Posted on 09/02/2022 5:34:37 PM PDT by nickcarraway
Seems like a good rule to me. I generally follow it.
A gay elf. I think we’ll be seeing more of them. Amazon is making a lot of changes to Tolkien’s world. Remember, evil cannot create, it can only corrupt.
Good enough for me. I won’t be watching.
So why did Jeff Bezos hire them if he's a Tolkien fan? He's just going to waste money on a crappy show.
I watched the first episode. That was enough for me.
If you are into that fantasy genre, the Witcher is a better series. No homo crap in that one but the black elves, is the maximum pc wokery as it gets. One of the line producers is a good MAGA bud of mine.
He’s not really a Tolkien fan. The exec producers are. And he can waste his money all he wants because he has billions.
Love Tolkein and CSLewis… they had a great friendship. How in the world the legacy of these men can be so easily bastardized with no legal challenge! SMH!
So far the audience score is 38% on rottentomatoes. It needs to go down like the Titanic so they'll go back to the business of entertaining the masses instead of trying to indoctrinate us with this crap.
“...And the hobbits (harfoots are hobbits, btw) are all wearing rags and covered in dirt. They are supposed to be English-cultured and mannered, like Tolkien intended.
At least the dwarves sort of look like dwarves. I don’t think the Scottish accents are accurate, though.” [Telepathic Intruder, post 82]
Shire hobbits were well-off and well-mannered, in accordance with the English cultural milieu the author seems to have had in mind. So were the hobbits of Bree.
But in the chapter “At the Sign of the Prancing Pony,” the author was careful to draw a line between the first two groups and all others - who were dismissed as “Outsiders,” though it was conceded there were a great many more of the latter than was generally supposed.
At the point in the timeline within which the Amazon series appears to be set, hobbit ancestors had not yet enjoyed much contact with either Elves or Numenoreans (Dunedain?) - the sources of all “high” civilization in Middle Earth, and taken up to a greater or lesser degree by every other group except those who worshiped the Enemies or who’d been enslaved by them. So one could argue that grubby and uncouth proto-hobbits are not completely out of the realm of possibility.
Peter Jackson achieved great success in his films, in which all dwarves seemed to have Scottish accents. It might perhaps be unsurprising that this new crop of writers would continue in that vein. Scots have long been looked down on in “pure” English culture as secretive, strange, touchy, violent, not quite to be trusted - a people apart.
“Except that Tolkien explicitly said that there were no hobbits mentioned in stories until several thousand years after the time that Amazon covers...their entire plot is contradictory to Tolkien’ actual histories. They are reinventing them in a more woke, multicultural, and politically correct context...it’s not Middle Earth anymore, it’s a bastardization. Would anyone do the same with Shakespeare?” [Telepathic Intruder, post 92]
You’re quite right, and I concede the point. Also the larger point, that this later “reinvention” is anything more than woke PC propaganda, which of course has no purpose beyond political indoctrination.
We might recall that the author himself quoted either Pippin or Merry in their first conversation with Treebeard, admitting that hobbits always seem to have gotten left out of the old lists. Lack of stories doesn’t equal nonexistence.
But we’re probably wasting our time, expecting any pushback from serious literary fans, academics, or the executors of the Tolkien Literary Estate (or whatever its name is). I’ve never heard of any court judgment in favor of a plaintiff who alleged lack of intellectual honesty, or failure to be true to what’s often called “canon” in various fandoms.
Hasn’t Shakespeare been done to death, in reworks and adaptations? And “modernizations”? I don’t imagine that any defender of a “Shakespearean purity” could clean up the mess now. And no professor of English and/or drama is going to make any such effort today. They’ve “grown” far beyond any such musings.
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