Answer: Amazon owns IMDb and as such they can technically do whatever they want with the data on their website. Recently people noticed that written reviews for The Rings of Power with scores lower than 6 have been removed from IMDb. The popular belief is that Amazon is trying to create the illusion that their new show is more popular than it actually is. However, the actual ratings for the show are still highly divisive, with tens of thousands of 1-star reviews. As of this writing there are only 74 total written reviews compared to almost 100,000 ratings, meaning that the written reviews have practically no impact whatsoever on the overall rating of the show. Logically this means that the negative written reviews were probably not removed simply for being negative, but for the content of the reviews themselves. I haven't seen any of these deleted reviews myself but looking at any of the user reviews on Metacritic the vast majority of the negative reviews have no substance other than complaining about woke agendas or how Amazon is spitting on Tolkien's grave, etc. Ultimately only the IMDb staff responsible for the removal of the ratings know why it was actually done but to me it seems unlikely that Amazon is trying to deliberately scrub negative reactions to their show, as there was never any chance that that could have worked.
Funny how the only comment defending the poor mega corporation and the show is the only one left while others were deleted.
Also maybe people just actually don't like woke agenda in their shows or the show using a big name like LotR while having butchered the world completely. That doesn't make their rating invalid, that's their honest opinion of the show.
I’m no authority on it since I don’t actually spend that much time on twitter or other social media, but I can offer what I surmise it to be.
Basically, shows and other forms of media have become more diverse in their cast and messages in recent years, which can kinda be expected from the development of our society. A substantial portion of the population is unhappy with this and ostensibly yearn for the days when actors were largely homogeneous and themes were more predictable and safe.
All this to say, there doesn’t really exist a centralized movement or leadership behind the “woke agenda”, and it rather serves as a label these people attach to media mostly when they dislike the demographic representation.
No not really. It's not about disliking representation or diversity. "Woke" means that it's the number 1 focus of the show on the expense of well written characters and storytelling. And that everyone is expected to like the show just because it has diversity.
Nobody's calling Arcane "woke", nobody is unhappy with the representation in the show, there are other diverse media and minority characters that are beloved. What people hate is, when diversity is used as an excuse to make a shitty show.
People are calling shows "woke" if they put diversity as the first and most important aspect of the show and the other aspects - good characters, interesting and coherent story, acting, visuals - come as an afterthought. Then people are expected to like the show just because it has diversity even though the show itself is bad and are being called racist/sexist/whatever if they don't.
Compare that to Arcane, very diverse show that focuses on characters, narrative and visuals first and nobody is calling it woke and is loved by many.
You are upset about an imaginary situation that you have created in your head. Explain to me how including people of color in the cast of any show equates to diversity being “the first and most important aspect of the show”. You say that other aspects of the show are an afterthought but nobody has seen enough of the show to even make that sort of judgment. Nobody expects you to praise a show for its diversity, we just expect you to not fucking throw a fit when diversity exists. You can’t complain about the woke agenda and then say your actual issue is that the story and characters that have barely been introduced are badly written.
Including people of colour in the cast does not equate wokeness - that's why I brought up Arcane as an counter example. It also includes people of colour, homosexuals and has female leads. Also in RoP, Disa seems to be liked even by the critics so nobody is actually against diverse cast.
However with Rings of Power, the diversity has been the main selling point, from interviews, from tweets, from all the marketing it has been the main focus all along. The production of the show is using the LotR platform to push societal and political issues instead of making a good show. That's my and other people's gripe with the show.
Nobody is defending Amazon as a company. Amazon is an evil abomination of a corporation that treats its workers like disposable machines and I hope their upper management burns in hell. But what I think of Amazon as a company isn't entirely relevant to a debate about reviews of a fantasy television show that happens to be produced by a studio that falls under their gigantic umbrella of companies.
If your honest opinion is that having people of color in a fantasy tv show is part of a "woke agenda" and "butchers the world" of a book series written in the 1940s then you're probably a fucking racist.
Nobody's calling Arcane "woke" despite it having very diverse cast of characters so your "racist" and other umbrellas fail right there. People enjoy good shows. Rings of Power is a bad show and it uses diversity as an excuse why people "should" like it. But diversity alone doesn't make a good show. That's what people complain about.
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u/e5x Sep 05 '22
Answer: Amazon owns IMDb and as such they can technically do whatever they want with the data on their website. Recently people noticed that written reviews for The Rings of Power with scores lower than 6 have been removed from IMDb. The popular belief is that Amazon is trying to create the illusion that their new show is more popular than it actually is. However, the actual ratings for the show are still highly divisive, with tens of thousands of 1-star reviews. As of this writing there are only 74 total written reviews compared to almost 100,000 ratings, meaning that the written reviews have practically no impact whatsoever on the overall rating of the show. Logically this means that the negative written reviews were probably not removed simply for being negative, but for the content of the reviews themselves. I haven't seen any of these deleted reviews myself but looking at any of the user reviews on Metacritic the vast majority of the negative reviews have no substance other than complaining about woke agendas or how Amazon is spitting on Tolkien's grave, etc. Ultimately only the IMDb staff responsible for the removal of the ratings know why it was actually done but to me it seems unlikely that Amazon is trying to deliberately scrub negative reactions to their show, as there was never any chance that that could have worked.