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IMDB deleted all negative user reviews for The Rings of Power

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Re: IMDB deleted all negative user reviews for The Rings of Power

#681

Post by shadowgovt »

soueuls wrote: post #618
SunlightEdge wrote: post #442

To be maybe controversial... I'm still thinking about it, but I do wonder if diverse casting works in European fantasy stories. The problem I have is that it generally pulls me out of the experience/ makes it less immersive. I welcome diverse castings in modern shows (though we don't need every show to follow a template 'diverse' casting). A common counter argument is, well you can suspend your disbelief and imagine…

The main problem with diversity, is that most of the time it's a performance. And it's often done with bad actors, who will spend hours and hours on talk shows, describing how they are proud to be the first X to have played in this role. The result is thus disappointing. And it does not create anything of value. Because unsurprisingly, people are not paying to the the "first black elf". Nobody care. So it's just alie…

The modern world's ubiquitous communication and transportation is increasingly moving people closer and closer to each other's front doorstep. As a result, everyone encounters more diverse people and opinions than they used to.

This is, indeed, not something everyone enjoys. But it is the more or less inevitable direction of the future.

Re: IMDB deleted all negative user reviews for The Rings of Power

#682

Post by [deleted] »

koheripbal wrote: post #203
smcl wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People were up in arms before a single episode aired, because they saw a fictional species (dwarf) had dark skin. many of those people have now pivoted their arguments against the show to being about pacing, writing (note: I’m in no way implying this is you, I haven’t seen any LotR series opinions on HN) - but the racist stuff has already occurred

"some people" are always irrational and unhappy. They are irrelevant. The new criticism isn't them "pivoting", it is a completely new set of people who dislike the show for entirely different reasons. You're making the common error of assuming everyone you disagree with is part of some homogenous club.

[deleted]

Re: IMDB deleted all negative user reviews for The Rings of Power

#683

Post by Beltalowda »

true_religion wrote: post #43
WastingMyTime89 wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have trouble making sense of your comment. I believe people would like the ratings of a show to reflect its quality and be somewhat informative. Brigading by a subpopulation with vastly different interest to the general public interferes with that and that legitimises removing their reviews as far as I’m concerned.

I'm not sure Tolkein fan's have a different interest than mine. I've never read the trilogy, and thus the only reason I'd invest time in watching this series this weekend is because I've heard it came from good source material. If it's not faithful to the source, then it's just on the same level as unknown author to me and I'll watch it when I find time... months from now, or maybe never.

There is very little direct source material to speak of; The Hobbit and the LotR books take place much later, and the The Silmarillion and some other works take place much earlier. There are some notes and references here and there, but it's not much.

Overall, I feel that's a good thing because this way you can both incorporate aspects of the original canon yet also have some freedom to do your own thing, kind of similar how The Next Generation taking place almost 100 years after the original series gave the writers some freedom.

Of course, that doesn't mean it's actually any good. The first two series of TNG were notoriously bad (with a few exceptions) before it finally got on the right track and actually started making good stuff.

Re: IMDB deleted all negative user reviews for The Rings of Power

#684

Post by rdedev »

Rant423 wrote: post #558
rdedev wrote: post #464

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't completely disregard the user reviews. It helps me get a feel of the type of movie or series when comparing it to critics review. The Gray Man has low critics review but high user reviews on rotten tomatoes. So i expected it to be something i can enjoy without too much of an investment. And it did. Helped me get through my 14 hr flight

What do you expect when this ratio is reversed (high critics review but low user reviews)?

The lighthouse is probably a good example of that. Critics have 90% but audience is only 70ish. There were so many themes within the movie that I had to look up online to understand it's significance. So overall not my cup of tea. Usialiif a movie has above 80% on both user and critics reviews i will watch it

Re: IMDB deleted all negative user reviews for The Rings of Power

#685

Post by Maursault »

wsgeorge wrote: post #667
Maursault wrote: post #616

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Well, in Tolkien's case it was meant to be proto European mythology. Unsupportable. Tolkien was only concerned with giving England a distinct history. He probably didn't care about Europe and hated everything French. Almost everyone assumes Middle-Earth is Europe. Try holding Tolkien's famous map of Middle-Earth up to a mirror to see that it is really strikingly similar to North America, too similar to be a coincid…

> Unsupportable I'd say it's more of a nitpick. You're right, he was more concerned about an English mythology rather than a European one. But I'm not sure where you're going by bringing up North America...

I thought OP was saying that Middle-Earth was Europe. Apparently, that wasn't his argument. But I wasn't going further than what I said: view Tolkien's map of Middle-Earth in a mirror and you will recognize the coastline and mountain ranges of North America. It is not exact, but it is too similar to be a coincidence. Tolkien did not randomly draw Middle-Earth in that shape, he used a mirror image of North America as a starting point to create the map of Middle-Earth.

Re: IMDB deleted all negative user reviews for The Rings of Power

#686

Post by szmb1e »

momento wrote: post #620
SunlightEdge wrote: post #442

To be maybe controversial... I'm still thinking about it, but I do wonder if diverse casting works in European fantasy stories. The problem I have is that it generally pulls me out of the experience/ makes it less immersive. I welcome diverse castings in modern shows (though we don't need every show to follow a template 'diverse' casting). A common counter argument is, well you can suspend your disbelief and imagine…

As a European, I find it absolutely absurd that peoples immersion is “being broken” by seeing non-white people in a fantasy show. When I see a dwarf in a fantasy TV show, I don’t see the colour of the dwarfs skin - I see a dwarf. The fact that people are uncomfortable by brown dwarves is ridiculous. What a strange hill to die on. I am flabbergasted that this is even a topic of such heated debate at the moment. It wou…

No post body was provided.

Re: IMDB deleted all negative user reviews for The Rings of Power

#687

Post by regularjack »

bergenty wrote: post #656
lordentropy wrote: post #487

Good god! It must be really hard to make anything these days. If you don't put enough people of color, people will shout of bigotry. If you include a few, some will accuse of wokeness and review bomb it to hell. I'm just glad that the show got made!

People are more pissed off about the feminist bullshit in the show. Galadriel a warrior? Give me a fucking break, puke.

What's wrong with Galadriel being a warrior? Seems like a pretty cool character to me. Also, just because she's a warrior that's feminism? I guess she should be in the kitchen instead.

Re: IMDB deleted all negative user reviews for The Rings of Power

#688

Post by canuckintime »

WastingMyTime89 wrote: post #468
canuckintime wrote: post #366

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The only way to faithfully film the book would be to make some sort of anthology series, and I don't think that format works well for big-budget prestige drama. It wouldn’t work on traditional TV but this is streaming on AppleTV. Budget was not a barrier AND ‘ratings’ don’t really matter for Apple either. That was the best opportunity during the period of PeakTV to just do what works artistically best for the adapt…

You are not going to like what I’m going to say but I think the reason they rewrote so much of it is simply that the books are not particularly good in the first place. The ideas are very interesting but that was mostly kept. The prose and characters are rather poor and the stories mostly serviceable. I do wish there was less violence and more focus on trades and exchanges however. That would have been a better show.

> You are not going to like what I’m going to say but I think the reason they rewrote so much of it is simply that the books are not particularly good in the first place. The ideas are very interesting but... The prose and characters are rather poor and the stories mostly serviceable. I do wish there was less violence and more focus on trades and exchanges however. That would have been a better show.

I like this

> The ideas are very interesting but that was mostly kept.

I disagree that the ideas were kept. For example the focus on the cloned emperor is the opposite of the ideas of the book (although Lee Pace was fun to watch)

Re: IMDB deleted all negative user reviews for The Rings of Power

#689

Post by scarmig »

Maursault wrote: post #669
LEDThereBeLight wrote: post #658

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You’re not understanding his argument. Medieval Europe didn’t have this internalized concept of race or skin color like we do - they categorized people more by religion (catholic, Protestant, Muslim) or origin.

Fair enough, but that still sounds absurdly idyllic and very hard to believe. I would expect it to be the opposite, that there was extreme racism even between different families within the same culture, and mostly only in Europe and not so much in the Middle and Far East. Europeans invented racism, and I would have expected it to have occurred around the fall of the Western Roman Empire. But this is all conjecture.

It wasn't idyllic. The Holy Roman Empire suffered millions of civilian deaths during the 30 years war (on the order of a third of its population). It's just the categories people used were things like region or (especially) religion.

Race and racial ideology were developed in Europe, but it was in tandem with the modern era, not before it. Think 17th-19th centuries. It served a concrete purpose: to explain and justify how the leading European nations interacted with their colonial subjects. But there was no reason for race before colonialism, so it never developed because it would have served no purpose then.

Re: IMDB deleted all negative user reviews for The Rings of Power

#690

Post by inopinatus »

dnh44 wrote: post #332
inopinatus wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is simply the other side of the same coin. The actual intellectual dishonesty on display is the suggestion that an identifiable “core audience” exists, and can be alienated at all.

I don’t agree at all. Emotionally invested fans of these stories clearly exist and describing them as the core audience isn’t a dishonest claim. Neither is it dishonest to claim that some of these fans feel alienated by the new versions of these stories. You can debate both claims, and my views don’t align perfectly with OP’s either but there is no intellectually dishonesty on the the part of the OP in making the cla…

If someone self-appoints themselves as a “core audience” and then complain when the creative output doesn’t meet their self-appointed in-group demands, they are not fans, they are over-entitled whingers.
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