The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power on Prime

Gonorrhea The Green

Trampy Ten-Tits

Which day are they dropping new episodes? Re-watched ep 1 yesterday with the kids as they hadn't seen it yet. So so good, I love pretty much everything about it. It is written just like fran and Peter did for the original trilogy which I like.

During the intro in episode one where it showed the elven capital with the eternal tree and morgoth taking the light my son said it was just like elden ring.

I am finding this kinda amusing: www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2022/sep/08/lord-of-the-rings-stars-speak-out-against-racist-threats-harassment-and-abuse

Not the actual abuse obviously. But all the people saying Tolkien 100% definitely made a multicultural society in the books, which is grade A bullshit. There's a bunch of welsh/saxon people fighting off all the thinly drawn middle eastern/african people from the east/south in LotR. Say what you've actually done in that you've improved upon the source material. Though that would send the nerds into a crazy spiral.

What a casual!

He could have explicitly described every single character to have dark skin and a massive afro and people would still complain that 'in my head, Celerydoor is a blonde, white man'

Gaiman’s only Sandman casting regret is he’s too old to look like whoever they cast as Dream anymore. Probably.

I think the books definitely benefit from every fantasy IP since they came out making their orcs and orc-proxies increasingly monstrous. It means thats the image that comes to mind for most readers. Their black or dark skin being more tar coloured elephant hide than person of colour. Although admittedly they do just team up with a load of middle eastern and broadly central Asian sounding people at one point which isn’t ideal.

I wonder how it would look to readers without nearly a century of pop culture influencing their minds eye and just using the text itself.

In general though I think the text is only racist in an ‘of its time’ kind of way than a ‘non-whites are all evil and/or lesser forms of life’ way,

I mean, that's filtered through your own biases still, surely? It might be an accurate reading of Tolkien's own worldview, or it might not be. It's kind of difficult to quantify now.

I read the books when I was about 18, before the films came out. At no point did it occur to me that there were meant to be deliberate parallels to real world ethnicities or races. Call me naive.

I've always viewed it as (as said a page or two back) a coming together of different races (or maybe species more accurately) to fight a common enemy. The more obvious parallel is the fight against nazi-ism and fascism, surely?

Regardless, to be the kind of twat who - even if that was the intention of Tolkien - is genuinely raging that some non white people have the audacity to show their murky faces in the world of men/dwarves/elves, about seventy fucking years after the fact, in a completely different world (socially and politically I mean), is just absolutely pathetic.

I could kind of forgive my parents' generation for thinking in those terms, but seeing all the hate from young people, it's very depressing.

Well all critique of books or art is filtered through ones own biases sure, but you still can't just come up with stuff that's not supported by the text. And yes obviously the trolls are fucking awful racist pricks. Just the people defending it by saying Tolkien's work was always multi-cultural are falling into a fallacy of just taking an opposite position because the opposition are cunts, rather than because the position makes any actual sense.

Instead the TV show has actually improved something, so they should just say that.

The jury is out, but even for his time there's evidence that Tolkien was one of the good guys

en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tolkien_and_race

He's no Enid Blyton.

Smooth.