Tag: Hellmouth

The Hubris of Morgoth

The review for which you’ve all been waiting. The Dark Herald reviews The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power for Arkhaven.

You would have to have had the hubris of Morgoth himself to take on this project.

As a writer, I would have been terrified of it. If the producers had come to me to finish the Unfinished Tales by Tolkien plus some original pastiche based on the Appendixes, I would have told them. “Look, I’ll require two years prep time before I write word one. I’ll need to completely immerse myself in Tolkien’s work to the exclusion of all else. Then I have to spend a lot of time with Tom Shippey and other scholars, plus a Catholic priest with three doctorates who is really into JRR’s work. And at the end of the day, it still won’t be Tolkien, just so you know.”

Who would take this on? Bad Reboot that’s who.

The inarticulate slaughterer of every franchise where they press diseased foot is their bread and butter. Their mode of operation is now predictably obvious. Being completely incapable of creativity themselves, they select anything at all that might have an audience, invade and metastasize, then give it a Bad Reboot treatment. This consists of a Feminist Heroine’s Journey combined with a bunch of mystery boxes to lure foolish audiences along. Be sure to break the bank on flashy effects scenes.

I spent some time in sales, so I can see what Jar Jar Abrams’s school of non-writing is. It is sales technique disguised as writing. That’s it. That is all that the Abrams Mystery Box school really is. It’s just a hook with nothing attached to the hook but the next hook. It’s just one long sales pitch trying to keep you watching despite the fact that there is in fact nothing to watch.

Let me assure you now, there is nothing to watch here.

There is, however, quite a bit to read. And you should read the whole thing. After which, you should congratulate yourself for not adding to the “record numbers” that Amazon claims to be achieving.

So anyway, we get to see Commander Galadriel the Warrior Princess take up her brother’s quest to find Sauron. Like every feminist heroine, her primary obstacle is disbelief. Her MEN don’t believe in her quest to find Sauron. This is fundamentally stupid because it’s based on the belief that he died of old age which is kind of hard for an immortal to do.

So, they go to some Ice Fortress of ice, (Geode makes a guest appearance) and she kills an ice troll single-handedly, (second step of the Feminist Heroine’s Journey is now in the bag). She find Sauron’s mark thus proving Galadriel was right all along, but her men quit on her anyway. So, she is forced to turn back and report to Gil-Gilad.

Let me be clear about this, in a really bad show, Karen-Galadriel is the worst thing in it. Morfydd Clark is horrendously miscast. I’ve seen her act but only in Little Wounded Bird roles.

We meet Neil Patrick Harris Elrond. It’s an absolutely cringe scene as they declare their platonic love for each other. In the Legendarium, he’s her son-in-law. Here, he’s obviously gay. Elrond attempts to mansplain things to Galadriel who shoots him down as she’s supposed to in the Feminist Heroine’s Journey. She then gets some leaf crown as an award from Gil-Gilad. He then declares her recon team the greatest heroes in all of elf-kind so they get the super big prize. A one-way ticket back to Valinor.

Oh. What. The. Fuck?

Okay, after the War of Wrath all the elves had the option of going back to Valinor… EXCEPT GALADRIEL! If you know anything at all about Valinor then you know she can’t go there.

Galadriel was specifically prohibited from returning by the gods of Middle Earth themselves.

That door was completely closed to her until she refused the offer of the One Ring by Frodo. Only then was she allowed to “…diminish. And go into the west. And remain Galadriel.”

Just to state this one more time. Galadriel could not fucking go to *Valinor.

All of this nonsense has inspired me to set a goal of finishing and releasing the complete A SEA OF SKULLS in electronic form before the end of the year, with the print edition to follow once a few rounds of typos have been identified and corrected. This is doable; just last night I finished Theuderic’s second-to-last chapter.

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He Should Have Listened

Jeff Bezos didn’t listen to his son:

Being one of the richest people on the planet, Jeff Bezos is not used to being told what to do. But when Amazon announced it was creating The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power, which is likely to become the most expensive television series ever made, he received a blunt order from his son: “Dad, don’t fuck this up.”

Sorry, Jeff. A verdict is in. And you done fucked it up.

OH LAWD, DEM RANGS! DEM RANGS A’ POWAH!

Past success sows the seeds of future failure

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March Into Darkness

The Devil Mouse is making it harder and harder for its defenders to justify any parents permitting their children access to Disney material.

“Disney has announced that FX’s new animated horror-comedy series “Little Demon” will begin streaming on Disney+ in Australia and New Zealand on Wednesday, September 21, 2022. The series currently debuts new episodes on Thursdays on FXX and streams the next day on Hulu. The show is also expected to arrive on Disney+ in other countries,” according to Disney Plus Informer.

The cartoon takes place 13 years after an unmarried pagan woman is impregnated by Satan (voice played by Danny Devito) and follows her and her daughter (literally the spawn of Satan and referred to as the Antichrist) through everyday life. The series features demonic witchcraft, pagan rituals, gratuitous blood, gore, and nudity…

Disney seems to be dead set on continuing their march into darkness as we previously reported, Disney announced that they created a task force to create more LGBTQ content for children, and recently announced casting a drag queen in a new marvel comic series Ironheart.

Perhaps you thought I was exaggerating when I began describing Disney as the Devil Mouse. I wasn’t, and the mask continues to come off. So don’t support those who hate you, and especially don’t support those who hate Jesus Christ, America, and Western Civilization.

If you’re not subscribing to UATV and/or Arktoons yet, this should suffice to explain why doing so is quite literally a cultural imperative.

UPDATE: “Laura and her daughter Chrissy are Jewish, something the writers plan to flesh out more in the first season. “We did make Laura Jewish for a reason,” says Fowler.”

Indeed. They could hardly be Christian, now, could they?

UPDATE: Google, which is no longer reminding itself “don’t be evil”, is openly attempting to hide the Devil Mouse’s wickedness from people looking into this.

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Thank You For Your Service

They watched the Amazon Abomination so you didn’t have to subject yourself to it.

  • I got 18 minutes in before I had to switch it off. The writing is so awful and cliched that at points I thought I was having a stroke. I love Tolkien and I hope Amazon loses a fortune for what they have done because this really isn’t good entertainment.
  • It genuinely felt like a parody. Tolkien reimagined by Human Resources Equality and Diversity branch.
  • Why describe the entire episode? It was cr@p anyway.
  • Oh lawdee dem rangz
  • I’ve loved everything The Lord of the Rings for decades now but I had trouble getting through the first episode of The Rings of Power.
  • I tried to start the lord of the rings trilogy last night (for no reason at all). i got the best sleep i had in months.
  • The diverse cast is encouraging to me, but Tolkien would have wanted it to address the pressing social issues of our time such as climate change and vaccine hesitancy.. let’s wait and see before passing judgement.

Black elves, black hobbitses, and black dwarfs. Checkmate, racists!

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“So Staggeringly Bad”

Don’t hate-watch the Amazon abomination. Don’t indulge whatever curiosity you might have about precisely how bad it happens to be. Don’t think that you’ll score points with anyone by cleverly pointing out its copious problems that even a half-wit could have anticipated. Just stand back, ignore it, and leave it to burn.

Turkey is not the word. No turkey, however bloated and stupid, could ever be big enough to convey the mesmerising awfulness of Amazon’s billion dollar Tolkien epic.

This is a disaster dragon – plucked, spatchcocked, with a tankerload of Paxo stuffed up its fundament, roasted and served with soggy sprouts.

The Lord Of The Rings: The Rings Of Power (Amazon Prime) is so staggeringly bad, it’s hilarious. Everything about it is ill-judged to a spectacular extreme.

The cliche-laden script, the dire acting, the leaden pace, the sheer inconsistency and confusion as it lurches between styles – where do we start?

One disconnected style follows wildly after another. A static scene in which elves journey by ship is conceived as a PreRaphaelite painting – each actor stock still in silver armour, swords clasped to their chests, long hair rippling, eyes fixed on the horizon in pious awe. Inspired by a flock of birds, they lift their voices in a heavenly choir.

There’s a lot of this quasi-religious imagery. The first episode begins with a cod Bible reading: ‘There was a time when the world was so young, there had not been a sunrise, but even then there was light.’

Popular culture invents blether like this to replace real religion. It’s scientology for the superhero movie era.

‘Year gave way to year, century gave way to century,’ the narrator continues, and already this reviewer was giving way to laughter. Soon, every fresh clunker provoked such hoots that I had to keep pausing to gather my composure.

It will be beneficial for the world to observe, yet again, what inevitably happens when SJWs are permitted to acquire the rights to well-loved intellectual property.

“If this show fails, say insiders, executives could be forced to shut down Amazon Studios.“

Let it fail. Let it fail in such a proverbial manner that it will replace Heaven’s Gate as an industry byword for complete and utter catastrophe.

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The Big Ticket

I’m not saying Jeff Bezos took the ticket… but it sure looks like he took the ticket and that it’s very nearly time to pay the piper. The more one learns about the ugly truth concerning fortune and fame in Clown World, the more one begins to truly appreciate the value of hard work, genuine fans, and the modest benefits of success that can be legitimately earned.

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The Devil’s Wire

It appears Ben Shapiro was instructed to hire Disney executives to lead his fake cultural non-alternative to the Devil Mouse:

To help Ben Shapiro and the Daily Wire continue to venture into the entertainment and subscription streaming business. the company has reportedly hired a former Disney executive to serve in the company’s Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) role. The right-leaning media outlet has hired Eric Caballero to be the CMO, who recently worked as a Vice President in Disney’s media and entertainment distribution group, The Hollywood Reporter (THR) first covered.

“While it includes politically focused content from The Daily Wire as well as some other conservative programming, the company is moving further into entertainment, committing $100 million to produce kids and family fare, and expanding into original movies (including a Gina Carano-led offering called ‘Terror on the Prairie’),” THR reported on the scope of Caballero’s work.

Jeremy Boreing, the co-CEO at the Daily Wire, said in a statement that Disney’s audience is sick and tired of the company’s progressive activism and expressed Daily Wire’s intentions to progress deeper into the children’s media space. “Companies like Disney have betrayed their family-friendly and pro-America audiences because of outsize influence from activist shareholders and employees, leaving money and opportunity on the table in the process,” Boering explained.

Caballero hopes to captivate the Daily Wire’s audience in a way similar to his work at Disney. “I studied Disney’s traditions of customer obsession, of multi-generational franchise-building, and of broadening Hollywood’s best talent,” Caballero told THR in a statement.

Earlier this month another Disney exec joined the Daily Wire. Chris Sonnenburg, the showrunner of Disney’s “Rapunzel’s Tangled Adventure” was hired to be the Daily Wire’s senior vice president of animation development and production.

Ben Shapiro’s Daily Wire Hires Former Disney Exec To Be CMO, 19 August 2022

This is a picture-perfect example of how the media gatekeepers create a false binary in order to present you with an alternative that isn’t actually an alternative at all, in the expectation that you’ll be dumb enough to accept the same thing that you previously rejected because it has a different logo on it.

Arkhaven is a real alternative. Unauthorized is a real alternative. That’s why you never, ever, hear the media – not even the comics media – uttering a single peep about either of them despite the fact that they are already technologically superior in some ways to their mainstream competitors.

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It’s Not MY Fault!

Rape Rape attempts to avoid taking the blame for the disastrous end of Game of Thrones.

The legendary HBO saga ended back in summer 2019, and there’s no doubt most fans were disappointed by the dud of an ending we got.

Well, Martin wants people to know he was pushed “out of the loop” as the show progressed by showrunners D.B. Weiss and David Benioff.

“By season 5 and 6, and certainly 7 and 8, I was pretty much out of the loop,” Martin told The New York Times. When asked by The NYT why Benioff and Weiss iced out the man responsible for creating “GoT,” he responded with, “I don’t know — you have to ask Dan and David.”

A rep for the two men didn’t give a comment to the Times.

For those of you who might not remember, there was serious outrage about the ending of “Game of Thrones.” Fans had invested nearly a decade of time into the series expecting some kind of epic conclusion. Instead, we got a mini-UN meeting, Bran became king, Arya became Dora the Explorer, Jon went north and Sansa became queen in the north. The only part of the conclusion that made sense was Sansa’s storyline.

The rest of it was laughably bad, and the backlash was immediate and brutal.

Strange. He wasn’t so hot on giving all the credit to Dan and David back when the show was well-regarded. If he didn’t like the ending – which he reportedly gave them – perhaps he should have just, you know, finished writing the books.

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Reflections on a Gamma Icon

A Gamma wonders if perhaps he might have done better to avoid patterning his behavior on an iconic Hollywood Gamma.

A generation of American male teenagers, me included, saw themselves in Duckie—charming, quirky and overlooked. Duckie belonged an elite gang of best friends “Pretty in Pink” screenwriter John Hughes made the beating heart of his ’80s teen filmography—Cameron Frye in “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off,” Farmer Ted in “Sixteen Candles” and Watts in “Some Kind of Wonderful”—characters who embodied the pain of being young and not yet able to be honest about your own desires.

Beyond Hughes’ other sidekicks, “Duckie” has become synonymous with “weird friend thrown over for safe, popular choice,” adolescent canon reinforced by a generation of boys who mimicked Duckie—in dress, manner and seduction—to joke and serenade their way into the hearts of their dream girls.

Disciples of Duckie, we had it all wrong.

No, you don’t get to be with the girl of your dreams just because you want to. No, you don’t get to avoid telling her how you feel and then resent her for showing interest in another guy. No, it’s not romantic, but rather a little sad that you can only express how you feel to her father and in charming but empty gestures like lip-synching Otis Redding’s “Try a Little Tenderness.” And no, you aren’t an unsung hero because your dream girl doesn’t dream of you. You’re a bad best friend for not respecting her decisions and thinking that means her love for you isn’t worth anything.

Re-watch “Pretty in Pink” and Duckie comes off not as a role model but as a cautionary tale about what we can destroy while growing up: The movie may end happily for everyone — even Duckie, who doesn’t win Andie’s heart but nobly tells her to forgive Blane for canceling on taking her to the prom. Before all that, Duckie comes dangerously close to losing Andie forever: Not 30 seconds after the Otis Redding serenade, Blane shows up to take Andie on their first date. Duckie, not knowing about the date, accuses Andie of disrespecting herself by going out with a rich guy, and then threatens to not be there (i.e., not be her friend) if she gets her heart broken.

Never mind that Duckie doesn’t know Blane and has no claim on Andie, and, since Andie is a smart, self-possessed, attractive young woman, she has probably received this kind of attention before. Since Andie and Duckie have been friends since childhood, Duckie having his world rocked when Andie goes on a date feels less like unfairness and more like Duckie ignoring an entire adolescence’s worth of evidence that Andie isn’t just his pal or his valentine, but a woman and a person in her own right.

“But Duckie’s pain was real!,” I just heard a squad of ex-Duckies cry. I used this excuse to not grieve my own teenage heartbreak but instead make it the heartbreaker’s fault. I wish had known better than to think my high school best friend/crush would fall for me after months of not letting on, and then getting mad when she fell for someone else, and in between trying to woo her with a lip-synch performance (mine was Mötley Crüe’s “Home Sweet Home.” Laugh all you want.).

It strikes me that the primary challenge of the Gamma is overcoming his intrinsic narcissism. Again and again, in fiction and in real life, we observe the Gamma’s total inability to grasp that everything is not about him.

The Alpha jock doesn’t hate you. He doesn’t think about you at all when you’re not actively annoying him or one of the women in his orbit. The hot cheerleader doesn’t despise you. In fact, she would be offended by the very idea that she had any opinion about you at all. The normal people don’t particularly dislike you, they just want you to shut up and leave them alone. The Girl of Your Dreams is not, and will never be, attracted by the strength of your desire for and/or your devotion to her.

And literally no one thinks you’re charming or roguish. Snark and sarcasm are not wit. Neither are movie quotes, however apt. Just stop it already.

The world isn’t out to get the Duckies of the world. It simply doesn’t like them very much because they’re weird and reliably annoying narcissists.

In sum, the Gamma’s emotional pain is no one else’s fault and no one else’s problem.

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The First Rule of Ticket-Taking

You do NOT talk about the Ticket Masters:

Kelly Clarkson: I’ve had people throw MILLIONS of dollars in my face to do something I didn’t want to do!

Kevin Hart: (makes a face, places index finger over his own lip)

Kelly Clarkson: And… what?

Kevin Hart: (repeats gesture)

Kelly Clarkson: Just… you’ve been offered, oh, they’re in the room!

Kevin Hart: Yeah, I don’t wanna, I don’t wanna…

Kelly Clarkson: (fake laughs nervously)

Kevin Hart: Yeah, that was my way of cueing you, like, it’s open time.

Kelly Clarkson: Yeah, you want me to keep talking about…

Kevin Hart: By all means, let’s, we can talk about anything, but, (repeats gesture)

Kelly Clarkson: But don’t do it! Shhh!

Kevin Hart: Yeah, no, of course.

If you have any degree of success, any degree at all, they will come to you with their over-the-top praise, their blandishments, their fancy pants, their lollipops, and their temptations. But even if they offer you all the kingdoms of the world, do not take the ticket.

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