>>24295 It's based on the Second Age, taken from the appendices of LoTR and The Silmarillion , but they've decided to cram in what should happen over about 1,500 years into one simultaneous event so they can keep the same (non-elf) characters and flip between different storylines at the same time.
Yeah, I am ignoring it. As far as I can tell the showrunners are just some blokes who are mates with J. J. Abrams and despite trying to recreate the success of GoT, Amazon has created what is essentially fanfiction. And we all remember how good GoT got after that show started ploughing its own furough, I do anyway.
I remember we did discuss it and how if you wanted to have a diverse cast it's pretty easy to do; rather than pretending all the black people died out you just set the series along trading locations or have them travel south. Also Dwarven women have beards.
>>24301 I don't mind their being non-white people in Middle Earth, provided there's a reasonable explanation such as they came from the Hither Lands or something like that rather than just being shoehorned into the wood-elves or something like that.
>>24301 Because if you don't have black representation in the cast, you'll need to have black representation among the board of executives, and that will mean white executives lose their jobs. We can't have that, now, can we?
>>24302 The funny thing about this talk of 'what the world actually looks like' is that nothing actually does it - you won't see casting reflecting population ratios on a global, local (i.e. modern Britain) or Yankee conception of everywhere looking like America.
>>24303 Be careful what you wish for, the drive for corporations to put women on their boards has led to a select few women now having seats across multiple company boards. These being the one's who ended up qualified or could rely on connections, not ones who have come up from any social mobility policy.
It's a complete shitshow and it's going to get a lot worse before it gets better.
>>24305 >I, for one, do not enjoy immersing myself in fictional worlds
Even if you can't enjoy entertainment you should at least be able to grasp why it would baffle people and why the failures of an industry is worth talking about. Especially as streaming services in particular makes the same mistakes again and again.
>>24306 >>24307 >>24308 It doesn't really matter, does it? I will watch it, so will millions of others who don't really care that an elf has short hair or is black. It is just a bit of shite consumable media, like a shite song on the radio. Not a religion.
I think a lot of it comes down to the way streaming services work. It's inherently different to traditional TV or even YouTube, where there's a direct competition to get your show viewed over the others in a particular timeslot or in a certain genre.
With a service like Netflix or Amazon Prime, the individual shows don't have to be good. Nobody's going to cancel their subscription over this show being wank, because there's dozens of others. What matters more is having a wealth of choice so that consumers feel like they're getting a good deal. That keeps people subscribes, even if they watch three episodes of the Lord of the Rings and think it's shit, the next big one might be good. And even then, they got a bit of their money's worth watching a few episodes and finding out it's shit, then talking to all their mates about how shit it was. Contrast that to normal TV where if something's shit, your viewing figures tank and you lose all your ad revenue- The pressure and incentive is there to keep your context high quality, where it just isn't with streaming.
And let's be clear here it does look wank. You don't have to be some seething alt right anti-SJW chronic type to see that. It's not going to be shit because it's got brown people and some female characters shoe horned in, it's going to be shit because clearly the people writing and producing have no real love or care for the source material. Same as with that disastrous Discworld Town Watch series. It might have got woke and subsequently gone broke, yet I have no doubt they could have pulled it off if they actually cared about the material they were trying to woke-ify. But they didn't.
It was a vanity project for a load of hipster wankers, and in this case, it looks like a half-arsed bodge job by people just trying to climb the ladder in the media industry. It's a box ticking exercise for these hacks to put on their resume.
>>24311 >they could have pulled it off if they actually cared about the material
>It's a box ticking exercise for these hacks to put on their resume.
Agonisingly true. This tedious pattern has been repeating for what feels like 20 or 30 years, and it's only happening more as time goes on. It's always about the next cynical cashgrab or career step.
You'd think they'd eventually burn out on original material to mine for flashy but completely hollow reproductions, but here we are. Star Trek: "Picard" in-fucking-deed.
>>24323 Wait until you start asking how in the fuck JJ Abrams still has a career let alone some nobodies that he has pushed because he worked with them on the Star Trek reboot. Then ask why Mission Impossible III seemingly launched the career of him, Alex Kurtzman and Roberto Orci (Amazing Spiderman II, now on a new Spiderman project somehow).
In capitalist American you can put out bad movies that don't make a return and yet get promoted. It's really no wonder that typical investors avoid media like the plague.
>>24327 He also wrote that elf pussy binds you for life and that if you tried to rape one they would die. Which might be viewed as quite alright if you were one of Britain's most famous entertainers but might not sell as well in one of those Japanese comics I've heard about.
>>24331 The skin colour of the dwarves is never touched upon, but considering they referred to themselves as Khazâd in their own tongue and their native Khuzdul is structured like our Semitic languages plus their love of gold they most closely resemble Jews or others from around the Middle East.
Trying to apply skin colour to what happens in Arda is also a bit bonkers, granted that Middle Earth is Europe. You could easily have "swarthy" dwarves by saying they're from the east like the Blacklocks or the Stonefoots; there were originally seven dwarves but they were scattered all over the world.
I find inclusivity in radio much more annoying. Every other voice I hear nowadays is either a grown bloke with a lisp, or a teen where some executive has clearly said "Would you mind making it a bit more, you know, urban?". It should be a given that if your voice is being broadcast to god knows how many people, you should be able to speak clearly. I'm not saying it has to be Received Pronunciation or nothing, but at some point someone should be sitting Thimon Thimpthon down and telling him a different career might be more appropriate.
>>24337 It's part of the concept of making your inclusiveness obvious. Channel 4 (obviously ) will sometimes have announcers who can barely speak due to various disabilities. That's fine really, but an announcer's entire job is to speak. Meanwhile, there was that weather presenter with one arm. Surely it would have made more sense,if you wanted to hire disabled people (and you should), to get the woman who has two arms but can't speak to point to a map while mumbling, and the one-armed lady to remind us all that we are watching Channel 4 and that the news is on next.
>>24337 I found myself quite patronised by the 'Bed Sitters' BBC radio comedy series for accurately describing me as thick, nieve and subject to manipulating parents.
Sometimes you just get that the producer wanted to portray a specific demographic, other times I wonder if what I'm noticing is an internal bias.
>>24338 Listening to Rosie Jones on the radio was painful. I'm sure she's a nice person and all that but when the radio signal is coming in poorly, you adjust the dial. I don't mean to say her work is without value, rather that there's been a conspiquous absense of her voice on the airwaves for quite some time now - surely there's a reason for that? Eddie the Eagle was a novelty - celebrate his effort sure but he's not a competitor.
>>24338 The old trope about people turning more conservative as they get older is turning out to be absolute gobshite as I've gone from a Tory teenager to a raging leftist 30-something thanks to how wonderfully fucked up our glorious capitalist utopia is turning out.
And before any of you point out that Marx would definitely have wanted one-armed people delivering 10 sets of clothes to try on before you return the whole lot (yes the Hermes courier who used to deliver to my workplace actually had one arm) and tongue-tied people announcing that "I'm a celebrity get me another chance to humiliate myself for exposure while my agents try to find me a better role" will be back after another 10 minute break, Fuck Off.
>>24301 Something called a diversity rider. Not just the cast, but the entire crew are required to be 50/50 PoC/White, regardless of whether having a 50% PoC cast and crew is even practical or appropriate.
Agents have started demanding them as part of their clients contract negotiations, whether they are actors, producers or directors it doesn't matter any Hollywood production has Inclusion riders.
If you want to see Tolkien's vision for an English mythology, you'll just have to imagine it in your head (or make one yourself). England looks different to the way it did racially in Tolkien's era. One can only speculate that if he had written it nowadays, he would have wanted PoC to feel included and apart of that English history.
I will say one thing though, that Dwarf princess is fucking stupid and she should have a beard. If the Dwarf women in this don't have beards, it can fuck off.
>>24343 >If the Dwarf women in this don't have beards, it can fuck off
That said, have you enjoyed any of the Discworld adaptations? The Sky One movies with David Jason always gave me the same weird nails-on-a-chalkboard CBBC feeling that I get whenever I try to watch Doctor Who.
>>24340 I have a real difficulty with people who talk slowly. My gf goes around the houses when she's describing something, and I inevitably pre-empt her or finish her sentences because she's taking her time. Seeing Rosie Jones on many many programmes, I get genuine anxiety with how slowly she talks. Yes, the comment is funny, but it took 5 times longer to say than a non-disabled person, and it's stressing me out. I still find her very attractive (though she is a lesbian), but I don't know if that attraction is due to the novelty of her being both sexy and significantly disabled.
>>24340 Christ I've never seen Rosie Jones look as normal as she does in that picture. And 'normal' is a red flag when you're talking about disability but it's nothing to do with that, it's that when she grins - and she is constantly fucking grinning - it takes over her whole face.
>>24344 >The Sky One movies with David Jason
That pissed me right off.
Rincewind was meant to be the least-wizardy wizard you can imagine, relatively young, crap wispy beard, and a hat that had sequins sewn on spelling out "wizard". It's a casting choice that completely and utterly upturns the plot and turns it back into the type of archetypal stories that Terry Pratchett was subverting.
>>24350 Not to mention he had already played another role in Hogfather, introducing discontinuities to the Pratchett Cinematic Universe from the very beginning.
Just don't care. The show's existence is having zero effect on me; like being hit with a gravitational wave or learning my second cousin is gay. Less facetiously I compared it to fanfic back in this thread's infancy and that's all it is in my mind. If someone makes a silly Star Trek fan film, or a total overhaul mod for New Vegas and fills it full of creepy sex stuff, it makes no difference to the original. It's just a pity so much effort's been sank into a project I don't see an audience for. The only people I imagine are excited about it are the outrage merchants with awful beards who make a living pretending to be upset by pop-culture ephemera.
Well, I think it's safe to say this exceeded even anyone's most pessimistic expectations about how shit it is.
You can pretend you don't care and all that, like the very cool, detached, cynical cool coolman fellow you are, but deep down I think you actually do care. And I think you should care. You do and should care that there's no cultural nook or cranny left that corporations can't stick their fingers in to pervert and corrupt. They are like the creeping, insidious influence of evil Sauron himself represents in the books, and you're not even allowed to call it what it is, because if you do you're a sexist and/or a racist.
Because let's be real, this show is fucking shit. It's not fucking shit because of having brown people in it, or because the protagonist is woman, but it is fucking shit, and part of the reason it's fucking shit is undoubtedly because the writers though having brown people and a female protagonist would somehow excuse them from putting in any effort whatsoever that might have stopped it from being fucking shit. Of course, for the last couple of months they have done nothing but use the brown people and female protagonist as shields from criticism about how their show is fucking shit, even though everyone knows it's fucking shit, but it's got browns and womans in it, so we should just ignore the fact it's fucking shit, apparently.
Think about the message being established here. It's basically "Just consume the product! If you don't consume the product, you're a bad person! This is objectively true because the only people who don't enjoy consuming this product are chronic masturbator neckbeards! You're not one of those are you?" The play they are trying to make not just here, but across a broad swathe of media, is to link actually having some degree of taste and standards, with being some sort of alt-right high school shooter type. The only way out of the dichotomy is to be some avant garde hipster who only watches French 16mm claymation films or whatever. If you want to participate in the watercooler discussion about any mainstream film or telly (you know- Anything your fellow humans in real life might have seen), you're trapped in that narrative.
I don't find it a satisfying answer to just say "turn off, go read books or something instead", because pop culture is something that so many social interactions and bonds are built upon. It's one of the things you use to relate to people, and I think only autistic shut ins are capable of fully committing to the literal "I don't even own a TV" lifestyle. Even the biggest crusty off-grid hippy type I know still pops round her neighbour's to watch Stranger Things. No wonder you lot can't get a girlfriend, what would you talk about with them? Anyway I'm getting off topic.
Point is I think you do care and should care because it's only going to get worse. These corporations have already have it in their head they can market with the stick instead of the carrot, train us to be more ideal consumers and lecture us like naughty school children if we don't play along. Society is already alienating enough, and this kind of shit is just one of the things that amplify it.
sage for a smei-drunk rant, but I think I still made some valid points
>>24555 >I don't find it a satisfying answer to just say "turn off, go read books or something instead", because pop culture is something that so many social interactions and bonds are built upon. It's one of the things you use to relate to people, and I think only autistic shut ins are capable of fully committing to the literal "I don't even own a TV" lifestyle. Even the biggest crusty off-grid hippy type I know still pops round her neighbour's to watch Stranger Things. No wonder you lot can't get a girlfriend, what would you talk about with them? Anyway I'm getting off topic.
It is the only reasonable answer though. Either you rage impotently at the clouds raining down piss on you or you break out an umbrella and find people who are similarly equipped. Sounds like you need to find a sangha m8.
>>24555 Look, I don't know where you hang about on the internet when you're not on .gs, but on the Guardian recaps for the show I'm looking at plenty of negative comments about the quality and direction The Rings of Power's taking so I don't think your points hold much water. However, you have admitted to being pissed at the time of writing so that's a fair enough excuse. Who gives a shit about pop-culture anyway? Watch a David Cronenberg flim, play PC games that are twenty years old, listen to jazz music so loud people on the street hear it from inside your car, feign politeness when the MCU is spoken about with any kind of fondness. Are you going to spend the rest of your life pretending to enjoy Ed Sheeran's music and caring about Meghan Markle just to fit in with an "imaginary demographic of idiots"?
>You can pretend you don't care and all that, like the very cool, detached, cynical cool coolman fellow you are,
Hey, man, don't hate me for my supernatural ability to stop caring about media when it goes to pot. I didn't play Mass Effect Andromeda and I didn't watch Star Trek: Picard series two because I knew better, because I smelt better.
>>24555 >If you want to participate in the watercooler discussion about any mainstream film or telly (you know- Anything your fellow humans in real life might have seen), you're trapped in that narrative.
I haven't seen a single person discuss it in real life. They're far more interested in House of the Dragon. I've got Prime but I've had no inclination to bother with Rings of Power so far.
>>24555 >there's no cultural nook or cranny left that corporations can't stick their fingers in to pervert and corrupt
I look forward to the Disney+ production of The Story Of The Eye.
Not that Bataille is an obscure nook or cranny, any more than Tolkein's back catalogue is. It's not like they're messing with the lore of, I don't know, Cyclonopedia. I'm struggling to think of things that are both genuinely obscure and that you'd' have heard of, to understand the reference.
>Are you going to spend the rest of your life pretending to enjoy Ed Sheeran's music and caring about Meghan Markle just to fit in with an "imaginary demographic of idiots"?
Of course not, but the broader point I left out in my tipsy rambling is that once upon a time, it was still possible to enjoy "mainstream" media without it being a guaranteed steaming pile of donkey shit. There's films like, I don't know, Terminator or Alien or whatever that absolutely everyone has seen and has a shared cultural reference point to, and they were still great works of art in their own right. You can't say the same about Marvel's Guardians of the She-Hulk: Revenge of the Silver Surfer 3 or whatever it is now.
I think the refuge in obscure media for people of superior taste is just admitting defeat, and while at the end of the day it's not the biggest issue in the world, I don't think it's illegitimate to care about it. What changed that people just started accepting this slop? What changed that prevented creators being able to make something popular without it being horse manure? Can we ever go back? Not when everyone is so apathetic as that we can't, anyway.
