#Like what is rop saying with its short hair elves??? Nothing they are saying nothing

[nameddame]

Tolkien in the 30s: the elves have beautiful long hair regardless of gender even tho a man having long hair in the 30s would be seen as an egregious sign of gender noncomformity at best

Amazon rn: boy elves have short hair girl elves have long hair because this adaptation is about girlboss galadriel

#lotr #rings of power #That is not to even touch on the missing bearded lady dwarfs #Not to be a Tolkien purist but if the man spends thousand of words describing the practices and cultures and food and history of a setting #Maybe #That has something to say #Maybe the curtains are blue for a reason #Maybe the elves have long hair for REASON and taking that away for???? Literally nothing is shit #Like what is rop saying with its short hair elves??? Nothing they are saying nothing

[lotronprimesucks]

Regarding the "negative reviews" that ROP is apparently receiving, because you all seem to claim, without seeing it, that it's a bad show or of low quality: most negative reviews on ROP I have seen are outright racist or, if they're not racist/bigoted they're childish arguments and incompetent critique. "The elves have short hair now". "Elrond isn't respectable enough". "Galadriel is too warlike". This is not a slam dunk. They're setting up character arcs and prepping them for development, as you do when writing a story. You idiots. The fanfictions you've devoted your life to have taught you nothing, apparently. They don't have primacy, and there's no intrinsic value to following the "fan-accepted" version of any character. Nobody who is negatively criticizing ROP can make a good argument against its writing or dialogue (which is no worse than the original LOTR, they're basically on the same level), its set design, its characters or acting. All they have is petulant stuff like "this is not my Galadriel" "they gave Elrond short hair" "they don't say Finrod's name". You embarrass yourselves, you lower the quality of the discourse. Boycotting ROP on the basis of Amazon being ghoulish is a valid approach, but making up incompetent arguments and passing them off as critique isn't. Y'all just can't accept that an evil company can also create a technically and artistically competent TV series, because you lack critical thinking skills and are consumed by tumblr brainrot, thinking things can only be wholly bad or wholly good. Children

Okay, anon, sure.

Let’s take this in order:

The negative reviews I’ve highlighted have been from respectable mainstream publications who are not caving to reactionary racist or sexist backlash. You’re assuming I’ve been going to great lengths to seek out user reviews or comments on Twitter or the shit the Daily Mail or Bounding Into Comics is saying. I’m not. The reviews I linked to all point out significant flaws with the writing and dialogue and approach to the showrunning. Whoever you’re accusing of being a child, it sure as hell can’t be me.

The things pointed out in those reviews - the gender-essentialist short hair, the complete mishandling of the family relations in House Finwë, the details they legally can’t mention, the political situation in the Second Age that are being completely rewritten - are all signs of a bad adaptation. They are indicators that the writers fundamentally do not understand the text they are using as a source material, and that therefore the story they are telling is not connected to the books. You present these as petulant or childish complaints but they aren’t, they’re significant and show that the people writing this work are not interested in accurately portraying what’s written on the page. At that point, regardless of how good the writing is, this project has failed at its most basic task.

The first episodes also prove that they didn’t have the rights to anything except the Appendices. This means they are compelled to write an entirely original story, which might be good but so far is neither accurate nor compelling on its own.

Whether or not the adaptation is accurate matters to people who aren’t racist. This is because a desire for accuracy is not approving of the author, the author’s personal politics, or the author’s preferences. I don’t want accuracy because I care about Tolkien the man. I want accuracy because I like the books as they are written, and clearly what Amazon is doing is not following the books as they were written. This matters to me and to many other people. (“Accuracy” is not a shorthand for “white people”. I have said before on this blog that I want substantially more people of color in the show, not less and not the current amount. It is in fact necessary to include more characters of color to accurately reflect the text.)

The writing on this show is bad. Abysmally bad. Horribly bad. So bad I’d rather watch The Room and Birdemic and Zardoz on loop. Assuming that everyone criticizing this show has nothing to say about the writing and dialogue is false. The production design is horrible, the music is either generic or actively racist, the plot is already disjointed and badly structured. All of these are things that have been said in many critiques, and all of them matter. I at this point doubt that anyone who likes this show has actually watched it because the incompetence in every possible place except for some of the effects and the cinematography is staggering.

So no, I can’t accept that Amazon made a technically competent series. They didn’t do that, and I am not interested in being told they did simply because of your assumptions about what we’re all objecting to.

Cheers!