It’s like a horn calling all anti-women/anti-woke chuds to battle.
The upcoming second season of Amazon Studios’ The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power, which is currently in production in the UK, will be directed by Charlotte Brändström, who is coming back after helming two episodes in Season 1, as well as Sanaa Hamri and Louise Hooper who are new to the franchise. The announcement also indirectly confirmed that Season 2 will consist of the same number of episodes as Season 1, eight.
In Season 1, Brändström was the only female director; in Season 2 she is leading an all-female directing team.
Is it Deadline that’s calling this out, or Amazon? It seems that Amazon just named the directors and Deadline is the one noting it’s all-female.
Tough to say. It could be Deadline noticed and decided to call it out, but it could also be that Amazon highlighted it and Deadline is passing that on. PR stuff.
Either way, the idiots that blame women for stuff being “too woke” or having nefarious feminist agendas will never shut up about it.
abrandt
1770
Haven’t had a chance to read it yet, but everyone’s favorite historian has thoughts
Better set aside eight hours; holy shit it is long. That said, thanks for posting it, I intend to at least try to skim it.
I did see this wonderful graphic in the blog which he culled from reddit:
Sharpe
1772
I’m still working my way through the post but I wanted to highlight this bit:
We want the fictional world to feel real or at least like it could be a real world, with internally consistent rules and clear lines of effect and consequence .
That encapsulates my view on both fantasy and sci-fi quite nicely. I tend to use the words like “verisimilitude” or “internal consistency” and the above quote is what I mean.
HOWEVER, one thing I have learned in my advancing years is that although that sort of verisimilitude/consistency is VERY important to me, there are plenty of viewers who actually have quite different views, both for fantasy and for science fiction. Some fantasy/sci-fi fans are willing to just “accept the magic” or “go with the flow” and so don’t hold shows or books or movies to the standards of worldbuilding and consistency that I prefer. This is one of those subjective dichotomies, like the difference between managed-risk-gamers and risky-victory-gamers that I’ve talked about in the games forum or like the difference between gamers who want everything transparent (me, Tom Chick) and folks who think “black boxes” in game design add to the excitement and mystery.
I used to strongly feel there was a right and a wrong on these type of things but in my aging years I try to be open to the idea that there is a subjective range to this sort of thing and it’s OK to have different views.
All that said, for me at least, the weakness of the world building is one of the reasons I disliked RoP. And then when you add the amazing world building which Tolkien did which the showrunners ignored or pissed on, that’s why I get quite annoyed with RoP. I hates it! But I do understand why folks with a more ecumenical approach to world building, verisimilitude and consistency don’t have the same negative reaction I do.
(Suppressing the urge to type: BUT THEY ARE WRONG!!!)
For someone who wrote a big article about Why We Need The Humanities, he’s got an extremely STEM like understanding of fiction.
Yeah, it was a lot of text to explain his nitpicks, but for me the show simply wasn’t written well.
But how can you get a massive thread and tons of followers by just saying that? Sheesh, get with the century man!
(Or, um, academia, where over-telling and vocabulary abuse has been a tradition since at least von Ranke).
Sharpe
1776
Yeah, the core point of that post is solid but he used about 10X the detail necessary to make his point.
The basic idea that the writing was poor, particularly in regard to internal consistency and issues of time, space, and world building, is a very valid critique. But then he buried that point until a level of detail that got pretty nit-picky.
No, the core point of of that post is bad. Fantasy stories can and usually do work with inconsistent and illogical worlds. Just about all of Tolkien’s stories do it, because he wasn’t writing fictional history, he was writing fictional mythology.
Sharpe
1778
Well, that’s subjective. For me, I need a minimum level of internal consistency, which Tolkien does have but which RoP lacked. OTOH some people are fine with a lack of any consistency, which is weird to me b/c as the post stated early on, that means there are no stakes to the story and the drama has no impact. YMMV.
The problem with that post is the author starts out talking about basic internal consistency and verisimilitude, which is a valid critique but then in the bulk of the text he goes WAAAAY out into nitpick-safari land and unfortunately weakens his own point.
Good fantasy stories don’t have inconsistent and illogical worlds. This is kind of world building 101 in any book about writing. You may be thinking of “realism” which is something else entirely. Consistency is about the rules of the fictional world. And as Bret correctly notes, if the rules make no sense, it becomes hard (for some of us at least) to feel invested in the story.
Sounds like those writing books suck.
If anyone wants to watch a TV show like it’s a source book for an RPG, that’s their choice to make, but don’t pretend Bree or The Shire feel like places that can exist in the middle of the Eriador wasteland. God knows how the LOTR would have been received by the “what do they eat” people if they were published today.
Huh? Eriador is a wilderness, not a wasteland; why you think the existence of settlements in such a place is impossible is beyond me. Medieval peasants would have been delighted to have such open lands to settle as Tolkien describes. If your point is that monsters would have overrun them, both Bree, the Shire and Buckland have militias (IIRC; Bree even repulses an assault from Mordor), in addition to which the region is protected by both Elves and the Dunedain.
Tolkien is the godfather of fantasy worldbuilding. That is literally his claim to fame. I’ve yet to read any author - pre or post-Tolkien - with deeper and more comprehensive world building. We’re talking about an author who spent time revising his magnum opus when he discovered that the moon phases in some scenes were inconsistent.
The Shire (with Buckland) is a seemingly self contained Hobbit civilization that exists as pocket of turn of the 20th century British countryside without any of the larger economic and social structures that time and place were a part of. Their limited trade with distant Dwarf cities can’t support them (what are exporting other than tobacco that somehow found its way to the old world?). Bree is even smaller, a collection of four villages that grew into each other and are the only (partially) human settlement for hundreds and hundreds of miles. Neither is believable as part of the local geography.
Tolkien cared a great deal about the consistency of his world, except when he didn’t.
Going back to the ACOUP article:
If there are no consistent rules to this world then nothing matters and if nothing matters…why should I care?
A story is about people, not how many horses can fit on a boat.
This sounds insane to me. What fictional universe stands up to this level of scrutiny? The economic trade underpinnings of Middle-Earth are about as relevant for that story as knowing the chemical makeup of spice in Dune to understanding that tale.
To put it another way, plenty of people have enjoyed Peter Pan and Alice in Wonderland despite the unreality of those settings.
I agree, but the article lists “problems” like how are Harfoots wearing wool if we don’t see them herding sheep.
We dont aee them herding sheep, or trading, or doing anything to get wool.
Infact we see them doing the exact opposite of behaviours required to get wool.
And you home in on the wool aspect, ignoring the context if what Devereux was talking about, which is that the Harfoots are an ill thought out compisite of cultures that dont work (if nomadic
then they need herds, if “traveller/gypsy” they need a settled community that they exist within - like the Tinkers in Wheel of time) of which where do they get the things they use is just one of them, wool being an example.
He also points out that they have literacy, plentiful paper, and metallurgy, all things that a society tends to either produce and sell to get the things they can’t produce, or the inverse.
But the Harfoots neither produce nor trade, so where do they get these things from?
PS - the Harfoots get off lightly in Brett’s critique.
It is true he could have made the salient points with half the words, but this is ACOUP, loquacious he is not.
If you think this article is long, go read the Fremen or Sparta series.
