galadhir | (no subject)

i hadn't really planned to watch it, but now I will definitely plan to NOT watch it.

I tried watching it with the mindset that it was a completely independent series that had nothing to do with Tolkien, and while I could keep that mindset up, I found it enjoyable enough, if rather derivative. But I kept running into places where they had just made up lore and contradicted what Tolkien had said, and flattened what could have been interesting into something so generic.

Idk, it's quite pretty and it's less grim and depressing than some stuff out there, and if it only hadn't been pretending to be Tolkien, I think I would have liked it. Maybe watch an episode and see what you think?

>>I can't even call it fanfiction because whoever wrote this can't have actually been a fan.<<

It's fanfiction, because they're not the original author. People have all kinds of far-out ideas about stuff, sometimes hysterically out of character. I saw someone cross Supernatural with My Little Pony of all things ... and it actually worked.

>>Why couldn't they have written a story that they did have the rights to?<<

It would've made less money. Major famous works are worth a lot now that people are really into franchises at present. Unfortunately, not a lot of people are actually good at worldbuilding. I've seen some epic team builds, but not everyone knows how to do that. Hence why I wrote down the instructions.

I suppose there are people who will write fanfic without having ever read the original canon - idk, based on gifsets and fandom meta, I guess, and that is still called fanfic. But yeah it's not just characterisation that is the problem - they're also randomly making up lore that is outright contradicted by canon, which I think I find most difficult to ignore. The whole 'the entire elvish race will die without mithril' thing was just .. wow.. bold.

They could easily have written a Lord of the Rings tie-in, though! I'm sure more people have heard about LotR and more care about LotR than the Silmarillion. They could have brought back LotR characters to write stories that Tolkien hadn't written before. Maybe some fascinating things happened when Faramir and Eowyn went to establish their kingdom in Ithilien? If they wanted elves, they could have told the story of Thranduil, Galadriel and Celeborn defending their realms during the war of the Ring. They could have done the story of Aragorn and Arwen... all sorts of things that they did have the rights to, and would have had better name recognition than the Silm.

Admittedly they would still have needed to do worldbuilding for that too, but at least they wouldn't be actively getting the canon wrong that way.

>> I suppose there are people who will write fanfic without having ever read the original canon - idk, based on gifsets and fandom meta, I guess, and that is still called fanfic. <<

Yep. Also, there's a whole branch of fandom based on stuff written from the first episode, some from people who didn't like it, some from people who couldn't find anything more.

I wrote "Touching Lola" based on the trailer for Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (and drawing some from previous Marvelverse content).

>>But yeah it's not just characterisation that is the problem - they're also randomly making up lore that is outright contradicted by canon, which I think I find most difficult to ignore. <<

Most people find that hard to ignore, unless it's something like AU "What if X instead of Y" where the whole point is to take a different path.

>> The whole 'the entire elvish race will die without mithril' thing was just .. wow.. bold.<<

That makes no sense. Aside from their general and sometimes problematic immortality, it's too limited a resource and the geopolitics does not fit at all. The elves never would've let the dwarves keep the sole supply, let alone the orcs and the damn balrog -- and they'd killed balrogs before.

>> They could easily have written a Lord of the Rings tie-in, though! <<

I like your ideas.

That makes no sense. Aside from their general and sometimes problematic immortality, it's too limited a resource and the geopolitics does not fit at all. The elves never would've let the dwarves keep the sole supply, let alone the orcs and the damn balrog -- and they'd killed balrogs before.

Ikr! Amazon don't seem to have made the switch between LotR's elves and the Silmarillion's elves. LotR elves are past their strength, just barely clinging on in little enclaves and well aware that they're in their last years on Middle-earth. But the Silm's elves are all in the vigour of youth and looking for conquest, and quite happy to go to war with anyone who looks at them funny.

I don't think they'd have qualms about attempting to massacre the dwarves if their lives in Middle-earth depended on it. And honestly that would have been a much more Silmarillion-like story than what they did come up with! If you're not being slightly appalled at the characters is it really a Silm story at all?

Ugh.

The way that enough money can buy you the rights to anything - whether that's a much-used website or a beloved and well-known creative property - with no actual attempt to do well by it is just... deeply depressing.

It is so infuriating! Look at Star Wars which so many people had loved for so long, and it got bought out and then given over to movie makers who didn't even bother coming up with a coherent story. It's like 'oh right. just take our heirlooms and damn well break them, why not? It's not like millions of people care!'

With the Silmarillion I suspect there aren't as many people who care, but those that do, do care a lot! :)

SO infuriating! I think I'm definitely angriest about Star Wars, and how badly the mainline property was treated. (No coherent story, no coherent vision for it, etc.) As good as I keep hearing some of the TV shows are, I don't think I could ever be interested in watching them, because I've been so soured on it, and how little it seems any of the powers that be actually care for the quality.

Tolkien fandom is EXTREMELY passionate, so even if it's a smaller number, the amount of care remains high!

I know! It's such a waste of a property that could have been bringing in new fans for another two generations - which you would think they would want to be bringing in new fans for years. And the whole wringing as much as we can from TV spin-off things is a whole other rant for me, given that I refuse to pay for Disney +, which means that one of the great formative fandoms of my life is now locked away from me entirely.

If they ever do a Qui-Gon series, or a history of the First Order series, I might be persuaded to watch a pirated edition, but for now Disney have deprived me of SW altogether. Which is a sad end to a story I've cared about for 40-odd years.

It really is!

And I guess they feel they ARE bringing in new fans, because the shows are popular, and they're on a proprietary streaming service that's already popular with kids, so they can hook 'em young.

The TV rant is absolutely a big one from me, too. I genuinely resent the idea that I have to jump between multiple TV shows and films, some of which are hosted in different places (though Disney has consolidated that pretty significantly for both their Star Wars and MCU stuff), in order to not miss something. IDK. The response from me is not "Ooh, new movie/show: better subscribe to D+!". The response from me is "Welp, guess I'll never see that, then."

I know a lot of people feel the opposite way, that they LOVE the fact there's endless content, and that seeing all the MCU stuff or every Star Wars thing means that they have hundreds of hours of content to get through. To me, that sounds... exhausting. I loathe the idea of "sit through a show about characters you don't care about because ooooh, cameo from a fan-fave toward the eeeend!" I've never cared all that much about the MCU, but my impression of a lot of the shows and movies are that they're practically just extended commercials for OTHER MCU shows or movies. I care more about Star Wars, or at least I did, but it starts to feel the same way... like it's more about churning out bottomless content to keep people subscribing rather than making each release a big deal. (Though I hear a lot of the shows are good! I'm just not gonna see 'em!)

I could ALSO go on a long rant about how taking something like Star Wars, which has been a FORMATIVE pop-culture franchise to basically every geek out there for the last 40 years, and putting most of it behind a proprietary paywall, is... shitty. It seems like it's going to be harder to even find those sorts of broad "everyone is into this thing" megafandom/cultural touchstones going forward, because so much is locked to specific services.

I personally have Netflix, Hulu, and Prime... but I hear good things about shows on HBO and on AMC and on Paramount and on D+ and on Peacock and on AppleTV... but fuck if I can afford to subscribe to all of those to find out.

The response from me is not "Ooh, new movie/show: better subscribe to D+!". The response from me is "Welp, guess I'll never see that, then."

Yes, exactly! If there's something I absolutely cannot live without seeing, I'll ask to watch it at a friend's house. I did that with The Mandalorian and the Loki series, and then because both of them were underwhelming I rather lost interest in anything they produced.

I do wonder if Disney is behind my inability to be fannish over the past few years, though, as everything I might have been fannish about is now locked behind a Disney paywall. I've had to start watching Chinese dramas on netflix just to get my fix of SF/F.

I've never cared all that much about the MCU, but my impression of a lot of the shows and movies are that they're practically just extended commercials for OTHER MCU shows or movies.

Yes, exactly. I gave up on reading comics when they went to a model where if you wanted to read one character's adventures you had to follow them through lots of different characters' comics. I was a dedicated follower of the Thor comic, and then the Loki ones when they came out, but it just became too frustrating (and expensive) to keep up with. Apparently that model is working for them, given that they've rolled it out to the movies and TV series, but I can't be having with it.

Yeah, the idea of taking SW away from everyone and locking it behind a paywall is symptomatic of everything that's wrong with the new model. It might be delivering a constant stream of content to the people who can afford it, but what about the rest of us?

Yeah, I had a friend offer me a D+ password once, and I should have taken her up on it to see the handful of things I was interested in. Alas.

I keep hearing that I MUST see The Mandalorian, but idk. A lot of the shows seem... okay but not amazing? I have a feeling I'd be underwhelmed. I know a lot of people have loved some of them, but I just don't feel like I'd be as excited about them.

I've had a pretty serious negative turn toward Disney over the last few years. I used to have some warm fuzzies toward a lot of the classics and the music, and I mean, Kingdom Hearts was my big fandom... but as they've consolidated more and more creative properties and made a lot of choices that seem terrible to me... I've gotten so soured on them that I have an almost knee-jerk negative reaction toward anything that has to do with them anymore. (And I KNOW they're an evil corporation and that they have been for a long time, but... it has made it harder to be fannish.)

The MCU in particular I recall being praised way back when for making the stories so accessible. The nods between them were fun, and having an occasional crossover was exciting... now it's just exactly replicated all the issues that kept me from having any interest in the comics. I don't WANT to have to follow the story I'm interested in into a series that I don't care about. I don't want to feel like I never ever get a complete story, because it's ALWAYS about what the "next phase" is going to be. The "oooh, post-credits hint at a future story!" thing has turned into the eye-roll inducing "The End... OR IS IT??" type thing. Ugh.

(Sorry for the rant!)

But exactly. It's one more move that makes it a lot more transparent that it's about money and not about the art or the property. And yeah, you'd always have to buy the movie ticket/the DVD/rent it/whatever. And yes, art is absolutely worth paying for! [Except a lot of people have been very open about how deeply shitty companies are toward the creators when it comes to streaming and what they pay.]
But the availability of buying a movie ticket every few years to a big theatrical release, or a DVD if you really liked it... is very different than "pay a monthly fee in order to access this, and if you stop paying, you lose that access."
I don't mean to sound like a hippie or whatever, but I love art as community. Fandom matters to me, and the ability for thousands of people to share in the fandom for a show or movie is something I love on a level beyond any single fandom itself.
MCU and SW are big enough juggernauts that they aren't going to go away - it's not like these are going to vanish or stop having thousands upon thousands of fans. But fandom feels very different to me when the participants (or potential participants) have extremely different access to the canon material.

Yeah, I was very underwhelmed by The Mandalorian. It was your standard 'tough guy is forced into situations that require him to get out of them via ultraviolence, but get this, he has a baby.' I have no doubt that it was interesting to people who wanted to know more about Mandalorian culture - Boba Fett fans etc - but that is not me. (And honestly as a person who likes good worldbuilding, I didn't find any of the culture particularly interesting either.)

Likewise with the Loki show the worldbuilding was yet more 1960s stuff and the characterization was really bad, and the whole thing built to the reveal of a villain who was going to be in the next movie, and left the literal god of chaos as a willing member of an authoritarian murder operation. None of the Loki fans that I hung out with liked it at all.

So yeah, I don't think you're really missing anything. It does feel like there's some kind of standard story template that they're feeding the characters into and then they hit all the same beats and there's no passion or originality left, because nobody involved really cares.

I do completely understand the rant and agree with it! I sort of expect book fandoms to get more popular from here because we can at least all participate in those.

Yeah, that was a bit of the impression I got. I know I have a lot of friends who loved it, but I got burned out so badly on baby yoda stuff, lmao.

I ALSO feel like I'd be underwhelmed by the Loki show if I watched it. My Lokean friend was extremely into it, and I saw lots of other fanning around it, but most of what I actually heard of it plot-wise left me unimpressed. (But that's been my general feeling toward the MCU for a while.)

But that feels like a lot of it. I don't want to be an asshole to the actual creatives involved, because I'm sure some of them really do care and are doing their best. But at the same time, it does feel like a soulless churn of content, all designed to appeal to the widest possible base (and not alienate anyone), which means that it fits the formula and comes out bland.

I kind of hope that book fandoms gain more prominence. That's certainly more accessible!

No, absolutely, it must be a dream come true for a creative person to land a job with Marvel or Disney. I wouldn't dream of blaming any of the people who actually make the content for the moneygrubbing of the executives above them. In fact I bet they could use a union to get them better pay and conditions.

I'm going to be hypocritical now however, because my daughter has loaned me her D+ passwords while we're recovering, and I might go and watch the Obi-Wan show, because I was such a Qui-Gon fan and I really want to see the point where his Force ghost finally turns up. I know it will probably not be anything like what I want it to be either, but it will be good to see.

Absolutely. (Though I know a lot of those creatives wind up in semi-abusive work relationships, because "anyone would be glad to work here!") But no, a lot of them I imagine do have a lot of love for the properties, and want to make the best product they can. It's not their fault that higher ups have nothing but profit in mind.

Haha, enjoy! Obi-Wan is apparently quite good from all I heard! I hope you enjoy it.

I am enjoying it so far :)

I'm glad to hear it! Good recovery TV!

Misstressofmuses said it well. There's many reasons I deeply hate big corporations, but this is one of those reasons. I believe something similar to this happened with the live action of the Witcher, on netflix. I haven't watched it but since hearing how far it strays from the actual stories, I DON'T want to watch it.

Oh! I watched the Witcher TV series and didn't really like it, so I'm interested to know that the books are different and presumably better. I might have to try reading them now :)

And yes, I know that it probably doesn't seem like it's a big deal to be accurate about who is related to whom in the Silm, and to realize that elves come in different kinds, and the politics between the different kinds is important, but a lot of that is what the Silm is actually about and you just lose so much if you leave it out.

I’ve only heard things and saw promo pictures – those pictures and the trailer did convince me to stay far away. XD It seems that there are people who actually enjoyed this, but overall I think it had far less buzz and success than Amazon hoped it would. And I’m glad about it. They spent a lot of money for a beloved IP with dollar signs in their eyes, but what they produced seemed to lack the heart this material needs, the understanding for it. Not even starting on the fact that they tried to make a Silmarillion set story without the rights to the Silmarillion…

I think that if you didn't know the Silmarillion (and the rest of the background material) then you could probably have enjoyed it as a very pretty series where some interesting things happened in the Middle-earth that you already loved from LotR.

I'm sure that there aren't actually that many hardcore Tolkien nuts who have read the Silm more than once and have also read the volumes of collected notes. Statistically there must be more of the former than the latter.

But if you have read the Silm, you know that it's a very different kind of book from LotR. There is epic race relationship drama. The elves, who were so infallible in LotR, are now a bunch of in-fighting jerks. It's vital to know a character's geneaology because their parentage will determine a lot of their actions. There's a very important curse at play. The tone is completely different, etc etc.

I mean, I'm sure the story they came up with was actually more commercial than the real book, but it also misrepresented it a lot, and that bothers me. (And I quite agree with you over the 'writing a Silm story for profit when they don't have the rights to the Silm.)

Yes, I think is just another pretty fantasy series, it would have worked better and I likely would have given it a go. But promoting it as another story from Middle Earth immediately brought LotR to mind, and it didn’t feel like LotR from everything I’ve seen and therefore my interest was gone. XD

I could understand making the Silm more commercial, but it really sounds like they managed to piss off LotR fans like me because it just doesn’t have the right feel to it and also the Silm fans because the changes they made weren’t great…

It is so mad when they could have made something more LotR-ish so easily since they actually had the rights to that, and they could even have used the same characters - maybe twenty years on. I'd have liked to go back to M-e ten years later and find out what was happening to all my favourites and what adventures they might be having now. Admittedly they wouldn't be saving the world from evil, but they could have come up with something.

And from a Silm fan perspective (because I'm a fan of both) one of the things I appreciate about the Silm is that it isn't anything like LotR. The Silm is Tolkien's Game of Thrones, and you're just missing out if you try to do it in the same style as the more fairy tale LotR.

So yeah, you're right, it doesn't really appeal to either. I mean, I know there are people who seem to have loved it, but I don't know if they were existing Tolkien fans. Is it a good thing that it might introduce new readers to the books? I guess it is, but they'll probably be very frustrated with what they find there.

And lo and behold, Warner Bros wants to make more LotR, which actually might use the popular characters again…

IDK whether to be happy or tremble in fear… I didn’t like The Hobbit movies all that much, mainly because they were so incredibly bloated and had that awful CGI computer game look. The casting was awesome, the costumes etc. too. They just wasted it with adding so much stupid stuff. If those had been just two movies, they would’ve been so good.

I also didn't like the Hobbit movies. I think it could have been good if they'd kept it to just one movie, but yes, too much padding. And honestly the stuff they added was really cliche and not terribly in the spirit of Tolkien. So I'm not sure I trust them to write their own Tolkien fanfiction any more than I trust Amazon. I think I'm in a minority as far as that goes, though.

I never thought I would be sad to see more Tolkien media, but I am excited to know there's a new book out, and I haven't yet got Tolkien's Beowulf, so there are good things to come even so :)

I'm reminded of the BBC adaptation of the Discworld books about the Ankh-Morpork City Watch; when I saw the trailer I couldn't help wondering what any of the visuals had to do with the books, since I recognized basically none of the characters and the setting had completely changed. I had roughly the same reaction to the trailer for Rings of Power, though to be fair I only got around halfway through the Silmarillion years ago so whatever remains in my memory is quite hazy by now.

Oh yeah! That's definitely another example of the same thing - where they take the most popular characters, and grab a few of the best known quotes, taking them completely out of context and giving them to different characters (because consistent characterization, i don't know her). And then they write a story of their own that is only tangentially connected to canon and call it by the well known name to try to profit from the source material's fame.

And then the fans get excited until they see what's actually been done, and then there's backlash, and the TV writers claim the fans are racist, and the controversy makes for publicity. But I can't imagine it's good for the company in the long run, because the thing is not strong enough in itself to win new fans to replace the ones it's driven away.

This has happened a lot of times to different things I like in different genres; I just steer clear of them entirely because I know I won't be able to stop complaining about them if I ever do watch them. (When I was younger I complained about every little thing in the Lord of the Rings movies that deviated from what I remembered; I've mellowed out since then, but the urge to nitpick remains.) I tend to think of the adaptations as targeting a different audience, one that doesn't include me, so I don't check them out unless I was actually waiting for them.

There's a Neil Gaiman story that talks about the book-to-movie adaptation process, wherein the novelist gets called in for consultations, and the brainstorming rounds get increasingly strange and convoluted, and finally the script that gets approved doesn't resemble the original book at all; the story ends with the wry observation that Hollywood only sees books as source material for its movies, with the implication that the finished movie is ultimately more important. I might be misremembering some of these details -- I'm still trying to remember where I read the story itself -- but the overall message is the same, and it continues to be true even until now. I guess this could change if upper management at companies that make movies and other media would realize that they'd make more money in the long run if they actually did the work of growing the existing source material and cultivating the fans instead of throwing most of that out, but it runs counter to the trend of chasing short-term/quarterly profits, unfortunately.

I was also quite outspoken about the Peter Jackson films :) Or rather, I thought his Fellowship was wonderful, and everything I was hoping for. I even forgave him for leaving Glorfindel out, even though Glorfindel was my favourite elf at the time, because I could see the reasoning for giving Arwen a cameo.

But he lost me with the next two movies, when he began making more and bigger changes that I felt didn't really mesh with Tolkien's intentions - like having the elves show up at Helm's Deep (which implied that they weren't in danger in their own lands), and having Faramir tempted by the Ring, and turning Gimli into comic relief and all the elves into Vulcans, and the theme-park ride of the Paths of the Dead... heh. Like you I've mellowed a bit about it all, but I still don't think they're as flawless as fandom remembered them.

companies that make movies and other media would realize that they'd make more money in the long run if they actually did the work of growing the existing source material and cultivating the fans instead of throwing most of that out, but it runs counter to the trend of chasing short-term/quarterly profits, unfortunately.

I know! It's so frustrating! Things like LotR, SW and Discworld have had dedicated fans for generations. With care they could have had a hundred years of some of the most passionate fans on the planet, but yeah, apparently that's too much trouble.

Idk if anyone else has mentioned this already but the thing is that they *didn't* have the rights to the whole book, they only had rights to very specific parts of the Silmarillion and were not allowed to use anything else, which is why they *had* to make most things up. The Tolkien Estate didn't allow them to use more material.

Yes, my understanding is that they only have rights to the characters and situations of the Silmarillion that are referenced in the appendixes of Lord of the Rings - because they don't have rights to the Silmarillion, but they do have rights to LotR.

So what frustrates me a lot is, why did they choose to do a Silmarillion story - which they would inevitably get wrong because they don't have the rights to do it properly when they could have chosen to do something else in Middle-earth which they did have the rights to? They wouldn't have had to make up stuff that contradicted canon if they hadn't chosen to tell that particular story. Middle-earth is a big playground and if they were going to make up stuff anyway, why not go the whole hog and make up a new story with characters that you do have the rights to?

Because the layman LotR watcher won't know any better (like me, I only know because I know Tolkien nerds who've told me) and this way Amazon can reap all the prequel benefits. It's capitalism.

Oh I agree with you, but that doesn't mean I can't be angry and sad about it. I hope at some point a good adaptation will be made. Maybe in twenty or thirty more years when everything has changed, there'll be a Silmarillion adaptation by people who actually love it for itself. (Or maybe nobody will be reading it by then. Who knows :) ) It probably won't be my problem by then.

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Qualified for Destiny

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