Sailer's Law of Mass Arrowings Holds True in Amazon's Tolkien Prequel
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From Amazon’s \$700 million Tolkien series, The Rings of Power:
12 orcs wounded, 0 killed pic.twitter.com/mpuUJOYRB6
— Covfefe Anon (@CovfefeAnon) September 3, 2022
Holding your bow sideways isn’t as accurate.
Seriously, Tolkien’s masterpiece The Lord of the Rings is obviously inspired by Wagner’s hyper-masterpiece The Ring. Tolkien’s work is about northern Europeans, just like The Iliad is about southern Europeans, and Journey to the West is about Asians. Like Wagner’s, Tolkien’s work is awesome, but not diverse.
If you are a giant global corporation like Amazon, it’s a difficult conundrum that the world loves northern European artistry, but also is instructed to resent northern Europeans.
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Steve, I get the joke and agree about the Ring and Rings, but Tolkien strenuously denied any influence. It seems that post-WWI anti-German animosity was behind his claim.
OTOH, Tolkien was very clear about his intention of writing a specifically English or British legendarium.
This Amazon tripe would have him spinning in his grave.
J.R.R. wrote of his desire that his work would inspire derivative works in music, theatre, art, dance, etc. There have been a few.
I gather the death of his son and editor, Christopher, and the apparent control of his insane grandson, make any faithful take on his work impossible now.
He talked a lot about his LOTR world being a mythos for the British Isles but even a cursory reading of it makes this tenuous - everything from the geography to the races to the technology - none of it makes sense other than Hobbits and the Shire are vaguely stereotypically rural English.
Same with the influence of Wagner, he denied this to a degree but also of course he would if he was trying to show how militantly “British” his myth was vs being German.
My gut feeling has always been that Tolkien dreamed up an interesting fantasy world as a childrens story for the Hobbit using a lot of common tropes and themes of both English and general European myth both high and low. He never quite realized at the time the legs it would have and as he expanded on it in further works these issues were glossed over or ignored.Replies: @Che Guava
OTOH, Tolkien was very clear about his intention of writing a specifically English or British legendarium.
This Amazon tripe would have him spinning in his grave.
J.R.R. wrote of his desire that his work would inspire derivative works in music, theatre, art, dance, etc. There have been a few.
I gather the death of his son and editor, Christopher, and the apparent control of his insane grandson, make any faithful take on his work impossible now.Replies: @Steve Sailer, @Wilkey, @Vladimir Berkov, @Anon, @Inquiring Mind
C.S. Lewis’s memoir is clear about what an immense influence Wagner’s “Ring” had upon his (and Tolkien’s) generation.
Wagner’s “Ring” is really, really good. Seriously, “The Ring” is good. The reason people went nuts over Wagner’s “The Ring” is because it’s awfully good.
"Wagner's 'Ring' is really, really good."
Not a big fan of the vocals, but the instrumental portion of the cycle is a masterpiece. Parsifal is his crowning jewel.Replies: @Polistra
Rather, it’s companies like Amazon who seek to expand upon a story line that a wide range of people enjoy—how different races come together to fight evil. I would say normies on the right side of history understand that.
You could learn from that. The more you know….
April Henry
Sep 3, 2022
@aprilhenrybooks
OMG In the Penguin Random House/S&S antitrust trial it was revealed that out of 58,000 trade titles published per year, half of those titles sell fewer than one dozen books. LESS THAN ONE DOZEN.
April Henry
@aprilhenrybooks
·
90 percent of titles sell fewer than 2,000 units.
That’s a pretty damned funny tweet though. Shouldn’t he pay homage to SS?
Separately, I’m well aware that MSM entertainment is staggeringly profitable, but ik still amazed that the budget for this show is nearly a billion dollars.
And even more separately: Steve, the Ring Cycle is indeed stupendously great work but so is most of Wagner’s oeuvre.
More separately still: we like to be intellectually pretentious around here but it still felt slightly gay typing that word.
I myself received a salacious frisson upon reading it.
Did I mention that Wagner’s “Ring Cycle” is good?
Actually, from a pure plot perspective, Wagner's Ring cycle is rather hard to care about. That's about like the old Norse sagas and eddas, which suffer from the Biblical problem of doing things we don't care about, like listing out in sequence the names of lots of dwarves.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=21h8B8sEkQg
I prefer to take Tolkien at his word. He was inspired by old English and old Norse literature, not Wagner's operas. Part of his genius was transforming the old northern themes and tropes into literature that could be related to and enjoyed by modern people. There's a reason Peter Jackson made a LOTR trilogy but neither he nor any other major Hollywood director has adapted Wagner's Ring Cycle plots for film--they kind of suck for modern audiences.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=wXh5JprKqiU
Sequences like Siegfried's funeral march are genius, but I submit that outside the context of the history of opera, they can't mean much to people. On the other hand, Tolkien is accessible even to children and has such universal appeal that minorities want to participate in its world even though it is obviously not for them.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=XD8ANtV6UbYReplies: @anon
I was hooked. I can't listen to ballet scores like she does but I won't pass up a chance to see a ballet live or in person. Anyway, I once checked out a copy of the Ring Cycle from the library, watched and listened, and was surprised how much I enjoyed it. I don't tease her about either ballet or opera anymore.
Thanks. I have a set of CDs, love it, and, as I implied, don’t believe Tolkien on ‘no influence’, although he may have been sincere but deluding himself.
“Tolkien’s masterpiece The Lord of the Rings is obviously inspired by Wagner’s hyper-masterpiece The Ring.”
It obviously isn’t, at least not positively so. (Tolkien may have been a little negatively inspired to set the record straight against Wagner’s abomination of myth.) Both took from the same ancient and medieval sources, which Tolkien understood well, and which Wagner didn’t. Tolkien loves the old myths, and sees truth and goodness woven into them as in a beautiful tapestry; Wagner sees them as bonds, seeks to unravel them, and to set man free to spin new myths as he wishes, beyond good and evil, truth and falsehood. Tolkien mourns the passing of the old world, slowly fading, slipping or hiding away, overtaken by a lesser new world; Wagner has the old world go up in flames or crash down in tumult, overtaken by a new world in which, free of gods and hidebound myths, society is to be built anew beyond good and evil, without authority, hierarchy, law, or property of any kind. Tolkien is a laudator temporis acti, a reactionary; Wagner a revolutionary iconoclast. They are very different indeed.
In essence, creating new gods and systems of devotion from the syncretic pool. Humanity has entered a fallow, nihilistic phase. Time for some of us to unleash the Promethean spirit.
I am not impressed by Tolkien's denials.
Either JackD and the rest of the Hasbara Chairborne have stopped donating, or iSteve has experienced a minor epiphany.
You really shouldn’t have to be told that the Small Hats hate people who so much as acknowledge the existence of “the” Wagner – and Der Ring des Nibelungen is about as popular with them as Amalek or the indigenous population of Palestine (or the population of the Donbas).
Not for nothin’… who else liked Wagner (and in particular Der Ring des Nibelungen and even more particular Siegfried)?
Austrian chap. Bad teeth and dodgy digestion. Quite a good public speaker, from all reports. Could have been a Charlie Chaplin impersonator if he turned his hand to it.
You’ll never get that big kike payola if you go around liking the things that that guy liked.
But mostly the diversity nonsense is all just bullshit.
Peter Jackson got away with keeping his cast for the LOTR Trilogy racially accurate (i.e., entirely white). The three LOTR movies were released at roughly the same time as George Lucas’s diverse, Wokish Star Wars prequels. Here’s a comparison of their box office totals:
The Phantom Menace (1999): 1,027 million
Attack of the Clones (2002): \$654 million
Revenge of the Sith (2005): \$868 million
Fellowship of the Rings (2001): \$898 million
Two Towers (2002): \$948 million
Return of the King (2003): \$1,146 million
So the LOTR trilogy with the all white cast out-grossed the more diverse Star Wars prequel trilogy by ~\$450 million, despite Star Wars having a much larger established fan base.
“Return of the King” actually grossed over \$70 more than the third movie of the Disney Star Wars trilogy, “The Rise of Skywalker,” which was released 16 years later – that’s without adjusting for inflation.
And LOTR did something Star Wars couldn’t do: retain and expand its audience with every movie, with each of the three movies outperforming the previous one.
Disney’s even more diverse and Woke trilogy did even worse in that regard. “The Farce Awokens,” released in 2015, grossed an impressive \$2,068 million. But the box office for the second movie, “The Last Jedi,” fell by over \$700 million, to \$1,333 million. The final movie, “The Rise of Skywalker,” grossed \$1,074 million. After adjusting for inflation, that was less than half the box office of the first movie.
Disney’s Star Wars trilogy did manage to outperform Peter Jackson’s Hobbit Trilogy by about \$1.5 billion, but about half of that was thanks to the exceptional gross of the first movie. The Hobbit Trilogy also retained more of its audience during its run, with box office declining by only about 5% from the first to final movies.
Even to this day there are plenty of fantastically popular movies and television shows without much diversity that do just fine. “Game of Thrones” wasn’t especially diverse. “Stranger Things” had one solitary black kid in its main cast for the first 2-3 seasons, and that show is pretty much carrying Netflix. It’s hard to make any real economic case for requiring “diverse” actors in stories where they don’t really belong.
They hate you and want you, your people and your history erased.
Steve and the other CivNats just can't accept this harsh reality so they tie themselves in mental knots trying to explain the other side's motivation when the answer is right in front of their faces.
On the other hand, The Northman had a pretty weak showing in terms of receipts. Maybe Game of Thrones gives us a clue--deep down, it's not that people want to watch whites but that they want to see races portrayed in ways they can recognize. Ghetto blacks playing Stormtroopers isn't believable, but some darkhaired musclebound brute playing a steppe warrior is.
Hollyweird has been pushing minoritarianism themes--virtuous minorities, evil close-minded white gentiles--for years.
But it is really amazing just how radically insane the Hollyweird people--including the various streamers--here have been in pushing blacks on people the past few years. They literally degrade, often flat out wreck production after production by jamming--often jarringly jamming--blacks into them. You try and find something Euro based to avoid it ... nope, must have blacks!
Worst is jamming blacks into leading romantic roles with whites--or as spouses of whites. It is just so ridiculous and jarring beyond being simply unpleasant. Click--not watching that.
Hollyweird people really are willing to wreck their own shows and burn their company's $$$ to virtue signal and abuse white people.
Beyond the usual cull of time, an additional 90% of what has been produced the last few years, will never be watched again. This era will be an unwatchable "black hole" era of Hollyweird, nothing from around it will escape to be watched future.Replies: @Muggles, @Moses, @Feryl
OTOH, Tolkien was very clear about his intention of writing a specifically English or British legendarium.
This Amazon tripe would have him spinning in his grave.
J.R.R. wrote of his desire that his work would inspire derivative works in music, theatre, art, dance, etc. There have been a few.
I gather the death of his son and editor, Christopher, and the apparent control of his insane grandson, make any faithful take on his work impossible now.Replies: @Steve Sailer, @Wilkey, @Vladimir Berkov, @Anon, @Inquiring Mind
I know nothing about Tolkien’s grandson, but I would guess that control of his work has been lost thanks mostly to Amazon’s willingness to fork over an obscene amount of money for the rights.
In this insane moment we are in the reality is that we were not about to get a racially accurate Middle Earth from any studio willing to pay that kind of money, and Tolkien’s heirs were not going to risk being publicly outed for insisting upon it.
Perhaps in a few years sanity will return – perhaps. But this is what we are stuck with for now.
It is isn't as if he didn't already have enough from inheritance, he is just a moron.
(I haven’t seen the new series either.)
That info. was hard to find through all the 'pro' propaganda, as was all of the below.
They are restricted to whatever bullshit they can spin from the LoTR appendices and the songs about ancient (in that fictional world) times and events within the LoTR books.
I will never watch this PoS, but doing 'net searches to find out, I found a few new doubleplusgood Newspeak terms, for example a very adverse audience reaction to something goodthinkers think they should like is called 'review bombing', likewise, for like/dislike scores 'score bombing'.
I know it must be very difficult for those with young children, but depending on mental development, must gently be taught absolute cynicism on zio (western) media from the youngest possible age in terms of ability to comprehend.
So the user ratings on Rotten Tomatoes are so bad Amazon has decided to suspend them (presumably until a suitable shipment of uncounted mail-in ballots can be found).
Wagner’s piano music is not all that great.
“12 orcs wounded, 0 killed”
“It is not yet known the race of the perpetrator or what his motives might have been,” said the local Istari, “but as of now it appears the volley was completely random.”
Though more whooshing than ringing...
The genius black mathematicians in Apple’s “Foundation” slayed me. But it was interesting how hundreds of thousands of years in the future in different solar systems people will still be distinctly white, black, or Asian. And some black people will have Jamaican accents.
But they do an interesting thing with accents. The sophisticated people all have English accents. If they want to signal that a character is lower class they give him an Irish accent. If they want to signal he is physically tough they give him a Scottish accent. Obviously, no one in Middle Earth or Westeros would be caught dead speaking with an American accent.Replies: @Guest87, @BB753
OTOH, Tolkien was very clear about his intention of writing a specifically English or British legendarium.
This Amazon tripe would have him spinning in his grave.
J.R.R. wrote of his desire that his work would inspire derivative works in music, theatre, art, dance, etc. There have been a few.
I gather the death of his son and editor, Christopher, and the apparent control of his insane grandson, make any faithful take on his work impossible now.Replies: @Steve Sailer, @Wilkey, @Vladimir Berkov, @Anon, @Inquiring Mind
Tolkien said a lot of things when pressed about his intentions or influences but I’m not sure even he had a firm idea of what he wanted or what they were. His works got their big start with The Hobbit which he then spent the rest of his life wishing to rewrite and retcon.
He talked a lot about his LOTR world being a mythos for the British Isles but even a cursory reading of it makes this tenuous – everything from the geography to the races to the technology – none of it makes sense other than Hobbits and the Shire are vaguely stereotypically rural English.
Same with the influence of Wagner, he denied this to a degree but also of course he would if he was trying to show how militantly “British” his myth was vs being German.
My gut feeling has always been that Tolkien dreamed up an interesting fantasy world as a childrens story for the Hobbit using a lot of common tropes and themes of both English and general European myth both high and low. He never quite realized at the time the legs it would have and as he expanded on it in further works these issues were glossed over or ignored.
OTOH, Tolkien was very clear about his intention of writing a specifically English or British legendarium.
This Amazon tripe would have him spinning in his grave.
J.R.R. wrote of his desire that his work would inspire derivative works in music, theatre, art, dance, etc. There have been a few.
I gather the death of his son and editor, Christopher, and the apparent control of his insane grandson, make any faithful take on his work impossible now.Replies: @Steve Sailer, @Wilkey, @Vladimir Berkov, @Anon, @Inquiring Mind
Tolkien was well aware of his own family’s Germanic blood. Benjamin Tolkien only moved to the UK in the 1700s. What’s more, Tolkien grew up in that bucolic time period before World War I, in which German culture was still admired by the English. The reigning English monarch, Queen Victoria, was totally German in blood, as was her family. The hated of all things German did not occur until World War 1 caused the Anglo press to go on the attack against Germany and its culture, and of course, Hitler ruined everything for generations afterwards. Germans today are mostly ditzy leftwing hippies, but they’re still demonized by the Jewish-American left.
How does that work? Does Amazon own Rotten Tomatoes ?
It is not too hard. You can look up the grandson on the ‘net.
It is isn’t as if he didn’t already have enough from inheritance, he is just a moron.
Peter Jackson got away with keeping his cast for the LOTR Trilogy racially accurate (i.e., entirely white). The three LOTR movies were released at roughly the same time as George Lucas's diverse, Wokish Star Wars prequels. Here's a comparison of their box office totals:
The Phantom Menace (1999): 1,027 million
Attack of the Clones (2002): $654 million
Revenge of the Sith (2005): $868 million
Fellowship of the Rings (2001): $898 million
Two Towers (2002): $948 million
Return of the King (2003): $1,146 million
So the LOTR trilogy with the all white cast out-grossed the more diverse Star Wars prequel trilogy by ~$450 million, despite Star Wars having a much larger established fan base.
"Return of the King" actually grossed over $70 more than the third movie of the Disney Star Wars trilogy, "The Rise of Skywalker," which was released 16 years later - that's without adjusting for inflation.
And LOTR did something Star Wars couldn't do: retain and expand its audience with every movie, with each of the three movies outperforming the previous one.
Disney's even more diverse and Woke trilogy did even worse in that regard. "The Farce Awokens," released in 2015, grossed an impressive $2,068 million. But the box office for the second movie, "The Last Jedi," fell by over $700 million, to $1,333 million. The final movie, "The Rise of Skywalker," grossed $1,074 million. After adjusting for inflation, that was less than half the box office of the first movie.
Disney's Star Wars trilogy did manage to outperform Peter Jackson's Hobbit Trilogy by about $1.5 billion, but about half of that was thanks to the exceptional gross of the first movie. The Hobbit Trilogy also retained more of its audience during its run, with box office declining by only about 5% from the first to final movies.
Even to this day there are plenty of fantastically popular movies and television shows without much diversity that do just fine. "Game of Thrones" wasn't especially diverse. "Stranger Things" had one solitary black kid in its main cast for the first 2-3 seasons, and that show is pretty much carrying Netflix. It's hard to make any real economic case for requiring "diverse" actors in stories where they don't really belong.Replies: @Citizen of a Silly Country, @Anon, @Chrisnonymous, @AnotherDad
Because, despite what Steve makes himself believe, it’s not about the money. Wokism isn’t some Jesse Jackson shake down.
They hate you and want you, your people and your history erased.
Steve and the other CivNats just can’t accept this harsh reality so they tie themselves in mental knots trying to explain the other side’s motivation when the answer is right in front of their faces.
Peter Jackson got away with keeping his cast for the LOTR Trilogy racially accurate (i.e., entirely white). The three LOTR movies were released at roughly the same time as George Lucas's diverse, Wokish Star Wars prequels. Here's a comparison of their box office totals:
The Phantom Menace (1999): 1,027 million
Attack of the Clones (2002): $654 million
Revenge of the Sith (2005): $868 million
Fellowship of the Rings (2001): $898 million
Two Towers (2002): $948 million
Return of the King (2003): $1,146 million
So the LOTR trilogy with the all white cast out-grossed the more diverse Star Wars prequel trilogy by ~$450 million, despite Star Wars having a much larger established fan base.
"Return of the King" actually grossed over $70 more than the third movie of the Disney Star Wars trilogy, "The Rise of Skywalker," which was released 16 years later - that's without adjusting for inflation.
And LOTR did something Star Wars couldn't do: retain and expand its audience with every movie, with each of the three movies outperforming the previous one.
Disney's even more diverse and Woke trilogy did even worse in that regard. "The Farce Awokens," released in 2015, grossed an impressive $2,068 million. But the box office for the second movie, "The Last Jedi," fell by over $700 million, to $1,333 million. The final movie, "The Rise of Skywalker," grossed $1,074 million. After adjusting for inflation, that was less than half the box office of the first movie.
Disney's Star Wars trilogy did manage to outperform Peter Jackson's Hobbit Trilogy by about $1.5 billion, but about half of that was thanks to the exceptional gross of the first movie. The Hobbit Trilogy also retained more of its audience during its run, with box office declining by only about 5% from the first to final movies.
Even to this day there are plenty of fantastically popular movies and television shows without much diversity that do just fine. "Game of Thrones" wasn't especially diverse. "Stranger Things" had one solitary black kid in its main cast for the first 2-3 seasons, and that show is pretty much carrying Netflix. It's hard to make any real economic case for requiring "diverse" actors in stories where they don't really belong.Replies: @Citizen of a Silly Country, @Anon, @Chrisnonymous, @AnotherDad
The Star Wars sequels did themselves in with horrible acting. Just about everybody in the films from the Phantom Menace onwards were just not very good at the actor’s craft. Hayden Christiansen and Daisy Ridley were terrible leads. Ridley was totally wooden throughout her entire trilogy, and had no clue how to give her character the emotional depth to make her interesting. Just to give you one comparison, Martin Freeman was way beyond both Ridley and Christiansen in acting ability.
LOTR, by contrast, had plenty of good actors that people actually wanted to see in their roles. The LOTR crew were so determined to put on a good performance that some of them went right on working evening when they were physically injured, broken bones, etc.
I would love to see the whole Star Wars sequels remade with much better actors.
“Seriously, Tolkien’s masterpiece The Lord of the Rings is obviously inspired by Wagner’s hyper-masterpiece The Ring.”
Tolkien explicitly said it wasn’t.
Who are the instructors?
Robin Hood statue, Nottingham. Bow is vertical. Robin should know.
Searching for an example to use for explaining to the Woke and Woke-adjacent why being disturbed by Amazon’s multi-racial Rings of Power casting is not intrinsically racist, the best I can come up with is this: imagine a movie set in medieval Japan, but, without explanation, some of the samurai are black.
Press the person you are talking to: Would that not bother you? Really? Really??? Would you ever stop noticing? Would it ever stop grating on you?
For some the answer might be yes — maybe even an honest yes for all I know — but I think that many would be forced to admit that, at least for this particular example, the answer would have to be no. There would be rationalizations of course: LotR is fiction. Tolkien did not explicitly specify the appearance of all of his characters, and in any case it’s unrealistic to expect all the actors to look the way he would have envisioned them. Tolkien lived in a different time, and it’s important that entertainment today reflect the diversity of today. And so on.
The thing is, all of these rationalizations apply equally to the samurai movie, which might also be a work of fiction rather than a historical drama, and might even incorporate elements of fantasy. So why is it racist to be bothered by one but not the other? If you pressed hard, I think you might even force an honest answer, which would be that it just felt like there was something bad about an all-white cast, something that needed to be fixed, while an all-nonwhite cast felt just fine. And now you’ve got something new to talk about…
Oui’.
I myself received a salacious frisson upon reading it.
If there are no black elves, dwarves, etc. in the Hobbit or Lord of the Rings, but they exist in the prequels, what happened to them? Did they all become orcs?
Who gets out of a perfectly good boat? It is like jumping out of an airplane.
Spoilers below [MORE]
___
We know what Elrond looks like. He was played by Hugo Weaving in the Peter Jackson trilogy (left)
WTF is the guy on the right?
That’s supposed to be Elrond?
Come on…
You gotta be kidding me…
PEACE 😇
At the end of Ep 1 — Galadriel jumps into the ocean, hundred of miles away from land. So, now we know she is a MORON….
Why not ascend the other elves leaving her on the boat, by herself. That would have been very creepy and evocative. And, a wonderfully exploitable story question:
— Was she not permitted to enter?
— Or, did she refuse to go?
Interesting blog post on this issue.
Opposition to black characters in The Rings of Power is not about “racism”
https://sinistradelendaest.substack.com/p/opposition-to-black-characters-in?r=qz5p0&utm_medium=ios
Money does not make you omnipotent. They could have easily refused to fork over the rights, or made them public domain. We all know it’s long overdue for Lord of the Rings.
But it’s good music, not good narrative story-telling.
Actually, from a pure plot perspective, Wagner’s Ring cycle is rather hard to care about. That’s about like the old Norse sagas and eddas, which suffer from the Biblical problem of doing things we don’t care about, like listing out in sequence the names of lots of dwarves.
I prefer to take Tolkien at his word. He was inspired by old English and old Norse literature, not Wagner’s operas. Part of his genius was transforming the old northern themes and tropes into literature that could be related to and enjoyed by modern people. There’s a reason Peter Jackson made a LOTR trilogy but neither he nor any other major Hollywood director has adapted Wagner’s Ring Cycle plots for film–they kind of suck for modern audiences.
Sequences like Siegfried’s funeral march are genius, but I submit that outside the context of the history of opera, they can’t mean much to people. On the other hand, Tolkien is accessible even to children and has such universal appeal that minorities want to participate in its world even though it is obviously not for them.
Wagner, his eventual (after dragging his feet on enlisting) combat experience in WW1, the idyllic English landscape, Nordic language and myths, were all blended into Tolkien’s creative synthesis.
“Wagner’s ‘Ring’ is really, really good.”
Not a big fan of the vocals, but the instrumental portion of the cycle is a masterpiece. Parsifal is his crowning jewel.
Well, people do occasionally rewrite classics in other times and places, like Manchester’s “Goodbye, Darkness” was modelled on the Odyssey and Frazier’s “Cold Mountain” was structured like Xenophon’s Anabasis.
Peter Jackson got away with keeping his cast for the LOTR Trilogy racially accurate (i.e., entirely white). The three LOTR movies were released at roughly the same time as George Lucas's diverse, Wokish Star Wars prequels. Here's a comparison of their box office totals:
The Phantom Menace (1999): 1,027 million
Attack of the Clones (2002): $654 million
Revenge of the Sith (2005): $868 million
Fellowship of the Rings (2001): $898 million
Two Towers (2002): $948 million
Return of the King (2003): $1,146 million
So the LOTR trilogy with the all white cast out-grossed the more diverse Star Wars prequel trilogy by ~$450 million, despite Star Wars having a much larger established fan base.
"Return of the King" actually grossed over $70 more than the third movie of the Disney Star Wars trilogy, "The Rise of Skywalker," which was released 16 years later - that's without adjusting for inflation.
And LOTR did something Star Wars couldn't do: retain and expand its audience with every movie, with each of the three movies outperforming the previous one.
Disney's even more diverse and Woke trilogy did even worse in that regard. "The Farce Awokens," released in 2015, grossed an impressive $2,068 million. But the box office for the second movie, "The Last Jedi," fell by over $700 million, to $1,333 million. The final movie, "The Rise of Skywalker," grossed $1,074 million. After adjusting for inflation, that was less than half the box office of the first movie.
Disney's Star Wars trilogy did manage to outperform Peter Jackson's Hobbit Trilogy by about $1.5 billion, but about half of that was thanks to the exceptional gross of the first movie. The Hobbit Trilogy also retained more of its audience during its run, with box office declining by only about 5% from the first to final movies.
Even to this day there are plenty of fantastically popular movies and television shows without much diversity that do just fine. "Game of Thrones" wasn't especially diverse. "Stranger Things" had one solitary black kid in its main cast for the first 2-3 seasons, and that show is pretty much carrying Netflix. It's hard to make any real economic case for requiring "diverse" actors in stories where they don't really belong.Replies: @Citizen of a Silly Country, @Anon, @Chrisnonymous, @AnotherDad
Man, with that windfall, the producers can get 2 pizza pies, 2 liters of Coke, and a bottle of Jack, and relax with Netflix!
Yes, well, as long as Hispanics and Asians (in Asia) are willing to watch all-white casts, why would you think diversity would have a positive impact?
On the other hand, The Northman had a pretty weak showing in terms of receipts. Maybe Game of Thrones gives us a clue–deep down, it’s not that people want to watch whites but that they want to see races portrayed in ways they can recognize. Ghetto blacks playing Stormtroopers isn’t believable, but some darkhaired musclebound brute playing a steppe warrior is.
“… Wagner sees them as bonds, seeks to unravel them, and to set man free to spin new myths as he wishes, beyond good and evil, truth and falsehood.”
In essence, creating new gods and systems of devotion from the syncretic pool. Humanity has entered a fallow, nihilistic phase. Time for some of us to unleash the Promethean spirit.
Come on Steve. The world does not need instruction to resent northern Europeans. Resentment can arise naturally when faced with northern European talent, beauty, achievement, and grace. It is a variant of jealousy.
What the world is being instructed to do is to hate northern Europeans and to want them exterminated.
I’d like to believe a red-pilled, mischievous director instructed the black actor to hold the bow ghetto-style. But it’s quite likely Amazon required a QR scan for ideology along with one for the dangerous vaccine.*
*The reformulated mRNA jab for omicron was tested on 8 mice and no humans before the public health authorities give the OK, which they most surely will. Will Steve get his booster? Yep.
If you are White, nothing will be left to you. They will take away your entire cultural patrimony, corrupt it, and use it against you.
There never will be a good cinematic (or TV) incarnation of Tolkien’s works. Peter Jackson had the chance but muffed it by making it too Peter Jackson-y. And now, it can’t be made without being wrecked by wokism.
Good news for Ralph Bakshi – his animated version from the 70s remains the closest contender.
Racially accurate? You mean real elves and dwarves? 😉
(I haven’t seen the new series either.)
I always thought the Orcs were supposed to be inner city black gangsters. They would be the sideways shooters.
Guess I was wrong…
Here is Rob Long on Amazon’s woes: https://www.commentary.org/articles/rob-long/lord-of-the-rings-spinoff-series/
True.
For anyone interested in an in-depth analysis, read Scruton:
https://cloudflare-ipfs.com/ipfs/bafykbzacebq4kvuwmllaxvmzxinfg7q2usrlrsj4xclal4ftb3nkutkec2vvo?filename=Roger%20Scruton%20-%20Understanding%20Music_%20Philosophy%20and%20Interpretation%20%20-Continuum%20%282009%29.pdf
…………………….
Looked at in that way, we can see Wagner’s Ring cycle as a bridge between two far more humble productions: Grimm’s fairy tales and the Lord of the Rings. Grimm influenced Wagner and Wagner made Tolkien possible. Indeed the emotions that are stirred by the cinematic realization of Tolkien’s rambling story are a faint echo of what would be felt, were The Ring to be performed as Wagner intended, with every single stage direction realistically obeyed. This would be the film to end all films, the Götterdämmerung of our modern era, in which Wagner’s moral would be apparent even to the unmusical. And almost certainly it would be banned.
Tolkien’s passion for the medieval world arose, like Wagner’s, from a lifelong religious quest. Unlike Wagner, however, Tolkien did not have the ability to remake the religious experience through art. He remained a ‘good sad Christian at heart’, but with a talent for pagan fairy tales. His novel has smatterings of the great conflict between good and evil, and an abundance of mysteries. But it does not re-create the experience that Wagner has always in mind in the tetralogy, which is the experience of the sacred. The Ring is not merely the greatest invocation of primeval Nature and the hunter-gatherer world in modern art. It also abounds in moments of genuine religious awe: Brünnhilde’s announcement to Siegmund of his impending death; Sieglinde’s blessing of Brünnhilde; Wotan’s farewell; Siegfried’s first encounter with Brünnhilde—and so on. Virtually all the turning points of the drama are conceived in sacramental terms; they are occasions of awe, piety and transition, in which a victim is offered and a promise of redemption received.
David Goldman when writing as "Spengler" for Asia Times Online had a piece with a ten-point plot comparison between that Wagner opera and LOTR.
They were identical.
I searched for the link but couldn't find it using my phone. I recall that Goldman used the analogy of Tolkien "filing down Wagner's Ring Cycle to dust and recasting it as LOTR" (my paraphrase)
Methinks Tolkien doth protest(ed) too much on this point.
My assumption was wrong, from my reading Amazon doesn’t have the rights to any of the material edited by Christopher Tolkien, so they can’t use any of that material directly.
That info. was hard to find through all the ‘pro’ propaganda, as was all of the below.
They are restricted to whatever bullshit they can spin from the LoTR appendices and the songs about ancient (in that fictional world) times and events within the LoTR books.
I will never watch this PoS, but doing ‘net searches to find out, I found a few new doubleplusgood Newspeak terms, for example a very adverse audience reaction to something goodthinkers think they should like is called ‘review bombing’, likewise, for like/dislike scores ‘score bombing’.
I know it must be very difficult for those with young children, but depending on mental development, must gently be taught absolute cynicism on zio (western) media from the youngest possible age in terms of ability to comprehend.
One of my sisters is a huge opera and ballet fan. I used to tease her about fat women singers dressed with horned headpieces caterwauling to beat the band. I lost no opportunity to reference “Kill the Wabbit” which she actually thought was a funny cartoon. She also really liked ballet which I would give her shit about until she talked me into going to see Alexander Godunov dance “Giselle” with Natalia Makarova on his first US tour post defection.
I was hooked. I can’t listen to ballet scores like she does but I won’t pass up a chance to see a ballet live or in person. Anyway, I once checked out a copy of the Ring Cycle from the library, watched and listened, and was surprised how much I enjoyed it. I don’t tease her about either ballet or opera anymore.
Did I mention that Takeo Fujisawa, the co-founder and number two man at Honda Motor, Ltd, was wholly in agreement, and took a week off from his busy schedule every summer to attend the Festival in Bayreuth? Kind of like Bill Gates’s annual week in solitary confinement, and that semi-secret airline executives’ conclave of fun in the Rockies.
Peter Jackson got away with keeping his cast for the LOTR Trilogy racially accurate (i.e., entirely white). The three LOTR movies were released at roughly the same time as George Lucas's diverse, Wokish Star Wars prequels. Here's a comparison of their box office totals:
The Phantom Menace (1999): 1,027 million
Attack of the Clones (2002): $654 million
Revenge of the Sith (2005): $868 million
Fellowship of the Rings (2001): $898 million
Two Towers (2002): $948 million
Return of the King (2003): $1,146 million
So the LOTR trilogy with the all white cast out-grossed the more diverse Star Wars prequel trilogy by ~$450 million, despite Star Wars having a much larger established fan base.
"Return of the King" actually grossed over $70 more than the third movie of the Disney Star Wars trilogy, "The Rise of Skywalker," which was released 16 years later - that's without adjusting for inflation.
And LOTR did something Star Wars couldn't do: retain and expand its audience with every movie, with each of the three movies outperforming the previous one.
Disney's even more diverse and Woke trilogy did even worse in that regard. "The Farce Awokens," released in 2015, grossed an impressive $2,068 million. But the box office for the second movie, "The Last Jedi," fell by over $700 million, to $1,333 million. The final movie, "The Rise of Skywalker," grossed $1,074 million. After adjusting for inflation, that was less than half the box office of the first movie.
Disney's Star Wars trilogy did manage to outperform Peter Jackson's Hobbit Trilogy by about $1.5 billion, but about half of that was thanks to the exceptional gross of the first movie. The Hobbit Trilogy also retained more of its audience during its run, with box office declining by only about 5% from the first to final movies.
Even to this day there are plenty of fantastically popular movies and television shows without much diversity that do just fine. "Game of Thrones" wasn't especially diverse. "Stranger Things" had one solitary black kid in its main cast for the first 2-3 seasons, and that show is pretty much carrying Netflix. It's hard to make any real economic case for requiring "diverse" actors in stories where they don't really belong.Replies: @Citizen of a Silly Country, @Anon, @Chrisnonymous, @AnotherDad
Thanks Wilkey.
Hollyweird has been pushing minoritarianism themes–virtuous minorities, evil close-minded white gentiles–for years.
But it is really amazing just how radically insane the Hollyweird people–including the various streamers–here have been in pushing blacks on people the past few years. They literally degrade, often flat out wreck production after production by jamming–often jarringly jamming–blacks into them. You try and find something Euro based to avoid it … nope, must have blacks!
Worst is jamming blacks into leading romantic roles with whites–or as spouses of whites. It is just so ridiculous and jarring beyond being simply unpleasant. Click–not watching that.
Hollyweird people really are willing to wreck their own shows and burn their company’s \$\$\$ to virtue signal and abuse white people.
Beyond the usual cull of time, an additional 90% of what has been produced the last few years, will never be watched again. This era will be an unwatchable “black hole” era of Hollyweird, nothing from around it will escape to be watched future.
The Chinese novel from the 16th century, ‘Journey to the West’, which Steve cites above, is a poignant reference.
The novel is set 900 years earlier, telling the tale of Chinese Buddhists who travelled to India during the first millennium, to bring Buddhist texts back to China, the group having various adventures making for a great story.
The Chinese Buddhist group in the novel, are described as studying at the great university of Nalanda in northern India, which existed for some 1700 years … until Nalanda was destroyed by Muslim invaders, reportedly around the year 1200 CE. Fascinating that the Chinese still remembered and honoured India’s Nalanda, centuries after it was laid waste by Islamic jihadis.
The destruction of Nalanda, ranks along with the apparently Christian destruction of the library of Alexandria, and the final closing of the university at Athens after nearly a millennium by Justinian and his Byzantine Christians reportedly in 529 CE, as landmarks of the destruction of knowledge by the Jewish-based Abrahamic religions.
Most moderns don’t know it, but under ancient spiritual influence of Nalanda and its Buddhist & Hindu collaborators, kingdoms of ancient India began abolishing the death penalty, as early as 2000 years ago … and Japan and China both abolished the death penalty as well for a time 1000+ years ago, under that same influence. Yet all three continue that barbarism today, like the USA.
Societies go backwards sometimes … and Christianity and Islam helped to send them backwards. The reincarnation religions are clearly the much better ones.
...
God damn it, nothing works any more. I search "police suppress riot 1971" on youtube, and I get all (all!) January 6th propaganda.
...
I'll reply again with an archived link. Michael Flynn is a classicist who wrote a good long article on Hypatia of Alexandria back when the Rachel Weisz movie came out.
https://www.scribd.com/document/87334562/Hypatia-Ipazia-the-Mean-Streets-of-Old-Alexandria-by-Mike-Flynn
I wonder that too. I suppose Amazon doesn’t legally own sites like Rotten Tomatoes, but since Amazon probably provides a big chunk of RT’s advertising revenue, they can tell RT to jump and RT asks “how high?”
One presumes you’re jesting, but actually … kinda, yeah. As I recall, the Appendices describe an orcish ethnogenesis leading to speciation where the dark races are fallen elves. Then Saruman creates a plantation breeding experiment of mulatto half-human half-orc Uruk-hai to be his vanguard shocktroops/occupational class for the twisted new age he wants to bring abuot. [You may substitute various globalists’s names for Saruman in the previous sentence.]
Wagner didn’t invent the storyline out of whole cloth, but crafted it from very old stories that told different versions of the basic themes. I think it is fair to say that Tolkien borrowed some from Wagners Ring Cycle distillation of the old sagas, but the LOTR had so many differences from previous stories that we can still credit Tolkien for his creative output.
No. Amazon suspended their own ratings system. No ability to select stars and review it there.
Robin Hood statue, Nottingham. Bow is vertical. Robin should know.Replies: @johnmark7
Indians on horseback would have had to cant their bows, but otherwise, no way.
I can believe that there might be dark-skinned elves, but dwarves?? They live underground ffs! How would that ever evolve?
Interesting, thanks. But consider that The Bayreuth Festival has a 10-year waiting list for tickets. That means that Takeo is very good at advance planning; getting each year’s tickets lined-up and staggered as would a JFK air traffic controller at rush-hour.
The Ring cycle may be good. But it doesn’t follow that everything based on Norse/Germanic mythology is derivative of another thing which is also based on Norse/German mythology.
"It is not yet known the race of the perpetrator or what his motives might have been," said the local Istari, "but as of now it appears the volley was completely random."Replies: @Muggles
Yes, “shots rang out.”
Though more whooshing than ringing…
The Game of Thrones prequel also just launched on HBO. It is very good. But also has the very annoying 2022 convention of dropping random black characters in where they don’t belong.
But they do an interesting thing with accents. The sophisticated people all have English accents. If they want to signal that a character is lower class they give him an Irish accent. If they want to signal he is physically tough they give him a Scottish accent. Obviously, no one in Middle Earth or Westeros would be caught dead speaking with an American accent.
Australian and N. Z. actors ( who are plentiful in the series) can usually make convincing English accents but American actors cannot.
Most actors, British and American and Australian can't even fake stage Irish.
IMHO, they should have shot the entireseries and Peter Jackson's films in Elvish and Numenorian with English subtitles, lol!Replies: @A123
Hollyweird has been pushing minoritarianism themes--virtuous minorities, evil close-minded white gentiles--for years.
But it is really amazing just how radically insane the Hollyweird people--including the various streamers--here have been in pushing blacks on people the past few years. They literally degrade, often flat out wreck production after production by jamming--often jarringly jamming--blacks into them. You try and find something Euro based to avoid it ... nope, must have blacks!
Worst is jamming blacks into leading romantic roles with whites--or as spouses of whites. It is just so ridiculous and jarring beyond being simply unpleasant. Click--not watching that.
Hollyweird people really are willing to wreck their own shows and burn their company's $$$ to virtue signal and abuse white people.
Beyond the usual cull of time, an additional 90% of what has been produced the last few years, will never be watched again. This era will be an unwatchable "black hole" era of Hollyweird, nothing from around it will escape to be watched future.Replies: @Muggles, @Moses, @Feryl
Interesting observation.
While I don’t “stream” any video or watch that, I have read that all of the streaming services, including the # 1 Netflix, have had huge billion dollar losses on running those businesses.
Billions, just look that up! The Wall St. Journal follows that closely. The major media conglomerates are now slowly adding advertising options to try to stem the cash flow losses.
The problem has been that streaming revenue doesn’t cover the huge production costs for filling up the “streams.” Most of which are not widely watched and hence streamer turnover rates are in the mid double digits.
Your comment makes me wonder about the long term viability of streaming. In classic network TV, much ad revenue was created by re-runs, both in summer and for years later. Eventually the better stuff was rented to syndication on obscure channels. Even now some 50s-60s shows run perpetually on cable.
Now if most streamer content isn’t being watched fresh, what is the long run revenue potential for that? Sure, they can license it for re-runs on free or cable TV, sell video DVDs, but again, who will buy ads to show those?
Those billion dollar production costs, unlike old fashioned network stuff, really can’t be re-run unless someone wants to see it. Will there be secondary streaming services (“Classic Netflix”) which will be full of third rate content paid for by late night porno ads?
Video content is quickly dated, and quickly “contemporary” actors/actresses will seem old fashioned or just old style.
Seems like junk streaming content is a financial anchor around the Latest Thing in media.
“If you are a giant global corporation like Amazon, it’s a difficult conundrum that the world loves northern European artistry, but also is instructed to resent northern Europeans.”
Rather, it’s companies like Amazon who seek to expand upon a story line that a wide range of people enjoy—how different races come together to fight evil. I would say normies on the right side of history understand that.
You could learn from that. The more you know….
"Wagner's 'Ring' is really, really good."
Not a big fan of the vocals, but the instrumental portion of the cycle is a masterpiece. Parsifal is his crowning jewel.Replies: @Polistra
Agree completely, though I’d put Tristan up there as well. You can’t blame the opera for the fact that it’s overexposed.
Is it? Then Wagner must be black!
For anyone interested in an in-depth analysis, read Scruton:
https://cloudflare-ipfs.com/ipfs/bafykbzacebq4kvuwmllaxvmzxinfg7q2usrlrsj4xclal4ftb3nkutkec2vvo?filename=Roger%20Scruton%20-%20Understanding%20Music_%20Philosophy%20and%20Interpretation%20%20-Continuum%20%282009%29.pdf
.........................
Looked at in that way, we can see Wagner’s Ring cycle as a bridge between two far more humble productions: Grimm’s fairy tales and the Lord of the Rings. Grimm influenced Wagner and Wagner made Tolkien possible. Indeed the emotions that are stirred by the cinematic realization of Tolkien’s rambling story are a faint echo of what would be felt, were The Ring to be performed as Wagner intended, with every single stage direction realistically obeyed. This would be the film to end all films, the Götterdämmerung of our modern era, in which Wagner’s moral would be apparent even to the unmusical. And almost certainly it would be banned.
Tolkien’s passion for the medieval world arose, like Wagner’s, from a lifelong religious quest. Unlike Wagner, however, Tolkien did not have the ability to remake the religious experience through art. He remained a ‘good sad Christian at heart’, but with a talent for pagan fairy tales. His novel has smatterings of the great conflict between good and evil, and an abundance of mysteries. But it does not re-create the experience that Wagner has always in mind in the tetralogy, which is the experience of the sacred. The Ring is not merely the greatest invocation of primeval Nature and the hunter-gatherer world in modern art. It also abounds in moments of genuine religious awe: Brünnhilde’s announcement to Siegmund of his impending death; Sieglinde’s blessing of Brünnhilde; Wotan’s farewell; Siegfried’s first encounter with Brünnhilde—and so on. Virtually all the turning points of the drama are conceived in sacramental terms; they are occasions of awe, piety and transition, in which a victim is offered and a promise of redemption received.Replies: @TorontoTraveller
Thanks for this.
David Goldman when writing as “Spengler” for Asia Times Online had a piece with a ten-point plot comparison between that Wagner opera and LOTR.
They were identical.
I searched for the link but couldn’t find it using my phone. I recall that Goldman used the analogy of Tolkien “filing down Wagner’s Ring Cycle to dust and recasting it as LOTR” (my paraphrase)
Methinks Tolkien doth protest(ed) too much on this point.
“Wagner’s music is better than it sounds.” – Mark Twain’s Autobiography (re-quoting humorist Edgar Wilson “Bill” Nye)
The lyingpress maintains a vague idea that Wagner was successful despite being unpopular (a recent BBC piece on the history of opera managed to skip him), but the other day 4chan’s lit board listed famous authors and artists who liked Wagner, and it was pretty much all the people whose opinion an artist would care about.
Actually, from a pure plot perspective, Wagner's Ring cycle is rather hard to care about. That's about like the old Norse sagas and eddas, which suffer from the Biblical problem of doing things we don't care about, like listing out in sequence the names of lots of dwarves.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=21h8B8sEkQg
I prefer to take Tolkien at his word. He was inspired by old English and old Norse literature, not Wagner's operas. Part of his genius was transforming the old northern themes and tropes into literature that could be related to and enjoyed by modern people. There's a reason Peter Jackson made a LOTR trilogy but neither he nor any other major Hollywood director has adapted Wagner's Ring Cycle plots for film--they kind of suck for modern audiences.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=wXh5JprKqiU
Sequences like Siegfried's funeral march are genius, but I submit that outside the context of the history of opera, they can't mean much to people. On the other hand, Tolkien is accessible even to children and has such universal appeal that minorities want to participate in its world even though it is obviously not for them.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=XD8ANtV6UbYReplies: @anon
Admittedly, parts of the Poetic Edda like the ‘Roster of Dwarves’ may be of interest principally to the specialist, but even that sort of thing shows how early literature always arises in part from genealogy: think of the importance of lineage in Homer, in the Bible and in Beowulf. Then too, other parts of the Poetic Edda contain fascinating material reflective of the proto-Germanic psyche without ancient parallel; for example the Havamal, including Odin’s advice on women found therein.
Important as the two Eddas are, the best foundation we have of Germanic mythology and proto-history, to throw all into a blanket dismissal with the Sagas too, that vast collection of tales and histories of a great people, the Norse, is too much. For a taste of the thousands of tales that remains almost as fresh today as Chekhov or Alice Munro, here is a link to ‘The Story of Ogmund Dint and Gunnar Half”:
https://archive.org/details/sagakingolaftry00snorgoog/page/250/mode/2up
Have fun, read it: only ten pages long. Then consider that this tale is but one of scores in the ‘Big Saga’ of King Olaf Tryggvasen, which is but one of four sagas centered on him, which are but a small part of the total corpus of the Sagas.
Back to the ‘Roster of Dwarves’: Tolkien himself poked gentle fun at in The Hobbit, by having the thirteen dwarves carefully introduced in small groups to Bilbo, then later even more carefully and in even smaller groups, to Beorn.
There’s a Neil Strauss interview in Everybody Loves You When You’re Dead with an African High Life musician, whom Strauss angers by suggesting Motown influence. In Steve’s and Spengler’s back-of-the-envelope analysis I fear people who aren’t artists trying to talk about art. At the same time the artist who denies influence (“inspiration” is just wrong) may be not over-defensive (the greatness of every great work is proven by that dismissal Robert Graves endured, when critics said that I, Claudius was just Suetonius and Tacitus romanticized, because, after all, Suetonius and Tacitus were all the critics knew, and they recognized shared elements) but too close to his own process. It should also be remembered that the rediscovery of European myth in art neither started nor stopped with Wagner. Tolkein taught himself Finnish so he could read the Kalevala. Did he do that in reaction to the Ring cycle? If so, he was going the wrong way: the Ring cycle is based on Norse and Icelandic stuff.
(“replying” to 212. USE A NAME.)
Important as are the two Eddas (the best foundation we have of Germanic mythology and proto-history), to throw all into a blanket dismissal with the Sagas (the Sagas being a vast collection of tales and histories of the great Norse people), is too much.
The Rings of Power is yet another leftist allegory of the Trump Administration. I’m betting Sauron will be Orange.
“While You Wait”: Oberammergau
Right. My apologies for getting rating sites confused.
And: servers.
(Although IJ has apparently revised his original statement. Amazon only banned reviews on their own site.)
Saw the Rotten Tomatoes founder speak once at a private event. Very woke Asian man.
Guess I was wrong...Replies: @Moses
The Dwarves clearly are Jews. Love of gold, big noses and all that. All the films and books anti-semitic. Should be banned.
Hollyweird has been pushing minoritarianism themes--virtuous minorities, evil close-minded white gentiles--for years.
But it is really amazing just how radically insane the Hollyweird people--including the various streamers--here have been in pushing blacks on people the past few years. They literally degrade, often flat out wreck production after production by jamming--often jarringly jamming--blacks into them. You try and find something Euro based to avoid it ... nope, must have blacks!
Worst is jamming blacks into leading romantic roles with whites--or as spouses of whites. It is just so ridiculous and jarring beyond being simply unpleasant. Click--not watching that.
Hollyweird people really are willing to wreck their own shows and burn their company's $$$ to virtue signal and abuse white people.
Beyond the usual cull of time, an additional 90% of what has been produced the last few years, will never be watched again. This era will be an unwatchable "black hole" era of Hollyweird, nothing from around it will escape to be watched future.Replies: @Muggles, @Moses, @Feryl
Hey hey Dad, cool it with the anti-semitic dog whistles pls.
Thanks.
Glad that freak’n series died without hardly anyone noticing that it existed.
But they do an interesting thing with accents. The sophisticated people all have English accents. If they want to signal that a character is lower class they give him an Irish accent. If they want to signal he is physically tough they give him a Scottish accent. Obviously, no one in Middle Earth or Westeros would be caught dead speaking with an American accent.Replies: @Guest87, @BB753
Because of the HBO series Rome and the BBC series I, Claudius, I just can’t accept that Romans didn’t speak with British accents.
The novel is set 900 years earlier, telling the tale of Chinese Buddhists who travelled to India during the first millennium, to bring Buddhist texts back to China, the group having various adventures making for a great story.
The Chinese Buddhist group in the novel, are described as studying at the great university of Nalanda in northern India, which existed for some 1700 years ... until Nalanda was destroyed by Muslim invaders, reportedly around the year 1200 CE. Fascinating that the Chinese still remembered and honoured India's Nalanda, centuries after it was laid waste by Islamic jihadis.
The destruction of Nalanda, ranks along with the apparently Christian destruction of the library of Alexandria, and the final closing of the university at Athens after nearly a millennium by Justinian and his Byzantine Christians reportedly in 529 CE, as landmarks of the destruction of knowledge by the Jewish-based Abrahamic religions.
Most moderns don't know it, but under ancient spiritual influence of Nalanda and its Buddhist & Hindu collaborators, kingdoms of ancient India began abolishing the death penalty, as early as 2000 years ago ... and Japan and China both abolished the death penalty as well for a time 1000+ years ago, under that same influence. Yet all three continue that barbarism today, like the USA.
Societies go backwards sometimes ... and Christianity and Islam helped to send them backwards. The reincarnation religions are clearly the much better ones.Replies: @Alden, @J.Ross, @J.Ross
The Christians did not destroy the library of Alexandra you anti Christian liberal ignorant moron. Your brain is a sink. Liberal lies headquarters closed the plug, turned on the faucets and the liberal anti Christian lies poured in. And you believe it because you are an ignorant moron. Or a typical MAN OF UNZ google researcher who knows nothing of history.
It was Julius Cesar who first burnt and destroyed more than half the library in 50 BC. When he conquered Egypt 100 years before Christianity.
The library survived. There were other fires due to oil lamps. And bugs and worms and fungus and mold. And the Muslim invasion Cervantes 660AD. That disapproved of all scrolls books research and writings done before the Koran. It was during the Muslim occupation that the locals began using the books scrolls and even furniture for firewood.
The library was finally destroyed cerca 900BC by the great Muslim Caliph, Haroun al Raschid. There was a cold spell for a few years and Haroun settler the dispute between the Christian scholars that wanted to preserve the library and the people who wanted the books and scrolls for firewood.
The Muslim clergy convinced Haroun that the only book needed is the Koran. And the library was destroyed and the contents burnt for firewood.
Except for books and scrolls that were rescued and taken to Christian monasteries in Egypt Syria Europe. Many are in the Vatican library. Many went as far as Ireland and N Germany.
What an ignorant moron you are. Go ahead and post a link to some lying atheist Protestant communist Jewish anti catholic article you find on the internet. The truth can be found in any university library.
For your informationbigotee ignoramus; the infamous Christian bishop Clement did confiscate some books cerca 4th century AD. But very few books. Books of Christian theology of the Arian version of Christianity. Clement was opposites to Arianism.
So don’t make a total ignorant fool of yourself by posting to a link about the lie that Clement destroyed the entire library you gullible credulous moron
Please, stop watching kids’ shows! Men of Unz, grow up!
OTOH, Tolkien was very clear about his intention of writing a specifically English or British legendarium.
This Amazon tripe would have him spinning in his grave.
J.R.R. wrote of his desire that his work would inspire derivative works in music, theatre, art, dance, etc. There have been a few.
I gather the death of his son and editor, Christopher, and the apparent control of his insane grandson, make any faithful take on his work impossible now.Replies: @Steve Sailer, @Wilkey, @Vladimir Berkov, @Anon, @Inquiring Mind
iSteve has arrived late to this party
Good point: there’s The AWS Veto, by which Amazon-CIA hold potential check and balance over the entire national conversation.
(Although IJ has apparently revised his original statement. Amazon only banned reviews on their own site.)
He’s holding the bow Gangsta Style.😀
The novel is set 900 years earlier, telling the tale of Chinese Buddhists who travelled to India during the first millennium, to bring Buddhist texts back to China, the group having various adventures making for a great story.
The Chinese Buddhist group in the novel, are described as studying at the great university of Nalanda in northern India, which existed for some 1700 years ... until Nalanda was destroyed by Muslim invaders, reportedly around the year 1200 CE. Fascinating that the Chinese still remembered and honoured India's Nalanda, centuries after it was laid waste by Islamic jihadis.
The destruction of Nalanda, ranks along with the apparently Christian destruction of the library of Alexandria, and the final closing of the university at Athens after nearly a millennium by Justinian and his Byzantine Christians reportedly in 529 CE, as landmarks of the destruction of knowledge by the Jewish-based Abrahamic religions.
Most moderns don't know it, but under ancient spiritual influence of Nalanda and its Buddhist & Hindu collaborators, kingdoms of ancient India began abolishing the death penalty, as early as 2000 years ago ... and Japan and China both abolished the death penalty as well for a time 1000+ years ago, under that same influence. Yet all three continue that barbarism today, like the USA.
Societies go backwards sometimes ... and Christianity and Islam helped to send them backwards. The reincarnation religions are clearly the much better ones.Replies: @Alden, @J.Ross, @J.Ross
Computer, route all references to “Library+Alexandria” to search engine imput “Michael+Flynn+Alexandria+Hypatia” and cheers.
…
God damn it, nothing works any more. I search “police suppress riot 1971” on youtube, and I get all (all!) January 6th propaganda.
…
I’ll reply again with an archived link. Michael Flynn is a classicist who wrote a good long article on Hypatia of Alexandria back when the Rachel Weisz movie came out.
The novel is set 900 years earlier, telling the tale of Chinese Buddhists who travelled to India during the first millennium, to bring Buddhist texts back to China, the group having various adventures making for a great story.
The Chinese Buddhist group in the novel, are described as studying at the great university of Nalanda in northern India, which existed for some 1700 years ... until Nalanda was destroyed by Muslim invaders, reportedly around the year 1200 CE. Fascinating that the Chinese still remembered and honoured India's Nalanda, centuries after it was laid waste by Islamic jihadis.
The destruction of Nalanda, ranks along with the apparently Christian destruction of the library of Alexandria, and the final closing of the university at Athens after nearly a millennium by Justinian and his Byzantine Christians reportedly in 529 CE, as landmarks of the destruction of knowledge by the Jewish-based Abrahamic religions.
Most moderns don't know it, but under ancient spiritual influence of Nalanda and its Buddhist & Hindu collaborators, kingdoms of ancient India began abolishing the death penalty, as early as 2000 years ago ... and Japan and China both abolished the death penalty as well for a time 1000+ years ago, under that same influence. Yet all three continue that barbarism today, like the USA.
Societies go backwards sometimes ... and Christianity and Islam helped to send them backwards. The reincarnation religions are clearly the much better ones.Replies: @Alden, @J.Ross, @J.Ross
Here it is as a Scribd, it might not be online any more.
https://www.scribd.com/document/87334562/Hypatia-Ipazia-the-Mean-Streets-of-Old-Alexandria-by-Mike-Flynn
I demand public vindication:
April Henry
Sep 3, 2022
@aprilhenrybooks
OMG In the Penguin Random House/S&S antitrust trial it was revealed that out of 58,000 trade titles published per year, half of those titles sell fewer than one dozen books. LESS THAN ONE DOZEN.
April Henry
@aprilhenrybooks
·
90 percent of titles sell fewer than 2,000 units.
There are many elements in Tolkien that come straight from Wagner, not from the medieval sources. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2003/12/22/the-ring-and-the-rings
I am not impressed by Tolkien’s denials.
Is there a Sailers Law of knifing? I see that a couple of Canadian native indians just took out a bunch of other indians. The perps were not white became neither the NYT nor the Woke Canadian authorities said anything about white supremos, through they will probably think of a way to work it in eventually.
There’s no Sailer’s Law of Mass Knifings (yet), but I’m not surprised that this tragedy appears to have something to do with Amerindians. I just mentioned in “The Geography of Homicides” that:
“There’s much discussion in the respectable press about legal gun purchases as being the cause (rather than, more likely, the effect) of the historic increase in shootings. It’s difficult to find statistics on what percentage of murders are committed with legally owned guns, but the CDC data lets you calculate the share of homicides due to gunfire rather than knives, blunt objects, fists, poison, or whatever. Among black homicide victims, 87 percent died by firearms compared with only 56 percent of American Indians, 62 percent of Asians, 63 percent of whites, and 75 percent of Latinos.
“As you might guess from rap lyrics, African American culture tends to encourage knuckleheads to use guns to settle beefs. Native Americans are also quite violent, but they aren’t as quick to resort to guns.”
Hollyweird has been pushing minoritarianism themes--virtuous minorities, evil close-minded white gentiles--for years.
But it is really amazing just how radically insane the Hollyweird people--including the various streamers--here have been in pushing blacks on people the past few years. They literally degrade, often flat out wreck production after production by jamming--often jarringly jamming--blacks into them. You try and find something Euro based to avoid it ... nope, must have blacks!
Worst is jamming blacks into leading romantic roles with whites--or as spouses of whites. It is just so ridiculous and jarring beyond being simply unpleasant. Click--not watching that.
Hollyweird people really are willing to wreck their own shows and burn their company's $$$ to virtue signal and abuse white people.
Beyond the usual cull of time, an additional 90% of what has been produced the last few years, will never be watched again. This era will be an unwatchable "black hole" era of Hollyweird, nothing from around it will escape to be watched future.Replies: @Muggles, @Moses, @Feryl
Movies went down the tubes with the switch to shooting on digital memory cards rather than on real film. Digital looks harshly realistic and unpleasing, real film looks enchanting.
The early Christians were the ‘antifa’ of their day, with the pagans playing the role of the ‘fascists’
He talked a lot about his LOTR world being a mythos for the British Isles but even a cursory reading of it makes this tenuous - everything from the geography to the races to the technology - none of it makes sense other than Hobbits and the Shire are vaguely stereotypically rural English.
Same with the influence of Wagner, he denied this to a degree but also of course he would if he was trying to show how militantly “British” his myth was vs being German.
My gut feeling has always been that Tolkien dreamed up an interesting fantasy world as a childrens story for the Hobbit using a lot of common tropes and themes of both English and general European myth both high and low. He never quite realized at the time the legs it would have and as he expanded on it in further works these issues were glossed over or ignored.Replies: @Che Guava
If you were a little better-read, you would know that J.R.R. had written a hell of a lot before writing The Hobbit for his children.
But they do an interesting thing with accents. The sophisticated people all have English accents. If they want to signal that a character is lower class they give him an Irish accent. If they want to signal he is physically tough they give him a Scottish accent. Obviously, no one in Middle Earth or Westeros would be caught dead speaking with an American accent.Replies: @Guest87, @BB753
The breakdown is the following:
– hobbits/ harfoot: they speak Irish or try to ( Amazon does not have the copyright for Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings or even the Silmarillion which means not only that they have to make up most of the characters and stories, which explains the poor and wokish writing on the show but also they cannot use the term “hobbit”.)
– Dwarves: ( stage) Scottish accent.
-Humans: lower class Southern English accent
-Elves and sorcerers: upper class English
I don’t know who came up with this classist and marginally racist convention. Peter Jackson?
Australian and N. Z. actors ( who are plentiful in the series) can usually make convincing English accents but American actors cannot.
Most actors, British and American and Australian can’t even fake stage Irish.
IMHO, they should have shot the entireseries and Peter Jackson’s films in Elvish and Numenorian with English subtitles, lol!
The new hobbits are filthy, hungry simpletons with stage-Irish accents. — Amazon putting a three-day pause on reviews for The Rings of Power.
Racism, straight up. “The Scots get it too in The Rings of Power. Stand-ins for the dwarfs, they are portrayed as aggressive and argumentative. It gets to the point where I expect Durin, prince of Khazad-dûm, to whip out a deep-fried Mars bar. Every other ‘mad Jock’ cliche has already been ticked off.”
PEACE 😇Replies: @BB753
Australian and N. Z. actors ( who are plentiful in the series) can usually make convincing English accents but American actors cannot.
Most actors, British and American and Australian can't even fake stage Irish.
IMHO, they should have shot the entireseries and Peter Jackson's films in Elvish and Numenorian with English subtitles, lol!Replies: @A123
https://instapundit.com/540914/
The new hobbits are filthy, hungry simpletons with stage-Irish accents. — Amazon putting a three-day pause on reviews for The Rings of Power.
Racism, straight up. “The Scots get it too in The Rings of Power. Stand-ins for the dwarfs, they are portrayed as aggressive and argumentative. It gets to the point where I expect Durin, prince of Khazad-dûm, to whip out a deep-fried Mars bar. Every other ‘mad Jock’ cliche has already been ticked off.”
PEACE 😇
The new hobbits are filthy, hungry simpletons with stage-Irish accents. — Amazon putting a three-day pause on reviews for The Rings of Power.
Racism, straight up. “The Scots get it too in The Rings of Power. Stand-ins for the dwarfs, they are portrayed as aggressive and argumentative. It gets to the point where I expect Durin, prince of Khazad-dûm, to whip out a deep-fried Mars bar. Every other ‘mad Jock’ cliche has already been ticked off.”
PEACE 😇Replies: @BB753
Random harfoot: “With our hearts bigger than our feet!” Cringe!
How about this?
PEACE 😇
It’s so bad, it’s bad even as a woke version of Tolkien. I had to skip most of dialogue because it was so embarrassing. Even the action scenes are boring. Anything, a Bollywood version with an all-Indian cast and dancing /singing in Hindi and over the top action scenes would have been better than woke Lord of Prime. And ten times cheaper.
https://youtu.be/HKN6FAKjFPU
There is (was?) a website “History for Atheists” that agrees with you. The blogger is an atheist who is apparently bothered that atheists regularly make fools of themselves with their gratuitously anti-Christian views of history. He pointed out that Alexandria is located in a hot and humid river delta, just the thing for causing scrolls to rot. An army of scribes was needed just to replace the scrolls that succumbed to mold.
Bezos need to get in touch with this Bollywood creative team to make an interesting and diverse Rings of Prime trilogy:
the Iliad is about blonde southern Europeans. ??
Canting the bow is fine in traditional archery. There is no arrow rest like on a modern bow so canting helps keep the arrow in place. The biggest problem with his form is the one-finger draw. Ouch!
I believe that particular elf is Puerto Rican; not sure how they fit into the Mass Shootings schema.