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Noria
Hithlum
Dec 11 2024, 7:02pm
Post #1 of 36
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A lot of posts about RoP mention “bad writing” as the major flaw of the series. But what does that mean to each of you? I’m looking for specific examples because I’m curious as to whether there is any consensus amongst the posters on this board.
Is it the dialogue?
Is it the deviations from Tolkien’s story?
Are there particular plot lines or scenes that you feel don’t contribute to the story as it’s being told by RoP?
Or are there parts that you consider to be written badly because you just don’t like them and their storyline?
Something else?
The sun yet shines
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Junesong
Nargothrond
Dec 11 2024, 8:01pm
Post #2 of 36
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Hard to nail down a specific definition.
I suppose its a bit like pornography.
You know it when you see it.
"So which story do you prefer?"
"The one with the tiger. That's the better story."
"Thank you. And so it goes with God."
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Noria
Hithlum
Dec 12 2024, 8:10pm
Post #3 of 36
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So, in which scenes and episodes of RoP did you perceive bad writing?
I’m not trying to be an ass here. I’m genuinely interested in exactly where other people think RoP went wrong. I’ve casually used the term "bad writing" myself , and later thought “What did I mean by that?”, without always having an answer.
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The sun yet shines
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Junesong
Nargothrond
Dec 12 2024, 8:24pm
Post #4 of 36
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Over the Christmas break I'm planning a big Season 2 rewatch so I'll look for a specific example and come back to post it.
"So which story do you prefer?"
"The one with the tiger. That's the better story."
"Thank you. And so it goes with God."
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TFP
Menegroth
Dec 13 2024, 12:50pm
Post #5 of 36
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This is probably a question better suited to a doctoral thesis than a message board, but I probably won't let that stop be bashing out a few ill-considered words on the subject at some point over the next little while.
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skyofcoffeebeans
Nargothrond
Dec 13 2024, 3:07pm
Post #6 of 36
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I think a message board is the perfect medium to dive a little bit deeper on these claims than a drive-by Twitter post.
curious to hear what concrete arguments people have. bonus points if we have any English majors or people who know the first thing about screenwriting. maybe even some examples of well-constructed writing in television or film?
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DGHCaretaker
Nargothrond
Dec 13 2024, 3:33pm
Post #7 of 36
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For one, the inability to write above one's weight. In other words, making intelligent characters do uncharacteristically stupid things to inorganically drive the plot(*). It's going to be difficult for a dumb writer to write smart characters. The stupidity probably rests more with whomever hired that writer.
* I'll make an exception here for horror flicks or parodies. Profoundly stupid characters are required for either.
(This post was edited by DGHCaretaker on Dec 13 2024, 3:37pm)
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Archestratie
Nargothrond
Dec 13 2024, 3:40pm
Post #8 of 36
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A lot of posts about RoP mention “bad writing” as the major flaw of the series. But what does that mean to each of you? I’m looking for specific examples because I’m curious as to whether there is any consensus amongst the posters on this board.
Is it the dialogue?
Is it the deviations from Tolkien’s story?
Are there particular plot lines or scenes that you feel don’t contribute to the story as it’s being told by RoP?
Or are there parts that you consider to be written badly because you just don’t like them and their storyline?
Something else?
First, it is clunky dialogue at times. Most of Galadriel's lines are just stiff and distant, like she's watching her life rather than living it. Gil-Galad's lines make him seem clueless and apathetic. Theo is annoying in every scene.
Not all characters have bad dialogue, though. The dwarves are all written well. And the interaction between Sauron/Celebrimbor was awesome!
Second, it is the leaps in logic. For example, in Season 1 when Halbrand receives a wound that can only be healed by Elvish medicine but is still well enough to ride a horse halfway across the continent, that was an example of bad writing. Similarly, Galadriel's disdain for royalty wherever she goes is bad writing. No matter how haughty a person might be, the position of King or Queen would demand at least a modicum of respect. She shows nothing but contempt in Season 1 for Gil-Galad and Miriel.
Third, it is the poor writing shows up in the lack of spacial communication. Characters seem to teleport from place to place. The most glaring example is During IV in Season 2 as he zips back and forth between Eregion and Moria. Arondir is another example. But also travel to and from Numenor is hasty, and the battle of Eregion did not communicate the location of the forces at war half as well as the Battle at Helm's Deep or Pelinor Fields. Even the Battle at Dale/Erebor was staged better in BotFA, IMHO.
Finally, the mystery boxing of characters and objects is just grating. By the end of season two, we should have been past all that. Now we have to wonder about Isildur's girlfriend and the Evil Wizard.
So for me, when I talk about bad writing, this is what I mean.
My Low-Magic Fantasy Novel on eBook/hardback: The Huntsman and the She-Wolf
The Huntsman and the She-Wolf on audio Book.
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Junesong
Nargothrond
Dec 13 2024, 3:53pm
Post #9 of 36
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"First, it is clunky dialogue at times. Most of Galadriel's lines are just stiff and distant, like she's watching her life rather than living it. Gil-Galad's lines make him seem clueless and apathetic. Theo is annoying in every scene."
One of the reasons I want to do a rewatch and then come back with specific examples is that I want to parse the difference between bad writing and bad acting.
This can be hard.
Sometimes actors look bad because they're trying to perform weak writing. Sometimes actor's choices (or the desire of a director) makes good writing look stiff and awkward.
(One small example of this would be Cate Blanchett's Galadriel in Jackson's films. I think it's by far her worst performance - but most of that is because of Jackson's vision and aesthetic for elves, rather than her skill or even the strength of the screenplay, which in Galadriel's case stuck pretty true to Tolkien's words.)
"So which story do you prefer?"
"The one with the tiger. That's the better story."
"Thank you. And so it goes with God."
(This post was edited by Junesong on Dec 13 2024, 3:54pm)
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Meneldor
Doriath
Dec 13 2024, 6:15pm
Post #10 of 36
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anything useful to contribute to the discussion, but I couldn't resist posting this.
They that go down to the sea in ships, that do business in great waters, these see the works of the Lord, and His wonders in the deep. -Psalm 107
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Noria
Hithlum
Dec 21 2024, 2:29pm
Post #11 of 36
(18004 views)
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The sun yet shines
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Noria
Hithlum
Dec 21 2024, 2:32pm
Post #12 of 36
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This is the kind of thing I was hoping for.
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Thanks for responding and sorry for my late response.
Your points are Interesting. Maybe if JuneSong has anything to say after his rewatch, we can all talk
So far, he’s the only other person besides you who seems willing to put their money where their mouth is.
The sun yet shines
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uncle Iorlas
Nargothrond
Apr 6, 7:58am
Post #13 of 36
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I’m late to this thread and late to the show, not to mention a bit late at night on this occasion. Only in the last couple weeks have I finally got round to watching the show at all, beyond some trailers and such early on. I had a Sad about it and was reluctant to find out what they’d actually ended up doing it. Now, I’ve watched all of the first two episodes of the first season, so it’s not like I’m necessarily qualified to sound off on the whole thing. I went back and looked at a couple threads from nineteen pages deep in this forum from when that’s about all anybody had seen. But I don’t honestly think I’ll ever really be caught up on it; I’m not sure I’ll go back at all, alas. As with Jackson, I feel like I’ve seen enough to know it isn’t suddenly going to get better now.
It looks about like I was starting to think it would: head and shoulders above Jackson, certainly, but that more or less just means the dialogue sounds like adults talking to each other. At the same time it is falling well short of what I might have hoped for.
There’s stuff I like in the show; Khazad-Dûm was gorgeous, easily my favorite part of it all so far. The dwarves in general have been satisfying, with reservations about their Scottishness. And maybe I’ll watch a little further to get a look at Númenór, since I saw enough in various previews to know it’s going to at least look gorgeous.
Surely some of what bothers me is what one might categorize as “purist” concerns: most of all, I find, the way the elves are being presented. And that’s not even new! Jackson did the same, and so have no end of Tolkien-derivative media for decades before him. Elves as haughty and cold and humorless, trying so hard to be lofty and dignified that they forget completely to be merry and joyous and inspiring. They have to make you fall in love with them! Or else the way Sam and Pippin react to them just doesn’t make any sense. And, maybe a better way to encapsulate the fundamental duality at the heart of Tolkien’s presentation of them: it must be possible for an old, worldly-wise dwarf to believe that they are foolish, and it must simultaneously be foolish for him to think so. Both must be true.
When we were talking some years ago about how to present elves, what we came to was that the elves should be well and truly over it. Anything that happens, they’ve seen it a million times before. They’ve survived it before. They’ve probably seen much worse. They’re like the ancient wrinkled activists you meet, if you travel in such circles, reminding all and sundry that you have to pace yourself, you have to live your lives as you go along*; you have to sing and dance even while you fight the good fight year after year, or you just shrivel up and die. Not that I mean the elves should be wrinkled—I honestly can’t get worked up at all about what kind of haircuts elves wear, but seeing some elves looking decades older than other elves was a real spell-breaker for me—I just mean, that well-seasoned, trauma-informed lightness of heart, the focus on what is essential and the twinkly-eyed shedding of everything else. If you’ve ever seen Harold and Maude, think hard about Maude here. There’s an elf for you.
The nature of elves has been shaped for centuries beyond count by trauma. This is a world where the devil is real and he is going to come out of nowhere and brutally shred any beautiful thing anyone builds anywhere and he doesn’t need a reason and everybody who’s been around for long has lost friends and family and homes and hidden cities and whole worlds to this blunt relentless fascist assault that knows no reason and no compromise. You’re not going to say or do anything to these people that compares to what he’s already done to them and they remember it all like it was yesterday. They see or hear one orc and all that trauma is back and the jokes and goofy rhymes and songs and bubbly laughter and carpe diem is right out the door and they are all fighting desperately for everything they ever loved. All they ever wanted was to sing and build fanciful things and talk to rocks and enjoy the bounty of life in creation and there is a deep injustice in the way that’s been taken from them for so long.
Instead we always get these pompous blondes in white tennis outfits sailing their empty boats by ceremonious synchronized swimming rituals or whatever that was. No joy, no humor, no wisdom. I expected it but it still saddens me. One of the first things I did was search this forum for the word “vulcan” to see if anybody else had the same impression I did (and plenty have). Arondir, particularly, seems very much to be playing a Vulcan rather than an elf.
But! All that is more a matter of textual faith, more than concerns about writing per se, though the one may bleed into the other. So what concerns are there about bad writing as such?
I have those too. Alas, it’s not just the mishandled elves and such “purist” considerations as that; it just isn’t very good storytelling. Already in the first episode a lot of plot is being driven by the angry wilful ignorance of major characters, which is reminiscent of Harry Potter. Seriously, your idea of the elves in the middle second age is that they not only shrug and assume Sauron just inexplicably vanished after having their entire civilization dogged by him for untold thousands of years, but they’re so abjectly bereft of critical thinking that they condemn and ostracize anybody not lockstepping with this unprompted leap of faith? What? Any small focus group composed of normal children would immediately flag that you don’t effing know that, Jack.
It makes Gil-Galad stupid. Not a good first move. And it also makes Galadriel stupid for being so helpless to clearly enunciate why she’s making the obvious right call, even though at least she is. The viewer is never going to be impressed with characters so starkly dumber than ourselves. If this is all you can think of to raise conflict, go back to the drawing board. I only wish conflict were so hard to come by in real life.
For the love of God, don’t pick thoroughly-understood fan favorites like Galadriel and Elrond for your principal characters! Let them play minor roles and get the fans excited when they show up for their cameos. Center the plot on a combination of invented characters and lesser-known, more notional figures from the second age who don’t really have that much personality in the public imagination (and I include Sauron here, since his function in the Lord of the Rings is much more macguffin than character).
Also, more minor point, but why alienate the true believers with clear departures from canon on the level of meteoric Gandalfery? Not that the true fans are such a big power bloc, but there’s so much room in the second age for invention on just that fantastic of a level. All those blank spots on the map and in the timeline are beckoning invitations shining with potential.
If you really want to engage with an idea, you study it in and out. If you want to engage with an argument, you seek out the smartest and most persuasive version of it, not some clumsy straw-man version. And in an important way, every story makes an argument; indeed every character implicitly has a case to make, namely that what she is choosing to say and do makes sense. When you let your characters operate on the basis of cloudy, poorly-understood motives, those characters are failing to make that case to the viewer. Worse yet if their motives are actively kind of dumb and easily debunked over coffee and cookies between episodes.
And what pulls a viewer into a show and holds her there is investment in the characters, their motives, their hopes and fears and hazards. We need to know what Galadriel wants, with some idea of why she wants it but mostly we need to be really sold that she does want it, and then we are right there with her as she sets about tryna go get it. Maybe she’s driven by clear-eyed reason, maybe she’s driven by passions she doesn’t properly understand, both are viable stories, but you have to give us something to hold on to, or we just won’t hold on.
Trying to maintain dramatic tension just by having characters be inexplicably more hostile and angry with one another than they have any sensible reason to be is a cheap substitute for understanding who your characters are and what makes them tick. Gil-Galad, most conspicuously in these first two episodes, is just there because he’s there. He has to be there cos the book says he will be later but all we know is he holds a high and mighty station; and instead of gleefully filling that mostly blank space with a personality, its background and habits and preoccupations, they just left him mostly blank paper. If your thing is really that Galadriel is the only elf left who still believes in vigilance against Sauron (which is cliché and unconvincing anyway, but even so) then figure out what kind of character opposes that, and what on earth his motives are, and make sure Gil-Galad is that guy. IF you really want to base your conflict on inter-elf rivalry and resentment, which I’m just saying, there’s a reason Tolkien never needed to do that, but anyway.
What is the rationale for thinking Sauron might be gone? Do the elves just mostly think he bit it in the War of Wrath? Did I miss something? I had the impression they just came to this conclusion because it’s been a while since anybody’s seen him, which is a crazy short attention span for elves to have if in fact we want the audience to understand that all these people are literally thousands of years old.
Maybe Gil-Galad is in some way invested in the idea that Sauron is gone? Like, he or someone he reveres was involved in some effort to remove Sauron and it wasn’t quite clear to them at the end of this operation what had actually happened? So he could have reputation or the loyalty of his heart mixed up in his reading of the evidence. That’s one angle, not maybe my favorite.
Maybe Gil-Galad is so fiercely against acknowledging any possibility that Sauron is still out there because he can’t bear it. Maybe it’s Lindon; he’s doing the fatal thing, even now, he’s presiding over the building of a beautiful elven city by the sea, it’s been going on for centuries and they’ve gotten less and less careful about defensibility until it’s not even secret at all any more, they’re just making it grander and grander—and we need to do more than pan across a cool rendering, we need to see that Gil-Galad and people all around are deeply invested in the complexities of creating this achingly gorgeous city that we wish we could buy tickets to right away, like a faux-medieval Vancouver with elf dance parties; make us see what he loves and then make us love what he loves. His head is all full of city-building and state-building and more and more he’s letting himself dream of ambitious, expansive, glorious works of peace and plenty, and it has been a while, and maybe it’s safe, and at this point he knows he and everybody he’s working for are horked if he’s wrong, and he just cannot stand to face it, the implications of being wrong. He has way too much to lose.
So he won’t look. Because that’s where his trauma lives. Because he remembers Nargothrond, and/or Doriath, and/or Gondolin, sorry, right off the bat I don’t remember how old Gil-Galad is and how much of all that he ever saw, but just pick whatever real bad stuff he’s seen in his life and he does not have the courage to admit to himself that if he is guessing wrong, he is setting his beloved Havens up for just as catastrophic a fate and by now it feels too late to change course so to live from day to day he has to believe it’s safe now. He’s committed, or in his heart it feels like that’s the only way to be. Even so, he has to have a good, convincing reason to believe Sauron might really be gone for good. Something has to have happened that was ambiguous, that a reasonable person could see as compelling evidence that it’s over now.
And then, when Galadriel is fixated on endlessly reenacting the war with Sauron because she wanted a piece of him and in the end that’s not how it worked out and she can’t face that, he can want to shut her up and also genuinely feel like removing her from the position of prosecuting her manhunt is a kindness to her, like an intervention, and we can even love him a little bit for doing it. Then we can see his side of it.
Anyway, point being, in the form we actually got we don’t get that buy-in. All we see is, he insists that Sauron is gone, because he says so, and that’s it. And while I like the effort at subtlety there, that he has the maturity to dismiss her in the guise of glorifying her, and to kick her upstairs as it were to some desirable reward (leaving aside purist concerns about how that works), it doesn’t go very far; obviously anybody who doesn’t tell her what he’s planning until the middle of a whole ceremony about it is being hell passive-aggressive and not that mature at all really. They had a good impulse there but all they actually gave us was a gesture in the direction of Gil-Galad being a clever statesman… which they implicitly ask us to accept as if it were the real thing. Just like he has no reason to insist he knows Sauron is gone, but he just loudly acts like he does, and we are implicitly asked to go along with it and pretend he’s a fully formed person with some kind of reason for the choices he’s making, even though we haven’t been given one really.
There’s just no way you move the viewer’s heart with that. We’re not that dumb. You can’t skip the part about the characters’ motives. They matter more, so much more, than all the magic and all the battles and all the lovely scenery and all the fan service.
We need to know what they want and what they need to do to get it. Each and every one of them. And we need to care about them getting it. And that, at the end of the day, is the whole game.
* http://calmunist.com/...ensive-of-snail.html
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DwellerInDale
Nargothrond
Apr 6, 9:36pm
Post #14 of 36
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Thanks for sharing your opinions. Reading your post, I couldn't help but wonder whether some of your views would stand up to a second watch-- there are many things that are a bit subtle and easily missed on first watch. In addition, relevant plotlines are resolved later in the season, especially in the finale.
I see two main contradictions in what you wrote, so perhaps you can clarify these points. On the one hand, you wish the elves to be "over it", moved on after the defeat of Morgoth, singing and dancing:
When we were talking some years ago about how to present elves, what we came to was that the elves should be well and truly over it.
Anything that happens, they’ve seen it a million times before. They’ve survived it before. They’ve probably seen much worse. They’re like
the ancient wrinkled activists you meet, if you travel in such circles, reminding all and sundry that you have to pace yourself, you have to
live your lives as you go along*;
you have to sing and dance even while you fight the good fight year after year
The other point I find contradictory concerns Galadriel's motivation. As our main protagonist for Season 1, the show must, as you say, present motives for the things she does:
And what pulls a viewer into a show and holds her there is investment in the characters, their motives, their hopes and fears and hazards.
We need to know what Galadriel wants, with some idea of why she wants it but mostly we need to be really sold that she does want it, and
then we are right there with her as she sets about tryna go get it. Maybe she’s driven by clear-eyed reason, maybe she’s driven by passions
she doesn’t properly understand, both are viable stories, but you have to give us something to hold on to, or we just won’t hold on.
But this seems to me to be the heart of Season 1-- Galadriel is one of the very few elves who have not "moved on", since her beloved brother was killed "in a dark place by agents of Sauron" (episode 5), and the obsession that has bred and the consequences explain her actions and form the major story arc of the first season. The Season 1 finale does present, in a symbolic way that intertwines with other developed themes developed in the show, her first step in moving on from her brother's death.
Don't mess with my favorite female elves.
(This post was edited by DwellerInDale on Apr 6, 9:41pm)
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uncle Iorlas
Nargothrond
Apr 7, 5:11am
Post #15 of 36
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I think the phrase “over it” became kind of a red herring for you. I wasn’t clear. Maybe some better language for what I mean could be built around the word “perspective.” I don’t mean the elves are, or should be, “over it” in the sense that they’ve “moved on” and put their troubles behind them. I mean that elves, with their millennia of perspective, aren’t going to get invested in ephemeral, trivial things in life. They don’t sweat the petty things, to take another modern idiom.
So their playfulness and signing and drinking in the pleasures of the natural world is not a matter of regression to a state of innocence, but a carpe diem approach to life informed by deep sorrow; they know how quickly it can all be taken away again.
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DGHCaretaker
Nargothrond
Apr 7, 1:08pm
Post #16 of 36
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...elves, with their millennia of perspective, aren’t going to get invested in ephemeral, trivial things in life. ... but a carpe diem approach to life...
These two things seem contradictory to me.
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uncle Iorlas
Nargothrond
Apr 7, 5:02pm
Post #17 of 36
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I don’t want to get bogged down in that one point.
Which is exactly what I meant: the elves, after their millionth rodeo, pay attention to what matters, and laugh off whatever really doesn’t.
That only contradicts carpe diem if you think of play, and the arts, as trivial. Which, to be fair, our culture teaches us to do—but the elves would know better.
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DGHCaretaker
Nargothrond
Apr 10, 3:27am
Post #18 of 36
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Writing Your Audience Out Of The Show
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This is appropriate not only to Rings of Power or Doctor Who, but many contemporary franchises. I posit that bad writing includes departing from the source material, character assassination, deconstruction, fan baiting, hitting your audience on the nose, and telling them to get lost.
Here are the first three paragraphs of, then the link to, an article that could be applied to why "Hollywood" is losing its audience through bad writing and the other things.
In recent years, Doctor Who hasn’t felt like the show I grew up loving. It’s not just nostalgia talking, either. It feels like something deeper has shifted, and not in a way that brings people together.
These days, fans don’t seem to talk as much about the plots or mysteries any more. Instead, most of the noisier conversations I see around Doctor Who are about controversy, politics, identity, and whether the show is making some kind of “statement”. Now, with the upcoming series, led by Ncuti Gatwa and new companion Varada Sethu, it’s all flared up again before a single episode has even aired.
In a recent Radio Times interview, Sethu addressed some of the backlash the show has faced, saying, “I just think we’re doing the right thing if we’re getting comments like that.” Gatwa added, “We’re going to p* off so many people.” I couldn’t help but sigh at this, because all I could think was, I miss the days when it felt like the marketing and mission of the show was to bring people together.
https://www.doctorwhotv.co.uk/doctor-who-antagonistic-103806.htm
(This post was edited by DGHCaretaker on Apr 10, 3:33am)
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Ataahua
Forum Admin
Apr 10, 3:50am
Post #19 of 36
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Doctor Who lost me with Jodie Whittaker
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because each episode of the first season took on a preachy tone and I got tired of being lectured to rather than spooked, thrilled and entertained. (TBH, I was losing my joy in the show bit by bit during the Peter Capaldi seasons.)
I had hoped to get back on board with Ncuti because Russell T Davies was returning as showrunner, but then Disney bought the streaming rights and I'm not paying for yet another platform just to watch it.
Celebrimbor: "Pretty rings..."
Dwarves: "Pretty rings..."
Men: "Pretty rings..."
Sauron: "Mine's better."
"Ah, how ironic, the addictive qualities of Sauron’s master weapon led to its own destruction. Which just goes to show, kids - if you want two small and noble souls to succeed on a mission of dire importance... send an evil-minded beggar with them too." - Gandalf's Diaries, final par, by Ufthak.
Fantasy novel - The Arcanist's Tattoo
My LOTR fan-fiction
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Junesong
Nargothrond
Apr 10, 1:25pm
Post #20 of 36
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I agree that the modern cultural priority of "representation" has started to strangle art. It's not impossible to write a good story while also caring about representation, but I think that putting representation at the top of the hierarchy of creativity is a huge mistake.
I think it got there because people correctly identified representation in creative media as having a big impact on how we see and evaluate the world. This began an initiative to be more thoughtful and intentional about how certain people or ideas were represented. Then, like everything else in human nature, this initiative began to get lazy, automatic and performative. The common currency seemed to be, just make things less white. Or just make things less heteronormative. That lazy default has started to get an enormous, unignorable pushback.
At first the push back was mostly from the same crowd who pushes back on anything and everything so it was mostly dismissable. But the problem with dismissing things because of affiliation politics is that THAT ALSO becomes lazy, automatic and performative until people are literally defending crappy stories and characters and plots because they don't like the demographic that's most vocally critical. (Meanwhile, a reactive secondary industry has caught fire online that dunks on all representation indiscriminately - regardless of how thoughtful or integral that representation may be - or even sight unseen in some cases)
Hollywood has never put pure story telling first, so this isn't new.
Hollywood has never cared about their fans, or catered to them (not successfully anyway) so that's not new either.
What's new is that the internet gives everyone a platform and everyone a community. The culture war pulls one into the cruelest of binaries with the force of a thousand suns and we find ourselves unable to be discerning, or nuanced, or even really fully engaged. Instead, we're reacting to "the other side" and are pretty thoughtblind most of the time.
And that's just entertainment media. Our "escape!" The real world is much, much worse.
"So which story do you prefer?"
"The one with the tiger. That's the better story."
"Thank you. And so it goes with God."
(This post was edited by Junesong on Apr 10, 1:26pm)
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uncle Iorlas
Nargothrond
Apr 10, 5:34pm
Post #21 of 36
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the essential purist complaint
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“Departing from the source material” was kind of set aside out the outset of the thread as *not* the point of “bad writing” complaints. I would say, Apocalypse Now departed radically from its source material, and is a fantastically good movie. Even though the source novel is also good.
Sometimes departing from the source material is what saves an adaptation. Every line people remember from Wizard of Oz is original to the movie. The book simply isn’t that well written.
I think the rest of your listed offenses are also only marginally concerns about writing per se. And the quoted article says nothing about writing; it seems to be setting out into a discussion of the culture or fandom surrounding a show, and how the makers of a show relate to that sociopolitical positioning. It’s a conversation one can have but it’s not about the writing exactly.
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DGHCaretaker
Nargothrond
Apr 10, 6:25pm
Post #22 of 36
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Everything comes out of the writing. The article exists because of the shows as written.
“Departing from the source material” was kind of set aside out the outset
Nope.
OP: "Is it the deviations from Tolkien’s story?"
Apocalypse Now isn't a franchise and I didn't read the book so I had no basis to argue it. I read The Wizard of Oz when I was a bit older after seeing the movie once a year for several years during its annual holiday broadcast. I remember being disappointed that some things were different for the worse than the movie. So I agree there, but it was my evaluation as a child.
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uncle Iorlas
Nargothrond
Apr 10, 9:49pm
Post #23 of 36
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I think this is a pretty nuanced take.
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I think that putting representation at the top of the hierarchy of creativity is a huge mistake.
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This began an initiative to be more thoughtful and intentional about how certain people or ideas were represented. Then, like everything else in human nature, this initiative began to get lazy, automatic and performative.
There is a lot to what you say, and as you point up, it can be difficult to talk about. I do have some mixed feelings myself about how the drive the representation plays out in contemporary media, but I tend to shy away from getting into the weeds about it because I don’t want to be perceived as jumping on any of the nastier bandwagons on display in this discourse.
I am certainly on board with the principle of representation in general. I make a practice, not constantly but as persistently as I can manage, of introducing female characters if I don’t have some specific reason to make them male. I try to bear disability representation in mind particularly, as I think that gets forgotten maybe the most. And lord knows all of it is easier when writing new stories. Creator, which became an instant favorite when I saw it in the theater a couple years back, throws so much crazy world building at you so fast that you barely have a moment to notice that the protagonist is a disabled black man and the principal villain is a sixty-something mom. You have a free hand for representation with original work and I like to operate in that territory for that reason.
I knew, years ago, that there was probably going to be a political need for diversified representation in what became ROP. I suspect, as I look at the show, that the pressure was greater than I had imagined, and that Amazon was imposing some specifics from above. I’m honestly not a hundred percent comfortable with it, but I debate it all with myself constantly. The circle goes like this: I would have thought, all right, if you want to have humans of different races, you have the Haradrim and the Easterlings to work with right there; one option is run some plotlines into their territory, but also the coast of what became Gondor is pretty cosmopolitan and has cultural commerce with those populations, so it makes sense if there are characters of that heritage present. You want to do the same with elves, hobbits and dwarves, well, it’s not hard to imagine that there are parallel populations of what we call “races” in the real world within each of what we call “races” in D&D. The dwarves are explicitly divided into seven peoples of whom we only see one, so the other six can be anything you need. Elves and hobbits are less geometrically categorized, but you can posit populations of black elves somewhere in the map. And then… well I guess once you’ve decided there are black elves somewhere, they come from somewhere, you can either meet a whole contingent of them, or well, it would actually begin to make sense to see a black face among elves in principally white-faced populations for the same reason as Southron faces in Gondor: people get around, over the centuries, and it’s been millennia.
Which leads to exactly the sort of picture we’re seeing in the show, really. Which I was initially uncomfortable with because it seemed modern, like something being imposed by an unmistakably modern sensibility.
It’s sort of parallel to what they call the Tiffany problem. The truth is, medieval Europe in the real world looked a lot more like what we see in ROP than what Tolkien presents in his book. Rome and the Han dynasty were aware of one another, across the length of Asia, with other empires along the Silk Road between. And Rome both attracted and kidnapped people from all around the Mediterranean and they circulated widely within that vast and shifting empire for centuries. Vikings had traffic with the Middle East and the Middle East had traffic into sub-Saharan Africa and by the time what we call the Middle Ages got started, only the Americas and the Pacific were really unknown.
But a lot of modern white boys have the notion that Europe was a sea of pasty white faces and that any variation in that is ahistorical, and the hard pill to swallow is, Tolkien himself may have been pretty much one of those white boys. My persistent discomfort with the helter-skelter appearance of nonwhite faces in a Tolkienian landscape isn’t because this defies history, but because I’m quite sure Tolkien wouldn’t have done it, and that’s the inconsistency that’s kind of jarring. But it’s really not to his credit that he wouldn’t have. He was kind of a git about race. So what am I defending?
(I should note, I think the silence of the women is much more noticeable in Tolkien—but for whatever reason, at least for most of the time I’ve been thinking about it, I haven’t felt troubled by the idea of giving the women voices in his landscape even if I am certain he wouldn’t have done so himself. Maybe because at least I always knew they must be present? Maybe that says more about me than anything.)
Part of me wants to say, people might as well give their love and attention to other stories, to new stories, that were inclusive from the beginning. Why go on trying to see yourself in somebody else’s generation-old favorites that exclude you? But… I’m a white guy. What do I know about what it’s like to love literature that doesn’t feature anybody I can see myself in? I find myself wanting to hear more from fans of every other demographic about what the experience of seeing not-just-white-guy faces in ROP (and Dr. Who, and all the other comparable media) has been like.
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DGHCaretaker
Nargothrond
Apr 10, 11:28pm
Post #24 of 36
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I knew, years ago, that there was probably going to be a political need for diversified representation in what became ROP. I suspect, as I look at the show, that the pressure was greater than I had imagined, and that Amazon was imposing some specifics from above.
Absolutely. Amazon placed their published "Inclusion Policy & Playbook" DEI mandate at the top of their org chart. It drove everything, including management, hiring, production, talent, and writing. For those who prefer their stories to be organic, this had the opposite effect of the tail wagging the dog. I wrote plenty of searchable posts on the topic so I'll just leave it there. Amazon has since dropped it under the political thumb, as covered by Deadline.
https://deadline.com/2025/02/amazon-studios-inclusion-policy-dei-donald-trump-1236288680/
Part of me wants to say, people might as well give their love and attention to other stories, to new stories, that were inclusive from the beginning.
Yes! Be creative and do it right instead of coopting and corrupting beloved works of art. "The Expanse" was one of those new things. It was far superior in how organic DEI was to the production and story instead of driving production and story. It was a great example of how good story, good writing, and the spirit of DEI are done right.
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uncle Iorlas
Nargothrond
Apr 11, 3:25am
Post #25 of 36
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Yes! Be creative and do it right instead of coopting and corrupting beloved works of art. "The Expanse" was one of those new things. It was far superior in how organic DEI was to the production and story instead of driving production and story. It was a great example of how good story, good writing, and the spirit of DEI are done right. Sure, I loved the Expanse as far as I watched it, and yes, I’m that’s another fine example of a blank slate making it infinitely easier to diversify all day long without upsetting the applecarts of pre-existing fans. Would it be great if diverse creators (and even white guys) kept pumping out new titles that were diverse from go and the fans loved them and new traditions began and everybody was happy? Of course.
But you can’t tell people what to like. Or what not to like. And while indeed there are armies of creators churning out just such material as best they are able, they often face a headwind of publishers who don’t want to bet on that kind of work financially. For all sorts of reasons, not just the tepid audience response and vocal screeching from some corners of the internet every time a story centers somebody other than a white man. (With movies in particular, there’s a whole side plot about how much money any given movie makes in China, often enough to render a movie profitable even if it absolutely tanked in the US and Europe, and the way this box office power incentivizes studios to strip all movies of things that annoy Chinese authorities—which includes gay plots, black characters, and of course anybody talking too much smack about China.) And even if diverse new work slowly gains a foothold in the public consciousness, that doesn’t mean everybody but white dudes will flock to that without a backward glance. These boards are chockablock with women who know Tolkien inside out, despite the lamentably few women he offers them among his characters. There are nerds of every race who read everything in sight and they aren’t gonna skip the popular favorites their friends rave about just because the characters are predictably all white men. Especially when there is chronically not much else to choose from.
Anyway. You can say “go find greener pastures” and that might be great if it worked, but you’re ignoring the rest of what I said. If in fact fans of all sorts are invested in Tolkien (and Who and whatever else) and it moves them to see faces more like their own in some version of those stories, that matters, and nobody’s gonna care whether a couple of white guys understand why. Not should they.
I should note, “co-opting and corrupting” is a pretty absurd description of what ROP, or the last Doctor or two, are doing. Nobody is stealing LOTR to enlist it in some political agenda; it isn’t even that book, or any other by the author. We are getting the only thing we ever could have gotten, a fanfic prequel with a budget. If you weren’t sounding the alarm about PJ “corrupting” LOTR by replacing Tolkien’s dialogue with his own infantile garbage, you really have no business crying “omg corruption” when somebody writes a black hobbit.
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