LOTR: The Rings Of Power Series

[Ghost In The Machine]

His Arwen was such a loser.

Arwen is a girl with a choice between

A; Being Elronds supernumerary unmarried daughter for eternity.

B: Getting married, being Queen, starting a dynasty, and dying gracefully.

Guess which JRRT wants her to choose? Escape from immortality is one of his favourite themes.

Anyhow

https://kotaku.com/amazon-lord-of-the-rings-of-power-series-flop-expensive-1850296353

What did I say??

Yes. In The Silmarillion, mortality is spun as Iluvatar (God's) "gift for men". Elves never truly die but go to the Halls of Mandos only to then reappear, refreshed, later on, when they feel like it. But mortals get to die and then go to something wonderful elves can't even guess at.

Elrond and his bro, for them who don't know the Silmarillion, are half elven so get to choose whether to be elves with an elven lifespan or men. Elrond's bro chooses to be mortal, although as a man of Numenor, gets a longer lifespan than most of us, but still... mortal.

For Arwen, choosing a mortal life is only what her uncle did before her (and her ancestor, Luthien) and she gets the bonus therefore, of the "gift of men" (death). Not as terrible as it first seems, to choose the mortal life, in other words.

Incidentally to PJ's strong woman stuff - there is no shortage of strong women in The Silmarillion. Time and again, they outwit, outperform or otherwise get the better of men. Interesting that Tolkien is now perceived to have written passive women when he totally didn't.

 

[Ghost In The Machine]

Tricky call.
To take on the criticism, they can't keep up the narrative that they were just haters. However, most of said criticism wasn't about production, or even the acting, but about the poor quality of writing.

Yes, they seem to have tried to gaslight the disapproving viewers. I felt pissed off as I was one who welcomed a multicultural cast, strong female roles, etc - but loathed what the producers/showrunners/writers did to Middle-earth. They don't get to call us racist/sexist just because we think the script/casting (of Galadriel, in most critics' cases) is awful.

 

[Stormkhan]

One suggestion a critic made was if they wanted ethnic diversity, they should've made one people (such as Numenorians) one ethnic group, and other regional people another. Because they've mixed ethnic actors in every race, if you don't pay attention or don't know the setting, it's hard to tell which group is which!
One idea which might've been controversial but logical would've been making dwarves nordic/pale and elves dark-skinned. This would delineate the races based on genetic requirements for increased melanin.

 

[Ghost In The Machine]

One suggestion a critic made was if they wanted ethnic diversity, they should've made one people (such as Numenorians) one ethnic group, and other regional people another. Because they've mixed ethnic actors in every race, if you don't pay attention or don't know the setting, it's hard to tell which group is which!
One idea which might've been controversial but logical would've been making dwarves nordic/pale and elves dark-skinned. This would delineate the races based on genetic requirements for increased melanin.

I didn't care less if elves and different sorts of men or hobbits were whatever skin tone, tbh. Quite liked it because fantasy has been way too white til recently. They'd have struggled to adopt Tolkien's light elves/dark elves as that refers to those who have "seen the light" back West and those who haven't.

Think we'd always have struggled to know what was going on or where on Middle-earth we were, as the writing was so chaotic. We really needed to have it spelt out that Numenor was what it was for the reasons it was - and where Beleriand was - and what the Southlands were to become (which takes on more significance with LOTR) but no basic lore was alluded to, so there were bugger all clues. It would all have had more poignancy/whatever, if we knew where we were and why. Game of Thrones does it economically, with a map in the credits. They could have found a way. Not being pedantic just - it means eff all anyway if you don't know how this feeds into the more familiar Third Age.

We could also have had more background as to the nature of the beef between dwarves and elves. Not giving it context makes it look irrational and incoherent.

Worse still, if they're going where many of us think they're going, for Season 2 - that actually won't make sense if they haven't established some more about Beleriand and Numenor, for spoilery purposes I won't go into here. They've wasted an entire season.

 

[blessmycottonsocks]

Quite liked it because fantasy has been way too white til recently.

Isn't that because Lord of the Rings was based on Old English, Celtic, Germanic and Nordic folklore and The Witcher was based on Polish (with a hint of Slavic) myths?
Isn't it reasonable therefore for such fantasies to depict people predominantly from those backgrounds?

The TV dramatisation of ancient Indian Sanskrit saga Mahabharata had a cast (as far as I can tell) of entirely Indian ethnicity. I'm not aware of any complaints about its lack of diversity.

 

[Stormkhan]

I have absolutely no problem at all with diversity in the media, concerning actors or characters ... unless it is pointless.
Hamlet played with the lead parts being played by females? Can't see the issue - the story remains the same. In Romeo and Juliet, the two warring houses being of different ethnicity would be great.

We could also have had more background as to the nature of the beef between dwarves and elves. Not giving it context makes it look irrational and incoherent.

In the TTRPG Runequest, the intense enimity was brought about by an argument: which race is the oldest?
In the Gloranthan creation myths, the dwarves were created first but by a God who hadn't been given permission to do so - he planned for the creation of elves. So the first dwarves were 'put into stasis' until the elves were created.
The trolls (Uz) in the game couldn't care less; they were created just after this divine spat by an entirely different god who wasn't putting up with any permission nonsense!

 

[Ghost In The Machine]

Isn't that because Lord of the Rings was based on Old English, Celtic, Germanic and Nordic folklore and The Witcher was based on Polish (with a hint of Slavic) myths?
Isn't it reasonable therefore for such fantasies to depict people predominantly from those backgrounds?

The TV dramatisation of ancient Indian Sanskrit saga Mahabharata had a cast (as far as I can tell) of entirely Indian ethnicity. I'm not aware of any complaints about its lack of diversity.

Nah, not really. Does it even matter?Just best actors for the job, whatever. (And the worst piece of casting is Galadriel, in my view, at least). Or, that's the ideal scenario - casting was off here but not for those reasons. And I come from a background of studying Old Norse, Old English etc so know Tolkien's sources in the original languages - but I couldn't care less about any kind of literal interpretation of that. I'd rather it reflected a broad audience, to appeal to everyone, than it was a literal, 1950s' kind of thing. I used to teach kids in a very multicultural area of a city and have never forgotten one of my kids once asking me why nobody on telly looked like him. Fecking haunted me.

 

[blessmycottonsocks]

Nah, not really. Does it even matter?Just best actors for the job, whatever. (And the worst piece of casting is Galadriel, in my view, at least). Or, that's the ideal scenario - casting was off here but not for those reasons. And I come from a background of studying Old Norse, Old English etc so know Tolkien's sources in the original languages - but I couldn't care less about any kind of literal interpretation of that. I'd rather it reflected a broad audience, to appeal to everyone, than it was a literal, 1950s' kind of thing. I used to teach kids in a very multicultural area of a city and have never forgotten one of my kids once asking me why nobody on telly looked like him. Fecking haunted me.

I don't believe it was the casting of Galadriel that was the problem.
Morfydd Clark is an accomplished actress, but she can only work with the script she was given and, let's face it, it was pretty bloody awful in TROP.

 

[blessmycottonsocks]

If the ratings justify it.
The 'record breaking' amount of money this one cost might not be considered a good investment by the money-men.

Depends on which ratings.
I've seen a few comments online comparing TROP to Star Wars: The Last Jedi, in that both were generally praised by professional critics, but reviews from the wider public fandom were far more mixed.
We all know that Amazon censored any negative reviews for several weeks in an attempt to skew the overall rating.
The bottom line though is that, because The Hobbit and LOTR had already received the hugely successful Jackson treatment and the writers for TROP were not permitted to use the Silmarillion, there is very little of Tolkien's creation left in the series, apart from the admittedly spectacular landscapes of Middle Earth.

 

[Stormkhan]

As the writers ... er ... 'showrunners' continually gushed "We are filling in the gaps that Tolkien left, writing a story as he would've done were he alive for a more *cough* modern audience."

 

[Kondoru]

Thats the great thing about the Second age; so many gaps to fill.

But I do think they compressed the story to death.

 

[Ghost In The Machine]

I don't believe it was the casting of Galadriel that was the problem.
Morfydd Clark is an accomplished actress, but she can only work with the script she was given and, let's face it, it was pretty bloody awful in TROP.

I dunno, she could have changed the facial expression more than once.

 

[Ghost In The Machine]

Depends on which ratings.
I've seen a few comments online comparing TROP to Star Wars: The Last Jedi, in that both were generally praised by professional critics, but reviews from the wider public fandom were far more mixed.
We all know that Amazon censored any negative reviews for several weeks in an attempt to skew the overall rating.
The bottom line though is that, because The Hobbit and LOTR had already received the hugely successful Jackson treatment and the writers for TROP were not permitted to use the Silmarillion, there is very little of Tolkien's creation left in the series, apart from the admittedly spectacular landscapes of Middle Earth.

All that stuff in the recently published The Fall of Numenor, though - much of it previously published but spread out across different sources - would have been fair game, so it wasn't like they had no idea about what Tolkien was thinking.

It was very narrowminded of them to think they were "modernising" or "improving" Tolkien, as anyone who's read The Silmarillion will know, he wrote some very "strong" and "modern" women.

 

[Stormkhan]

It was very narrowminded of them to think they were "modernising" or "improving" Tolkien, as anyone who's read The Silmarillion will know, he wrote some very "strong" and "modern" women.

Ah, but you're assuming they were telling the truth.
I'm a cynic - I admit - but I think they were hired to write a 'blockbuster' to reap the money that GoT garnered. They used the well-known name of Tolkien and his characters, made it 'edgy' and 'representative' (to respond to a perceived 'modern' audience) then, using the Tolkien branding, claimed that they were 'continuing' the good work and any critics were shortsighted, bigoted idiots.
Look how eager they were to bribe ... er ...give advance access and merchandise to selected 'fan experts' who just happened to fall in with the studios views.
It wasn't about presenting Tolkien's work - it was about making money and exploiting an old and established fanbase. When they weren't up to the task, it was the fans that were wrong.