Tag: Hellmouth

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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How Did This Happen?

The Dark Herald explains how the Amazon Abomination came to be. It’s a long, detailed, and rather sordid story, so read the whole thing there.

This whole mess started as a vanity project. I mean it couldn’t be anything else, could it? Amazon Prime is at maximum saturation, it wouldn’t have mattered if they had produced something as big as Game of Thrones, there would not have been any new subscriptions from it. From a business perspective, this was pointless.

That said, the timing looked pretty good to take over the TV fantasy market. Game of Thrones was ending its legendary run. The market was going to be open.

Now here is the thing you have to remember about Amazon. They are always throwing shit at the wall to see what sticks. It’s just how Bezos does business, he wants as many data points as possible. So, when he set out to have his own Game of Thrones, he didn’t put all his chips in one pile. There were going to be two major fantasy series. One geared for families and another for adult content.

The adult content show was going to be a Conan show and they had made the superb choice of Ryan Condal to be the showrunner.

Slightly before this, the Tolkien Estate had gone into arbitration with the Saul Zantz company and kind of got hurt. For labyrinthine legal reasons, the Tolkien Estate was required to put the Appendices at the back of Return of the King up for sale. And for other reasons it had to be a TV series. But the Tolkien Estate was NOT required to sell those TV rights to the Saul Zantz Company. Christopher apparently said, fine anybody but you, and it was announced that those rights were for sale.

After Amazon went through a lot of people with proven track records, they signed Patrick McKay and J.D. Payne, (who have nearly non-existent IMDB credits) to be the showrunners. They do have a close association with JJ Abrams and he would be a close consultant. Their pitch was for (according to rumor) a series based on the Fall of Numenor. You have no idea how much I would like to see that.

Amazon bought the rights to the Appendices for $250 million in 2017 directly from the Tolkien estate and didn’t take a close look at the veto rights that Christopher Tolkien automatically had. Incidentally, grandson Simon Tolkien is claiming that this was his vision from the start but since Christopher was still alive at the time, I have serious doubts.

Now it gets very murky. Amazon announces that it has these rights and there are words to the effect that they will be remaking the Lord of the Rings as a mini-series.

Here comes the guesswork on my part.

Bezos is a software billionaire who thinks like a software billionaire.

Ever since Microsoft infringed all over Intergalactic Digital Research to create MS-DOS, the model has been, infringe on your target, wait for them to sue you, then spend them into the ground in court and take over his whole business.

I suspect (but can’t prove) that Jeff Bezos decided to do that with the Saul Zantz Company. The rights were supposed to be reverting to the SZC soon, and they seemed willing to license those rights to Amazon but I suspect Bezos wanted to own them outright. So, during the series, they would infringe on the IP, Saul Zantz would have to sue, and Amazon would spend it to death in court until they owned the whole Saul Zantz company to include the Tolkien IP.

It was only after this strategy was embarked on that an entertainment lawyer was consulted. He informed Amazon that entertainment copyright legal precedents are different from software copyright precedents, and it won’t work. You won’t be getting sued by Saul Zantz, you’ll be getting sued by Warner Brothers and they are (at the time) owned by AT&T. They aren’t going to run out of court money, and you will end up paying somewhere around $500 million. If you’re lucky.

Then #MeToo swept through Hollywood like a typhoon. The head of Prime Video got caught up in it and had to be fired. Jennifer Salke was brought in to start making Woke content and one of her first decisions was to shitcan Conan on grounds of toxic masculinity. Put a gigantic pin in that one, we are circling back to it. She replaced it with Wheel of Time which is almost but not quite as big a disaster as The Rings of Power.

Reminding us, once more, that the Shadow cannot create, it can only twist, subvert, and mock.

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The Original Mary Sue

The 1973 Star Trek fan fiction by Paula Smith that introduced the now-inescapable Hellmouth trope, most notoriously exhibited by Not-Galadrial in Dem Rangz o’ Powah.

A Trekkie’s Tale
“Gee, golly, gosh, gloriosky,” thought Mary Sue as she stepped on the bridge of the Enterprise. “Here I am, the youngest lieutenant in the fleet – only fifteen and a half years old.” Captain Kirk came up to her.

“Oh, Lieutenant, I love you madly. Will you come to bed with me?”

“Captain! I am not that kind of girl!”

“You’re right, and I respect you for it. Here, take over the ship for a minute while I go get some coffee for us.”

Mr. Spock came onto the bridge. “What are you doing in the command seat, Lieutenant?”

“The Captain told me to.”

“Flawlessly logical. I admire your mind.”

Captain Kirk, Mr. Spock, Dr. McCoy and Mr. Scott beamed down with Lt. Mary Sue to Rigel XXXVII. They were attacked by green androids and thrown into prison. In a moment of weakness Lt. Mary Sue revealed to Mr. Spock that she too was half Vulcan. Recovering quickly, she sprung the lock with her hairpin and they all got away back to the ship.

But back on board, Dr. McCoy and Lt. Mary Sue found out that the men who had beamed down were seriously stricken by the jumping cold robbies, Mary Sue less so. While the four officers languished in Sick Bay, Lt. Mary Sue ran the ship, and ran it so well she received the Nobel Peace Prize, the Vulcan Order of Gallantry and the Tralfamadorian Order of Good Guyhood.

However the disease finally got to her and she fell fatally ill. In the Sick Bay as she breathed her last, she was surrounded by Captain Kirk, Mr. Spock, Dr. McCoy, and Mr. Scott, all weeping unashamedly at the loss of her beautiful youth and youthful beauty, intelligence, capability and all around niceness. Even to this day her birthday is a national holiday of the Enterprise.

Ironically, the original Mary Sue is a more developed character than most despite the short length of the piece; at least she has a moment of weakness. Sadly, she lacks purple eyes; that was a later development. As was a particular facility for sexual performance, that, too, was a later development.

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Tolkien Knew

It’s easy to understand why the Prometheans hate Tolkien so much and why they want to destroy his legacy. He knew. He absolutely knew. He knew about them, their evil, and the source of that evil, as evidenced by the Dark Herald’s review of the third episode of The Rangz:

The Men who sided with the Valar during the War of Wrath got a nice off-the-cuffo from the gods. An island kingdom flowing with bounty and whatnot. And the Men were happy. For a while. However, a division rose up; there were those who remained loyal to the Valar and excepted Iluvater’s gift of death, they thought Elves were super cool too. But the vast majority of the Númenorians resented the Elves’ immortality and wanted to be immortal themselves.

Sauron was captured by the Númenororians and was imprisoned but then like an evil Joseph worked his way up to becoming the high advisor to the king. A cult of Morgoth was established complete with human sacrifice of the Elf Faithful humans with the goal of achieving immortality. Finally, the last king of Númenor launched an invasion of Valinor to steal immortality. Iluvatar Himself intervened and destroyed the entire fleet of Men by opening a chasm in the sea. Then Númenor itself was sunk beneath the waves during a night of fire and whatever that will cost a lot to CG. The Elf Faithful escaped under the leadership of Elendil, who became their king and founded Gondor.

Read this sentence again: A cult of Morgoth was established complete with human sacrifice of the Elf Faithful humans with the goal of achieving immortality.

Fascinating, is it not, that a high fantasy writer could foresee today’s transhuman global technocrats in the 1940s? It’s because their goals are no different than they were back before the dawn of recorded human history: to be like God.

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A Masterpiece of Progress

The Woke Critic explains that we’ve all got it wrong, that THE RINGS OF POWER are actually better than THE LORD OF THE RINGS, and that it is a defining moment in the history of the world.

Every generation there comes along a work of cinema or television that transcends the medium. It is no longer a movie or TV show: it is a work of art. A masterpiece. A production so profound that you wonder if it should be displayed in the galleries at the Louvre.

That magnificent day has arrived, ladies and gentlemen.

Amazon’s The Rings of Power is not only a television gift from the gods, it is better than the original cinematic The Lord of the Rings trilogy. Peter Jackson, step aside, and welcome the true heir to the Lord of the Rings throne.

Here’s why The Rings of Power is a masterpiece.

The cinemascape of the Peter Jackson trilogy was littered with strong, white males. Frodo and Sam, the ringbearers, entrusted with destroying the one ring ahead of a female, even though they were three feet tall. Aragorn, the king everyone had been waiting for, when a Queen would have sufficed. Gandalf, the magical old white male, in eternal battle with… other magical old white males. The Rings of Power has brought Middle Earth into the 21st Century. No longer is this a world of men. Indeed, it is a world of women. All the main characters have estrogen in abundance.

Take Galadriel, for instance, a side character in the trilogy. Now she is the driving force through the whole saga. Strong, independent, and utterly brilliant. Where men err, she is right. Always right. Every idea, every solution works. Men who do not follow her lead… lead themselves to the grave. She can cut through oceans like an ocean liner, climb mountains like Sly Stallone and dunk more shots than Michael Jordan.

Frodo and Sam. No. Now we have Nori Brandyfoot and Poppy Proudfellow. All the same characteristics, quirks and mannerisms as the iconic duo, but now completely female. Why have male characters when we can have female characters? This is 2022, after all. It is much more progressive to have two women in such roles. Like Galadrial, they are never wrong and never weak. A true inspiration for humankind.

Bronwyn, another female character brutally ignored by the men in the village. Not for long, however. When all the males laugh at her expense, she is the one who has the last laugh. She quickly shows them that she was right about the orcs all along and assumes the leadership role. Another inspiring moment for everyone watching.

Fear not, dear viewer. There are white male characters. Such as this one. He arrives on the screen in a burning scrapheap and his prospects do not improve much from there. He screams gibberish at young ladies and looks like he just walked out a homeless shelter. A true lesson in progression.

White males, your time is up. This not a world of men. It is a world of women.

The Rings of Power is not just a television production, but a message to the world that racism is over. Future generations will look back and say this was the defining moment where everything changed.

It’s hard to argue with that. Impossible, really. Sadly, it appears that most of us are missing this masterpiece of progress, as I took a pair of polls, on both SocialGalactic and Gab, in order to see how many people in the greater community are watching this triump of post-racist consciousness. Now, given that I am arguably one of the top-five living epic fantasy writers – which isn’t that impressive given how few novelists are capable of writing epic-length works – one would expect that my readers would be far more inclined to watch The Rings of Power than the norm. This is especially true given that we have a strong Tolkien contingent that obsessively reads the published notes, visits Hobbit museums, and subscribes to the Forge of Tolkien.

  • SG: 237 did not watch, 6 watched, in part or in full
  • GAB: 1,339 did not watch, 35 watched in part, 37 watched both episodes.

This is pretty astonishing for a very high fantasy-friendly crowd. Yes, the polls are unscientific and self-reported, but even so, the numbers are less than one-quarter of what I would have assumed. And it tends to support the Samba.tv numbers that indicate the public rejection of the production is going to be a catastrophe for Amazon Studios. I would not be at all surprised if the second season is cancelled, or if it isn’t, a complete reboot is ordered for Season Three.

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Amazon’s Pants are on Fire

Unlike Tha Rangz o’ Powah, which apparently are not being watched anywhere nearly as much as Amazon is trying to claim. The Dark Herald busts the Bezos machine on the Arkhaven blog.

Have you ever heard the phrase, “numbers don’t lie?”

Accountants say that all the time… When they want a good laugh.

Amazon is proudly claiming they have 25 million views for Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power, on its very first day of streaming. That is a nice ROUND number, isn’t it?

“25 million people viewed it.” Always be careful with the exact wording.

We can start with I don’t believe it for a second.

Warner Brothers is, for their part, claiming 25 million for the first week of House of the Dragon, and Warner Brothers put the first episode up for free on YouTube. Realistically, House of the Dragon has had way better public reception than Rings of Power. And ain’t it funny that Amazon had the exact same ROUND number?

So, where did this massive overnight number come from?

Well, it came from Amazon.com.

UPDATE: OWWwwww! Samba.TV has released its metrics on Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power and they are b-a-a-d. Amazon was claiming a huge number for it’s first day. Samba.TV uses the first three days. On its first three days, the Rings of Power only got 1.8 million US views.

I didn’t buy the 25 million number myself. But an average of 600k/day? I also wasn’t expecting anything that cataclysmic. This looks like it is going to be a downright proverbial failure.

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Amazon’s Diary of Anne Frank

I don’t know about you, but I’m looking forward to this one.

Hey, if you don’t have a problem with ballpoint pens in 1941 and a teenage girl writing copiously about middle-aged male sexual fetishes on MySpace, then a simple change of skin color shouldn’t be a problem for you either. Also, Mary Beard was the historical consultant, and you know you can trust her. Checkmate, haters.

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When Failure is Inevitable

Booster Patrol’s latest recording, THA RANGZ OF POWER, is an epic lesson on why one would do well to avoid watching Amazon’s The Rings of Power. The Dark Herald further explains:

Some things get a little better when you think about them for a little bit.

This ain’t one of them.

Whenever you are surveying the smoldering wreckage of a horrifying man-made disaster, the same questions are always asked. How was this allowed to happen? Wasn’t it someone’s job to prevent this? Was it a deliberate act of sabotage? How is the richest man in the world this fucking stupid?

These are all valid, simple questions with complicated answers. Which I shall endeavor to answer for you…

The secret to the Bad Reboot school’s success is a combination of an established reputation for success, superb salesmanship (I have to give them that), and a mastery of studio politics as well as fashionable politics in general. Additionally, Bad Reboot skillfully manages its relations with the press. Finally, the disciples of Abrams rigidly follow their business model and always get out before the burning building collapses on top of them. If they were trying to make anything good, I could admire the professionalism.

The fundamental problem is that they don’t know how to make anything good. It’s like cotton candy, it looks big and smells great but once you take a bite the only thing you have in your mouth is empty sugary grit. If you are only trying to grind out pablum like summer tentpoles then that is good enough. Honestly, most fandoms really do only want that, just consume product and get excited for the next project.

Problem.

Tolkien fans aren’t remotely like that. The magnitude of this disaster would have been manageable if they had just invented their own IP that kind of looked like Tolkien. But as it is, they put The Lord of the Rings label on this, so that was the standard they would have to meet.

Ha! Ha! Ha! (gasp…wheez…gasp) Ha! Ha! Ha! (wipes eyes)

Expecting Bad Reboot alumni J.D. Payne and Patrick McKay to meet that standard is like expecting Ariana Grande to win the Noble Prize for Physics. Theoretically possible… But not likely.

Tolkien fans have been arguing over the same five books for better than half a century. The body of scholarly work based on it is gigantic. It is the entire bedrock of modern fantasy. Every fantasy writer has to consciously adopt or reject the Lord of the Rings, but you can’t possibly ignore it. There are frequent and violent arguments over what exactly the Valar were. What was the nature of Tom Bombadil? How much of the legendarium was adopted from Celtic myth? This was not the kind of fandom that you can use as a base for a popcorn burner. And there was no way in hell a couple of graduates from the Bad Reboot school of non-writing were going to be able to fake their way through a five-year series. This project was doomed from its inception.

There were several people at Amazon whose jobs it was to prevent something this bad from happening. As near as I can tell, all of them were circumvented. There is no way in hell these scripts looked good.

This may be the best fan comment that has surfaced yet:

I liked the bit where Galadriel said “I’m gonna fight Sauron alone! and then went home instead. And then she said “I’m never going to give up fighting Sauron!” but then decided to go on holiday. But just before she got on holiday she decided to drown herself instead because her brother said something sad to her when she was a child.

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