re: The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power S1, Episode 3 Thread | Amazon | Available Now

My 11 year old son is really liking this show. He doesn’t even notice what color the characters are and I hope he never notices a difference. Isn’t that what MLK wanted.

From a “true” Tolkien fan being entertained by the show.

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I really do feel bad for you and Sammy. You both want this to be a "thing". I did too but when you deviate that far from the norms...

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I think you once again are making leaps and building straw men.

I’ve said already my feelings on the show are that it is slightly above average so far. It’s solid, not anywhere close to the height of the Jackson LOTR, but it’s also only 30% in. But it’s been a better production and execution than 95% of fantasy shows out there, which isn’t necessarily the highest bar.

The point you seem incapable of grasping is getting past your delusions of grandeur, that somehow this bubble and the 4chan one in any way serves as some 1 for 1 correlation to larger reality. That a few thousand racists review bombing LOTR is representative in any way of what the larger public will think.

Right wing media culture outrage has literally become a cottage industry, much like online right-wing propaganda news before it, now incentivized by YouTube algorithms and the same clickbait business model that drives hyper partisan news. a lot of you are too thick to recognize how the manipulations work and how the industry now needs a constant stream of new culture war content to drive fear, outrage, and a sense that your opinions about society are secretly still the majority view in this scary world of social change you don’t like. All in order to ensure the revenue keeps flowing at regular intervals.

And to create that feedback loop that your outrage reflects society, review bombing is the weapon of choice currently. Where a vocal minority bomb user reviews and then point to their own manipulations as evidence of their premise. So it was “too woke” House of The Dragon a few weeks ago, “too woke” Rings of Power is the current cash cow, but you also see already the same YouTubers latching onto a black Ariel as the next coup de jour to generate outrage revenue from their ever thirsty and miserable incel revenue base. And just like clockwork, we have a thread on here of 45+ boomers, many without children even, acting just as outraged about POC in a made up cartoon about a mermaid


And once again, one only need to look at actual reality to see how much of a bubble you all continue to live in. Where Euphoria, about a black girl and her trans girlfriend is the highest watched show on HBO, Bridgerton, that reimagines 17th century aristocracy with POC cast in huge roles is top 5 all time on Netflix. House of the Dragon despite it’s pre-release outrage campaign smashing records left and right for a new HBO show. “Too woke” Disney+ smashing subscription forecasts despite all the outrage. Marvel continuing to be one of the few bankable brands in a post Covid world where billion dollar films are suddenly very rare.

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at actual reality

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I think arrogant dipshits like you are probably more in line for a reality check than you think. The entire point many are making is that people like you need to forcefully change beloved brands that don't carry "your reality" to align with it. The examples of this are too numerous to name. From Venezuela being a "right wing fascist dictatorship" in Jack Ryan to the countless race and gender swaps of popular character brands, it's been deemed "important" to make these changes... by people like you who think you own the culture. How does Euphoria stack up against HBO properties like Game of Thrones, Rome, Band of Brothers, The Pacific, The Wire and other shows whose entire purpose was not to push social engineering? How do movies like Buzz Lightyear, Ghostbusters (the gender swapped version), the new Thor or the Mary Sue Jedi trilogy stand against the movies that created that brand in the first place? It's not as cut and dried as you suggest.

Again, race swap any character in the fictional fantasy land of wakanda and come back and tell me it's no big deal. If you think it wouldn't be, you're being disingenuous. From what I've gathered of this show, bad writing and poor acting is as much a cause for audience criticism as "racist troll bombing", but answer this question. Why is it important to gender and race swap a classic novel? Why isn't it equally or more important to build brands that represent this inclusion and diversity on their own? You claim Euphoria is such a victory for the rainbow people, why not create more of that rather than demand James Bond be black, gay or a woman? The true answer to THAT question is why Amazon's show is getting so much criticism. You underestimate how many people see through it and are growing weary of it, despite their best intentions.

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How does Euphoria stack up against HBO properties like Game of Thrones, Rome, Band of Brothers, The Pacific,

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It crushes all of them besides peak original GoT. Which is a juggernaut(and also was slammed for being too woke with the way it elevated the female characters).

But once again we circle back to the other conversation, where you infer a false premise, that decisions of representation today were somehow forced, but that Hollywood for the previous 100 years wasn’t., Where 90% of films and TV starred straight white men, and often a very narrow type of straight white man, and almost all action and adventure films were catered to white male power fantasies.

As for Thor, not sure that’s the argument you want to go down. Global box office is still down close to 50% from pre pandemic worldwide, Thor Love and Thunder was only down 12% from its most recent sequel. Marvel continues to be the most bankable box office property by a long shot, and seeing much less of a hit to their revenue than the box office industry as a whole. Too woke Disney+ is the fastest growing streaming service and is now only behind Netflix and Amazon.

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Why isn't it equally or more important to build brands that represent this inclusion and diversity on their own?

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My guess is that if tomorrow, Warner, Disney, and Fox all said fine, we understand you white incels are so upset about black casting in historical Hollywood where we over represented white men, instead we are now going to take our limited budgets and shift our spending on more diversity focused franchises instead. That means that we may need to abandon long held mostly all white properties cause the money and resources to fund both just isn’t there. So you may lose some of Star Wars, LOTR, classic white led superhero franchises, Bond, and in their place you’ll get ground up franchises that have more diverse casts or adaptations from novels with more diversity.

You and I both know you all would be melting just as much, if not more. Decrying that Hollywood is destroying and erasing white people to push a diversity agenda. You fricking know it!

Cause again, for many, nothing will be acceptable unless Hollywood goes back to over-representing white people and focusing first and foremost on male power fantasy’s in action and adventure films/tv. And so anything straying from that will be met with outrage and anger….And YouTubers and clickbait “journalists” ready to profit off feeding and fueling that outrage

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So Galadriel was going to swim from Valinor back to middle earth?

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Apparently, boats are the escalators of Middle Earth. Used for convenience, but not a travel necessity for elven women.

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This thread is an abomination. We can't have an honest discussion about the actual show.

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I accidentally posted it in the spoiler thread when I meant to post it here:


I don’t love the show so far but episode 3 was structurally the strongest so far imo. Characters all settled in and became interesting, and the action with the warg was great. I appreciated how they carried over the fighting style of Galadriel in episode one with Arondir. It establishes a sort of elven fighting identity

The problem the show has at this point is it really needed tighter editing, and isn’t well designed for the weekly format. I think pretty much all three episodes could have been trimmed down by about ten minutes and been way better for it from a pacing perspective.

Way too many drawn out slow motion shots of things like Galadriel horseback riding on the beach, or unnecessarily drawn out exposition and lore dumps, like Islidur on the shore, likely meant to placate the neck beards that are gonna rage hate anyways, but that break any sort of momentum in the episode.

The mysteries of Halbrand and the stranger are intriguing but I just hope they don’t build it all up for the obvious “twist” that Halbrand is Sauron and The Stranger is Gandalf.

That comes off waaaayyy too much like try-hard fan service that almost always narratively hurts shows/movies. see The Walking Dead as a prime example of writing to fan expectations and harming a story.

If that is the twist it only reinforces this show needed to be released in batches cause that is way too easy a twist to try and sustain over ten weeks.

Blood splattering on the screen during that fight in the back alley

As if this show wasn’t already gay enough

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The problem the show has at this point is it really needed tighter editing,

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I swear they end every scene like it’s the end of the episode. Fade to black then you realize it’s only 15 mins in

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Seriously, you can’t discuss the pre-established characters without discussing who they turn out to be given this show gives you basically nothing to go off of. How am I supposed to talk about Celebrimbor when I’m forbidden to say what he does and who he is, despite the fact we’ve been talking about it ad nauseam for like 9 months now?

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You aren’t watching the show, and have made up your mind 100% about it, so you literally have no way of having an honest discussion about the actual show.

Instead you and several others just spam this thread with incessant whining and book spoilers to try and make everyone else as miserable as you are