IMDB deleted all negative user reviews for The Rings of Power • Hacker News Board

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

#581

Post by ethbr0 » Sat, Sep 03, 2022, 5:36 PM UTC

dylan604 wrote: post #469

ethbr0 wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Watching it happen over and over, my impression has been that: (a) Creative leaders (producer, director, writer) hired for these projects chafe at having anyone tell them what to do ( and this especially includes the source material! ). (b) Creative leaders hired for these projects are typically not themselves fans, and do not elevate anyone who is a fan to a position of authority, and so lack even an awareness of th…

Welcome to the concept of creative license.

There's a distinction between creative -license and -arrogance.

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

#582

Post by [deleted] » Sat, Sep 03, 2022, 5:36 PM UTC

LawTalkingGuy wrote: post #540

fttx_ wrote: post #342

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you're right. Italian is not an ethnicity. Italy hasn't been a unified political entity for very long. There are Italians from all sorts of different ethnicities and races. Would it be okay for a Black person to play this role if they were Italian? If not, why is it okay for non-Italian white actors to play other roles? Is a Corsican person Italian? Is an Italian-American? Is Mario Balotelli (for example)? Wh…

Quoted post unavailable.

[deleted]

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

#583

Post by benpxu » Sat, Sep 03, 2022, 5:37 PM UTC

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…

Being aware of... context? In this day and age of reactionary posts and total lack of empathy? What is that?

To be clear, fully agree. If you include a person who doesn't fit the time and style of where they exist, you need to give me a reason or I won't believe it. Reality is very often unbelievable, and good fiction/immersion requires believability, not reality. (Sidenote: this usually has nothing to do with race and more often how they act.)

For music and literature though, I think it's mostly that the mediums are not visual and so defies our culture of memes or quick messages. Hard to point at a screenshot of text and get likes unless it's under a sentence long. Also, good readers know good writing, and reading is dense enough that the general public won't read. So there's no real reason to go after books.

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

#584

Post by didibus » Sat, Sep 03, 2022, 5:40 PM UTC

wizofaus wrote: post #568

didibus wrote: post #560

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I want to see black people stories, not just black people participating in white people stories where they are not originally mentioned Isn't part of the problem that there are no such stories for those who were stolen from their culture and made to work by force, kept uneducated on purpose, and weren't given the opportunity to build stories of their own? A lot of Afro American don't speak their original language a…

Even if you restrict "black" to mean African Americans, that subculture has existed in its own right quite long enough for new stories to have been formed surely? The wikipedia article on African American literature would certainly suggest there's plenty to choose from.

> The wikipedia article on African American literature would certainly suggest there's plenty to choose from.

Absolutely, I recognize I might just be unaware, and that's probably because they're not made into big budget movies and very much should be. I'd also love to see that. And to be clear, I'm in 100% agreement that I want to see and think there should be a lot more of their stories represented and made into big productions.

What I wonder though is how much those stories are a part of the average Afro American active culture. Do they grow up reading those books too, or they do so reading Tolkien instead?

If the experience of an Afro American child is Marvel Comics, Disney movies, and Tolkien stories, and you continue to exclude them from the characters, it just seems wrong.

I also wonder if there are a lot that aren't slave stories or racial tension stories.

And finally I wonder if the stories would always be diverse, logically they'd all include white people, since Afro American heritage now is American life, a life in a place of diverse people from many race.

And maybe this is my point as well, if you write fantasy, but your experience is American, why wouldn't you include people of all color in your story? But if you did, you'd one hundred percent get some folks come out and say that fantasy stories are European inspired and should only have white people in them. That if a person has an Irish accent they can't be of black skin, and what does that make of black people in Ireland right now?

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

#585

Post by oblio » Sat, Sep 03, 2022, 5:41 PM UTC

amanaplanacanal wrote: post #538

oblio wrote: post #277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There’s been black people in Italy for pretty much all it’s history. You may want to also read a few history books. (Black moors, Alessandro de' Medici, etc ) I hate this argument because it's disingenuous. It's in great part a lie and undermines the push for diversity. Just because there were 1-2-5-100, in major cities, in countries with populations of millions, didn't make them common and frankly more than a curi…

It would be a sad world if we judged all of our entertainment by how close they were to “average”.

I don't mind character switches and such in media, but reaching a point in conversation like the one above, where the comment I'm replying to is asking everyone to RTFM history books to discover this supposedly hidden massive diversity in the Middle Ages is frankly, just a bad comment.

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

#586

Post by benpxu » Sat, Sep 03, 2022, 5:42 PM UTC

rich_sasha wrote: post #550

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 used to think that. I had a similar knee-jerk reaction when watching the Witcher. But then, when stories are told and retold, it's not quite the same story each time. Jackson's LoTR follows the books closely, but is not the same. Some plots, like Tom Bombadil, are taken out. Some are modified, like the rivalry between Rohan and Gondor. Partly it's cinematic but also partly it is about what story the reteller wants…

All the talk about racial anything, is mostly just noise imo. The only thing that matters at the end of the day is good writing, good acting, good directing, and good cinematography (at least for shows).

It's been showing a lack of the first two so far.

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

#587

Post by ethbr0 » Sat, Sep 03, 2022, 5:43 PM UTC

throw0101c wrote: post #472

ethbr0 wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> have no idea where you get the 90 minutes from >> but having the first two (allegedly: haven't seen it myself) Not watching something that you critique, and instead basing it on what you saw on Reddit, HN or YouTube, seems de rigueur these days. I did watch it. Enjoyed it. And will hold my final opinion until I've seen the last episode.

> Not watching something that you critique, and instead basing it on what you saw on Reddit, HN or YouTube, seems de rigueur these days. Movie and television reviews have been around for decades. There are only so many hours in a day/week, and everyone has to decide how to spend their finite amount of time, so "pre-judging" a show by early episodes is nothing new. But if you want to try to watch everything as a compl…

I'm not suggesting critique without completion is invalid: I am suggesting critique without viewing is invalid.

Since BBSs and Usenet there has been plenty of commentary of ongoing series.

But the difference now seems to be people having an opinion, sharing that opinion... and then calling out that they haven't even watched the part of the show that is out.

Which boggles my mind.

I probably wouldn't opine publicly on Sidney Poitier or Katharine Hepburn as actors if I'd never seen anything they were in...

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

#588

Post by peoplefromibiza » Sat, Sep 03, 2022, 5:45 PM UTC

mcphage wrote: post #425

rendall wrote: post #376

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think GP is not arguing his case well, especially not to Americans, who come with a preset cluster of expectations and arcane protocols to signal that we "get it". And, sure, anti-Black racism might be his prime motivation. But, just assuming it's so, when someone questions American appropriation of his own culture's literary traditions is ... it's frankly imperialist. "Americans agree: Italian who questions Americ…

The only part of the depiction he’s complaining about is race, though.

> The only part of the depiction he’s complaining about is race

Am I?

Are you sure?

Can you quote me on that please?

The blue fairy is an important part of my culture, at least for me.

If someones rewrites it using all the power of a conglomerate like Disney, that puts at risk our shared culture and heritage.

For me she's gonna be a woman with blue air, for someone younger it will be a bald black woman, that has no direct representation in the society where I live.

I don't care who the actress is or what the color of her skin is, it's just not the "Fata Turchina", it's another character.

Simple as that.

Try doing that with Sherlock Holmes and see what happens.

What would happen if a Chinese company made a movie where Martin Luther King is an Albanian immigrant who came to Italy with the Vlora ship in 1991 to become a supporter of immigrants rights and got killed by a mobster in a fight over a pool game?

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

#589

Post by oblio » Sat, Sep 03, 2022, 5:47 PM UTC

peoplefromibiza wrote: post #302

oblio wrote: post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The pale white skin is a well known proxy for ethereal/angelic beings In European and European derived culture...

Of course they did. But Disney is not making culture, they are making entertainment for making money. Tolkien is culture, Amazon's rings of power is not. EDIT: sorry, misread your comment, no, not only in European cultures, it's consistent across the cultures throughout history. White is the light, first men loved light and hated dark, in darkness lure grave dangers. For example in African mythologies fairies are whi…

> Tolkien is culture, Amazon's rings of power is not.

Funny. Culture is almost everything. If we like it or not, if it's high or low culture, that's a huge discussion. But for sure the TV series is culture.

* * *

Cool link! True, the association with light is strong, universally.

Actually, there was also the social class factor in any culture where tanning is highly visible: aristocrats vs everyone else, who had to work outside. No tan = upper class.

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

#590

Post by chimeracoder » Sat, Sep 03, 2022, 5:49 PM UTC

peoplefromibiza wrote: post #167

farleykr wrote: post #61

My issue with the show has nothing to do with the “woke” stuff mentioned here. I don’t like it because none of the heroes are likable. All of them have some form of sticking it to the man and doing what they want as their story line. True heroes are self-sacrificial and reluctant. Contrast Galadriel who acts like a self righteous dickhead with Aragorn who was reluctant to accept his calling spent and three movies pro…

> 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 product of Hollywood, not a reflection of what the time period was actually like.

Anyway, your statement is objectively incorrect, even beyond the obvious hyperbole. There were plenty of Black people in Italy in that time period, enough that it's really not shocking to imagine one as a magical character in a literal fairy tale.