(no subject)

[galadhir]

Just watched the last of Amazon's Rings of Power. Good God, they really did just make the whole thing up, didn't they?

What kind of hellworld do we live in that a big corporation can spend millions just to buy rights to a deeply beloved book so it can comprehensively misrepresent it in the most expensive way possible? I can't even call it fanfiction because whoever wrote this can't have actually been a fan.

Why couldn't they have written a story that they did have the rights to? And then they could have made something that could have lived with the actual canon.

GDI Amazon.

Comments

[sunshine304]

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…

[galadhir]

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.

[sunshine304]

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.

[galadhir]

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 :)