The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power series

It is trying desperately to do a Mulder & Scully-style "will they, won't they" scenario.

I'm not sure this works - they seem very fond of each other by the start of the episode, much screentime is spent on why both elves and humans think that theirs would be a doomed relationship, and they're holding hands by the end of it.

i thought they were both just super-boring characters: arondir totally has aragorn disease, bronwen is just a gesture at a role with a simplistic narrative purpose

Oh yeah absolutely! The only saving twist is he's actually a Vulcan.

Huh, I thought "not all who wander are lost" was a LotR thing originally, and made its way from there to memehood. But if Ned hasn't corrected it, then I guess it must not be.

No you’re right on that one, I guess just taking the inspirational poster line from LOTR and sticking it in a new cloying harfoot song was just particularly eye rolling to me.

It's from a poem Bilbo wrote about Aragorn isn't it?

maybe bilbo copied it from the LORE

mark s is right: Very Much In Character for Bilbo to find a cute little half-remembered scrap of something in an old book (or a folk song heard by a busker at the Hobbiton Farmer's Market) and pass it off as his own. Sly laziness is kinda his jam. He will cheat, lie, steal, and dissemble and then play it off with a goofy "who, me?" look.

i mean he totally stole that dude's ring

while employed as a BURGLAR

I hasten to note that I'm not necessarily dissing Bilbz. He's a fun character and sometimes even admirable - but it is fair to say that he's modeled on tricksy Odysseus.

But it's not just the ring; he cheats at riddles and he lies to a dragon and lies to a wizard and to all of his friends and stages an elaborate vanishing act and and and. We can like him without trusting him.

As the writer of his own saga, he has every reason to make himself look good and take the credit. Which he very much does. I don't have enough biohazard gear to wade into Hobbit fanfic, but I hope someone has Rashomoned the story from the perspective of, say, Gimli.

(Long way of saying, yeah, he totally stole that line from an old Harfoot walking song, and basked in the admiration he got for it.)

#ISTANDWITHLOBELIA

lolz

Woolfian lolz

I wake up to all this. (And yes, “Not all who wander” is from Tolkien; “always follow your nose” is from Jackson, and much of this series is from hell.)

is this anything: SHELOBELIA

Hell of a slashfic

Props to SHELOBELIA

But what about

SHELOBELIARAGORN

Or

BOMBABILBO

Sauron Jeremy

Son of Groin

i'm angry because danny devito should be sauron

on the whole i'm really hesitant to argue that oh, the terrible dialogue, here-and-gone narrative turns, and piously boring characters are all just a product of video game culture (tho i'm seeing various otherwise perfectly smart ppl who play a lot of videogames apparently enjoying this: or shall we say giving it a lot more leeway than we are here): and much more inclined to argue -- as above -- that the show-writers are faced with a near-insuperable problem of differential levels of spoilers (some viewers just know too much lore bcz there IS too much lore, just insanely detailed, closely written crabbed lore; others are coming in semi-cold and just constantly assuming oh this must all be in the silmarillion no matter how often they're told that none of it can be from the silmarillion; and still others are arriving knowing nothing at all) and the origins-backstory problem (which is a general IP plague these days and not a videogames-derived flaw)

It feels like a video game because as you describe, it is trying to address a lot of the same problems a (D&D RPG) video game has - those BioWare cRPGs from the 90s had the D&D license, and they were trying to write a compelling game that would satisfy both gamers who had spent their entire lives playing D&D and gamers who knew absolutely nothing about D&D at all except it might be fun to kill monsters with swords and fireballs. You also have the same tendency to spend big on graphics and skimp on paying writers, because visuals sell in a way good writing doesn't.

I think you also see viewer response shaped by having grown up playing video games these days. An essential problem in designing narratives for video games is that the player will always end up doing whatever the fuck they feel like doing. So those here-and-gone narrative turns are something players get used to - you'll have moments where you do what the designers expected you to and the writing clicks, but usually you end up piecing together your own narrative from what transpired from the choices you made. Like, I watch Rings of Power and think "this is terrible writing/plotting" but clearly a significant number of fans are taking this mess and shaping a narrative by filling in a lot of the gaps themselves. Same thing with the newer Star Wars movies. Their most fervent defenders end up doing a lot of heavy lifting to make sense of things that the creators didn't intend. That's par for the course when you're playing computer/console RPGs.

Fwiw I have apparently never played a video game (of the type under discussion).

Like, in the 1980s I played Pac-Man and Pong and Gorf and Galaga and Frogger and Tetris etc. In the 2010s I played Angry Birds and Plants vs. Zombies and Candy Crush.

Personally I skipped everything in between, and it is a whole world that I know nothing of, except for what I have observed and heard from people I know who do the gaming.

If that whole world is like these rather dreary plodding shows, with fake swords hitting fake armor over and over again, with temporary lulls to discuss a magic potion or amulet or whatever? Okay if that's what you're into but I don't think I can realte, at this point.

*relate

There's a difference between playing a video game and watching someone else play a video game--although my kids' generation is inexplicably interested in the latter.

If that whole world is like these rather dreary plodding shows, with fake swords hitting fake armor over and over again, with temporary lulls to discuss a magic potion or amulet or whatever? Okay if that's what you're into but I don't think I can realte, at this point.

That's the point, people who grew up playing those sorts of video games are both writing and reacting to a show like Rings of Power in a fundamentally different way... they're used to players/viewers doing some of the work of making sense of events. What is incoherent to a non-gamer will simply be the usual raw materials you're presented with in a video game to have fun with. As narratives, video game RPGs can be dreary and plodding, but that is missing the point - when the player controls the narrative, even dreary and plodding is a lot of fun. So they focus (consciously or not) on world-building.

if mck@y had posted in my CRPGs thread on the stylus staff board, this show would probably be better

F hazel, are you saying that folks like me are never going to grok these pieces of entertainment, because we are not the audience? Or rather that gamer folks will just process them differently and that's okay?

Nah, your critique is valid - TV as a medium is not video games, and the writing on this series just isn't very good. What I'm talking about is more of an explanation of how video games might affect how the creators approach the series/what they focus on and definitely how some viewers are so weirdly enthusiastic about a show that isn't even really on par with like Krull in terms of dialog and story.

To me, someone who has spent thousands of hours playing cRPGs and jRPGs, Rings of Power just feels like one of those games in so many ways. And it isn't just that the DNA of RPGs is Tolkien either. It's a resonance of structure, not content.

https://i.imgur.com/LzSiUqy.png

I just watched the first episode of House of the Dragon and the difference in quality is enormous. Even though it's very talky, there's no contest.

"i'm angry because danny devito should be sauron"

I get more a Radagast vibe

season 2: another man falls from the sky.
blue wizards: “sauron?”
radagast: “nope”

i want to know more abt the 3 blue wizard-witches -- are they gone for good or is literally everyone in the elf show immune to fire lol?

internet chat (apparently citing the credits for the final ep) (no i will never check) -- is referring to them as "The Ascetic", "The Nomad" and "The Dweller" (great work getting a dweller and a nomad to work in a team i guess)

also i see we're being what-colour-is-the-dressed abt their garb: no they are not wearing white #ffs

I will never not think of them as Zod, Ursa, and Non. Sorry not sorry.

https://i.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/newsfeed/001/353/199/3c5.png

Ascetic and Nomad are from the closed captions - Ascetic has the wimple, Nomad the helmet, Dweller I guess is the non-speaking shapeshifter

they're used to players/viewers doing some of the work of making sense of events.

This is definitely a thing, but I'd struggle to describe it as a gamer thing rather than a general modern fan thing, where everything now has its own wiki site?

Elrond and Durin laffin it up over beers - this is what Tolkien wanted

Strong Enya vibes at Numenor

So....we had thoughts. We SURE had thoughts.

https://www.megaphonic.fm/bythebywater/44

This is definitely a thing, but I'd struggle to describe it as a gamer thing rather than a general modern fan thing, where everything now has its own wiki site?

I'd say that sort of fandom is the result of growing up playing video games, although you could make a case for the Internet also affecting how these shows are consumed. Like, at some point the show itself becomes less than 50% of the phenomenon, and the majority of fan interaction with a franchise happens online. Whereas in the 80s, you watch a show and you can maybe tape it and watch it again and then talk about it with your friends who are interested. It's hard to see how eventually this wouldn't affect how shows are produced, where you begin to focus on creating stubs for this sort of activity to hang off of instead of a fully-developed story that can stand alone.

I mean, a video game narrative gets you to the same point just due a different set of constraints inherent within the medium - you can't easily force players to do what moves the story along in a predictable way.

i didn't know JJ Abrams had a connection to the showrunners, but that makes total sense. I'm sure I knew it at one point and buried that information deep in my mind-vault.

I had a whole debate last night with my son about the use of "yester-eve."

were there two sides in this debate?

the only point of contention was "is it a bad phrase and commonly used" vs "is it bad phrase and therefore never used"

yestereve is not a word they made up, it's been around for centuries but has about the same incidence as sennight in the last couple hundred years. ereyesterday and overmorrow used to also be English terms (the day before yesterday and the day after tomorrow), even more archaic than something like sennight unless you read Tor fantasy novels with any regularity.

oh i believe in yestereve

yestereve just stuck out like a sore thumb, "let's figure out a way to say last night without saying last night, and let's dig deep." just say last night!

reminded to lol at the whole "the elves are going to take our jobs!" subtext

I think that sort of cod-fantasy English works in pulp novels because your brain can imagine it sounding cool but there's no fooling anyone once it's said aloud onscreen.

xpost Please don't remind me