Rings of Power: Tolkien's Shambling Skinsuit

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j00t

Silver Baronet of the Realm
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They didn’t buy The Silmarillion rights because they aren’t worth anything. Only 1 in 1000 viewers of this show will know who Annatar is, or when Durin’s bane actually awoke, or when the first wizard arrived in Middle Earth. Even fewer will actually care.

LOTR is a far richer story with much more recognizable intellectual property to produce content from. It’s vastly more valuable than The Silmarillion or Unfinished Tales.

Buying the rights to those so some online dorks don’t sperg out over lore inconsistencies would be a totally retarded business decision. Not to mention, they’d sperg out anyway.
yeah, you're right.. i mean it's obvious they don't care at all about tolkien's literary legacy... so that makes perfect sense that they would come to this conclusion

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Chukzombi

Millie's Staff Member
72,969
214,258
Payne: “Season one opens with: Who is Galadriel? Where did she come from? What did she suffer? Why is she driven? We’re doing the same thing with Sauron in season two. We’ll fill in all the missing pieces.”

McKay: “Sauron can now just be Sauron. Like Tony Soprano or Walter White. He’s evil, but complexly evil. We felt like if we did that in season one, he’d overshadow everything else. So the first season is like Batman Begins, and the The Dark Knight is the next movie, with Sauron maneuvering out in the open. We’re really excited. Season two has a canonical story. There may well be viewers who are like, ‘This is the story we were hoping to get in season one!’ In season two, we’re giving it to them.”
 

Penance

Silver Baronet of the Realm
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I get it now. This show feels like an amalgamation of Microsoft Teams meetings.

No vision, no direction. Just charts and graphs.
 
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Tearofsoul

Ancient MMO noob
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Is it that bad? Or are some of you as negative as usual?

I will check this out this coming weekends
 
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Warpath

Golden Baronet of the Realm
1,279
9,587
Hehe. I think you got me confused with all the other beta-bottoms here that think it's some kind of meta-political thing to hate on RoP, Black Panther, She-Hulk whatever because their trumpchan/critical drinker handlers tell them too :emoji_smile:

being called a 'beta-bottom' by a soyface disney simp is a new low for me


Sad Arrested Development GIF
 
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amigo

Molten Core Raider
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529

In case timestamp doesn't work: 18:22.
Looking forward to Amazon's biopic on Hitler (spoiler: Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin were the bad guys).
 
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Creslin

Trakanon Raider
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Morgoth was chaotic evil and pretty unhinged. Sauron was the more complex character, he wasn’t good in any way but I would seriously question anyone who thinks Walter white is good in any way either. Both of them have stories where you can see their motivations and understand why they did what they did but that is the reality of evil people, thanos is a good example.

I like the idea of making him a more three dimensional villain. Anyone who likes Tolkien lore should like that. They might do it terribly on the show but making him just another evil dude doing evil shit for evils sake would be way out of line with his character.
 
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Hoss

Make America's Team Great Again
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Am I the only one bothered by the hairless faces of the Dwarven women? Was that not part of Tolkiens original story? Did we ever see a dwarf woman on screen? Because I don't rightly recall where that came from.
 

Runnen

Vyemm Raider
1,857
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Am I the only one bothered by the hairless faces of the Dwarven women? Was that not part of Tolkiens original story? Did we ever see a dwarf woman on screen? Because I don't rightly recall where that came from.

Technically we have no way to know if we ever saw dwarven women on screen because Gimli says they look so much like the dwarven men that outsiders can't tell them apart, which gave way to the legend that dwarves just sprout from the earth (which in a way they did as they were sculpted from stone and earth by Aulë).

I don't recall Tolkien specifically saying they always have beards, but he did say the dwarves don't have a big population because dwarves only take one mate for life, and some dwarven women aren't really interested in getting in a relationship or having children in the first place as they'd rather pursue other dwaven interests such as mining, crafting and fighting.

In that way, I'd imagine dwarven women warriors tend to look a lot like men and would have beards or mohawks and whatever other dwarven archetype stuff. Disa, Durin IV's wife, is the first dwarven priestess / rock singer we have seen on screen AND she wanted to get married, so maybe she's more "girly" with robes and no beard. *shrug*
 
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Chris

Potato del Grande
19,436
-10,733
Morgoth was chaotic evil and pretty unhinged. Sauron was the more complex character, he wasn’t good in any way but I would seriously question anyone who thinks Walter white is good in any way either. Both of them have stories where you can see their motivations and understand why they did what they did but that is the reality of evil people, thanos is a good example.

I like the idea of making him a more three dimensional villain. Anyone who likes Tolkien lore should like that. They might do it terribly on the show but making him just another evil dude doing evil shit for evils sake would be way out of line with his character.
I like the idea of Sauron wanting forgiveness after the War of Wrath but thinking that he has to fix what he broke first, however his sense of morality is now so warped that everything he does turns to evil.

It doesn't work because he tries to invade Valinor after setting up a human sacrifice Morgoth cult there. Adar's story is actually much closer to that, in trying to redeem the orcs he's nuked Mordor and turned it into a waste.

Like most repurposed reboots, the writers just want to piggyback their own ideas onto an established IP rather than make their own IP.
 

Falstaff

Ahn'Qiraj Raider
8,399
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Is it that bad? Or are some of you as negative as usual?

I will check this out this coming weekends
If you are a casual/semi hardcore fan of the LotR universe, meaning you’ve only seen the movies and maybe read the books, you’ll like this. If you consume every scrap of writing and cocktail napkin that Tolkien wrote on then you might hate it. It really depends on how much you value an “interpretation” of a story vs “my precious source material”.
 
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Hoss

Make America's Team Great Again
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I have read every scrap of Tolkien's writings that I could find and I like the series. However, I admit that I hate reading, so I've only read it all through once. Maybe if you've read it all multiple times, that's when you run the risk of hating this.
 
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Asmadai

¯\_(ツ)_/¯
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Or if, you know, you actually paid attention to what you read the first time you read it.

It doesn't take a Tolkien scholar to see the differences between what he wrote, and what this show is producing.
 
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Burns

Avatar of War Slayer
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14,654
I have only watched the Peter Jackson movies and still thought this was mediocre through and through.

It was slightly worse than the Hobbit movies. If the Hobbit movies didn't have the Peter Jackson and WETA nostalgia going strong for it, I would probably rate them the same.

The last episode was the best, but it was still hampered by the bland writing of the rest of the season. I forgot what its called when the writers do this, but it looks like they made an outline of where all the characters had to be, then wrote them getting there. All developments in the story were so they could be in the scene where they needed to be. In Halbrand's case, it was incredibly idiotic and Gladdy the Elves path wasn't much better.