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naraburns  nihil supernum  2yr ago (text post)   33194 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 10, 2022

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So, after all these weeks, Amazon's Rings of Power wraps up its first season. A section of mainstream media is still defending the show while others are somewhat calling it, we have a 2nd season coming, several retcons to the lore, and a very predictable Sauron reveal. Now we're supposed to expect a certain special someone from Galadriel's past that I'm shocked even exists in this canon. If there's one bit of character development in this whole debacle, it would be Erik Kain's diminishing confidence in the show.

I'm gonna nitpick a line from this piece:

As of this writing, House of the Dragon has an 86% rating on Rotten Tomatoes (with an 84% Audience Rating) and The Rings of Power has an 84% approval rating on the review aggregator (with a 38% Audience Rating, which should largely be discarded).

I don't know if Amazon Studios will face a crisis as was reported earlier, or if they intend to trot out a slightly less expensive season 2 before axing it altogether, or drag it all the way. But it seems, as several others had stated in last week's thread when I brought it up, this is really just a billion dollar gig for Bezos' ticket to the ultra-woke Hollywood clique to maximise his elite status after all. To that end, he likely has succeeded many times over.

I myself is a huge fan of JRRT work since I read The Hobbit while in high school (that was quite some time ago). I own a lot of Tolkien and about-Tolkien books. I own a DVD set of the LOTR trilogy and regularly re-watch it. But, I can't find any reason for myself to watch the Amazon stuff. I know it's not Tolkien. I know it's not made by people who respect and cherish Tolkien's legacy - they said it themselves that they think Tolkien should be "updated" to fit their modern sensibilities. I'm fine with that, at some level - it's their billion dollars, and we're a free country. But I really don't see why I would watch any of that.

The bad thing is that this is probably the only adaptation of Tolkien we're going to get for a while now. The good thing is that this is probably the only adaptation of Tolkien we're going to get for a while now - and maybe the next one would be when the woke wave has receded and people would go back to put Tolkien's work on screen because of the love of the lore, and not because it's a Platform for The Message (TM) and also maybe we can make some money on the hype.

Firstly, I'm laughing with Eric Kain. He started off rosy optimism, then when the show turned out to be every bit as shitty as we critical ones were saying, he still defended himself with a snide remark about 'he could have made more money with the haters' (where is all this free money, Eric? how do I turn my 'hate' into cash money?)

But now he is every bit as disillusioned as anyone else, and it's cold comfort for the likes to me to say "Well, where were you when we were complaining about the bad writing, pissing on the lore, and using 'anyone who doesn't like the show is a racist' as a general defence?"

I think Amazon are desperate to sell the narrative that the viewership figures are good enough, certainly a lot better than they really are. Because I noticed that, despite living in a region where previously I couldn't access Prime video content (Republic of Ireland, not UK, and lots of times it was 'oh sorry, you can't see this show, you're not in the correct region'), suddenly they are (a) offering me free trial of Prime including everything and (b) now I can watch Rings of Power even though I don't live in that region. How convenient to bump up viewing figures.

I availed myself of the free trial and watched the finale, since it cost me nothing but my sanity, and yikes. They had six weeks of nothing happening, then had to cram everything in at once.

What I liked: the opening, with rain falling on forest plants and Meteor Man silently holed up under a tree. Unfortunately, then the rest of the episode commenced. Celebrimbor and Halbrand-Sauron being forge buddies, once they remembered Celebrimbor was the guy who forged the rings, the rings of power after which this entire show is named, the forging of those rings being the reason for the plot, those rings. As little as could reasonably be expected of the Harfoots. Adar (though he wasn't in this episode). Galadriel getting her nose rubbed in how yes, this is all your fault because actions have consequences.

What I didn't like: everything else The Númenorean scenes continue to be pointless as Nothing. Ever. Happens. The weirdly slow pacing. The surprise revelations that were anything but, since they spent the entire previous seven episodes nudging us in the ribs with "guess who this guy really is, go on, guess, you'll never guess, could he possibly be....?" Yes, it turned out that Halbrand was Sauron, as everybody had been saying since the teaser trailers (dammit) and they're shoving hard to have it be that Meteor Man is Gandalf (dammit part deux). Galadriel only remembering her husband in the seventh episode, and not saying a word about how or even if she had been searching for him all this time. Elendil's invented daughter continuing to be useless; whatever the point of her bit with the palantir was, we're not going to see that pay off until season two (if then), and when is season two going to be broadcast? Whatever happened to the Southlanders, or don't we care about them anymore? The continuing terrible writing. The continuing having Galadriel being Mary Sue (now it's her idea to create three Rings). Rushing everything - we should have had Annatar and Celebrimbor over several episodes, the forging of the rings over a couple of episodes, the white cloak mystics and Meteor Man over several episodes. Instead, everything got wrapped up in fifteen minutes, with little to no explanation, because they needed to tidy up the plot threads for the finale and lead into the second season. That warbling end credit song (who is Fiona Apple and why should I care?)

Payne and McKay said in one recent interview that the second season would take a couple of years to make. A different interview after that had the studio contradicting this and that season two would be out as quickly as possible.

I think Amazon have a turkey on their hands, and calling fans who raised reasonable objections trolls, racists, and just plain durned bad think thought criminals pissed off the hardcore lore fanbase, but didn't do a thing to draw in casual viewers. And it serves them right.

I've seen exactly one episode of this show, and it was the second to last one. And it was...okay! We got character moments--the orc nationalist was really acting his heart out. Galadriel was a huge bitch, but it seemed intentional rather than tone-deaf, and I actually enjoyed having a Lawful paladin dropped into the setting. Costuming looked pretty good, reminiscent of Peter Jackson without being identical. There were plot revelations and set-piece battles, and all of it was absolutely dripping in dramatic (expensive) visuals.

It would be easy to pick out things I didn't like, too. That whiny child is a moron who only lowers anything resembling emotional stakes. It replicated one of the biggest failures of late Game of Thrones, teleporting armies, in spectacular fashion. The MacGuffin is not just a weapon but a spooky key for the local...public works project? Really? And I'm sure there were plenty of direct contradictions to the Sauron/Númenor timeline of Akallabêth.

From the sound of it, I watched the only decent episode, and most everything previous constituted about 1 episode worth of plot points. There are about 5 characters who make any actual decisions (Galadriel, Halbrand, Adar, Arondir, and Bronwyn; I guess technically Theo). Elendil and Isildur get a pass, as it looked like they were actually developing their own subplot, but everyone else exists to populate the setpieces. The Harfoots and Magic Meteor Man are nowhere to be seen.

In other words, if that's all the consequence of the first five (?) episodes...I'm not surprised they were incredibly dull.

Galadriel is not a Lawful paladin, so I don't get who you are referring to.

Adar is indeed the one sympathetic character in this mess so far.

The visuals are expensive, but the rest of the show doesn't live up to them. It is probably personal taste, but I think the costuming looks bad and the armour is terrible; they have Celebrimbor decked out in a bathrobe I used to have about fifteen years back (mine was blue not green) and the villagers all get to wear mud, except Bronwyn who gets a nice bright blue dress because she is the only person who matters.

They've gone far beyond contradicting established canon to making their own shit up. Now we have Sauron proposing marriage to Galadriel - so what, his motivation for ring-crafting was because he wanted to make engagement and wedding rings?

It's (bad) original fantasy, with the names from Tolkien pasted on. If they dumped any pretence at "faithful to the lore", it would be better, but they lie about that, too.

The most offensive part has been the use of "you're a racist white supremacist" as the general response to all criticism. The show has proven it is not faithful to the lore and they lied about everything, but criticism means you're a racist white supremacist:

Payne looks particularly distressed by the topic. “The spirit of Tolkien is about disparate peoples who don’t trust one another and look different from one another finding common ground in friendship and accomplishing big things,” he says. “That’s the spirit we’ve tried to inculcate into every single comma and period in the show. That this aspiration would be offensive to people and enrage them … it’s very hard for us to understand. What are they protecting? I don’t see how people who are saying these things think that they’re fighting for good. There’s a line in episode seven where Galadriel says every war is fought from without and within. Even if you’re fighting for something you think is good, if you do something worse in that fight, then you become evil. I don’t see how people who are saying these things think that they’re fighting for good. It’s patently evil.”

So I am patently evil because I think Payne is a whiny little pissbaby liar who couldn't write his way out of a wet paper bag, has admitted to being a ten-year loser who couldn't get one script made and had to get J.J. Abrams to use his influence to get them hired, and has consistently lied about being faithful to the text and to canon. Well, boo-freakin'-hoo, you pasty-faced talentless hack.

(What? I'm just being Sauron, being complexly evil in my origin story as they invent a romance for him between him and Galadriel to explain why did Sauron go bad - he's an incel!)

In that single episode, Galadriel was totally a paladin.

  • Heavy armor and equestrian skills

  • Lots of followers despite actively pissing people off—must have a high charisma score

  • Generally a huge zealot

  • Pragmatism code of conduct won’t let her allies kill prisoners

  • Crusading to kill all orcs just because they’re Evil^TM

  • Not even worried about failing her saving throw vs. ash clouds.

Lots of followers despite actively pissing people off—must have a high charisma score

A high Charisma score would be represented by not pissing people off. Charisma isn't a magical force that compels you to like the unlikeable. It's what makes people likeable. That said, yes, Galadriel would be a badly done D&D Paladin.

he still defended himself with a snide remark about 'he could have made more money with the haters' (where is all this free money, Eric? how do I turn my 'hate' into cash money?)

there is absolutely a section of youtube which is just people pumping out long-winded rants about contemporary "woke" media. Which whether or not the criticisms are correct (and they often are because much of it is dire), it's nevertheless just an endless sea of performative negativity, at its heart not much different from the ones who are playing the reverse game with the algorithm by endlessly fêting the newest Disney/Marvel/whatever product. It can't be mentally healthy to just watch an endless stream of videos bitching about the casting of The Little Mermaid

Sure, there are Youtubers etc. who churn out that kind of stuff, just as there are Youtubers etc. who churn out the opposite (see the Amazon 'superfans' hired on to do that trainwreck event video to market the show; turns out none of them have posted a single comment about this show that they are all allegedly 'superfans' of).

But Kain was making that remark in the context of everyone who had been critical of the show, and it's unfair. A lot of us were going by the teaser trailers, the already obvious inventions ("we can't have Hobbits, so we're going to have Harfoots who are ancestors of the Hobbits", "the Harfoots can be black because Tolkien said they were brown-skinned" (ignoring what that means in an English context of being fairer or darker, not meaning oh yeah these are black Britons) and the publicity about how wonderfully diverse and egalitarian they were.

Then the show aired, and it was poor. And yet people like Eric Kain wrote glowing reviews for the first two episodes.

And then when they realised that hey, it was trash, somehow those of us who all along had been pointing this out and backing it up with more than 'I hate black people which is why I hate this show' are still the bad guys, even when Kain himself is talking about how he gets criticised and insulted for watching the show if he's not going to give it rave reviews.

I watched the first episode last night to have a more informed take on it. I don't care about the deviations from lore, and the casting choices don't bother me. It's pretty.

The big issue is that... it's boring. Aside from Galadriel, all the characters are completely flat, and there's nothing that makes me want to keep watching. It's probably unfair to compare it to E1 GoT, but it's weak compared to HoD or even WoT. My GF (who has watched the Peter Jackson films half a dozen times but has no other connection to Tolkien or fantasy lit) checked out and went to bed halfway through. I persevered but won't be watching further episodes. I'd probably get more out of generating hobbit images on Stable Diffusion for hours.

The first episode was super slow, but it speeds up a lot after that. I'd at least give the 2nd episode a chance, that's where I decided I liked it.

Also, how dare you compare it to WoT lol, that show was a dumpster fire. Tbf it didn't really get terrible until the 5th episode or so though.

Okay, but was WoT worse than "Legend of the Seeker"? Because if so, that's Plan 9 from Outer Space, so-bad-its-good territory.

I think the WoT comparison is spot on. Both shows have people running them who don't in the least care about the source material, and who lash out at anyone who criticizes their work as being a bigot. Both shows are also, by most accounts, not good even on their own merits. Seems like a pretty apt comparison to me.

I'll throw my 2c in the ring with "While it commits a number of the same flaws, RoP is way better than WoT". I'd give RoP a 5 or a 6 / 10 -- it looked very good (except for the armor, which, except for Galadriel's, looked like fake plastic armor you buy for your kids, IMO), and had some nice scenes (Adar, Elrond & Durin). I hard the Harfoots though, and for me the main problem is nothing really had consequences -- we just flowed from one set piece to the next. Also, the diverse casting wasn't too damaging for RoP, in my opinion, except for the Harfoots, where it really makes no sense.

WoT was a 2 or 3 / 10, where a number of "The Message" things really destroyed the whole story (and underlying system of magic and source of tension in the book).

I don't think I'll be watching Season 2 of either, unless the family makes me.

If Amazon is smart, they hurry Season 2 out, as I think otherwise most people will turn their back on RoP.

Nothing RoP did comes anywhere near some of the BS WoT pulled, like making race non-genetic (except for red hair for Plot Reasons), or Rand's journey throughout the whole season essentially boiling down to being sad but accepting and supporting his potential wife's decision to be a Career Woman rather than letting him be a homemaker for her. At least in WoT the white character's black mom is her stepmom.

I'll give it another shot, based purely on the recommendation.

It's pretty.

The wide CGI shots are pretty. Get into the sets, and it's all cramped: Númenor has five ships for their grand fleet to the Southlands? The main square can hold sixty people max? There isn't a barracks to train the recruits, we do it on a set of stairs in a side-street where the shopkeepers have stalls set up?

CGI and the New Zealand Tourist Board wet dream vistas can only do so much.

With the disclaimer that I haven't watched RoP at all: isn't "cramped" a pretty good description for medieval Europe? Most commercial activity had to fit within the city/town walls, and the manpower needed to build the walls was proportional to the square root of their area. The old European cities I'm familiar with don't really have "squares" in the modern sense so much as they have random areas where buildings are set back and these became public areas or markets. For example, in old Vienna the only space I can think of is in front and to the sides of the Vienna cathedral, and in the City of London the only green space is around St. Paul's. Presumably these were staging areas for construction when the cathedrals were built, after which they became public spaces.

Ships were very expensive in the middle ages, too, but I think you are right about the number being far too small: well after what we would consider the medieval period, the battle of Trafalgar (1805) only involved 73 vessels, and we think of it as the breaking point of the Spanish fleet. But according to this website, the British navy of 1650 had 74 vessels. Wikipedia says that "In the 11th century, Aethelred II had an especially large fleet built by a national levy." but Aethelred II opted to pay Danegeld following the Battle of Maldon in 991, at which the total strength of the Norse was supposedly 2000-4000 men. That would have been at most 100 longships. And the Norse King Canute the Great is said to have had 1,200 Snekkja (41-man longships) in Norway in 1028.

It didn't feel cramped that way -- full of life and stuff. It didn't actually feel cramped at all, just that it was filmed on a stage (especially Numenor), which is not good for your sense of immersion.

Even cramped, dirty, pop-history mediaeval Europe managed to find somewhere better to train raw recruits than "go down that alley there and hope a Super Warrior Elf turns up to show you which end of a sword is the pointy bit".

This is meant to be Númenor, the greatest realm of Mortal Men that ever existed, not a village in darkest Berkshire in 1289. Since they're showing Pharazon and Miriel, this is the period in its history in which Ar-Pharazon was able to mount such a huge invasion force that Sauron's armies ran away without even engaging them, just from the terror they inspired upon seeing them.

Instead we get "We're sending out five ships - oh no two burned down - we're sending out three ships to fight a war to liberate the Southlands against an unknown number of Orcs, but Galadriel assures us that hordes of them have infested Middle earth so probably more than fifty".

With the disclaimer that I haven't watched RoP at all: isn't "cramped" a pretty good description for medieval Europe?

Lotr is not medieval Europe. It is mythological Europe and Numenor is Atlantis. And there is grandeur everywhere in Tolkien's world. The white city of Minas Tirith was small outpost of the Numenorean Empire.

Tolkien's world can be viewed a bit like fragment of fragment compared to previous ages. Sauron is but a shadow of Melkor, Godor is but a shadow of Numenor, Elves themselfs are shadows of glory past ...

... And thus am I outed as a non-Tolkie.

Godor is but a shadow of Numenor

But that hit home. The RoK makes Gondor out to be comparable to imperial China in its constructions, and so Numenor was presumably vaster and richer than Rome. For an island nation presumably richer than Rome and presumably with magic to only be able to swing together five ships... yeah, that would break the immersion.

Thank you for the explanation.

The way I think about it: If Rohan had the state capacity of an Anglo-Saxon kingdom, Numenor was Rome at its height, or mythological Trojan-War era Greece, complete with a thousand ships.

a 38% Audience Rating, which should largely be discarded

Funny, I'd say it's the critics' ratings that should be ignored. After all, who do I have more in common with? Who is the show supposed to be made for?

I don't even know why we tolerate critics anymore.

This also bothers me. I'm continuously baffled by how the same people who never shut up about "protecting" "our" "democracy" can still get away with shitting hard on the opinions of the common man. And it seems like there's a large minority of the country who can doublethink this stuff into a coherent ideology. I'm deep enough into conflict theory territory that whenever I read thinga like this I just order more ammo for the day when they inevitably decide that something must be done about the ineducable subhuman underclass.

Here is my heuristic.

Critic Score| Audience Score| Interpretation
Low Low SUCKS
Low Medium Not "highbrow" enough
Low High NOT Woke
Medium Low SUCKS but woke
Medium Medium Mediocre
Medium High Good but not woke enough
High Low WOKE WOKE WOKE WOKE WOKE
High Medium Woke but tolerable
High High AWESOME

If troolean algebra existed, I could have come up with a formula for the above.

Good news!

Unfortunately, I can't tell what's going in for most of that article, so I'll leave constructing those tables as an exercise for the reader.

Which one is more likely to give a dishonest review for financial reasons? Real hard choice figuring out whether to trust normal people watching shows or paid "experts"!

Which one is more likely to give a dishonest review for financial reasons?

Not a fair comparison, since critics are the only side in this comparison likely to get significant financial pay for attaching their name to a corrupted review.

As silly as I find the isolated demands for rigor in terms of which audience ratings we take seriously, the faceless internet mob has shown itself incredibly willing to put out corruptive "reviews" at will too, for basically free. If anything they don't even count as "reviews" since they happen before the work is revealed.

So you're correct, but it may not mean what you think :)

They’re both bad. Critics fall for wokeshit but audiences fall for shitshit. Superhero trash and Black Panther are at the top either way

but audiences fall for shitshit

Audiences have also elevated a ton of great shows in the Golden Age of TV. If anything the American audience is more heterogeneous in its tastes than ever, the problem is that big tentpole films need to cater to the lowest common denominator...globally now.

And, really, a world where the public has a proportional role in determining the media seems preferable to the world in which critics have a disproportionate one. At least, in current, polarized America.

Most people here seem to want the show to fail, and I haven't even bothered watching it myself, but is there any strong evidence that it's underperforming expectations to a significant degree?

I didn't want it to fail, I wanted a show set in Middle-earth and based on Second Age to be awesome. And it could have been, except that for whatever reason Amazon put it into the hands of two Bad Robot protegés who, in a ten year career, have failed to have a movie script they worked on made. J.J. Abrams must have some amazing kompromat to get these two in charge of a major production.

I understand compressing the timeline. I understand creating new original characters. I understand not being able to fit it all in, or changing elements to make the story work. I could even tolerate the "We is so woke and diverse!" crap if they'd been less gung-ho on "if you want an explanation for why there is a sum total of one (1) black Elf among all the white Elves, you are a racist hater bigot" and spent two sentences on "Dísa is a princess of the Eastern Dwarven House of the Blacklocks" (there, that explains our black Dwarf) and we had all Arondir's troupe of Elves be an off-shoot of the Silvan Elves (Tolkien split the Teleri into multiple branches, you could surely fudge something up) and they were all mixed-race like him, instead of the only two speaking parts in his garrison force being white Elves. Míriel is now black while her dad is white? Eh, who cares, at least this is a human character being played by a human, and again you can fudge up a backstory about her mother's ancestry.

But they didn't just change elements, they flat-out contradicted lore and invented their own crappy horrible explanations for why suddenly all the Elves in Middle-earth (or the Noldorin ones, anyway) will die because the Great Tree in Lindon is dying because of the Darkness and the only thing that will save them is the light of Valinor which is contained in mithril, which is now a magic metal that does Elvish healing. The Silmaril in a tree stupidity. Teleporting all over the place. Vague geography, vague timelines so that in the Southlands battle, you simultaneously have it be day while the Rohirrim, I mean Númenoreans, are riding to the rescue while the villagers are fighting the Orcs at night. All this bullshit after they put out heaps of interviews and articles about what huge fans of Tolkien's work they were, how they weren't going to change anything but update it for a modern world, how they were going to be so faithful to the lore. Also the pointless Arondir-Bronwyn romance; after all the talking up about the 'forbidden love', what actually happened? Nothing! And the two actors have no chemistry, so every scene of them together might just as well be them talking about knitting socks, or churning butter, or "I remember the day your grandmother was born"!

I ended up liking the bad guys better! This is not what you want to do!

J.J. Abrams must have some amazing kompromat to get these two in charge of a major production.

I don't think it's blackmail, just plain old clout. Clout he probably does not deserve, but alas.

I just didn't finish it. Maybe it drastically improved after the first few episodes, but those were so painfully cringe-inducing I just couldn't continue. Nice that they had a go at making it, I suppose.

As a pretty strong conservative, I loved the show, fight me. There were tons of great moments, lines, special effects, music, and overall ideas. The one thing it didn't have much of was character development--while the side characters did seem to grow, the main characters mostly stayed pretty static.

But seriously, there were plenty of scenes that just amazed me. I find myself confused at the very tepid audience response--it did tons of cool things that to me make up for its relatively small issues.

I'd like to know which ones were most impressive so I can give them a gander.

One of the reasons I haven't started the show is because despite looking, I haven't seen any reference to a particular scene or sequence that was mindblowing and awesome and justified the whole show just by its very existence.

Like, what scene would you point to if you were trying to draw someone in?

That brings to mind 2 scenes, but the better one is a huge spoiler so I'll focus on the other (much smaller spoiler).

In short, an elvish protagonist is captured by orcs, and now he and a few other elves and a bunch of other humans are stuck working for them as slaves.

They wait until daytime, when the orcs hang out under a protective awning while the slaves labor under the sun, then start working to break their chains so that at least one can escape and notify the elves of what's happening. The orcs of course catch on quickly, but can't enter the sunlight en masse, so it turns into a battle to buy time for the escaping elves.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=hXMvoApWHT0

That's the actual video, I have to confess that watching it over again I was much less impressed with it, but in the moment found it very cool.

I liked the improvisational aspect of that, but it also highlights the core of the shows problem to me -- there isn't really a story, there is a sequence of things that happened. If elves are ninjas that can use chains and twigs, how did they get caught? Why do they run into close-quarters and get disembowelled by the Warg, rather than using the spear in their hands as a spear. Arondir sometimes seems a master warrior and other times not, and the other elves mainly seem to suck (except for that one brief moment).

And then Arondir 'loses', but gets set free anyway (Adar), where he gets in a fight, but they get free anyway (running in the forest with Theo), where the Orcs surround his town and attack him (pre Mt Doom) ... but they get free anyway. It made it hard to care, because nothing that happened in one scene (Arondir captured, Bronwyn hit by an arrow, Halbrand bedridden with a gut wound, Whatsishisname blowing up boats, Mt Doom exploding, The Numenoreans going to middle earth) has no effect on the later ones.

So you can't really set any expectations or feel for a story. You can watch the pretty pictures, but that's about it.

Oh lord.

That's one of the scenes I've already looked at because it was one of the few 'high points' anyone seemed to tout from the show.

It's not bad but nothing in there spurs me to want to watch further to find context. Some elves were captured, and there's an escape attempt, with a giant mutant dog. I'm not exactly ripe with curiosity to know how this situation was brought about. Maybe a little curious to know how it resolves, but I can safely guess that the Orcs lose, right?

I'm especially annoyed with some shoddy editing choices. At 1:45 he does the slow-mo flip (which is offputting to me anyway, but okay) and the warg flies past him and is a few mere feet from impacting the tree. Then immediately cut to a new shot that shows the warg flailing around for another full second as they're further from the tree than they just were in the previous shot.

The spatial orientation of that scene is a bit fucked.

The orcs actually win, and all of Arandor's elf friends die. Later the bad guy asks Arandor to deliver a message asking the villagers to join team Bad Guy, which is how he escapes.

Arondir and the trench? That is so bad - did you see Fluffy, our fearsome Warg bitch (and yes, Fluffy is a she, I saw the teats on her corpse in one shot)?

The wuxia wire-work acrobatics of Arondir, the other Elves and humans digging the trench trying to fight the Warg and the Orcs with bits of sticks, everyone dies except Our Hero, the pathetic copying of Boromir's death with the Elven watch commander - it was embarrassingly bad.

I liked the Dream of the Downfall of Númenor, because it's hard to go wrong with a massive wave destroying everything in its path.

But the eruption of Mount Doom was also terrible, because everyone should be dead - there is no way you are walking away from that, before you can even flee you will be dead.

Galadriel walks face-first into a pyroclastic flow at the end of episode six and at the start of episode seven, she wakes up totally unharmed save for a coating of orange dust while around her horses and people are on fire.

All of Galadriel's fight scenes are bad, from the ice troll onwards. So we have five or six Elven warriors being smacked around by the ice troll, then Galadriel just has to do a jump off a sword blade and kills it with a twirly-twirl of her sword single handed and without even a decent fight. Every scene she is in, she wins because she is that awesome. And it's all done fast and reliant on CGI to fill in the gaps.

There's a funny, if exaggerated, analysis of the Battle of the Southlands here and I think it makes the main points clear; the show went for what it thought would look 'cool' but failed on that, as well as failing on making any kind of sense. Yeah, the Jackson movies also went for 'cool' in the face of 'this makes no sense' but they pulled it off because they were able to make the fight scenes look reasonable. The show copies the movies but gets it wrong all the time.

But seriously, there were plenty of scenes that just amazed me.

Oh, there were scenes that amazed me, too. Like having Galadriel walking face-first into a pyroclastic flow and then waking up none the worse except for a coating of Cheeto dust. Or Galadriel jumping overboard and deciding to swim a couple of thousand miles back to Middle-earth. Most scenes with Galadriel, to be honest.

Sure, those were pretty unrealistic, but it also avoided plenty of modern script cliches that show up everywhere else. For example, I don't remember any characters ever having a long heartfelt scene where they explain to the audience all of their character motivations in order to make sure we understand them.

Who explained their character motivations? Galadriel? "My brother died and I am out to avenge him" - so why are you a bitch to everyone? You don't care about the men under your command, you don't use diplomacy and persuasion, you demand demand demand, and in the final episode it is shown how your manipulation of others has come around to bite you in the backside, and you still get away with it!

This thing is packed full of modern script clichés, that's the problem. They can't write the characters any other way than appealing to the clichés.

Galadriel was definitely pretty bad. Honestly the characters in general were pretty bad--none of the main ones had flaws per se, at least as far as I can tell. I mean, Galadriel was very pushy, but the show didn't present that as a flaw.

IDK if you get the situation I'm referencing exactly, where characters just come out and tell another character all of their thoughts and motivations. It's just not the sort of dialogue that happens in real life. I didn't see it in Rings of Power, and I do see it in virtually every show I watch nowadays. Much better to have passing references at motivations and otherwise watch people's actions speak for themselves. I do wish characters had made more in the way of mistakes though because there's no better way to watch character growth than to see how they handle their mistakes.

I feel like the more overwrought "0 out of 10, stupid fat hobbit, they've RUINED IT" takes were a bit much, but in terms of quality of writing it felt much worse than similar "prestige tv" competitors/predecessors like Game of Thrones.

If they wanted cool scenes, they could have made their own universe that doesn't really make sense and had it the way they wanted. The issue is that the writers of this series were clearly not in the headspace of Tolkien. The idea behind the lord of the rings was to create a great nordic epic and Tokien was very much in the headspace of northern Europeans in the 900s. He created a very immersive, detailed and rich world that captured deep elements of Germanic culture.

This series has a shallow world centered around the headspace of mediocre people in Hollywood while claiming to be a continuation of something much deeper.

they could have made their own universe

No they couldn't. If they could, they wouldn't need to vandalize others. If you can create your own universes, you just do that. If you can't - well, you either learn to code, or do sequels, reboots, derivatives and stuff like that.

they could have made their own universe

We live in Sequel world now, no further universes are allowed.

Also, you're not allowed to not care.

We live in Sequel world now, no further universes are allowed.

New universes still come out occasionally, but they have to prove themselves as books first. Both The Martian and The Expanse started out as novels.

Also, you're not allowed to not care.

"You may not be interested in the culture war, but the culture war is interested in you."

But even though you may not be allowed not to care, you are still allowed not to watch.

Boycott people who hare you.

Or people who rabbit you, even

Very bunny.

I'm lappin' up these puns.

Typical mottian lagos/pathos mix up.

The Babylon Bee have been naughty again, this time about Rings of Power. I fully expect Snopes to do another fake news debunking any day now 😁

The idea behind the lord of the rings was to create a great nordic epic and Tokien was very much in the headspace of northern Europeans in the 900s. He created a very immersive, detailed and rich world that captured deep elements of Germanic culture.

The problem is that he succeeded too well.

It's the Brothers' Grimm/Bible problem: by gathering all these stories into a new, self-contained book, they were rendered more portable and legible to the world...but were now no longer rooted for a particular people alone and a lot of the geographic and cultural specificity is written over. Especially because Tolkien was so influential in the greater genre.

Anyone can read Tolkien. And that young non-Germanic kid doesn't need to dig into just where Tolkien got his impression of Elves, Dwarves or whatever (or recognize his own culture in it) cause we all now know that that's just part of fantasy and everyone does it cause Tolkien.

As of this writing, House of the Dragon has an 86% rating on Rotten Tomatoes (with an 84% Audience Rating) and The Rings of Power has an 84% approval rating on the review aggregator (with a 38% Audience Rating, which should largely be discarded).

I know the article doesn't bother but: has the mainstream come up with a coherent theory for why HoD - which was coming off a controversial Game of Thrones finale and it's own "woke" PR problem - is doing vastly better than RoP in audience ratings?

Sexists are more motivated than racists?

If it is good the complainers just get laughed at and ignored.

Also, ASoIaF is way less iconic than LotR.

Better writing, better acting, the creator is alive and presumably has the last word over any alterations, lessons learned from the final season of GoT, things do actually happen at more than a snail's pace, the audience is more familiar with the GoT world so there is less need to tell you all about dragons and the Targaryens and the background lore they don't have the rights to.

Did you watch HoD? It's genuinely amazing. Not sure how to put it exactly but its treatment of power and tragedy makes GoT look one-dimensional. And there are some scenes that took my "#1 Tv/movie writing" spot. For example king Viserys' ruminating on the nature of his rule and what it means to be King to his Hand, if you've seen it.

This show deserves more cultural spotlight than GoT had, imo. And I love GoT.

I am still a bit salty after the GoT disaster, but I keep hearing it's a good show, also from people who aren't shy to call out a shitty one when they see one. So maybe worth trying out...

Do beware: I initially almost dropped it out of annoyance at the woke casting of one Old Valyrian family (not the Targaryens thankfully). Since then they've more than made up for it. On the other hand, the woke actors are at least very good, and it's consistent (instead of making random characters black they really bit the bullet and made an entire family black with white hair).

I don't even mind diversity casting by itself, unless it breaks the story. So fine, who knows, maybe some Valyrians did have dark skin. Doesn't bother me, if the actors are good, who cares.

I'm glad to hear it works well, but in the stills I've seen, it looks so silly an obviously wiglike. (as do some of the white people's hair though).

Which Targaryen is race-bait casted?

Can you name one, please? I don’t recall any from the show, unless you count Daemon’s kids, which seems silly - their mom’s black.

Those are Daemon’s kids, which I just mentioned. Their mom’s black.

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And the race-bait casting of the Targaryen family did not help in that regard.

But at least it has been established that in the ancestral homeland of the Targaryen, there are black and brown people and we've been shown them and their cities and cultures in GoT. so you can squeeze in "oh and there is this noble black house" without too much upsetting the apple cart.

Rings of Power just went "Here's one black Dwarf even if we never show any other black Dwarves in speaking or main parts, here's one black Elf with no other black Elves around. And if you don't shut up and accept this unquestioningly, you're a racist".

But the race-bait makes a lot of "Strong" sense given plot and the difference between reading and watching.

Warning Spoilers: Who the real father of the king's daughter's children is and appears to be is a key plot point. In the show the real father is white, while the guy who is supposed to be the father is black so it's extremely obvious to everyone what is going on. The king ignoring what is going on makes him either a fool or someone playing a deep game where pretending can make something real if you are the king. While I haven't read the book, someone who has says that in the book both men are white and people infer what is going on from less obvious phenotypical features. Mathematically, the race change makes its 99.99% likely in the show that the kids are bastards but, say, 95% likely in the books and the plot of the show does reflect this extra 4.99% likelihood. The race change also makes it extremely salient to we the viewers that the kids are bastards.

If you're talking Lost in Space (which fits), that daughter is actually adopted, and ends up meeting her father, who is black, so it works in-world quite well. It was weird at the beginning, I grant you.

RoP has no such excuses. I found it okay for the elf (in the army, people come from all over, and he was more elf-like than most of the community-theater-roman-senator elves anyway), but for the Harfoots it's very distracting and weird.

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One powergirrrrrrl moment where a girl attacked by an animal survives without injury in a situation where she probably shouldn't have.

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The problem with HoD is honestly not the show itself, it's GoT. GoT had an amazing first season too! But after how abysmal the ending was, I'm not going to watch HoD until after it's over and we know if it wound up going to shit the way GoT did.

I think it's still worth watching, more than anything I've watched over the last few years. It dethroned Better Call Saul as my favorite. It would suck if they cock it up but the writing, acting, and aesthetics are still so good that they stand on their own.

You're genuinely depriving yourself of something Great.

Besides, why would they cock it up again? Are the conditions for that happening even there? It's a finished story of a smaller scope. They know they fucked up. I'm not worried.

I mean, why would they cock it up the first time? If you went back in time and told someone after GoT S1 or S2 "this will end up sucking and the show's legacy will be how they ruined it", that person would think you were crazy. Back when GoT started, it was so good that nobody would have believed it could ever turn out so bad.

It wasn't at all obvious from the outset of GoT that they were going to fuck up so hard by the end. And if they do fuck this show up, it certainly wouldn't be clear now that they will do so. Now, maybe they learned their lesson at HBO and this will be great. But for myself, once bitten twice shy. Besides, if it actually is good in the end, then I will still enjoy watching it at that time. I'm not depriving myself of anything, I'm simply putting this off until we can assess the work as a whole.

Fair enough, they certainly might fuck it up. Personally I think it's much less likely than it was for GoT. Baseline probability for fucking up shows that start so great is low, smaller scope, and lessons learned are still my arguments.

But that's not the point. I just don't share the overall sentiment that GoT is not worth watching because they fucked up the last few seasons. It feels like you are substituting the legacy of the whole show for its overall quality.

Stories have endings. The narrative arc that has a identifiable beginning, middle, and end is what defines a given story. In general, stories that have a poor ending are unsatisfying in some way, linked to exactly how the ending was "poor." GoT S8 was widely panned for nonsensical/unexplained plot devices (teleporting armies, for example) that made the story intellectually unsatisfying, and character-arc reversals and betrayals of theme (Jaime's sudden un-redemption arc) that made the story emotionally unsatisfying. That's a massive double-failure.

Let's say I had a book, and told you, "Hey, read this, it's super good, but you'll want to stop after Chapter 15 of 20, the rest of the book's shit," would you want to start the book at all?

I wouldn't read that book because reading is much harder than watching a TV series but I do get your point. GoT is worsened by its bad ending, how can I argue it's not. I'm just saying it's not completely ruined and that I'll rewatch it no problem.

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I think the problem is Martin's outline ended up being a very conventional fantasy story, but it hid who the main characters were for a long time. So it looked like something else. People invested in the genre rule breaking early part of the story were always going to be disappointed when the traditional fantasy story emerged.

It also suffered from one of the themes of the book is all the people playing politics are ignoring a slow building apocalypse with little evidence, but the people playing politics are also very popular with the fans of the show which left them in a pretty severe bind, do they kill off everyone in the south who is unprepared (last scene the winter king sitting upon the iron throne before a zombified court as snow drifts across all Westerns) or do they save them with a deus ex machina solution that staves off the apocalypse. Either is going to piss off a lot of fans.

I feel like the problem is that A Song of Ice and Fire breaks genre conventions by not deus ex machina'ing things you expect to be deus ex machina'd. Ned being killed makes total sense, you just expect him to have plot armour. It definitely does get more high-magic/standard fantasy as it goes on, but I don't think that's the problem people have with the ending (whether they know it or not).

But it feels like what the writers took away from that was that what people liked about the show was "That can never predict what's going to happen next!" and made all sorts of nonsensical stuff happen because "subverting expectations is what GoT is about!" I don't envy them running out of GRRM to adapt and having to wing it (even if he gave them the broad strokes, a big part of the work is in the execution).

Besides, why would they cock it up again? Are the conditions for that happening even there?

"Unsatisfying scriptwriting" is the default scriptwriting. Ask not are the conditions sufficient to create a cockup; ask are the conditions sufficient to maintain a very unusually high level of quality?

That's true in general but not here I think. Other 'good' series usually manage to maintain great scriptwriting, for example Sopranos, Breaking Bad, etc. Bad scriptwriting is the default starting position, but series that start good and are intended to be good really do require special circumstances to go down the drain.

We know what caused the GoT fiasco (lack of source material, producers wanted out, extremely long and built careers which caused pressure to move on). Those are the conditions.

The GoT problem was that the show runners were counting on GRRM to finish the series and wrap up all of his plot lines. They would have only needed to adapt and simplify what GRRM wrote.

GRRM didn't publish enough adaptable material and D&D were left to come up with a conclusion on their own.

HotD is based on material GRRM has already published. It's adapted from about 120 pages from a book on Targaryen history.

So it won't have the depth and twists of the early seasons of GoT but there is a complete arc for the show runners to follow.

GRRM purportedly told the showrunners exactly where the show was going. But because he didn't flesh it out at GRRM levels of detail, the showrunners had to fill stuff in and didn't. Why did Daenarys turn evil? Clearly GRRM told the writers it's because all the people she loves get killed and she suffers a lot. But if he were to actually write it, he'd realize that Missandei getting killed isn't narratively sufficient.

It's the same reason that a lot of "software architect" type people are kind of disastrous - if they actually sat down and wrote code instead of making diagrams and saying "fill in the details", they'd realize where the actual hard parts live.

GRRM could probably have made it work, though maybe 2 books would have become 4. The TV writers couldn't.

GRRM purportedly told the showrunners exactly where the show was going. But because he didn't flesh it out at GRRM levels of detail, the showrunners had to fill stuff in and didn't. Why did Daenarys turn evil? Clearly GRRM told the writers it's because all the people she loves get killed and she suffers a lot.

The showrunners have shown they can fill in Martin's skeleton in the past: S1 had some great non-canon scenes, and there are well-received TV-only plots (like Arya meeting Tywin in S2)

The problem imo is that GRRM's entire plot has spiralled out of his control and he keeps adding new and new plotlines to push things forward. This is fine for GRRM because he explicitly left TV to not have writing constraints. However this is obviously a problem for a TV, even the one with the largest budget ever.

Disclaimer: everything after this is well-worn fandom speculation.

In this case the problems in GoT are likely due to the showrunners - understandably- removing major characters like the alleged surviving Targaryen heir Aegon and his Dornish allies. Why? Cause we'd have to go back to Dorne and explain just how this Targaryen hid for years just like Dany, maybe adding seasons to the show and annoying the audience.

The problem is that roles like this are likely pivotal and its absence explains a lot of weird things.

For one: why Cersei has permanent support despite her actions which are so norm-breaking I can't think of a real-world precedent. In the books, if this happened, Aegon and his wife (lovelier than Cersei) would likely depose her and they'd be the threat to Dany.

This actually makes a lot more sense: Season 7 and 8 basically butchered Tyrion and Varys' characters to provide some justification for why Dany wouldn't just destroy Cersei instantly to much rejoicing (this causes the attendant problem that any/all warnings about Dany going evil aren't credible until she does something ludicrously over the top)

However, Dany's reticence would make sense if she was dealing with a fellow Targaryen pretender to the Throne. She actually can't just roast him. And his existence is the perfect thing that would cause her to be insecure and/or slip up.

I think there's sort of a cascade of problems like this, due to having to deal with an increasingly spiraling Martin plot. A plot that is so dense and complicated and unworkable that Martin literally scrapped a lot of work that didn't go well and hasn't successfully put out a book since Dance With Dragons. So I actually wouldn't be convinced that Martin can do it in two.

As I said:

GRRM could probably have made it work, though maybe 2 books would have become 4.

Fair enough. Then I should say: I'm not convinced that Martin can do it at all (especially given that the "split the books up" was tried for Feast/Dance and we've been stuck for a decade)

"software architect" type people

Could you give more detail? In my (biased) experience, they're normally competentish (if given to trends and overcomplicating things). Generally they've been developing for a decade+ before taking the role, from what I've seen. There are however many PMs or such who misrepresent/get overly stuck to diagrams and i've met some people who managed to become architects without coding at all. At my work, I make architectural mvps with seniors with chunks of the functionality and low effort piping, then tell other juniors how to make everything production ready while seniors work on hard parts we aren't quite sure about.

But fundamentally it's an organizational issue. 10 experts alone could very well be better (and in some projects, I'm able to give parts each to domain experts who write their parts in a week and it's all done (waterfall can work!)). But engineers are normally at the behest of non-tech people coming up with stupid features, who change their minds, or the domain space isn't even properly explored with exploratory test models (so we can't do good engineering practices). But this can be justified, since the tech is supposed to automate away concrete tasks and processes, for people who are paying for it. Path of least resistance etc.

So I'm referring to software architect types who probably are competent, but also aren't doing a lot of coding anymore. The net result is grand plans that often fail, or succeed but overbudget, due to a lot of stuff just getting bogged down in bad ergonomics and day to day tasks that are harder than they should be. As a concrete example, I once worked on an ETL task run by a high level architect plus a bunch of fairly junior folks.

ETL tasks just dragged on, took forever, had lots of errors. One of the biggest errors was simply importing stuff to the wrong column, because the developer actually mapping json -> SQL had to manually map "input field_name -> integer column position in CSV file -> SQL loads the CSV". After about a year of delays due to transposing columns (return [...20 columns...row['foo']['bar'], row['baz'][0]...] when it should have been return [...row['baz'][0], row['foo']['bar']...]), a clever (new) junior dev finally figured out developers should just do return { 'foobar': row['foo']['bar'], ...} and wrote the system to translate 'foobar' -> column 23 by just checking the column order in SQL. Another example would be days added to any ticket just because setting up a testing env is a lot harder than it needs to be.

The key point here is that in neither case did the architect actually spend much time actually doing the task that was dragging on and slowing the project. If they spent a month doing that, they probably would have just fixed it without much notice. And once we got that one clever guy, it did get fixed.

As it relates to this example, from what I've read, GRRM is actually good at the details of writing. But since he's retired from writing, he's put into the "clueless architect" role, and the actual people doing the implementation are just not able to actually fill in the details.

I have only very rarely worked with an architect who is competent. Most of the time, it's someone with little to no experience actually doing the technical work, who gives these high-level pie in the sky statements like "the system will take in lead, and output gold" with no indication whatsoever of how it should do that. Then they dust their hands off, go "OK your turn now" and leave it to the technical people to figure out how to actually make that happen.

I'm not saying competent architects don't exist, I've actually worked with some! But they are very much not the norm in my experience.

I've seen this said before but I don't think it's true. Game of Thrones' problem was that the showrunners started writing their own fanfiction well before they ran out of material. This was made worse by them cutting things that must have seemed, at the time, unimportant, but later led to the last two seasons feeling incredibly unbalanced. The changes start around season or 4 (it's been a while), start getting really bad by season 5, and finally compound to where the average viewer can tell things are very off by the end

By fanfiction I don't necessarily mean fleshing smaller characters out, like Tywin and Margaery — generally this was done well and didn't conflict with anything pre-existing. I'm talking about things like Jaime's storylines after returning to King's Landing being completely different, whatever they did to Euron Greyjoy, and literally everything about the Dorne plot.

An example of cut content is the ignored storyline of Aegon Targaryen landing his armies in Westeros while Daenerys is fucking around in Meereen. He kind of comes out of nowhere in book 5 but it really feels like he should have been there for the endgame in the show. What we had instead is the situation where everyone is against Cersei and the writers have to bend the story in knots to have it be an even fight. A multipolar conflict with Dany, Cersei, Euron, and Aegon all facing off would be much more chaotic and even, assuming this was Martin's intention.

Perhaps the most infamous example of cut content was not including Lady Stoneheart. As I recall, this heavily strained the showrunners' relationship with Martin and led to him distancing himself from the show and depriving it of its most important advisor.

For all the things you can say about the showrunners at least they finished their damn job. I'm more bitter now at how GOT/Martin influenced Attack on Titan's writer and caused him to run that off a cliff too.

This was made worse by them cutting things that must have seemed, at the time, unimportant, but later led to the last two seasons feeling incredibly unbalanced. The changes start around season or 4 (it's been a while), start getting really bad by season 5

Lol, serves me right to write a post about this and scroll down and find someone has put it more succinctly hours ago.

I'll just reiterate: I'm very sympathetic to the showrunners here, despite them usually getting the criticism for this.

It would be one thing if there was a complete series but Martin himself has proven incapable of resolving his own narrative kudzu. He basically spent years on the "Meereenese Knot" problem of trying to get all of the characters in the right place and iirc has dumped more than one version of the story. His last few books only covered parts of the world due to the rapidly proliferating viewpoints.

All of this stuff costs when you're doing a show, in a way it doesn't cost a writer.

I agree with your sympathies especially when it come to cut stuff. On a show you have to cast, build sets, account for the limited ability of your core audience to follow many concurrent plotlines. On a finite budget it’s pretty easy to say “where the hell is this going” to a lot of the book 4-5 plots and cut them, especially when the books don’t have an easy answer to that question.

I’m less sympathetic in cases like Dorne where they built the damn sets and hired actors, just the wrong ones. That felt like the writers just didn’t understand what Martin was doing with Dorne at all and said fuck it, let’s add some girlbosses and put Jaime in it. Give me Arianne back

It would be one thing if there was a complete series but Martin himself has proven incapable of resolving his own narrative kudzu.

I mean, sure. But the problem wasn't just "the writers inherited a thorny plot from GRRM and weren't up to the task of concluding it well". The problem is "the writers turned out to be a failure at basic writing". In the last few seasons of GoT character motivations are all over the place, things regularly happen that make no sense in-universe, and the writers lack even the most basic fucking attention to logical coherency of the story. In the last episode, Jon Snow goes from one scene (and location in the world) to the next in ways that would require him to literally teleport for it to be possible.

I have sympathy for the writers that they inherited an unfinished plot that GRRM himself hasn't been able to finish successfully yet (and may never do so). But my sympathy runs out when they make writing mistakes so large that anyone, even a completely untrained fan like myself, is able to spot them. That's 100% on the GoT writers, and not GRRM.

The problem is "the writers turned out to be a failure at basic writing". In the last few seasons of GoT character motivations are all over the place, things regularly happen that make no sense in-universe, and the writers lack even the most basic fucking attention to logical coherency of the story.

Yeah, but I see this as partly a problem caused by the giant hole left by the aforementioned kudzu when they cut it out.

For example: Varys and Tyrion HAVE to be stupid cause there's no other way to stop Dany from just killing Cersei but this then makes it hard to take their ambivalence about Dany seriously as foreshadowing. All of the political complexity of Westeros has to be removed or Cersei would never last as Queen.

And so on and so on.

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I'm more bitter now at how GOT/Martin influenced Attack on Titan's writer and caused him to run that off a cliff too.

I am morbidly-curious now that you mention this. I've only ever watched the first season of the anime and I left off in the manga when they introduced the anti-human 3DMG. I'm roughly aware that AOT goes to some weird places, and I know from watching Ironmouse that Eren does Some Shit(tm) that was apparently guaranteed to turn the audience against him.

I am morbidly-curious now that you mention this. I've only ever watched the first season of the anime and I left off in the manga when they introduced the anti-human 3DMG

You should watch at least the first 3 seasons; they really are something special.

I should be able to explain what I mean in a mostly spoiler-free way. The creator of Attack on Titan, Hajime Isayama, binged Game of Thrones in 2016 and got really into it, even saying that the ending of his story would be inspired by the show.

There's a point in the story where the themes and style of storytelling vastly shift and not for the better. This coincides with the split between season 3 and the "final season" and there's an easy visual cue to tell when it happened because a different studio took over animating the show. This also coincides with around when Isayama got into Game of Thrones and it started influencing his writing.

I would summarize the original themes of the show (Seasons 1-3) as RAGE, SCREAM, FIGHT. There is something existential coming for you and it won't leave a single one of you left alive. Your 'leaders' think it best if your people quietly went extinct, and as you learn they are far from the only ones... Fight with your lives and with everything at your disposal, even if it means literally turning into your mortal enemy. There are times when good friends have to fight eachother but the mission is never in question because those are the stakes. This and the military imagery gave the show heavy nationalist themes and the series began to be criticized at the end of season 3 once certain interpretations became circulated online. I found it to be extremely refreshing compared to what I'm used to.

The post-GOT era show has heavy Martin themes. War is bad and you'll be heavy-handedly browbeaten for liking the cool parts with the sobering reality of characters you like dying. Morality is very grey all of a sudden. Killing others is wrong, even if they all want you dead... it feels quite incongruent with the earlier themes of the show, even with the story that the author laid out. These themes may sound better to you as you read this but consider that they are kludged onto a work that was saying the exact opposite things for so long. It's a different bill of goods now.

I should elaborate on the storytelling changes as well. Attack on Titan's narrative framing ties you and Eren very closely together. Later this expands so you get the POV of a few other main characters at times, but the important thing is that you and the characters are almost always on the same page. You know what they know, you discover the mystery together. This was the style of storytelling until the shift I talked about, at which point it becomes basically... Game of Thrones.

Tons of characters. You don't follow characters, you check in with them to see where they are with their story. Your relationship to Eren is completely broken as he goes from being the POV character to someone you don't see the inner world of outside of 4 episodes or so. You're catching up with his plans like everyone else is. This is pretty much exactly how Martin does it and the style has its merits... just not on something that did it differently for most of its existence. This is harder to articulate for most people but I think it's why the new seasons are so jarring.

As for the ending of Eren doing Something Crazy — this is certainly where the show was going from the start. His words to a certain betraying friend are downright genocidal in rhetoric. I think in a world without the influence of Martin it'd be framed much differently by the narrative, which would make for some interesting discourse online.

I'm not sure anyone with thematic sense should have been expecting Eren to not go into a bad place. The way it gets there is weirder than the resolution that a super-angry kid who turns into a race of cannibals goes to a bad place when worldviews are shattered.

Western young adult literature it was never going to be.

Oh see I thought that, like many things in AoT, the ending where Erin Does Shit (which I also haven't seen yet) was going to be Evangelion-adjacent.

The "non-mainstream" explanation is that despite the obvious woke overtones and casting, the writing is pretty solid. They're also making a Jon Snow sequel, have to see how that goes.

Well...yes. But the non-mainstream view easily lends itself to deflation of the naive mainstream view (it's all racists/sexist) - if writing quality is what leads to more or less prominent trolls why are we always talking about racists/sexists? So it's not much help figuring out what mainstreamers think.

Which is why I ask if they've come up with some theory that avoids this line of argument.

/fantasy had been generally pro the show, but the discussion thread for the finale was fairly barren, and reduced to disappointment and recycled Morbius memes."My favorite part was when she said 'It's Galadrielin' Time!' It was definitely one of the episodes of the year."

I think a lot of billionaires just want to make something cool they can show off and be proud of. A show has the potential to be more loved and less hated than their companies.They aren’t aliens that haven’t consumed media their whole life too.

Like with space projects, there is justification for spending the money but it’s a secondary concern. Shows are trendy right now and billionaires are unanimously competitive people that follow and anticipate trends.

Wait, how many episodes was it? Was the season really short, or did I just lose like three months? Didn't it only start a few weeks ago?

Allegedly was going to be ten episodes for the first season, they cut that down to eight, and the first two episodes were streamed together as the pilot.

Rumours are that they rushed it out to beat House of the Dragon which was scheduled for the same initial time to broadcast.

Eight episodes, the first two premiered at once so the release timeline is a tad shorter.

8 episodes released over six weeks (two episodes the first week).

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