Yea GRRM does that a lot. Not too fond of excessive torture/rape scenes. I get the vibe that the author likes that stuff a bit too much. There are ways to depict that without falling to horror porn territory and turning other stuff to gore etc.

Also all the pedotastic and incest related stuff. There's plenty of reasons to include that in every medieval:esque world since that really was the norm, but I think you can do it in a few different ways. Mildly related to that, I do get some enjoyment in pitting whatever romance arc RoP comes up with HoD's Uncle/Niece special combo.

its wild how GRRM is like right out in the open putting a spotlight on sex acts/dynamics that American contemporary society considers irredeemably evil and criminal, but somehow hes simply stayed on that horse and said 'yeah check it out tho i dont give a shit what any of you think, this was/is a driving force behind history and dont watch it if you dont like it' and, in what i can only say is a clear testament to his artistry, has managed to build a world in HoD where it plays and has captured an audience of millions and millions and millions in the process.

credit where credits due.

and that dovetails splendidly into your comments about how lopsided and distracting RoP is. i marvel at how many things need to go wrong for a show like RoP to completely whiff on getting me actually interested.

a pyroclastic flow is meters away from engulfing 80% of the principle characters. im supposed to be on the edge of my seat. i do not feel on the edge of my seat. even if they were about to wipe 80% of the characters off the chess board, id not care. but they arent. and im curious to see how they pull that off, not because im invested in the 'hero' characters success but because i simply want to see what the writers think they can get away with next week. thats my entire motivation at this point. im rubbernecking this show one week at a time.

the sheer absolute laziness of not a single principle character dying in a goddamned volcanic firestorm that set horses on fire but miraculously didnt so much as damage anyones fucking hair.

lol wait thats right... somehow the queen is now blind. but no one else is. ok.

also we are over 7 hours into this and the only interesting characters are the 3 weird ass albino death elves and we literally have no idea who or what they are or what they are doing or why.

but watching them fuck up some harfoots was nice. credit where due.

hey so interesting thing about Industry... it does really, really bad numbers right but not only does it cost virtually nothing to produce, but BBC picks up a large part of the tab.

so yeah we might actually get a season 3.

this is the show GRRM wanted to make.

ok so a couple of RoP things.

1) ive never seen a show so ruthlessly spoilered within minutes of it airing. the sauron reveal was literally splashed across every sosh media feed, it was fucking bizarre. and literally it was sites like av club doing it who should know better.

2) honestly just what the fuck is this plot? sauron tricks them into basically inventing magical nukes and then dips without taking his? really?

bonus point

3) holy shit those rings look like they came with a mcdonalds happy meal.

seriously at what point do we start shorting amzn off this nonsense.



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yuuuuuge shoutout to bezos going super loud with the message that his notes to the showrunners were ignored.

hod is absolutely better than got. im sorry i just dont see what they can do in the next hour to fuck up its legacy. got's achilles heal was its inability to stay focused on anything for an entire episode, it always seemed to have half a dozen plates spinning at once. hod feels linear and patient and attentive and articulate where got was really never any of those things for longer than a few minutes.

im very curious to see what sort of decisions they make re how long the 'dance of dragons' will be. obviously there is a mountain of source material to work with but honestly things do get a little dry once we move past the current principles. there are abooooout id say 7 generations (super rough eyeball guestimate) between now and ned stark handing jon snow a direwolf puppy.

and just keeping it a hundo a lot of those kings are fucking boring. but id still like to see them somehow cover the whole 200 year stretch. like lets just do it, fuck it.

also next week is the season finale and i said it before and im saying it again; holy shit tv is a wasteland again after that and i might have to start posting more market oriented content again

HoD just keeps getting better and I'll hazard a guess that the first season is very rewatchable, because they don't waste time. There's almost no filler in the show. They covered 20 years in the first 9 EPs with ease. I have no idea what happened with RoP. Sometimes it was few days and other times months. Erasing not hobbits and not Gandalf would've had no impact to the story. At best those were a shitty setup for S2 payoff.

The greatest merit of RoP is teaching how physics/biology work in the Middle-Earth. I didn't know that's how volcanoes work. I've learned a lot about genetics. Apparently multiculturalism is a the norm for every city/faction/race except orcs. Something that only happened in trade ports and/or a consequence of slavery/mercenaries in the olden times. How it applies to fantasy settings follows the logic that it was that way because it was practical. To this day were fairly tribal, but we have more reasons/benefits for multicultural cities/countries.

I think I originally rated RoP 4/10. 3 points for Tolkien adjacent and 1 point for not being a complete dumpster fire. At this point Tolkien points are at 1 and dumpster fire score is 0.5. So far they've ripped 100 odd lines/scenes from Jackson trilogies. Butchered most of them. What ever original content they've brought to the table has been hilariously retarded. Most of the shots are a combination of CGI/plastic and it shows. The best scenes are the ones where there's no dialogue and preferably no characters. They did ok with backgrounds. The score on it's own is ok.

The biggest mystery box is still how it got released. Someone must have read the scripts. There must have been screenings. How? Was it some random nepotism thing with a mix of emperor's new clothes? Blackmail/extortion? New drugs in the market? Variety of mental illnesses? All of the above?

Also what the fuck is up with using technicolor blue/red in otherwise desaturated scenes? It can't be the only way they know how to draw the eye to relevant characters/objects. Is it somehow possible they successfully assembled a team so consistently mediocre that they were all proud of the end product? Oh, why do they think they're the only ones that watched the Jackson trilogy? We know Celeborn and Isildur are alive.

so far my favorite tidbit about this show by far is the actror playing giladriel having to seek out trauma therapy.

like this feels like what would happen if someone was given a billion dollars to dedicate some random king james bible chapter to film and a dozen writers were like 'ok look job one is to make this weird ass hallucinatory wives tale make sense' and their boss leapt out of his chair and pounded his fist against the table and screamed "ABSOLUTELY NOT".

its sad because that actress is going to need a _lifetime_ of therapy over these reviews which means shes going to be too busy to spit in my mouth.




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A curiously synergistic addition to this thread;

‘THE LORD OF THE RINGS: THE RINGS OF POWER’ Season 2 will have an all-female directing team. This includes returning director Charlotte Brändström as well as Sanaa Hamri (‘The Wheel of Time’) and Louise Hooper (‘The Sandman’).