zero argument with any of this, and id enjoy it more if it was as racially homogenous as the books.

but would it save the 2 episodes i just watched? would it make it 'good'? and like i said would it outweigh making this a more engaging experience for children who might be happy to see characters that look like them? naw, so fuck it. there are so many things id want fixed in this series ahead of the tokenism.

Yea that's fair. Not a big issue and most of the time I don't care about it. There are worse crimes you can make towards the source material and I don't think it's that important when an adaptive work makes small dents to the original "rules" of the world.

I was semi busy earlier so I just replied to the first post. Tokenism for me is just performative. They "fixed" the show by sprinkling a handful of black people in it, because there's only 2 races in the world we've now achieved maximum diversity. We have the dwarven wife, random black hobbit who no one cares about and the stoic elf in an interracial love affair with less context than most gangbang videos. All there to likely hype up the white MarySue/Karen who does all the things.

So far the first 2 episodes look like something that came out when a shitty algorithm was tasked with remaking the Peter Jackson movies "magic" with a dumbed down modern sensibility.

With the amount of money they burned I assume they didn't intentionally try to feed ammo to casual racists and incels, but I fail to see what else did these "fixes" accomplish. Kids just don't see this shit the same way. I didn't need a white Eddie Murphy, Jackie Chan or Optimus Prime growing up. I didn't care that they spoke in a foreign language. Not really the point, but I learned to understand that language watching them. Random benefits of subtitles. Well maybe it ties to my point, if all the shows were dubbed to Finnish it would have taken a lot longer to learn something new and there are plenty of human shit that's universal. Kids don't need reverse white washing, that's for close-minded adults.

yeah as much as i cling to the hope that some children someplace had a good time because of the diversity id be not at all shocked if they were just like 'uhhh this show sucks so who cares'.

*rubs temple* this fuckin show...

I have no deeper knowledge for Tolkien's state of mind when he created LotR and related works so it would be strange to lay claim for his "wishes". Creation of mythos for Britannia, industrialization and/or the WWI among many that are tossed around.

Contrary to popular belief Anglo-Saxons weren't that numerous or long lasting anywhere. For a while they were the majority of the ruling elite in England and they played their part in reconstructing the past. I can see why someone would be oppose to that. Though I doubt that was the first thing a linguist that had written a cheerful fable had in mind.

What you need to understand about mythology and story telling is that not only are the European tales interconnected, but that wasn't limited by our current boundaries. We share quite a lot with tradition from North-Africa (Babylonia and Egypt foremost), Middle-East (Iran/Persia) and India. Those are the closest "relatives" we're aware of. I don't have a good idea what was lost to various purges in most of Africa/Asia vs just being isolated.

Semitic religions had thing with assimilating/incorporating parts of older tales/characters as a marketing ploy and eradicating what they didn't use.

Oh and my dog in this fight...

https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-34063157

...or how any of the babble relates to a random Amazon show. Hamlet thing is a bit of stretch. Likeliest reason is just that Shakespeare and Lönnrot drew from older tradition. Kalevala was collected in the 19th century. It's based on selected songs/poems where the oldest had been around few thousand years. They were passed from one bard to another. The Finno-Ugric variants of the stories came from Finland, Estonia and Karelia. They share the most similarities with closest trading partners and/or former conquerors/conquered.

Language tends to preserve random things. English weekdays are mostly Scandinavian gods (days devoted to them) and months are Roman gods that are rebranded Greek gods. They go even further and pretty soon we get to the part how intermingled they are. Wednesday is for Woden that's just another name for Odin (there's like 20 different variants). Friday for Frigg (or Freya). Thursday you can likely guess. And Finns use some variation of Scandinavian Gods, but we don't fuck with Roman gods. Also our Friday (Perjantai) might relate to a name of our ruler of gods that's only referred to with pseudonym Ukko (literally means old man), Baltic tradition refers to him as Perkunas/Perkons. We don't have a day for Odin and our bibles rebranded devil as Perkele (classic christian marketing btw). Our wednesday translates to middle of the week. We only have 2 days of the week that don't follow the tradition of our former conquerors that brought Christianity with them.

I'll finish this thought in another post.

ok tolkien is trending on twitter and i gotta say, im learning a few things.

for example...

harfoots arent hobbits. and tolkien described them as.... black.

They were browner than other hobbits. Everyone is free to interpret that however they like, but the running theme is that it was all of them. It didn't go from lily white to non offensive shades of dark mocca. You can basically either aim for Sicilians or North-Africans like Morocco/Egypt.

The Hobbits themselves aren't "discovered" before the third age when they started moving to Middle-Earth. There are 3 races of Hobbits. Harfoots are one of them. We can pick a random race of humans and claim they're not humans. I've heard of this tactic, but it usually comes from the far right.

In the Shire after 2k years or so the 3 races had blended together so much that they were essentially 1 race/breed.

Oh and to the previous point I was trying to make while getting distracted by myself. If someone goes out of their way to write a universally loved story, that took a ridiculous amount of work and incorporated multiple old European (and their ancestors from other continents) tales to create a vast coherent fantasy world, it's fucking rude to piss on it.

You can build upon it. You can expand it. Just be respectful.

Ps. I have no issue with the Catholic parts Tolkien added to it. My dislike is with "corporate" side of Christianity that used to include a lot more stabby-stabby-murder and quite literal thousand fold eradication of historical monuments compared to what Taliban did. Out of all the Semitic Religions Jews might be the only ones that had/have a moderate marketing strategy.

It's been about 3 decades since I read most of the Tolkien things and I'm not that attached to the source material so someone else is better at describing how they felt about the first EP...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=an0s...el=JustSomeGuy

...my biggest gripe was just that it was fucking boring and lazy. To me it felt like it had chosen a side and was feeding political fan service to a world that's divided/dumbeddown to 2 teams. I don't think that's what Tolkien envisioned. LotR was about little people making a difference and corrupting force of power. Human shit since forever, temptation, sacrifice, working towards a common goal, bravery and other random adjectives. Not about a flawless heroine whose biggest problem is how much of a cunt she can be towards everyone around her and still be able use them as cannon fodder for whatever random goal she has chosen today. I think that's how we used to describe villains.

ok i need to say something. im 7:45 into that video. the dude is going off on how galadrial is the only one who can understand that the threat of sauron is a concern 'because vagina'.

thats.. not true. they literally have a discussion where the top elf is like 'we gotta peace this chick out of here because "the wind that can extinguish a flame can also fuel it" or something like that'.

and this is exactly whats frustrating to me about the dialog surrounding this film; its not like the guy making the video is 'wrong' but hes reallllllly bringing those incel vibes with that sort of comment and it sucks because it makes me wonder if the other 99 points hes making are also just him being lazy and resentful.

but that aside and setting aside my own bias against incels, hes absolutely dunking on this shit and now ill finish the rest of the video.

17:30 hes going off on how she doesnt want to go back because of 'the pain in her heart over the war etc etc' and thats not what i took away from that exchange at all, she seemed to me to be saying she knows in her heart that the threat remains.

this guys fucking insufferable tbh.

im tapping out at 18:45, i cant. hes grousing about huge swathes of the book that they cut out and he sounds like every cliche he spent the first 30 seconds defending as valid.

hes right about a lot of things, some of which i pointed out like the disconnects between the scenery and .. everything that was suppose to happen in it.

but when he gets into this shit where hes rattling off 6 elf names and bemoaning how the show cant possibly work without their being woven into the plot and we are literally 2 episodes in and virtually nothing has happened, i mean, he just kinda loses me there.

im looking forward to watching quinn's reviews.

Yea most of the above comments are reasonable. I think there might have been around 2 months of hype related discussion based on random trailers with the usual clickbait oriented back and forth that is the thing to do in YouTube when it comes to monetization. So it's going to be combination of the most scorching review and disappointment. Pyrrhic victory of "I told you so", but the IP you're attached to was mangled pretty brutally.

I have time to waste, but no fucking way am I going to read Silmarillion, random letters and less coherent things than Silmarillion. So I linked a POC that I agree about 80% with.

It's mostly just an issue with having like 20 pages of new source material for a 5 season show and questionable level of creativity. That's most the "suggestions". People are trying to come up with versions of the story where they don't fuck with the lore while dealing with the confines of the material they own rights to.

In a world where Amazon owned the rights to shit they are trying to do it would be mostly elf stuff with a few dorfs. That's the second age. There's some humans and orcs.

I'm guessing the frustration comes from the knowledge of how little Amazon has to work with and they are already combining/cutting characters. Simplifying events etc. type of stuff you would do when you need to edit 1000 pages to a single 8 EP season. But they don't have 1000 pages and so far all their original additions are hollow/shit.

Not too fond of any of the right wing buzzwords in social media and I like them even less when they are right.

PS. How you make a lore appropriate "black" elf is fairly easy. All you need is a black mother from the southern parts of Middle-Earth with a bog standard white elf soldier stationed to that part of the world. Half-elves are a thing in this world. That background gives a level of affinity to humans and a progressive thingy that exists in every single culture known to man. You can be more passing in your surrounding depending on your heritage, but it has never been just a mixed race thing. A variation of the coconut/oreo effect lives to this day among mixed culture/nationality within the same "race".

I found a cure for insomnia on Amazon

I'd love to write a wall of text about the new show but I've literally fallen asleep every time I've tried to watch it.