The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power

Post Reply New Topic

And the attacks on fans AREN'T toxic? Hollywood has developed this attitude where they think the artist/writer/director/producer/actor is always right and they won't admit when they've made even a small imperfection and attack anyone who points it out.

Oh we're all racist, sexist bigots in the end. I try to peel off these stupid labels and BAM, a dozen more stick.

I think some of the fans are confused. They take out their frustrations on the actors who are just paid to act,

Thanks for acknowledging that. I first read the book when I was in hospital. I was told on my 16th birthday that I wasn’t really expected to live. I didn’t even know if I’d get to the end of the book. But here I am 50 years later, still going like a creaky gate. The book was my medicine… other people’s experierencs may differ.

Ooops. Hope I haven’t killed the thread off… I’m good at that.

Good to see you again, Trueno.

I first read the books in junior high school after seeing a Frodo Lives button.

Now, you haven’t officially killed the thread.

This season is over, so comments might fade away.

And of course you will always have the original books. In some ways the fanbase are really like one long book club who are perpetually exploring the universe created by the original authors.

Nope, that's NTs job

I would say, not in blockbusters but we got 3 of them in the near future

Fans of specific genres seem to gravitate to blockbusters with A-list white actors.

It's not rocket science. Back in the 70s and 80s (pre-internet) if you walk into a teenagers room the movie posters on their wall would predictably be one type of race.

In 2022 there is more black content in TV and cinema but it's scope to attract audiences outside of PoC is limited.

I did an experiment where i looked at the feed for 50 white teenagers on social media (they have sites/celebrities and podcasts/music they follow). I estimate maybe 5 out 50 had people of colour in their feed whom they follow. And of course of those five only one had any significant proportion of PoC whom they follow.

Therefore if you have a multicultural cast in a movie you still need the main characters to be white to guarantee a return on the investment.

On second thought, all this politically motivated racial controversy is exactly why I won't ever give this series a chance. I'm not going to be guilted into watching anything and feel forced to like it or shamed for not liking it so f**k that.

Back when the Star wars Phantom menace was released there were literally hundreds of fans saying the same thing about Hayden Christianson and Jar Jar Binks. But here's the thing, nobody was forcing anyone to watch.

Today the same fans who wanted Hayden Christianson and Ahmed Best to kill themselves now think they are legends. Sometimes you need to look past the noise and focus on the talent. The multiracial cast in ROP are absolutely fantastic actors. Don't get caught up in the narrow minded type casting. Sure I too would prefer closer alignment with the canonical literature but at the end of the day I don't care and appreciate whatever it is they dish out.

After all...it's all fiction anyway

Most people have a more refined taste in what they enjoy when it comes to fiction. Some fiction looks good over time and some doesn't. The reason why the prequels are such masterpieces is because the sequels sucked. The prequels had better storytelling and the sequels had storytelling that dropped in quality from one film to the next. Good or decent, consistent storytelling will start to look good decades from its release. You say you'll appreciate anything they churn out? I want to believe you have better judgement than that. Imagine a fiction about a bag of crap and the story focuses on that bag of crap just sitting there for 20 minutes an episode and the whole season goes on for about 24 episodes. Just because some producer tells you to shut up and consume product and then get excited about next product, doesn't mean you should.

No probably not. And everyone is free to critique based on their own preferences.

However, none of us have the money/budget/time/skills etc. to create our own franchise. Disney and Netflix control the purse strings to a number of fan fiction novels made into television series.

Disney have had considerable losses over the past few years and sacked Bob Chapak. However this has nothing to do with producing "woke" teleseries and more to do with the failure of Disney + and COVID-19

I mean it is funny. But you also need a spoiler warning

A conspiracy theory that is funny whether true or false: RoP was written by an AI.

https://arkhavencomics.com/2023/02/21/w ... generated/

I was chatting with a couple of guys who work with AI and they dropped a bombshell on me.

I had suspected that an AI generator came up with some of Rings of Power’s more cringe-worthy dialog.

Finrod: Why does a stone sink? Because it cannot look up.

That line is exactly the kind of thing an AI generator comes up with. The words can be made to sound like wisdom by an actor trying his damndest but give it any kind of sapient thought and it falls into the uncanny valley.

But I didn’t think the whole thing was written that way.

But those AI guys I chatted with are convinced that a new Amazon AI wrote the entire thing. That any human involvement at all was only there to sand off edges that were just too rough.

The big tell for them is the number of things that are produced by a mind that simply doesn’t know any better. Like Galadriel going for a swim in the middle of the ocean or the townspeople giving up their easily defendable castle to move back to their completely indefensible town. It was something that happened and it had dramatic impact, of a sort, but again taken as a whole the concept falls into the uncanny valley. Every episode had something like this in it. Adar’s rousing “brothers and sisters in our own land” speech was weird and out of place when applied to orcs. And of course “Feed me the meat and give it to me raw.” Every single episode was full of things like this.

Then there were all of these incongrous and conflicting events, that frequently had me yelling, “didn’t you read your own damn script?” Individual events sound plausible in isolation but can’t be turned into a coherent structure when taken as a whole. Mostly because the AI isn’t looking for that problem. And the Bad Reboot guys may not have been allowed to correct it. I could understand a couple of frustrated Hollywood nobodies being willing to sign a suicide before reading NDA if it got them something made and they could take credit for it. A high-level failure is still high level, people will be returning their calls.

Was that the real point of Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power just a big experiment by Amazon to see if an entire mega hit could be created by AI?

Just buy a huge fantasy title give the AI some tidbits and then stand back and let it do it’s thing. Was that what Rangz was?

Any other company and I would say it’s nuts but this is Amazon. Their entire business strategy has always been ‘throw some s**t at the wall and see what sticks.’ I could easily see Bezos ordering this thing into existence as a grand experiment in AI before he got kicked upstairs into the board room.