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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

#601

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…

My position, for what it's worth, is that it doesn't matter one inch what the actors are, if the quality in general is good. They could be cats and dogs and I would enjoy it if it was Good. That some of them are black is so irrelevant that it's, frankly, fucking absurd to even talk about it.

Rings of Power, as far as I can tell after watching a single episode, wouldn't be good even if every single detail was exactly as Tolkien imagined it. Because the quality is just not there.

I'll be watching it to the end though, it's not impossible that it might become good.

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

#602
post #575

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you name 10? I'm actually asking in good faith because I can't recall any "to white" race swapping in the past few years. All the ones I can think of were Ann Boleyn, the little mermaid, the coming beauty and the beast, the recent terrible resident evil, etc.

Jesus?

What color skin did his father have?

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

#603
post #6

Interesting to contrast the IMDB rating with Rotten Tomatoes, not owned by Amazon, which currently has an audience rating of 38%. https://www.rottentomatoes.com/tv/the_lord_of_the_rings_the_... In my opinion, Steam does the best job of handling this tricky problem by leaving all reviews up and transparently letting the user pick whether or not to include periods of "unusual activity".

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…

Reading the first page of user reviews on RT, one thing I found interesting is that the low and high reviews said similar things.

The high reviews praise the set, setting, and production value.

The low reviews also like the set, but claim they spent too much on production value, and nothing on writing.

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

#604

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? Did the Harfoots resemble British subjects, or do the race of men have to be from the European continent because of their skin color? Which city did Lindon look like? If we're already in a fantasy setting, why is there such a focus on relating the setting of the fantasy to o…

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.

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

#605
post #504

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I would never think of a movie were Kunta Kinte is Dutch and is portrait by Chris Hemsworth Kunta Kinte was a slave in a story that heavily dealt with slavery, set in a time and setting where slavery was race-based, for an audience somewhat familiar with the history of that time and setting. If you made him Dutch and portrayed by Chris Hemsworth you'd have to include in your movie all kinds of extra exposition and…

> did not involve characters where their race was either important to I think the appearances of a character is quite important if the author took the time to describe it, don't you think? Would a Little women adaptation where the three women are two trans gender people, one Black, one Asian and one South American person that identifies as woman, be a good idea? We all know what "Little women" is about, we all expect…

The black bald fairy is just a stunt to create fake controversy, to sell tickets.

And if any children read this, let me tell you that either you run to ask money to your parents and go to itchy and scratchy land, or you are a bunch of little racists. You are warned. Gimme money.

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

#606

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.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/England_in_Middle-earth

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

#607

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…

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? Did the Harfoots resemble British subjects, or do the race of men have to be from the European continent because of their skin color? Which city did Lindon look like? If we're already in a fantasy setting, why is there such a focus on relating the setting of the fantasy to o…

You honestly deny that middle earth is not based on Europe? Everything Tolkien wrote was drenched in that reference frame.

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

#608

I don't get reviews saying that TRoP, or some other new prestige TV series, is "terrible", or "a disaster", based on the first couple of episodes. Some really excellent TV series have taken more than a whole 26-episode season before they find their rhythm and get properly good. ST:TNG is a classic example, but I'm pretty sure you can come up with others. And some people are claiming that a new series totally worthles…

People were saying the show was going to be terrible based on promo images.

And they were right too

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

#609
post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why go to fiction when we have real history, like Yasuke the ‘black samurai’. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yasuke

“When Yasuke was presented to Oda Nobunaga, the Japanese daimyō thought that his skin must have been colored with black ink. Nobunaga had him strip from the waist up and made him scrub his skin.[22] These events are recorded in a 1581 letter of the Jesuit Luís Fróis to Lourenço Mexia, and in the 1582 Annual Report of the Jesuit Mission in Japan, also by Fróis. These were published in Cartas que os padres e irmãos da…

Oh sure, it was incredibly unusual but once everyone got used to him being around after a few years, or a generation if he had kids, the novelty would wear off. I just don’t think it matters.

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

#610
post #69

the show deserves 3/4 at best, I haven't seen anything so expensive this bad, it's really weird that this much money can't buy quality in any of the aspects of the show

Because too much of the money goes to the intellectual property owner as rent. And also, prequel/sequel stuff that was not originally mapped out by the author is usually crap.

Absolutely has nothing to do with the IP owner.

That much money (as well as being tied to a big name like Amazon) attracts the antithesis of creativity, where everything becomes ‘plastic’ (someone above called it a ‘wax museum’ which is a good way to put it) and means anything remotely controversial or original will be killed dead.

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