Agreement with Amazon for films and television series

[HeadlessCross]

48 minutes ago, Evil Eye said:

 Turning Galadriel into a generic sword wielding girlboss when she's supposed to be serene and so unbelievably powerful she doesn't NEED a sword to smite evil

You play Warhammer 40k where the exact same thing happens: people want to run up and kill things with their sword. This is not a valid criticism. 

[The Praetorian of Inwit]

What Amazon did to LotR was despicable. 

 

Amazon having any creative control/input is bad. 

 

It is a surprise to see GW, a company for which though it has many faults does actually treat its employees well, team up with Amazon that are notorious for treating their workers poorly. 

[Evil Eye]

1 hour ago, HeadlessCross said:

You play Warhammer 40k where the exact same thing happens: people want to run up and kill things with their sword. This is not a valid criticism. 

Warhammer 40K and Lord of the Rings are nothing alike thematically. 40K is far closer to Dune than LOTR, and Tolkien was actually not a fan of Dune- not because of the quality of writing (which I seem to recall he either didn't see any problem with or thought was good) but because Dune's themes of pragmatism and ends justifying means ran completely counter to his own worldview, and the themes of his work- idealism, the triumph of good over evil and a fundamental belief in a good and just world with objective morality. Dune's heroes do things because they will bring about a good future, LOTR's heroes do things because they're the right thing to do.

 

I'm not saying either approach is better than the other but they are complete polar opposites and in no way compatible. 40K lifts quite a lot from Dune and while it has been put in a blender and made into very much its own thing it has a lot of the same thematic DNA. By contrast most of what is borrowed from Tolkien is surface level at most. The morality of the Inquisition alone- spying on Mankind, abduction of citizens and occasionally mass-murdering the population of entire planets- is justified in 40K as a pragmatism themed setting (if the Inquisition didn't do this, the Imperium would have been eaten by Tyranids or cast down by the worshippers of literal incarnations of evil long ago. From a Tolkienian perspective, with a fundamentally idealistic thematic core, the Inquisition is utterly villainous in spite of their intentions and the fact humanity has reached the point where this is even necessary means frankly humanity would be better off extinct.

[Ripper.McGuirl]

8 hours ago, The Praetorian of Inwit said:

Amazon having any creative control/input is bad. 

Sorry to break it to you, but any major streamer could at any point insist on a lot of input/control, even when they are mostly staying out of the way and letting people work. That’s just how it be. 
Best case: they just kinda stay out of the way and let people crank away and they collect money in the end off of everyone’s work. 

[ursvamp]

14 hours ago, Evil Eye said:

Warhammer 40K and Lord of the Rings are nothing alike thematically. 40K is far closer to Dune than LOTR,

I think that is what HeadlessCross’s point is, as well.

That the Rings-show was turned into something more akin to 40k than to Tolkien’s work, could be read as the studio’s inclinations being more in line with/suitable for 40k. (Rather than being read as ”they will always misread the source material, and go in the wrong direction”).

 

14 hours ago, Evil Eye said:

The morality of the Inquisition alone- spying on Mankind, abduction of citizens and occasionally mass-murdering the population of entire planets- is justified in 40K as a pragmatism themed setting

While I find your analysis of the Dune-inspiration being more thematic, and the Tolkien-inspiration being more surface, to be on point, and well expressed, I’ll have to disagree with this part.

 

The game is pretty clear in framing the Imperium’s actions as horrifying and evil.

The unwieldy beuraucracy and mass sacrifice of human lives are meant to be nightmarish and hellish. Meant to be seen as a moral failure on the Imperium’s part, not as justified pragmatism.

 

40k is not a pragmatic setting. It is an evil, horror, and nightmare setting, full of fun ways to explore such themes.

 

(All this, of course, with the caveat that it is a -setting-. And therefore will contain a multitude of different works, writers, and voices, that all have slightly different takes, views, and tones, etc., that might stray from, or align with, that in different ways.
But the core game, and how the setting is pitched, is pretty clear in the tone and premise of the setting)

Edited March 3 by ursvamp

[ZeroWolf]

Also, unless I'm mistaken, isnt it Henry's production company that's actually doing the work with Amazon's money (same set up as Invincible and The Boys) versus Rings of Power which was an in-house thing?

[Evil Eye]

3 hours ago, ursvamp said:

40k is not a pragmatic setting. It is an evil, horror, and nightmare setting, full of fun ways to explore such themes.

I think it can be both, to be fair; it's an absolutely monstrous setting, and part of the horror is that acts that would be utterly unforgivable in other settings are tragically necessary for humanity to survive. I remember one inset fluff piece in the 3E rulebook (I think?) briefly touches on how Inquisitors are haunted in their sleep by the untold millions of innocents they have consigned to death, and how they must shoulder the burden because the alternative is somehow even worse.

 

I do think that Amazon has a better chance with 40K than LOTR; the setting has more flexibility and room for exploration than Tolkien's extremely detailed and incredibly mapped out world of Middle Earth, and themes of moral relativism and an overall more unpleasant vibe work VERY well for 40K (but not at all for LOTR). That said my point was more on how Amazon butchered the source material, with Galadriel being taken from "infinitely wise, graceful embodiment of the divine feminine who does not fight because it is utterly beneath her" to "angry sword woman" just being the example I chose to illustrate the point, and my concerns with Amazon doing a similar hackjob being from the "completely ignoring the source material's basic makeup" bit rather than the specific depiction of that character.

 

Rings of Power was definitely awful though. It's telling that Peter Jackson's Hobbit trilogy (which was a complete trainwreck and an insult to the book, and apparently suffered from atrocious executive interference...) managed to do a better job as an adaptation. Coming back to Galadriel, and then I will shut up about her I promise, Jackson showed a better understanding of her nature, character and power in the scene where she banishes Sauron his Nazgul with a command than Amazon did in the entire series. And that was from a scene that wasn't even in the book!

 

Anyway. Rings of Power was a disaster for a whole raft of reasons, and in no way "just OK" or "overhated". Hopefully 40K won't be, but it still COULD be.

[ursvamp]

8 hours ago, Evil Eye said:

I think it can be both, to be fair;

/…/

I remember one inset fluff piece in the 3E rulebook (I think?) briefly touches on how Inquisitors are haunted in their sleep by the untold millions of innocents they have consigned to death, and how they must shoulder the burden because the alternative is somehow even worse.

I think that’s a pretty good example of what I was getting at with the ”settings can/will contain different stories”-part!

Someone thought it would be interesting to examine the inner mind of someone who does those things. And reflect on the horror of the world through that personal perspective. Which is a great way to add nuance to the world. As well as being necessary for cresting interesting characters to follow -in- that world!

 

But when reflecting over what a setting is, I think it’s helpful to separate what -can exist- in a setting, and what is -core- to the setting.

The vast majority of 40k-lore that I’ve come across does not deal with the tortured feelings of making such choices (and a lot of the settings dark humor comes from situations where blind duty, and rigidity of thinking overrides pragmatism and lead to absurd outcomes! :) ). Those things are interesting to explore and, as you say, add a very nice flavor to the horror of the setting.

 

But the setting isn’t sold to us as ”this is a time of hard choices, where survival challenges you to become a monster”. It is presented to us as ”to live under the bloodiest, and cruelest regime imaginable. In the grim darkness of the far future there is only war, and the laughter of thirsting gods” (often combined with the picture of a motionless corpse upon a throne, hooked up to a mass of cables and machinery.

it is about powerlessness. About being small in an uncaring world. To be trapped in the carnage of forces too large to affect, no matter how powerful you are. (All of which seem, to me at least, to also map well onto the Inquisitor-story you mention).

It is horror, both conceptually and esthetically.

 

But it is also about all of those things Looking Really Grimy and Cooool! 

personally I’m pretty curious to see what mix of all these things this upcoming show will latch on to.

Starting to actually… look forward to it? That doesn’t sound like me