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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

#721

Post by shadowgovt »

pvaldes wrote: post #702
shadowgovt wrote: post #604

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Sorry, I can't wrap my head around how this comment relates to mine. Can you clarify?

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

#722

Post by 2muchcoffeeman »

webmobdev wrote: post #666
soueuls wrote: post #618

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

As an indian, I find this politically fascinating. As Noam Chomsky's Manufactured Consent pointed out, the US has always used its media to influence politics and culture both in its own country and outside. It appears the US now believes that it can "mainstream" the acceptance of certain vulnerable group by showing them more on TV and movies. (I do think this will work with the next generation in a decade or so). How…

I think one of the things that makes this contrived diversification poor, is that producers are hell bent on taking existing characters and stories and changing it up in a way that's somehow more permanent that just a simple reinterpretation. I'm sure there's plenty of productions of Shakespeare plays where they mixed up the casting.

Old things are going to be a product of their times and there's an easy solution to all of this: Write new material.

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

#723

Post by inopinatus »

thfuran wrote: post #321
inopinatus wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The peanut gallery does not like being reminded that their simplistic preferences make for poor art.

That's the most pretentious thing I've read in some time.

Some might take that as a criticism, but when it comes to the creative and performing arts I'm an unabashed elitist snob, and it's a perspective I recommend.

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

#724

Post by Maursault »

scarmig wrote: post #689
Maursault wrote: post #669

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 justif…

This idea of racism being a modern invention is merely an academic theory. There is no doubt there were periodic exterminations of Jews in classical antiquity and atrocities perpetrated against Jews throughout the Middle Ages. Antisemitism is racism.

Though the word "race" was probably coined in tandem with British Imperialism, Black slavery and the modern era, race, in fact, does not exist. Race is entirely a social construction, and regardless of the words used in antiquity, the same concepts were used to discriminate against, stereotype, repress and enslave peoples from the very dawn of civilization.

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

#725

Post by sudosysgen »

nec4b wrote: post #706
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.

>>There were Roman emperors who were indigenous to (Northern) Africa. They were decedents of Roman people living there and not sub Saharan Africans.

Rome was a multiethnic empire. I don't see what being Roman or not has to do with ethnicity.

The Roman people living there being ethically Berber, that is, African. The name Africa itself probably coming from the Afri Berber tribe. They were both Roman people and also ethnically African.

And Berber tribes despite not being from subsaharan Africa did, through thousands of years of contact, have significant ethnic and cultural admixture with various subsaharan African peoples. Not that North Africa is less African than subsaharan Africa.

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

#726

Post by Maursault »

rowanG077 wrote: post #716
Maursault wrote: post #671

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tolkien borrowed quite heavily from Scandinavian mythology, especially the epic Väinämöinen from Finnish mythology, and seems to have been obsessed with Odin from Norse mythology. Is that what you mean? Because claiming he based his fictional myths and his fantasy fiction on European myths and history is so vague and technically inaccurate that is must be false. Though Italy is firmly in Europe, describing lasagna as…

If you don't believe Italy, or the Nordic countries are European I will not be able to convince you. Our world view is simply too different to come to an understanding.

Why specify Europe? Why not just say the Solar System? Or the Western Spiral Arm of the Milky Way? Or the Local Group?

Inexplicably, you chose to be incredibly vague. Just because France is in Europe does not make Europe representative of France. You can say the Eiffel Tower is in the Milky Way, but this is overly broad and imprecise; it makes far more sense to say it is in France.

Similarly, Tolkien borrowed from very specific Scandinavian sources, and that is borrowed; his works are not based upon these sources nor upon ancient Scandinavian culture. To conflate Scandinavia with Europe is the same mistake as conflating France with the Milky Way.

Your claim that Tolkien based his works on Europe is incongruous because it is overly general and imprecise, and it is also a pretty good example of the vagueness fallacy.

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

#727

Post by Maursault »

pezezin wrote: post #699
Maursault wrote: post #631

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There weren't black people in medieval Europe But there definitely were.[1] Also, the idiots complaining about black elves are racist morons. There were, in fact, black elves in Tolkien's world. Though never depicted as such by artists, Eöl the Dark Elf (who was not Moriquendë, i.e. not a member of the Moriquendi or the Elves of Darkness) probably wasn't white. In The Silmarillion, Tolkien goes out of his way to de…

Moors are not black. Or maybe they are from an US point of view, but nobody in Europe would call them black. Africa is divided by the Sahara desert, and most black people come from Sub-Saharan Africa.

From the Middle Ages through to the 17th century, Europeans depicted Moors as being black,[1] and referred to them as such. Black Africans were also called Moors and "blackmoors" during the same periods. Ignorant European royalty, courtesans, craftsmen, and peasants did not discriminate between foreign cultures: they were racist against all of them.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moor%27s_head_(heraldry)

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

#728

Post by rowanG077 »

Maursault wrote: post #726
rowanG077 wrote: post #716

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you don't believe Italy, or the Nordic countries are European I will not be able to convince you. Our world view is simply too different to come to an understanding.

Why specify Europe? Why not just say the Solar System? Or the Western Spiral Arm of the Milky Way? Or the Local Group? Inexplicably, you chose to be incredibly vague. Just because France is in Europe does not make Europe representative of France. You can say the Eiffel Tower is in the Milky Way, but this is overly broad and imprecise; it makes far more sense to say it is in France. Similarly, Tolkien borrowed from ve…

It's quite simply because Tolkien's work shows Germanic, Finnish, Greek, Celtic and Slavic mythological influences. That spans almost the entirety of Europe. I don't feel you are arguing in good faith here. Either you are willingly ignoring it's European heritage or just haven't done the research on it.

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

#729

Post by simonh »

thrown_22 wrote: post #697
simonh wrote: post #529

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Middle East and North Africa had frequent contact with Europe. When thousands of Europeans went on crusade to the Middle East they didn’t all drop dead. The Romans went everywhere. Berber pirates even raided for slaves as far north as Iceland. This is simply not an issue. The Americas was a different situation, they’d been isolated from Eurasia for tens of thousands of years. In Middle Earth the Numenorians had e…

The middle east is _not_ sub Saharan Africa.

So what? The same applies. Sub Saharan Africa had frequent contact with North Africa and the Middle East. The Romans sent expeditions, and Arab traders travelled across much of the continent. For example:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romans_in_Sub-Saharan_Africa

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timbuktu#History

The Egyptians sponsored a Phoenician expedition that circumnavigated Africa. Finds at the ruins at Great Zimbabwe include items from as far away as China.

Check out this mural of the Roman emperor Severus and his wife from the 2nd century, and tell me again how there were no black people in Europe as long ago as Medieval times.

https://www.history.co.uk/article/severus-rome’s-first-afric...

And again, we know for a fact from Tolkien that the Numenorians ranged from the north all the way to the far southern continent, and the oceans of the Far East.

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

#730

Post by thrown_22 »

simonh wrote: post #729
thrown_22 wrote: post #697

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The middle east is _not_ sub Saharan Africa.

So what? The same applies. Sub Saharan Africa had frequent contact with North Africa and the Middle East. The Romans sent expeditions, and Arab traders travelled across much of the continent. For example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romans_in_Sub-Saharan_Africa https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timbuktu#History The Egyptians sponsored a Phoenician expedition that circumnavigated Africa. Finds at the ruins at Great Zimb…

Yes, and you keep ignoring the death rates for those expeditions.
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