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anyone here actually gonna watch this thing? i'm personally rooting for a complete and utter failure, the likes of which has never been seen before. |
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I don't know half of you half as well as I should like; and I like less than half of you half as well as you deserve. |
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never been a fan of CGI orcs, dragons, or whatever |
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In Peter Jackson's trilogy the orcs were mostly just old school costumes/makeup Course there was a bunch of CGI shit too, but he also used pretty detailed miniatures for most of the locations. I know this because I have the super extended versions and I watched like all 40 hours of bonus content on each one. Maybe the nerdiest shit I've ever sat through. But even as much as I like the original trilogy, it loses the essential literary quality of Tolkien's spoken word. The dude elevated his shit, and invented the genre at the same time. |
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thanks i didnt know what an orc was tbh in primary school i borrowed a tolkien book from the library and pretended to read it all. i didnt read a word of it. how pathetic of me. lol :-) |
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frodo is half mexican in the books |
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Merry and Pippin called him Frito because he was always fried from massive bong hits of pipeweed in the books |
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it is first revealed that he is half mexican when he invites his family to celebrate dia de los muertos first book chapter 3 |
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in the Forgotten Tales, Sam's uncle Gumblebum is forced to retire from his professorship for saying Dwarf with a hard R |
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yeah and his excuse was that he was allowed to say it with a hard r because he's married to a dwarf himself |
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dwarf please |
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It looks disastrous, it has no essence of Middle Earth whatsoever, looks like a shit video game cut scene |
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I think i read somewhere the woman who is writing it has made up her own characters, you might as well wipe your arse with a copy of the history of middle earth. There is alot i like about American culture, and Americans but giving them the reins over something which is fundamentally European in feel and scope is a tremendously bad idea. Its like asking Alan Bennet to write and direct Die Hard. |
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Then again i don't think its something that is narratively suited for television or movies. If you read something like the Silmarillion its more like a description of events, although there are stories embedded with in. Its just Jeff Bezos trying to make loads of money from the IP. If its a success i will be genuinely surprised. |
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I got into an argument with someone on twitter, cos they were going on about Tolkien and how he wasn't a racist which is true but I posted this article by Michael Moorcroft Tolkien a crypto fascist. and the guy was saying "bullshit bullshit" even though the article was sort of tongue in cheek. Plus Tolkien supported Franco in the Spanish Civil war so he was far from perfect |
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Actually just realised gave this far too much thought as I won't be watching, hopefully some people enjoy it. Much better off sticking to the books i reckon |
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Moorcock has a light touch but he's on point there. Tolkien is at the very least a reactionary. His heroes are the stolid country folk, the hobbits, who want no truck with Saruman and his industrialization. Tolkien is anti-progress. He would hate the way China is building high speed rail and elevating its peasants out of crushing poverty. I wouldn't say he's a RETVRN style traditionalist like some of his fans - Varg for example. But certainly reactionary. George Monbiot made a good point that we love narratives and this is why we can cheer for hereditary monarchy as an ideology in LOTR, where Aragorn comes to the throne because of his awesome genes. This doesn't justify revision of Tolkien's work. Leave it as it is, don't try to put blackface on it. Why not just create new narratives. But that's not how we milk a franchise, is it? |
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Yeah i mean I wouldn't go so far with calling Tolkien a fascist but he seems to be overly preoccupied with hereditary lineages, order, chivalry stuff like that. It seems sort of subconscious but Middle Earth seems like a classist place. The Elves and Númenóreans men are like the upper classic, aristocracy types, high culture, long lived. Sort of an unattainable position in society for an upper middle class guy like Tolkien. The Hobbits, middle class to upper working class, Bilbo is like Tolkien's avatar in middle earth. smoking a pipe and a fascination with his betters i.e. elves Orcs/tolls very working class/underclass talk with a stereotypical cockney accent lol. No culture, violent and usually covered in dirt like the workers in the industrial revolution |
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Yeah suppose Sauron is the personification/spectre of industrialisation/hardcore capitalism, no coincidence the midlands used to look like mordor and Tolkien's own sketch of Barad-dûr looks a bit like some victorian era brickwork factory |
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I was a massive Tolkien fan as a kid/teenager first read the Hobbit in 1992 but I think its hard for me to see past all this fascination with the elves and stuff in his work and realise its probably a subconscious desire of his to be aristocracy or royal especially as someone who is lower class like myself who has never had that desire. I associate much more with the Hobbits in a cosy small house smoking pipes, eating cheese, drinking ale and walking through the woods |
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i look at the bigger picture: a society that's been juvenilized & infantilized and is obsessed with nerd shit/children's hobbies like comic books, videogames, superheroes, cosplay, adult cartoons, harry potter, and all this fantasy shit that has turned these things into being part of an identity and/or lifestyle. too much arrested development going on in the western hemisphere. i shouldn't have to look at a grown man wearing elmo & big bird streetwear or cars plastered in marvel & star wars bumper stickers. it's time to grow up. |
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I have to say I totally agree with that, especially when it comes to the endless superhero movies, when a adult says oh yeah I love the Harry Potter books I do get a bit disconcerted, as you said its the infantalisatioon of culture. |
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We have people like that in the UK but it seems much more prevalent in America like to the Nth degree |
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Stepladder? |
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I still play videogames from time to time |
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I dunno. You're venturing on making a firm statement on the "point of living," when there's no real point other than to procreate (I guess-- been with my gf for 10 years and told her day 1 not interested in kids ever, no regrets). What else would be the point? climbing the corporate ladder? Art and entertainment immersion seem as valid as anything else. Hobbies in general. People act like gaming is a less valid hobby than model trains or something, but that's a shit boomer take. fuck your trains old man. Anyway it's all kinda moot because what I *didn't* see coming at ALL was an extreme push to use all my old favorite nerd shit as a vessel for (leftist) political messaging. It's not just LOTR, I don't trust anything being made in 2022. I don't trust any critical reviewer to not be agenda first in 2022. This is a real trash time for entertainment (last 7 years or so), if you respect artistic integrity on any level. |
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everything has been infiltrated & subverted because a) that's the modus operandi of the left i.e. resorting to manipulation & guilt/shaming tactics to coerce people into taking up a cause due to an inability to enact policy & ideology via force and b) this started long ago by putting it in the minds of children over the last several decades and now those children have reached adult age who work in/operate/control these institutions. there's also identitarian hyper-capitalism (i say this as someone who advocates for capitalism) where the message has become "buy the thing! spend money on the thing! you want to be part of the thing right? then just give us the cash! you can buy into your identity! spend money to become the thing! reinforce your identity and buy our shit to feel like you're part of the thing! we don't have to put out a good product, we just have to put *a* product appealing to identities and brainless consumers will flock to it!". it's down to pumping out a product with a bare minimum effort involved knowing consumers will still consume it for their dopamine fix & identity reinforcement. also the psychological profile of the left wing is that of narcissism & manipulation of the parasocial relationship, as in "we will make our problems your problems. you will be forced to care about what we care about. we will continually shove it down your throat and if you disagree, we will resort to those guilt/shame tactics & demonization and throw a tantrum until you placate us" view them as children who go out of their way to annoy people and then go "neener neener neener! you can't touch me!"; the type to provoke you into smacking them around so they can go "he hit me! he hit me! make them stop! i'm a victim!" and then the person who actually tried to administer any sort of discipline or put their foot down is the one who gets in trouble/demonized. where this all ends is in essentially a reactionary force eventually stomping the fuck out of them (physically or figuratively) |
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this is the sort of nitpicking that I find hilarious, Dwarves aren't even real |
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Its the American definition of the left, its neo-liberalism to my mind, when I think of the left I think purely in economic terms i.e. socialism, seems to have morphed into this Culture war bollocks now Corporate media have done a very good job of painting people who are traditionally left as hysterical purple haired sexually ambiguous nightmares. When i think of the left I think of Arthur Scargill and people like that |
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Oh well looks like the ultra capitalists and Rupert Murdoch has won, people are just going on and on about shit that doesn't matter from both sides of the political spectrum while the rest of human race is being bummed to death. |
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I do it myself sometimes, engage in this pointless culture war, its ultimately fruitless I reckon cos human civilization doesn't have that long left, perhaps a few half dozen generations |
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You're right that it's definitely a corporate problem, it's not the government doing this. Companies play it super safe now, and are trying to cover their own ass. If the first question a studio asks is "where is the diversity," then no one will ever get off the ground without playing by those rules. Hardcore progressives have just been going through this avenue for the last few years and it seems to be working for them. I don't get "representation" as a factor in writing. Characters never represent me... What the amount of melanin in my skin is supposed to somehow make me the same as Bruce Willis? We're nothing alike. I want the characters to be the characters. I don't respect anyone who asks to be represented in their entertainment. It's pathetic. Maybe spending a billion dollars (actual cost) on this LOTR thing and getting low viewership will be an eye opener. We used to TRY and tell new stories all the time when I was growing up, and now it's just re-tread the old with a veneer of woke. Nothing worthwhile has come of this. |
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Yeah my dad lives in Germany, and he's like "we have a very different definition of leftism here. Most Germans do not know what Americans are talking about when you refer to "leftist" [with regards to social progressive identify politics stuff]." It's almost a semantical distinction-- I have zero problems with the economic left or social programs, but I have a big problem with the cultural push coming from that wing here in the US. Do forgive my Americanism there. And it shows too, I think my favorite piece of entertainment in the last 10 years of so was a German show called Dark (it's really great). No bullshit messaging, just a kick ass time travel web. |
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Yeah exactly you said it better than I did |
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I think its a very successful smear cos people in America probably associate socialism with sexual deviants and identity politics rather than its original meaning |
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I mean lets face it there was no way this wasn't going to be a PC disaster being made in 2022 |
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Yes, absolutely. Continental Europeans still have a tradition of real economic leftism that has been long gone in most of the English speaking world since Thatcher / Reagan. Over here now it's just catpeople fighting for pronoun recognition on social networking platforms. |
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my dad was a trade unionist, masculine guy and avowed leftist, he would have been very confused |
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Being made in 2022 for 1 billion USD, lol. We'll see how it goes. I was so fucking excited for the midnight releases of all 3 LOTR movies. 17 year old wolfslice, just found aphex twin, just started posting on XLT. Times were good. The one thing that could really upset my worldview was to start fucking with art to this degree. I just have to get over it, I know-- but then what do I have left? *I* have not found the meaning of life, but I've always been really happy and comfortable in enjoying good art. |
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"leftism" has been neutered by liberals, turned away from political forms that could upset wealth and power, turned towards harmless fetishization of identity |
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We still have the books mate, i had no confidence this was going to be any good, firstly cos it was being made by Amazon as a TV series, and secondly the times that things are made in, were identity politics are the first order of business for everything including fantasy worlds written by a British heterosexual author. Really they shouldn't be making things based on people of that ilk if they find it so objectional. But if they made something purely written by someone whose head is mired in modern postmodernist thinking it would be pure shit and wouldn't make a dime. Thats the real paradox isn't it?? |
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Yeah and I get the feeling that alot of dark money and political interests on the right were behind this shift, cos if they can distract the mainstream political dialogue. Then they don't have to be worried about their own position cos everyone is bogged down in this self thought policing state of affairs. |
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i concur with civil sex rights are getting far too much attention as opposed to equal opportunities, money and power. its kind of a trap we fell in. i didnt give much thought about the classicist world tolkien describes, as in humans past (and present mostly too) its all about heritage and we mostly lived and live in a classicist system. however i dont feel dwarves, humans, elves or hobbits stand in some kind of hierarchy towards each other or one was explicitly better than the other, even when elves are described as the purest of all etc due to their long life and experience/knowledge, because THEY ALL say things i agree or disagree with, they all strive for things and act questionably at times and all have their flaws, and most importantly they all get tempted by power. which ultimately is what the story is about for me. even the bad guys, sauron, the ring wraiths who were kings. they all fall to the claim for power. no one can resist it thus it must be destroyed. i cant find a better story to show the problems power inherits. even the later returned king feels its effect, rejects it and he wont rule over all of middle earth, just a part of it and only for a shorter amount of time than he would have with the ring. the coronation scene in the lotr movie may give a different impression at he very the end, but the book and later the extended version show his death and we know hes mortal becaue of the arwen plot. the bow to the hobbits really put an exclamation mark against the existing classicism as described in the lotr btw and its not the only time he displays the supposedly lowest as equal. so imo he shows classicism but he doesnt glorify it at all. its my personal impression though. other people may only see a colossal war story/movie for example. its kind of subjective, because there are so many events and motives, you may pick the ones you think about the most anyway or reflect your personal opinion. |
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I really like your breakdown (and completely agree with your take on the themes). I can almost guarantee there's more nuance in those paragraphs than will be showcased in the entirety of the new show. I think part the "class division" based on purity in LOTR has a literal magical component though. The elves just got more of the good stuff, whatever actual force that made the Ents and the wizards, rangers, hobbits and everything else in tune with nature. Men and dwarves, not so much. |
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and got more of the good stuff than anyone else, if you catch my drift. |
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heres a great article about the class structure of the shire lol. I think you're generally right though ijonspeches if there is a class structure to middle earth is pretty much in the background or not apparent at all, its mostly different cultures interacting on the same level. |
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Having said that there are kings, lords, merchant classes and peasants within each separate culture like Gondor, Rohan, even the shire to a certain extent. Perhaps Mordor is a metaphor for godless communism, with its anarchic social structure, I don't think so though, I don't think Tolkien wanted to politicise his world I think its just a depiction of classical evil. Destruction versus creators |
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Yeah the deference Aragorn shows the hobbits is a very good point, I think he might be unique in his world view in some respects as he has spent years as a ranger living amongst the common folk under his Striker alias. Someone like the Steward of Gondor Denethor was very dismissive of the hobbits, so it makes me wonder who is more representative. I suspect its Aragorn as his forefathers are described as very wise and magnanimous. |
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