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.

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.

I don't really have an ability for immersion anymore so I just dislike tokenism for more technical/theoretical reasons. I view it the same way how I see participation trophies. Cheap, lazy, empty carb happy meal slosh with no sustainability. You rarely learn anything from winning/succeeding. Almost everything you learn comes from losses and failure. Struggle can build character, the sting of failure is a pretty good Pavlovian trigger and without it success is demeaned.

Tolkien's world does have non Caucasian human races. They just weren't the main focus of a story centered around Northern European mythology.

Hobbits have been turned into Ewoks of Middle-Earth. The time period that's covered in Rings of whatever either didn't have Hobbits or they weren't part of the stories (can't remember). Anyways they were mostly nomadic and not even remotely ethnically diverse. There are some very practical reasons for it. Out of modern day nomadic tribes kale/romani/gypsies (not really synonymous. but share ancestry) tells that story and shows how it works out in 1500 years.

And then there's Elves/Dwarfs. Melanin is predominantly a protection mechanism for UV rays. Concentration related to genes requires the threat and time. Time is measured in generations when it comes to evolution. Lack of threat means there's no pressure for natural selection and longevity means that evolutionary changes would take forever (in years).

so, heres the thing i noticed more in season 2;

the writing is cringe and the pacing is terrible.

the whole shit with the dwarf king and his little box and the slow zoom towards whatever it is and then cutting away like its the suitcase in pulp fiction?

thats not clever thats very very very cringe.

because the thing is, zero energy has been spent priming me to give a shit whats in the kings fucking box. i dont care. no one is making me care about anything.

there are so many opportunities for them to create a story *in* the world theyve built but it never really happens, its either incredibly expensive looking CGI sweeps or absolutely grueling dialog that never actually seems to propel the plot.

we never have anything happen _in_ the gorgeous breath taking scenery and when there is a conversation taking place in it, eg the elves staring at the carving of her brother and talking, theres nothing really accomplished by it.

oh also the relentless map transitions are literally the new star wars wipe transitions.

ep 1 of lotr in the bag:

right now the only thing thats pissing me off about lotr is the goddamned hobbits. christ i hate hobbits.

the race stuff is a minor distraction but if some kids are watching this and connecting with it because they feel represented, i mean, thats kinda wholesome. i fuck with that.

like of all the genres where this sort of inclusion should be embraced, this is fucking well it.

also holy shit wowwwww does this make HoD look bad. i mean realllllllllly. this shit makes HoD look like community fucking theater.

ok i havent watched yet but will tonight because apparently the shills have clocked out and now the real reviews are coming and my brothers in christ they are bad.

Well first 2 episodes of Rings of whatever are out. I have no idea what's the purpose of the first episode. Or more precisely how the hell can they make it so boring. It ticks the boxes for introducing characters, the world, background and few random action scenes without any context, but I don't really care about any of it because I have no connection to any of it.

Second episode sucks less. I don't know why you couldn't just edit the two episodes in a way that focuses in fewer characters and places at a time. That way you have actual stories where episodes function in isolation. How chapters work in written format. You tend to have a reason to keep turning pages, because stuff happens to people you're becoming familiar with. You form a connection and that gives weight to events.

Now you can obv create standalone scenes where you don't "know" any of the characters beforehand, but that requires a little bit more work (a lot more work actually) and even then they tend to serve a purpose. Good prologues are like that. Say how The Dark Knight starts off. It establishes The Joker, ties into the future events and it's a really enjoyable scene. Or how GoT starts off, it's suspenseful on it's own and it creates an ominous evil presence. It gives a tangible meaning to "winter is coming", no matter how badly they butchered it in the future. They even carry the lone survivor to the 3rd scene where they start introducing the Starks.

Meh oh well it's not like there's too much things to watch. I'll just mentally erase things that are casually retarded. Token black people, zero fucks given to established lore/canon and how the show works around IP limitations.

“We have the rights solely to The Fellowship of the Ring, The Two Towers, The Return of the King, the appendices, and The Hobbit,” Payne says. “And that is it. We do not have the rights to The Silmarillion, Unfinished Tales, The History of Middle-earth, or any of those other books.”

also im kinda skeptical but a lot of the high profile reviews for LOTR are absolutely superlative, and the guardian just basically said it exposes dragons as amateurish and cheap garbage.

one of the 2 showrunners for Dragons just bailed on season 2.

in what may be more evidence that westworld season 5 might not be happening, tessa thompson is filming a Neill Blomkamp space thriller .

https://www.avclub.com/tessa-thompso...ash-1849469233

HoD season 2 greenlit.

no news on westworld season 5.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x8UAUAuKNcU

i was so disgusted with HoD that i just decided to say fuck it and read the (many many) wiki pages about the very shitty books GRRM wrote about the targaryans and my friend we are in for a fucking slog. 80% of the budget is going to go towards CGI dragons that are somehow less convincing than Elden Ring bosses, and a big chunk of the rest will likely go towards 'intimacy coaches' for what i absolutely guarantee will be hours of matt smith fucking his various whores.

we have about 150 years worth of bullshit castle intrigue to put up with before rhaegor is born and then another 20 years before he does anything interesting.

on the VR front i hear some interesting things about PS5 VR... :

https://www.cnet.com/tech/gaming/pla...e-know-so-far/

obviously the big issue is and has always been that everything VR looks like total ass. the solution they are rolling with is to render what youre looking at and the area around it in a higher resolution. tbh it sounds like snakeoil to me, people dont want half measures at this point. but im certainly interested.

i cant explain why there isnt a legitimate best-in-slot PC VR headset in the scrum, except perhaps that there really isnt a best-in-slot VR platform for VR devs to gravitate towards.

i think meta is actually scaring VC away from VR at this point because the feedback is universally negative and rightly so.

Everything I've seen about LOTR looks like a shitshow. They have rights to almost nothing and they decided the fuck up what little they had.

The first episode of the first of the 20 in production GoT spinoffs looks a like failed paint by numbers script. Like they tried to tick the boxes to relive the magic, but they either chose the wrong boxes or failed to hit the box. No one really expected anything original from this project, but for the money they shot off this doesn't seem promising. I recognized a single actor and I have no idea where the money went. It can't be just the license.

And then regarding earlier discussions, WTF is up VR. How hard can it be to make a semi functional PC VR setup for $500. I assume some of the costs for PS VR was baked into the games (since that's how consoles mostly work), but that was years ago. At this point there should be a decent standalone setup with a reasonable price point.