Bret Devereaux: So very bad. Just so deeply disappointing. I'd be remiss if I didn't note it was so disappointing I wrote an essay on the topic (acoup.blog/2022/12/16/c... ), but then still felt annoyed and so wrote an additional 3-part series (acoup.blog/2023/01/20/c... )

So very bad. Just so deeply disappointing. I'd be remiss if I didn't note it was so disappointing I wrote an essay on the topic (acoup.blog/2022/12/16/c... ), but then still felt annoyed and so wrote an additional 3-part series (acoup.blog/2023/01/20/c... )

anyway the fullness of the language, especially when they take it straight from Tolkien, also shows up how very, very bad the rings of power was

Collections: Why Rings of Power’s Middle Earth Feels Flatacoup.blog This week we’re going to take a look at the worldbuilding of Amazon Studio’s Rings of Power from a historical realism perspective. I think it is no great secret that Rings of Power broa…

Only read your greek/roman stuff, guess I'm staying up and reading nerdy Tolkien blogs My take is that RoP runs aground on a trap that a lot of adaptations do: taking Tolkein's vagueness about how magic/power works as license to do whatever you want, rather than as intentionally mythical writing

It does make that mistake, for sure. And many others besides.

Lack of a sense of scale and geography annoyed me no end

What you get from writers who grew up with Bethesda games is the Bethesda world building: vast oceans of lore, all as shallow as a puppy's piss puddle.

I actually don't think that's fair to Bethesda or more correctly to the Elder Scrolls - the series has been coasting on TES1-3 (esp. Morrowind's) worldbuilding for a while, but the foundation is actually pretty sound and the politics of Tamriel broadly make sense.

The 'Empire' in TES is in fact a vassalage structure, where the emperor rules Cyrodil more or less directly (through 'counts'), but rules the remaining provinces through vassal political structures, backstopped by a central military recruited primarily from Cyrodil.

The elite capture of that system in turn enables resource extraction, which actually shows up in Morrowind a lot - both raw resources, but also tax revenues. Which in turn pay for the military. A fairly classic military-tributary complex.

What I *will* say is that nearly all of the weight of this is held up by Morrowind - there are story reasons for it to be less present in Oblivion and Skyrim, but the real problem is that Morrowind was interested in colonialism, imperialism and power-structures, its sequels were not.

Really? I felt like Skyrim brought up some interesting questions about decolonization vs ethnonationalism, and where you draw the line between the two (or is there a line?)

Admittedly, it's no easy task to present a deep, intricately woven world through the medium of video game, while keeping it interactive and engaging. Story-driven RPGs love to offload the world's background into books/scrolls the player can find in the game. That's just lazy.

I loved these articles and the absolutely petty level of detail you go into - because if anybody was prepared to go into petty levels of worldbuilding detail, it was my man JRRT. The problem of fast-travel and the inconsequentiality of ROP's Middle-earth as a **place** really got to me.

I blame Demetrious Polychron. www.euronews.com/culture/2023...

LOTR fanfiction author loses copyright case to Tolkien estate & Amazonwww.euronews.com Author Demetrious Polychron accused Amazon and the Tolkien estate of copyright infringement of his Lord of the Rings-inspired book. His lawsuit backfired and now he owes $134,000 (€122,000).

Yanno. With all that money and all those resources, if they wanted drama they could have done First Age with all the sons of Fëanor. Heck, it would have rivaled Game of Thrones in its battles, betrayals, kinslayings, violence... Every single bright and beautiful high king dies!

Not quite that simple, because they don't have the rights to the Silmarillion. www.cultureslate.com/news/why-ama...

Why Amazon Doesn't Have The Rights To J.R.R. Tolkien's 'The Silmarillion' — CultureSlatewww.cultureslate.com

I am aware of the rights situation, but if you've read the appendices to ROTK, the story of the sons of Fëanor is in the very first one.

No, it's not. Feanor is mentioned, but nothing whatsoever about his sons. The only thing that comes close is Celebrimbor being a "descendent of Feanor." There's very, very little on the First Age in LotR and Appendices, certainly not enough to reconstruct something even vaguely resembling it.

(Now they had more than enough material to do a passing version of the Akallabeth... You miss some of the fun details but get the plot.)

YOU WOULD THINK SO, RIGHT? I MEAN! They could have easily read the entire legendarium and extracted the bits that pertain to the 2nd age and found the corresponding bits and BEEN TRUE TO THE NARRATIVE.

I mean. As I mentioned to the OP, it's here and there, as you know. Hard to mention Beren & Luthien without the Silmarils. And Valinor-born Galadriel is right there. And Elrond, fostered by Maglor. ëarendil high in the sky.

Yeah, but it's what the show had access too, and the name Maglor isn't among that. Nor are any other brothers, nor the Oath, nor, for that matter, the Third Kinslaying. There's a decent bit on Earendil and Elwing that you might make something of, but not what you get from the Silm

OK, but how do you make a show covering the subject matter of the Silmarillion without having the rights to the Silmarillion? I don't think "it got two paragraphs in Appendix A" would stop the Tolkien estate's lawyers.

I mean. We also have Sam's song of ëarendil, Aragorn's story of Beren & Luthien... As Tolkien said in a letter, his legendarium kept cropping up despite himself. Honestly, I don't know how the estate could extract LOTR from all that went before it. (I guess it's good that Beleriand drowned by TA?)

Those examples are explicitly in the text of LOTR, so I expect Jackson was in the clear. Spinning them out into a lengthy Beren & Luthien flashback would've been a whole different matter. Behind the scenes, these questions can keep lawyers busy for years.

The funniest bizarre scale one imo is Galadriel hopping off the boat at the end of episode 1 just outside of Valinor and then I guess swimming across the ocean and happening to run into a random raft that happens to have Sauron on it, relatively near Numenor

This may be answered elsewhere (I just read the first essay) but: do you know Tolkien’s ‘On Fairy Stories’? Because you make a lot of similar points about world-building and consistency.

And yet I’ve seen numerous people who think it’s great. I do not understand.

Much appreciation for bringing up the ridiculousness of surviving a pyroclastic flow head on! Hardly the show's worse fault (which is probably the dialogue), but probably the one that bothers me the most.

It's awful. I couldn't finish the series. And I'm a *huge* Tolkien fan. As a kid I obsessed over the books to a possibly unhealthy degree. But as an adult I have better things to do than watch that dreck.

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