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Well, if the guy is Sauron that is going to be the big first season twist, so we should know that probably by the penultimate episode or something. Or we'll have it it ruled out by Sauron unambigiously appearing before that in a non-flashback capacity.Everyone posted:See I liked the cut to the head. Just "Here ya go, bitches. Can we be done with all this "no proof maybe it's just the wind" bullshit now?" Personal tastes I guess. I mostly just kind of hate "badass" stuff like that because I've grown immensely tired of it. e: I feel like I would have liked the scene more if the orc actually got away by jumping out of the open window that was in view during the scene after it's been wounded. That would have made everything far more threatening and urgent than this big threat just getting killed by some person with household implements. Randarkman fucked around with this message at 01:09 on Sep 7, 2022 |
# ? Sep 7, 2022 01:02 |
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# ? Jun 8, 2024 07:38 |
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This show's gonna run five seasons and Sauron is going to show up in the last ten minutes of the final episode and the last thing you'll see before the end credits of the finale roll will be the first ring being forged at the end of a very hasty series of Where Are They Now? vignettes.
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# ? Sep 7, 2022 01:11 |
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Arc Hammer posted:The Doors of Durin were built as a cooperation between Celebrimbor and a Dwarven architect named Narvi sometime during the two race's friendship in the mid Second Age. It stands to reason that the Dwarves would have had other smaller entrances before then, but the Doors of Durin were specifically made to establish trade and good relations between Elf and Dwarf. Going to be weird when the elves and dwarves' friendship at Eregion comes off as a brief, regrettable mistake directly linked to Sauron's machinations
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# ? Sep 7, 2022 01:12 |
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Randarkman posted:You can have the occasional non-white characters, but you still have to have the majority of all characters be white or whiteish. This is how it works. Yeah it's just weird seeing people talking about the diversity of the casting when you're excluding a race that makes up 20% of the earth's population.
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# ? Sep 7, 2022 01:15 |
Randarkman posted:Well, if the guy is Sauron that is going to be the big first season twist, so we should know that probably by the penultimate episode or something. Or we'll have it it ruled out by Sauron unambigiously appearing before that in a non-flashback capacity. That's just the tone the show is going for. I was more bothered by their skepticism personally, by the time she plonked the head down the tone had been set and it felt like a reasonable catharsis. I also have no idea how you felt that harrowing fight made the orc not seem like a major threat. It was appropriately terrifying and desperate and a bunch of their attacks did nothing to it.
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# ? Sep 7, 2022 01:15 |
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Eiba posted:I also have no idea how you felt that harrowing fight made the orc not seem like a major threat. It was appropriately terrifying and desperate and a bunch of their attacks did nothing to it. I'm saying if that orc got away the threat is far more pressing (edit: or at least I think so). But yeah, this is a matter of personal taste I think. e: I'm also fairly certain schlock or over-the-top is not actually what this series is going for. I'm not completely sure what the tone is yet, but it seems fairly serious for the most part. Randarkman fucked around with this message at 01:25 on Sep 7, 2022 |
# ? Sep 7, 2022 01:18 |
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One thing about the orc fight I can't wrap my head around is why did the kid hide in a cupboard instead of running out of the house after the orc saw him?
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# ? Sep 7, 2022 01:28 |
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BoldFace posted:Rather than the whole racial thing, the representation of women has been more striking to me in this adaptation. There are no damsels in distress or meek female side characters. Galadriel is an ancient and wise warrior protagonist who seeks revenge, Numenor is ruled by a queen, the only normal human from the Southlands so far is a single mother orcslayer, and Nori the explorer will most likely set out on an adventure with the first wizard. I have no doubt Durin's wife will also play some role in the dwarven subplot. This was also a thing going back to Jackson's adaptation of the Lord of the Rings as well, they tried to make sure that there were no weak or passive women in the film trilogy either, despite there being so few women to begin with. They actually wrote and filmed a massive deviation from the source material where not only did the elves show up at Helm's Deep to offer help to everyone, but Arwen was a part of the force and there were whole massive sequences of here kicking the poo poo out of Uruk-hai alongside Aragorn. Still photos of it leaked online and the 00s internet versions of The Usual Suspects lost their poo poo over it, so they had to re-film basically Arwen's entire subplot in The Two Towers in late-stage filming and pick up shooting to give her a more true-to-the-books story to make the internet shitlords of the day shut up. Liv Tyler recounts some of this in the Appendices DVD extras for The Two Towers, specifically how she herself was personally harassed by internet dickshits over it to the point where she had a nervous breakdown and nearly quit acting over it because she'd never seen a reaction quite like that before in her life. E: They were also going to cast Kate Winslet as Sauron (or more pertinently Annatar) for the Black Gate fight in Return of the King, but their prior experience with how people went ripshit mad over Arwen being at Helm's Deep played a role in scrapping Sauron showing up in person at all and they had to digitally rotoscope him out of the fight and replace him with that random troll that Aragorn fights instead. nine-gear crow fucked around with this message at 01:42 on Sep 7, 2022 |
# ? Sep 7, 2022 01:37 |
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BoldFace posted:One thing about the orc fight I can't wrap my head around is why did the kid hide in a cupboard instead of running out of the house after the orc saw him? Could be something to do with her kid hiding behind a very obvious door that the Orc most likely would have detected after knowing a kid was there.
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# ? Sep 7, 2022 01:47 |
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nine-gear crow posted:This was also a thing going back to Jackson's adaptation of the Lord of the Rings as well, they tried to make sure that there were no weak or passive women in the film trilogy either, despite there being so few women to begin with. They actually wrote and filmed a massive deviation from the source material where not only did the elves show up at Helm's Deep to offer help to everyone, but Arwen was a part of the force and there were whole massive sequences of here kicking the poo poo out of Uruk-hai alongside Aragorn. Still photos of it leaked online and the 00s internet versions of The Usual Suspects lost their poo poo over it, so they had to re-film basically Arwen's entire subplot in The Two Towers in late-stage filming and pick up shooting to give her a more true-to-the-books story to make the internet shitlords of the day shut up. Can’t wait to hear how Liv, who is by all accounts a wonderful person, had to deal with all this poo poo.
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# ? Sep 7, 2022 01:48 |
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Ending RotK with a 1 v 1 fight between Aragorn and Annatar was never a great idea, but if you’re gonna do it Winslet would have been pretty cool casting.
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# ? Sep 7, 2022 01:59 |
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MrMojok posted:I’ve been watching the extended editions for the first time with the commentaries on, and I am right up to the Helm’s Deep part, with the cast commentaries. Legit, don't sleep on the extras DVDs for the Extended Editions. There's so much cool stuff there, I probably watched them more than the films at this point.
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# ? Sep 7, 2022 02:31 |
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Eiba posted:The villager's skeptical reaction was over the top and absurd, and her proof was over the top and absurd. The fight made the orc seem like a terrifying threat and it was - to a lone poorly armed woman and her also poorly armed teenage son. And sure that villager's skeptical reaction *cough*climate change*change* to a dangerous threat *cough*climate change*cough* was really unrealistic climatechangeclimatechangeclimatechange. The villagers don't want Bronwyn's warning to be true because they don't want to have to evacuate their homes and go begging the elves for help right after they were finally rid of said elves. So they were going to hem, haw and make excuses until Bronwyn either got through to them in an undeniable way (as with plunking down the orc head) or the orcs came up one night very soon and ate them all.
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# ? Sep 7, 2022 03:03 |
Randarkman posted:I'm saying if that orc got away the threat is far more pressing (edit: or at least I think so). But yeah, this is a matter of personal taste I think. How do you account for the raft sequence where a woman goes, "Of course we'll help someone in need! Wait you're an elf? gently caress off! [gets eaten]" over the course of like 30 seconds? The background Harfoots are no more silly than the background Hobbits were in Lord of the Rings, but they contribute to a trend here. This show clearly enjoys being silly. It's honestly kind of refreshing. Everyone posted:The fight made the orc seem like a terrifying threat and it was - to a lone poorly armed woman and her also poorly armed teenage son. Of course that level of unreasonableness then paid off when she plonked the head down. It wouldn't have been as satisfying if their denial had been more reasonable. So we get over the top denial, and a satisfying scene later. I may have been bothered by the level of their skepticism, but honestly that just made the whole sequence better in the end.
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# ? Sep 7, 2022 03:56 |
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nine-gear crow posted:This was also a thing going back to Jackson's adaptation of the Lord of the Rings as well, they tried to make sure that there were no weak or passive women in the film trilogy either, despite there being so few women to begin with. They actually wrote and filmed a massive deviation from the source material where not only did the elves show up at Helm's Deep to offer help to everyone, but Arwen was a part of the force and there were whole massive sequences of here kicking the poo poo out of Uruk-hai alongside Aragorn. Still photos of it leaked online and the 00s internet versions of The Usual Suspects lost their poo poo over it, so they had to re-film basically Arwen's entire subplot in The Two Towers in late-stage filming and pick up shooting to give her a more true-to-the-books story to make the internet shitlords of the day shut up. edit: I thought I also remembered this but I have just watched all of TTT and it's not there. Liv Tyler does not speak at all in the last couple hours of the TTT commentary.
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# ? Sep 7, 2022 04:04 |
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Eiba posted:
Yeah. I mean if you feel like it there more than enough nits to pick to fill a couple dozen mysterious dwarf chests. This is High Fantasy show - which does not necessarily mean witch skybattles and magic sooperpowerz. People will sometimes behave in an unrealistic, even fantastic, way. If the villagers had been more "realistic" the whole bunch would have moved out and we wouldn't have gotten that harrowing fight which went a goodly way toward making orcs kind of scary again.
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# ? Sep 7, 2022 04:21 |
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MrMojok posted:edit: I thought I also remembered this but I have just watched all of TTT and it's not there. Liv Tyler does not speak at all in the last couple hours of the TTT commentary. Like I said, it's somewhere on one of the two Appendices discs for The Two Towers extended edition.
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# ? Sep 7, 2022 04:30 |
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I don’t think it is. The appendices didn’t really ever engage with the negative sides of the fan base. Actually, even the official press junkets didn’t. The BTS content really stuck to a positive narrative and were as much self promotion as anything else. It’s largely just “look how hard we worked.” Liv Tyler did talk about the harassment in other places though.
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# ? Sep 7, 2022 04:38 |
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I think it might even have been from an AICN interview, that I remember this. It’s a fact that they were planning to have Arwen at Helm’s Deep, it’s undeniable. I remember “spy reports” talking about it at the time, there were some pics of it, and I remember the Purist backlash against it at the time, but I am finding no evidence of it at all on the TTT Blu-ray extras.
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# ? Sep 7, 2022 05:05 |
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MrMojok posted:I think it might even have been from an AICN interview, that I remember this. Oh yeah, it’s extremely well documented and not even hard to find. Here’s a top google hit: https://www.resetera.com/threads/ar...e-today.101035/ I think they talk about shooting it in some of the bts stuff. They just never acknowledge the harassment that led to the reshoots in the official media.
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# ? Sep 7, 2022 05:56 |
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Mameluke posted:Thinking more about Galadriel's actions, how are they going to depict Ar-Pharazon's living entombment on the shores of Valinor if it's just a big yellow light? Its going to be a reenactment of the january 6. Capitol storming.
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# ? Sep 7, 2022 06:03 |
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I said come in! posted:I think I am probably wrong about this, but didn't Gandalf not come to Middle-Earth until the 3rd age? It could be one of the other wizards, Googling around the internet suggests its one of the blue wizards? Tolkiens notes are contradicting on this point. In people of middle earth the istari are mentioned as coming to ME in the 2nd age. So theres an opening for both ages being the arrival one.
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# ? Sep 7, 2022 06:06 |
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What exactly do they have the rights to? Is it just the appendixes?
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# ? Sep 7, 2022 06:11 |
Ikonoklast posted:Tolkiens notes are contradicting on this point. In people of middle earth the istari are mentioned as coming to ME in the 2nd age. So theres an opening for both ages being the arrival one. Maybe there's another passage that presents it differently, but the whole thing seems really confused to the point that I now have no idea why Gandalf categorically can't be introduced in the 2nd age like people were saying.
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# ? Sep 7, 2022 06:13 |
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Eiba posted:I have to say, this nuance seems really important and if it's true a lot of people earlier in the thread seem to have missed it. It felt like there was a whole lot of "Gandalf can't be in the 2nd age because his first encounter with an elven ring-bearer is really important!" and then someone posted the relevant passage and it just said that when Gandalf met the elven ring bearer the guy was impressed, not that the first thing he did was to meet the guy. I can't remember exactly where Tolkien went on in some detail about Gandalf and Glorfindel arriving by ship from Valinor in the Grey Havens where he was met by Cirdan. I think there's even a definitive timeline in appendixes that says when the Istari arrive. Literally just a part of the appendixes that explicitly lays out the timelines for the 2nd and 3rd ages. Been a while since I owned the books though.
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# ? Sep 7, 2022 06:18 |
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Funky See Funky Do posted:What exactly do they have the rights to? Is it just the appendixes? Full rights to anything in LotR or The Hobbit. So if the appendices or a character in the main story mentioned something from the past, they can use it. Other elements from The Silmarillion and Histories were allowed by the estate on a case-by-case basis, but we don’t know what those elements are until they show up on screen.
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# ? Sep 7, 2022 06:20 |
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Ikonoklast posted:Tolkiens notes are contradicting on this point. In people of middle earth the istari are mentioned as coming to ME in the 2nd age. So theres an opening for both ages being the arrival one. I think that's only the Blue Wizards, no?
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# ? Sep 7, 2022 06:43 |
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Sheng-Ji Yang posted:
It somehow makes me feel happy, that some of my favorite shows this year are hated by the right-wing incel crowd
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# ? Sep 7, 2022 07:02 |
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Show good. Tolkein dead. So what.
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# ? Sep 7, 2022 07:12 |
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Noam Chomsky posted:Show good. Tolkein dead. So what. I bet if he'd been alive today he'd be a lot more chill about this stuff. He'd probably have an office full of LOTR Lego minifigs and Gollum plushies.
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# ? Sep 7, 2022 07:20 |
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nine-gear crow posted:E: They were also going to cast Kate Winslet as Sauron (or more pertinently Annatar) for the Black Gate fight in Return of the King, but their prior experience with how people went ripshit mad over Arwen being at Helm's Deep played a role in scrapping Sauron showing up in person at all and they had to digitally rotoscope him out of the fight and replace him with that random troll that Aragorn fights instead. I didn't know about the Kate Winslet bit, but to be fair the leaked version of that Sauron scene is utter poo poo. Basically goes "1) ring goes in lava; 2) Aragorn shanks Sauron; 3) Sauron explodes" which for most audiences would probably read as "hey look Aragorn killed Sauron!" Coming back to the show at hand, the giganerd pearl clutching where they are going all "when it says the Harfoots were browner than Hobbits, it means they were tanned! No non-whites on my TV!" is loving hilarious and gently caress those people. There are all kinds of problems with this show, especially the first half hour of the first episode, but at no point is the actor's skin color one of those problems.
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# ? Sep 7, 2022 07:23 |
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rkd_ posted:I think that's only the Blue Wizards, no? In Unfinished Tales, Tolkien wrote that the five Istari came to Middle-earth together in TA (third age) 1000. However, in The Peoples of Middle-earth, they are said to have arrived in the Second Age, around the year SA (second age) 1600, the time of the forging of the One Ring.
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# ? Sep 7, 2022 07:23 |
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But they always are described as arriving in a maritime fashion at Lindon. So the entire falling out of the sky thing is new. (If its an istari).
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# ? Sep 7, 2022 07:35 |
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BoldFace posted:Rather than the whole racial thing, the representation of women has been more striking to me in this adaptation. There are no damsels in distress or meek female side characters. Galadriel is an ancient and wise warrior protagonist who seeks revenge, Numenor is ruled by a queen, the only normal human from the Southlands so far is a single mother orcslayer, and Nori the explorer will most likely set out on an adventure with the first wizard. I have no doubt Durin's wife will also play some role in the dwarven subplot. They swung the pendulum so far in the other direction that it makes the script really predictable and cringy. Raise your hand if you didn't immediately guess how the whole human village thing would play out and which characters would be jerks and for what reasons.
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# ? Sep 7, 2022 07:58 |
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The Entwives and their gardens are still around in the timeframe the show is at. They've shown some Ents in woodlands, but I wonder if they'll even touch on the whole Entwives tragedy?
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# ? Sep 7, 2022 08:04 |
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Loezi posted:I didn't know about the Kate Winslet bit, but to be fair the leaked version of that Sauron scene is utter poo poo. Basically goes "1) ring goes in lava; 2) Aragorn shanks Sauron; 3) Sauron explodes" which for most audiences would probably read as "hey look Aragorn killed Sauron!" Yeah, the first part of the scene is the orc force pours out of the Black Gate like they do in the final film and then just stop and that bit of Aragorn being transfixed on the light of Sauron's eye was originally going to be Sauron manifesting in front of everyone as Annatar, who would have been played by, in Peter Jackson's words "the most beautiful actress in the world", which in his opinion at the time was Kate Winslet, and she's explicitly named in the featurette on the DVDs that discusses the original version of that scene. And Sauron would be like "Ooooh, look at me Aragon Elessar! I'm Sauron, and I'm so sexy, and you should just give up and join me because the halflings are dead and I'll have the One Ring back any second now. Come on, you're a weak little bitch just like Isildur was. Come bend the knee to daddy and we'll forget all about this little "war" thing you think you're waging against me." And when Aragorn snaps out of it Sauron's all "gently caress THIS!" and instantly turns into his 12 foot tall monster form seen in the prologue of Fellowship just starts going to town on everyone. But yeah between the Mouth of Sauron showing up like five minutes before that (in the Extended Edition, anyway) and the fight looking like poo poo, and it being probably one of the most controversy-courting swings away from the book, PJ eventually decided it was more trouble than it was worth and spiked it. But god I wish they at least kept the first part of it, because Kate Winslet as Sauron The Fair would have been loving baller as well.
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# ? Sep 7, 2022 08:20 |
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Speaking of 8 foot spikey armor Sauron, I’m kinda bummed they went with that depiction again in the prologue for RoP. I get that it helps film fans who might not remember names track with who is who, but it’s one PJ invention that never say well with me. At least we’ll get a different look with his Annatar form at some point in the show.
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# ? Sep 7, 2022 08:35 |
Watching all this hate for Rings of Power over how it is "ruining Tolkien's works", I'm left thinking where all these fools were when the Shadow of Mordor/War video games made the player OC Isildur's replacement among the Ring Wraiths, had Shelob lounge around dispensing advice in her convenient Hot Elf shapeshift form and showed how Celebrimbor's spirit is a colossal rear end in a top hat who's all-in on having his meat puppet become the next evil overlord of Middle-Earth if it means he can bring down Sauron in the process. It's an adaption. The only difference is that Rings of Power will reach a wider audience. They are just mad about other people liking something they don't. PS: The games were good
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# ? Sep 7, 2022 09:33 |
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Arglebargle III posted:I'm not in a great place right now so I'm going to touch that hot iron: Ok, I will engage: I'm someone who loves Tolkien, but that also comes from my background: I studied literature and languages and I live in the German-speaking region of Europe, my cultural region has a lot in common with the Scandinavian mythology that Tolkien heavily draws from: our pagan ancestors shared aspects of the same pantheon, their Odin is Wodan, Thor is Donar (there's even have a weekday named after him: thursday, Donnerstag) and a lot of the folklore has shared concepts, like: Sigurd/Siegfried the Dragonslayer, the Nibelungen-Saga, Dietrich von Bern, critters like the basilisk of Vienna, fairy tales like Rübezahl (a giant who lived in the mountains) and so on.... Personally I think Arondir is a great pick who, so far, really "gets" the whole elvish aspect of the role and I love how he plays this war-weary soldier who is getting sick of Middle Earth, but then finds himself attracted to a human woman and ends up in the turmoil created by the return of Sauron. Yeah, Elves were described as light skinned in Tolkien's work, but that was during an era that was way less inclusionary than today's world and from the perspective of an author who saw the peak and then the decline of the British colonial empire. His day and age, from a British perspective, was shaped by white Anglo-Saxons and the rest of the world were (in the view of many of his contemporary peers) "less civilized" people of various ethnic groups. In Tolkien's work there's dragons and balrogs, there's orcs and talking trees, there's ghosts and goblins. There's a powerful primordial spirit in the shape of a jolly man who loves to sing nonsense. But despite all of that otherworldly fiction some of these Youtube weirdos still have the gall to say: "A black man cannot play an elf in my show!". Remember when Idris Elba played Heimdall in Thor, and the outcry of these very same idiots? That's a fking Marvel comic series, about superheroes, about flying dudes who can shoot lasers from their eyes, about a space giant who eats whole planets. Why should there be no black Heimdall? I think people often forget that Lord of the Rings, as well as anything Marvel/DC/Star Wars, is a work of fiction. Sometimes the writers draw upon various aspects of mythology as a foundation, but none of the creators ever said: "This is a historically ("historically" as in: what researchers know about the religious beliefs of that time) accurate depiction of the Norse pantheon". The Thor comics heavily borrow from Scandinavian mythology and turn that into garish, americanized nonsense that was meant for mass consumption and was originally aimed at young teenage boys. If a filmmaker went along and said they want to make a historically and culturally accurate drama-documentary of the life and times of Leif Erikson, or a faithful adaption of the Völsunga-Sage (these are heroic songs from the Edda, a collection of heroic deeds from Scandinavian mythology) and then Leif is played by Denzel Washington, then one might have a point. But applying any such rules to works of fiction, that are entirely based on make-believe and often shift, depending on the current batch of writers, is plain silly and very often a hint for "I don't like Black/Hispanic/Asian people". Elves are also way less homogenous than in the movies, there are various houses/tribes and their offshoots. Someone like Legolas (a Wood Elf) would have been considered a country bumpkin by the Noldor (High Elves) that came back from Valinor. For them it would be like coming from a big city and visiting their relatives somewhere out in the sticks, who are great at hunting and know their way around the woods and have their own folklore songs, but are way less learned in the "high arts" or however the Noldor would view their own culture. Harad, Rhûn (the Easterlings), Khand: that's the same world building as in the Conan stories, where you have your central kingdoms of white people in one part of the world and that's where most of the plot happens. And then there's a map that populates the rest of the world with exotic lands, possibly hinting at real-life counterparts (at least Conan, unlike Lotr, actually went to some of these places in a few stories and introduced a few characters from there). The trap here is that many readers will apply racial stereotypes to these far off lands. I read Lotr relatively late in my life, either late teens or early twens, that's long ago. But the conditioning from school, my environment and from the description in the books meant that I immediately had a picture in my head for each of these stereotypes: the Haradrim were Saracens, the Easterlings and Rhûn were some kind of swarthy South-East Europeans that went all the way east to Russia and Mongolia, Khand was Persian-themed....and so on....but all of these perceptions come from assumptions that the reader makes, based on their own upbringing. The source material gives no useful hints what these people are really like, when it comes to culture, traditions, looks etc..., except for a few scarce bits and pieces like "darker skinned" and "cruel" and that they are antagonists influenced by Sauron. Harad is probably the most fleshed out region and their hatred for Gondor et al is justified, because the Men of Numénor (once their decline began) became their colonial overlords. But that there would be a "story" for non-white ethnic groups in these lands, comes entirely from the false conclusions of predominantly white readers, who might as well say "Get the gently caress out of my ethnic group's narration and go back to YOUR people.". All in all no real argument can be made why a work of fiction, that takes place in a fantasy world full of different people and fantastic creatures and that sprang from the mind of someone who lived in a very different world than today's, would need any kind of racial barriers when deciding who is allowed to play which role. P.S.: I took the time to write all this because you said you're not in a great place atm and maybe some of my arguments offer you some brighter perspectives. I wish you all the best and that things improve for you. Hammerstein fucked around with this message at 17:10 on Sep 7, 2022 |
# ? Sep 7, 2022 09:45 |
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# ? Jun 8, 2024 07:38 |
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Hammerstein posted:All in all no real argument can be made why a work of fiction, that takes place in a fantasy world full of different people and fantastic creatures and that sprang from the mind of someone who lived in a very different world than today's, would need any kind of racial barriers when deciding who is allowed to play which role. Watch all of these paragraphs crumble into dust when the shoe is on the other foot, like with The Last Airbender. I'm used to seeing actors being cast with no regard to race in opera and theatre, but these arguments somehow only apply one way or are overridden by different arguments when, say, characters in Hades are portrayed as non-Mediterranean, or when the cast of The Last Airbender doesn't exactly line up with the ethnicities they're based on.
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# ? Sep 7, 2022 10:20 |