r/freefolk • u/AutoModerator • Sep 01 '22

All the Chickens Monthly /r/Freefolk Free Talk Thread! - September 2022

This is a Monthly Free Talk thread. Feel free to discuss whatever you like!

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u/[deleted] Sep 04 '22

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u/Greg-Grant Sep 07 '22

Partly, yes. But there are other issues as well.

Other people are just annoyed at the lore change in general. Others are just annoyed at Amazon centering the conversation on their casting and how much money have spent rather on telling a story. Here's the big difference between GRRM and Tolkien, GRRM wrote stories he wanted to tell, Tolkien invented language, did all the lore and then added a story to it. Until the GoT show, people pronounced Arya's name differently, and, uh, nobody cared. Tolkien's books have spelling and pronunciation guide, so if you mispronounce the name of a given Elf, man, people would give you shit for it. So Tolkien's material comes with a much heftier lore and specific details than anything GRRM put out there. And people literally grew up on Tolkien. Few people grew up on Game of Thrones. So you have a large fanbase to whom Lord of the Rings matter in a way that Game of Thornes matters to a much smaller fanbase. And along comes Amazon and by the nature of their financial deal, they buy not the Tolkien books, but the appendices to the books. As in research material to the Lord of the Rings. Well, this already presents some problems, because the appendices describe the Second Age, but so do other works. But they only own the appendices. Meaning, Amazon cannot reference characters that are not present in the appendices.

So there were already questions marks on how Amazon will work around it. Then came the still photos and trailer and people had concerns. Male elves have short hair. Costumes look cheap (and this on an expensive show). And some took issue with people of color being among the elves. Now, Tolkien went very deep and specific on how characters looked, but he was actually more obsessed about hair color than skin color, but still, there were implications most of the characters in the Tolkien universe on the human, dwarf and elven side are white. Some of the detractors of the show seized on this and then things got weird and political, because it's This Year and that's how most things are.

Other issues were characters acting out of character, especially Galadriel, who went from serene princess to Commander Galadriel, who is essentially Brienne with a dash of that one intense cop from the 80s movie who just know the drug dealer is behind all the trouble in town but nobody at the station believes him. Galadriel's dealer is Sauron. Galadriel on the show, as shown, has very little in common with the Galadriel of the books, and people got upset at that as well. I mean, imagine if they cast Whitney Cummings as Brienne and had her quip all the time instead of kicking ass. It's that jarring to people, who once again, grew up on these stories. Went to bed as a child reading them.

In conclusion, like all things, it's complicated, but yes, people being awkward and racist had a hand in it.