Rings of Power: Tolkien's Shambling Skinsuit

Chukzombi said:

just keep in mind while you dont care about canon, then you shouldnt care about the story either. the people writing this story have no prior experience to anything. they were found off the street and given this job. none of this is from Tolkien. its only a loose adaption using the names of certain Tolkien characters and inventing whole cloth other characters. this is only "inspired" by Tolkien, you will NOT be getting a Tolkien story.

-edit
if they had followed canon then you may have gotten a story close to what Tolkien intended. now you get nothing.

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Khalan said:

On the other hand if it is entertaining and well written, I won't really give a shit who is cast as who as long as it's a good show.

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jayrebb said:

Good thing they hired guys that never made a good show or wrote, produced, directed even so much as 1 episode of TV then.

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Khalan said:

I think thats ultimately my point. The story is 90% made up. Including what I am sure will be a ton of scenes, dialogue and events that never happened in the book. If you are willing to watch the show and accept that, I can't imagine you are then stuck up on some minor casting issues.

I'll repeat if the show stuffs wokeshit in your face just cause, I will shit on it as hard as anyone. On the other hand if it is entertaining and well written, I won't really give a shit who is cast as who as long as it's a good show.

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Chukzombi said:

i mean if you are fine with a non Tolkien story using some Tolkien character names and locations, i guess you cant be disappointed with anything. even if Tar Miriel is twerking at Sauron and he starts mumble rapping in return, then that would just be the icing on the cake.

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zignor 4 said:

Even if diversity casting was 100% not a thing and every character in this was true to their book descriptions, no dramatic TV show or movie format is going to be faithful to The Silmarillion or The Unfinished Tales. It's impossible. The books are largely made up of huge sections of exposition with no dialogue at all. When characters do actually converse, it's nearly always sparse and in small snippets. No matter how amazing a cast or brilliant a writer that might have been put together for this in another universe, massive liberties would have to be taken by necessity.

The only way you could adapt these books to film and keep it reasonably faithful would be to do so in a documentary format. I'd be much more interested in watching something like that than whatever this is going to be.

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zignor 4 said:

Even if diversity casting was 100% not a thing and every character in this was true to their book descriptions, no dramatic TV show or movie format is going to be faithful to The Silmarillion or The Unfinished Tales. It's impossible. The books are largely made up of huge sections of exposition with no dialogue at all. When characters do actually converse, it's nearly always sparse and in small snippets. No matter how amazing a cast or brilliant a writer that might have been put together for this in another universe, massive liberties would have to be taken by necessity.

The only way you could adapt these books to film and keep it reasonably faithful would be to do so in a documentary format. I'd be much more interested in watching something like that than whatever this is going to be.

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popsicledeath said:

All screenplay adaptations involve edits and rewrites and taken liberties, even the ones staying as true to the source material as possible. It's another idiotic point to try to say it couldn't be a faithful adaptation because full dialog wasn't written out.

I guess any show or movie isn't a faithful adaptation unless the actors only make facial expressions explicitly described in the book? Can't be a faithful adaptation because a book can't describe every raised eyebrow!

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Nomvete then made it clear The Rings of Power is actually an erasure of Tolkien’s work and the whole point of the show is to reflect the modern world rather than reflect Tolkien’s work.

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zignor 4 said:

No, you illiterate dipshit. I'll break it down further, since reading is hard.

Jackson's LoTR films, particularly Fellowship, were largely faithful to the overall structure, narrative, and spirit of the books. Plenty of material was left out by necessity, the action scenes were protracted, and we got dumb shit like Legolas surfing down steps and elephants, but taken as a whole, they were about as respectable and as reasonable of an adaptation as we're ever likely to get in our lifetimes. But even if Jackson had totally botched it (hi, Hobbit movies), the fact is that the books contain piles of cinematic potential, provided they're adapted with some care and skill, which they mostly were.

On the other hand, there's very little to structure a long-form show or film around within The Silmarillion / UT - especially the parts that are set in the first and second ages - without taking massive and multiple liberties. Years, decades, and even centuries often pass by in a couple of sentences. Even the more intimate, slower moving narrative sections like Beren and Luthien, Turin Turambar, etc, are often written in an extreme combination of broad story beats mixed with hyper-detailed minutia. There's no way to flesh those stories out into a compelling TV show without altering and inventing bucket loads of shit. I mean with the source material here we're really only a couple steps ahead of what the GoT show runners had to work with when they ran past where Martin decided to stop to wait for the inevitable coronary, and we all saw how fantastically that worked out.

Now, do I think that it's still possible to craft a successful and compelling show out of these stories while keeping it at least respectable of the spirit of Tolkien? Absolutely. But it would still contain a massive amount of material that was wholly invented by the writers, because it would have to. Do I think that this is that show? No way, especially if this is true and not simply some stupid trolling horse shit designed to blow up Twitter traffic:

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popsicledeath said:

Nobody is saying they have to restrict themselves only to things already explicitly existing in the IP, only that there are industry standards regarding adaptions and "based on and "inspired by etc. These clowns seem intent on shitting on the very IP they're hired to work with to act on political and social agendas.

Your contribution is adaptations aren't possible because dialog isn't written out so they'd be required to take liberties.

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i mean if you are fine with a non Tolkien story using some Tolkien character names and locations

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popsicledeath said:

Bringing that up either shows your ignorance, or proves you're a retard just saying dumb shit so you can feel like you're contributing to a discussion you don't seem equiped to meaningfully contribute to.

All adaptations and screenplays based on existing IP or source material required editing and rewrites and making up a lot of shots. It's how it's handled that is in question. We agree on that, but you still make retarded points getting there.

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popsicledeath said:

Edit: my guess is you actually fancy yourself a writer and have spent many hours typing in coffee shops, which is probably why you're retarded.

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zignor 4 said:

Only if you can't read. I'm saying (again) that a faithful adaptation of this particular source material into a dramatic TV format is not possible. That doesn't mean that I expect Sauron's jock strap to be period-accurate at all times or else all bets are off. There are degrees, and in this case, the material is not suited for it.

Here:



My contention is that virtually any show based on this material is largely going to be a "non-Tolkien story" (or at best, an extremely loose Tolkien story) that uses some Tolkien character names and locations. That's essentially all it could ever realistically be. The material is too scattered, too uneven, too incomplete, too inconsistent in tone and depth and detail for it to be anything else. It's literally a conglomeration of random and often inconsistent writings that Tolkien scribbled down over decades that his son gathered up in an attempt to hammer into something resembling a coherent series of short stories set against an overarching mythology.

That doesn't mean that one couldn't make a show that is: A) compelling, B) well-written, and C) largely respectful of Tolkien, even if 90% of it is completely invented by the showrunners. Again, I seriously doubt that this show will be all or even any of those things.



Yes, we agree on that and I never said otherwise. That didn't stop you from twisting what I said so it could be forced to fit into a conclusion that you made up on your own.

Then that would make your guessing skills even worse than your comprehension skills.

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