131–140 of 605 posts
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Never thought I’d live to see the day where people would unironically call equity dogma. But here we are. What a sad state of affairs.
What other word would you describe when people cry over "lack of diversity" when the story is set in a fantasy world that did not have such type of diversity to begin with?
After Wheel of Time my expectations are so incredibly low, if it still manages to disappoint I will be impressed. I'm expecting a shitshow and a shitstorm of epic proportions.
I'm expecting a 465 million dollar joke about the ease of delivering products to Mordor using Amazon's infrastructure. If not in live action then at least as an advertising campaign based in supporting material.
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The better question is whether it's possible to create a LotR representation with even a shred of the original's soul. Chris Tolkien hated the Jackson trilogy, and then see how much further modern market demands pushed The Hobbit's execution. I don't want to see what another ten years of compromises and pandering will do to the product.
Christopher Tolkein was hopelessly grumpy (or protective, depending on your perspective) about anyone doing anything with his father's works. Personally, as a fan of Tolkein's works, I thought LoTR was fine . I didn't necessarily agree with all of Jackon's decisions, but, in the end, I enjoyed watching the movies (and still do). The Hobbit films are a different beast, for sure.
Exactly my opinion as well. What worries me is that we saw what ten years of market shift did between LotR and The Hobbit. Now it's been another ten years of it. Instead of showing bad people tearing down trees to fuel industry, we're going to have some good character give a five minute long speech about it. There is going to be a romance plot between an orc and a non-orc. There is going to be a female orc and she is going to be a strong independent woman. There is going to be a ruler who is as bad Denethor but they're going to make a strong point about him also being a racist.
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Keep in mind that Amazon needs to get only ~0.2M incremental Amazon Prime subscribers to recoup the investment. The lifetime value (LTV) of a Prime subscriber has been estimated at ~$2,300.[a] You can play around with the figure, but given that every LOTR fan is going to want to watch this series even if it sucks , I wouldn't be surprised is Amazon ends up getting far more than ~0.2M new Prime subscribers because of…
> but given that every LOTR fan is going to want to watch this series even if it sucks Citation needed. I'm a big fan of LOTR, but I didn't even bother with the last Hobbit movie. And I expect this series to be even worse than that.
Also, keep in mind there are people who are really fanatical about LOTR. At the end of the spectrum, some of them enjoy this stuff so much that they regularly attend LOTR conventions dressed up as wizards, knights, hobbits, orcs, etc. Those people will watch the new series even if it's only to criticize all the things it got wrong!
Obviously, I’ll wait and see once it comes out. But it seems odd to spend so much and not have a single established creator that has put out great content. And not to involve Jackson seems off because even having him in a consulting role would be a good sign. Looking at the imdb page this seems like a corporate driven project rather than a creator driven project with lots of different directors that haven’t don’t any…
No one ever mentions his first, a splatter flick: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bad_Taste
Hilariously bad but a fun watch.
Obviously, I’ll wait and see once it comes out. But it seems odd to spend so much and not have a single established creator that has put out great content. And not to involve Jackson seems off because even having him in a consulting role would be a good sign. Looking at the imdb page this seems like a corporate driven project rather than a creator driven project with lots of different directors that haven’t don’t any…
Speculatively, is there some tax optimization purpose? Eg, if you invest in content that builds technology that could be used for other purposes? Amazon is pretty amazing at tax optimization. But R&D tax writeoffs are pretty great, so not sure what it would accomplish. hmm, so maybe this is just cover for the UFO skunkworks.
> Tax inspectors were told that A-listers from Hollywood were starring in a £19.6m production that would be shot in the UK. However, the movie was never made and the only footage shot was seven minutes of "completely unusable quality" filmed in a flat, which cost just £5,000.
https://www.theguardian.com/film/2013/may/01/uk-film-executi...
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LOTR, and also Peter Jackson are not compatible with modern media. LOTR is completely opposed storytelling wise to the current dogmas of postmodernism and equity, it's fundamentally a story based on old western/european/christian myths, basically what gets called white supremacy these days. I think this will turn out to be an absolute morbid tv series as it will force LOTR into the current dogmas, but this is probabl…
although i wouldn’t have worded it the same way, there’s definitely something true in your comment. I’m still amazed that people keep torturing stories made at different eras with different mentalities to try and promote today’s philosophy instead of coming with original materials. If you want diversity and black people on screen, why not create stories about the amazing empires that ruled the african continent in th…
I personally think they are simply not capable of making something engaging, BECAUSE they feel the need to promote todays philosophy over good storytelling. (They as in the streaming services)
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Equity means equality of outcome, basically meaning you believe every person is equal in their results. This is religious dogma, because it's just not true. We are not the same, and you will always have differences in outcome in society. If you cannot see this, you are trapped in religious level dogmatic thinking. (PS: if you want to talk about equality, which we might perhaps call equality of opportunity, I'm all fo…
A charitable interpretation of what you call modern dogma is that people acknowledge that we're not all the same (that's what diversity is about, I think), but that the differences aren't predicted by gender or race or culture or whatever. That is of course also not very compatible with LotR.
Media productions are daughters of their time. We currently have a situation where the elite in Hollywood are desperate to bring diversity and blackwashing into the stories. When a new LOTR series is shot in 50 years from now, this will no longer be an issue.
As a fantasy series, it seems the ethnicities of the actors are quite irrelevant. I can understand that it can be a bit odd in historical dramas, but male actors used to play the female roles in plays. It seems pretty secondary unless the plot is explicitly about race. And historical accuracy, even in historical dramas is usually tenuous at best anyway. I’d suggest that when you say “blackwashing” people are going to…
In the Hobbit movies there were some black elves and they didn’t describe anything about them. Just that there were some Black Forest elves mixed in with all the other elves.
I guess it slightly distracted where every minor detail had some back story and history, but I don’t think detracted from the story. I don’t think leaving out these details was in the top 100 flaws of the Hobbit movie.
As someone really into Tolkien, I’d rather see them expand or adapt the lore than just swap out details. It’s not that it’s the end of the world, but it’s dangerous to change details from someone else’s work because I never know what was the actual important piece. I suppose I could change Michaelangelo’s David’s sex but it would be hard to recreate it with the same qualia as Muchaelangelo as I’m not him. It’s not the sex of the sculpture that’s important, it’s my implementation. I’m sure Michaelangelo would have e carved an amazing woman, or African, or Asian, or any background. But few are Michaelangelo.
An example of this that I think went kind of well is the Kevin Kostner Robin Hood movie where they cast Morgan Freeman and gave him a back story of being a Moor from the crusades who returned to England. I think this worked out better than if they had just randomly changed a Robin Hood character ‘a race.
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What other word would you describe when people cry over "lack of diversity" when the story is set in a fantasy world that did not have such type of diversity to begin with?
I love how it's fine for there to be dragons and magic in fantasy. But minorities ? That's a bridge too far.
Also, I think most aren't actually opposed to minorities being in the show, but rather the hamfisted way they think theyll be included with. (I personally expect racism being a big part of the show that will need to be fought.)