Lord of the Rings series!?

[Frelga]

I finally finished it today. It was excellent TV, and arguably the best Tolkien adaptation to date, taking into account the amount of invention the show required. I would rate it above PJ-LOTR, especially since he had the entire work right there to adapt and still invented a lot of things that did not need to be invented.

It makes a lot of choices I wouldn't have made, but at no point did I feel tempted to throw things at the TV.

It certainly takes the prize for how far it exceeded my admittedly low expectations.

OK, now I can go see what y'all have been posting all this time.

[Voronwë the Faithful]

Glad to hear that you liked it, Frelga!

[RoseMorninStar]

I haven't watched it in it's entirety either, I'm glad to hear you liked it. Not wanting to throw things at the TV sounds like fairly high praise from you Frelga.

[elengil]

I've seen enough clips to almost want to watch a few characters' scenes, but I don't have a Prime account and have no real interest in watching the actual show. But that is probably more because I have so little interest in "TV" in general than for any specific reason associated with the show.

[Eldy]

It's good to hear your take, Frelga! I'm glad you enjoyed it. Having low expectations can definitely be helpful: that's probably the main reason I liked Amazon's Wheel of Time (that, and it comparing favorably to Netflix's Cowboy Bebop, which was released the same day and that I actually did expect to be decent).

[Eldy]

Bret Devereaux, military historian and self-described "pedantic" commentator on the intersection of his field with speculative fiction (he's previously written extensively on the book and film versions of the Battle of Helm's Deep and the Siege of Gondor), weighs in on the worldbuilding of ROP:

https://acoup.blog/2022/12/16/collectio ... eels-flat/

Now before we get into the historical critique (because that is what we do here), I want to explain why I think this approach is valid for this sort of media. Rings of Power, after all, makes no claim to historical accuracy or realism (unlike Game of Thrones or Assassin’s Creed) and so cannot be faulted for failing to do something it never set out to do. Nevertheless, there is a failing here and I think that failing is in worldbuilding rather than historical accuracy. Speculative fiction – be it fantasy or science fiction – is a genre where a great deal of the weight is carried by the fictional world being constructed.

We want the fictional world to feel real or at least like it could be a real world, with internally consistent rules and clear lines of effect and consequence. In part that is because the deep, rich real-ishness, as it were, contributes to the sensation (be it joy or horror, depending on the work’s tone) of exploring and discovering a new fictional world and in part it is because a world that feels real and bounded by rules, the way our world is bounded by rules, makes the stakes of the story itself more engaging. The plausible link between causes and consequences, bound by those rules, is what encourages us to invest in characters and to care about their decisions and internal struggles.

One may easily contrast a story set in a world unbounded by rules of logical consequences, like a dream. Anything can happen in a dream, unrelated to what came before or after. Dreams can break their own rules and they can exist in unreal or surreal spaces. And they also, famously, make for extremely boring stories. Nothing is quite so tedious as having someone narrate a dream to you, because nothing in the dream actually matters for anything that comes before or after. Of course nothing in a fictional story necessarily matters in the real world, but nothing in a dream actually matters even in the dream world. Thus the consistency of the rules and the setting are essential for allowing the audience to engage their emotions with the characters and story because they make the events in the story matter by making them feel less arbitrary.

[Voronwë the Faithful]

I got as far as "I think it is no great secret that Rings of Power broadly failed to live up to expectations and left a lot of audiences disappointed" and stopped reading.

[Eldy]

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

[Frelga]

I got a number of paragraphs farther than that, but he still hasn't said anything about the show and my attention span is not what it used to be.

[Snowdog]

I think this guy just likes to read his own typing, or 'hear himself talk'.

[Voronwë the Faithful]