAND IS ANNATAR??? and now we're going to get not one but two Saurons. One as Halbrand still mooning around, one as Annatar (of course they had to cast a British Indian actor for that part, but I don't care so long as he can act, unlike Arondir's guy. He's a RADA grad so maybe?). Possibly three if the wilder rumours are right and he turns up in a third version as pretending to be Celeborn ("honey I'm home, did you miss me?" "remind me again, who are you?").
I wonder if we will ever get to see the second season? They ploughed ahead at the end of season one with "Well it doesn't matter if you hated it, we're already filming the second season, so yah boo to you toxic trolls", but even with that, they may decide to just write it off, use it as a tax loss, and not go ahead with something that isn't looking like it will improve on the first season reception and might indeed sink the streaming service if they make it the flagship show.
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No, it really wasn't. There's a million unexplored areas of Tolkien's world. You have two whole-ass Blue wizards out East, you have an entire age of Numenor doing stuff, you have adventures of Young Aragorn (feat. Young Legolas and already old gandalf).
The problem for Jeffy and his Cunning Plan to sell a shit ton of new Amazon Prime subscriptions - if you do new, original stuff, then who's gonna watch it? Those pathetic Tolkien nerds that you're already planning to paint as toxic fandom trolls when the backlash about your changes hits the fan? Pfft, who wants them?
You want the global movie audience, and what the movie audience is most familiar with are the characters Elrond, Galadriel, Gandalf, the Hobbits, Sauron. So you need those for your show. But you can't remake the movies wholesale, so you do some... re-imagining. Move back in time to when Galadriel was Young Piss'n'Vinegar Glads (ignore that even in the Second Age she was married with a daughter). Shove in Meteor Man (Gandalf, we strongly hint). And Sauron. Make the mystery box thing of "is it him? or him? or them?" about Sauron's secret identity (the showrunners are part of J.J. Abrams pack of second-raters, hence the mystery box).
And thus the entire steaming mess of "we tried ripping off GoT and failed because House of the Dragon ate our lunch".
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I never was going to see it. Now I'm especially not going to see it.
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I can't comment in too much depth as I haven't seen any of them, RoP largely because in the ads it looked like it was aping GoT and I had no interest in it. My understanding is that RoP was a pretty massive failure. Being on the wrong side of the zeitgeist can end that way.
Oh damn those bloody trailers, talk about bait and switch! There's one tiny part where I was going "Are they gonna give us the Oath of the Feanorians????" but nooooo, of course not! That's the really frustrating thing - they clearly dug into the lore, because only book nerds are going to pick up on things like that and that they actually put the Bough of Return on the Númenorean ships, but then they go and give us Super Galadriel One Shots Your Puny Troll and Sauron Just Wants To Do Some Smithing, Dude, Gimme A Job In Your Forge.
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Rings of power was also just bad, with a nonsensical plot, physically implausible stunts, flat characters, and lawd’ dem rangs nigga diversity wrecking suspension of disbelief.
Like I said, I never watched it, based on everything that was said about it. And you have to make a really bad Tolkien adaptation to fail to get me to watch it when I already had a Prime subscription for football. But surely we can draw some reasonable conclusions from the choices made by those who make bad television, as contrasted with those who make good movies. They intentionally benchmarked Game of Thrones, and they flopped so badly that fewer than a third of people who started it finished it. Bad decisions tend to cluster.
If you never watched it, good decision on your part. If you want to know what it was like, this parody series gets it right 😀
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Also the black Elf guy can't act for toffee. I know he's a Wood Elf but that doesn't mean he has to be as wooden as a plank! Black Dwarf lady is a bit too on the nose for Sassy Black Chick, if she toned it down a bit she'd be more bearable. She went Lady Macbeth mode disturbingly fast.
The stunts. Oh my gosh. Galadriel one-shotting an Ice Troll after it's thrown the Useless Male Loser elf-soldiers around like snuff at a wake. Galadriel pretty much in everything - she's so AWESOME GIRL POWA!!! The training sequence in Númenor is very special, though.
Honestly, at this remove, I've kind of stopped being steaming mad and I'm just laughing at it all. Imma just gonna swim the width of the Atlantic home! The knife-ears took our jerbs! Galadriel horsie-riding! Celebrimbor the most useless smith in Noldor history! The dirty little psychopath Harfoots! Oh, and the Magic Hobo who is not Gandalf, we swear (wink, wink) plus the Eminem impersonator servant of Morgoth (we think)! and of course, THE SEA IS ALWAYS RIGHT!
Adar was the best character in it, so of course the one good actor promptly left after the first season and has been recast.
That is, uh, indeed very special. I had to pause 20 seconds in just from the cringe before continuing. I'm not sure I can watch the whole thing. It looks like if someone who has never trained in combat in their life or even watched a martial arts movie decided to write what they imagined a training scene might look like. Which, to be fair, is very common in action scenes in a lot of films and TV shows, where the choreographers clearly believe that making a good fight scene is about people waving their limbs around in flashy ways, rather than making every swing, punch, kick, block, dodge, etc. a meaningful and believable progression of the back and forth to weave the narrative that constitutes a fight. It's just, you'd expect with a billion dollars to play with, they could hire at least a half-decent action choreographer/director.
HEMA armchair analysis:
The swords themselves seem comparable to a Langmesser (long knife), which is a renaissance weapon for which we actually have some primary sources. Sadly I have almost no experience with it. That said, the ones we see on screen are clearly blunt practice or rather stage weapons; steel wasters.
Now, for the fencing, Curly Blackhead takes a perfectly valid two-handed Pflug guard there...only that his sword is about half the length it should be for it to make sense, and even then he's starting out within arm's reach of Mary Sue. And then we get some overcommited thrust, wild swings - all one-handed of course, which makes more sense for such a short sword - and in between a lot of stepping back to start over instead. I'd say it's credible under the assumption that this is the very first time that guy ever picked up a sword.
As for everything that comes later, eh. No point in pretending it makes sense. Every man in that scene is a bumbling idiot who stops cold as soon as she parries, they wind-up for a half a minute each but strike without any force and are effortlessly deflected, nobody follows up with anything after first contact, and they seem to stumble and forget what they're doing all the time.
As for a bunch of newbies getting to fight an experienced fencer - it's fun with a slightly elevated risk of injury, and worthless for actual practice.
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What, you misogynist, you can't suspend your disbelief that tiny Morfydd Clark (playing a character who canonically is a minimum of six feet tall* and should be played by someone like Gwendoline Christie) can beat up a pack of Númenorean teenagers in a back alley crammed with shopkeeper's stalls? 🤣
Considering how useless those teenagers are, who clearly have never held a sword in their lives, and that the famed military powerhouse of Númenor doesn't seem to have such a thing as a barracks or a training ground but has to find the nearest semi-clear space around the city in which to teach them how to fight - what about the navy, do they only skulk around on beaches shouting at the sea or what? - well, it's less unbelievable that the Awesomest General In All Of Middle-Earth could kick their puny mortal asses. She is a knife-ear, after all! We already know they're coming for the Númenoreans' jobs!
*She's described as "man-high", and taking the basis that later Númenorean heights were based on the ranga, which is around 6' 4", that's the ball park figure we're looking at here. So a good foot taller than Morfydd. Gwendoline is 6' 3".
It's not even just because I'm a raging misogynist. Like, I could suspend my disbelief while watching a fantasy series enough to believe that a slender 5' 4" woman could defeat half a dozen people at once, if she's a master warrior and they're all lowly amateurs. That's a common enough trope in martial arts and other combat-based works - usually it involves a clearly powerful and muscular badass, but the world being a fantasy world goes a long way. Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon did it quite well with the tiny Zhang Ziyi making fools out of dozens of men at once. But that's the kind of thing the show needs to establish first by showing us what kinds of supernatural/fantastical abilities she has to overcome these odds that would be literally impossible IRL. And even then, the show needs to meet me halfway by showing her struggling, getting bested here and there for a moment before using her greater experience, skills, abilities, etc. to turn the tables. There's some level of incompetence and intentional "waiting their turn" we can accept in these 1-on-many fights, but the show needs to make an effort in hiding it.
But even before all that, there's the fact that they seem to be starting the training by having these rookies fight this master swordswoman using real weapons. That's like bringing in Michael Jordan to teach basketball to teenagers and throwing them straight away into a one-on-one match against him. Not even where he's pointing out errors in his opponent as they play, but he's just playing to win. Sure, that'd be a fun thing to try at some point in training, most likely as a little showcase for the most confident/best trainees, but as step one? All that would accomplish is showing off just how much better Jordan is than everyone else, and no one would learn anything. Perhaps there could have been some subplot of Galadriel getting no respect as an unproven small foreigner, and using this as a way for her to earn their respect, but that didn't seem to be the setup. I'm no expert in things like combat or training, but even I know enough to tell just how unbelievable the whole scene is, right from the jump. These writers getting paid handsomely in this billion dollar production should be expected at least to do enough research to make it believable to a layman like me.
Gotta say, it's a shame that the GOT curse of its less established actors not being able to transition to proper stardom seems to be in force with Gwendolyn Christie. Someone of her stature could make for a really fun action heroine to watch, and she seemed competent enough in the combat scenes in GOT. The Star Wars sequels completely wasted the opportunity with her character. I wonder if there's an alternate universe where ROP starred her instead; that said, I never got the sense from the Jackson trilogy that Galadriel was supposed to be some badass warrior, so perhaps it wouldn't have been the best fit.
It's such a stupid scene that really. Count the ways it's idiotic.
(1) We need to suddenly train up a bunch of warriors in, like, ten minutes before we set sail on our heroic mission
(2) The reason we need to train up etc. is because they're all volunteers, unlike our navy. At least we have a navy, and they're trained, even if it's mostly to shout at the sea
(3) Since we only have a navy and not an army, we don't gots no place to train up our volunteers
(4) Well, that's what side-streets were made for, right? Not that we're expecting to, like, do any urban fighting but hey, maybe we'll have to liberate a village and so. You know. Knowing how to fight in confined spaces? Yeah, I'm not convinced either
(5) Okay, so you know the raging paranoia roiling the populace about the Elves, especially since this one mouthy bitch landed? Let's do everything to stoke that by suddenly putting that one mouthy bitch in charge of training our army
(6) Speaking of training, she's going to go right from "this is how you hold a sword, pointy end away from you" to "let's try and see who gets first blood, winner gets the promotion, loser gets - well, at least a case of sepsis" in about, ooh, three steps?
(7) Speaking of training part deux, it's going to involve a lot of "am I teaching you to fight or to dance limbo?". If we have to take on the Orcs in the cha-cha, we'll leave them in our dust!
I could go on, but Shad from The Knight's Watch did it better
EDIT: If they had to insist on Galadriel being a Queen Bitch, then yeah, Gwendoline Christie towering over the cowering bunch of squeaking kids going "yes, ma'am" in terror would work. Still, Elendil is supposed to be about seven feet tall, and the actor they got is there mainly to be bossed around by Glads and Miriel (which is a shame, he gives distinct impressions at times that he could actually act in the part if it didn't consist of him being the punching bag for the Girl Bosses as a Useless Male).
EDIT EDIT: No, it is because you're a raging misogynist that you object to their totes cool and awesome display of Glads being a Boss Bitch. They told us so in myriads of media pieces that only toxic trolls objected to the show because it was all about Women! Diversity! Inclusion! Reflecting Our Modern World! 😂 So it can't have anything to do with "This is bloody ridiculous", or common sense, no that's not the real reason at all.
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In the media associated with ROP I saw, the racially diverse hobbits and dwarves seemed rather curious, especially compared to its absence in the Jackson trilogy. I also heard that ROP had the same problem of people teleporting across the continent that plagued the later seasons of GOT (also, apparently at one point Galadriel hops off a ship that's hundreds of miles from nearest land with the plan of just swimming back to shore? And it actually works?). Which points to a very distinct lack of understanding of what contributed to GOT's success. Part of GOT's appeal was in presenting us with a believable medieval fantasy world, which, besides the realpolitik and sudden violence the show was known for, included different peoples from different nations looking, talking, thinking in recognizably distinctive ways. Even stripped of all the costumes, the Dothraki looked different from those from Winterfell and they looked different from those from Dorne, and all that made sense because of the presumed lineage of these cultures and nations. And when people needed to travel a few hundred or thousand miles, this presented real logistical issues that would present challenges to overcome, often in interesting and entertaining ways (IIRC Arya and the Hound running into adventures traveling from King's Landing to just halfway up the continent took a whole season, and it was an absolute blast the whole time!). These aren't things you can just gloss over and expect to still be good.
I wonder if the showrunners just thought that only autistic nerds care about that nerdy shit, and what matters is their ingenious powerful narrative that this franchise is merely being used as a vehicle for delivering. And, arguably, that could have worked! Perhaps it would've pissed off the Tolkien fans, but there are more non-fans than fans, and the world of Middle Earth merely being window dressing for a good story could still have been wildly successful. Unfortunately, from what I've heard, the protagonist, a young Galadriel, ended up being just another aggressive, abrasive, overpowered girlboss whose primary flaw is that everyone else doesn't see how correct she is. Which isn't exactly conducive to a satisfying narrative.
Yeah, if the Numenoreans weren’t slacking on their swim lessons, they’d have made landfall without a hitch.
They put all their planning into ship design.
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Well very fortunately you see, she is picked up by a raft of survivors from a shipwreck, who are then all immediately eaten by a sea monster except for her and Sauron, I mean Halbrand. But the raft of love only is necessary for long enough for Halbrand to once again save her life, then a passing Númenorean ship finds them in the middle of the wide ocean and brings them back to Númenor.
As you can see, total fidelity to the books was paramount for the adapters.
In the confrontation between Adar and Galadriel, the psychopath genocidal torturer is not the Orc-father.
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Oh man I didn't even make it past the first episode. Soooooooo Bad.
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