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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

#701

Post by suzumer »

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…

While I agree that Tolkien likely viewed the races of men, elves, and dwarves to be white, and a show that seeks to adapt his mythology while having a diverse cast will stray from Tolkien's vision, we run into an interesting problem: a LOT of money is being spent on this show. Amazon reportedly spent 250 million to acquire the rights, and another 500 million on the first season. The US Bureau of Labor Statisitics says that there are 51,600 working actors, and they earn on average $23.48 an hour. Assuming 2000 hours a year, that's $2.4 billion spent on acting a year, putting Amazon's current budget of $750 million at roughly a fourth of all money spent on acting. With this in mind, if Amazon were to only hire white actors, in order to be equitable towards those of other races, we would need to guarantee that $250 million went to projects with actors of other races, and those projects would need to be entirely multi-racial. If said projects were in abundance, than I wouldn't be opposed to an all white Rings of Power, but considering that the highest budget project with a majority multi-racial cast I can think of is Nope with a budget of $50 million (and even then there are still white actors), if a company wants to make a nearly $1 billion show, it is necessary for there to be at least some actors of other races. If the show had half the budget, or if there were more projects written by and for a black audience, then I would prefer that it is acted by only white people, but as it stands now, it makes sense for there to be diversity.

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

#702

Post by pvaldes »

shadowgovt wrote: post #604
irrational wrote: post #599

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wasn’t the whole point of Lord of the Rings to provide a (made-up) mythology for Great Britain? Middle Earth is ancient Great Britain (or maybe ancient NW Europe) according to Tolkien.

Do you have a citation on this assertion? I'm pretty sure when he said anything about it being a fake-prehistory, he said it was global prehistory. He drew heavily from the European sources he knew, but I don't recall any implication that it was meant to be Britain or Europe only.

There is not such thing as a "medieval US" with American natives dueling with broad swords. Maybe in Las Vegas.

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

#703

Post by sudosysgen »

shadilay wrote: post #700
sudosysgen wrote: post #639

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually, European and Asian characters are definitely going to be relevant to a lot of African mythologies. The Middle East and Europe were right there and there was a lot of interactions. The same goes for early europe. Plenty of people from either. There were Roman emperors who were indigenous to (Northern) Africa.

The north africans of roman times have almost nothing in common with the modern arab north africans. The Carthaginians in north africa during roman times were more similar to modern Portuguese. https://www.heritagedaily.com/2016/05/ancient-dna-study-find...

You are completely and utterly wrong. That DNA was sampled by a Phoenician settler into North Africa of the Phoenician ruling class or Carthage. The vast minority of North Africans at that time had predominant Phoenician ancestry or lived in Phoenician culture.

North Africans are and always were the same people genetically. The North African emperors I am referring to specifically had Berber, not Punic or Phoenician ancestry. Which is still the dominant ancestry in North Africa today, and the Berber culture and language still lives on today.

Unfortunately it seems you are not knowledgeable of the history either of late Rome, of Carthage or of (North) Africa in general, and the authors of that website either did an incredibly poor job at it or are as well.

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

#704

Post by ironcurtain »

onepunchedman wrote: post #649
maxk42 wrote: post #570

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> When you say European, except for the fact that Tolkien wrote the story, what part of the show thus far has given you an explicit European feel? "Middle Earth" was an old phrase used to refer to Western Europe in several Scandinavian languages. Tolkien, being a linguist, would have known this and chosen that turn of phrase deliberately.

You are missing my argument completely. What I'm saying is that yes, Tolkien may have envisioned Middle Earth as proto-European fantasy, but when you're arguing for "historical accuracy", you can't pick and choose. You're arguing about skin color as if a) no people of color lived in Europe at the time, and b) you're completely avoiding touching on the origin of Tolkien's evil races and nations, and in particular orcs…

Would you mind explaining how - even in this fantasy world - people living in closed societies would get wildly different features? Somehow elves are different from human who are different from gnomes - it there are 2-3 afro elves or afro-hobbits? That’s what’s jarring about “per quota” insertion of minorities - because it contradicts our experience. One can make southerons look Persian or Indian, but having a token minority is just laughable. And throwing around virtue signaling is not helping your argument.

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

#705

Post by setr »

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.

The in-groups and out-groups always exist, and will be at war perpetually. It’s naive to think such a division would begin and end at something so superficial as skin color; you can go much more specific.

Why would the British man go out of his way to identify himself with those bloody red-haired potato-fetishizing Irishmen? Or the pompous Frenchmen who cover their pervasive stench in perfumes and jam lard into anything they can find in some depraved vision of “high couture”? Or the barbarians and savages of the east, who can’t tell the difference between a puff of wind and God? The 12th century African man hardly runs around thinking “we’re all black, so we’re all the same so nothing to fight about” — they just choose a different division and massacre one another on that basis

You would only bother with white vs black racism when there’s enough blacks to identify against and vice versa; otherwise you choose different boundaries and compete on that. Religion, country, skin color, geography (eg mountain men vs hicks vs cityfolk); there’s more than enough choices to go around. And hell, there’s something stopping you from applying multiple boundaries simultaneously

Your 16th century farming peasant in the corner of England doesn’t see enough Africans or Middle Easterns or Asians to wield race as an effective identity. Your Roman’s could have, but they also had quite the diverse array of colors and folks through varying conquest — race probably played a role in internal conflict (Roman vs roman) but even then religion was clearly the far stronger identifier and a much stronger motivator for their slaughters.

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

#706

Post by nec4b »

sudosysgen wrote: post #639
UnpossibleJim wrote: post #450

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, in Tolkien's case it was meant to be proto European mythology. It would also look out of place to place a lot of European or Asian characters in a proto African mythology story. I don't think it's racist to have a story set in a place where peoples of a particular race are all that habitate there. The modern world is just that, modern. A medieval fantasy world has to play by those rules, in its own sort of ways…

Actually, European and Asian characters are definitely going to be relevant to a lot of African mythologies. The Middle East and Europe were right there and there was a lot of interactions. The same goes for early europe. Plenty of people from either. There were Roman emperors who were indigenous to (Northern) Africa.

>>There were Roman emperors who were indigenous to (Northern) Africa.

They were decedents of Roman people living there and not sub Saharan Africans.

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

#707

Post by _8j50 »

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…

If it is a historical story or even a fantasy story taking place in historical times, like say for example king arthur and merlin then I agree with you. But if the story does not take part in europe or a specific place or cultural background the why does it matter. So long as the actors actually a good fit in portraying the character who cares?

The problem a lot of people have is when they read LOTR for example they presume everything is supposed to be relatable only to people of european ancestry. Other than Tolkein being influenced by a european background there is little you can reasonably say it requires europeans for adequately portraying the character.

Stories are meant to be told and if you want to tell a fantasy story to an audience you don't go out of your way to explicitly exclude anyone resembling your audience. That isn't being woke, that is just capitalism. I wouldn't like Abe Lincoln or Hery VIII to be portrayed by a black person but LoTR, Narnia and other stories that are european-inspired but not set in europe don't need such restriction.

I mean where was all this outrage when Cleopatra was portrayed by a white woman for example?

If the actors are good it makes no difference other than the initial phase of "I didn't imagine this character to look this way" but the same goes for hair color, height, stature, etc...

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

#708

Post by stjohnswarts »

dwild wrote: post #660
nzealand wrote: post #527

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While a third of the IMDB ratings are 10, another third of the ratings are 2 or 1. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt7631058/ratings/?ref_=tt_ov_rt I think the reviews are being flooded by two extreme opinions If you look at the ratings from the top 1000 raters, you get a more normal distribution. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt7631058/ratings?demo=top_1000_v... But it's really hard to trust anything about these numbers now…

Theses graphs are always so useful on IMDB. The popular or controversial movies are always like that, usually it's less bad and you can actually see the normal distribution in the general population, but we are lucky to have the top 1000 raters in this case.

I find if you toss out the 1's and 10's you'll get a much better idea of whether it's worth watching.

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

#709

Post by stjohnswarts »

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…

I always find it strange that people take issue with having diversity. Toss all that, if you find "they aren't all white" takes you out of the scene you should do some soul searching I think. If you are taken out of the scene because they're shitty actors then you have a reasonable take.

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

#710

Post by nec4b »

chimeracoder wrote: post #590
peoplefromibiza wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Contrast Galadriel who acts like a self righteous dickhead with Aragorn who was reluctant to accept his calling spent and three movies proving himself to be worthy of honor and love You mean three books, right? The difference here is that Aragorn was written by Tolkien, this show wasn't and has completely betrayed the original material. Race or gender swaps are not a big issue, but they become one if the purpose is…

> Italy, Tuscany, mid 1800, [where] no black woman was ever seen I hear people say things like this a lot, and it's always jarring to me to think where they get that impression, because it's quite ahistorical. Going back actually all the way to antiquity (Romans, Vikings), there was far more visible diversity across Europe than what you typically see in cinematic portrayals. The homogenous image people have is a prod…

There are still plenty of villages in Europe, where older people, who don't go to the cities, have never seen a black person in real life in their lives. So I would dare to guess very very few people saw a black women in mid 1800s in Tuscany. Objectively your perception of European history and its people is wrong.
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