(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

[xancredible]

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.

[galadhir]

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?

[xancredible]

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.

[galadhir]

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.