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Post by tkdco2 on Feb 10, 2022 21:51:25 GMT -6
Some images and backgrounds in this video. www.youtube.com/watch?v=jmGBekYjg9EI don't have Amazon Prime, so I won't be watching. But hopefully it's a good show that stays reasonably consistent with Tolkien's lore. I already see a few changes I don't like, but I won't judge until I get the full story.
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Post by tdenmark on Feb 11, 2022 1:32:02 GMT -6
I want to be optimistic, but none of the images released so far give me any hope.
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Post by cadriel on Feb 11, 2022 7:14:30 GMT -6
I'll probably watch but I think it's a very expensive bit of fan fiction, and no more impactful than that. I imagine Tolkien wouldn't approve.
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Deleted
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Post by Deleted on Feb 11, 2022 7:18:37 GMT -6
I feel physically ill looking at some of those photos. The aesthetic is just off. Something vital passed with Christopher.
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Post by Falconer on Feb 11, 2022 12:54:26 GMT -6
Something about it makes me think of Canto Bight.
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Post by tdenmark on Feb 11, 2022 14:31:58 GMT -6
I'd like to see a Lord of the Rings and Hobbit series done in the style of Tolkien's drawings. Silmarillion too, but that'd be harder to translate as it is all exposition.
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Post by geoffrey on Feb 11, 2022 22:08:36 GMT -6
This obviously wasn't made to my taste.
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Post by tombowings on Feb 12, 2022 0:27:02 GMT -6
I wish we could leave literature alone. Visual media can be powerful, but I prefer words written for the page to remain there. I see no purpose in recreating the same stories over and over again in different mediums. Surely our screen writers and directors have imagination enough to produce films of their own creation. I personally will grieve if the once unbound creativity of western civilization has finally dried up.
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Deleted
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Post by Deleted on Feb 12, 2022 7:53:41 GMT -6
There's that old chestnut that there are supposedly only seven basic stories but I never bought into that. Pratchett has a great quote about Tolkien's impact on fantasy, though.
"J.R.R. Tolkien has become a sort of mountain, appearing in all subsequent fantasy in the way that Mt. Fuji appears so often in Japanese prints. Sometimes it’s big and up close. Sometimes it’s a shape on the horizon. Sometimes it’s not there at all, which means that the artist either has made a deliberate decision against the mountain, which is interesting in itself, or is in fact standing on Mt. Fuji."
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Post by tombowings on Feb 12, 2022 8:39:05 GMT -6
There's that old chestnut that there are supposedly only seven basic stories but I never bought into that. Pratchett has a great quote about Tolkien's impact on fantasy, though. As someone who has written 5 books, I find some truth to that quote, but only in the sense that all table top RPGs are really the same type of game. As the RPG can spiral into an infinite number of systems and infinite number of instantiated campaign, so can those stories be told in an infinite number of ways.
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Deleted
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Post by Deleted on Feb 12, 2022 8:55:29 GMT -6
There's that old chestnut that there are supposedly only seven basic stories but I never bought into that. Pratchett has a great quote about Tolkien's impact on fantasy, though. As someone who has written 5 books, I find some truth to that quote, but only in the sense that all table top RPGs are really the same type of game. As the RPG can spiral into an infinite number of systems and infinite number of instantiated campaign, so can those stories be told in an infinite number of ways. I suppose even if there are 'only seven stories', that doesn't mean all these producers need to keep reusing all the same tropes in the exact same ways over and over. It's like they're terrified to take a risk. "Let's do another Spiderman. Kids like Spiderman." Yeah okay he's great and all but can't you write a new character with a similar character arc? You can keep the core message of a teenage protagonist learning about great power and great responsibility and recontextualize that. It would feel fresh just by not being Spiderman, even if it's essentially the same story. (I mean, I understand the Monomyth and how Frodo Baggins is basically Luke Skywalker is basically Peter Parker and I'm fine with that.)
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bobjester0e
Level 4 Theurgist
DDO, DCC, or more Lost City map work? Oh, the hardship of making adult decisions! ;)
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Post by bobjester0e on Feb 13, 2022 13:09:20 GMT -6
I see nothing positive coming out of Amazon for Tolkien aficionados or fans of Peter Jackson's movies. Productions like this give (even bad) fan-fic a bad name.
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Post by tdenmark on Feb 13, 2022 21:32:41 GMT -6
This...just isn't for me. It looked more like that Hobbit trilogy than LotR.
Also, I've listened to The Silmarillion on audiobook more times than I can count. All the liberties they are taking for the sake of political correctness rather than for story is going to grate on me.
I'm happy PJ made Lord of the Rings. That was for my generation. At least the liberties he took were to tie story elements together and for adaptation to the screen, and always with respect to Professor Tolkien's work.
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Deleted
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Post by Deleted on Feb 15, 2022 10:24:18 GMT -6
The thing is, it's so simple to represent diverse groups of people without major alterations to the established world. Haradrim and Easterlings are established groups already. It wouldn't be a stretch to imagine a protagonist from either group.
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Post by Falconer on Feb 15, 2022 13:00:37 GMT -6
I thought about doing a lengthy post about race within Middle-earth as Tolkien wrote it, and all the story potential it provides regarding the Númenóreans and their relations to various Middle-earth natives. But my expectations about this series and its willingness to engage Tolkien lore is SERIOUSLY diminished. This appears to be a bland and generic LotR fanfic about Galadriel, Elrond, and Hobbits in the Second Age. (Nevertheless, if you are interested, here is a post I wrote about race last year.)
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Post by Finarvyn on Feb 15, 2022 16:27:40 GMT -6
I'm not a real scholar of Tolkien but I have a whole shelf full of his stuff and I like to read it. Essays such as your race one are useful as I try to wrap my brain around all of the material he imagined. He did so much of it!
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Post by tetramorph on Feb 15, 2022 17:58:06 GMT -6
Something about it makes me think of Canto Bight. Falc, help me understand what this means. (Sorry to kill the joke if it is a joke I am not getting!)
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Post by Falconer on Feb 15, 2022 20:23:53 GMT -6
I applaud the casting! The Witcher had a diverse cast, and it was fantastic. I want all my fantasy TV/film to look like that from now on. I can't "un-see" this cool looking character design, and now if Amazon didn't have Black elves (like Netflix) it would be weird: Well, I suppose I was thinking it was supposed to be a Tolkien adaptation first and foremost. I don’t really agree that all shows should look the same or should share all the exact same fantasy races. Everyone wants to see real human diversity on TV today. And as I said, Tolkien in his writings makes sure to invent diverse societies and to grapple with issues of race in-world, perhaps especially in the Second Age. But if they are just going to cast any actor in any role with a “colorblind” perspective, it suggests to me they are actually going to shy away from grappling with any issues of race in the story. That seems like cop-out, to me. Safe, bland, less interesting, less beautiful. Falc, help me understand what this means. (Sorry to kill the joke if it is a joke I am not getting!) Vanity Fair also did a “first look” at TLJ, and it was the first time I got that gut feeling that TLJ was off somehow. It was just a gut reaction, not really a joke.
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Post by tdenmark on Feb 16, 2022 2:48:58 GMT -6
I applaud the casting! The Witcher had a diverse cast, and it was fantastic. I want all my fantasy TV/film to look like that from now on. I can't "un-see" this cool looking character design, and now if Amazon didn't have Black elves (like Netflix) it would be weird: Putting all politics aside, having a group of characters with different skin tones together on screen simply looks cool and I can't imagine why any director wouldn't want to make use of the widest possible visual palette. A diverse cast is fine, we live in a time we get to see all kinds of fantastic diversity in a wide range of media. It is great and makes thinks more interesting, rich, and varied. To put some context here if this was a story about The Monkey King, or Mulan we'd expect to see a Chinese cast, maybe some Mongolians. And it'd be all the more believable and beautiful for it. LotR was an attempt on Tolkien's part to create a mythology for England. The shire represented an idyllic English village. And he drew much from Scandinavian folklore and mythology. Now, there ARE peoples of various types in Middle Earth, so there are ways to pull in that rich diverse cast we all love to see. Making Galadriel a warrior queen and Elrond a pacified architect isn't the way, that literally goes against who and what those established characters are. As for the dwarf (some are referring to as a dokkalfar) the main problem is that she doesn't have a beard. (okay, I added that last line for a bit of fun)
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Post by Falconer on Feb 16, 2022 9:27:39 GMT -6
As you probably know, Tolkien was a professor of Anglo-Saxon, and so his primary interest was to create a mythology for the Anglo-Saxon people which (like all mythology) takes place in an imaginary prehistoric time. The written history or pseudo-history of the Anglo-Saxon people begins with Hengest and Horsa in the 5th Century. That’s well before WWI.
Anyway, literally no-one here is saying that there shouldn’t be a racially diverse cast.
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Post by tdenmark on Feb 16, 2022 9:33:48 GMT -6
LotR was an attempt on Tolkien's part to create a mythology for England. If we follow that logic to its conclusion, then the cast-of-characters should reflect the racial diversity of England. Black people have been living in England since Roman times. Oxford College (where Tolkien was a professor) had Black students. Tolkien served alongside Black soldiers in WWI. Yeah, ok. This is well known. People groups have been migrating since the dawn of time. That isn't the point. That wasn't in the novels. You could do The Cheetah and the Lazy Hunter (a traditional Zulu story) and shoehorn some diverse people in there because. But why would you? It is all the more interesting because it is African. Tolkien's writings are beloved all around the world for a reason, why mess with it?
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Post by tdenmark on Feb 16, 2022 9:38:35 GMT -6
Anyway, literally no-one here is saying that there shouldn’t be a racially diverse cast. Exactly, like the Black Númenóreans.
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Post by tdenmark on Feb 17, 2022 0:09:40 GMT -6
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Post by waysoftheearth on Feb 17, 2022 1:11:30 GMT -6
Rings of Fluff.
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Post by tombowings on Feb 17, 2022 1:48:52 GMT -6
I should really stop reading this thread. I more I learn about this show, the more disrespectful I find it to the source material.
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Post by captainjapan on Feb 17, 2022 7:37:29 GMT -6
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Post by tombowings on Feb 17, 2022 7:50:29 GMT -6
Check your sources before posting, please. "boundingintocomics" is a known hate-speech site associated with the alt-right. They are associated with the "Comicsgate" incident, harassing and threatening artists. This kind of drivel has no place on odd74, please. mediabiasfactcheck.com/bounding-into-comics/Can we keep politics and name-calling off the site, please? There are many other places to discuss what is "alt-right", what is and isn't considered "hate-speech", and who is associated with various incidents, harassment and threats. Let's be better than that here. If we have a problem with an article, let's try to critique the facts it presents, not the website the article is published on. After all, no one is perfect. Let's focus on improving ourselves instead of cutting down others for their shortcomings.
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Post by rredmond on Feb 17, 2022 13:27:01 GMT -6
Sorry for the temporary lock folks, I was looking at something, all good to go now. But just wanted to highlight this very good bit of wisdom:Can we keep politics and name-calling off the site, please? There are many other places to discuss what is "alt-right", what is and isn't considered "hate-speech", and who is associated with various incidents, harassment and threats. Let's be better than that here. If we have a problem with an article, let's try to critique the facts it presents, not the website the article is published on. After all, no one is perfect. Let's focus on improving ourselves instead of cutting down others for their shortcomings. Thank you tombowings!
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Post by Deleted on Feb 17, 2022 15:56:32 GMT -6
Anyway, literally no-one here is saying that there shouldn’t be a racially diverse cast. Exactly, like the Black Númenóreans. I thought that was a colorful descriptor of their allegiance and not a commentary on their skin color.
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Post by tdenmark on Feb 17, 2022 17:23:37 GMT -6
Exactly, like the Black Númenóreans. I thought that was a colorful descriptor of their allegiance and not a commentary on their skin color. You could be right. I'm no Tolkien scholar.
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