Ah maybe 4/10. Say you get 3 points for being Tolkien adjacent and 1 point for not being a complete dumpster fire. I have reasonably high standards for dumpster fires.

I don't know if it qualifies as beating a dead horse, if you come up with "new" ways to do that because you kinda forgot 4/5 ways to do that because you spent your time with your personal favorites on the first go around?

With Sandman I think they could have done a better job and for the most part I think the worst decisions came from Netflix. For all it's flaws I think I came with 8/10 for the whole show. It wasn't a bad adaptation. For me most of the gender/race swaps seemed unnecessary/detrimental. In the scope of the first season there was an episode with nothing but black people that was cut of the show and to a degree you need it for the second season. WTF is up with that? And I just don't see the +EV of creating a wealthy black family in late 19th century Britain like it wasn't a big deal for the sake of representation. To me struggle has a meaning. Sanitizing history is erasing very literal blood that was shed for an even moderate economic/social standing a century later.

There was fuckery with the power balance of characters. That fucks with weight/gravitas of decisions related to the second season, And 20 odd random deviations that were not done for common reasons when adapting stuff. Maybe when we're talking about Netflix I don't have to care about problems down the line, because everything decent gets canceled. Something about streaming services losing the free pass to make 4 Waterworlds every year when corporations can't stay in the red forever.

Anyways we could say that rings of whatever can still have a redemption arc. I think a variation of that was used when the marketing started for the show. Well we've seen 2 episodes and nothing that was said before has been proven wrong. It's really really bad still. It's also bad in ways that are nearly impossible to fix later. Fixation on pilot episodes relates to how safe of a bet that is. Out of all the shows in the last 5 years I can remember I can only think of Peacemaker that grew on me and the latest season of Westworld. The 3rd season of Westworld was an abomination. I did not see way to save that. There's also Vikings and Expansion for older shows that I didn't instantly warm up to.

The problem with rings of whatever is that after 2 episodes I don't see any route to kinda decent and/or sorta ok. Writing is hideous, pacing is whatever, there's maybe 2 actors that are just not only clocking in and there's not a single character I care about. I'm awful at writing dialogue, but It would never cross my mind to keep repeating retarded banalities in 3 different ways in the same scene. There's nothing inherently wrong with more digital or soundstage oriented ways of doing things. The catch is that it takes a lot more work to do it right. Dune and Euphoria did it well. Depending on the scene, effects and dozen things that I can't think of now it's usually cheaper to just do things digitally. It's not really uncanny valley variation issue, but analog on site stuff you kinda get light/shadow and focus related things for free. Likely few other things I can't think of now, but bouncing light is a bitch and replicating how our visual perception functions is pretty hard to balance.

Ps. Quinn liked the first 2 EPs of HoD. Dunno if he was wasted enough and/or just enjoying the return to GoT related world that wasn't a complete abomination with some combination of being more familiar with the source material.

Pps. I'd still give 5/10 for the first 2 EPs for the ring thingie. It's still Tolkien adjacent and maybe the meteor dude is one of the blue wizards. Stoic elf dude is pretty decent depiction of certain lore appropriate elves. Most of the elves aren't going out of their way to outgay Legolas and so far there's only been one retarded elven action scene. Also a reasonable amount of comedic relief hobbit/dwarf hijinks or I've become better at instantly forgetting those.

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.

I found a cure for insomnia on Amazon

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".

im looking forward to watching quinn's reviews.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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...