But this theme is pretty much in keeping with the darker subject matter of The Silmarillion.
This was many years ago, is my recollection flawed?
It's true that the first 50 pages or so are pretty much just worldbuilding, mainly focusing on the mythology behind the creation of the world (Arda) by Iluvatar and the various demigods. After that, you start getting into the details of what the elves did upon waking up as the first quasi-"mortal" inhabitants of Arda, and the subsequent eras of history. Some of it is painted in broad strokes, but there are plenty of chapters that zoom in on specific characters and their heroic and evil deeds, personal conflicts, betrayals, hubris and other tragic flaws, etc.
Sure, the style of the prose is a bit dry, but there's plenty of drama to be had in the story.
Wikipedia has a pretty good summary of the overall plot: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Silmarillion#Synopsis
The Halo story bible is an exception which has seen parts released: https://www.halopedia.org/Halo_Story_Bible
A portion of the story bible for ATLA was leaked: https://www.reddit.com/r/TheLastAirbender/comments/aj0mfp/th...
Then you get into the elf family trees and their migrations. Its really dry. But it really helps understand the motivations of individuals in the rest of the book and the other books. There are some diagrams in the back to help you plow through it.
Then there are the accounts of both individuals and nations/races. They are more like greek tragedy than anything else. Though sometimes it doesn't even seem like there needs to be a flaw to bring down the fall. It is like binging all of Breaking Bad at once. Not going to leave you smiling, but that doesn't mean it isn't art.
Some parts are more like a traditional narrative: the story of Beren and Luthien, and Turin Turumbar.
If you didn't find it enjoyable to read before you might not change your mind at a second reading, but if it really was a long time ago it's possible your perspective may be different.
You might as well leave it be.
It’s also not a great way to characterize the Second Age, since both a portion of the good and a vital portion of the evil sides in the conflict survive and both are very greatly diminished, but I don’t think the writings about the Second Age were really central to that work. That’s why the show (which I haven’t seen yet) seemed like perhaps not a terrible idea to me. There’s not much legacy there to tarnish.
Amazon is going full Sauron here. They're a multi-industry-spanning conglomerate that preferentially ranks its own show and discards negative reviews, while leaving House of the Dragon and competitors out in the cold.
They have whole other business units to recoup the costs. This doesn't even matter to them other than as a means to grow even bigger and capture/kill more industries. Talk about power.
Why are our legislators asleep at the wheel? We need to give smaller companies and startups a way to fight this. It's madness that Amazon can be bigger than Walmart, have its own shipping fleet, serve the whole Internet, run homes autonomously, own the e-reader/book market, own game streaming, and now apparently throw Hollywood around and make their productions look cheap.
This reminds me of something I read recently.
> ..Tolkien's vision of the greatest evil in the universe was something he referred to as "The Machine", which was his way of talking about accelerated industrialism and mass surveillance.
> He wrote multiple books where the main villains were a dragon who sits on a huge pile of treasure that he never intends to use but incinerates anyone who comes near it; a man in a giant tower who's wrecking the environment with his factories; and an evil being who uses what's essentially a listening device to control the citizens of Middle Earth.
> And now Amazon is making a Tolkien show.
They aren’t going to hide the fact that the show sucks and they certainly just made that much harder by doing this.
In order for them to actually maintain their power this show would need to somehow help them create a moat (it doesn’t) or just make money on its own by driving subscriptions.
As far as abuses of power go, this is absolutely not one of them.
The issue is that this was a high dollar show and it likely had to have a lot of sign off. Unfortunately, great art and vast pre-approval don’t tend to go hand in hand.
I’m afraid we’re turning a corner in our golden age of television into a dark world of corporate overreach.
That was included in one of the paperbacks published by Christopher Tolkien as “Unfinished Tales.”
Time will tell, but I am sensing a major fiasco for Amazon studios
Xcloud and GeForce Now would like to a word with you. Does anyone actually use Luna?
Nothing about what the person being interviewed said implies that the moral of the story is “you should go really really far into evil to do good.” I’d say the implication of that question is the opposite.
If Aragorn took the Ring, he would be able to challenge Sauron. Denethor was somewhat of a lesser rank, but still an almost pure Numenorean. The Ring would have turned both of them to Evil, for sure, but not necessarily into servants of Sauron himself. They might just become the new Evil overlords of the world after defeating Sauron.
The main character flaw of Denethor is that he sacrificed his life to the cause of Gondor and Gondor only. Existence and might of Gondor were his main motivations, not preservation of Freedom or Good in the world in general. He was based on a stereotype of a proud medieval or Roman noble, though (untypically) a highly educated one.
Nonsense.
In the movies, yes, but not in the books.
The movies completely reversed Faramir.
I was surprised as an adult when I first watched the movie that it didn't have this ending to the character arch, missing the final stage of the hero's journey.
co-creator J.D. Payne teases. "The question the first season asks is, 'How far into the darkness would you go to protect the things that matter the most?'"
That would explain why the Tolkien state sued "Dungeons and Dragons", and Warner Bross, and anybody trying to clone middle earth in their own shows...
This explains also why the Witcher would need to find a way to have elves depicted as much different as possible from Tolkien's elves. Tolkien's elves are extremely advanced technologically and the "de facto" standard now for the term, Witcher's elves are a tribe of poor forest people, closer to the (copyright free) traditional goblins, but that went extinct with Tolkien's work.
> You can make the Ring into an allegory of our own time, if you like: an allegory of the inevitable fate that waits for all attempts to defeat evil power by power.
If these writers are using Tolkien's name without respecting his beliefs, even Tolkien might have given the show a bad review.
Of course that's just speculation, but only a rare storyteller can tell an epic tale that isn't ultimately resolved by superior force. If this show can remain faithful to Tolkien's vision, I'll be very impressed.
(Shrug) It seemed to work pretty well. The important part, both morally and practically, is how you treat your former adversary after defeating them.
Why should we give a bad review based on insufficient evidence?
When I hear how far into evil will somebody go, I think of an individuals choices to do evil for a perceived the greater good.
Kind of related, but not quite the same.
> “What a pity Bilbo did not stab the vile creature, when he had a chance!
> Pity? It was Pity that stayed his hand. Pity, and Mercy: not to strike without need.
> I do not feel any pity for Gollum. He deserves death.
> Deserves death! I daresay he does. Many that live deserve death. And some die that deserve life. Can you give that to them? Then be not too eager to deal out death in the name of justice, fearing for your own safety. Even the wise cannot see all ends.”
And it was that small individual mercy that ultimately saved the world.
Picard and Discovery throws this out the window. It seems like the rough outline of the show was to shoehorn as much heavy handed modern political controversy in between the big budget space battles. The characters seem to be raring to fight at every juncture which is pretty much the opposite of the Federation's MO.
This has also happened with Star Wars but I feel less bad. I think Star Wars was always a bit less "high brow" than some of the other media being discussed here, but Disney seems to have scoured the entire script of the original trilogy for any lines they could stretch out into scenes for a spinoff film ("Kessel Run" for Solo, "Many Bothans Died" for Rogue One). To me this stuff is straight up cringe - at the same level as bad fan fiction.
Ultimately I have started to regard most of these films as products in the same sense as breakfast cereal at the grocery store. When they put out a new neon green version of lucky charms I don't get mad - I don't pay attention at all. Luckily, it seems like there are some filmmakers who are making interesting films even post-COVID (Robert Eggers, David Kwan and Daniel Scheinert) so I have some hope for the future. But these mega-budget reboots? I do my best to ignore their existence at this point.
Even TOS isn't without its preachy nonsense, like: https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Let_That_Be_Your_Last_B..., a "subtle metaphor" of racism and ethnic conflict.
I also agree about the uneven quality.
Responsibility, sacrifice, being torn between good and bad, these are not what modern stories should be made of.
But for some masochistic reason these same people can’t write their own stories, they actually want to destroy existing stories, kill off the previous characters and storylines, and insert their own philosophy into the old worlds.
It’s ridiculous, and narcissistic, and I sincerely hope something that makes these companies go bust. I sincerely hope in the long run there isn’t a market for this behaviour. Star Wars certainly seems to have collapsed.
Star Wars huge size and market came from all the toys it sold, now that is pretty much over.
Why is it that almost every generation had star wars fans yet kids don't find it cool any more NOW?
Perhaps it's because this new type of storytelling has no market appeal. It appeals to narcissistic preachy writers in hollywood, but not to anyone else.
According to the books, a gentle creature, that gets easily scared. The right way to calm it down involves tickling.
But Galadriel chopped up every single part of its body. Twirling around unnecessarily while doing so, after having shot it up with 6 arrow. For this reason I have elected to cancel my prime membership.
> Snow-trolls are mentioned only once in Tolkien's works, in reference to Helm Hammerhand stalking his enemies "like a snow-troll" during his sorties against the Dunlendings in the Long Winter. The trolls who lived in the Coldfells in western Eriador may have been similar to these. [1]
And the actual passage, from The Lord of the Rings, Appendix A, "The House of Eorl":
> Helm [Hammerhand] held the fortress during the Long Winter. He blew his great war-horn, and broke through the Dunlending ranks, clad in white, stalking men like a snow-troll slaying them with his bare hands. However, his sons Haleth and Háma were slain and Helm grew gaunt because of grief and famine; still his horn would fill the Dunlendings with fear each time it was heard. During one of his night sorties Helm died, possibly from famine and cold; his body was discovered frozen in the snow still standing. [2]
I would say the "stalking" and the subsequent "slaying" similitudes rule out the gentle qualities of the snow-troll.
For the record I haven't watched RoP yet; something feels wrong about this interpretation of Tolkien's work and I think I'll save myself the disappointment.
[1] https://lotr.fandom.com/wiki/Snow-trolls [2] https://tolkiengateway.net/wiki/Helm#cite_note-Helm-5
And there was nothing unnecessary about the fight scene. It’s unrealistic in the way that Legolas is unrealistic in Peter Jackson’s movies, but no worse.
I'll watch it if the writers room turns out to be staffed by weird old British Catholics though.
Bill Murray, Nick Offerman, and Steven Wright would all like a word.
However he regularly expresses emotions through gestures and subtle body language, so yes it’s close but not there over a full routine.
Aye! They write Fantasy like action movies.
I don't think you should take the longevity of each as a mark of popularity or quality. The British version wasn't cancelled - Gervais and Marchant ended it deliberately with a proper conclusion. I don't think anyone doubts more British series would have been commissioned if they'd wanted to carry on.
When Gervais was asked if he likes the American version his response was "Yes of course. It's made me very rich." That's his dry sense of humor, but I suspect it also hints at why they stopped doing the UK version and started on the US version instead.
And it has been said multiple times by people working on the American version that besides the inital setup, Gervais and Merchant had very little if any input and everything was done by the American wtiters/show runners.
The troll attack advanced the plot by serving as a catalyst for Galadriel’s troops deserting.
Unless you’re saying that just having a fight scene with a troll was gratuitous? But the books have plenty of battle scenes with trolls as well.
They are not elite fighters in the sense of, say, just being a Navy SEAL.
If you're looking at Rings of Power and expecting a being such as Galadriel to break a sweat fighting something like a troll, you have a strange set of expectations.
Which is why it's s suprising that a frost troll took out 3 of them in one lumpy throw of some packed ice
I don't think that's consistent with the fights in the books.
I mean Fingolfin physically fought a 40+ foot tall Morgoth in the Silmarillion. He was jumping around between huge pits that Morgoth's mace made when Morgoth tried to hit him. Fingolfin had a sword, while Morgoth held a mace that was bigger than Fingolfin, and yet Fingolfin was able to survive being beaten to the ground by said mace.
I don't think there's anyway to depict fights on screen like that without looking a bit silly.
If you start trying to realistically depict what it would look like to fight giant humanoids, you'd end up with something that is probably very interesting to people like you and myself, but that the majority of people would find boring. Plus that's not how the source material approached combat scenes.
https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/513872-he-was-tall-as-a-you...
In general, the elves, especially the older ones like Galadriel, are shown to possess super-human characteristics in all physical feats, including agility, stamina and strength (though the Men of the First Age apparently were stronger though less agile).
Personally I couldn’t care less about Tolkien’s legacy or anything like that, and it seems like a cool show with lots of very expensive spectacle on screen and I think that should be enough. I guess I’m just not big into the whole proprietorial fandom thing.
Perhaps after it is done someone will say to me "oh it wasn't like that at all" and I will enjoy it then.