Amazon putting a three-day pause on reviews for Rings of Power | Hacker News Reader

Amazon putting a three-day pause on reviews for Rings of Power

variety.com

265 pointsdmix608 comments

> Each critique is then evaluated to determine whether it’s genuine or a forgery created by a bot, troll or other breed of digital goblin.

In general, this sounds like a good idea to me. There are a lot of reviews that aren't in good faith, or aren't useful because they're something like "0/10 this sucks" or "10/10 lol", and I don't really see those as valuable — in fact, the opposite.

However, the evaluation of what reviews are and aren't worth keeping would have to be done by an independent third party, not the company that produced the show, and who has an obvious conflict of interest.

Amazon would never do something like that, which is why as a rule I would keep in mind that reviews for Amazon products on Amazon platforms are not reliable (to the extent that any crowd-sourced reviews are reliable, which is a different conversation).

I find it very interesting that Amazon, after years of criticism for not doing anything regarding sellers gaming reviews, pauses reviews on the product they spent a billion dollars on.

They actually instituted it earlier, but it's just being noticed/discussed now in the context of the Rings show.

Yea, they alsp began shitting on Tolkien fans preemptively by saying if ypi don't like it you're against diversity, etc.

It's no accident they enacted this shortly before releasing such a steaming pile of IP monetization.

Again- this is Amazon, who have shown they have no regard for laws, or their customers, and have a strained relationship with the truth to say the very least.

I'd bet dollars to donuts no one knew about this policy because it was never enforced until now.

The first instituted a few months ago... for another Amazon show.

Add to this the fact that they recently deleted all reviews on this show with a rating lower than 6 from IMDB, which confirms for me that they are not to be trusted to be subjective about this at all.

I wonder what the decision process about this is like. It’s as if this show is “too big to fail”, and management is scrambling to make it appear a success.

It’s at 39% at Rotten Tomatoes. Ouch!

I love fantasy but this series has me pretty indifferent.

That's audience score which is being review bombed just like the IMDb ratings. So i wouldn't pay much attention to that

The critics have it around 80%, so the truth is in the middle?

Possibly yes. The only way to find out is time. Because review bombers tend to stop after the first few days. So the future reviews will tend to be more reliable than the early reviews

A quick look at Rotten tomatoes top critics score of all time is a good reminder why one should take critic score with a big row of salt

That’s basically every review aggregator ever.

I'd say not. The problem is that many 'critics' are just randoms like you and I.

'critics' giving it 8/9/10 out of 10 aren't being truthful.

I love how people are all 'you can't rate a show that just came out!' but critics have done just that as well.

Reading the RT 'critics'[1] we find there are a total of three critics (none of them 'top critics'. We have a 7/10, a 3.5/5 and a fresh score. Somehow that translates to an 84% score at the moment.

Why are bullshit high reviews not considered 'positive review bombing'?

[1] https://www.rottentomatoes.com/tv/the_lord_of_the_rings_the_...

Calling a review a "bomb" is just a rhetorical trick for invalidating somebody else's opinion.

By all means, remove bot posts. But A slew of negative reviews from real people is not that.

Depends. If they're reviewing it without watching it, then I'm fine with their "opinion" being filtered. We don't need to amplify twitter outrage.

Amazon/IMDB have that information, so they could have done that. But they didn't; instead they removed all the bad reviews.

That’s the smoking gun to me: no way that every review lower than 6 was a bot, they’re not even pretending to act in good faith.

Whatever you call it, a score infiltrated by people (or not) who haven't seen or care for the material has no value for me.

The value of aggregate reviews is to tell if I want to watch something. Amazon might be treading a dangerous line, but it appears to be in my interest.

> people (or not)

There's the dehumanizing language I'm talking about. By all means delete the actual bot reviews, but that's not what Amazon did. They removed all the bad reviews, and their sycophants online use dehumanizing language to justify it.

That's not dehumanising, that's the reality of who's voting. You can't talk about interpreting online polls without acknowledging the data source and problems around it.

Your focus on bots isn't enough. Real people who haven't seen this have mobbed online votes because somebody else has told them to hate it.

How do you actually tune into people who actually watched it? How do you condition that data from the contaminated mess that it is to something has value to people who want an unbiased review?

There are some technical options, but even (eg) only allowing votes from people who used an Amazon account means cutting legitimate votes that saw it under another Amazon account, from an IMDB account, etc, etc. There is no perfect solution. What's best?

> Real people who haven't seen this have mobbed online votes because somebody else has told them to hate it.

As stated in another comment[1], Amazon already has the data on who has watched it and who hasn't. It's pretty clear that they're acting in bad faith by completely ignoring this data and removing all negative reviews, when they could have simply removed reviews from people who hadn't seen it.

> only allowing votes from people who used an Amazon account means cutting legitimate votes that saw it under another Amazon account, from an IMDB account, etc, etc. There is no perfect solution.

The solution above is more than good enough. The majority of people watch streaming content on their own accounts, and I'm willing to bet that that's also true for the vast majority (>95%) of watches. The solution above is more than adequate - the fact that Amazon isn't using it speaks to the fact that they don't actually care about the reviews being representative of what individuals thought when they watched it, they just want positive reviews.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32734997

Go to the IMDb login page on your phone. The choices of account are: IMDb, Amazon, Google, Apple.

So while we're betting, I would bet most new accounts fall into the last two. They offer zero-friction without another password to remember. Longstanding users have IMDb accounts that predate the Amazon takeover.

So I'm not so sure as you are that it's that simple. You're also limiting it to one vote a family.

So Amazon does have some data. They could probably infer some more from metadata. Perhaps those reviews should have remained, and if they wanted to do this in the future, a "verified purchaser" model might work Fairly-Enough™ but it still discounts many, probably most, fair reviews

I actually really liked it. Only a casual LOTR fan.

But yeah it’s 5-star from me so far, amazed to see it at 39% on Amazon.

People vexed they divert from the books I guess. Understandable but it’s a good show if that’s not your main concern.

Look at you, spinning the soft disinfo like a pro.

The negative reviews are from lotr fanatics.

The negative reviews are from people who dislike it deviating from the text.

I would like to see the criteria they are using to filter reviews. Are they removing disingenuous good reviews with equal force? Are they removing genuine, sincere, and insightful bad reviews?

> or "10/10 lol"

Oh don't worry. They are only removing the negative reviews.

>> ... by a bot, troll or other breed of digital goblin.

Ok, the goblin bit is cute though.

Rings of power is equal parts boring, predictable, and positively ho-hum in every respect. Feels like it got focus-grouped to death. I am likely not the target audience, seeing as how Amazon provides ~14 languages for closed captioning - they may be seeking a more global audience with this content.

I read all the books and saw the Peter Jackson trilogy in theaters. This adaptation leaves a dull impression.

I think that many of us are coming at this with Peter Jackson's trilogy in mind (and the extended editions at that), but we have - probably intentionally - forgotten the exceedingly mediocre The Hobbits trilogy.

If you use that more recent work as the baseline, then I can see how the episodes released so far place the series fairly in the "watchable, but forgettable" category.

I do hope Amazon releases some UHD stills of the cities though. The team who handled those did an exceptional job.

> forgotten the exceedingly mediocre The Hobbits trilogy.

True. That could have been a 2 hour movie or at most two episodes. However, one difference is that the characters there do not seem that much at odds with the book or the first three movies. Galadriel in the Amazon show, on the other hand, just doesn't feel like the book or the movie Galadriel so it's a bit jarring. For their large budget, the dialog and characters should have been done a bit better I thought.

> That could have been a 2 hour movie or at most two episodes.

https://hobbitfanedits.fandom.com/wiki/Hobbit_Fanedits_Wiki :)

Watched one of these (forget which), and it was actually a decent movie.

> the characters there do not seem that much at odds with the book or the first three movies

well, The Hobbit itself as a book is at odds with LoTR, being a children fairy tale rather than an epic.

Just compare the scene where they get away from trolls in The Hobbit with the the trolls attacking Gondor in the movie. The change of tone is insane.

OTOH, it's pretty silly to be angry about it :)

>True. That could have been a 2 hour movie or at most two episodes.

It was: check out the fan edits. So far, my favorite is the Maple Films Edit. It's about 4 hours long and it's pretty great. It cuts most of the crap and leaves all the good stuff in.

>Galadriel in the Amazon show, on the other hand, just doesn't feel like the book or the movie Galadriel so it's a bit jarring.

Galadriel here is thousands of years younger than the version you saw in Jackson's movies or the LotR books. Presumably she's matured.

From what I've heard in others' descriptions of her depiction, Galadriel in the Amazon show also doesn't much match her depiction in The Silmarillion.

That is exactly what I was terrified of. I just watched the first episode a couple hours ago. It's pretty good. Not as good as the trilogy, but heaps better than the hobbit.

I've been telling people to forget the Peter Jackson movies exist (LotR and Hobbit). This is a different vision of Tolkien's world, and trying to compare them is apples to oranges. If you go into it with just the expectation of it being high fantasy with high production values, I think your average viewer would enjoy it.

> we have - probably intentionally - forgotten the exceedingly mediocre The Hobbits trilogy.

I consider myself a good Tolkien fan, and I really liked the Hobbit trilogy. There is no consensus on how it was universally accepted.

As to the Rings of Power, it tooks 90 years for the elves to forge their rings. Let's see how they're going to translate that in their story.

The Hobbit trilogy wasn't mediocre - it was just astonishingly bad and worse, they added a huge amount of material that had nothing to do with the book.

The Hobbit is a single book that is shorter than any of the three LoTR books. There was no reason to make three movies out of it other than greed.

The Hobbit fan edits are actually quite enjoyable movies. Of course, they all remove that huge amount of extra material, so...

Amazon/Netflix/Disney all provide 30+ subtitle tracks for every show, by the way. I don't think you should make any conclusions from the amount of subtitles. And besides, for all we know, they could be very bad.

For every show they create. Subtitles are hit and miss for shows/movies they don’t make.

Since people get upset and downvote for no reason.

10 subtitles Netflix: Little Woman - https://prnt.sc/6cmW9S-As8tF

5 subtitles Disney: Going to you at the speed of 493km - https://prnt.sc/bmz2a6tFtIsb

1 subtitle Amazon Prime: Meet the malhotras - https://prnt.sc/YnQjP7zHfwdY

> "Rings of power is equal parts boring, predictable, and positively ho-hum in every respect."

Unfortunately, this seems to be a common issue with our current, cookie-cutter style of storytelling. I think the root cause is the rate at which streaming services are trying to produce content. I know my work suffers when I take on too much. I assume the same is true for Netflix, Apple, Amazon, etc.

Not HBO, but they are self immolating because it was too good to be true and not economically viable, fast enough

Don’t forget end producers and the top brass who often cut content because they are scared as heck for some innovation.

These things work in cycles. New hit series breaks through, say “GoT” which is different enough, and everyone thinks they need make series X, but in the style of “GoT”, until everyone does it and it gets meh.

Or like every series doing a life flashback to build story. (I think Lost started that)

I read it was supposed to be losely based on the books. Is that true as a person who's read everything?

I'd read the Hobbit and found the Hobbit Trilogy to be kind of ... wack.

It's kind of enjoyable if you don't think about the book too much though.

It's kind of enjoyable if you fast forward through the parts where they're doing mundane things in slow motion. Like picking up that key at the mountain.

I feel like there is room for an underground torrent scene to re-cut awful films and tv shows - especially the ones that excessively interleave different stories, spreading out the meat with lots of bland filler. Maybe we can have our own personal ML models do this in future "Cut out all the scenes with this character + put the whole show on a linear timeline + max interleaved character timelines = 2 per show"

There are people who do that. The M4 recut of the hobbit is one I have heard of.

The most egregious part was the barrel scenes.

It's not really based on the books at all. Amazon has rights to the Lord of the Rings only, but not the stuff that was used to make the Peter Jackson films. Rather than remake The Lord of the Rings (can you imagine the outrage?), they decided to focus on the brief summary of the history of the rings of power given as an appendix to the last book of the Lord of the Rings trilogy. Basically a couple of paragraphs in the epilogue where Tolkien says "btw, 6,000 years earlier such-and-such happened and that's how the rings were made." Amazon invented this entire show out of those couple of paragraphs.

There are larger bodies of work (The Silmarillion, The History of Middle Earth, etc.) which go into great detail about this era and the conflict which involved, incidentally, the crafting of the rings of power. But Amazon doesn't have the rights to those books. So they're creating a storyline out of what little scraps were provided in the appendices of Return of the King, while reusing some of the characters in the Lord of the Rings which would have been around back then--Elrond, Galadriel, etc.

And I agree. Forget about the books and watch it as high fantasy on TV, and you'll be enjoyed. It is well made, and so far is following a couple of interesting plot lines.

> This adaptation leaves a dull impression.

I got the same impression as far as the story and dialog goes (-"You have not seen what I have seen.", -"Yes, I have!", - "No, you haven't!"). I am trying to like Galadriel but she's just too different than the movie or the book version, so it's a struggle for me.

However, I do like special effects and the costumes. I like how they did the ship sailing to Valinor. It's not how I imagined it when reading, but it's still interesting.

Khazad-dûm in the second episode looked pretty epic, I thought. The wife could have used a beard :-) but, oh well, not not a big deal.

> However, I do like special effects

The trolls body movements in Ep1 took me out of the show, the CGI looked worse than most games. But agreed otherwise they did a good job production-wise. It didn't lean too heavily into the New Zealand Peter Jackson style while still keeping it on point.

She is 6,000 years removed from the Lord of the Rings though, and this is before she acquired her great ring, and the responsibilities that went with it. I think it makes sense that we see her in a younger, more raw form.

Yea, if you look at elves in the books, they made a bunch of crazy mistakes all the time. In LOTR they are all calm, wise and peaceful, but that's after several millenia of massive screwups.

The dialogue could have used a couple more passes to be more subtle and cleverly written.

It is important to remember that Tolkien was like a British gentleman: well-mannered with a sharp wit. All of his characters have that same coloring to them.

> I got the same impression as far as the story and dialog goes (-"You have not seen what I have seen.", -"Yes, I have!", - "No, you haven't!").

These lines are actually referencing things in the history of that universe, they aren't empty.

> I am likely not the target audience, seeing as how Amazon provides ~14 languages for closed captioning - they may be seeking a more global audience with this content.

Yes -- instead of you they're focusing strictly on Earthlings.

Any comparison to House of the Dragon? I'm liking it so far (as one who liked GOT, but hated the last season like most I know).

There’s nothing wrong with not being the target audience of a show, but I find the bit about subtitles in 14 languages a bit odd. How could that possibly be an indicator that you’re not the target audience?

Nobody is the target audience when you're aiming for everybody...

I don't know what Amazon pays for subtitles but I could probably get it done for around $50/language. Hardly a relevant metric

I seriously doubt that.

for 50$, I mean they could use "google translate". Seriously though localizations and translations are a serious business and important. Not everyone speaks (or understand movie/tv show) English.

But... they're aiming for every language not every person surely. Do you think that only English speakers want to watch good fantasy TV?

I wouldn't be so sure. There's a reason why Big Dumb Action movies get cranked out while comedies have largely died: they do well in the foreign market. This is basic least-common-denominator thinking that leads to bland schlock.

Based solely on my anecdotal data it seems like many comedies where I live are local (aka not from the US).

Some of them do well others don't but they are certainly there.

Is there a similar set of movies in the US (aimed at the national/state level market) or is all the money sucked up by productions for the international market.

I believe the implication is that the priority is for a general international audience ala Disney

So is OP under the impression that the Jackson trilogy is not available in 14+ languages? Or that the Tolkien books aren’t, for that matter?

Well, one could argue that Tolkien didn't plan on his books to be translated in that many languages. I'm not sure why this matters at all, though.

He was a philologist who oversaw translations during his lifetime and even wrote a guide for translators to use when translating fictional names. It sounds like he was picky and critical of translations, but not because he didn’t want them to exist.

I didn't mean to imply that Tolkien opposed translations.

Maybe I'm being a bit naive, but intuitively I would think that most writers do not write a book with the explicit intention of the book being translated. The first intended audience is typically readers in the original language.

This is opposed by producing a series for Amazon, where it is mostly clear that the intended audience is world wide, talking many languages (in particular if it is about such a famous topic). And I wouldn't be surprised if this fact does impact the production of a work.

> intuitively I would think that most writers do not write a book with the explicit intention of the book being translated. The first intended audience is typically readers in the original language.

I don’t think so. I think most writers are only fluent in a very small number of languages and they choose one of those languages to write in.

Remember that English wasn't quite as dominant in Tolkien's day as it is today. In the 50s most people in e.g. France wouldn't speak English.

Or simply an audience targeted by something other than the language they speak. As others have mentioned, it’s very common for new original content from major streaming services to have subtitles in many languages. Even if that weren’t the case, it wouldn’t be surprising for a Lord of the Rings show, given that the book series has been widely translated and the author himself was a philologist who reportedly meticulously oversaw early translations of his works.

A complete disregard for languages, and talking about a Tolkien adaptation! Preposterous!

Tolkien was so into languages he edited the Oxford dictionary.

And besides, this feels like English chauvinism.

Perhaps GPT-3 wrote it?

>14 languages for closed captioning

Look at "The Boys" with regards to 'closed captions' (hint 30+). It's good they translated the TV shows, and drawing conclusions about its target audience out of that is dumb.

I make good use of those captions, given that most of Billy Butcher's dialog is: "Roight, now we gonnagyabrngs frbitszlan in th righnylnggnsya!"

I thought I was the only one!

As a brit, his accent makes me cringe hard. But his character more.than makes up for it.

Isn’t it an Australian accent?

He means himself as a brit listening to the actor with an aussie accent.

That's the smell I got from glimpses of a trailer. Bland, middle-of-the-road, bleh. I'm guessing the behind-the-scenes social events were given much more attention than the actual show.

Tons of languages is not that uncommon for big providers as I see - e.g. I just watched The Foundation on Apple TV and they have 8 languages for audio (sorry, I count all French variants as one, surely earning everlasting hate of every francophone) and about 40 languages as subtitles. If you've got money, I imagine that's not that expensive to translate a set of CCs.

How is providing translations or catering to a global audience a bad thing?

I am not the tatget audience for children's movies yet I can still review them and not expect my review to get deleted.

What Amazon is doing here is just another example of big tech censorship, and yet there are still people here who would argue that Twitter, Meta, Google and Amazon aren't censoring people, altough in Amazon's defense it's just for profits instead of politically motivated so it's at least understandable.

I agree. They are now the publisher and the platform. We can not trust them.

What is the implication of having a more global audience? In today's interconnected world we all watch the same tv shows and movies, would you expect a person in Europe to have lower standards for watching a series than a person in the US?

"I am likely not the target audience, seeing as how Amazon provides ~14 languages for closed captioning - they may be seeking a more global audience with this content."

Because you have nothing in common with folks that aren't fluent in English? Even when they live in the same city and neighborhood as you? I really don't understand this. Lots of folks have common interests even though not all of them are fluent in English. Subtitles are so widespread and entertainment so international that even streaming sites tend to have decent subtitles. I truly don't understand how this says anything about the content of the show.

> I am likely not the target audience, seeing as how Amazon provides ~14 languages for closed captioning

What an utterly weird concept.

Marvel movies are translated into 12-15 languages, like almost all blockbusters.

> I am likely not the target audience, seeing as how Amazon provides ~14 languages for closed captioning - they may be seeking a more global audience with this content.

It seems global audience is not thrilled with Amazon inserting US identity politics into the movie though, which I think was quite predictable from the begging. I don't know what were they thinking or what audience they were targeting with this.

This is no more Tolkien than the various incarnations of “Star Trek” pushed by Paramount+ are Star Trek. The names and locations may be similar, but once they have diverged from the original creator’s vision and mythology, it’s simply exploitation for financial gain.

You should watch Strange New Worlds. Has so much of ToS in it.

Strange New Worlds is very good. The story arc about the medical officer who kept his daughter in the transporter buffer was awesome and reminded me of TnG while Gene Roddenberry was still around.

> ...once they have diverged from the original creator’s vision and mythology, it’s simply exploitation for financial gain.

Must things always stay the same? Can't some popular stories grow and evolve beyond one, albeit original, author's imagination?

As stories cross generations I think it's kind of awesome when each can add some flavor to the retelling or expansion of the tale.

I have a special adoration for Star Wars yet am happy to see it getting more production, even if it must be at the hand of Disney.

The problem is, what typically happens is an author writes an original story and then it's "extended" by filming a completely unrelated off the shelf plot with some of the names changed and lore added. If something isn't a Hollywood hero's journey it's going to be one now. Scouring of the Shire would've been a lot more original than any new material we're getting here.

Though American TV has improved a lot since the time they had directors of making sure none of the protagonists were women.

I sense the displeasure is due to a perception, which may well be correct, that certain cultural artifacts are recycled as a platform for propagating socio-political agendas. Emasculation and milk toast male characters, for example, seem to be de rigueur these days.

> Can't some popular stories grow and evolve ..

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wolfram_von_Eschenbach#Parziva...

One of my all time favorite European works is Wolfram von Eschenbach's Parzival. He wasn't the original author of the legend of Percival, and there were other versions after him. It evolved, but that process took centuries and imo was an organic development.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Percival#Perceval

So I think the generally unspoken issue is who is doing the 'growing and evolving' (here: Corporations) and how are they evolving dearly beloved cultural works. Wolfram for example changed some bits and even inserted a short (rather amusing) interlude to vent his frustrations with women, but we can be certain there wasn't a committee with a social agenda sponsoring him to write that.

So, genuine development is definitely OK. At least in my book.

[pdf] https://ia800908.us.archive.org/24/items/Parzival/Parzival.p...

"If there is anyone who praises women better than I, I will surely not be the one to hold it against him..."

(See page 117 of the pdf to hear out this knight's complaints.)

> ...Can't some popular stories grow and evolve beyond one, albeit original, author's imagination?

Of course they can, but it's also the case that Tolkien was extremely defensive against divergent interpretations of his work, and he has a large fan-base with the same attitude.

If he wanted to be so defensive of his work, he shouldn't have sold it (or left it to his descendants to sell).

You can't have it both ways, if I sell my startup to Google I can't then berate them for deviating from my vision and making it too corporate.

> if I sell my startup to Google I can't then berate them for deviating from my vision and making it too corporate.

I'm pretty sure can. Maybe they could gag you with a contract during the sale, but I am certain that fans of your original business are well within their rights to criticize what Google later does with it. Your decision to sell something doesn't oblige others to respect what the new owner does with it.

I'm not arguing for any particular position, just trying to explain the motivation of some Tolkien fans.

Unfortunately, with most new productions it’s clear that the new folks don’t understand the story or characters they’re supposed to be extending. Or rather, they don’t care to and want to tell their own. That would be fine if they just chose a new name.

> Can't some popular stories grow and evolve beyond one, albeit original, author's imagination?

Sure, it's simple. Name it differently when you already plan to stray from the author's vision and as a bonus people will rate it more independently from the original (though that also means no free marketing by riding on a known brand).

They can, but then change the name and any implication that it is somehow more of what we got before (Lord of the Rings). Or clearly state it is only based on it, but has actually nothing to do with the original work, only draws inspiration from it.

This is not the case.

Here the directors / whoever just think they can do better than Tolkien (and that's fine) but then they appropriate themselves with everything he did, including claiming it's his work, but that they "improved" or "modernized".

Speaking of star trek, I'd highly recommend "lower decks" to anyone who is repulsed by the latest live action horror show. It's kind of funny that a lower budget cartoon has managed to be more authentic, original and well written all at the same time - it manages to pull off making fun of the old franchise while also being nostalgic about it. For any true star trek fans, the only real new star trek show is lower decks imo.

I was pleasantly surprised by the old Star Trek: The Animated Series

I think it was targeted at kids, but they had an all-star series of writers.

The repeating music reused in every episode just flashed in my head.

I would say the reverse, while agreeing with most of what you wrote.

It pulls off making fun of the old franchise while also being nostalgic about it.

But it’s simplistic with characters who are so dumb and childish that there’s no Star Trek in Lower Decks either.

Not a single character on the show is an adult. They’re all edgy and nerdy tweens vying for influence in the middle school yearbook club… in adult bodies. This includes the captain and bridge crew.

Lower Decks would be a phenomenal Star Trek if they would mentally age all the characters by 10 ~ 20 years, especially the captain, XO, security officer and every alien.

> But it’s simplistic with characters who are so dumb and childish that there’s no Star Trek in Lower Decks either.

Well... i wouldn't completely disagree, but it's a cartoon comedy so it seems fitting, the characters might be dumb and simplistic but they make fun of themselves; unlike Discovery where the characters are also dumb and simplistic yet pretentious and serious with terrible acting making it unbearable.

Lower Decks might be an excellent cartoon comedy by some measures, but it's not very good Star Trek for the same reasons.

The whole thing with Star Trek is competent "culturally evolved" professionals exploring the universe and representing the best of us.

There's no way any Starfleet character from Lower Decks could have made it through the academy entrance exam or psych eval from TNG. They're not competent and they're driven by childishness, which is what makes the show a comedy and not good Star Trek.

> Speaking of star trek, I'd highly recommend "lower decks" to anyone who is repulsed by the latest live action horror show.

I wouldn't. I tried, not once, not twice, but three times to watch it. The speech from all characters is just way to fast for me to understand.

I actually reinstalled Far Cry 2 (which was widely lambasted for speech being too fast) to compare, and the speech in lower decks is a lot faster than Far Cry 2.

As a Star Trek fan I found Lower Decks to be one of the worst of the bunch. It seemed targeted at kids/teenagers though so I reserved judgement. To each his own.

Lower decks is okayish in the sense that it can only be watched if you enjoy (or tolerate, for that matter) high school humor. I'm regularly meeting with friends, we currently watch Voyager and sometimes shove in an episode of lower decks here and there when it's getting late. It's alienating everyone enough to take a long break afterwards. The characters are all hyperactive and constantly screaming, including the senior officers, most episodes feature or are about shit, piss or sex in some way. It's good in the sense that it doesn't throw away everything you like about the older series and try to ruin them retroacticely like Picard did. That doesn't make it a good series though.

And that's "fine", right? I mean it's not for me, because I really like The Lord of the Rings, but then nobody's holding a gun to my head to watch it.

As I've gotten older, I've gotten more and more okay with shrugging and accepting that most things are not made for me anymore. What I think is only going to result in fruitless frustration, is thinking "this _should_ be made for me, because I do like X".

There's an argument to be made that quality in the arts has been declining as a result of — in part — dumbing down, or trying to appeal to the most people, based on current social norms, but I feel that's unrelated and not behind why people get so worked up with these things.

Tolkien took Norse mythology and completely butchered it - for example Gandalf is a dwarf in Norse mythology.

I guess that would make Tolkien "exploitation for financial gain"?

> I guess that would make Tolkien "exploitation for financial gain"?

He didn't write "Lord of Thor's Rings" trilogy

He used sources to create his OWN unique setting. He wasn't claiming his books to be Bible 2 or Koran prequels.

That's the difference.

I'm unsure what distinction you make here. Are you saying it would be totally fine if Amazon used Middle Earth, Elrond, Galadriel, Sauron etc. for a story as long as they didn't call it a prequel to Lord of the Rings?

There is no Thor, Odin nor any other character in lotr, there is no direct referencing to any other works (ie talking wholesale of anything) afaik.

Tolkien used a some of lesser character from norse mythology and completely rewrote its origin, purpose and made him central player in his story.

I think that's completely comparable to lets say: making movie about evil galactic empire, i mean dictatorship with its leader in black costume that has telepathic powers and laser sword... /s

Yes nobody will notice.

There is difference between inspiration, homage, and just ripping off a setting with minimal effort.

Here is an article on lotr influences

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._R._R._Tolkien%27s_influence...

tell me how is that comparable to

> Amazon used Middle Earth, Elrond, Galadriel, Sauron etc. for a story as long as they didn't call it a prequel to Lord of the Rings?

If Amazon writers want to tell their story about their issues the way they want it go ahead. There are plenty of original shows, and plenty more would be even better.

Tolkien wrote a straight-up retelling of the Kullervo cycle from Kalevala though.

I don't see any relevance,

so tolkien wrote something that is an expansion of a source text is your point that... what exactly are you implicating?

Rather than blocking reviews, how hard would it be for a company like Amazon to release some anonymized data about these alleged review bombing incidents and allow independent researchers to make their own analysis on whether or not these are genuine reviews or not?

There's a big moral hazard here in that it's trivial for a big corporation to make claims that cannot be verified. Are we supposed to just trust them?

but then they would not be able to manipulate the results their own way which is exactly what is happening. make a crapfest look better than it should by cherry picking reviews.

Based on the kinds of things I've heard in the past about supposedly "anonymized" data being reassembled, I have to imagine that Amazon's lawyers would unequivocally decline that idea before the soundwaves finished reverberating off the conference room walls.

I just don't understand the level of virtriol about a TV show. Is this the fruit of waning religiosity, where everyone adopts whatever random cause and fights to the death about it?

I thought we got past this malarkey with the stunning finale of The Sopranos... creative art is not there to satisfy your clamouring desires. That is 'content'.

I seriously missed some weird angry mob. I watched the first two episodes yesterday out of curiosity and it was the most compelling TV show I’ve seen in years. I’ve read the books a long time ago and enjoy fantasy. I thought this was a great start for a fantasy series.

There isn't, in the big picture, a huge level of such vitriol.

It's mostly that it's a very easy angle to write click-friendly articles about.

You can easily go "nut-picking" on Twitter, and find people saying whatever crazy thing you need for an article like that.

The HN comment threads above indicate there's a fair amount of vitriol.

Tolkien created one of the most fleshed out fantasy universes to date. As a result, there's a not inconsiderable number of die hard fans who don't react well to disregarding canon as there is a rather insane amount of detail spelled out in the books.

As long as one can get in the mindset of 'this is some disposable Tolkien-ish fantasy content', it's an OK bit of filler (IMO, having watched the first couple of episodes)

This feels different though.

(a) Most of the angry people haven't even watched (!) the few episodes (!!) that are out.

(b) I'm not sure most of the outraged are Tolkien fans. It honestly feels more like dog piling / mob hysteria.

When did we become consumers of visual media where "I don't like it, and I haven't and won't watch it" is a valid position to publicly kvetch about?

How do you know they haven’t watched it?

Some of the reviews were posted before the episodes were even released.

Because they said so?

> "Now after all this rant: I didn't watch rings of power, and I don't plan to, why soil a good memory and good mental mythos I have of that world?"

> "I watched up till the intro credits of episode one. It seems... OK?"

> "I watched the trailer and I didn't watch the show yet, but I if it follows the trend, I imagine what I will find. I don't know if I will watch it."

> "I found the first episode very long drawn and boring. Wanted to leave a review but Amazon told me: "please watch till the end to leave a review". Not going to torture myself just to leave a review."

> "I’ve only watched one episode, but that episode was not good."

> "That begin said, I haven't watched any RoP, the "nothing" could be complete fluff because the story is too thin."

> "I don't think I'll be watching this series at all based on what I've read in the comments here."

> "zero sympathy here; Tolkien reader; not watching this media at all.. zero"

> "I don’t known about others, but I really don’t want to watch this show now."

Am I the only one that seems weird to? Like, watch it and have whatever opinion you feel! But when did not watch it and have a strong opinion become a valid option?

I've seen several memes presented to me by Facebook, since it's normally the kind of content and subject matter I'd consume, counseling people to not even "hate-watch" it. So there is some variety of blind opposition or boycot afoot, and shockingly, the comment sections very frequently come back around to color-blind casting.

> As a result, there's a not inconsiderable number of die hard fans who don't react well to disregarding canon as there is a rather insane amount of detail spelled out in the books.

This sounds very similar to what happened with the fans of the well-known Wheel of Time series. Given the broad divergence from the canon, the future of the series is in doubt [1]

[1] https://screenrant.com/wheel-time-show-backlash-controversy-...

I don't understand why they even bothered trying to adapt the Wheel of Time. The values expressed in those books, particularly w.r.t. gender, were obviously going to clash hard with the present zeitgeist and necessitated butchering the story to bring it into compliance. Anybody could have seen that coming. They should have just written a new story.

In no particular order:

Conflict between men and women leads to ruination.

Men need women and women need men, without the other they aren't complete.

Men are naturally stronger than women, but women make up for it with teamwork.

Powerful men get harems. Men frequently take multiple wives but the reverse is virtually unheard of.

Slavery as a cultural difference to be respected.

Good guys allying themselves with an empire built by the chattel slavery of women.

Wheel of Time season 2 was confirmed before season 1 ended and season 3 was confirmed before any part of season 2 aired.

Amazon is doubling down. Expect more of this sort of "we'll buy your favorite property and change it and there's nothing you can do about it". Nothing that is still protected by copyright is sacred, you just need a rich enough business to buy it to change it.

But a lot of the people who are freaking out clearly haven’t read the books because the stuff they say is often incorrect

Note that the canon is somewhat fluid: Tolkien changed his mind on various things (off-hand, I can think of the creation of the orcs, when the wizards first arrived in middle-earth and what exactly Balrogs look like).

Quod licet Iovi, non licet bovi

But 'Jupiter' has been dead for close to 50 years. While Tolkien was protective of his work and its integrity, I'm not entirely sure he would have wanted it to ossify entirely (as already quoted elsewhere: "I would draw some of the great tales in fullness, and leave many others only placed in the scheme, and sketched. The cycles should be linked to a majestic whole, and yet leave scope for other minds and hands, wielding paint and music and drama").

I watched up till the intro credits of episode one. It seems... OK?

It makes me miss old Amazon prime where they'd use the $200M to fund dozens of risky shows from up and coming directors.

Even if 90% ended up being terrible, they'd still end up with multiple shows that I'd enjoy more than one big budget production.

> It makes me miss old Amazon prime where they'd use the $200M to fund dozens of risky shows from up and coming directors.

Seems like a standard trajectory for new independent streaming services at this point. First you make art, then you make content.

Yeah smaller budget Amazon was amazing Patriot is still one of the best TV shows ever There was a glimpse of those glory days with “outlaws” though

This is the latest culture war front. The right-wing media ecosystem are pointing their hundred millions viewers at this one outrageous thing. It'll eventually wane like the previous iterations, such as critical race theory in schools.

Wait what's the culture war angle here? I don't get the correlation between "purist" Tolkien fans and the right wing vs left wing? I'm probably missing something since I've never read or watched anything related to tolkien or LOTR, but for me it looked more like a typical fanboy reaction/rage to Amazon adding new stuff to an original story.

(Which honestly can suck, because of course some people will just review bomb it no matter without ever actually watching a single episode. Makes it harder for everyone else to actually know if it's bad on its own merits.)

There’s black people in it. That’s it. That’s the whole controversy

That's an oversimplification. The "controversy" is that some people already had an image of what elves looked like (tall, very white, long haired) and now one of the main characters who is an elf, is a short haired black man.

As someone who doesn't live in the US, it is always a bit amusing when you see these Hollywood productions very clearly add or make some characters certain race or gender because of US politics.

It’s amusing when people don’t understand that it’s a political decision to have movies and tv shows with entirely white people in them.

It's a US political decision. In my country, where there are very very few black people, it definitely wouldn't be a political decision to not include black people. But it goes beyond that. What I usually see is that the focus is on including black characters. There is rarely focus on including for example Asian or Hispanic characters, or they are portrayed in much more stereotypical ways.

As I said, it's a very US thing, that is very noticeable to non US viewers. Try watching some non US movies or shows and you'll see what I mean.

The US seems to have in general a lot of interest in races for some reason. For some applications or forms I've had to fill for US things, I was asked my race or ethnicity, which to me seems completely bizarre (what does it matter?). Moreover I didn't even know what race I was supposed to put (am I white? am I Hispanic?) because I've never been asked.

> The US seems to have a lot of interest in races for some reason.

The reason being systemic racism imposed on brown and black people in the US.

Look back to the 1990s movies where you'd have large casts depicting everyday life, and there'd be literally 0 non-white people. Non-whites were explicitly excluded in many movies, obviously with exceptions, but we're talking about averages and tendencies here. Racism didn't end in the 1960s.

Conservatives think we live in a post-racial era where there's equality of opportunity just because there aren't laws that explicitly discriminate against certain races. But that's a really flawed sociolegal analysis, given that equality of opportunity isn't exclusively determined by equality under law, and given that there's laws that aren't explicitly racist but cause racist outcomes and likely have unstated racist motivations (e.g. marijuana criminality, immigration restrictions).

> There is rarely focus on including for example Asian or Hispanic characters

I totally agree that they need to do a better job on that.

> it’s a political decision to have movies and tv shows with entirely white people in them.

Well, that kind explains "I just don't understand the level of virtriol about a TV show." from OP.

For instance, I don't live in the US, I don't care about the US and most importantly I don't care about US politics, but the US is the only capable of running shows like this.

I imagine there would be americans that don't want politics or political influences in their beloved stories too.

Me, I just want a Tolkien show despicted as in (or as accurate as possible to) the books. I watched the trailer and I didn't watch the show yet, but I if it follows the trend, I imagine what I will find. I don't know if I will watch it.

How much time will I have to wait for a new version? 15, 20, 30 years? I'll probably be long gone.

It's even more bizarre when you consider that all of Tolkien's works are based on an incredibly Anglo Saxon/European centric view of the world.

I find it extremely ironic that people are so bent out of shape about a couple characters cast with darker skin. These must be the same people that have no clue that every character in their favorite book (The Bible, King James version) was non-white. These are most likely the same people with the historically inaccurate pictures of Jesus Christ as a caucasian man.

The two largest fantasy franchises in the world are Euro-centric white fantasy (Middle Earth and GoT). It isn't enough that our fantasy canon dominates the world, we need to have every actor be caucasian as well?

Lots of shows have black people in them, and most of them don't get tons of negative reviews.

So here's my theory: LOTR is extremely popular with a huge number of fans. This show is subpar. Subpar adaptation of very popular thing means lots of disappointed fans, meaning lots of negative reviews.

I'd heard "meh" things about it before it was even out and none of it included anything about there being a black elf. What was complained about were weak writing, trying to add sex/nudity to GoT it, and firing their lead "Tolkenist" because he was opposing it, etc.

> I just don't understand the level of virtriol...

I can't comment on the social phenomenon of Amazon mob reviews, but the attitude of Tolkien toward his work is relevant. He incorporated a tremendous amount of material from his research on northern European mythology, and had very definite ideas about how it should all hang together. Once LotR was published, he would react very strongly against interpreting or extending that material in any way that didn't match his vision. A large part of Tolkien's fan base takes a similarly serious attitude towards his material.

That's fine, but Amazon isn't rewriting his books. I think it is impossible to infer Tolkien's reaction, and furthermore, quite silly to try and enforce that inferred reaction.

Take the Wheel of Time series. A lot of unhappy fans again. Robert Jordan isn't around to give his opinion, but Brandon Sanderson finished off writing the series after Jordan's death and has talked about what he thinks of the TV series. His comments are remarkably less hysterical than what fans say. He basically says he likes it and there are some things he would have done differently [1].

Ghost in the Shell is another example. The live action movie was bad. There was a whitewashing controversy about a caucasian actor playing the lead role. The original Ghost in the Shell anime director came out and said it didn't matter [2]. His comments are worth reading:

> ...Oshii said that because the main protagonist – Major Motoko Kusanagi – is a cyborg, the question of race and whitewashing is a moot point. “What issue could there possibly be with casting her?” Oshii said. “The major is a cyborg and her physical form is an entirely assumed one. The name ‘Motoko Kusanagi’ and her current body are not her original name and body, so there is no basis for saying that an Asian actress must portray her. Even if her original body (presuming such a thing existed) were a Japanese one, that would still apply.”

Oshii added that he thought Johansson was the best possible person to play Kusanagi in the Rupert Sanders-helmed remake, which is out next weekend in the US. He also argued that actors of different backgrounds from the characters they are portraying is part and parcel of the film-making world.

”In the movies, John Wayne can play Genghis Khan, and Omar Sharif, an Arab, can play Doctor Zhivago, a Slav. It’s all just cinematic conventions,” he explained.

”If that’s not allowed, then Darth Vader probably shouldn’t speak English, either.”

[1] https://winteriscoming.net/2022/01/27/how-brandon-sanderson-...

[2] https://www.theguardian.com/film/2017/mar/24/scarlett-johans...

>Oshii added that he thought Johansson was the best possible person to play Kusanagi

And considering how bad it went, his opinion might not be that worthwhile in this endeavour.

> ...Amazon isn't rewriting his books.

That raises a kind of interesting point. They aren't rewriting his books, they are rewriting his world.

Tolkien started out with a hobby of creating languages. He then was inspired to build worlds in which those languages would live. His fiction came out of a desire to have adventures in those worlds.

I've read descriptions of Tolkien's dealings with people who wanted to adapt his published stories for film. He was quite ready to accept modifications to the stories to fit the needs of another medium, so long as the main thrust of the narrative was preserved. What would really draw his ire, though, was when people tampered with his world.

All that said, though, his writings, especially later in life, give me the impression that if it were explained to him that racial diversity was to become the hang-up for people that it has, he would have sought to modify his stories to avoid giving offense.

He took the mythology completely out of context and added his own catholic morals on top. But he created a great work of fiction in its own right.

It’s mostly hysteria. I’m enjoying it a lot more than the clunky GoT prequel series, for instance. I can’t possibly see how it could move someone to join in a one star review-bombing campaign unless they had a political agenda they weren’t being honest about.

I’m not saying you can’t have an opinion, of course. The recent Star Wars trilogy isn’t exactly an unparalleled artistic achievement. But unfortunately when the internet’s overflowing with misogynists and racists desperate to hold their crumbling cultural Maginot line, any legitimate criticism isn’t going to be heard.

>Clunky got prequels

House of the Dragon has surprisingly been great, sure you have the random teleporting character or out of character military tactic but it also shows HBO learned from their mistake and you can feel they brought back the politics and meetings and focus on characters instead of fan service and whatever made the last 4 got seasons the garbage they turned into.

But again you have to have read GRRM's work and not be a contrarian just for the sake of it to enjoy it.

Rings of power had a budget of a billion $, either there is some money laundering scheme at work that I'm unaware of, or people have just forgotten how to hire good writers and other people to make a decent movie/series.

If you gave me a billion $ today I'd just hire Peter Jackson, pay him a shit ton of money so he accepts, and give him FULL creative power over the project so it doesn't turn out like The Hobbit trilogy or That Raimi directed Dr Strange in the multiverse of madness. And if he refuses to do it then find another good director and I'm sure there are a lot of big names who would gladly accept the challenge of topping Jackson's work.

A billion $ is A LOT of money in cinema, despite you having to pay the movie theaters, marketing, etc. Amazon owns imdb so can market it themselves on 2 of the most visited websites in the world: Amazon and imdb (for movie/series watchers), and if that's not enough, they own the streaming service where they plan to put it.

People aren't saying it sucks (at least I'm not) but that it had no reason to not be great. Galadriel felt inhuman in Jackson's movies, she's supposed to be one of the fairest and mightiest elves in middle earth, I doubt she felt like that to anyone in rop.

Now after all this rant: I didn't watch rings of power, and I don't plan to, why soil a good memory and good mental mythos I have of that world? I made that mistake with the witcher, I had built up the characters in my head from the books and later the videogames, then Netflix took a huge dump on this mental model, and now whenever I think about some character (outside of Cavill and a few others who did great work) I also get the image of the new one in my head: I hope this weird rambling makes sense.

Galadriel is thousands of years younger in this show... The show does a good service to both the lore and the old movies, you can see they put a lot of care into it so dont worry. The orcs actually look like corrupted elves, which they didnt in peter jackson. Peter showed that he was done with lotr in the hobbit..

Amazon, that union busting corporation, spent a billion dollar to deface Tolkien and Variety thinks "trolls" are the problem here? See the greater picture and it's implications. And Amazon thinks they deserve a medal for being performatively "woke"? while having the most utter disdain for their employees trying to organize for better work conditions?

Rings of Power isn't suffering from trolling, it's suffering from angering tolkien fans. Every review I've seen on youtube pretty much hates it. The gist I get is that good writing has taken a backseat to woke messaging.

I've noticed in the past few years that the professional reviews on rotten tomatoes tend to skew in way different directions than user reviews. I don't think it's because the professionals are right though. I think there's a lot of group think and peer pressure.

Giving it a 1/10 score just means that person is very angry for some reason, not because they objectively evaluated the series and gave it a 1/10 rating because it's terrible on all fronts.

Giving it a 3/10 means that series needs to live up to some kind of standard that other series don't need to live up to.

If this series wouldn't be based on Tolkien and was released before anyone heard of "woke", it would at least be a 7/10. For reference, Xena is a 6.7/10.

Even a 6.7 likely has a few people giving it 1/10, a few people giving it 3/10 and a few people giving it 10/10. I have probably rated a couple of things 1/10 out of the 20 odd ratings I may have provided IMDB, but that does not make me angry, just that the particular topic (move, series, episode) somehow seemed to waste my time, but someone else may feel otherwise.

> Giving it a 3/10 means that series needs to live up to some kind of standard that other series don't need to live up to.

Whatever standard people used to give 3/10 to Xena could be used to give 1, 3 or 10. The problem is we do not know who is a genuine critic, and who is just a hater (or a complete aficionado) unless we start doing some kind of meta-analysis which is what Amazon seems to be trying to do, as long as they do it consistently.

Well, basing a series on a well known work is a tradeoff. You have an automatic audience, but they have certain expectations and if you fail to meet them the backlash is harsh. Would it be higher rated if it wasn't based on Tolkien? Probably, but vastly fewer people would care about it. End of the day you have to respect the source material.

The “woke messaging” narrative is just racists mouthing off. Ignore them.

The Tolkien fans angry about deviations from books maybe have a point. But not being one I’m really enjoying it, praying it doesn’t go down hill but so far so good.

I think it's entirely possible to be annoyed with overt obnoxious virtue signaling without being a racist, which seems to be what the critics are saying.

One reviewer pointed out that the protagonist manages to be both a Mary Sue AND a Karen. (If you're unfamiliar with the tropes -- automatically good at everything with no heroes journey to develop themselves, and wants to speak to your manager). I haven't watched it personally but yikes if that's accurate.

Woke messaging is ESG score driven agenda.

Also worth mentioning how the Tomatometer is calculated: reviewer's scales (be it some number of stars, a 1 to 10 rating, a letter grade, etc) are quantized down to being either "positive" (1) or "negative" (0), and then, they are averaged to a percentage.

One issue with this method is that middling reviews have more effect than they should. For example, if 100 reviewers all thought a movie was 51% good, the Tomatometer would read 100%. And, conversely, with just a two point difference, if they all thought it was 49%, the Tomatometer would be 0%. In both circumstances, the Tomatometer would probably not represent how the reviewers felt about the movie.

I love the first two episodes and I am looking forward to the next one. Orcs are downright terrifying compared with Peter Jackson's version. I liked the tension between the elf legions and the men whose land they occupy. It is an interesting new angle.

Am I the only one that feels this way?

It has been said a country only needs 10% of its populace to united behind a radical ideology to start a revolution. This has roughly held for the American Revolution, French Revolution, Russian Revolution. I would not be surprised if the same holds true here. An extremely vocal minority is extremely discontent with this show. The average Amazon Prime watcher meanwhile is completely oblivious to the controversy. They find the show to be somewhere between slightly below and slightly above average. The issue is that they are writing reviews at a much lesser rate than the rabble rousers.

It actually looked like a corrupted elf, which makes it that more scary and sad.

They also portrayed elves really well. Vain and ideological.

It's these lore holes that normal people dont have and they miss out on a lot of connections watching this series

Same here, I think I will enjoy the rest of this series too.

From what I observed, the negativity stems from a few different groups:

- Tolkien fans that are very critical towards derived works.

- anti-woke groups that take offence in racial and gender castings.

- People that like to see big Amazon fail.

After all the dust has settled, I think this series will do pretty well for Amazon.

Giving it a score below 6.7 basically means "This show is worse that Xena: Warrior Princess." Which it clearly isn't.

The internet crowd was already upset before the first episode aired.

Nope, I'm enjoying it! It's been a long time since I've been looking forward for a new TV show episode. It's obvious to me that they've put a lot of work and love into it, and (in spite of the hate from hardcore Tolkien fans) it's obvious that they really care about the world that Tolkien wrote.

I'm nervous because no TV show stays good forever, but I'm very excited for the rest of this season.

Idk I like it so far. I don't understand the hype about giving bad reviews for short haired elves.

This review hazard will only make them not producing more seasons. The reviewers earn nothing by this and ruin it for those who like the new approach.

While some may have point, I believe it only became a sport to give bad reviews to personally annoy Jeff.

Yeah, same here. I didn’t go in with much expectations and found it interesting and well done. I’m eagerly waiting for episode 3.

Elves are supposed to be a different species of humanoid, so making them more human-like by thinking they're supposed to be a certain way that humans are doesn't feel like the source material. It's important to adhere to that source because they are using the name for recognition. They could have just made a new fantasy story with short hair elves, and I think that would have been judged on its own.

In the source material they look pretty much just like Men. The most consistent difference seems to be their height (they’re taller than Men) and the fact that their bodies don’t really age at the same rate. There’s never any mention of them having pointy ears, or any other obvious physical characteristic.

I think there are several places across the Silmarillion and other books where it’s mentioned that some Men are mistaken for Elves. If I recall correctly, this happened with Túrin, who was given the name Adanedhel (“Man-Elf”), which he got because he was so alike to them.

The Wizards are given the appearance of old men, but the Men think that they’re elves. Gandalf’s name comes from the Old Norse for “wand/staff elf”. In-universe, in the north he was known as “The Elf of the Wand”, because Men mistook him for an Elf.

Also, I’m not sure that calling them a “different species” is accurate. They certainly can produce offspring with Men just fine.

Then i guess don't give them pointy ears. I remember reading they had long hair, regardless they are called something different and have completely different lives.

> They certainly can produce offspring with Men just fine.

While true, in fantasy all kinds of mixes are possible that result in creatures like minotaurs, half-orcs, half-demons, half-dragons, etc., and those are obviously not human.

> I remember reading they had long hair,

Every single individual has long hair? What, not a single one of them cuts their hair? I call bs

Some of the elves look like they use an electric razor. I suppose maybe they have a magic obsidian or something, but it's kind of distracting.

I mean if I had glorious elven hair, I would probably not cut it. Also short is one thing, but in RoP the elf Arondir has a military buzz cut, which raises more questions.

> Then i guess don't give them pointy ears.

Not giving them some distinguishing physical characteristic sounds like a great way to make the work more difficult to understand. Personally I don’t mind the change.

> I remember reading they had long hair, regardless they are called something different and have completely different lives.

Some of them had long hair, but presumably others don’t. I’m not aware of any part of the Legendarium which suggests all elves had long hair. That would seem like an uncharacteristic thing for Tolkien to write about them.

> While true, in fantasy all kinds of mixes are possible that result in creatures like minotaurs, half-orcs, half-demons, half-dragons, etc., and those are obviously not human.

This is not D&D. As far as I know, there’s nothing in the Legendarium suggesting there can be unions of anything other than Men and Elves, Men and Orcs, and Elves and Maiar.

A union of an Elf and Maia happened exactly once, and is a bit of an odd becuse Maiar choose the physical form they take. Melian presumably clothed herself in the body of an Elf, at least as far as mattered.

The Men and Orcs thing is unusual in two ways. One is that it’s not explicit how they were combined. Saruman did it… somehow, but the implication is that it was through his art (magic). yhe other is that, depending on the day, Tolkien considered Orcs to be anywhere between corrupted Elves/Men, fallen Maiar, or something like animals. He wasn’t ever comfortable with the ramifications of any of these different origins had, but I think that at the time of writing Lord of the Rings, the idea was that they were corrupted Elves. I’m not super sure on that though. Either way though, I can see a lot more philosophical justification for Men and Orcs being crossed than Men and dragons, balrogs, or anything else that isn’t an Elvish/Mannish being.

Anyway, this is a long way to say that just because it happens in other fantasy settings doesn’t mean it applies here. Tolkien thought about this kind of stuff a lot, and wrote extensively on it. If you’re interested in reading more about this kinda thing, I highly recommend the History of Middle Earth series of books, especially Morgoth’s Ring, which deals a lot with the nature of existence (both physical matter and things like souls) in the Legendarium.

> ...there’s nothing in the Legendarium suggesting there can be unions of anything other than Men and Elves, Men and Orcs, and Elves and Maiar.

Tolkien, Race, and Racism in Middle-earth[1] has a long section discussing this. Tolkien regarded elves, men, hobbits, dwarves, and orcs all as races of one species, who thus could interbreed.

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Tolkien-Racism-Middle-earth-Robert-St...

Thanks! That was the impression I had, but as I was writing the comment I realized I couldn’t recall any specific line that made me think that all the children were basically the same species (though I did know that Hobbits were counted among Men).

Fair points. Sure, pointy ears I guess is expected, although I think they could definitely make it work otherwise. Regarding the races, it seems there is a vagueness to the lore which means an opportunity to stay within Tolkien and still expand it with these types of questions (what it means to be human, etc). This is one way they could work with what already exists while adding something new.

The situation is more complicated than that though. The apparent vagueness is not a sign that there is wiggle room, but rather that there are existing contradictions the author didn’t manage to resolve. The reason the origins of the Orcs changed so often is because Tolkien laid down some pretty hard boundaries in his world as to what it meant to be an Elf/Man/Dwarf, what Melkor was able to do (not capable of independent creation), free will existing, Orcs always being evil, and his desire to maintain consistency with his Catholic faith regarding salvation.

But because of a vague memory about something you read sometime (which looks like it was wrong), the presence of short-haired elves breaks your immersion and damages your enjoyment of the show?

Ok, well I'm just alluding that there's probably source material around certain differences. I wouldn't mind short-haired elves, but personally I'd want some justification that makes sense within the story since it deviates from what is previously established.

> They could have just made a new fantasy story with short hair elves, and I think that would have been judged on its own.

And all of 10 people would have watched it. IP is for name recognition more than anything else. What percentage of people who watched the Peter Jackson trilogy actually read a book from the trilogy? I'd bet way less than 50%.

Jackson didn't adhere 100% to the source material either. There are length lists, including many substantial non-narrative related changes, for[1] each[2] film[3].

[1]: https://tolkiengateway.net/wiki/The_Lord_of_the_Rings:_The_F...

[2]: https://tolkiengateway.net/wiki/The_Lord_of_the_Rings:_The_T...

[3]: https://tolkiengateway.net/wiki/The_Lord_of_the_Rings:_The_R...

> What percentage of people who watched the Peter Jackson trilogy actually read a book from the trilogy?

The trilogy was great because of the writings of Tolkien. Peter Jackson did his best respecting that and telling Tolkien's story, not his own. I think that's why they were successful.

What's the point of adapting a source material if you think it should be changed to begin with? Just don't adapt it... but of course they want the massive fanbase even though they're not acknowledging why it's big in the first place.

Do you really think they won't get a massive fanbase just because of the outrage of a couple thousand anonymous strangers on the internet?

As far as I can tell, outrage over controversial changes to the IP (e.g. Game of Thrones, The Last of Us 2, Star Wars 7-9) is _positively_ correlated with popularity.

I think it's not as big as it could have been. They might still be successful in terms of views (although that's yet to be seen), but I think that might be because a lot of people are giving it a chance. We'll see how it does towards the end of the season.

I'm not saying it will or won't be popular. I'm saying the quality of the writing according to "proc0" is not going to have any impact on the situation.

Fans have completely abandoned GoT after the last season.

The Star Wars Trilogy critically flopped and only 5x their budget compared to +20x for the original trilogy.

The follow up Star Wars content didn't really work out besides the Mandalorian maybe.

The Foundation series is a complete flop as well.

> The trilogy was great because of the writings of Tolkien. Peter Jackson did his best respecting that and telling Tolkien's story, not his own. I think that's why they were successful.

Laughable statement. Where did Gandalf hit Pippin when they talked to Denethor in the books? That was in complete contradiction with the Gandalf from the books so please dont tell me this was faithful in any way.

Sauron became a floating eyeball and characters were made into caricatures of themselves (Denethor) or forced to undergo 'character growth' not present in the books (Aragorn, Faramir).

The movies are great, but by no means some sort of gold standard of faithful adaption of the source material.

> What percentage of people who watched the Peter Jackson trilogy actually read a book from the trilogy? I'd bet way less than 50%.

You optimist. Probably less than 5% :-)

Long hair was not really a defining characteristic of Tolkien elves. It seems like a pretty minor point to base a criticism on.

I find it ridiculous to refer to "source material" as if it was gospel. Amazon owns the rights for this tv show, and therefore anything they make is new source material.

Just like how in the Marvel cinematic universe Spiderman's MJ is mixed race and not a redhead, Thanos in the comics doesn't care about halving the universe's population, he wants to kill as many as he can to court the embodiment of Death, or most of the Eternals are gender and race swapped from their comic versions.

Elves are now closer to humans, and they can be black, but the old material with white, tall, long haired elves is still there for you to enjoy... is it really a big deal?

The source material is subject to criticism as well, but it should also be given credit. The reason we're even talking about it is because the books were really good and had a huge impact around the world. It's no coincidence that movies based on books tend to be great. Authors think through their world in detail which serves as a foundation for the screen adaptation. Deviating from this is risky, as directors have different skills, and more than likely they won't write a better world and dialogue than a renown author.

This was very clear with Game of Thrones with George RR not being able to finish his saga, and this being so obvious after season 4 (or 5). The quality dropped dramatically and it all crashed and burned by the last season. Had they planned it more carefully, so that George was in charge of the story until the end, I think we would have seen the most successful fantasy show of the century.

I’m honestly surprised by the writing in the show so far. I was afraid they would go the Game of Thrones Season 8 route and just dumb everything down to stupid quotes.

But so far, there’s a definite richness in the writing that I wasn’t expecting. Its not entirely Tolkienesque, but its richer than I expected a mainstream blockbuster show to be.

Yeah.

Racists (thankfully) are a small group, as are Tolkien die-hards.

Amazon was probably right not to pitch the show at either group.

So you have this entity Sauron trying to forge a tool to control and dominate all life. I think the people at Amazon are well positioned to write this narrative.

I bet Sauron can't deliver cat food to me within 4 hours.

Is Sauron against unions?

I have a hard time believing the authenticity of the critics' reviews.

The Rings of Power is a complete snoozefest. Stuff is happening, but it's a confusing mess and there are no stakes to make anything interesting. The dialogue is stilted and cringeworthy.

The show just isn't good, and Amazon knows it.

After 2 episodes we still don't know what the central conflict actually is.

It's the same as in every other mediocre fantasy with poor writing: the "Good" people against "Great Evil", which is usually manifested as some kind of deformed monsters, deep voices, nefarious deeds and ominous music.

Meanwhile, this conflict is padded with needlessly elaborate, yet meaningless side storylines and fake drama appealing to the 18-25 demographic.

To be fair, in good fantasy it can also 'good' vs 'evil'.

Say what you want about mediocre fantasy shows, but I thought The Wheel of Time, another Amazon show, was much more interesting than The Rings of Power after a mere two episodes.

I managed to read all 11,898 page across 14 books of Wheel of Time but thought the Rings of Power was much more interesting than the first couple of episodes of Wheel of Time I made it through.

I read and listen to all those books multible times plus prequal plus podcast and so on.

You made it through books 6-10 multiple times? I'm both impressed and sorry for you :|

Well yeah sure. But I often just jump in in random places and I don't might skipping over stuff.

I listen to the audiobooks to fall asleep or if I don't want to start something new. When you have like 10 books you want to listen to in theory but can't decide, listen to some Wheel of Time.

Mhhh yeah it was. But the real collapse in quality with Wheel of Time started with Episode 4 and got worse with every single episode.

In total Wheel of Time was terrible, and didn't look good. Rings at least has some good visuals.

Lets hope Rings gets better. Sadly for now it looks like both shows will end up rated button tier.

At least House of the Dragon and The Sandman didn't disappoint.

>In total Wheel of Time was terrible, and didn't look good. Rings at least has some good visuals.

It looks good so far, except for one huge problem, which I think is by far the biggest problem with the whole show so far: the lens flares.

> The Sandman didn't disappoint.

saw a few ads for it, and watched it.

Well-written, picturesque, excellent acting, and a number of fresh faces. The visuals for Gault's suit found to be better than anything I've seen thus far in the Marvel universe, which are themselves no slouches.

I think it is turning out rather excellent, and would be a great source for spin-offs too.

The Sandman was excellent.

Well I completely agree but I'm surprised you went out and said it since usually people only praise Tolkien and never judge it objectively.

Does it count as spoilers to say that it's Sauron forging the One Ring, given it's in the name of the show?

Thanks for ruining the show for me.

Apparently plenty of people here think I'm doing you a favor :-)

I’m going to really ruin things for you: eventually, in the end, the ring dies.

> I’m going to really ruin things for you: eventually, in the end, the ring dies.

Well, obviously. I mean, the goodies have access to giant eagles and all they have to do is to give the ring to one of them and drop it in Mount Doom and the whole thing is solved, right?

Mind blown

Wait, it must be that eagles are easily corrupted? Or not fully sentient, and thus the ring can control them?

The eagles could be corrupted, yeah. They're sentient and (some at least) are ancient. One of the central themes of The Lord of the Rings is that the Powers of Middle Earth are very, very tempted by the ring and must overcome the test of the ring at cost to themselves: Galadriel is doomed to travel to the West, Boromir loses his mind temporarily, Saruman becomes a tyrant and eventually his staff broken etc. The eagles are themselves a Power and if they picked a Ring Bearer up they'd be tempted to drop said bearer on the ground and fetch the ring from their dead hand, become some type of eagle tyrant.

Maybe they would, maybe they wouldn't. Big risk either way.

Anyway, this theme is why the most meek people of Middle Earth -- the Hobbits, who desire basically nothing more than a quiet life -- are the only ones in Middle Earth that could actually cart the ring into Mordor. Even then it's not a sure bet, considering Gollum.

Even the hobbits fail - Frodo claims the ring at the last minute and it is only the intervention of Providence (in the guise of Gollum) that saves the day.

Ah yes, fair point. I think it’s Gandalf that says the Hobbits are stouter than even the Wise know or something to that effect but, like you say, they aren’t impervious to the charm of the ring. Except perhaps Sam, with his abundance of hobbit-sense and love for Frodo.

Eagles are literally servants of an angel, they aren't a taxi dispatch service.

Its actually because the eagles are not just a straight up ally. Eaglea are the servants of the highest god, and that god doesn't really care about the concerns of elfes and men. Just like the ents also don't really care unless you fuck with them directly.

The eagles showing up at the end is more like an 'Oh we were so awesome and heroic that even the high god sees considers this a worthy cause'.

The eagles help Gandalf because of a personal relationship

I hate to ruin the upcoming sequel for you, but the ring ends up being coughed back up in mid-2022 by a volcano in Iceland. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EnKaZBngPu0&t=1s

Don't be ridiculous. The video narrator specifies that the gold on the basalt must have been present locally at the eruption, but as anyone can tell you who has read the Silmarillion seventeen times and memorized every single historical fact therein (while being unable to, for example, name their legislative representatives), Mount Doom is canonically in New Zealand, thus the gold in Iceland can't be from the One Ring. I give this post a 1/10, it would be a 0/10 but Jeff Bezos is censoring me.

I mean, while we're waltzing around the absurd, how meaningful do you really think the continents remain at magmatic depths? We're literally talking about the space where the bedrock melts and flows in the unknowable oceans of Sauron's marmalade, after all. I think the ring spent eons swishing around before reassembling like a blended up sea sponge before making its way back to the surface in the modern-day land of the elves (Iceland). It's only a matter of time before the trolls in the forests of Norway begin amassing their forces. As for that video's narrator, I think his name is Dave Sméagol, so I'd take his misdirections with a pinch of salt.

As a non-geologist, it seems plausible to me that gold that was somehow subsumed into the mantle in New Zealand could migrate to Iceland in the span of thousands of years. As Sméagol pointed out, though, gold coming up in the magma would be more diffuse and not create an identifiable layer on the surface of the lava rock. You're right, though, he's hardly a reliable narrator when it comes to His Precious, so that could be a misdirect. And perhaps there's some attribute of magically endowed gold that causes it to behave in unexpected ways. I searched Google Scholar, but couldn't find any peer-reviewed studies on the physical properties of magic rings.

Antipode of Iceland is not too far (relatively speaking) from New Zealand. Going the other way around it's really Spain, so if The Ring was slowly traveling through Earth's core, one could imagine that it made "wrong turn at Albuquerque" and instead surfacing in Spain it hit Iceland. QED

The joke is on you. On all of us!

Unknown to all in LOTR, while the volcano is hot, it has cooled in the thousands of years since the ring's forging. It does not completely dissolve the ring, instead, it melts yet remains together.

Fast forward 10000s of years, the area is mined, and the precious metal is used for fillings in teeth.

Surprise! It's Bezos! And he now has part of the ring of power in his lower right molar.

Now he is understood. One sales platform to rule them all, indeed!

Don't be such an ass.

Other than a few establishment scenes for the various characters and settings, that’s literally all that has been happening in the first two episodes.

And Galadriel’s troop fought a snow troll. We have Gil-Galad sending a troublesome commander to Valinor. Elrond used a contest with a dwarf prince as a start on an alliance between elves and dwarves. Orcs are tunneling below human villages to kidnap the inhabitants and Proto-hobbits are helping a man who fell from the sky.

Really nothing, I guess. /s

Galadriel is searching for Sauron, whom she believes is still hiding and plotting. Her entire plot is about everyone telling her the threat is gone but she (and the viewers) clearly see that’s not the case.

Elrond is trying to recruit the dwarves to help build the forge to create the rings.

The comet guy I’ll grant you is the show’s one mystery, granted, but I have a feeling he’s going to have something to do with the reemergence of Sauron and the creation of the rings.

Or he is Gandalf.

That would be my guess

Breaks continuity with the official timeline, as Gandalf doesn't come to middle earth until thousands of years later. But with the hints they dropped (e.g. the names he mutters and the speaking to insects), I don't see who else it could be. And bringing Gandalf in early for this series would be a good change imho. It would balance out the cast of characters and be an interesting plot development.

Per Tolkien's later writing, the blue wizards arrived during the 2nd age to oppose Sauron in the East, but as far as I know they aren't mentioned directly in the material Amazon has the rights to. Having that role filled by Gandalf might be an acceptable compromise...

Maybe it's Radagast the Brown. He always had a way with animals.

Maybe but Gandalf spoke to moths. I just can’t see them with a narrative that prioritizes Radagast over Gandalf.

Probably not, I was being glib.

Perhaps it's Saruman... it would be interesting to see some backstory on him.

Only in the PJ films. But yeah I just can't see them using Radagast over Gandalf.

That’s pretty clearly what they want people to think, so it’s either that or a big twist.

Fireflys dying is a bit ominous though.

Yeah, I interpreted most of the symbolism as being pretty ominous too. I know Gandalf is something of a fire wizard, but crashing to earth in a red comet as signs of evil are popping up everywhere? Controlling and then killing a bunch of fireflies?

His fire power comes from his great ring, but it’s not a stretch for the writers to say he had some nascent fire powers which the later ring just enhanced. They are already breaking from canon if this is Gandalf. The death of the fireflies could be an accident. He doesn’t control his power well yet.

I don’t want to over analyze though as they are obviously trying to be ambiguous for suspense.

Galadriel dispatches a snow troll isnt story, its just a random 1min action scene that has no impact on anything.

Also that was a really dumb scene in so many ways.

Gil-Galad shouldnt really have the power to just send people away. The just invented some lore to get characters where they want them.

Even outside that, a character that shows up for 2 scenes and make one vagly interedting incredibly cryptic remark isn't exactly a barn burner.

Ok, Orcs still exists, amazing who would have thought. And a random person fell from the sky that is a total mystery and unconnected to anything so far.

So yeah its not much for 2h+ of runtime. Not sure wht you added ' /s'.

That seems like plenty for 2 episodes in spite of your dismissal of each event. This is a series not a movie. I wouldn’t want it to follow the frantic pacing of a movie where they have to compact and discard so much to fit into a short runtime.

Compare it to the first to episodes of Game of Thrones, House of Dragon, Breaking Bad, Firefly or any number other good shows.

Its also not really a good slow burn either. If you want to see that done expertly check out True Detective Season 1. That story draws you in.

And this episodes were very long and all the story lines are slow.

- A Story: Galadriel wanders around without doing much in the first episodes and swims around not doing much in the second episode. She has basically 1 expression, her motivation is the most basic revenge story plot ever and its totally clear that she is right and everybody else is dumb. The scene of going to Valinor standing on boat in full armor looked dumb and it was totally clear she would not go, but I guess show runners wanted to drop a couple million on special effect.

- B Story: Hartfoots mostly slice of life and some interaction with a mysterious wizard that amount to nothing so far. Kind of cute but not interesting and totally different tone then everything else. Including with slap stick humor.

- C Story: Basic Elf-Human love story with neither of the characters being very interesting and they have little chemistry. Also evil is rising, but I don't really care about those characters so I don't really care, for now its just random orcs. Nothing to connect to, no large conflict or the other characters. This is even worse then the love-story the added to the hobbit.

- D Story: Elron goes to the dwarfs and we get lots of exposition about (mostly nonsensical) backstory that is required for the current plot to make sense and some character setups for the dwarfs. Honestly maybe the most interesting part of the first 2 episodes, but not actually that interesting.

The tournament/birth sequence in the first episode of House of Dragon had more interesting character moments, character development, story progression then all of the Rings of Power had in the first 2h.

Or compare it with the story that happen in the first 2h of Lord of the Rings (~10h) total vs Rings of Power (10h).

In hindsight, it is amazing how much happens in the first episode of Game of Thrones and Breaking Bad. I recently rewatched both, and it felt like watching half a season.

My point was that more than establishment scenes have happened and it is only two episodes.

They usually happen early.

I watched the first two episodes yesterday and basically nothing happened yet.

I really can’t understand how people can yet have good or bad opinions or how they can say it isn’t good.

It’s been 2hrs 12mins of runtime and “basically nothing happened yet”.

That’s a pretty strong review itself.

To be fair, some series just start off like that. The Expanse felt like a slow start too, but after episode 4, everything starts paying off and the first 3 seasons were (imo) some of the best Scifi on television.

That begin said, I haven't watched any RoP, the "nothing" could be complete fluff because the story is too thin.

I love the expanse but the first few episodes were slow and a little confusing. This is more a problem with the story writing. However, the acting, visuals, and physics were fantastic and the show quickly corrected the story telling.

Amazon seems like it would rather hide reviews than fix the story telling. I couldn’t finish episode 1 without falling asleep

The Expanse is different. Different premise, rules, and stakes compared to other sci-fi on screen. It’s complex. Easing us into the story could have taken a whole season.

Instead, they dumped as much of the setting as possible into those first few episodes. We learn so much about the players, cultures, technologies, physics, histories, economies, even languages, etc. It’s exhausting. So much detail! Go back and watch. But then when the Donnager battle hits, you get it, and the payoff is huge.

I don’t think the writing is bad. I think they had to rush the setting-onboarding to get to the good parts of the story, to create excitement, to better their chances of justifying additional seasons, all within the constraints of their budget. I think the writing is excellent in hindsight.

Exactly. It was a lot to take in in the first few episodes. The alternative would have been an extra season or two, and probably would have been boring.

I always have to advise people, when I recommend The Expanse to them, to make sure to sit through the first 3-4 episodes even if they don't feel like they're really getting hooked. By the time they get to episode 4, they're hooked.

I found the Expanse great from the start. I don't think I'll be watching this series at all based on what I've read in the comments here. I've already read the books and I just don't think they'll be able to do it better.

I think you have to get to episode 4 (the attack on the Donniger) before The Expanse really starts taking off. I was hooked on the first episode, but that's because I'm a sucker for hard sci-fi and I like Noir (Miller's storyline). Most people don't get the show until episode 4.

Rings of Power is so far turning into an interesting show. I would say give it a shot. The second episode is definitely better than the first. Hopefully it will improve from here.

Well for a thing that is supposed to last a whole season (and maybe more) it’s fine to spend one or two episodes setting the scene and introducing characters

In 2 episodes…

  They’ve established the backstory.
  There is already a conflict within the elves.
  Galadriel meets a human who seems like he will be important.
  Elrond has a contest with a dwarf as a negotiation tactic.
  Orcs are now tunneling under villages to steal the human inhabitants.
  We meet proto-hobbits and a man who fell from the sky.

So… basically nothing happened?

Not sure why you’re being downvoted. You laid out exactly what happened, which is a lot more than nothing.

I mean my problem is that too much is happening,

That would be my main worry that it starts splintering off too much. Maybe they’ll merge or kill off some of the storylines. The hobbit and the elf outpost seem like plot devices that might go away to keep it a bit more focused.

My biggest problem with it so far is the overall stylistic look and feel. It's like someone is trying to recreate Ted Nasmith's epic paintings with living people and CGI, and the result just looks awkward rather than epic.

Same thing about the dialogs: the "epic prose" style would work on paper, but not so much in a live action movie.

Yes. I think they doubled down too much on certain aspects of the Peter Jackson aesthetic, which was already a departure from The Hobbit / Lord of the Rings.

Confusing? We get introduced to the main villain, we learn how the elves came to middle-earth, and we setup the story for how Galadriel will get a second chance for vengeance while Elrond is setup to unite the Elves and Dwarves in a common goal. I'm enjoying it so far, and it's certainly not confusing.

I was confused why the antagonist was the same as LotR, why there were hobbits (they were an obscure race in The Hobbit), and whether this story was supposed to be continuous with the existing Lord of the Rings. These are just a few examples, but while I was watching many details didn't add up to me.

Those don't seem confusing to me considering LotR shows Elrond facing off against Sauron in the Second Age and Hobbits were never indicated to not exist in the Second Age (why would you think that?). They tell you right off the bat that this is well before LotR, so I don't know why you're making these strange assumptions.

That “sink or float” metaphor was clumsily written and reminded me of someone wanting to convey something important, but didn’t know how or what to say. I’ve only watched one episode, but that episode was not good.

In contrast House of the Dragon is better written, equally gorgeous, and is far more interesting. At least it is 3 episodes in compared to the 1 RoP I’ve seen.

I watched the first episode of House of Dragons passively in the background while doing work, but it kept catching my attention. I watched it again in the background, and other parts of it kept catching my attention.

By episode three, it had my devoted attention. This is definitely a great show.

fwiw, to convey that not everyone on either side is a bot, i can barely get through an episode of HOTD despite it's visual appeal while i wasn't even tempted to look at my phone during ROP.

HOTD, to me, lacks even one compelling, relatable, or likable character and has a boring story that feels as though is lacks any weight.

maybe it's because i just rewatched all of GOT thrones though and it's been a few years since i watched any of the Peter Jackson films. (and even longer since i read the books from both authors)

I would suggest watching the second episode. It gets better. I think the first two episodes should have just been one long episode. The first felt like it didn't go anywhere, and then the second pulled it together.

It has a 71% on metacritic.

That's in line with a mediocre Marvel movie.

Why is it so hard to believe the reviews?

How does it even rich 70 when it deserves a much lower rating? The scale goes from 0 to 100 not from 70 to 100.

Maybe your subjective opinion is different than other people's subjective opinions?

In fairness, mediocre marvel movie is absolute bottom of barrel.

For comparison, The Room got a 9. Maybe metacritic scores follow a bathtub curve with "worst possible" sitting somewhere in the middle?

Distribution of grades is rarely even, and I'd guess that if you looked at the median grade on Rotten Tomatoes is would be much closer to 70 than 50. Things less than 50 are usually "very horrible".

> I have a hard time believing the authenticity of the critics' reviews.

It's sitting in the 70s in other review aggregators, so I think it's okay.

It's worth also considering that many critics are not reviewing this with Peter Jackson's LotR trilogy in mind, but rather with the exceedingly mediocre The Hobbit trilogy.

The Maple Films edit version of The Hobbit was a very good movie.

What this whole stupid controversy is emphasizing to me is how many people are living in a post-subjectivity world.

I've enjoyed this show more than any other I've watched recently. I like basically every actor. I've really appreciated the attention to detail in the world. The dialog was awkward at first but after I acclimatized to the style I actually kinda like it—it's quirky, but consistently so.

It turns out, people like and dislike different things! But both sides of this ragefest are in all seriousness accusing the other of not existing because no one could possibly have a different opinion. It's weird.

> Amazon has introduced a new weapon in the battle against internet trolls: delays.

What a bunch of BS. Their product was received very negatively by the users and they would rather call them "trolls" than admit they screwed up.

That's the thing tho, was it received very negatively? No. It was not. The general consensus is that it's an ok show so far, a 6/7 out of 10. But there's a bunch of people mass bombing the show with 1/10. How is that fair?

On the other hand you also have those trying to tip the scales by giving it a 10/10 which is also very wrong.

Unwinnable scenario for Amazon (or any content producer in any medium). Only way to win is by not playing it or changing the rules. Have to Kobayashi Maru the user reviews.

> The general consensus is that it's an ok show so far, a 6/7 out of 10.

That's only the "general consensus" after you exclude people who disagree, using dehumanizing language to justify the invalidation of their opinions.

> But there's a bunch of people mass bombing the show with 1/10. How is that fair?

One person, one vote. That's as fair as it gets.

my ideal for reviews are: one person one vote, the voter actually watched the content (or owns the product etc), and voters have a relatively similar standard for what value corresponds to each possible rating.

however, i have no faith that any of these ideals are met for reviews on any platform. by and large this is why i don't pay attention to any reviews but it's really hard, or in the case of physical things, expensive to take this approach.

just like any platform that has to deal with spam it can be dangerous for them to release information about what they do to combat spam because it can enable to people trying to spam. so there's a bit of a stalemate where the user lacks a justification for having faith in the reviews

as far as most platforms, i'd be shocked if they done anything more than a captcha or ip restrictions, and you can just pay ~$1 for 1000 solved captchas and about the same cost again for proxies

> the voter actually watched the content (or owns the product etc)

How much of a bad show does a viewer have to subject themselves to before their review is allowed to count? If watching 30 minutes then tapping out doesn't count, then you're artificially skewing the reviews towards those who like it.

Also, Amazon is promoting the popularity of the show by saying 25 million people "sampled" it. Using the word "sampled" leads me to believe they're counting people who only watched a portion of it, perhaps only a few minutes. To count those people as having viewed it, but to invalidate reviews from such people, seems like Amazon is trying to have their cake and eat it too.

6/10 is a failure in this case.

Couldn't most of the backlash (the legitimate parts) be addressed by changing the title of the show to LOTR fanfic: Rings of Power?

It was the same with most recent Star Treks too, including all of the new movies. They may as well have been titled “Generic Sci Fi Movie” and “Generic Sci Fi TV Show”

Strange New Worlds is the only Star Trek in a long, long time that has been worthy of the name Star Trek.

But well known and deeply loved IPs sell, so we get a ton of generic media with the name slapped on it.

it's just not considered half decent fanfic, is the main issue.

I found the first episode very long drawn and boring. Wanted to leave a review but Amazon told me: "please watch till the end to leave a review". Not going to torture myself just to leave a review.

So that's a novel way to keep the reviews artificially high, I guess.

Vertical integration, where the firm that controls the marketplace platform is also a vendor on their own platform, should be unlawful.

You don’t think someone should be able to make content and distribute it?

Amazon owns IMDB, which reportedly deleted a bunch of negative reviews[1] a few days ago. This could be what he's talking about?

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32700019

Would we really think of IMDB as a market place?

I'd say that's more like a big corporation buying a newspaper and then preventing it from publishing anything unflattering.

Not if they also control a marketplace where they have the opportunity to favor their own products over competitors. That is a perversion of capitalism. The marketplace should be run by an independent firm without a conflict of interest.

> That is a perversion of capitalism.

In what sense? Setting up a store to sell our own product seems to be pretty consistent with capitalism.

> Not if they also control a marketplace

And which market place does Amazon control here? They made a show. They put it on Prime.

They control IMDB (via direct ownership).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IMDb

IMDB is not a "marketplace". They don't sell anything, except subscriptions to IMBOpro.

You seem deeply confused about this entire topic.

Amazon Prime Video should actually be run by an "independent firm"? Who? Who pays for that? Who ensures they are impartial? Why?

Ludicrous.

Until very recently (which is news even to me), the movie studios couldn't own the distribution channel - I.E., the theaters

Here is the original ruling [0], while apparently that changed in 2020 [1]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Paramount_Pic....

[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/tomnunan/2020/08/07/judge-decre...

Reviews ultimately don’t matter. What matters is whether people love the show and whether Amazon is able to attract new customers to sign up to Prime (or increase likelihood that Prime customers stay subscribed, or buys stuff, whether LOTR merch or other stuff).

I agree, they actually don't.

Amazon cancelled the expanse, a series with very good reviews and praise sadly it didn't create new prime members...

In the not to distant past, movie studios were not allowed to own movie theatres. The FTC was very wary of large companies using vertical integration to take over the market and keep movies from smaller companies from being shown.

What you're seeing here is the future. Amazon produces the movies, finances the movies, distributes the movies, controls how they're reviewed (they also own IMDB).

Oligarchs never trust what they don't own.

I didn't know the Paramount decree was ended, but I guess it was put in a two year sunset period two years ago so it is indeed gone. That's a shame, it's hilarious that the FTC doesn't think the studios could bring back the old studio system. Doing that might be the only thing that'll save mainstream theatres from Blockbuster's fate tbh.

We really desperately need a similar ruling for streaming services though.

Delaying the effect of human actions seems like a great idea in general. Humans tend to get angry and do/write something they would either regret later or something that hurts others.

Even if the reviews aren't verified, simply confirming with the poster a few days later whether they want to make changes before making it public may reduce the number of rash remarks.

Shouldn't this rule applying to everything instead of just the amazon one's ?

Yes, as much as practically possible. For instance, in an online forum, days long delays would be impractical, but maybe 10-20 minutes.

This seems to be the intended effect of the Presidency and the Supreme Court in the United States. Congress hastily shoehorns a bill to vote, the President has a chance to veto it. If a truly unworthy law makes it so far as to be executed into law, the people have the chance to bring a lawsuit wherein the Supreme Court can strike the whole thing down on a reasonable constitutional basis. Perhaps it would be wise for the United States government to start bankrolling Tolkien reboots?

Let's stop pretending it's about the hair or the color. It's about clumsily shoving some politics down everyone's throats.

When Peter Jackson made some changes it didn't cause this response because it wasn't politics-shoving, and it wasn't clumsy. Maybe you liked it, maybe you didn't, but it was easy to engage with it at the level of art or entertainment.

When Amazon makes this show, it's so appallingly obvious that the number one requirement is on the politics level that people respond at that level. These are not artistic changes. This is propaganda. So it gets treated as such.

Can you be more specific? I’m a fan of the books and I quite enjoyed these first episodes. I didn’t notice obvious politic agenda and diversity was handled quite gracefully (i.e. not noticeable if you are not looking for it), nothing clashing with the spirit of the books and preventing the enjoyment for me.

> clumsily shoving some politics down everyone's throats

I assume it is the presence of dark-skinned characters which you call politics-showing? If the movies had retained Tolkiens description of half-orcs as having squint-eyes, would you have considered it completely un-political?

Have you even watched the show? I expected after all of the outrage to find something political in it, and it's just not there as far as I can tell. Is there anything truly political besides black people and Galadriel as a warrior? Any dialog you found offensive?

What I expected based on all the cries of politics was something like the Star Wars prequel trilogy, where every 20 minutes or so someone would say something that was obviously a jab at a modern political party. I'm just not seeing that at all.

All they have to do is wait until the sun comes up and all the trolls will just turn to stone.

This doesn't change anyone's mind, and is also evidence that they're not interested in listening to feedback. They have this opportunity to make the show because of the success of the source material and movies they think is so problematic.

When you put a halt to all reviews it's because you are afraid of bad reviews. And this "but no, these bad reviews are insincere" stuff is pure malarkey. I know it, you know it, my cat knows it.

Amazon isn't fooling anybody.

Hopefully Streisand effect will be strong and it backfires on Amazon

Streisand here would mean more people watch it, since the negative backlash from censorship creates more publicity.

Just like awful superhero movies these things don't die for simply for being bad. Even I watched it just to see how much they messed it up (I thought it was merely okay, not awful). The test will be whether it maintains momentum with the 4th and 5th episode. That's usually where big shows die.

That would depend on the veracity of the negative reviews, many of which offer no substance apart from, “it’s too woke and not canon!”

I don’t think the show is incredible, but visually the show is pretty awesome, and I enjoy the story enough to continue watching so far.

I simply don’t understand why that cannot possibly be a legitimate review, albeit one you strongly disagree with and one I think is bluntly put.

I don't like the idea of pausing / censoring reviews in general, but its understandable given the hate brigading thats going on with this show in particular. Hopefully they stick to no censorship of reviews/user ratings after the "pause" period but who knows. Personally I found the show to be pretty good, I was pleasantly surprised.

In the last few days Amazon was removing negative reviews from IMDB (owned by Amazon), they are not stopping with this move

Well in that case...it sounds like Amazon is abusing their position in the market and ought to be broken up into several smaller companies :)

> In the case of “A League of Their Own,” it appears to have worked: To date, the show has an average 4.3 out of 5 star rating on Prime Video, with 80% of users rating the show with five stars and 14% with one star.

Great, now just delete those 14% and the result will be even better and closer to what the audience is supposed to think.

Hot take: maybe the writers wanted to show their loyalty to Tolkien by making the first couple of chapters really boring

Best comment ever, lol ;)

Too little singing and spending an hour describing a tree.

This is not a bad Tolkien show, it's just a bad show. Terrible writing, as in seriously, show this thing in schools to illustrate how to not tell a story and write dialogues.

Nobody would care about this thing if it didn't have the LOTR name.

This is not a Tolkien show. This is a show by Amazon wearing Tolkien's world as a skinsuit. The same thing happened to Star Wars. The viewership of this show is still riding on the name recognition, but as soon as it flops, people will stop watching more. Give it 5 years, and the original Peter Jackson trilogy videos will no longer be culturally relevant because nobody wants LoTR content any more, while record amounts of it continue to get produced.

> Give it 5 years, and the original Peter Jackson trilogy videos will no longer be culturally relevant because nobody wants LoTR content any more, while record amounts of it continue to get produced.

hehe this reminded me how after matrix 2 and 3 I had forgotten how good the original matrix was. Took me 10 years to rediscover it.

xkcd comic: https://xkcd.com/566/

It's pretty telling that they're so afraid of reviews that they have to intervene this hard to keep their score above water.

The first time they've been this concerned about fake reviews and they just happen to be all the negative ones.

Well, it's the most expensive television program in history on a cost-per-minute basis, it is critical for them that it looks like a success.

From the article:

> Amazon introduced the policy earlier this summer, starting with its reboot of A League of Their Own, which contended with review bombers who opposed the show’s political stance.

Amazon developed that series too? That only supports my point, regardless if it's the first time they did it.

Turns out people don't like it when you take something not about being woke, and make it about being woke. Amazon should hurry up and learn their lesson. If they want a show about being gay they should just make one, don't rewrite an existing story to shoehorn it, and if you want black and brown fantasy characters, don't appropriate something cobbled out of anglo-saxon mythology to do it.

Metaverse: when you have to fight internet trolls instead of real trolls.

I hope they use the same standard for any review giving high score. Let's say anything over 6. As surely those are product of bot farms or dishonest culture warriors too.

Casting choices and politics aside, the intro was weak, the story lacked grip and the characters were all unlikable. It doesn't even feel like Tolkien. As a huge Tolkein fan, it feels like yet another betrayal (just like The Hobbit movies). I'll give it the benefit of doubt for another episode or two, and if it fails to improve I'll give up.

> (just like The Hobbit movies)

This is a good point. Everyone is saying people just expected Peter Jackson movies and got disappoint... but the Hobbit series was PJ and had a significant amount of negative reviews. Especially the further it got into the series, particularly by diehards.

For ex: this imdb page has plenty of 1 and 10s, just like the new show but you can't simply dismiss it all as culture war nonsense like people are trying to do this time around

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2310332/reviews?ref_=tt_urv

Even Peter Jackson can't make a worthy successor to the Peter Jackson LotR movies. If he can't pull it off, how can anyone else be expected to achieve that level of greatness?

Maybe people should just re-adjust their expectations and stop expecting a cinematic masterpiece. We got lucky with LotR, and honestly, FotR because the successor movies in that trilogy (particularly the last one) weren't as good as the first.

It was going to be a flop from the start, proclaimed by many that such a huge budget would not lead to success. The executives signing off on this will claim this as a huge project they led as usual, meetings will be had brushing losses under the rug, tweaking metrics. The world will move on. Cannot help thinking that these execs are king makers, choosing which few individuals to crown with their follies.

What evidence do you have of what Amazon executives did?

So basically they are openly admitting to censoring their user reviews on cultural/political grounds. Cool to know

Why does Amazon care about the reviews? Just seems like they have more to lose with this extraordinary freeze.

Just have to wonder if the move isn't ego driven instead of business driven.

But I also think Bezos can do whatever he wants on his website. Including undermining users' trust.

It's bad PR to have a review bomb on a show with a billion dollar budget. A review bomb also discourages people looking for something new to watch. Amazon is in the unique position of having a near monopoly on quantifiable reviews with their internal system. It's in the best interest of the company to buffer the review bombing by any means, so long as the buffering doesn't induce negative PR in itself.

This show is a steaming pile of crap. It's low effort, low IQ political propaganda fan fiction in Tolkien's universe. Lead characters are Mary Sues and the rest of the cast serve as useful idiots. Nothing in the storyline makes any sense, or has any coherence. This very same show would have bombed immediately and hardly been mentioned if it were in a new universe.

Can't believe Tolkien's heirs sold out for that kind of trash. Evil cannot create anything on its own, it can only corrupt. JRR was right about that.

User reviews is a very tricky subject, it's a shame but there's really no way to win, be it on IMDB, Metacritic, Steam, etc. User reviews are always a pain and more often than not they're abused by either side of the scale, be it the mass bombing of 1/10 or the bots that give 10/10.

Companies want to use reviews to promote the product, people feel the only way their voice is heard is by mass bombing. You look at Rings of Power and you see tons of 10s and tons of 1s. But the show is just ok, it's neither of those scores. but both sides are trying to misuse the system.

Honestly I wish we'd just abolish user reviews altogether.

No one had to pause reviews for Top Gun.

Not being a huge LoTR fan, I watched RoP after the review hoohah first came up.

It’s pretty bad but I’ll watch the rest. The Fantasy Irish Gypsies of Colour was a bit much though; tough to watch.

My impression was that although the acting felt a bit amateurish it was still an enjoyable experience and I'm looking forwards to next episodes.

I have wanted the trilogy, many times, including the extended edition and I've really loved it.

While I'm not a fan of woke stuff in media, the first episode seemed okay, even though there was a black elf and such. The PC stuff did ruin Dr. Who for me though but I'm still hoping that I'll one day return, because I really loved that show.

Kind of hard to say that a black elf signifies wokeness isn't it?

Didn’t you know? There are two types of actor. White male and political.

> An elf is a type of humanoid supernatural being in Germanic mythology

> The word elf is found throughout the Germanic languages and seems originally to have meant 'white being.

Lmfao how is a black elf not woke https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elf

Norse mythology have dark/black elfs (Svartálfar).

I'm amazed at how much "content" people will devour inside their fandoms these days. Whether it's Marvel, Star Wars, Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings, etc... seems like people will watch like 15 movies of content and happily lap up more. I don't have the time for too much content these days with several young children but when I do get more time I hope there's more interesting stuff to watch.

The Lord of the Rings is obviously a masterpiece of literature. I've not seen the new show, but it seems obvious that any new story would likely be far inferior - simply as a matter of chance, most stories aren't at the level of The Lord of the Rings. The new show could be pretty good and would still look bad in contrast to the originals. Just seems like a cost of not being original.

This is a good point: There have been many flopped reboots of Shakespeare, the Bible, Mark Twain. They mostly arose before they could be instantly criticized en masse the day of their release with the Web. We only remember the good ones for a reason.

Even The Hobbit, which should've had a much easier time piggybacking off of the success of LOTR than ROP, struggled to recapture the magic that made LOTR great.

Isn't "brigading" and "review bombing" just pure spin? What if thousands of viewers do care enough to write reviews? worried about your "investment" ?

zero sympathy here; Tolkien reader; not watching this media at all.. zero

Because what they care about might not be the content of the show, but particular political views.

For example there was quite a vocal group when the first trailers came out and they found out that (shock) not everyone in the show is white.

These groups are often amplified (or in one case, astroturfed into existence) as part of an outrage marketing strategy:

https://switch.com.mt/outrage-marketing-how-why-what/#:~:tex....

Ghostbusters was also promoted this way.

>”For example there was quite a vocal group when the first trailers came out and they found out that (shock) not everyone in the show is white.”

These people exist, but I am extremely skeptical that this is the primary motivator for the droves of negative reviews. What major media production isn’t diverse?

This reminds me of the controversy around Ghostbusters 2016 where people claimed review bombers hated the movie because of the female cast.

I would say it is much more likely that these well-loved properties had botched adaptations and that is why so many people are raking it over the coals.

> What major media production isn’t diverse?

It’s still pretty common, especially in sitcoms and romcoms.

https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/MonochromeCastin...

Millions of people watch shows like this but only an extremely small fraction write reviews. This is why it only takes a small but vocal # of review bombers— emotionally motivated in a way the average viewer isn’t— to have a huge impact on review scores.

> What major media production isn’t diverse?

...and every major media production has people complaining about that.

Yeah but part of what happens is that there are tons of people who just don't like the show and then pretty quickly everybody that doesn't like the show is a racist by implication.

And of course that is the typical company response. Negative reviews, well its all political and racism.

But the reality is that there are also people who don't like some of the race choice in 'House of the Dragon' and that property is as big as Lord of the Rings, and yet those racist don't manage to motivate lots and lots of people to write reviews.

So when you make a good show racists are a small minority, when you have a bad show then all of a sudden all the criticism is because of racism.

House of Dragons doesn’t give reviewers with racist motivations any rhetorical leverage. They can’t hide behind arguments that it doesn’t conform to source or canon or anything like that because the original author is leading the creative process.

the original text clearly states that some of the people that are black in the show are white. It doesn't matter that the author is involved, if you are a racist why do you care that the author has been bought to conform to 'the message'.

> there are tons of people who just don't like the show and then pretty quickly everybody that doesn't like the show is a racist by implication

What do you say about people who are very vocal about how they don’t like the show but admit that they have not and will not ever watch it?

Those people are trash but again, tiny minority.

They seem to be pretty vocal, unfortunately.

The only issue I have with reviews are the ones given by people who haven't watched the show. Everyone who watches is entitled to their opinion, but simply smearing or promoting a show that you haven't even seen based on some sort of culture war position is not useful to anyone.

How exactly do you police reviews so that only people who legitimately watched a show are able to review it?

> Isn't "brigading" and "review bombing" just pure spin?

Do you think it doesn't happen? Or just that it didn't happen in this specific case?

I've read LOTR many times as well the Silmarillion, Unfinished Tales, Tolkien's letters, etc. I really recommend trying out this show. It gets the heart of Tolkien if not the exact details.

Too many people that should be fans will not watch it or will dismiss it immediately because they have a fixed idea of what it might be and cannot abide a show that deviates one iota.

The people that are claiming it is a mess because some elves have short hair are one example.

In my opinion, it gets anything but the heart of Tolkien. Some details are attempted to be kept similar to LOTR movies, but much of the themes and ideas of the legendarium are not here.

So have I and I don't recommend it to any Tolkien fan because nothing about Rings of Power actually feels like something out of Tolkiens work.

Holy heck, the diving into Silmarillion (sp?) intentions. Amazon has a series. It’s not true to subject matter. It’s been entertaining (not at the level Amazon paid). Just like the movies, liberties aren’t taken.

Good thing they deactivated reviews. Maybe it's just one of those Chinese copies of well-known existing products slipped into Amazon's warehouse to make a buck off unsuspecting customers.

It’s absolutely dreadful and I think this behavior is shameful on the part of Amazon. What’s the point of a review system if you’re going to game it. Reviews mean nothing anymore

Reviews havent been meaningful for as long as I've been alive (90's). Watch trailers, watch the show, make your own assessment, keep it to yourself, move on.

> "Watch trailers"

Trailers are not suitable replacements for reviews. They are edited and packaged to deliver hyped expectation via self-congratulatory endorsement.

Reviews are better than trailers. You could stick to reviews from news publishers if you don't trust user reviews. Here's a snippet of the Washington Post's review of Rings of Power:

"The performances are serviceable but unremarkable, while the dialogue is particularly corny and inartful... Rarely has danger felt so dull."

washingtonpost.com/tv/2022/08/31/lord-rings-tv-show-review/

Reviews are great!

How could you possibly trust that statement without watching the show yourself first? The subjective nature of entertainment means that one reviewer's opinions are not universal. This means you basically have to go find a reviewer who agrees with your opinions on average - effectively telling you what you want to hear.

How is that a useful system?

You described it pretty well—if the reviewer is good at identifying things you won’t like, then that’s useful.

> subjective

"Corny dialog" is rarely a subjective observation. It's either corny or it isn't.

The rare exception might be when the dialog is deliberately corny for stylistic reasons or some kind of self-referencing theatrics. Corny dialog is easily identified... "I've got a baaad feeling about this".

> How could you possibly trust that statement

Because the statement doesn't sit in isolation. It's from a longer professional review where the show is deconstructed and analyzed. The statements are qualified, unlike user reviews.

Of course there are subjective aspects too, but there are also strongly bonded criticisms across reviews that can't be dismissed with "subjective" counter-claims. If not universal, then near-universal qualities can be found.

Take the recent James Bond movie. Even the good reviews were noting the "woke" themes. They specifically hired a writer to help inject those themes into the movie, such as anti-toxic masculinity etc. It turns out many people don't have much love for injected woke themes forced into their fictional movies. Many people wanted escapism from 007, not a social re-education lecture or some awkward comment about current world events.

My wife and I do check IMDB ratings before watching a show, but we apply some adjustments based on the genera. If its a super hero show you can subtract 2-3. If its scary film or indie sci-fi you can add 2-3. That kind of thing.

The best "review" system I've ever come across was Netflix's DVD plan. You would rate a bunch of movies and then it would give rating estimations of other movies based on how people with similar taste to you rated them, which is exactly what I want from a review system.

The general population, groups of trolls, review bombers, people who just didn't like the same kinds of movies as you, etc. would all be irrelevant.

have you looked at amazon product reviews recently ? while this particular approach (locking reviews at the outset) may not be the best approach, i would LOVE to see companies put some more effort into combating review "fraud" either by verifying watch time or restricting reviews per ip including captcha etc etc the exact same stuff that any social media platform needs to do to combat spam because for me personally reviews on the internet have lost almost all value as they no longer represent a collection of human opinions where each person gets only one review

Will I be allowed to watch it for free for 72 hours too?

Has any content producer/review platform blocked reviews on freshly released flagship product before or is it a new thing invented by Amazon?

It's the equivalent of Karate Kid (2010), where the martial art being practiced is not even karate, but kung fu. Complete nonsense.

This is Amazon adopting their shady practice of review pumping they perfected on physical goods store to digital media.

I like the show so far. I don't mind that some people don't. Let's see what happens next.

They’ve slipped the ring on

I have no opinion on this show, but the cynical side of me says that the majority of watch time comes from the first few days and Amazon doesn't wanna put potential viewers off by negative reviews. If you combine this with the aggressive marketing they do then it's basically a ploy to get people to watch. I get it, they sunk gobs of money into this and want returns, but it does seem like they're trying to trick people into watching.

The moderation of reviews is an obvious conflict of interest but is also a massively hard problem to solve (just look at Steam reviews).

This is a good time to plug a practice I started a while back of only watching things a year or so after they release, it really lets all the positive and negative hype die down so you can get good reviews and opinions. Plus you don't need to wait for episodes to premiere each week.

It’s the Ghostbusters 2016 strategy: blame negative reactions on bigots until everyone gets the chance to see for themselves that your product is trash.

I enjoyed the 2016 ghostbusters, in particular McKinnon and Hemsworth. I can see someone involved trying to justify the lackluster economic performance.

That's fair, I was being hyperbolic. I thought I would like it, the cast is obviously great. The humor just fell flat for me.

Like so many bad movies, it had terrible direction. Just look at George Lucas's SW prequels. Having a great cast is useless if the director is bad.

i can't speak to what happened with Ghostbusters 2016 but before watching I checked the metacritic user reviews for LOTR:ROP and there was blatant "review bombing" if that's the right term, where it was so blatantly obvious that a large proportion of the 0/10 reviews were manufactured by one person. (they made the exact same points, and had ~100 users supporting that review, whereas genuine appearing reviews rating 2-8 had at most ~5 users supporting a review)

Your confidence is astounding.

yeah that's fair. i should have said "a large proportion of the 0/10 reviews i looked at" and even then i admit that there is no perfect way to determine what is and isn't a fake review.

i guess i have very little faith that any platform does any work to combat review bombing so i take a very skeptical look at anything i see. i'd also wish for more powerful user tools to automate some of the things that looked suspicious to me such as filtering the score to exclude new accounts, accounts which have only reviewed one thing, reviews that are just the exact same sentence, reviews which have tons of "helpful" reactions the moment they are posted.

Oh comeon, Ghostbusters 2016 was genuinely bad. It had an incoherent plot that went nowhere. The first episode of ROP was OK, amazing production value, a laying out of foundation, some nice fight scene. Nothing especially bad nor especially good. The vitroil against this show is so obviously manufactured.

>(just look at Steam reviews).

"Halflife 2 is a solid 8/10. I can't wait for the sequel!"

Any hints whether this will end up on disc at some point?

Good question. I'm not really too sure how this works these days. Does any Netflix/Apple/Amazon content make it to disc?

Can we just say two world about the non-stop background music that sounds like it was written an Alexa-powered symphonic orchestra stuck in the elevator

Here's a quick review from someone who is brown skinned and has read most of Tolkien's legendarily.

# I was somewhat biased against the idea of black elves before the show started and will admit that in actuality, it felt like a non issue as the show went on.

# The visuals and production values are amazing. One of the best in any TV show I have ever seen. Music, is surprisingly not memorable at all.

# the dialogs are cringe inducing. They have tried too hard to write in prose and utterly failed. You will have characters talking to each other in similies and metaphors which make no sense.

# The plot so far feels very slow and hamfisted. And at the same time, it seems to lurch randomly here and there, hoping to find some way forward. Too many Hollywood cliche decision making, lack of logic in the characters

# Harfoots are both endearing and boring at the same time. Would have been nice to cut their screentime to half as nothing happens in their story parts at all other than setting the fact that these are simple, good natured people.

# This wasn't Tolkien. This was some generic fantasy. Thats the only way to digest this work, if you have read Tolkien. It is fine to make fill in the gaps in his writing (Or appendices in this case) with your own invention. Its another to overwrite what he wrote with unhinged ideas

# One of the things which I hated in the LOTR movies is here as well - Bollywood elf physics.

# Dwarves again are Irish and exist mainly for comedic relief. Would have loved to see at least this show to give them some gravitas. They might as well have wandered from the sets of the Hobbits movies. Elves look rather old and just human. Nothing like immortal, ethereal beings they are supposed to be. Would have preferred younger actors for the role.

# Female dwarf beards? That was such a stupid controversy anyway. Even in the original writing, I read it as a funny throwaway line from JRR. I am happy that the showrunners didn't go with beards. That would have been extremely stupid to look at.

# The main character of Slay Queen is very unlikable. She is dour, humourless, everyone is ready to heap praise on her yet we only see how terrible of a leader she is. Not a fan of Galadriel. Elrond is better but the stilted dialogs and a complete lack of screen presence from the actor kills his character as well. Nori, the Harfoot, is the only one I liked so far. She is Hobbit, through and through.

# If I has to give it a rating, it would be a solid 6/10. a mediocre rating for a mediocre show. Not a terrible show by any means but not that good either. For reference, I would give Wheels of Time 5/10 - so they both are pretty close by in quality.

# Will I continue to watch it? Likely. Though, if the quality doesn't improves, I expect I will wander off to shinier things by episode 5.

> I expect I will wander off to shinier things by episode 5.

Name shinier sci-fi/fantasy things, please. I’m all out.

House of Dragons is a solid 8/10 for me so far. So thats where I am getting my fantasy fix from right now. Nothing in scifi right now. Was very intrigued by Raised by Wolves - but it went full mystery box and got cancelled.

Haven’t started HoD yet but definitely looking forward to it.

This is the mostly thoughtfully written review I've seen in a while, thanks.

I fight against the purists all of the time, and creators should be able to make whatever they want, that said, it stink when they just make something 'generic' where it's 'themed' as the source material but really isn't.

$500M in production but can't just hire some writers and people to make it at least 'true to the spirit' of the material.

I mean, they could set LOTR in Compton/Hollywood Hills if they wanted to and it might still work (!) but when it's 'generic' it's really sad.

In other news, IMDB (which Amazon owns it seems) has a strange bug (certainly an accident and coincidence /s) that you can't see any of the written reviews of Rings of Power that are under 6 stars. And yet, House of the Dragon works just fine in that department. How very odd.

iMDB said they deleted all negative reviews. That was yesterday. Today they announced the ban on all new reviews.

https://old.reddit.com/r/lotr/comments/x46870/imdb_have_dele...

It's a feature not a bug.

https://www.metacritic.com/tv/the-lord-of-the-rings-the-ring...

I haven't trusted IMDB for years. Reviews certainly aren't everything; "bad" art can still be loveable to some, but I'm at the point where I just avoid anything attached to a preexisting franchise; lest I become enveloped by cynicism.

HBO (Discovery+?) should sue and claim damages for trust-related preferential treatment.

This is clearly an instance of a multi-industry-spanning giant preferring its own content. They're giving it away for free / as a loss leader, and yet they were able to spend enormous institutional capital on it.

How can any production company compete?

This is overwhelmingly monopolistic.

> “The Rings of Power” has been fending off trolls for months, especially ones who take issue with the decision to cast actors of color as elves, dwarves, harfoots and other folk of Tolkien’s fictional Middle-earth.

This article feels a bit quick to write off the negative reviews as being from racist “trolls”. A quick look of reviews on Rotten Tomatoes [1] shows a lot of negative reviews that seem legitimate to me.

I personally enjoyed the first two episodes, but the show is far from perfect.

[1] https://www.rottentomatoes.com/tv/the_lord_of_the_rings_the_...

It doesn't read as sole attribution, but rather a description of some trolls

Fair point. But that’s the only justification given in the article for the negative reviews, which I think gives the impression that the bulk of negative reviews are coming from said trolls. I think it would have been worthwhile to at least mention some of the legitimate criticism the show has received (pacing, dialogue, straying from Tolkien in other ways, one-dimensional characters, etc.)

fwiw i found that a large proportion of the metacritic user reviews i looked at the night it come out appeared to be fake, not all containing racist/sexist content, and more seemed to take a "tolkein would be rolling in his grave" slant

it was a fun problem to consider though, how to evaluate whether a review is fake or not. obviously the most powerful tools would be ip logging or browser fingerprinting or requiring other user verification but absent that i wonder what approaches review verification services take based on the content alone. i use some plugin for amazon reviews that i think looks for similar terms but it seems like it can sometimes be overzealous when products are very simple so many reviews seem similar when they might be from unique people

There seem to be three types of review on there.

1. Hur hur, rubbish. 1 star (There are seriously reviews like that)

2. This isn't Lord of the Rings. 1 star

3. I really loved how they took that piece from the Silmarillion and explored the concept. 5 star

The people giving it low ratings don't appear to know the source materials. Disclaimer - I have not yet seen it so I am witholding judgement, but the reviews are embarrassing.

Most reviews I read noted the terrible writing and at best mediocre acting from several of the main characters.

On a personal level i don't care much if it's true to the source material, I haven't read it. Nor do I care that there are PoC in it. I do care that it's just at best a 6/10 (maybe a charitable 7?), which hurts based on the potential it had.

Amazon doesn't have rights to Silmarillion, though, so they can't take anything from there.

I love this show so much. I'm reading some criticisms from tolkien purists on rings of power. My thought is: the details are changed from the silmarillion but there is so much love for the work in this show. A lot of respect for the feeling and themes of the source material Ex. How some things are meant to be by a higher power in Arda.

If you havnt read the books - believe me, this plot is going exciting places.

Highly recommend!

I agree. Really enjoyed watching the first two episodes. Was a little frustrated that the next episode wasn’t ready to watch. Most shows, I’m fine waiting.

Yes, there are changes from the Silmarillion. How could there not be. That is a massive book written more as a reference for Tolkien than as a single cohesive narrative. It’s not the kind of writing that would translate directly to video. It needs some translation. I got out my 1977 edition to peruse after the shows, but am not surprised if there are differences.

Also, yes, there are some dark skinned people in this new work. Big deal. If that kind of thing “takes you out of the story” then perhaps you should ask yourself why that is.

FWIW The show is based on the appendices of Lord of the Rings and not the Silmarillion, which they don’t have the rights for and have to avoid infringing upon.

Thanks. I’m mainly going over the maps and looking up names to remind myself. Plus it’s been a while since I revisited this book.

> Also, yes, there are some dark skinned people in this new work.

I’ve never understood why people get so worked up about stuff like this.

Nothing changes within the narrative itself. In-show characters don’t acknowledge the character’s newfound darker skin tone. The character stays true to the original vision - except that their skin is darker.

I would be outraged if Dev Patel played an English knight and then was shown eating Indian food or wearing Indian clothes. That’s breaking the consistency of the narrative and the authenticity of its world.

But Dev Patel simply plays an Englishman - with English habits and speech. Nothing within the world is changed to match the actor’s skin color or heritage. Rather, the actor’s skin color blends into the narrative’s world.

Because it breaks with how we always imagined Tolkien's world to look.

time to expand your imagination

To what end? For the sake of telling a good story?

People will say that its for “diversity”, but as a brown person, including black/brown actors really does nothing for me. As I said, these are not “brown” people - they’re brown actors playing white characters. Except for their skin color, they have nothing in common with me.

I find it mildly offensive when they reduce my identity to the color my skin. My identity is far richer and includes everything from food and clothing to customs and traditions.

An Indian actor playing an Egnlishman with English customs and traditions does nothing for me. It would take an Indian actor playing an Indian man for me to take this “diversity” seriously. Of course, that would mean creating entirely new narratives and stories, which, of course, Hollywood can’t and won’t do.

So we get brown and black actors shoehorned into pretending to be white - the lowest common denominator of “diversity”.

Who's "we"?

>Also, yes, there are some dark skinned people in this new work. Big deal. If that kind of thing “takes you out of the story” then perhaps you should ask yourself why that is.

The dark skinned people are fine. I especially like the diverse proto-hobbits.

The thing I really, really hate, that takes me out of the story, is the lens flares.

> The thing I really, really hate, that takes me out of the story, is the lens flares.

What, have you forgotten the tale of the ancient cinematographers of the elves preferring it for its authenticity, even going so far as to commission elven spell-smiths to add it in their visions?

Yeah, changing the details is fine. Tolkien wrote in his letters, "I would draw some of the great tales in fullness, and leave many only placed in the scheme, and sketched. The cycles should be linked to a majestic whole, and yet leave scope for other minds and hands, wielding paint and music and drama." We're getting work from other minds and hands now. It's normal for a tale to change in the retelling. Given Tolkien never stopped revising and retconning his own work—the Lord of the Rings itself starts with a major retcon to the Hobbit—there's no single source of truth anyway. Points of difference are often interesting to discuss, but their mere existence is not automatically a bad thing.

I'm not sure who it was, the director, producer, somebody, who gave an interview fairly recently in which they stated one of the central themes was "how far into evil will you go to do good?" Given that that is diametrically opposed to the central theme of Tolkien's work, which is that it is worth not using/doing evil in order to fight evil even though it is much harder and requires greater sacrifice, I elected not to view this show.

Perhaps after it is done someone will say to me "oh it wasn't like that at all" and I will enjoy it then.

It’s possible to tell two stories in the same fictional world with opposing themes.

Tolkien once wrote:

> You can make the Ring into an allegory of our own time, if you like: an allegory of the inevitable fate that waits for all attempts to defeat evil power by power.

If these writers are using Tolkien's name without respecting his beliefs, even Tolkien might have given the show a bad review.

Of course that's just speculation, but only a rare storyteller can tell an epic tale that isn't ultimately resolved by superior force. If this show can remain faithful to Tolkien's vision, I'll be very impressed.

What do you see as not respecting Tolkien’s name? The quote was "how far into evil will you go to do good?". that is a question, not an admonition. It sounds like they may explore that. If so, it would not be unreasonable to end up with the same “do no evil” answer as Tolkien.

Why should we give a bad review based on insufficient evidence?

A also think they are not directly related. I would think Tolkien is talking about Authoritarian Power of governments. i.e. don't vote Fascists into power.

When I hear how far into evil will somebody go, I think of an individuals choices to do evil for a perceived the greater good.

Kind of related, but not quite the same.

I don't agree, I think Tolkien was also talking about individual choices. Remember this bit?

> “What a pity Bilbo did not stab the vile creature, when he had a chance!

> Pity? It was Pity that stayed his hand. Pity, and Mercy: not to strike without need.

> I do not feel any pity for Gollum. He deserves death.

> Deserves death! I daresay he does. Many that live deserve death. And some die that deserve life. Can you give that to them? Then be not too eager to deal out death in the name of justice, fearing for your own safety. Even the wise cannot see all ends.”

And it was that small individual mercy that ultimately saved the world.

and I think that Galadriel could make some choices that she later regrets and has to learn the lesson the hard way about doing evil. This is why I don't see that quote as being against any of Tolkien's principles.

I’m sure Boccaccio was similarly nonplussed when Shakespeare produced Romeo and Juliet.

an allegory of the inevitable fate that waits for all attempts to defeat evil power by power

(Shrug) It seemed to work pretty well. The important part, both morally and practically, is how you treat your former adversary after defeating them.

Not really if you dont even understand the theme of the underlying story and its moral aspects.

It’s also possible to just make a neat show with good production values, solid acting talent, and lots of intrigue and spectacle. You can enjoy stuff so much more when you don’t convince yourself that you have some ownership of the fictional material or the material owes you something.

People should try being happy rather than angry. It's more fun!

The Tom Bombadil approach.

Too bad it's not what we got.

So far, the closest we have seen something like that is Galadriel’s obsession with finding Sauron in a very Captain Ahab way. It may become a test for her to see if she is willing to do evil in this quest and whether she can pull herself out of that. I doubt that they are actively promoting doing evil as justified. That quote did contain a question.

That reminds me of the scene where Denethor told Faramir he should have taken the ring back so it can be used for good. Had Faramir done that Sauron would probably win.

9 Kings of Men fell to the power of the Dark Lord. What is a steward who can’t even love his children equally going to do that they couldn’t?

Well, compared to that time, Sauron didn't have his Ring and his Ring contained a lot of his former power.

If Aragorn took the Ring, he would be able to challenge Sauron. Denethor was somewhat of a lesser rank, but still an almost pure Numenorean. The Ring would have turned both of them to Evil, for sure, but not necessarily into servants of Sauron himself. They might just become the new Evil overlords of the world after defeating Sauron.

The main character flaw of Denethor is that he sacrificed his life to the cause of Gondor and Gondor only. Existence and might of Gondor were his main motivations, not preservation of Freedom or Good in the world in general. He was based on a stereotype of a proud medieval or Roman noble, though (untypically) a highly educated one.

> "how far into evil will you go to do good?" Given that that is diametrically opposed to the central theme of Tolkien's work

But this theme is pretty much in keeping with the darker subject matter of The Silmarillion.

The subject matter of the Simarillion is that we are all flawed and those flaws lead to suffering and ultimately the repeated triumph of evil over good. And that every once in a while flawed beings shine with such a brilliance that it redeems all the rest of it.

Honest question... I recall attempting to read the Simarillion and finding that it was a simple recitation of facts about middle earth. I abandoned this after some 150 pages.

This was many years ago, is my recollection flawed?

No. You're not actually supposed to read it, or he would've published it while he was alive.

He tried to get it published, for decades, starting in 1937. The publishers would never take it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Silmarillion#Development

I mean, you could view any story as a "recitation of facts" if you're really determined to take that point of view, but I don't think it's at all fair to dismiss the Silmarillion that way.

It's true that the first 50 pages or so are pretty much just worldbuilding, mainly focusing on the mythology behind the creation of the world (Arda) by Iluvatar and the various demigods. After that, you start getting into the details of what the elves did upon waking up as the first quasi-"mortal" inhabitants of Arda, and the subsequent eras of history. Some of it is painted in broad strokes, but there are plenty of chapters that zoom in on specific characters and their heroic and evil deeds, personal conflicts, betrayals, hubris and other tragic flaws, etc.

Sure, the style of the prose is a bit dry, but there's plenty of drama to be had in the story.

Wikipedia has a pretty good summary of the overall plot: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Silmarillion#Synopsis

It's best to treat the Silmarillion as you would read the Bible. The styles are intentionally similar and both evolve throughout the works. There are narrative diversions throughout Tolkien's work, but it's ultimately a history of Middle Earth rather than a narrative story.

Similar to how modern franchises will have a "story bible" for writers to reference for themes and consistency.

This is really interesting. Do you have any examples?

Usually these are internal documents not released.

The Halo story bible is an exception which has seen parts released: https://www.halopedia.org/Halo_Story_Bible

A portion of the story bible for ATLA was leaked: https://www.reddit.com/r/TheLastAirbender/comments/aj0mfp/th...

https://clickhole.com/this-is-vince-gilligan-s-series-bible-...

No. It is by all means poor with no literature value other than the fact that has relation to the hobbit and the LoTR trilogy that are masterpieces.

You might as well leave it be.

I think it's great, but it's pretty dense and it's one of those things that you get more out of it by reading it several times. First read through it's just a barrage of names and places, and you don't know who's going to be important later. The second time through you at least know who the main characters are and what decisions are important.

Some parts are more like a traditional narrative: the story of Beren and Luthien, and Turin Turumbar.

If you didn't find it enjoyable to read before you might not change your mind at a second reading, but if it really was a long time ago it's possible your perspective may be different.

No, not flawed, it took me a few tries. The beginning has a lot of mythology that closely parallels the bible in broad strokes. Eru is God, the Valar are arch angels, Morgoth being Lucifer. Maiar as other angels like Gandalf and Sauron. With a few twists like Ungoliant that seem more like something out of India's pantheon.

Then you get into the elf family trees and their migrations. Its really dry. But it really helps understand the motivations of individuals in the rest of the book and the other books. There are some diagrams in the back to help you plow through it.

Then there are the accounts of both individuals and nations/races. They are more like greek tragedy than anything else. Though sometimes it doesn't even seem like there needs to be a flaw to bring down the fall. It is like binging all of Breaking Bad at once. Not going to leave you smiling, but that doesn't mean it isn't art.

That’s poetic but it’s a poor way to characterize the First Age described by Tolkien in The Silmarillion, in which redemption comes literally in the form of a Deus Ex Machina.

It’s also not a great way to characterize the Second Age, since both a portion of the good and a vital portion of the evil sides in the conflict survive and both are very greatly diminished, but I don’t think the writings about the Second Age were really central to that work. That’s why the show (which I haven’t seen yet) seemed like perhaps not a terrible idea to me. There’s not much legacy there to tarnish.

Does The Silmarillion include a monopolistic antagonist that can spend hundreds of millions of dollars on something to simply give away for free (or as a loss leader)?

Amazon is going full Sauron here. They're a multi-industry-spanning conglomerate that preferentially ranks its own show and discards negative reviews, while leaving House of the Dragon and competitors out in the cold.

They have whole other business units to recoup the costs. This doesn't even matter to them other than as a means to grow even bigger and capture/kill more industries. Talk about power.

Why are our legislators asleep at the wheel? We need to give smaller companies and startups a way to fight this. It's madness that Amazon can be bigger than Walmart, have its own shipping fleet, serve the whole Internet, run homes autonomously, own the e-reader/book market, own game streaming, and now apparently throw Hollywood around and make their productions look cheap.

> Amazon is going full Sauron

This reminds me of something I read recently.

> ..Tolkien's vision of the greatest evil in the universe was something he referred to as "The Machine", which was his way of talking about accelerated industrialism and mass surveillance.

> He wrote multiple books where the main villains were a dragon who sits on a huge pile of treasure that he never intends to use but incinerates anyone who comes near it; a man in a giant tower who's wrecking the environment with his factories; and an evil being who uses what's essentially a listening device to control the citizens of Middle Earth.

> And now Amazon is making a Tolkien show.

What exactly is the problem here? If Amazon keeps cavalierly losing money on endeavors they will drag everything else down.

They aren’t going to hide the fact that the show sucks and they certainly just made that much harder by doing this.

In order for them to actually maintain their power this show would need to somehow help them create a moat (it doesn’t) or just make money on its own by driving subscriptions.

As far as abuses of power go, this is absolutely not one of them.

People make these shows and I don’t think anyone wants to make a shitty show.

The issue is that this was a high dollar show and it likely had to have a lot of sign off. Unfortunately, great art and vast pre-approval don’t tend to go hand in hand.

I’m afraid we’re turning a corner in our golden age of television into a dark world of corporate overreach.

> own game streaming

Xcloud and GeForce Now would like to a word with you. Does anyone actually use Luna?

I think they mean Twitch.

That makes even less sense given the trend of game streamers leaving it for YouTube.

I haven't noticed this trend, I know some streamers have moved but Twitch has been dominating the market for around a decade and YouTube is finally somewhat worth mentioning.

Except LOTR is an excruciatingly boring drivel and even the current GoT with its second-hand agenda is more entertaining and watchable.

Time will tell, but I am sensing a major fiasco for Amazon studios

What is GoT's second-hand agenda?

> Does The Silmarillion include a monopolistic antagonist that can spend hundreds of millions of dollars on something to simply give away for free (or as a loss leader)?

That was included in one of the paperbacks published by Christopher Tolkien as “Unfinished Tales.”

I stopped watching after they butchered a snow troll for no reason.

According to the books, a gentle creature, that gets easily scared. The right way to calm it down involves tickling.

But Galadriel chopped up every single part of its body. Twirling around unnecessarily while doing so, after having shot it up with 6 arrow. For this reason I have elected to cancel my prime membership.

For those who aren’t aware this is either satire or confusion on the OP’s part. There are no “gentle snow trolls” in the source material.

And there was nothing unnecessary about the fight scene. It’s unrealistic in the way that Legolas is unrealistic in Peter Jackson’s movies, but no worse.

And there is no gratuitous killing of trolls in the source material either.

It wasn’t gratuitous in the context of the show. They were attacked by said troll.

The troll attack advanced the plot by serving as a catalyst for Galadriel’s troops deserting.

Unless you’re saying that just having a fight scene with a troll was gratuitous? But the books have plenty of battle scenes with trolls as well.

I mean it’s a fantasy show. They wanted to show that Galadriel was a elite fighter and they succeeded

They showed plot armor not an elite fighter.

Isn't that exactly what you would expect from one of the oldest elves, clad in some of the finest armor created by the ancient elf smiths? Tolkien's elves are superhuman entities, magical and supernaturally agile, strong, tireless and so on.

They are not elite fighters in the sense of, say, just being a Navy SEAL.

If you're looking at Rings of Power and expecting a being such as Galadriel to break a sweat fighting something like a troll, you have a strange set of expectations.

>Tolkien's elves are superhuman entities, magical and supernaturally agile, strong, tireless and so on.

Which is why it's s suprising that a frost troll took out 3 of them in one lumpy throw of some packed ice

The regular fall to orc arrows. Their durability is highly variable in the books.

Notice that there were no dead elves at the end of that scene, just some mad elves that refused to follow their leader any more. They got kicked around by the troll, but afterwards they were ok. Elves are tough.

No, I would expect risk and effort minimization through perfection of strategy and technique. When 1 v 1 combat looks more dangerous than a farmer killing a goat it breaks my suspension of disbelief.

>I would expect risk and effort minimization through perfection of strategy and technique

I don't think that's consistent with the fights in the books.

I mean Fingolfin physically fought a 40+ foot tall Morgoth in the Silmarillion. He was jumping around between huge pits that Morgoth's mace made when Morgoth tried to hit him. Fingolfin had a sword, while Morgoth held a mace that was bigger than Fingolfin, and yet Fingolfin was able to survive being beaten to the ground by said mace.

I don't think there's anyway to depict fights on screen like that without looking a bit silly.

If you start trying to realistically depict what it would look like to fight giant humanoids, you'd end up with something that is probably very interesting to people like you and myself, but that the majority of people would find boring. Plus that's not how the source material approached combat scenes.

Troll scene aside, I am just bored that it seems Disney and Amazon Studios share the same writers when it comes to their strong female leads.

Americans should, I think, not be allowed to write fantasy because none of them know fairy tales well enough, and worse, none of them are capable of dry humor. I assume if I watch this Rings of Power show it'll turn out to be written by Joss Whedon and everyone will constantly be quipping at each other and looking at the camera like on The Office.

I'll watch it if the writers room turns out to be staffed by weird old British Catholics though.

none of them are capable of dry humor

Bill Murray, Nick Offerman, and Steven Wright would all like a word.

We must have very different definitions of dry humor if those three are your examples.

Steven Wright is dry, at least his powdered water joke is.

If we are talking individual jokes sure. He is the closest of the three and keeps the dead face unlike Nick Offerman who’s brow is integral to the comedy.

However he regularly expresses emotions through gestures and subtle body language, so yes it’s close but not there over a full routine.

Now this was a good chuckle

the British office lasted one season, while the American version lasted 9. Gervais also wrote much of the American one.

There were two seasons of the British version of the Office, and a Christmas special.

I don't think you should take the longevity of each as a mark of popularity or quality. The British version wasn't cancelled - Gervais and Marchant ended it deliberately with a proper conclusion. I don't think anyone doubts more British series would have been commissioned if they'd wanted to carry on.

When Gervais was asked if he likes the American version his response was "Yes of course. It's made me very rich." That's his dry sense of humor, but I suspect it also hints at why they stopped doing the UK version and started on the US version instead.

Gervais has writing credit for literally one episode of the American Office https://www.imdb.com/filmosearch?role=nm0315041&job_type=wri...

And it has been said multiple times by people working on the American version that besides the inital setup, Gervais and Merchant had very little if any input and everything was done by the American wtiters/show runners.

> Americans should, I think, not be allowed to write fantasy

Aye! They write Fantasy like action movies.

They should take a cue from the Expanse. Like the wire, they just made the characters epic, male or female (having amazing actresses helped)

Did not watch but your description most certainly convinced me not to watch it.

The description is nonsense.

His description was sarcastic.

One would hope that "for this reason I have cancelled my Prime membership" would've made it obvious that they were joking. Alas.

The case of gentle snow-trolls susceptible to tickling existing in Tolkien's universe made me quite curious. The following turned up after a brief research session:

> Snow-trolls are mentioned only once in Tolkien's works, in reference to Helm Hammerhand stalking his enemies "like a snow-troll" during his sorties against the Dunlendings in the Long Winter. The trolls who lived in the Coldfells in western Eriador may have been similar to these. [1]

And the actual passage, from The Lord of the Rings, Appendix A, "The House of Eorl":

> Helm [Hammerhand] held the fortress during the Long Winter. He blew his great war-horn, and broke through the Dunlending ranks, clad in white, stalking men like a snow-troll slaying them with his bare hands. However, his sons Haleth and Háma were slain and Helm grew gaunt because of grief and famine; still his horn would fill the Dunlendings with fear each time it was heard. During one of his night sorties Helm died, possibly from famine and cold; his body was discovered frozen in the snow still standing. [2]

I would say the "stalking" and the subsequent "slaying" similitudes rule out the gentle qualities of the snow-troll.

For the record I haven't watched RoP yet; something feels wrong about this interpretation of Tolkien's work and I think I'll save myself the disappointment.

[1] https://lotr.fandom.com/wiki/Snow-trolls [2] https://tolkiengateway.net/wiki/Helm#cite_note-Helm-5

Amazingly she didn’t even run out of breath while running over swords of her compadres. Do elves posses superhuman stamina as in they can sprint a marathon and some such?

>He [Legolas] was tall as a young tree, lithe, immensely strong, able swiftly to draw a great war-bow and shoot down a Nazgûl, endowed with the tremendous vitality of Elvish bodies, so hard and resistant to hurt that he went only in light shoes over rock or through snow, the most tireless of all the Fellowship.

https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/513872-he-was-tall-as-a-you...

Yes. Legolas is shown in The Lord of the Rings to be capable of stalking his foes day and night, and he only has to stop because Gimli and Aragorn can't keep up.

In general, the elves, especially the older ones like Galadriel, are shown to possess super-human characteristics in all physical feats, including agility, stamina and strength (though the Men of the First Age apparently were stronger though less agile).

Galadriel also saw the light of the 2 trees which tends to make elves even more super human.

Troll was hungry af and was also hanging around that evil place, sus

I guess I understand that if one is a big Tolkien fan and takes the source material very seriously. But it sounds like a viewpoint that is almost certainly of little importance to the showrunners and the vast majority of potential viewers.

Personally I couldn’t care less about Tolkien’s legacy or anything like that, and it seems like a cool show with lots of very expensive spectacle on screen and I think that should be enough. I guess I’m just not big into the whole proprietorial fandom thing.

That was certainly a theme of much of Tolkien’s writing. Many characters fell out a desire to do good, and many others were confronted with the choice to do evil in the service of good.

Nothing about what the person being interviewed said implies that the moral of the story is “you should go really really far into evil to do good.” I’d say the implication of that question is the opposite.

Here's a prediction: This show is all about current events and the answer is going to be "Yeah, a lot of evil, and we're still the good guys"

This type of development is unfortunately par for the course with modern Hollywood remakes of older media and probably will only get worse over time. I am not familiar at all with the LoTR stuff that's going on, but it seems somewhat similar to what they've done with Star Trek. Discovery and (especially) Picard make a mockery of Old Trek in terms of vision and values. I saw a recent parody video that described the TNG Federation as "Vegetarian Space Socialists" that everyone finds annoying but it seems like the writers of Picard have taken it literally. I won't argue that Old Trek is the epitome of subtlety, but the basic premise was that the Federation represents a utopian society that has mostly put aside material concerns in order to promote peace and prosperity in the galaxy. Star Trek was a series of stories about what would happen when you take people from this utopian society and put them in uncomfortable and challenging situations. This worked amazingly well.

Picard and Discovery throws this out the window. It seems like the rough outline of the show was to shoehorn as much heavy handed modern political controversy in between the big budget space battles. The characters seem to be raring to fight at every juncture which is pretty much the opposite of the Federation's MO.

This has also happened with Star Wars but I feel less bad. I think Star Wars was always a bit less "high brow" than some of the other media being discussed here, but Disney seems to have scoured the entire script of the original trilogy for any lines they could stretch out into scenes for a spinoff film ("Kessel Run" for Solo, "Many Bothans Died" for Rogue One). To me this stuff is straight up cringe - at the same level as bad fan fiction.

Ultimately I have started to regard most of these films as products in the same sense as breakfast cereal at the grocery store. When they put out a new neon green version of lucky charms I don't get mad - I don't pay attention at all. Luckily, it seems like there are some filmmakers who are making interesting films even post-COVID (Robert Eggers, David Kwan and Daniel Scheinert) so I have some hope for the future. But these mega-budget reboots? I do my best to ignore their existence at this point.

The people who write these believe that the old hero myths stories are based on the wrong values, and they are on a mission to correct it.

Responsibility, sacrifice, being torn between good and bad, these are not what modern stories should be made of.

But for some masochistic reason these same people can’t write their own stories, they actually want to destroy existing stories, kill off the previous characters and storylines, and insert their own philosophy into the old worlds.

It’s ridiculous, and narcissistic, and I sincerely hope something that makes these companies go bust. I sincerely hope in the long run there isn’t a market for this behaviour. Star Wars certainly seems to have collapsed.

Star Wars hasn't collapsed, but it isn't cool among the kids anymore. There is much better stuff out there for kids and young teenagers. Take the Star wars Battlefield games as an example - those games were contentless, badly designed crap and quickly went to available-for-free. Even for free I could barely play it for an hour. Another example, when the new movies came H&M had star wars t-shirts in their stores, I never saw a single person with that new storm trooper helmet on their chest in my city.

Star Wars huge size and market came from all the toys it sold, now that is pretty much over.

Why is star wars not cool among the kids any more, when being a geek is very cool, sci fi is cool, much more than in the 80s and 90s.

Why is it that almost every generation had star wars fans yet kids don't find it cool any more NOW?

Perhaps it's because this new type of storytelling has no market appeal. It appeals to narcissistic preachy writers in hollywood, but not to anyone else.

I'm a massive Star Trek fan, I've watched everything with "trek" in the title, but the quality has always been very uneven.

Even TOS isn't without its preachy nonsense, like: https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Let_That_Be_Your_Last_B..., a "subtle metaphor" of racism and ethnic conflict.

Yea, I find the people who complain about Star Trek and its 'wokeness' who also state they are diehard fans confusing. TOS was very heavy handed in its progressiveness at the time. Uhara and Sulu were considered groundbreaking characters from a diversity perspective.

I also agree about the uneven quality.

I'd say the bigger difference is old Trek showed and talked about how they are better, while new Trek talks about how not being like them makes you horrible.

Bro this is literally the entire plot of the original trilogy. Boromir, Faramir etc all want to use evil for good.

Nonsense.

> Faramir

In the movies, yes, but not in the books.

In the books, the dichotomy between them is pretty significant. Boromir gave in to temptation to use it to defeat his enemies and was killed because of it. Faramir did not, suffered a bit for not having that weapon, but survived and was rewarded in the end. They were extremely clearly intended as a moral lesson.

The movies completely reversed Faramir.

Also the book has a extra chapter at the end where the shire turns into a police state, Fordo leads a horse back revolution to kick out the corrupt hobbits who inslaved their own people with the new tools from the people with the machines.

I was surprised as an adult when I first watched the movie that it didn't have this ending to the character arch, missing the final stage of the hero's journey.

I'm surprised they haven't turned it into a movie over the past twenty years. I suppose they'd have wanted Elijah Wood back and I get the feeling he wouldn't be keen to reprise the role.

Well I'd posit that this question is absolutely interesting enough to explore without the specter of "authenticity" hanging over it.

It’s a question poorly suited for artistic exploration when the artist defines the outcomes.

The conversation isn’t over when the credits roll, rather that is the end of the beginning.

The issues is narrative isn’t bound by causality making such conversation hollow.

Hardly, talking about how some narrative is hollow and what would have actually happened is a fruitful source of lit papers. The source material is merely the beginning of that conversation, as you and I are literally demonstrating in this thread.

I don’t see how the actual story applies to this discussion as I haven’t seen it. I actually came here to see if it was worth watching.

You would actually like the show, the main moral is exactly the tolkien one you mention. The interview person is not saying it's good to do evil to do good, just that it is a theme in the show as it is in lord of the rings.

After just 2 episodes it seems too early to state what the theme is, unless you’ve seen more than the public has.

Tolkien several said he wanted see what other people with their own creative vision “with other minds and hands” could do set in Middle Earth. It doesn’t seem like he expected them to slavishly follow his own style.

> "I would draw some of the great tales in fullness, and leave many only placed in the scheme, and sketched. The cycles should be linked to a majestic whole, and yet leave scope for other minds and hands, wielding paint and music and drama.”

> Tolkien several said he wanted see what other people with their own creative vision could do set in Middle Earth.

That would explain why the Tolkien state sued "Dungeons and Dragons", and Warner Bross, and anybody trying to clone middle earth in their own shows...

This explains also why the Witcher would need to find a way to have elves depicted as much different as possible from Tolkien's elves. Tolkien's elves are extremely advanced technologically and the "de facto" standard now for the term, Witcher's elves are a tribe of poor forest people, closer to the (copyright free) traditional goblins, but that went extinct with Tolkien's work.

Why are you even trying to make an argument like that? The point, as I'm sure you very well know, is Tolkien wanted other people to contribute original material to Middle Earth on their own terms. He was all for it. The opinion of his estate since his death is different of course, but that's got nothing to do with his own opinion.

You are right, is not really relevant here. Fair point

It’s also a completely overdone trope by now

https://www.usatoday.com/story/entertainment/tv/2022/08/31/l...

co-creator J.D. Payne teases. "The question the first season asks is, 'How far into the darkness would you go to protect the things that matter the most?'"

I'm surprised most of the comments here are about the pros and cons of The Rings of Power. I thought it would be more about how Amazon reacted quickly and decisively to protect their own content and product from trolling reviews, but then why does it feel like so many of the other products on their site are swimming in BS reviews?

This is the real point. Amazon seems to only care about review quality when it hurts their short-term bottom line. They don't much care when even a third party website like Fakespot can detect fake reviews better than their own systems.

User reviews are anyway getting useless.

As a society we are now trained to have strong opinion about everything and being internet, there'll be a million loud voices supporting your view. So why worry about reading counter view and nuanced details when you can live happily in your echo chamber.

user reviews are way more reliable on average than critics reviews who are paid to lick someone elses boots.

I’m not sure I agree. There are at least two independent websites designed to combat paid user reviews on Amazon alone.

What proof do you have of this wide accusation?

Bullshit. I find that user reviews and critic reviews often diverge in the same way that an Adam Sandler movie is never going to win an Oscar even if it is popular with theatergoers, but that's fine. In fact, I find it really useful to categorize movie reviews as:

* High critic score, high audience score - OK, why did everybody love this movie?

* High critic score, low audience score - usually a more "niche" or academic topic, definitely something that will make me think, even if I don't like the movie.

* Low critic score, high audience score - A "turn my brain off and enjoy it" kind of movie.

The Last Jedi was not panned by the populace for being too highbrow, quite the opposite.

On the other hand, users are idiots.

"Hammer was not able to turn my screw. I don't know what this is for"

"THIS THING IS BAD I WNT MY MONEY BACK"

Critics, aka online blog journalists, are paid to generate content. The goal of that is to get you to click on it to look at an ad, either by getting you angry at it or just by producing tons of it so you'll read it all.

Complimenting people doesn't come into it - who do you think is going to pay them for that? Amazon's not going to block them from watching the show.

> Each critique is then evaluated to determine whether it’s genuine or a forgery created by a bot, troll or other breed of digital goblin

Look they’re criticizing us! They must be trolls.

Not all criticism is equal in value, or in a vacuum.

Coordinated review bombing — as described in the article — distorts the purpose of a review average.

Im this case we have a well- organized group of people determined to hate on a show because it offends their racial purity ideals. If you’re not part of that hate cult, when they deliberately skew the average figure in order to make a political point, that makes the review less useful.

Honestly Amazon should probably give up on reviews and do surveys instead. And they and other studios likely do this for their internal reviews, which is why we see Wheel of Time and House of the Dragon continue on despite the vocal hate cults surrounding those shows as well.

> Im this case we have a well- organized group of people determined to hate on a show because it offends their racial purity ideals.

Yeah, but looking around it looks like there's also LotR fans who are offended because they feels it shits on Lord of the Rings. Maybe not the best motivation to slam the series with 1/10's either, but certainly less bad.

And then there are others who just think it's poorly executed in general. Seems to be a mix of things.

From this perspective I’m not sure that it’s the motivation that really matters, but the effect.

If a bunch of ultra-hardcore lotr fans review bomb, the effect is the same as when republicans do it. They give their own clique outsided weight in the review average, skewing the result so it would be less representative of a true average result.

They should do these reviews with all reviews of their products.

Url changed from https://www.theverge.com/2022/9/4/23336624/amazon-prime-vide..., which points to this.

I don’t known about others, but I really don’t want to watch this show now.

These days any negative opinion is trolling I guess.

I believe these reviews are targeted. How the hell you are going to review a series based on just first 2 episodes? The first few episodes of breaking bad were extremely sedate, and no way in hell the series or even the first season was reflective of the pace set in those episodes

Wtf are you talking about, the pilot of Breaking Bad was a great hook and draws people in. It sets up the world amazingly well.

Also, this is a 1h show, so you have 2 hours, that is the length of a full movie. And people review movies all the time.

People also reviewed the first to episodes of House of the Dragon.

>How the hell you are going to review a series based on just first 2 episodes?

The series may turn out to be worthwhile, but the first 2 episodes are objectively not good. The writing is poor, the dialogue isn't good, the characters are not compelling and the episodes themselves aren't well put together. I don't see how anyone can watch the first 2 episodes of this series and then watch the first 2 episodes of breaking bad and see any comparison. The vibes I got while watching this show reminded me of the last season of Game of Thrones after it had gone off the rails. The difference here is we haven't spent years getting invested in the story line and the characters, which kept us watching even as the quality was poor. I won't be tuning in for episode 3 and certainly won't feel like I've missed anything.

I'm enjoying the show so far. I can totally see where you're coming from, too, but I think it's pretty disingeous to give a bunch of opinions and then slap the word "objectively" on them.

> I can totally see where you're coming from, too, but I think it's pretty disingeous to give a bunch of opinions and then slap the word "objectively" on them.

Whether something is entertaining or not is purely subjective. However, speaking in my capacity as someone who has worked in the film industry for the last 30 years, the writing of the first two episodes was objectively "not good". I think Hesh Rabkin put it better than I can, on Season 1, Episode 10 of the Sopranos when he said, "There’s one constant in the music business...A hit is a hit...and this, my friend, is NOT a hit." The same holds for tv shows.

> speaking in my capacity as someone who has worked in the film industry for the last 30 years, the writing of the first two episodes was objectively "not good".

You keep using the word objectively but it doesn't mean what you think it means. You did not like the writing, that's fine. I don't think it's fair to call it "objectively" not good. There were some awkward parts and some awkward scenes, but I personally found a lot of the dialogues to feel quite natural and compelling. The elves are a bit of a stiffer but that's part of the characters. It is plagued by some of what I call the modern "marvel" adventure quirky speech (especially some exchanges with Galadriel) where a lot of exchanges turn into funny quips back and forth but that's par of the course in the current movie industry.

On the other hand the cinematography, environments, special effects, sound stage (sauron's whispers in a 3D home theater system were just SO GOOD), and a lot of other stuff is absolutely amazing.

True but without a solid story and good writing no amount of special effects can make it good. At the end of the day the most important factor is a compelling good story IMO

Art has many different dimensions that people evaluate when they experience it, and many of them are subjective, but many of them are not. The objective ones are ones I will call "craft," and relate to the demonstrated skill of the artist. I will ascribe the rest of the dimensions to "vision." Craft is about how well the artist can convey the vision.

I am not in the film industry, but I am a musician, so here are a few examples from classical music: A performer who tends to rush the slow sections of music will often give bad performances: the vision of the piece is for that section to be slow, and a weakness in the performer's skill compromises the vision. A composer who writes music that is impossible to play has bad craft. A conductor who gives unclear cues and doesn't keep an orchestra together has bad craft.

I can still enjoy a performance where the slow sections are a little rushed if I like the piece, but that doesn't make it a good performance.

You are totally allowed to subjectively enjoy something that is objectively bad.

As surprising as it may seem, the art of writing has rules. Setting up character arcs, payoffs, hero journey, etc. These have been around for literally thousands of years. These 2 episodes are objectively poorly written.

We have no idea if character arcs and payoffs are well set up in the first two episodes because we haven't seen if anything is paid off or resolved later. It's been a while but I remember the first season of Game of Thrones being similarly slow and ponderous to start with. I enjoy the slower pace, it suits the scale of the conflict and it suits the source material which never felt like it needed to hurry along.

It's an episodic tv show with full season story arc. I think there's still some time before you can really judge the narrative structure in this case. As far as aristotelian narrative "rules" go the first episode seem to follow a classic aristotelian tragedy. A high born hero, set on a course of her own destruction. Anyway these rules are not really set in stone, over these past few thousands of years we aquired a multitude of narrative structures and plot devices. Of course Hollywood is obsessed with money and risk aversion so we tend to mostly see the most formulaic "classic" narratives.

BTW, I'd also claim that original tolkin narratives are not very good if you strictly judge them by these rules. The generous use of Deus ex machina to solve the plot climactic moments is just cringy.

can you please share the objective metrics for quality ?

Which Breaking Bad did you watch? The show literally opened with in your face action.

Just read to refresh everything that happened in episode 1, I pasted the first paragraph below, from here https://breakingbad.fandom.com/wiki/Pilot

> In the New Mexico desert, a man wearing nothing but his underwear and a gas mask erratically drives an RV down a desolate dirt road. In the passenger seat, another man is passed out, also wearing a gas mask. In the back of the RV are two bodies. After crashing the RV in a ditch, the driver climbs out, dons a shirt hanging from the side view mirror, and retrieves a video camera and gun from the vehicle. Recording a message on the camera, the man identifies himself as Walter White and bids a cryptic farewell to his wife and son. Sirens are heard in the distance. Walt walks onto the road and awaits the apparent approach of police, gun in hand.

Thats your personal opinion and not very objective. If you look at the metacritic scores for bb, it has the LEAST favorable reviews for season 1, and then it takes off. That is the point I am trying to make.

The first episodes are supposed to make you want to watch the show. 2 hours is not enough? This is the length of a full movie.

Fair point but this is adaptation of book that is quite slow (and huge) tbh

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