> "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.
But this theme is pretty much in keeping with the darker subject matter of The Silmarillion.
This was many years ago, is my recollection flawed?
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
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...
You might as well leave it be.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Xcloud and GeForce Now would like to a word with you. Does anyone actually use Luna?
Time will tell, but I am sensing a major fiasco for Amazon studios
That was included in one of the paperbacks published by Christopher Tolkien as “Unfinished Tales.”