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naraburns  nihil supernum  2yr ago (text post)   35889 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 3, 2022

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Ahh interesting point. We should just neuter copyright law at this point, the man has been dead for decades.

Making all the works free of copyright would do no good, I don't think this show could manage to write a decent story even if they had free access to all the material. They'd stick with the parts they've showed us in the prologue: Morgoth was the baddie who attacked Valinor, the Elves all sailed off to fight him - and leave out the awkward parts like "Soooo... how we got these ships we showed you? that involves the First Kinslaying. And then Galadriel and her kindred and their section of the Noldor were betrayed and abandoned by Feanor and had to cross the Helcaraxe. Oh, yeah; speaking of Feanor and his sons..."

They want a simpler "good guy Elves fighting Sauron" story. They're not interested in "death and the desire for deathlessness" or anything 'philosophical'. Diverse skin colours and genders all come together to overcome mutual distrust and beat the bad guy through the power of friendship.

Agreed on that. Still, theoretically others could try their hand and the best would rise to the top.

I kinda want to see the same crazy mashups you get for Cthulhu or Sherlock Holmes.

In fact that's my main argument against the very concept of copyright. We're missing out on so many possible works for essentially no reason.

To hell with canon and rigid control and back to when you could compile random tales into your own new ones and have some cultural evolution.

Hell, LOTR itself was made in this spirit.

I kinda want to see the same crazy mashups you get for Cthulhu or Sherlock Holmes.

Frogwares Games got you covered! Their first version of the game is good, they're remaking it now to fit in with their new version of Sherlock and eh, I'm waiting to see if they can pull it off.

Actually Sherlock Holmes' early adventures are in the public domain now. His later ones are not.

So you can publish your mashup, but it will have a similar mishmash of restrictions on material.

In a different era, I would've agreed. Now though, anything that throttles attempts to trot out atrocious works drafting off the brand name is a shield I'd rather not part with.

Tortured sequels are not unique to this era.

I choose to believe that the reason works are atrocious now isn't that no talent exists, but that no talent makes it to the places where they get access to the IPs, because you have to optimize for politicking to get there.

If anyone could make a Star Wars, you bet your ass we would get higher grade interstellar swashbuckling adventures.

How does one look at the current entertainment landscape and conclude we need even more remakes?

Sufficiently broadly inspired remakes are indistinguishable from novelty. In fact there is no such thing as novelty that isn't that, it always comes from somewhere.

The problem with copyright law is (right now) that it benefits corporations even more than the writer who hits it big like Tolkien. And I think it's major corporations that often get the criticism for being bland and formulaic.

Theoretically, if it was equitably removed, you would end up with a situation like we have for zombies : yes, a ton of corporate products since film is so capital intensive.

But there's a chance for original work with the concept cause anyone can use it. Zombie media are all variations on the same concept but aren't all soulless corporate remakes; they run the gamut in terms of budget and even geographic spread (one of the big shows of this recent Korean explosion in pop culture was zombie-based)

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