Watched the second episode and liked it overall. I think it moved a little bit better than the first and the action was better. Spoiler I think the stranger is definitely one of the Wizards and is most likely Gandalf. Given his affinity though for animals It would be interesting if he was Radagast since he played a much larger role in the Jackson Hobbit series than in the actual books. Elrond and Celebrimbor appear to be working on the Rings of power. I’m the books it is said that Sauron actually helped the Elves to creat them as he disguised himself as a friendly wizard. I’m wondering if the twist with the Stranger is that he is Sauron in disguise and does end up helping Celebrimbor with the end of season cliff hanger he is revealed to be Sauron.
Just some more thoughts on the multi racial casting. It doesn’t bother me too much and I think some of the actors in the roles are doing a good job. Tolkein though had some strong racial views and his descriptions of the different people of Middle Earth were very racial. Consider the high elves were Scandinavian looking align with the riders of Rohan. The men of Gondor were tall of brownish hair with fair eyes. The Hobbits generally look like British peasants. The orcs in addition to being generally ugly were frequently described as with dark skin and even slanted eyes. A group of humans who sided with Sauron were the Easterlings described as being sallow (yellow) skin with dark hair and slanted eyes. There were also Southrons who were very dark of skin, wore a lot of gold and rode elephants. Based in those descriptions it’s no accident that one of the casting directors for LOTR said they could easily do their job casting walking around the streets of Aukland. Talk blonde whites are Elves, short stout whites are Hobbits, Māori and Asians are Orcs. This is where it’s very obvious to me that the casting of The Rings of Power is for PC / Woke reasons. Yes this is a fictional story and Elves and Hobbits don’t actually exist but this based on source material that was very specific regarding racial views. Mid century British racial views aren’t acceptable now but if you’re going to invoke the name and legacy of Tolkein that was part of Tolkein and just changing things for current mores I think does come off as preachy and not really necessary. Rather than just accepting that Tolkein was a product of his time and he wrote and thought that way. That doesn’t mean it bothers me enough to not watch it but this is frequent problem with adaptions. They don’t trust the source material enough but decide they have to change things.
I suspect the series will pick up quite a bit after the first two episodes. There was a lot of groundwork laid which should set up for bigger things later. Nori was beyond annoying, though.
Yeah, that's what I thought. The first episode was really laying groundwork/backbone for the start. I liked Nori. She kind of is what a Hobbit should be. Annoyingly innocent and useless for the most part. Just watch it on your own, and if you like it, you like it. Screw what the neandertal fringe elements want you to think. It's not really completely canonical, so if you're expecting that, you're not going to get it. But even the LOTR movies pissed off Tolkien fans, so there's never going to be pleasing everybody. They're basically writing their own story and piecing together canonical elements into it to a large extent with this series. But judging a series only after a couple of episodes is just wrong. I would've never watched ST:TNG if that were the case.
No one is racist, swapping genders and race from original characters is the problem.... If they tried making a black character white from an original story or franchise there would be outrage... Lets make Black Panther with Chris Pratt and then call people racist for not agreeing with it...
By current standards JRR Tolkein could be considered a racist. All the good guys are very specifically described with white features and many of the bad guys have Asian or Black features. In his writings he frequently uses “fair” as in regard to lightness of skin color synonymous with beautiful. So yes Middle Earth doesn’t exist except in the mind of its creator there was a very specific racial view of those who populated it. As I said above it’s not enough to get me not to watch the Rings of Power but I do think being true to an adaption does mean understanding that there are things about it that might not be as acceptable now.
Respectfuly, I don't understand the need to be slavishly true to an adaptation of a fantasy book written prior to desegregation in the US. We tone down all of the Grimm fairy tales for kids because they are too violent for our current understanding of what is appropriate for kids. Nobody thinks it's appropriate to subject children to nightmares in pursuit of "staying true" to the original stories, and nobody complains about originality. There is no Federalist Society for JRR Tolkein, and it isn't the immutable "word of God" like the Quran. Adapting forgotten or incidental source material to fit the current standards and practices is what writers for TV do. I don't care what some superannuated British guy born in the 19th century would think of the show. Even if he is the dusty old frump that wrote the source material.
It’s not an adaptation. It’s a prequel that was a footnote in a former book. So new characters being of color and that being a controversy… yeah that’s a bizarre take. But yes a character like Black Panther being cast with a white dude or a movie about someone like Winston Churchill with a black woman playing Churchill or a white person playing Jesus… yes there are times where changing the identity of the character would be a bad choice… yes I get that. But these are new characters that merely exist in this fictional world. And if the race of the good and evil characters in Tolkien’s story was so paramount and he was a massive racist then maybe we should make new fantasy stories and stop buying rights from this estate. But I don’t think that’s the case and I doubt the Tolkien estate wants his work to exist soley for neo Nazis. Everything I’ve read about Tolkien is that he spoke out about and denounced antisemitism and fascism during WW2. There’s also nuance on race in the stories with Elves and Dwarves mistrusting each other and often in conflict but characters at times get to interact and become great friends and fight together. I think there’s more nuance there based on my experience as a moderate fan who has only read the first book but yes I do think he unknowingly drew from stories in history and his own experience as a white man and that came through at times in problematic ways. It doesn’t mean that Tolkien TODAY would have been outraged by a BRAND NEW character being black or a character or family being of color where their race isn’t of significance to the character development. I don’t think he’d give two sh$ys because even though he was a white man of privilege in the 1900’s, he wasn’t a propagandist for Hitler or anything… the guy was just writing fantasy stories.
It's interesting what people will be willing to express as a non-negotiable in fantasy and sci-fi, says a lot about personal views what they find acceptable in imaginary worlds.
I think there are artistic questions and not legal or historical questions. Part of understanding art is understanding the context that it was created and what the creator intended. There’s nothing inherently wrong with changing aspects of a work of art for a new adaption for example redoing Shakespeare’s Richard III except setting it in the present White House to give a modern spin on the view of political power. Where I think it gets problematic is if it is just done to make it more palatable to current audiences. Here I think Disney has done a disservice to Grimm’s fairytales. In recasting characters racially or for gender purposes just because of that’s what producers think current audiences want is both lazy and in many cases unnecessary from an artistic standpoint. Here I would agree with some of the other critics. If we consider the flip side where the 1950’s James Dean adaption of East of Eden largely wrote out the Chinese character Lee because audiences didn’t want to see a major Chinese character. Or in the adaption of the Good Earth where white actors played Chinese. For that matter most of Hollywood history White actors have been playing roles both fictional and historic characters who weren’t white.
I’ve read a lot of Tolkien’s work and do consider myself a fan but part of that is understanding what Tolkien’s mindset was. I’m not surprised the Tolkien estate is fine as they are making a lot of money off of this. What JRR Tolkein would think is much harder to say but his writings are pretty specific on how they paint the different races. JRR Tolkein was a product of his time and mid 20th century British had some very racist views. I put this like how we understand the Founding Fathers. We need to understand they were also people of their time and as such did things like owning slaves and believing that nonwhite people were inferior. That’s not all they were though and Tolkien certainly should not be reduced to racial views but it should be understood Tolkien had those views. As I said it’s not going to stop me from watching the show. I do think it’s lazy and unnecessary to just change things to make it more appealing for current viewers. Also this isn’t just a prequel based off of a footnote. Tolkein did write extensively about the Second Age of Middle Earth. Those stories were collected in the Silmarillion and other works.
That’s an interesting way of looking at it. As someone who is Asian I was pretty aware when I first read LOTR that a lot of the bad guys looked like me. That has not stopped me from appreciating them and the movies. I guess for me as a Tolkien fan I’m less interested in representation for people like myself as I am fealty to source material. I stated I felt the same way about East of Eden where the film adaption wrote out a major character because he was Chinese.
Well I guess you know more than I do about middle earth but it still doesn’t change the fact that it’s fiction. They aren’t changing Abraham Lincoln to a black woman with a Nigerian accent. The discourse around this show is invented to rally right wingers around a made up cultural war issue. There’s a real risk that Tolkien gets politicized for generations because the importance of race in middle earth will be co-opted. Yes we can still be honest about the truth that Tolkien did write characters mostly in the vein of a white guy in the 50’s. We don’t have to whitewash him just as we don’t need to whitewash the fact that our founding fathers mostly were slave owners. However that doesn’t mean that the white nationalist right gets to say that Lin Manuel Miranda has no right to make Hamilton. Also the reason why the right wing has gone hard on this one and not House of the Dragon which is much more blatant in changing of races is because Tolkien is dead and can’t comment while George RR Martin will probably tell them all to go F off. House Vallerion was clearly written as a cousin type of family to the Targeryons but the show runners cast them as black with silver hair… because it’s fiction and the actor who plays the patriarch is really really good. My favorite scene in the new Star Wars content is the scene at the end of The Last Jedi. Because the point the filmmaker was making was “The Force” belongs to all of us… no just secret bloodlines. At some point artists leave ownership of the art up to future generations, artists, and ultimately the fans to run with either in future work or just in your own imagination. In the end it’s fiction, and it was released by the artist for everyone. Not just racists. Future generations are allowed to interpret and reimagine.
Of course this is a political issue because everything these days is a political issue. My own view is just because Rightwingers are upset about it on cultural issues doesn't mean I reflexively take the other side. I agree this is art and Hamilton is art specifically reinterpretting a historical figure with a very deliberate view of casting him and others around him a different light. With the Rings of Power though I'm not getting the sense that this is a so much as a conscious reinterpration to make you look at it in a different way as just being lazy. It's the producers feeling that they get heat for not casting more roles for people of color so lets just make some roles for people of color even though Tolkein didn't write them that way and was specific that the bad people had nonwhite features. It's the converse of the casting of David Carradine in "Kung Fu".
Just to add I thought the Last Jedi was terrible. I think the Star Wars sequels very much were an example of trying to hammer in wokeness into storylines that didn't need them and added nothing to them. For example the whole side trip to the Casino planet and saving the poor kids forced to race space camels in the second one.
