Posted on 09/02/2022 5:34:37 PM PDT by nickcarraway
One of the more tiresome complaints I’ve heard online about Amazon’s Lord Of The Rings: The Rings Of Power show is that it’s pushing a woke agenda—cramming said agenda down our collective throats in an attempt to push some leftist identity politics on the masses.
This is a silly critique for the most part, driven by idle speculation and a fandom that has been utterly overwhelmed by culture wars and endless politics. There used to be a time, not so long ago, when we could enjoy movies and TV shows and video games without a constant barrage of politically charged opinions, angry click-hungry YouTube videos and massive, charged debates on social media and forums.
Or maybe I’m looking at the past with rosy-tinted glasses. All I know is that when I went to school in the 90s’ most of my classmates and I didn’t really care who was president, didn’t really talk about the election and never argued about the political messaging in Beavis and Butthead or Seinfeld.
Now, I understand that this cuts both ways. There has been a concerted effort by those peddling identity politics to get that message—or ‘The Message’ as it’s come to be known in some circles—into games and shows and movies, often at the expense of quality.
Recently, I talked about She-Hulk, which is a charming enough Disney+ MCU show—other than its heavy-handed approach to its protagonist. The show is so concerned with making Jessica Walters (aka She-Hulk) a Strong Female Protagonist that it mangles the script. Instead of making the character strong on her own merits, it does so by making the men around her creepy and sexist. Pro-tip: You should probably not make Hulk look bad when making a spinoff about She-Hulk.
(Excerpt) Read more at forbes.com ...
Seems like a good rule to me. I generally follow it.
A gay elf. I think we’ll be seeing more of them. Amazon is making a lot of changes to Tolkien’s world. Remember, evil cannot create, it can only corrupt.
Good enough for me. I won’t be watching.
So why did Jeff Bezos hire them if he's a Tolkien fan? He's just going to waste money on a crappy show.
I watched the first episode. That was enough for me.
If you are into that fantasy genre, the Witcher is a better series. No homo crap in that one but the black elves, is the maximum pc wokery as it gets. One of the line producers is a good MAGA bud of mine.
He’s not really a Tolkien fan. The exec producers are. And he can waste his money all he wants because he has billions.
Love Tolkein and CSLewis… they had a great friendship. How in the world the legacy of these men can be so easily bastardized with no legal challenge! SMH!
So far the audience score is 38% on rottentomatoes. It needs to go down like the Titanic so they'll go back to the business of entertaining the masses instead of trying to indoctrinate us with this crap.
“...And the hobbits (harfoots are hobbits, btw) are all wearing rags and covered in dirt. They are supposed to be English-cultured and mannered, like Tolkien intended.
At least the dwarves sort of look like dwarves. I don’t think the Scottish accents are accurate, though.” [Telepathic Intruder, post 82]
Shire hobbits were well-off and well-mannered, in accordance with the English cultural milieu the author seems to have had in mind. So were the hobbits of Bree.
But in the chapter “At the Sign of the Prancing Pony,” the author was careful to draw a line between the first two groups and all others - who were dismissed as “Outsiders,” though it was conceded there were a great many more of the latter than was generally supposed.
At the point in the timeline within which the Amazon series appears to be set, hobbit ancestors had not yet enjoyed much contact with either Elves or Numenoreans (Dunedain?) - the sources of all “high” civilization in Middle Earth, and taken up to a greater or lesser degree by every other group except those who worshiped the Enemies or who’d been enslaved by them. So one could argue that grubby and uncouth proto-hobbits are not completely out of the realm of possibility.
Peter Jackson achieved great success in his films, in which all dwarves seemed to have Scottish accents. It might perhaps be unsurprising that this new crop of writers would continue in that vein. Scots have long been looked down on in “pure” English culture as secretive, strange, touchy, violent, not quite to be trusted - a people apart.
“Except that Tolkien explicitly said that there were no hobbits mentioned in stories until several thousand years after the time that Amazon covers...their entire plot is contradictory to Tolkien’ actual histories. They are reinventing them in a more woke, multicultural, and politically correct context...it’s not Middle Earth anymore, it’s a bastardization. Would anyone do the same with Shakespeare?” [Telepathic Intruder, post 92]
You’re quite right, and I concede the point. Also the larger point, that this later “reinvention” is anything more than woke PC propaganda, which of course has no purpose beyond political indoctrination.
We might recall that the author himself quoted either Pippin or Merry in their first conversation with Treebeard, admitting that hobbits always seem to have gotten left out of the old lists. Lack of stories doesn’t equal nonexistence.
But we’re probably wasting our time, expecting any pushback from serious literary fans, academics, or the executors of the Tolkien Literary Estate (or whatever its name is). I’ve never heard of any court judgment in favor of a plaintiff who alleged lack of intellectual honesty, or failure to be true to what’s often called “canon” in various fandoms.
Hasn’t Shakespeare been done to death, in reworks and adaptations? And “modernizations”? I don’t imagine that any defender of a “Shakespearean purity” could clean up the mess now. And no professor of English and/or drama is going to make any such effort today. They’ve “grown” far beyond any such musings.
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