Carry on

I'll try carry on with people who have seen the show and didn't get their opinions from YouTube videos.

Am I actually the only person watching it, out of interest?

Sure, you keep on believing that. Like I said, carry on.

I mean the thread is literally started over a YouTube video....

But whatever, I'll carry on if you let me.

Animavore wrote:Am I actually the only person watching it, out of interest?

Don't know, but I have not even heard of Rings of Power until this thread was started. Having read a few dozen pages of Lord of the Rings some time ago there's not much chance of me watching it one day.

Animavore wrote:I mean the thread is literally started over a YouTube video....

So?

Animavore wrote:But whatever, I'll carry on if you let me.

Have at it.

Hermit wrote:

Animavore wrote:Am I actually the only person watching it, out of interest?

Don't know, but I have not even heard of Rings of Power until this thread was started. Having read a few dozen pages of Lord of the Rings some time ago there's not much chance of me watching it one day.

It's a bit of a slog and it seems rather twee and one-dimensional compared to some later fantasy works. I think it took three or four months to read as a teen, starting and stopping.

I'm reading it again now and I think it has a childishly simple, black and white view of morality, and good vs evil. It's also full of convenient plot contrivances and long bouts of exposition.

I certainly don't think it's this untouchable great work some fans seem think it is. Some people treat it like a holy text from which any deviation is some sort of sacrilege. There were literally people calling the Rings of Power show a "desecration".

I don't remember a backlash over any of the many video games which took massive liberties with the lore and absolutely fell under the umbrella of "fan-fiction" which seems so much more offensive now.

Bit inconsistent but I guess none of them were made by the evil Amazon corporation.

Papa Smurf wrote:

Evolving wrote:Dark skin would be evolutionarily advantageous for creatures who live underground, n'est-ce pas?

Why? As far as I know cave dwelling creatures' skins are usually white or translucent in the real world. Without some sort of explanation I would expect the same thing to be true on Arda. Dark skin is an evolutional response to exposure of bare skin to sunlight, is it not?

Oh for a zoologist to ask, to clear this up!

It's not particularly important, but aren't the creatures with no pigment at all in their skin (or other surface) those that live in utter darkness, where they can't be seen whatever colour they have? If there's some light, but not very much, a white skin would make you rather conspicuous.

If moles and badgers are black, it's not because they spend so much time in the sunshine.

Hermit wrote:

Animavore wrote:Am I actually the only person watching it, out of interest?

Don't know, but I have not even heard of Rings of Power until this thread was started. Having read a few dozen pages of Lord of the Rings some time ago there's not much chance of me watching it one day.

I was utterly gripped by The Lord of the Rings when I first read it. I was sixteen. Since then I have inevitably become more conscious of its flaws, but I retain fond memories of it. If I were to read it now for the first time, I might well find it as daft as Game of Thrones.

I watched the first one and a half episodes of this new series, and found myself rather losing interest. I'm a busy woman. More recently I've read some positive reviews of later episodes, which might encourage me to find time to return to it.

Game of Thrones was not daft. There were dragons and nudity.

Two strong points, certainly.

Evolving wrote:

Hermit wrote:

Animavore wrote:Am I actually the only person watching it, out of interest?

Don't know, but I have not even heard of Rings of Power until this thread was started. Having read a few dozen pages of Lord of the Rings some time ago there's not much chance of me watching it one day.

I was utterly gripped by The Lord of the Rings when I first read it. I was sixteen. Since then I have inevitably become more conscious of its flaws, but I retain fond memories of it. If I were to read it now for the first time, I might well find it as daft as Game of Thrones.

I watched the first one and a half episodes of this new series, and found myself rather losing interest. I'm a busy woman. More recently I've read some positive reviews of later episodes, which might encourage me to find time to return to it.

Yeah I fell for that trap. I stopped watching at episode 4 then reviews and people insisted it was really picking up so I went back and watched 5&6 and I didn't think it picked up much at all.

I find it quite boring. GoT-lite. Like if GoT had just one story instead of multiple and as a consequence that one story needs to be padded out by having everything done slower.

I find it hard to understand why it's so popular and why it's getting a free pass while RoP gets dog-piled.

It's all political I guess.

Evolving wrote:Dark skin would be evolutionarily advantageous for creatures who live underground, n'est-ce pas?

Typically no, which is why most of those squirmy, squishy, too-many-legged, or blind beasties that find themselves evolutionarily encaved end up pale, white, or (eww) translucent. Their pigment doesn't really matter as no one's using sight to hunt or be hunted. Instead, melanin is something they no longer need to produce - there's a cost however minimal to that production. No selection pressure to retain, and a cost however slight will produce a circumstance more favouring albinism than melanism.

Animavore wrote:

Evolving wrote:

Hermit wrote:

Animavore wrote:Am I actually the only person watching it, out of interest?

Don't know, but I have not even heard of Rings of Power until this thread was started. Having read a few dozen pages of Lord of the Rings some time ago there's not much chance of me watching it one day.

I was utterly gripped by The Lord of the Rings when I first read it. I was sixteen. Since then I have inevitably become more conscious of its flaws, but I retain fond memories of it. If I were to read it now for the first time, I might well find it as daft as Game of Thrones.

I watched the first one and a half episodes of this new series, and found myself rather losing interest. I'm a busy woman. More recently I've read some positive reviews of later episodes, which might encourage me to find time to return to it.

Yeah I fell for that trap. I stopped watching at episode 4 then reviews and people insisted it was really picking up so I went back and watched 5&6 and I didn't think it picked up much at all.

I find it quite boring. GoT-lite. Like if GoT had just one story instead of multiple and as a consequence that one story needs to be padded out by having everything done slower.

I find it hard to understand why it's so popular and why it's getting a free pass while RoP gets dog-piled.

It's all political I guess.

I wouldn't have said that GoT got a completely free pass. Look at the reviews for the final season, for instance:

https://www.rottentomatoes.com/tv/game_of_thrones/s08

Given that they'd run out of the author's original stories, and the screenwriters had the particularly difficult job of wrapping up a saga yet unfinished, I'm not surprised that the backlash was fierce though.

My take on Rings of Power is that it's got a similar problem. It's Lord of the Rings in name only for commercial reasons, telling a story that Tolkien never told, and not even that consistent with what he actually wrote about it.

I had similar issues with Peter Jackson's adaptation of The Hobbit. There's maybe one film's worth of material that tells the story of the book, but it's stretched into a trilogy via interpolated filler because there just wouldn't have been enough money made from a single film. I still enjoyed them overall, but they plainly weren't what they been if given a more appropriate treatment.

Still, I'm not here to be a gatekeeper and if anyone is enjoying it, that's great. I'm just trying to set out the case for why a Tolkien fan who isn't a paid up member of the anti-woke brigade might not have warmed to it.

Spearthrower wrote:

Evolving wrote:Dark skin would be evolutionarily advantageous for creatures who live underground, n'est-ce pas?

Typically no, which is why most of those squirmy, squishy, too-many-legged, or blind beasties that find themselves evolutionarily encaved end up pale, white, or (eww) translucent. Their pigment doesn't really matter as no one's using sight to hunt or be hunted. Instead, melanin is something they no longer need to produce - there's a cost however minimal to that production. No selection pressure to retain, and a cost however slight will produce a circumstance more favouring albinism than melanism.

Thanks, but doesn't that rather go to my later point?

Evolving wrote:
It's not particularly important, but aren't the creatures with no pigment at all in their skin (or other surface) those that live in utter darkness, where they can't be seen whatever colour they have? If there's some light, but not very much, a white skin would make you rather conspicuous.

If moles and badgers are black, it's not because they spend so much time in the sunshine.

Tolkien's dwarves don't live in utter blackness; so if they had evolved to be the way they are (and I'm aware that, in his universe, we're supposed to accept that they were created), I can see how some kind of dark covering would be of benefit.

Evolving wrote:It's not particularly important, but aren't the creatures with no pigment at all in their skin (or other surface) those that live in utter darkness, where they can't be seen whatever colour they have? If there's some light, but not very much, a white skin would make you rather conspicuous.

Melanin in the skin protects against UV radiation from the sun. As a rule artificial light, which is the source of light that the dwarves use in their deep underground cave dwellings, has no UV content.

Evolving wrote:If moles and badgers are black, it's not because they spend so much time in the sunshine.

I'm not a zoologist but is it their skin that is black or only their fur?

Polar bears for instance have white fur but black skin. Or actually their hairs are translucent but do reflect visible light from their surroundings. The black skin helps to absorb warmth from the sun (infrared radiation).

Evolving wrote:Tolkien's dwarves don't live in utter blackness; so if they had evolved to be the way they are (and I'm aware that, in his universe, we're supposed to accept that they were created), I can see how some kind of dark covering would be of benefit.

In which case you'd expect there to be black dwarves only, not black and white ones. Assuming that Aule who created them thought all this through. The only reason both black and white dwarves exist in RoP is because that 'reflects the world we live in', which is a stated objective of the show's producers. I've said before it before : it would have been better to have black dwarves only except that it causes a huge continuity problem if LotR is taken into account, which of course Amazon doesn't care about since that was not their show. But maybe, just maybe, people who watch your product do care about such things, Amazon. Your product does not stand by itself.

As for HotD, last Tuesday's episode again failed to grip me. I'm not sure I will continue watching it. The acting isn't bad for the most part (the portrayal of Viserys Taqrgaryan was rather good actually), the fx are good enough, but it's missing something. It's almost as if movies and such need a truly interesting and compelling story to stay interesting. So far this is just a rehash of GoT but without the mystery and most of the characters far less distinctive and memorable.

Matt_B wrote:

Animavore wrote:

Evolving wrote:

Hermit wrote:
Don't know, but I have not even heard of Rings of Power until this thread was started. Having read a few dozen pages of Lord of the Rings some time ago there's not much chance of me watching it one day.

I was utterly gripped by The Lord of the Rings when I first read it. I was sixteen. Since then I have inevitably become more conscious of its flaws, but I retain fond memories of it. If I were to read it now for the first time, I might well find it as daft as Game of Thrones.

I watched the first one and a half episodes of this new series, and found myself rather losing interest. I'm a busy woman. More recently I've read some positive reviews of later episodes, which might encourage me to find time to return to it.

Yeah I fell for that trap. I stopped watching at episode 4 then reviews and people insisted it was really picking up so I went back and watched 5&6 and I didn't think it picked up much at all.

I find it quite boring. GoT-lite. Like if GoT had just one story instead of multiple and as a consequence that one story needs to be padded out by having everything done slower.

I find it hard to understand why it's so popular and why it's getting a free pass while RoP gets dog-piled.

It's all political I guess.

I wouldn't have said that GoT got a completely free pass. Look at the reviews for the final season, for instance:

https://www.rottentomatoes.com/tv/game_of_thrones/s08

Given that they'd run out of the author's original stories, and the screenwriters had the particularly difficult job of wrapping up a saga yet unfinished, I'm not surprised that the backlash was fierce though.

My take on Rings of Power is that it's got a similar problem. It's Lord of the Rings in name only for commercial reasons, telling a story that Tolkien never told, and not even that consistent with what he actually wrote about it.

I had similar issues with Peter Jackson's adaptation of The Hobbit. There's maybe one film's worth of material that tells the story of the book, but it's stretched into a trilogy via interpolated filler because there just wouldn't have been enough money made from a single film. I still enjoyed them overall, but they plainly weren't what they been if given a more appropriate treatment.

Still, I'm not here to be a gatekeeper and if anyone is enjoying it, that's great. I'm just trying to set out the case for why a Tolkien fan who isn't a paid up member of the anti-woke brigade might not have warmed to it.

I was talking about House of the Dragon getting a free pass.

I can understand why some fans don't like RoP, I just don't think the anti-woke arguments are good, that's all.

I get it is fan fiction I just don't agree that is inherently bad. I think there are genuine criticisms which I hope they take on board to improve the show going forward unfortunately, I think, things like race have taken over the conversation and are muddling the water.

Even in this thread people are talking about would dwarves evolve dark skin instead of about the show (because they haven't watched it) when Tolkien's world is clearly a creationist one. It's ridiculous, beside the point bullshit that doesn't help anyone.

Evolving wrote:
Thanks, but doesn't that rather go to my later point?

Sorry, I swear there were no other posts after the one I replied to, but I must have missed seeing another page!

Evolving wrote:
Tolkien's dwarves don't live in utter blackness; so if they had evolved to be the way they are (and I'm aware that, in his universe, we're supposed to accept that they were created), I can see how some kind of dark covering would be of benefit.

I think the presumption is that they were created for and then continued to live in a zero U.V. environment with a large mountainous shade permanently over their heads.


As a random aside, Tolkien does have dark-skinned dwarfs, but as a man of his period, dark-skinned populations of M.E. are exoticized and tend to be under the sway of Sauron.

Spearthrower wrote:Tolkien does have dark-skinned dwarfs

Source?

Just generally 'the books' I'm afraid. I don't have any scholarly indexing to refer to!

Of the founding dwarf tribes, I believe 4 of them went East and South (there are some parallels here with the Christian stories of the sons of Noah). Those dwarves, in the areas known in the 3rd Age as Rhun and Harad, came under the influence of various evil dudes through history before finally becoming part of Sauron's armies. They're described as 'swarthy' which is, in my reading,Tolkien PC language for 'not white'.