I hope they don't side story a romance plot. Damn do I hate that stuff, the Aragorn / Arwen scenes in PJ's too. Personal taste, romance is the most boring of the cinema genres.
I hope they don't side story a romance plot. Damn do I hate that stuff, the Aragorn / Arwen scenes in PJ's too. Personal taste, romance is the most boring of the cinema genres.
Galadrial is almost 10K years old in Lord of the Rings. I find it ludicrous to believe she can't have changed at all in those years, and this portrayal isn't THAT much different in terms of characterization other than her being a super adept swordsman.
To each their own, but Elrond is one of the more "likeable" characters - and again, he seems reasonably in line with the previous film's version, albeit one that is thousands of years younger.
The "troll" is likely Gandalf or Sauron or at least one of the Maiar. How can it be random if they're building the plot over the mystery of who he is? And Galdrial choosing to return was a completely understandable decision given the entire first episode, it wasn't random at all.
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The series is set in a fictional universe and race doesn't matter for the plot, lore, or tone so there is nothing wrong with adding black characters. If you think they make the show seem out of place, that says more about you as a person than the showwriters. I love how everyone who criticizes this show is suddenly a PhD in Anthropology and needs to point out all these ridiculous nitpicks (they're not even that) as why the show is "woke" or "politicized".
If there is variety in hair and eye color then variation in skin color is perfectly reasonable. It’s all the same thing at it’s core. Being so fixated in skin color as a differentiating factor says a lot more about your narrow world view than about the fantasy world itself.
What does it say about me? Go on, I'll let you know that I'm a "PoC" before you step in something you shouldn't step in. But I've been to Africa, I've lived most of my life in Asia, I've been to the middle east. Once you go 100km outside of an international airport it is VERY rare to see someone of a different race in those places. Fantasy does not make this different, fantasy needs to be grounded or the writers hand will show, and as soon as the writers hand is apparent, immersion can not be had.
You also say that Galadriels personality doesn't matter because there is a timeskip, so if the original lore doesn't matter, personality doesn't matter, and race doesn't matter, why are we calling this Lord of the Rings?
Go read some reviews about the Matrix, there isn't anyone talking about forced diversity there, because in that universe it makes perfect sense, and it's one of the most popular movies ever, please explain that to me, how come everyone is ok with it when it makes sense, but people are not okay with it when it doesn't make sense? If they wanted to make entire villages of darker skinned people, or continents, it would make so much more sense than what they did.
There are 2 types of fantasy "light" fantasy, things like Harry Potter, clearly designed for a younger audience, if you start thinking about the magic system or why noone notices tons of people going in and out of the train station compared to getting on the trains, well, it doesn't make sense, but it is not designed to, it's fully escapist fun for a younger audience, it's ok that you have a watch that lets you travel back in time, and the only thing they use it for is so Herminoe can take double classes because that is the design the author was going for.
Then you have the "hard" or "serious" type fantasy, lord of the rings and a song of ice and fire both fall under this banner, they aim to depict a world as if it really existed. We are asked to suspend our disbelief for a few fantastical elements, but nothing more. Their worlds are designed to make internal sense. If .. lets say the average person could cast fire spells, the author would've thought through what ramifications that would've had for the world.
It's a little like comparing a light hearted action movie and a serious drama, you would be totally fine with Vin Diesel surviving driving a car out of a plane in fast and the furious 6, it would however take you right out of your immersion if Ayrton Senna drove a car out of a plane in the Senna mini series about his life and tragic death.
For people that don't like fantasy very much I can see how you don't care if nothing in the world makes sense, but for people very into the second type of fantasy, it is jarring.
Show me a post like that, I think you saying that says more about you than the people you are trying to critique.
You can't understand why it doesn't make sense? Would you be perfectly fine with a few modern buildings in the elven cities in LOTR? How about if the Burj Khalifa was in Hobbiton? I mean, what is wrong with architectural diversity right?
Last edited by Sialina; 2022-09-04 at 01:28 AM.
You cant leave an honest review if you have not seen it all for one, and even if you dont like it for whatever reason that doesnt make it right to claim its a 1/10 show just because you dont like it, i dont like love island but im not going to claim its bad just because its not to my taste, a 1/10 rating is not a genuine rating and is completely dishonest.
STAR-J4R9-YYK4 use this for 5000 credits in star citizen
I am just giving my way of looking at it because this is a TV show that requires a time investment over months and potentially years.
If you are not drawn into it based on a few episodes then yes, it can very much be a 1/10 because you really dislike it that much.
For me, there are plenty of TV shows on streaming that fall into this category especially new stuff created on those services.
Basically it means "hard pass" wouldn't watch even if I had all the time in the world after watching everything else available I wanted to watch. Streaming is all about getting eyeballs on product and it is a very crowded space so yes, that kind of response would make sense in that context.
Whether that applies to any or all of these who knows. That would be my personal justification for a rating like that.
Last edited by InfiniteCharger; 2022-09-04 at 01:36 AM.
I never said Galdrial's personality didn't matter, I said the character's are similar enough in their portrayal that the differences feel authentic while maintaining an arch of continuity. And that's a lot of big talk for "black people can't be in lord of the rings". It's fantasy - there are no rules. The trends and behaviors we see in the modern world (and even in antiquity) do not have to apply here. Now of course, there are rules and then there are rules - it is still Tolkien's universe after all. But there is nothing that precludes non-white characters in that universe, so it's a bit of a stretch to call it immersion breaking. Comparing seeing black people to shooting fireballs out of your palms is a bit ridiculous.
It doesnt matter if you dont like something a 1/10 rating is completely dishonest, if you simply dont like something you might give it a 4 or 5 but to claim its a 1/10 is just some personal grudge you have against the show or the company making it, entertainment is there to waste time and make you switch your brain off for a while and doesnt take much time investment, even shows with hundreds of episodes have a few weeks of watch time at most. You will not convince anyone that a 1/10 rating would be fair for even some of the worst shows on netflix or whatever, even the new resident evil show is at least a 4/10 and its not very resident evil like.
STAR-J4R9-YYK4 use this for 5000 credits in star citizen
Explain 2 things to me then, 1. Why don't we have mixed races all over the earth? 2. How would you go about walking to China from Europe 1000 years ago? Think about needing to survive the winter, you need food for the trip, you don't know where water is, you can't speak any of the languages along the map, you don't have complete maps.
3. Explain why you would go on this trip several times in your life?
4. Explain why people don't have any problems with this whatsoever in a modern setting where you can travel quickly via Airplane.
Go on
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Go ahead and explain what is wrong with using the easterlings and the people of Rhun or some other established people of color instead of token characters?
There are rules if you want your series to get more than 6.2 on IMDB, house of the dragon and game of thrones both had plenty of diverse actors, all in fitting roles, and the sit way higher on IMDB
House of Dragons having black actors representing a family in a series that takes place before GoT just makes people question what happened to them all in the lead up to the start of the GoT story. It's the only real issue with the series but it is also too early to tell.
We have 2 shows that have popped up recently to compare. LOTR and House of the Dragon. Both have had diversity injected into them where it wasn't. LOTR is getting a ton of flack for this, and House of the Dragon isn't.
So what is the difference? Why doesn't House of the Dragon have nearly 200 pages discussing why HBO is doing with black Valyerians (sp)? I'm sure a few people have mentioned it, but nearly all of the discussion I've seen of that show is "wow so much better than I could have hoped for.... please don't screw it up like S8"
The issue boils down to HBO injecting diversity but focusing on making a good show, where Amazon focused on the diversity without bothering to make a good show. It shows where the focus was. For Amazon it wasn't on the story. For HBO, it was.
When the people behind the show spend that much time telling you that their focus wasn't on making a good story, nobody is shocked that shows turn out like this.
The problem isn't with the actors playing parts in the show, but rather the people running the show who picked those actors because they were less concerned with making a good show than they should have been. Its like when actors are given a horrible script. They were set up to fail.
Amazon turned off comments and ratings for the show, guess they are really worried how its turning out. I hope everyone in here supporting it is watching, because I don't know a single person IRL that has bothered.
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I mean, that entire family dies except for a brother and sister, so the answer is "they all die".
HoD is a well made show though (so far...) so nobody cares that one of the white haired family married a black guy and has mixed children. The story is good, the actors are acting well, so nobody cares about the diversity....
imagine that
Do you think when early humans migrated north they just all turned white as they passed a certain latitude? Do you think the mutations that led to skin lightening in the early peoples of Europe popped up across the continent all at once?
If you knew anything about these things you’d realize that it took thousands of years of migrations and passing on genetic mutations to get to what YOU seem to think is required for a “grounded” fantasy setting.
Tolkien set Middle-earth in a prehistoric time, and his peoples didn’t evolve or migrate the way actual Homo sapiens did. The idea that for it to be “realistic” the setting must mirror a relatively modern, highly segregated version of our world is simply your own prejudices talking.
We technically do. Some people just decide to ignore every difference except a few particular ones, like very strongly diverging skin tones. There is no such thing as a strict, distinct "white race", or "black race" scientifically speaking. There's just very large catalogs of certain gene markers, a lot of which can be WILDLY different even within families, while other may be similar even across global distances. Humans just pick out some traits and say "these are important!" for no real reason other than that they want that to be the case. Race is a construct, not because "herp derp the left is trying to tell us skin color isn't real don't they have eyes", but because you choose certain criteria and make them more important than others based on nothing but cultural and traditional biases.
None of that matters for a world where evolution wasn't a thing anyway, because the canon lore is that some gods just came along and went "hocus pocus, let there be dwarves/elves/humans/whatever".
But to get back to the actual show instead of more derailing...
The problem is, Tolkien's source material is in itself very diverse. There's cohesive titles like the Hobbit or the Lord of the Rings, but even something like the Silmarillion is more of a collection of things. And then there's the myriad other short snippets, drafts, appendices, letters, and whatnot through which Tolkien developed his world over long periods of time. Very often changing things as time went by, sometimes quite substantially.
Galadriel is such an example. He said himself in his letters that his goal was to make her a very different character, much more of a woman-warrior type than the composed ruler figure we see in LotR. And she always had sass - one of her most famous appearances in the Simarillion has her give the metaphorical finger to THE greatest elf who ever lived. Three times. She was a rebel. She joined with the Noldor in their resistance against the Valar. It's not against her character at all to be going against Gil-galad in the show, and having her own, stubborn way of things. ESPECIALLY considering the plans Tolkien had for her that he simply didn't get around to realizing before his death (but did speak about in his letters).
Her holding a grudge for a bunch of centuries is similarly entirely in line with elves of the First and Second Age. The whole reason so many of them left Aman was exactly that: an unquenchable grudge that drove them to rampaging and often self-destructive violence. That's a core tenet of the entire narrative of elves in Middle Earth, and it makes perfect sense that Galadriel in the show would embody that.
That's not to say there isn't any avenue for criticism here. If anything, my problem, personally, lies not with Galadriel's motivation or role in the narrative, but with the way her actress puts it on the screen. It's what creates the "bitchy" image in people's heads, because she doesn't quite manage to properly convey the depth of emotion that the character has to contest with inside herself: her desire to be of service to her people, while at the same time unable to let go of the grudge against her brother's killers (which is effectively a stand-in for the Oath of Fëanor from the Silmarillion that they're not allowed to touch in the show). The problem, to me, is that this emotional ambiguity needs to be tempered by the fact that unlike her actress, Galadriel isn't in her 30s. She's THOUSANDS of years old. She has internalized those emotions for longer than most of the human race has been alive. That requires and creates a complexity of character you can't just brush over with the same strokes you use to portray a random 30-something in a generic, non-fantasy drama. It makes her come across as immature and obstinate, when that is absolutely NOT what Galadriel is about. And that's the fault of the director and the actress both. It's their job to plumb such particulars when it comes to a complicated role like that, and work on making that kind of portrayal convincing. Instead, it seems they were trying to go for some kind of pseudo-Daenerys to please executives, and that is just so, so, so not the way to go.
You are the one talking about prejudice here, you said it yourself, it took thousands of years slowly migrating north, a gradient over the continent. Which is why if you landed at any one place, the people there would be homogenous. You are making my point, not the opposite.
This is all very true, people in here calling everyone racist seem to have trouble explaining why most like house of the dragon but dislike LOTR, the characters of color in house of the dragon also come from the sea, it would make total sense for a character with a powerful fleet to marry into the Targaryen family, and the children are clearly mixed race.
Nope. That’s not what I said, and the reality was quite the opposite. Humans lived in the European continent for thousands of years before the genetic mutation that contributes to European white skin existed, and it took thousands of years of European peoples traveling and mixing for that genetic mutation to become so widespread (yes, light skinned and dark skinned Europeans interacting together). They didn’t just become more and more pale as a gradient moving north. That’s not how skin works.
And again, you missed the most important point which was that without the exact pattern of migration, mutation, and evolution, there’s no stipulation for a fantasy world to adhere to ours. Especially not to such a modern perspective of ethnic segregation like the one you’re espousing. If different eye and hair color exists and is accepted without thought, then different skin color can as well.
Last edited by Adamas102; 2022-09-04 at 02:33 AM.