My thoughts on the upcoming LOTR: Rings of Power

[olivermoss]

I hope to enjoy it. It looks pretty. I am in no way expecting it to be anything like canon.



For three ages of mankind I've been dealing with fans conflating book canon and movie canon. I've had the 'Tolkien elves aren't vegan' discussion more times than I even want to think about.

The original films were amazing. I loved them. They also made Gimli the comedy relief.

The Hobbit films made Elrond a bad host. I don't even know how to get across what a big deal that is. In the medieval and early english texts he was drawing off of, and the storytelling traditions he was drawing off of, being a good host was integral to a person's honor. You could not both be a good person and a bad host, an honorable person and a bad host. How you treated guests was everything and Elrond's place was known as The Last Homely House. It was the pinnacle of hospitality. He's not some uptight little petty noble who can't figure out how to feed a Dwarf. The veganism was put in 100% because 'lol making fun of vegans' but vegans don't just eat shoots and leaves. I've had plenty of hearty vegan meals. Even if elves were vegans, Elrond could easily have made a feast for them out of savory nut based dishes or the seed cakes and other things they canonically enjoyed at Bilbo's. It's layers of nonsense and they trashed his character for the sake of a 'lol vegans' joke.

The good jokes in the Hobbit were removed and Jackson put in 'lol vegans' and 'lol guy in dress' jokes instead.

So, the canon ship has long since sailed. I assume things on the show are going to make me go 'ugh... no'. But I wish we'd view the adaptations like how Marvel fans view the MCU. It's not canon, it's a different thing by different people. I will probably write a a few 'how this contradicts book canon' posts, but I do hope I enjoy the show. I'd much rather enjoy the show with the elfs and dwarfs than not enjoy it.

My Tolkien fic tends to be very book-purist, only to get fans trying to 'correct me'. I've nuked a lot of comments 'correcting' one of my fics.

I am sad that female dwarves wont have beards, but also putting POC women in beards was not going to hit well. In a perfect world, it would be fine to have a dark-skinned Dis with a beard, but we do not live in that world. A lot of fans justifiably upset if promo pics of a black woman in a beard came out. All they'd see would be racist stereotyping and think it was some sort of horrible joke.

Actually I don't remember if the beards were even book canon or History of Middle Earth canon. It's been a while. I tend to treat anything not in the books he published while alive like a buffet. HOME, letters, etc, it's interesting and useful but it's not ... canon-canon.

The one thing that gives me pause and might lead me to not watch is the number of accidents filming had.

According to a story published by The New Zealand Herald Friday, four sources on the set of the tech giant’s $1 billion “LOTR” show say their concerns about safety regulations are not being taken seriously due to the fact those incidents, which later required surgery, were not disclosed to WorkSafe. These workers also told the Herald they think a senior stunt supervisor has created an “uneasy” on-set environment, contributing to the unsafe standards.

source.

I also saw reports on twitter about experienced stunties flat out refusing to go work for the project due to poor safety conditions.

Comments

[muccamukk]

I'm another book fan, though I'm over on the Legolas/Gimli side of things, so the movie crossover is close to nil, and I don't seem to get corrected like you do. I haven't seen the Hobbit films due to the shortness of my existence on this mortal plane.

I believe the lady dwarf beards are from the RotK appendix, but I didn't actually look this up.

I will probably watch the new show? I guess? It seems like at the moment like a soft attempt to rebrand Jeff Bezos as One Of Us, as I keep hearing about how this is his pet project. He's close to the last person on Earth I want to imprint himself on the text, which has enough weird white nationalist types clinging to it already. Hearing about the safety violations only underlines that.

[olivermoss]

I've been solidly Legolas/Gimli since before the films came out. The film cut the relationship but also made Gimli bumbling and spill beer on himself.

Not watching the Hobbit films was a good life choice. I did, but my time would have been better spent dong anything else.

I want to like the show, but if I nope out it likely wont be due to conflicts with the canon or overly modern hairstyles.

[muccamukk]

Yeah the main slash ship in the films was Aragorn/Legolas, and a bunch of hobbit ones, so that opinion was incorrect on a number of levels, lol.

The one thing the hobbit films did do was give Legolas/Gimli a bit of a boost as dwarves were sexy now, which was kind of nice (as long as you don't mind all the hair braiding fanon). It's certainly my most read fic, along with Steve/Tony.

[olivermoss]

When the films came out it was suddenly okay to like the dwarf in a slash pairing! That was great for like a minute. Trying to be part of Gigolas fandom was not one of my better life choices.

[muccamukk]

I heard things got pretty exciting on tumblr. My publish one fic a year and don't otherwise participate thing seems to be working out, but it's not really very much like being in a fandom, admittedly. I did my time in Tolkien fandom wank pits when the films came out twenty years ago, and I guess I'm not looking forward to another go around with the new show.

[olivermoss]

There was tumblr, but also meetups and an irc chat. Idiot Me was all 'oh hey, people who like thing I like! I should hang with them'

Ah, well. I have a few nearly complete fics and also a fic idea I've rewritten from scratch a few times and never posted. I am going to get those out the door... eventually and probably not interact.

[mistressofmuses]

I wish that people in general were more willing to look at adaptations as *different* canons. And I do get that sometimes there are plain bad adaptations out there - teenage me still has too many feelings and is still super upset about the Blood and Chocolate movie - but for the most part... adaptations to a different medium HAVE to be different. Books and movies and TV shows all work DIFFERENTLY from each other, and can't ever be 100% faithful copies of each other.

I absolutely love the LotR film trilogy. I... didn't like the Hobbit movies. And I will utterly agree with you that throwing out important characterization in order to shoehorn in a joke is pretty much always going to be a bad decision. And it was! I'll stay angry about it, lol.

My knowledge of book canon is rusty. I'm probably guilty of conflating some bits of book and movie canon, too, because it's been longer since I read the books. I really need to reread them - it's been decades at this point. So the Amazon show probably won't trip up any "but that's not how it's supposed to go" feelings for me personally.

Tbh, the behind the scenes issues are likely to bother me a lot more. Those types of safety issues are extremely concerning. The number of shows being produced by streaming platforms that seem to have bad safety conditions, or sketchy anti-union shit going on, etc. definitely doesn't make me happy.

[olivermoss]

I'm sure I'll be pissed at things, but the canon ship has long since sailed. It's hard to take Tolkien series at large, especially since a lot of them embraced that one video game that used designs from PJ's films, even thought it broke new ground in video game monetization and went against a core idea of the books. A lot of the complaints about Elrond are citing movie canon, not book canon.

I looked at tumblr last night and it was pure anger. People were upset that people were upset. Straw man and bad faith arguments. I was legit like 'is this the worst thing I've ever see, or was this typical of tumblr like ten years ago and I've just forgot?'

Deviations from canon are not bad in and of themselves, it's the why and how. And when has the earliest promo copy for anything ever been right? What we have so far are not things to get worked up over.

PJ's films were a better adaptation than I thought possible, even though I've been dealing with a fandom that consistently forgets Gimli is nothing like that in the books. Point out that Legolas isn't supposed to look like that and people look at you blankly. It's just years of fan art and book art made the whole frail/pale thing such strong fanon and PJ decided to roll with it. He rolled with a LOT of fanon for appearances.

So seeing 'nooo.... but the canon!' from fandom at large makes me want to turn into a balrog, one with wings.

The on-set accidents and the BS around them is why I stopped following development of the show.

[mistressofmuses]

I feel like criticism of something going against previous canon is fair, but yeah, there's no way for it to BE completely true to the original book canon at this point. I feel like I probably know what video game you mean, though I never knew much about the lore of it or anything, so I missed what it did counter to the main ideas or themes of the books.

Pretty much same with what few scraps I saw on tumblr. Seemed like no one was happy, haha, and that meant they had to be sure no one else had a chance to be. I feel like I can't even tell anymore what the ~discourse~ is like, because the bad faith arguments quickly swinging to personal accusation seems so damn endemic anymore.

The why and how do matter. I do think any adaptation is going to HAVE to deviate, because a movie can't tell a story the same way a book can, nor is everyone's "mental movie" when they read a really evocative book going to look identical. But sometimes the deviations are done extremely poorly or for very weak reasons. Way worse if they go against the themes of the work they're adapting, which I think is one of the more "unforgivable" adaptation sins out there.

Yeah. I know that in the PJ movies, a lot of people seemed to think the characters were very much how they'd imagined them... but those versions that people had in their heads had been influenced by years of visual art that had codified some of those appearances. I don't blame him for going that route, but it definitely exacerbated the pre-existing common fanon.

WITH wings, lol. It *does* give a pretty ironic cast to those complaints about "canon". Which canon?

As much else as could go wrong or be a mess or suck about the series... the on-set stuff is way more worrying and upsetting imo.

[olivermoss]

They don't have Silmarillion rights still, and they are clearly trying to be based on the movie-verse. This is meant to make sense to the people who thing dwarves would break up furniture at the Last Homely House and have Elrond react... like he did. The show is fanfic of fanfic... by people who can't follow the actual canon for legal reasons. That's the reality of the situation.

I'm just going to sit over here and consider finally making a final version of Return to Erebor, because when Gimli goes home (with Leggy, of course) he is going to be carrying the Book of Balin that he retrieved in Moria that has the details of the doomed expedition of his kin.

I will probably watch the first few eps at least, because I am just one of those people who needs to see the big thing going on in fandom. I like that the Elrond promo pics looks like a fantasy themed istagram photoshoot. But, I am probably going to be very hair-trigger on noping out rather than buying in easily due to the on-set stuff... and also how hilarious it would be if Bezos' billion dollar baby bombed.

[mistressofmuses]

I've seen multiple comments about "ugh, why would they try to make a prequel if they're too lazy to read the Silmarillion", not seeming to realize that those are separate rights that they don't actually have.

Yeah, it's basically a canon divergence AU at this point.

Writing better fic (than their AU prequel) is sometimes the way to do it, ha.

I feel like it's the kind of thing that will probably wind up on in the background while I do other stuff, at least for a bit. But being ready and willing to nope out is also good.

(And tbh, I would kind of love it in an admittedly meanspirited way if it bombed, haha.)

[olivermoss]

I stopped following development when the set accidents came out, but I used to follow it pretty closely. This show is thoroughly it's own thing, sort of. It's weird that Amazon is clearly using the designs from New Line / Weta... especially since the Tolkien licensing rights are likely going to be contested in a new series of lawsuits, soon. Poor Tolkien Estate keeps taking a beating. They were actually in the red until a few years ago.

[mistressofmuses]

I suppose I can't blame them for basing a lot on the movie canon, since those are so prominent in people's minds and perceptions. Still kind of an interesting choice.

I know the whole licensing rights and estate stuff has been a nightmare. It sounds like it's pretty continually been a mess.

[olivermoss]

Yeah, it makes sense. Making a totally different fanfic of the books would confuse people. They are trying to go with... what fandom keeps mistaking for canon anyway.

[mistressofmuses]

True. Fandom does seem to have a very weird amalgamation of what makes up canon as a whole. Me included - it has been way too long since I read the books. But it's still a bit unfortunate that it's probably going to add even more weirdness to the fandom perception of what canon is.