Tag: Hellmouth

Amazon Doubles Down

It appears that Amazon Studios has decided that the fundamental problem underlying the comprehensive failure of Dem Rangz o’ Powah was an insufficiency of strong woman power storytelling.

The Lord Of The Rings fans got a glimpse of what to expect with the upcoming second season of the prequel series The Rings Of Power on Wednesday. Amazon Studios announced that the next season will feature a striking all-female directing team, according to Deadline. Among the women helming the season will be Charlotte Brändström, who previously directed two episodes of the fantasy show’s debut season.

Hamri, who hails from Morocco, got her start directing music videos for Mariah Carey, Destiny’s Child and Prince, among others, before directing the Sanaa Lathan film Something New in 2006. She later directed The Sisterhood Of The Traveling Pants 2 and Just Wright, but she has mostly worked in television in recent years, including producing and directing for another Amazon fantasy series, The Wheel Of Time.

Hooper has worked in British television for decades, though she recently scored high-profile directing gigs on episodes of The Sandman and The Witcher.

After all, who better to visually interpret the vision of a white male Oxford don than a bunch of women who have failed, failed, and failed again? You just know the great debate in the writer’s room is if it’s enough to hint that Galadrial just might be attracted to another woman or if they should throw caution to the winds, shave her head, and have her form a lifelong romantic attachment to a female orc.

I expect that the great majority of Tolkien fans who successfully ignored the first season will ignore the second one even harder.

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A List of Demons

What’s remarkable is how many of the names on this alleged list of visitors to Jeffrey Epstein’s wicked island are exactly those you’d expect to be involved in awful things based on unrelated reports and rumors. So much so, in fact, that it almost makes one suspect it might be fake. There are a few disappointing surprises, but regardless, all of these people should be viewed with extreme skepticism, unless and until proven otherwise.

UPDATE: While some of these people are known to have visited the island, I’m pretty sure it’s a fake. I very much doubt Arsenal’s Spanish manager ever visited there, or even met Epstein.

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Diversity Fails the Hellmouth

Hollywood is discovering that diversity is not a strength:

“For three years, we hired nothing but women and people of color,” said a senior film executive, who like many leaders in the industry is a white male. He added that he did not think some of them were able to do the jobs they got.

In hushed conversations over lunch at Toscana Brentwood and cocktails at the San Vicente Bungalows, some powerful producers and agents have started to question the commercial viability of inclusion-minded films and shows.

They point to terrible ticket sales for films like “Bros,” the first gay rom-com from a major studio, and “Easter Sunday” a comedy positioned as a watershed moment for Filipino representation. “Ms. Marvel,” a critically adored Disney+ series about a teenage Muslim superhero, was lightly viewed, according to Nielsen’s measurements.

They weren’t able to do their jobs for obvious reasons related to IQ, ideology, and solipsism. Now imagine how badly that same diversity is going to fail the US military when it finds itself going up against the non-diverse Russian and Chinese militaries in the next decade.

Anyhow, the Hellmouth’s struggles are our opportunity, as I expect to be able to demonstrate soon.

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Satire or SJW?

It’s getting harder and harder to tell the difference:

Economic experts are sounding the alarm: if the most important product of the world’s most important company fails, it could trigger a major economic meltdown.

Amazon Studio’s $1 billion Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power bet is universally praised by critics as a sprawling ode to diversity. Yet BusinessInsider reports that the TV series that could determine the future of streaming is “falling flat with initial audiences, posing risks for Amazon and the company’s Prime membership program.”

And now economic experts are sounding the alarm. They’re warning that if Rings proves a flop, it risks slamming the brakes on a record-setting global economic expansion. The argument goes that if the most important product of the world’s most important company fails, in this current climate that could be the trigger for a major economic meltdown with far reaching consequences.

Hundreds of millions would starve. Millions more would perish of otherwise preventable or avoidable disease. World War III and even nuclear war could finally be here as nations desperate for resources renege on the traditional rules-based world order.

And indeed, the hopes and dreams of women and People of Color who wanted a place in European folkloral history will be dashed against the rocks forever.

I’m confident this is satire. I’m entirely certain this is satire. But the reality is that these days, Clown World often manages to exceed the imagination of even the most skilled satirist.

How Did THAT Ever Happen

At first glance, you’d assume it would be totally absurd to suggest that Jennifer Newsome, the pretty blonde who is the current First Lady of California, could ever have had a consensual affair with Harvey Weinstein. At first….

UPDATE: Rose McGowan has publicly stated that Gavin Newsom’s wife Jennifer called her on behalf of Harvey Weinstein’s lawyer six months before the Weinstein scandal broke to make the story go away.

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Hollywood is Never an Option

We didn’t actually need to see Amazon Studios folding, spindling, and mutilating the appendices of The Simarillion to know the Hellmouth is totally incapable of producing anything worthwhile from the literary medium.

Legendary comic book creator Alan Moore was disgusted by the woke adaptation of his comic Watchmen by HBO and told the showrunner never to contact him while it was being filmed.

The showrunner reached out to Moore and admitted that the show was a disaster. They sent a letter to Moore, saying: “Dear Mr. Moore, I am one of the bastards currently destroying ‘Watchmen.’” Moore did not appreciate the correspondence.

“That wasn’t the best opener,” Moore said regarding the showrunner letter. “It went on through a lot of, what seemed to me to be, neurotic rambling. ‘Can you at least tell us how to pronounce “Ozymandias”? I got back with a very abrupt and probably hostile reply telling him that I’d thought that Warner Bros. were aware that they, nor any of their employees, shouldn’t contact me again for any reason.”

THE BOYS would be the singular exception that proves the rule, but that’s only because the wildly over-the-top nature of the comics actually forced the producers to tone things down. A lot.

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She’s Not Wrong

She may be fake-dating a little gay British man and have stumpy little legs, but Olivia Wilde is clearly brighter than the average Hellmouth whore. Jordan Peterson cried in public because Wilde correctly identified him as “an insane pseudo-intellectual”.

Jordan Peterson had tears in his eyes as he said he was not ‘bothered’ by the movie star calling him an ‘insane pseudo-intellectual hero’ to the ‘incel’ community as she revealed he was her inspiration for a character played by Chris Pine in Don’t Worry Darling.

‘We based that character on this insane man, Jordan Peterson, who is this pseudo-intellectual hero to the incel community,’ Wilde said, adding that incels are a community of ‘disenfranchised, mostly white men, who believe they are entitled to sex from women.’

When asked whether he agrees with Wilde’s assessment that he is an ‘intellectual hero’ to incel men, Peterson became emotional and had tears in his eyes, before insisting that her comments ‘really didn’t bother me’.

Peterson said that he was a ‘hero’ to incels or ‘involuntary celibates’ – a mostly online group of young men who believe society unjustly denies them sexual or romantic attention. Speaking on Piers Morgan Uncensored, Peterson said: ‘Sure, why not. People have been after me for a long time because I’ve been speaking to disaffected men – and what a terrible thing to do that is.’

Peterson then paused as he became emotional and tried to fight back tears, before adding: ‘I thought the marginalized were supposed to have a voice.’ Speaking about how Wilde branded him ‘this insane man’ and a ‘pseudo-intellectual’ who appealed to an ‘incel community’, Peterson said: ‘You know, as far as critique goes, that was kind of low level.’

Yeah, because he handled the high-level criticism that was directed at him in Jordanetics so very well. At least this time he didn’t go off on a Definitely Not Meth binge that landed him in a coma in Russia.

People aren’t after you because you speak to disaffected men, Jordan. They’re after you because you are a dishonest pseudo-intellectual with a Christ complex who delves into the occult, passes off faux Jungian bafflegarble as philosophy, and offers terrible advice to people who need much better role models than you can provide.

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Improving on Tolkien

The Amazon Abomination tries, and succeeds, to improve upon the late, great grandmaster of high fantasy. Needless to say, it doesn’t go well.

They are trying to improve Tolkien.

They are not succeeding.

Mithril now has an origin story. According to Celebrimbor, there is a legend of an Elf warrior fighting a Balrog for a tree in which one of the Silmarils is lodged. The fight was so titanic (and cliché) that it forced the power of the Silmaril through the tree’s roots, into the ground and created the Mithril.

No. It didn’t. Mithril’s origin story is that the Dwarves found it and dug it up.

Here is a brutally quick history of the Silmarils.

Feanor created three jewels of literally unsurpassed beauty, within them was the light of the two trees of Valinor. Manwë’s wife made the jewels sacred so that no one evil or mortal could touch them without withering and dying. Morgoth coveted them so much, that he killed the Trees in order to steal them. Then he took them to his fortress of Angband. Their light burned him but he couldn’t part with them, so Morgoth put the Silmarils in a crown that he wore upon his head.

Feanor and his sons made a terrible vow to recover them. Their clan committed untold crimes against the rest of the Elves to fulfill this vow. Great wars, Kinslayings, and misery were the result.

Beren stole a Silmaril, and gave it to his wife Luthien, when she died again (don’t ask) it passed to their son Dior. When the sons of Feanor killed him it fell into Dior’s daughter, Elwing’s hands. She flew with it to her husband and they sailed with it to Valinor to beg the aid of the Valar.

When Morgoth fell after the War of Wrath, the remaining two Silmarils were taken by Eanwë, the herald of Manwë. The last two sons of Feanor snuck into the Valar camp and stole them. Eanwë caught them but apparently decided to let the holy jewels pass judgment on them and gave one to each of the brothers.

They were so tainted by the crimes they had committed in the pursuit of these jewels that they were horribly burned and withered by the Silmarils. Maedhros threw himself and his Silmaril into a fiery pit. Maglor cast his into the sea and apparently spent the rest of his immortal life singing songs of lamentation.

So, of the three Silmarils, one of them is now the North Star, one of them got chucked into a volcano and the third was pitched into the sea. None of them was ever, at any time in a god damned tree, ever. Their locations were always accounted for in the legendarium.

As for Mithril, this is blatant idiocy. The Silmarils never worked that way.

Mithril is just a precious metal. Now it is super rare and worth ten times its weight in gold, but it ends there. It’s not magical and never was.

Well, at least they’re trying to tell a story of some sort. Even if it is an incoherent one that is completely inconsistent with canon.

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Abandoning the Indefensible

Even the corpocratic media has reluctantly thrown in the towel on Dem Rangz despite being more than willing to accept the sadistic defacing of Tolkien’s legacy, to endorse the rampant blackwashing, and to osculate the Bezosian backside:

I’ve come to a sad realization: The creators of Amazon’s The Lord Of The Rings: The Rings Of Power know how to create spectacle, but they don’t know how to tell a good story.

There it is, scrawled in blood on the wall. The writers and showrunners responsible for this show could have won me over with good fan-fiction. They could have tossed Tolkien’s lore onto a bonfire and I’d have been perfectly happy if they’d simply crafted an enjoyable story with characters I care about.

Unfortunately, The Rings Of Power is written so poorly it defies even my worst fears. Oh yes, I was awed and impressed by the opening two episodes just like many others. But my how quickly a badly written TV series can wear out its welcome once the shimmer fades….

Galadriel’s adventure in Númenor is honestly just embarrassing. She arrived there—after being rescued—and effectively just bullied everyone in her path like the elven version of a steamroller. The queen regent has her hands full from the moment Galadriel barges through the door, and soon she’s demanding to see the king, then asking for an army.

Miriel has to lock her up and then pack her off back to the elves just to get her to stop. Then—thanks to petals falling from a tree*—she decides to take her back and commit her people—who moments earlier were all but chanting “death to the elves!”—to a war in a strange land? Everything taking place in Númenor is just a shortcut for the plot. Move the plot forward at all costs no matter how many characters are butchered in the process. (I wrote about the hilariously bad Black Speech spy note recently which is another great example of the shoddy writing in this show)>

Instead of actual character drama, the creators of Rings Of Power simply make everyone bicker and argue with one another all the time. Whether that’s Isildur and his father and friends, Elrond and Durin, Nori and the village elders, Bronwyn and the village idiots, or Galadriel and, well, everybody—all anyone seems to do is argue.

The people Galadriel wants to go save are evil and stupid and some of them seem ready to throw in with Sauron at the drop of a pin. But for some reason we’re supposed to care about Galadriel’s quest to go fight to save them from the Enemy?

As an aside, here’s a thought for those producing future films and television series: if casting a cute blonde with a mild case of resting bitch face in the place of an ethereal blonde beauty is enough to functionally derail an A+++ production, imagine how much you are lowering the odds of your own little project being successful if you submit to the creative death by diversity that the Hellmouth is presently demanding?

It’s never a good sign when the most entertaining thing about a production is the commentary on its ongoing immolation.

Anyhow, back to A SEA OF SKULLS. Lodi is discovering he’s got a new task at hand, and he’s not very happy about it….

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He Paid the Price

The Dark Herald manfully suffers through the fourth episode of DEM RANGZ so you don’t have to. The least you can do is read through the whole thing, which you really have to do in order to grasp the full magnitude of the self-immolatory incompetence of the Amazon Studios team.

The smelting guild member is giving an incendiary speech about illegal elf immigrants sucking up their jobs and I’m not kidding in the slightest. It’s a “Dey tuuk r’ jubs” thing. The crowd is getting pretty worked up about these wet ears who work harder, never sleep, never need retirement benefits because they are immortal, and will soon storm the borders… Wait a minute. What borders? Númenor is an island and there is exactly one elf on it, and she would very much like to leave.

And just a reminder. What made the Men of Númenor come to resent the Elves was their immortality, (not their willingness to do the jobs Númenoreans wouldn’t). They wanted to be immortal themselves. The Men of Númenor had pretty long life spans too, one hundred years old was just hitting middle-aged maturity so far as the *Númenoreans were concerned. Which made this desire a bit petty.

Chancellor (gack) Ar-Pharazôn arrives and steals the guild master’s thunder by giving a populist speech that allays the crowd’s fears and gets them chanting his name in the media-approved Alt Right fashion.

Well, now we know the form of the destructor. In the legendarium, he was known as Ar-Pharazôn the Golden. He seized the throne by forcing his first cousin Míriel into a marriage with him against her will. In Tolkien’s world, she was a tragic figure rather than an annoying one. Ar-Pharazôn himself led a war against Sauron. Scattered his army of Orcs and took Sauron back to Númenor in chains. He was the kind of guy you would have hired Yul Brynner to play.

Even though, his later actions directly lead to the destruction of their beloved and beautiful homeland, Elendil’s surviving Númenorians erected a giant pillar as a monument to Ar-Pharazôn in Minas Arnor to honor his great victory over Sauron. When Sauron’s forces captured Minas Arnor the first thing he did, was to have the pillar destroyed.

Ar-Pharazôn was an Adonis. An Alpha’s Alpha who was ultimately brought to ruin by his pride and his own iron will.

In this version he’s Trump.

What were you expecting? Something good and/or original? These guys were trained by JJ Abrams.

They just can’t stop telling the same non-story again and again and again and again. Trump has been out of office for two years, and yet they’re still obsessed with him. Then again, their other stock bad guy, Adolf Hitler, has been dead for nearly 80 years and that hasn’t caused them to give it a rest, so this may only be the beginning of the trend.

On the plus side, Amazon is inadvertently making a strong case for why women have no place in government, be it democracy, republic, or monarchy.

Karen-Galadriel forces her way into the manager’s office to give the queen a piece of her mind, she has once again exchanged her resting bitch face for her active bitch face. The queen is as ever, unmoved by it.

The Elf Warrior Princess vociferously demands that Queen Míriel, on Galadriel’s, say so and nothing else, go to war out of the blue and invade the Southlands. She is to then put Not-Sauron, (a castaway hobo and bar room brawler, whose claim to the throne is based solely on the Southlands royal sigil he is wearing on a hunk of driftwood hanging on a piece of string around his neck) on the fucking throne of the Southlands. Which incidentally hasn’t had a throne for a hundred years or so.

I suppose this is their version of Aragorn begging King Théoden to send the Riders of Rohan to Gondor.

Míriel rejects this idea due to the fact that is fundamentally retarded. Karen-Galadriel demands to speak to the manager’s manager and orders Míriel to give her an audience with her father, the king. Míriel remains unmoved by Galadriel’s bitch-face.

Nope my mistake, she is moved enough to throw Galadriel in the clink.

I got to say it, I’m starting to warm to Míriel.

Now, what sort of person imagines that a foreigner should be able to simply show up in a country and demand that its rulers put their entire military forces at their disposal in order to invade a sovereign country to which neither the foreigner nor the rulers have any connection? What sort of person…

Sometimes you don’t even need to check Early Life On Wikipedia. And apparently, sometimes you don’t even need to know the name. Karen-Galadriel is bad enough. But Karen-Galadriel-Neocon?

To call this show an abomination and an insult to the legacy of Tolkien would be too kind. It’s also an insult to human intelligence.

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