Is there any hope for Amazon's Lord of the Rings show? | Hello Future Me

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Tim Hickson
PO Box 69062
Lincoln, 7608
Canterbury, New Zealand

Script by meeeeeeeee

The artist who design my cover photo:

Stay nerdy!
Tim

[HelloFutureMe]

Some people are misinterpreting me. Yes, the race changes are a lazy form of representation and they should have done it better. Yes, all these changes do ring of a corporation trying to leech off a beloved work, but I'm willing to give it a chance. No, viewing this as a "culture war" with the "woke" is dumb. I wanted to discuss mostly the way we talk about the race changes.

[DanielGreeneReviews]

Tim… who said you were allowed to use knives in front of a green screen? You’re stepping into a world you’re not prepared for.

[Cwronaga]

I'm a little bit put off by the fact that they actually fired two lore experts because they couldn't agree with Amazon's vision because it contradicted the lore

[FoxCastleChild]

The actual reasons to be worried about this show without getting into race stuff:

1. Amazon butchered the Wheel of Time show and didn't faithfully adapt the story, world, or characters. It was seen by many as a trail run for this series with one of the Wheel of Time directors directing HALF the episodes of Rings of Power.
2. It is trying to pitch itself as a prequel when it is actually a reboot. The movie adaption rights are still with New Line and as such the show can't use any of the props, sets, locations, or music.
3. The directors have almost no history with an adaption of this scale...or really of any scale.
4. The trailer looked cheap despite being the most expensive show of all time (a similar problem Wheel of Time had as it looked cheaper than other shows with much smaller budgets).
5. They have already shown in interviews and the trailer massive departures from the source with a condensed timeline from thousands of years down to a handful and characters barely reflecting their literary counterparts.
6. Why is everything so clean and why are people rocking modern Harry Styles haircuts?
7. Most importantly, Amazon is making a show about the second age WITHOUT ALL THE RIGHTS TO MATERIAL FROM THE SECOND AGE!!!

[Uniquenameosaurus]

Oh god they only have the rights to PARTS of Tolkien? Omg that must be a legal nightmare to write for

[happyllama]

I just wanted giant women beards 😭 Imagine the craic that the costume department could have had making a dwarf queen’s beard? Bits of gold and jewellery strung through it, fancy plaits ect. Awesome

[adc]

As someone who isn't white, my big issue with the race changes is that there already were non-white humans in the lore (e.g., Haradrim) that are really underexplored and would be a great avenue for the creators to write their own stories while also including some racial diversity. But that would take some actual talent and creativity to do. Simply adding in one black dwarf and one black elf (why just black elves and dwarves, where are the Asian elves and dwarves?) reeks of the type of "woke" corporate diversity checklist that is far too common in American media. Amazon doesn't actually care about true equality and representation of diverse cultures and worldviews, they just want to make money, and a big group of overpaid executives likely got together and decided that adding in a couple token black characters would make them more money than not having them.

[Ceirahmoon]

Interestingly, my biggest gripes weren't really what you brought up. For me, some of the biggest immersion-breaking things were:
1. Why are these "adventurers" wearing fresh-pressed and spotless linen sheets straight from the Target rack?
2. How were some of these more modern hairstyles achieved in the Second Age? "Magic" I guess?
3. Having a "younger version" of some of our well-known elven characters is foreign to me. Wasn't the whole point of the elven race that after they reach adulthood, they look exactly the same until the end of immortality? that was one of the reasons they seemed so disconcerting to people.

Things like this!

[poodlemuffin]

The lack of lady dwarf beards is definitely annoying.

[SerTahu]

One more point that's not really touched on in the video is some worrying quotes from those making the show which imply that they've completely failed to grasp the characters that they're working with.

For example, they call Elrond "politically ambitious", while McKay said that "[Galadriel's] got a sword that’s broken because she’s killed so many orcs. This young hot-headed Galadriel…how did she ever become that elder stateswoman?". What they've described isn't even remotely similar to the characters of the books. Based on those quotes, they will be Elrond and Galadriel in name only.

Everything that's come out so far seems to indicate that they essentially just want to make another Game of Thrones, with Middle Earth being nothing more than a backdrop for it.

[David_Fellner]

Can two kids in the 21st century tell "the novel that Tolkien never wrote?"

Well, Tolkien was a man who lived through two world wars—fought in one of them and saw his children and friends' children fight in the other; taught multiple forms of English at a university; learned an extinct form of English and translated ancient texts like Beowulf so that modern people could read them; and spent the remainder of his life imagining and inventing a world with such believable and realistic depth that you can actually _learn the fictional languages in it._ Not translate whatever words and phrases appear throughout the text, you can actually learn to speak and read these languages because they have grammatical structure that is as detailed and functional as any extant language.

So, no... I do not think that two kids in the 21st century can tell a story on Tolkien's level. They might be able to come up with some cool fanfiction, though!

[nathansteinfromarkham]

I'm not too well versed in the lore of Lord of the Rings and not that big of a fan, but I can sympathize with its fans. This whole affair just reads to me like Amazon trying a milk a fan base--which has been around for generations--with no respect for Tolkien or what he created. If they really wanted to do their own thing I would have just tried to make a else world story (like how I choose to perceive Shadow of Mordor and Shadow of War). It is more so how they've been trying to promote it and the journalist reaction to the backlash that I find the most insufferable. In addition to this they SEEM to be trying to inject modernity into this and it feels---somewhat--out of place. You are right, taking some creative liberties can help--the movie Wanted comes to mind--but it feels as fit they are taking more than some creative liberties.

[knackis]

I think the lack of rights is one of my major concerns. The other major concern is that this is a product by a massive, faceless corporation, and it feels like it. It does not feel like a passion project by a small group of dedicated creators who fought tooth and nail to get the rights to make something they were truly proud of, not knowing whether or not they would be successful. Now, I'm not saying that everyone who makes a Tolkien adaptation has to play with the exact same set of cards that Jackson and New Line did. But I would like to see the same passion, respect and knowledge from the creators, and so far, I'm not seeing it.

[Scuzzlebutt]

I have a couple of concerns/issues:
-They screwed over the NZ Film industry a bit moving the filming of Season 2 onwards to the UK, so screw Amazon for that.
-The second Age is 4000 years long, and they look to be putting it a ways in, if Celebrimbor and the creation of the Rings of Power is central. Any first Age character is a developed adult several thousand years old, and that doesn't fit what they're pushing for Galadriel and Elrond.
-For the Jackson films, they talked about making the films with Tolkien's vision in mind, for this they are talking about their and Amazons vision.
-For the Movies, the props created looked like real tools created by civilizations, the swords looked sensible. Some of the ones from the posters, well, look like cliche Fantasy props.
-They are looking to recreate the look and feel of the Rings movies, when that is 1000s of years on the future, it should have a different look and feel. It would be like trying to get a WW2 vibe in a film set in Ancient Egypt.

[MrCovi]

As many others have said, the issue with the race swapping isn't "oh muh races, I can't stand black dwarves." The fact that Tolkien built an already diverse world where races and ethnicities arose in logical geographic areas as happens in the real world is part of what made Tolkien's world breath and live. But more importantly than the fact that there are diverse areas of Middle-Earth that they could have used for diversity, I feel that the fact that the Amazon writers thought that the only way to include diversity in the show was to race swap existing races and ethnicities shows that they DON'T know the lore or world well enough to be faithful to it. Its like trying to write a historic WWII story and in an attempt to be diverse you make up an all black battalion because you don't actually know about the Tuskegee airmen or the 761st Tank Battalion. It shows you didn't do your research.
Which means they CAN'T write Tolkien's stories because they don't actually know or understand them. They can only write their own. You said you were worried they'd write their own stories instead of Tolkien's, well this is the red flag that they're going to do just that.
Its getting a lot of attention because its a red flag. There are faithful ways they could be diverse (heck if they actually cared about the stories they'd HAVE to be diverse because the fall of Numenor has interactions with the Easterlings). But either they don't realize that because they don't know the lore and just assumed "ah its all white dudes, we gotta fix this", or they do realize it but are swapping things anyway "because we can, its our story."
Its not about "oh no black dwarves, " its that either they don't know the lore or they don't care about it. And both are a recipe for disaster for a setting that they don't even own the rights to the source material for.

[cravenlunatic]

ok, here's my prediction:
there are undoubtedly people working on this series who are passionate about tolkien, and will try their damnedest to bring us a story that is both new and unique while also being faithful to the fiction that they are trying to adapt. and they will be hamstrung by their corporate masters every step of the way. so we may get some cool moments, and i'm sure the show will be very visually pleasing, but ultimately for most tolkien fans it'll be a big "meh." the people who will probably enjoy it most will be those who don't think too hard about the source material.

[ShaunRF]

For me, the black elves and dwarfs represent a huge missed opportunity. It is perhaps the least interesting way to introduce POC into this story. It feels like they are cynically just trying to check boxes, the way studio executives often do. If you're creating new characters anyway, why not try to tell the story of some of the Eastern nations that were traditionally enemies of the Free Peoples? Perhaps the long-standing grievances that caused them to join forces with Sauron were based on very legitimate issues. Let us get to know these nations we really know very little about. You don't even have to set storylines in those locations. Just have characters that have traveled from or defected from these places.

[NerdoftheRings]

Great vid, my friend!

Also, I'm pretty sure Legolas' knives are named Ringo and Steve McQueen.

[boid]

"A story Tolkien never wrote"

He never wrote about the province of Rhún extensively for intrigue

[siths]

I never needed a lord of the rings series and if it isn't amazing I am not gonna watch it.