That's seems like a stretch to say he's doing this to mock European views. He was very Euro centric. Spoiler The Men of the West are the good guys. The men of the East and South are the bad guys. Tolkein doesn't seem to have much of a sense of humor and his writing is very serious even dour.
This is probably better for the D&D but I think we need to take people like Tolkein as they are and not try to project modern sensibilities on them. While it's possible if Tolkein was alive he might be fine with multi-racial casting but I don't see anything in what he wrote that would indicate that. Whether Tolkein would approve or not the problem that I have with the casting in Rings of Power is that it just seems to be lazy casting. There is no sense of why there are these multi racial characters and cultures. They are just there and director goes out of his way to have a lot of establishment shots of non white characters just to let us know that they are there. Tolkein as someone who was a historian and very concerned about details would want to know why these things were. The writings that became the Silmarilion he wrote just to explain the evolution of the Elvish language.
At the very least he is portraying orcs in a way that he knows will provoke the feelings he wants his audience to feel. That may not be much better though, although given the times it's hard to villainize him for it.
The problem with the show isn't casting minorities as Dwarfs or elves. If you can make Hamilton work, then that shouldn't be a problem. The issue is just that it's not a good overall product. It's confusing as heck and the writing is weak. The timelines seem all jumbled up. The actors actually seem to be pretty decent but the dialogue isn't really great. There's a lot of missing characters as well.
Maybe the producers wanted to sidestep the "Tolkein Racist?" debate by sprinkling in the casting without making a point about racial geography. Seems like an entirely different can of worms and a rabbit hole not worth risking half a billion dollars over.
This is exactly it. Doing the lazy box checking race swap BS wouldn't matter if the content was good. I do think that you'd always get complaints when the lazy race or gender swap BS directly contradicts the lore....like if they decided to make T'Challa Asian and a bunch of the Dora Milaje white or hispanic for the sake of diversity, it would look stupid but it might be something they could overcome if they wrote the story well enough. They randomly decided to gender swap the character of Starbuck in Battlestar Galactica and I don't think anyone minded. Starship Troopers was COMPLETELY unfaithful to the source material, but despite me being a big fan of the source material, I still really like the goofy ass 1997 movie. A better example of a random race swap is in House of the Dragon that very much goes against lore is when they decided to make the entire Velaryon house black....I'd be going into spoilers to explain just why that decision will cause problems down the line, so I won't do that, but suffice it to say it was a VERY weird choice. That said, most people thus far are liking the show, so we're not really hearing about it. The answer is always to just put out quality entertainment.
Jesus, when did people all of the sudden think that their opinion matters? I mean if you are bothered by not following the Cannon, great, be bothered, don't watch, but please don't whine about it to others.....most of us honestly don't care if the Dwarf wives have beards or not..... DD
I actually don’t think the writing is that bad. Im not blown away by the story but it’s not terrible even for a Tolkein fan like me. I like the visuals and it’s kept my interests. This is a a discussion of artistic merits though and as while it’s not enough to keep me from watching the casting I find more distracting and not adding to it.
I was thinking about it Starship Troopers and that is a radical departure from the book. FYI it’s also whitewashing as the Johnny Rico and Carmen in the book are supposed to be Filipino. For that though there was a very deliberate artistic choice for the direction it took. Verhoven didn’t like the source material at all and wanted to mock what he saw he saw as the Fascist overtones of the book. With Rings of Power I will come back to that there doesn’t seem to be an artistic reason for the multiracial casting other than just to appeal to current attitudes.
You don't think the writing is bad? "Oh look here's some writing on this map" "What does it say" "Their evil plan, in case their first plan had failed.... It not just to endure, but to thrive!" "Thrive - their plan is to thrive?" "Yes, what a diabolical plan. This is much worse than I imagined"
Oh I know how much of a departure it was, I was a fan of the book well before the 97 movie came out. It's one of those situations where it's so radically different from the source material that I can view them as completely different works and I enjoy both of them for different reasons. I was just citing that as an example of when a bastardization of source material can actually work. When it comes to Rings of Power, it doesn't work for numerous reasons. The casting IMO was a cynical attempt to generate controversy that could be used as a shield from legitimate criticism. As many shows and movies these days, the worst part is the writing....and the reason for that is twofold IMO. First, far too many modern writers are what wrestlers would call "spot monkeys". In that they come up with ideas for flashy scenes or set pieces and then just BS together an excuse to get from one to another. Secondly, far too often writers are incapable of subtlety or a balanced approach when it comes to handling themes or messaging. Beating people over the head with whatever BS you are trying to push on them simply isn't entertaining to anyone.....and entertainment really should be your primary concern if you are that kind of writer.
Yeah that’s not great and was too much like the dagger in The Rise of Skywalker. Overall though it’s kept my interest.
I agree with a lot of this. I don’t think the casting was meant to cause controversy to cover for deficiencies in writing though. If that was really the case the producers wanted to cause controversy I don’t think there’s any way Amazon green lights this and puts $1 billion into it if they really believed that. I think it was just lazy casting to appeal to current audiences. My guess is they didn’t think it would cause much controversy. While this is fodder for online discussions I don’t think it’s really hurt the ratings.
I think Elrond and Elendil are dope. Through 3 episodes I've never stopped to contemplate the purity of the cast.
My thoughts, so far... The visuals and cgi are excellent. So are costumes and makeup. Soundtrack is good, but overdone. Character development is poor. Galadriel has a very different personality than what has already been established in books and movies. The harfoots are just annoying. They aren't doing a very good job of making me care about the new characters they introduce. The story is terrible. It develops poorly and in ways that don't make sense. And it's sooooo slooooooooow.. I fell asleep in the most recent episode. This is after I successfully fast-forwarded past the slo-mo of horse-riding on the beach and the useless reading-of-the-names-in-the-book. And it doesn't make sense, either. I'm watching it thinking, "This dude just rescued Galadriel - why is she so spiteful to him and his people? Come to think of it, she's like that with EVERYBODY. Doesn't she ever say thank-you?".... "Wait - she just read about the bad guys' plan in an ancient book? Has nobody actually READ this book until now? Didn't she already know that there's trouble a-brewing? If the book is ancient, hasn't it been brewing for a long time? How is it that nobody has known about it?"... "wait - not too long ago, the folks at Numenor weren't going to help Galadriel at all.. now she's got a ship and some friends?" The wokeness is too in-your-face. This most recent episode screams "look at how the Numenor people are prejudiced against the elf!".. "Look at how the Harfoots are prejudiced against the outsider!" Quit screaming your SJW garbage and focus on delivering a good story. I don't mind the addition of non-white actors into roles, but it needs to make sense (which.. it doesn't). Example: there shouldn't be ONE black elf. It should be SOME black elfs.... like the elfs of the Northern Wood are darker, or something.... or the people of Numenor have brown skin... something like that. The way it's being done feels, again, like a forced statement.
Like the rest of the show, but agree with that part, and it would even be pretty easy to make up one regional tribe that developed different due to their environment and explains the skin colour. My head canon is that the one black elf is from the elvish African colonies and the offspring of a slave elf owner+colony mom fling.
