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Rings of Power was doomed to be bad. They wanted to do a prequel, but didn't have the rights to The Silmarillion. So they could use aspects that were implied by other works but had to change details to avoid infringement.
Naturally most showrunners wanted to avoid that whole mess.
Thanks be to Eru Iluvatar they didn't get their claws on the Silmarillion. I'm seeing a lot of rumours about season two, some of which I can't believe, but just imagine if they had done so. Given that they thought they needed to invent a whole stupid-ass* origin story for mithril, they'd have decided to polish up the original. Make it sexy. Make it diverse. What was it Southpark said? Put a chick in it, make it gay, and make it lame?
*Unbelievably stupid, dumb, ridiculous, nonsensical, crappy origin story. Mithril does not need an origin story, except if you decide to write it as magic power metal that is the life force of the Elves because it rips off the concept of yin and yang. Oh, which also requires you to invent a fourth Silmaril - look, I can't even be bothered to finish explaining this, the urge to kill is rising once more in me. No wonder Gil-galad is hard drinking in this version, I'd be hitting the booze too if I had to deliver these lines.
If you want to know why an Elf and a Balrog were fighting over a tree, it's that fourth Silmaril. And it has to be a new, fourth, Silmaril because we damn well know where the three Silmarils ended up, and none of them were in a tree. AAAH, MURDER! MURDERRRRRR! I CRAVE THE BLOOD OF THE SHOWRUNNERS!!!!!
The Silmarillion is my favorite book of all time (though I haven't read it in years now). I'm just kind of baffled now at what you just told me, I knew Rings of Power was bad but not that bad. Why did they have to bring the Silmarils into them at all? Their target audience obviously wasn't Tolkien nerds so what were they hoping to gain by bringing them up at all? The median Rings of Power fan has no idea what the two trees were, or who Feanor and Morgoth were. Meanwhile the median Silmarillion enjoyer avoids the entire series like the plague.
I have to keep one eye on the mods as I try to answer that, because a full and frank appraisal of the two Onlie Begetters will get me into trouble 😁
The selling point originally was that Jeff is a mega huge super-duper Tolkien fan, loves the books even more than he loves banging the hot chick next door, and it was his life's dream to bring a version of the legendarium to the TV screen.
The truth is that Bezos wanted to sell a ton of new Prime subscriptions via the screening service, sign up to see the must-watch shows of the year and now you have your subscription why not stick around and do some shopping?, and to do that he needed a big tentpole show. So he wanted his own Game of Thrones but unhappily they were already making House of the Dragon elsewhere. Where to next for fantasy doorstopper hits? Hey, there's that Tolkien guy and his books that got turned into movies that made a ton of money, Amazon sells massive amounts of merch from all of those. Problem solved!
Problem not solved, as they didn't have the rights to anything except the Lord of the Rings plus the Appendices, and if they tried remaking the movies, the rights holders there would come down on them like a ton of bricks. I think they wanted the Silmarillion but couldn't get the rights. They were hampered by only being able to use the material they had the rights to, so they couldn't make the changes or bring in characters mentioned in other works, so we only get very fleeting glimpses of Valinor and so forth. Instead, they took the book - and more so, the movie - characters and moved them back in time to the Second Age, then merrily pushed on with rewriting Tolkien.
They couldn't have Hobbits, for instance, so they gave us Harfoots instead. No these aren't Hobbits, don't be silly, they're the ancestors of Hobbits! and so on for their changes. Thus, they fell between two stools: they based early marketing on "gonna be so faithful to the writings, gonna tell the story of the Second Age" for the lore nerds, but they also had to do the DEI stuff, with rationales about 'writing the novel Tolkien never wrote' and 'representing the modern world'. After all, this was going to launch the streaming service globally, so they needed non-white characters for overseas audiences. They had to fix Tolkien's diversity problem.
That also meant they had a ready-made excuse when the show was downvoted to Utumno: it was being review-bombed by trolls and toxic white supremacist racist haters of strong women and non-white persons! It wasn't because of trampling on the lore or some really bad story decisions, no it was all racism, sexism, homophobia and whatever Waldreg is cooking up in that barn masquerading as a pub in Tirharad.
The fun (in a grim way) part afterwards was when the same media outlets which had been pouring praise on the show and selling the line that it was all Italian Fascists hating on it, then turned around and went "yeah, it was a bit shit". The one guy I respect on this is Eric Kain, who started out as "give it a chance, it looks good" but after a couple of episodes went "yeah, it's crap" and did entertaining reviews.
Now, to be fair, there was an element of the Italian Fascist sort amongst the criticism, and those who didn't accept that as a different medium television has to make a ton of changes to books, but it certainly was not the whole of it, nor even the majority. But say one word about anything less than awesome, and you're a far-right woman and minority hater, was the reaction.
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There's so much "it gets worse." On the one hand, they slip in references to at least medium-deep lore with no show-internal explanation, so only fairly invested Tolkien fans will even recognize that a point was being made, but on the other hand, you've got major lore-breaking points shoved in your face right and left that are obvious to more casual fans. (Was that a bit of casual flirting between Galadriel and Elrond? Did I just throw up a bit in my mouth?)
Like introducing a fourth Silmaril to support the 'origin' of mithril through philosophical dualism that is completely anathema to Tolkien and his works...and never once mentioning Feanor. Or the famous motto of the Numenoreans, "The sea is always right." Or the infamous teleporting armies problem straight out of GoT S8. Or the greatest smith of the Second Age having to be handheld through the concept of "this is an alloy," and the importance of (fuck me) and I quote "coaxing" metals together instead of "forcing" them.
They actually have disguised-Sauron describe his little "alloy" tip to Celebrimbor as "a gift." That only lands if you know that Sauron is supposed to be disguised as Annatar, the Lord of Gifts, BUT HE ISN'T! Who is that for?! The only thing I'm left with is that the Easter eggs hidden in the show are intended as calculated insults to fans of Tolkien's actual work. No presumption of charity can or should stand against the mountain of contrary evidence.
@FarNearEverywhere is welcome to her claim on the blood of the showrunners, but I would at least like to watch.
That's what had me banging my head off the desk; they throw in little snippets of lore that only the book nerds will get (the set-up for 'is this the Oath of the Feanorians?' in the trailers, the items in the King's tower in Númenor that have you going 'That's Dramborleg!!!!', the Bough of Return on the ships) so they've plainly done the reading, and they're trying to coax us in like laying a trail of breadcrumbs.
And then the cage comes down!
And we get Elrond "I'm nobody important, just the King's speechwriter, which is why I'm not even invited to the banquet" - what? This is the guy who has the blood of a Maia in his veins, the descendant of both the Mortal and Elvish noble houses, someone who if he wanted to cut up rough could lob in a claim for the High Kingship! Then to make up for this, they give all the best bits to him from what Celebrimbor should be doing (so no Celebrimbor and Narvi, now it's Elrond and Durin Jr.) so the greatest smith of the current generation has nothing better to do than wander around in a granny bathrobe and need to be taught about "alloys" by a scruffy Mortal.
Gil-galad at least looks like an Elf, this younger generation with their rebellious short haircuts, but his main purpose is to be pompous and anti-Dwarven.
It takes Galadriel five episodes to remember she has a husband. Maybe. If he's not dead. She has no idea, she was too busy wandering the world for centuries looking for Sauron and couldn't take six months out of that to see if her husband was alive or dead or off fathering kids in that Southland village (who is Theo's dad? we know Mom has an eye for the Elf boys, her and Arondir, the most unsexy, lacking in chemistry, bloodless 'forbidden love' grand romance you could hope to see). Against that, mangling the lore and character of Finrod is a smaller matter.
If I believe the rumours about the second season, they did give in to the loud complaints about WHERE THE ANGBAND IS ANNATAR??? and now we're going to get not one but two Saurons. One as Halbrand still mooning around, one as Annatar (of course they had to cast a British Indian actor for that part, but I don't care so long as he can act, unlike Arondir's guy. He's a RADA grad so maybe?). Possibly three if the wilder rumours are right and he turns up in a third version as pretending to be Celeborn ("honey I'm home, did you miss me?" "remind me again, who are you?").
I wonder if we will ever get to see the second season? They ploughed ahead at the end of season one with "Well it doesn't matter if you hated it, we're already filming the second season, so yah boo to you toxic trolls", but even with that, they may decide to just write it off, use it as a tax loss, and not go ahead with something that isn't looking like it will improve on the first season reception and might indeed sink the streaming service if they make it the flagship show.
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No, it really wasn't. There's a million unexplored areas of Tolkien's world. You have two whole-ass Blue wizards out East, you have an entire age of Numenor doing stuff, you have adventures of Young Aragorn (feat. Young Legolas and already old gandalf).
The problem for Jeffy and his Cunning Plan to sell a shit ton of new Amazon Prime subscriptions - if you do new, original stuff, then who's gonna watch it? Those pathetic Tolkien nerds that you're already planning to paint as toxic fandom trolls when the backlash about your changes hits the fan? Pfft, who wants them?
You want the global movie audience, and what the movie audience is most familiar with are the characters Elrond, Galadriel, Gandalf, the Hobbits, Sauron. So you need those for your show. But you can't remake the movies wholesale, so you do some... re-imagining. Move back in time to when Galadriel was Young Piss'n'Vinegar Glads (ignore that even in the Second Age she was married with a daughter). Shove in Meteor Man (Gandalf, we strongly hint). And Sauron. Make the mystery box thing of "is it him? or him? or them?" about Sauron's secret identity (the showrunners are part of J.J. Abrams pack of second-raters, hence the mystery box).
And thus the entire steaming mess of "we tried ripping off GoT and failed because House of the Dragon ate our lunch".
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