Good
– they spent much of the massive budget on decent special effects. The scenery and setting were often great
– the Hobbits are weird, but the main Hobbit character I kind of like, probably because everyone else was often so ponderous and self-important. The Hobbit was the only human central character
– wasn’t soaked in contemporary wokeness. The race stuff was just tokenism
Bad
– lots of little comments that deviate from well-known stuff in Tolkien. For example, an elf says that the two known elf-human couples died. Beren and Luthien experienced a lot of tragedy, but Tuor and Idril ended up in Valinor. They don’t have access to the Silmarillion so they just change things? I could go on and on about how they changed the “history” of Middle Earth
– they transformed Galadriel in a lot of ways. Her husband and daughter don’t exist in this timeline and they turned her into an elven Joan of Arc
– lots of wooden lines for the elves. Rings of Power is convincing me that elves should be seen but not heard. Especially Galadriel, who is probably the biggest character in the show
– the “star man” is super annoying and out of place tonally compared to the rest of the show (is it Gandalf?)
– the people seem racially diverse like a mid-sized Midwestern American city. Mostly white people, but a fair number of black people, and someone you might think is perhaps South or part East Asian here and there. It doesn’t make much sense and doesn’t even play a role in the story at all, which is probably better than the alternative, but it’s still weird
– Many people sound like they grew up in Manchester or something
Overall, my contention that this is what Taco Bell is to Mexican Food was too harsh. More like Chipotle. Fast casual.
“they transformed Galadriel in a lot of ways” – is precisely being soaked in wokeness. I am surprised you don’t see it.
Making female characters central, warriors and as good as or better than men at anything is central to new woke fantasy rules. Read almost any modern fantasy book published in the last few years and weep. The whole genre now destroyed by this.
A lot of Tolkien fans on YouTube really hate the show, and now that it has premiered they are focusing on the negative reviews, while disregarding the large number of positive reviews. My guess right now is that the show is going to be reasonably successful.
I don’t have a Amazon Prime account, so I can’t actually watch the full shows; viewer reaction to the show may play a part in whether I eventually decide to get one. But based on what I know so far, my two biggest complaints would be: 1) kickass warrior princess Galadriel (a mundane Hollywood trope that seems wildly contrary to anything Tolkien had to say about her); and 2) the multi-racial casting (which grates on me the same way black samurai in medieval Japan would grate — it’s just not something you’re ever going to stop noticing).
“racial diversity of a midwestern city” nails it. A middle class suburb of St. Louis about 2005 (there would be more east and south asians now). Which is fine with me. Tolkien’s “Dunedain get grey eyes, Rohirrim get blue eyes” never added much. I’m intrigued by the concept of Arondir and the elves as a long term occupation force like Union troops in the reconstruction south, or American soliders in Afghanistan in 2018, only on an Elven time scale. And I would not see Galadriel not as Joan of Arc but more like the John Wayne character in The Searchers, which is odd,but I’m open to seeing where it goes. The only aspect of this that really bothers me is the way key aspects of the Silmarillion get altered. Is this intellectual property driven, or just lazy storytelling? The Noldor leaving Valinor to fight Morgoth is depicted as an idealized crusade, but in reality, it was a brutal mess like the real crusades, with the pointless massacre of the Teleri analogous to the killing of the Rhineland Jews. And I think Razib pointed out on Twitter that like all the other Noldor, Galadriel had lost her Valinor privileges. Plus, Valinor wasn’t separated from the rest of the world in the 2nd age. You could just sail there and pull up to the dock. No need for that mystical transformation. How is Ar-Pharazon going to think attacking Valinor is even possible?
@Voice of Sauron
Isn’t it because the reading demographic is made up of mostly middle-aged liberal women?
That’s Hollywood for you. This has been going on for a good while. Years ago, I saw an ad for some medical TV drama that supposedly takes places in Seattle (in which Asians are the largest minority group). And, mind you, this is at a hospital (which in reality has loads of Asians). The ensemble, I think, was made up of 5-6 white doctor characters, 3 black ones, and 1 Asian.
I work in the field and have never ever seen that proportion of races in medicine, not even in a heavily black majority county. But that’s, again, Hollywood for you – white main characters (which is normal), but way more blacks than reality, and a token Asian or two (used to be East Asian, but now increasingly South Asian), and rarely Hispanics unless it’s a crime/police drama.
As a Catholic, I identified with the original Tolkien. But all this woke stuff of late makes me root for Melkor and Sauron.
According to the backstory this is before the Elf lady had a daughter, so the story has not necessarily changed.
In most Hollywood fantasy movies(Star Trek etc.), there is always an over-representation of Blacks and an under-representation of East Asians. The Blacks are generally males and East Asians are overwhelmingly females. No rational explanation is given as to how the society keeps producing full blooded Asian females with that kind of composition.
In order to counter the accusation of bigotry the East Asian females are no nonsense taking tough girls and in love with non-East Asian men. The underlying assumption is that she is too much of a woman for wimpy East Asian men.
It is corny but that is Hollywood. I always turn it off whenever I see the mandatory corny romance between Asian women and White men. I am sure White guys do the same when they see an Asian man – White woman couple.
According to the backstory this is before the Elf lady had a daughter, so the story has not necessarily changed.
the chronology is all made up. celebrian was born 300 SA. this is clearly set “near the end” of the SA, ar-pharazon reigned 3200’s SA (he shows up later in the first season).
can you bother and not correct things when they just changed tolkien’s chronology to make it make sense?
Unless it is explicitly stated in the movie it is not uncommon that writers work around the chronology because what is the “canon” keeps changing, defined by different agents like the movie studio, the original writer, a prominent director etc.(for this I have the Alien series in mind).
I am not really a fan of Tolkien so I just read Wikipedia and it says “Set thousands of years before the events of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, the series is based on author J. R. R. Tolkien’s history of Middle-earth.”
While I am not a fan of Tolkien, I find Tolkien movies at least moderately entertaining especially because my favorite game, Master of Magic, is loosely based on his work. This blog informed me of the release of this new series. Thanks for that.
Galadriel in the books was almost like a demi-god, she was one of the most powerful beings in Middle Earth. And yet they reduced her to a sword swinging Xena Warrior Princess.
Kind of a downgrade.
Agree 100%. It was mediocre. But if you are against you are a racist fascist troll and if you like it you are a woke libtard. I don’t think it is going to be a big hit for Amazon and they can’t not produce the 5 seasons. People will quickly forget this show. In the meantime we have House of the Dragon so that’s not a problem.
He looks like Gandalf, he sounds like Gandalf, he gets an episode grand finale, I think I spotted a runic G at some point. The whole point of the show, like many Hollywood prequels, is an origin story to the best known characters. It does look gorgeous.
“Unless it is explicitly stated in the movie it is not uncommon that writers work around the chronology because what is the “canon” keeps changing, defined by different agents like the movie studio, the original writer, a prominent director etc.”
Not with Tolkien. There may be some loose threads in the outside, like hobbits and Gandalf, but the main canon is pretty tight. This Is Not A Comic.
@Ezequiel
But the Rings of Power may claim it is only loosely based on Tolkien. Most people probably will be comfortable as long as the plot is compatible with previous the Lords of the Rings movies(some may grant even greater artistic license). Not everyone has such a high opinion of Tolkien as to frown upon any degree of deviation.
To be fair Razib did not directly criticize the drama but merely expressed displeasure(or noted the perceived inconsistency with the canon), which he has a perfect right to do so. I only showed what the movie studio might have been thinking based on Wikipedia.
Either way I don’t really care.
“they transformed Galadriel in a lot of ways. . . . they turned her into an elven Joan of Arc”
Not really the most apt comparison. Joan of Arc’s accomplishments were predominantly in the war room or war tent planing battles, and as a sort of mascot for her side’s military forces, not a paragon of personal hand to hand combat skills.
Galadriel is a portrayed as a female ultra-warrior with a nose for evil. More like Trinity from “The Matrix”, or Major Mira Killian from “Ghost is a Shell” or a more seasoned Ahsoka Tano in the Star Wars Clone Wars universe or one of the countless anime female martial artists.
If you want a historical example, there aren’t many that are even remotely close, but perhaps the Dahomey Amazons https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dahomey_Amazons featured in the movie “The Woman King” to be released later this month might be as close as you can get.
Female ultra-warriors may not be very realistic, but they make all sorts of sense as a fictional icon because their war-like behavior and looks can appeal to boys while the fact that they are female makes them less of a turnoff to girls than males in comparable roles, thereby expanding your potential audience.
@Ezequiel
FWIW, after watching the first two episodes of Ring of Power, I reviewed the different Lord of the Rings languages that Tolkein imagined for his world, knowing that this was a Tolkein speciality and his day job, and there is actually lots of canon discontinuity or inconsistency in that part of his worldbuilding.
I don’t think East Asian females being “tough girls” in Hollywood is mostly racial in nature. Female characters in general these days are supposed to be “tough” and can beat men in combat.
That doesn’t bother me either way since it’s pretty realistic. East Asians, both males and females, have high intermarriage rates (and, yes, my wife is white). I don’t think whites are bothered by seeing such pairings either.
A while ago, I came up with a Hollywood-reality racial decoder:
@twinkie, surely in the 20th century Asians as sly gangsters and diabolical plotters is generally less inaccurate than Jews as such, at least?
(I mean, triads still exist, Mao and the top reds were diabolical plotters etc.)
In Year of the Dragon Mickey Rourke flew into a rage when he suspected his Chinese girl friend might have slept with an Asian man before they met. Initially I thought the author was being critical of the rampant racism and emasculation of Asian men but after researching the author’s past works I am not so sure. He might have portrayed the general mentality of White American males and even the way things should be. And it is pretty much how White men act as I have observed them for most of my life here in the US.
Good looking Asian women in their view properly belong to White men. Asserting this and seeing Asian men seethe in anger greatly satisfies their male ego hurt by the perception that White women prefer Black men.
If you go to anonymous forums like econjobrumours, a forum mostly for Economics PhDs, you see everyday
1 attempts to show that Whites don’t really have smaller dicks than Blacks
2 attempts to show that Asians really do have smaller dicks than Whites
3 Asian penis jokes
4 tirades against Asian female celebrities for having sex with Black men
If I tell them the genetic reality, how Europe was invaded, how recent was the skin depigmentation the mod deletes it immediately. They have a bizarre list of banned words like Khazar. Economists are a bit more mathematically competent than most in social science but they are pretty similar to the rest of the crowd in social science, petty, vindictive and overly aggressive wimps with fragile ego.
“surely in the 20th century Asians as sly gangsters and diabolical plotters is generally less inaccurate than Jews as such, at least?”
Then again Jews did make money off the blood of German youths in WWI didn’t they? And this sin should be extended to the whole Caucasoid race just as you don’t make distinction between Chinese and the rest of Asians.
Despite what people have to say, I never felt Tolkien was all that interested in consistent worldbuilding — certainly not in the way many authors who followed in his footsteps have been. Rather, he was mainly concerned with two things: 1) a semi-mythical past that was informed by his deep knowledge of the Northern European sagas; and 2) the immediate experience of his characters right now. Explaining how the dwarves fed themselves just didn’t interest him much.
(Also, I tried posting a similar comment earlier and got a message saying I was banned from the site! This seems odd, since I’ve been occasionally commenting here for quite some time, including my earlier comment on this post. Well, let’s see what happens this time…).
There are deep departures from the allegedly source material, what rightfully can bother hardcore Tolkien fans, but could be inconsequential for the broader audience.
There are nonsensical multi-racial composition even among nomadic “Hobbits” or among isolated Human villages. That’s weird enough, but we can throw a blind eye to that stuff.
And although the scenery is beautiful, figurines are nice, some casting choices are awful. The short-haired around 50yo looking Celebrimbor is absurd to portray an Elf.
But what really stroke me as quite distasteful are the poor/silly lines, awfully and childish written dialogues, dumb and/or uninteresting plotlines. Even for the broader audience these issues can be a pain in the ass, and the show can turn to be forgetful because of that.
@jb
I had the same issue as well
In the 20th Century America, Jewish gangsters such as Bugsy Siegel and Meyer Lansky were far more influential and destructive than any “Triad” even though such illicit activities were usually blamed on the Italians more often than not in the media.
But I was thinking more Bernie Madoff these days. Most people probably don’t know, by the way, that the worldwide capital of financial crimes is… Tel Aviv.
That was a Hollywood movie made almost 40 years ago.
No, it didn’t… even back then. In the 1980’s, intermarriage rates of Asian males in America were higher than they are today (probably because the Asian population was even smaller and the overall culture was far more assimilative).
I don’t know where in the U.S. you live, but I’ve lived in New England, the Mid-Atlantic, California, the Pacific Northwest, the Midwest, and the Southern regions of the United States, and my wife (white) and I (East Asian) have never run into any hostility from white Americans, most of who just seem to think that my children are attractive. What little hostility I’ve experienced in this country has come from almost entirely from blacks, and even that hasn’t been all that much.
I still carry with me a note my wife’s very white Midwestern rural grandparents gave me at my wedding, in which they expressed delight at the marriage. They wrote that they thought I was a wonderful Christian young man and that they had hoped their granddaughter would marry me eventually and were indeed happy that their wish came true.
You need to get off the internet. In the real world, black male-white female pairings are very much downscale socio-economically and are highly prone to divorces. I doubt most middle to upper class white males care. The vast majority of white female marriages are to white males, in any case.
https://static01.nyt.com/images/2012/02/16/business/economy/economix-17interracial/economix-17interracial-blog480.jpg
https://external-preview.redd.it/qr4BnnPjx6sG_0MnmRmOmTy1Pkv6EM-V0zgaipDiWEg.png?auto=webp&s=cbe8847bd5c0434ba474a44b230f3b1e17496f72
The only people who obsess about that are people who have small ones. Have you ever heard a woman say that she wouldn’t date a guy, because he might have a small penis? I haven’t.
@twinkie, I was thinking more Jho Low, or I guess Leland Yee and Shrimp Boy (I don’t know of a more cartoonish example of a corrupt US politician!). Financial crimes probably overrepresented in both groups in the US due to high education. Asians in America today do have the benefit of how open US institutions are, less so in say, Spain. In the early 20th century people had to take what they could get.
@twinkie, I’d read up on Yee’s story if you haven’t come across it; seriously like the Grand Thefty Auto version of a politician and the ultimate Democratic party hypocrite on gun control! It’s wild how there’s no movie about him yet (it might be more entertaining than Rings of Power, sounds like, and a fraction of the budget).
The US justice department website provides rich lists of diabolical plotters against the United States and its citizens
https://www.justice.gov/archives/nsd/information-about-department-justice-s-china-initiative-and-compilation-china-related – an espionage related list
https://www.justice.gov/usao-cdca/pr/new-york-man-convicted-federal-fraud-charges-related-multi-million-dollar-pyramid – a pyramid scheme
But how frequent all this is, a real mystery.
This is silly. All major countries engage in acts of espionage against others. I mean, gosh, do you know what kind of reputation the Mossad has? And it’s supposed to be an allied agency, not a competitor!
“Multi-million dollars”! That would’ve been real money in the 1960s! Bernie Madoff ran a Ponzi scheme worth $64.8 billion dollars (that’s with a B).
If Asians are mobsters because of triads, Europeans are too because of Mafia.
If Asians are diabolical plotters because of PRC, who are Stalin, Hitler and their cronies? OK Stalin is Georgian so technically Asian but does he not count as a White at least?
@Twinkie
When I was in college there was a Korean buffoon who was all about “I have a special feeling about this beautiful country”. Fellow Koreans were very upset because his White “friends” were making fun of him all the time, to which he was completely oblivious. He probably lived and still lives in his beautiful country that he feels special about.
I may be a bit older than you but the generation gap cannot explain it all. Whitlock was not fired nor was he in any kind of serious trouble after he made the “a couple inches of pain” joke. Steve Harvey was even worse. Jay Leno and the likes complete the White side of this holly alliance.
Your personal experiences probably tell more about you than the Whites around you.
I’m in my 50’s.
Isn’t he black?
As for your college anecdote, color me skeptical about just-so story.
Lots of immigrants, Asian or otherwise, have special feelings about this once beautiful country. And lots of native Americans, white or otherwise, appreciate such feelings on the part of the newcomers.
Twinkie: ““Multi-million dollars”! That would’ve been real money in the 1960s! Bernie Madoff ran a Ponzi scheme worth $64.8 billion dollars (that’s with a B).”
Indeed;bigger and better. It is indeed silly, but suggesting that Jews more than Asians are “diabolical plotters” is a silly conversation to begin with, so no doubt it goes to silly places.
Were “neocons” who conspired to have the USG launch a war in Iraq that led to thousands of American and untold Iraqi deaths and cost more than a trillion dollars Asians?
Were the executives of major banks and financial services who bled American tax payers in bailouts after the Great Recession of 2007-2009 Asians? Funny, not a single one of them was indicted let alone prosecuted, except for a single Asian-run family bank in NY: https://www.npr.org/2017/05/18/528650014/abacus-the-small-chinatown-bank-that-paid-a-high-price
Too big to prosecute I guess.
The fact is there is a lot of ultra elite diabolical plotting going on in America today and Jews are far more represented among the ranks of them than Asians are.
https://www.ojp.gov/ncjrs/virtual-library/abstracts/criminality-among-jews-overview
The last time the USG published relevant data, Asians in America had lower than proportionate white collar crime rates (on a side note, contrary to the popular perception, blacks had higher-than-average white collar crime rates, not just elevated violent crime rates). The USG no longer publishes this kind of data.
@twinkie: not much out there on these topics that I could easily track down, but this one may be relevant https://ccjs.umd.edu/sites/ccjs.umd.edu/files/pubs/3%20COMPLIANT-Punishing%20the%20Model%20Minority.pdf – 2009 – “However, these results also indicate that Asian offenders differ from other minority groups in several important ways. Relative to the pooled sample, Asians have shorter criminal histories, are given shorter presumptive sentence lengths, and are less likely to be detained prior to sentencing.
They are also significantly more likely to be convicted of fraud and are less likely to be convicted of drug offenses relative to other racial minority groups. Moreover, only 50 percent of Asian offenders are U.S. citizens. In line with the model minority stereotype, Asian offenders are most likely to hold a college degree. Given the relative uniqueness of federal Asian offenders, we turn next to our multivariate analyses to investigate whether racial differences in punishment remain after accounting for these differences.”
Judging by Table 2, as I read it, Asians comprised about 2% of their sample of 188 thousand offenders against 33% White. Both are about <50% of what their share of the population would've been in 2010 (White 72% of pop, Asian 4.9% of pop, per wiki – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historical_racial_and_ethnic_demographics_of_the_United_States), which checks out.
Of the Asians, 47% of the prison sample were convicted of fraud, which was significantly different from 21% among the whole sample and 35% among the White sample. I don't know how you'd compute a relative fraud probability here. I guess it doesn't seem that significantly different anyway.
Interestingly: “Turning to the race and ethnicity findings, the results suggest a partial pattern of leniency in punishment for Asian offenders relative to other minority groups. Asian offenders are overwhelmingly more likely to receive substantial assistance; they are 30 percent more likely than whites and more than twice as likely as blacks or Hispanics to get these departures.”. Seems like this may be partly driven by liberal leniency towards substantial rates of immigration fraud, however “Asians, for instance, seem to experience some sentencing leniency for fraud crimes, whereas blacks and Hispanics received relatively severe sentences for drug crimes.”
Although modifying that comment, immigration offences treated differently in the table so it really does seem like that elevated share of fraud reflects financial fraud.
https://prezi.com/xyc29bguucwf/racial-disparities-in-white-collared-crime/?frame=bb3e68f76dd12019bc5bfa949bcecd18d32037fa
In 2012 UCR arrests by race, Asians (+PI) were 0.9% and 1.6%, respectively, of those for fraud and embezzlement. Asians (+PI) were about 5% of the American population at that time. Blacks were over 30% of those arrested for these crimes (when they were about 13% of the population). Whites were about 65% arrested for them vs. 70% or so of the general population.
Crime data on Jews is extremely hard to come by (just like Jewish military service rate), but that lone study done in 1971 indicated that their rate of fraud and embezzlement were above the rate of their population fraction. But the good folks at FINCEN know full well that Jews are significantly over represented in these crimes (Madoff is not an outlier), but are too bright to ever mention it in public.
Remember the Wolf of Wall Street? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jordan_Belfort
Well, there are the Wolves of Tel Aviv: https://www.timesofisrael.com/the-wolves-of-tel-aviv-israels-vast-amoral-binary-options-scam-exposed/
Our FBI and Secret Service operate in Israel, because of the massive amount of global fraud crimes that originate from that tiny country.
“indicated that their rate of fraud and embezzlement were above the rate of their population fraction.”
Willie Sutton observation/rule.
Saw the first three episodes, and I don’t think that they’re bad at all, if one is OK with them making Galadriel into an elven delta force commando.
One thing about Tolkien, is he doesn’t go in for the woman warrior type, which is every bit of a fantasy as a sorceress. Galadriel is an uber girly girl, or womanly woman since she is the potrait of wisdom and maturity, elven princess in the books, which sees nothing wrong with that, and fanboy types might get mad about the deviation from the books, being fanboys.
Lastly, it seems that the show is really aimed at grrrrl power types since the main characters who are so brave…. and stunning!!… are all going to be appealing to teenage girls, which since teenage girls are pretty rare amongst Tolkien fans, might hurt it commercially. One wouldn’t be surprised to see Galadriel, given what she looks like, do something like akin to this in the show.
I bet Starman turns out to be Tom Bombadil.;