I assume everyone is in agreement the Wheel of Time remake was a complete wokeastrophe that was dead on arrival, and we will not be seeing a Season 2.

Isn't this what happened with the Marco Polo show a while ago?

Also, my understanding is Gaiman himself is responsible for this rally, and he may be doing it as a bargaining tactic to get more favorable terms for the 2nd season.

4 episodes in the new GoT show is promising. Bit slow paced at the start, but it's ramping up. Someone that liked the first EPs likely did it because those were faithful to the books. Quite a few people that hated the new LotR thing and Wheel of Time have liked the show.

Haven't watched one second of the GoT or Middle Earth series, and am completely fine with that decision. I was a fan of the original source material, but that material was made exactly for someone like me when I consumed it. These new series are targeted towards a much different, bigger audience and I have as much interest in watching them as I did in watching Friends (that is to say zero interest) when it was the biggest show in the world. No biggie. It just is what it is.

I am currently watching Season 2 of Industry which I am finding enjoyable. And I am looking forward to starting Westworld once that is done. I guess I am one of the few people that actually enjoyed Season 3. I like shows that are more adult oriented that ask interesting questions about humans place in the universe. And if the writing and acting is actually good and not a wokeastrophe, I dont even mind woke casting decisions.

I dont want to watch the Middle Earth series because it looks completely uninteresting, independent of my feelings towards there being black hobbits or dwarves.

Amazon had the showrunner for HoD working on Conan before they axed that and sold the IP to Netflix. Conan was supposed to be Amazon's GoT, but instead decided to go with Wheel Of Time for that demo. Atm by most neutral sites HoD is beating RoP in viewers/retention/reviews and costs roughly 1/3 per episode.

Yea the Prince must have been one of those things they kinda forgot.

im not sure if HoD is good, but its sure as shit not bad.

also side note remember when everyone spent dozens and dozens of hours trying to figure out who was The Price Who Was Promised only to find out the showrunners decided to wrap up the series by ignoring he prophesy completely?

i think the RoP equity isnt in merch or syndication, but for establishing amazon prime as a player in the streaming original content battlefield. which is hilarious considering the timing and that amazon prime simply isnt creating compelling much less competitive product.

sorta unrelated; still not a peep about westworld season 5.

thats a bit fucked tbh.

totally, point taken.

I think we're just talking about scale and degree. Once upon on a time when movie stars existed, they used to be the main tool for controversy/hype that was net positive for the associated project. Fan baiting related things were essentially a freeroll in small doses then.

The current argument for RoP is that 90% of the characters are shit and there are zero fucks given for lore because of intentional magic of fan baiting somehow covering the lost viewers. It's not even working in the short run.

You could make an argument in HoD for black Sea Snake existing as a form of fan baiting, but that's not really the scale the term is used for. That's just basic tokenism and freeroll controversy.

Fan baiting is used to explain why 2016 Ghostbusters was as bad as it was. It wasn't net positive. I don't even know if they've covered the box office losses 6 years later. 70m is pretty hard to make back when there's no merchandize to sell and zero interest in the IP.

I severely doubt RoP is ever getting close to breakeven.

so this is an interesting dynamic because "fan baiting" absolutely exists, but not as a principle goal thats directly pursued as much as a welcome side effect of cultural diversification of source material, for example. and i dont mean 'welcome side effect' in any artistically / creatively healthy context.

when a writer creates a world, he doesnt give a shit about fan baiting because if the world he builds is somehow unpleasant, people will put down the book and trash it and it wont sell.

but in the secondary market, aka these endless adaptations of source material, viral impact -> SEO -> monetization is a thing.

basically theres a degree of marketing / salesmanship that goes into these adaptations where yes, if you ewokifiy something, you make it more palatable to undeveloped or underdeveloped brains and gain numbers and traction there but you are also guaranteed that there will be a hundreds of thousands of youtube videos made about how infuriating it is, and for every 1 account netflix or amazon prime loses to accusations of wokeness, they probably gain 3 from people who either support wokeness or dont give a shit and just want something to sit their kids in front of while they sit there trying to figure out how to pay for groceries this week.

so yeah fan baiting really is a net positive at the moment. least of all because the anti-woke crowd probably doesnt have the discretionary income to afford streaming services while the opposite side of the culture wars is willing to spend almost any amount of money to distract themselves from how shit the world is these days.

There's lately been some talk about "fan baiting". A form of manufactured controversy related race/gender bending in remakes/adaptations. At a glance doesn't seem like a real thing.

When it comes monetizing IP corporations aren't exactly subtle about it and that's the one area they're willing to spend money/resources over quality of their products.

Tokenism and bandwagoning the latest social issue have been around in media for decades. In small doses it's essentially free PR. Scorching your own property by ramping it up for a loss just isn't a thing. You would have to believe 17 other retarded conspiracy theories for it to make any sense that corporations were willing to lose money intentionally.

Fairly sure majority of the "proof" can be explained by incompetence. No one is hedging their bets with excess diversity/messaging/randomrightwingbuzzword, because when it comes to making money by "silencing" critics or having a plausible excuse for poor performance, you're simply losing too much for it to function as a hedge. Critics don't matter. Companies produce bombs every year and no one cares. Corporations have the backend numbers, so clearly you're not fooling anyone above you on the ladder. You don't need additional motivation for critics not to shit on your product, because you've already bought the ones you could. And in the case of the "other" side, they don't care about being branded as bigots. In all likelihood it's financially beneficial to them.

My guess for a variety of retarded modernization attempts is just a combination of nepotism, bubbles and just plain stupidity. At least that's usually how things go when there is too much money floating around and paradoxically making shows/movies is insanely expensive. Personally not a big believer in the value of representation when comes to making money. Meaningless gestures on the other hand are cheap. I really hate it when people focus on a random detail and then extrapolate that as a universal law. You can just look at hip-hop and basketball in the US. Can't see too many white faces, but somehow they're still burning the most money. It's like people appreciate merit over almost everything else as a crowd, there's no shortage of individual tards and/or non fans looking to turn everything into identity politics.

Might as well comment this, since I said I wouldn't.

The books target audience for Hobbit was kids, LotR 13+ and Silmarillion essentially no one.

The movies were for kids and that was criticized at the time. The decision/execution to make RoP more appealing to kids is just another decision I don't agree with. I don't think there's a single show/movie that became better with more Ewoks. Well RoP might work better if not-Hobbits were more incoherent and not Hobbits. That way you don't fuck with the lore.

Also when you make shit for kids that shouldn't lower the standards. The opposite is actually true. Obv I'm not easily distracted by the same things as kids are, but there's little bit of a responsibility with things like morals/ethics and how the world functions. I would've had an issue if the gay Teletubby was teaching retarded shit about buoyancy, evolution etc. And by issue I mean changing the channel, note that that was retarded, reflect my own life decisions regarding getting baked at 8am watching a kids tv show because I was too lazy to look for the remote control. Simple plot, repetitive nature, silly dialogue and lack of logic would still be non issues.

Edit: Doubt I need to mention that "gay Teletubby" bit wasn't about morals. It was just something silly retarded people projected on a character in a show meant for toddlers. Making him/her gay in canon would still function as a reasonable shield for all and any criticism that had nothing to do with the sexual orientation of a blob with no sex organs. Now, if there was a say HBO remake of the show where the target audience was 18+, recoloring the characters, adding sex organs/orientation, removing a random character because they had become problematic and adding a Mary Sue as the main character, I would find that fucking weird.

4th EP of HoD was still solid.

Dunno who RoP is made for, but I doubt I care enough to comment it anymore mid season. It really feels like punching down.

There was a first episode of The Serpent Queen. It has something to do with Catherine Medici. It's an interesting subject, but so far they haven't done anything with it. I think the nicest category to put it would be historical fantasy. There's few very good actors in it. It's nice they still get paid.