Idk how to phrase this but Gay Lord of the Rings and Straight Lord of the Rings are two completely different trilogies. hilariously different. I hear straight people talk about lord of the rings and it’s like they watched the movies in a bizarre funhouse mirror alternate reality
People keep insulting the Amazon Lord of the Rings show by comparing it to fanfiction when really it’s the EXACT opposite of fanfiction! It’s so interesting/awful because it’s like the ultimate ANTI-fanfiction!
I was talking to someone the other day and wasn’t aware that lots of people don’t know about the insane complicated rights issues happening behind the scenes of the Amazon Show but it’s wild. To give a quick summary of the Battle of the Five Rights Issues, as I currently understand it:
1. Amazon only has the rights to make a show about the pre-LOTR era as described in the Lord of the Rings books– primarily in the appendices of Return the King, where a handful of pages give a brief timeline of some events that happened before the stories. In practice this means they are unable to use nearly all of the characters, places, and events people are familiar with when they think about Middle Earth. They have to make up everything out of whole cloth– from characters to events to settings. This is either because of timeline reasons or for legal reasons or for both. Whenever they do manage to scrounge up the rights to something you might even vaguely remember (like Mithril) they announce it with enormous fanfare like they’re a marvel movie introducing an avenger.
(Parenthetical: Another weird thing I noticed is that the series features practically zero quotes from Tolkien. I only counted about like 4 lines that were edited versions of lines from the books? While this is just a wild tinfoil hat theory, It does feel to me like there might’ve been some kind of limitation on the amount of Tolkien’s words they were allowed to use, as well as the obvious limitations on characters and plot points and etc. The show has the rights to so few things and always REALLY wants you to know when it has the rights to something. It’s desperate to remind you of the original books. You would think that, when it’s unable to rely on familiar characters or places or events or plot points or music or etc, they would rely instead on Tolkien’s really recognizable prose/poetry/language to form an emotional connection to the original stories. After all, language is the heart of Middle Earth, the author’s love of language is the reason the world was created, and the unique prose of the story is kinda the soul of why it’s memorable. And again, they theoretically have the rights to everything mentioned in the original trilogy right? Theoretically? So it’s really odd that they don’t use almost any of the language, unlike basically every other adaptation. It might just be a weird writing decision, but it’s so strange that it really makes me feel like they were limited or at least dissuaded from including lines from the books.)
2. Amazon is legally Not Allowed to feature things that were mentioned in the Unfinished Tales or the Silmarillion, despite the fact that those are the books that contain most of the stuff about the era they’re theoretically adapting. This leads to a bunch of really weird stuff where they introduce things you’d only care about if you read the Silmarillion, but can’t include any of the things that would actually make you care about it. Like people who Aren’t deep into the lore have literally zero emotional investment in Celebrimbor, but people who ARE deep into the lore know that you can’t reference any of the reasons they care about it.
3. Amazon’s series is NOT part of the same canon as the Peter Jackson/New Line Cinema films. They’re not. However they obviously want to trick people into thinking they are because those movies are popular and a prequel to them would make money even if it sucked (see the Hobbit films.) But again, New Line Cinema still wants to make its own LOTR content based on the slivers of rights they’ve managed to grab onto, and don’t want Amazon to step on their toes. So IIRC Amazon actually made a deal with New Line Cinema that they were allowed to imitate their movie franchise’s aesthetic (to keep the brand popular and in the public eye)…….. BUT if New Line Cinema ever felt like Amazon was infringing too much on their territory, they could step in and stop it. So the show just sorta looks and sounds like a bland knockoff of the New Line films, because that’s all they’re legally allowed to be XD. Like they’re supposed to look/sound just enough like them to trick you, but they’re not legally allowed to include the specific things from the PJ films that would actually make you feel nostalgic for them (like the famous musical leitmotifs.)
4. Part of the deal was that the Tolkien Estate could step in and change anything in the show if they felt it wasn’t true to the lore– which is ridiculous because again, Amazon basically doesn’t own the rights to any of the lore so they’re just making stuff up anyway. From what I can tell it seems like this basically means the Tolkien Estate can arbitrarily veto any creative decisions based on whatever they’ve decided “Tolkien would’ve wanted,” which obviously limits what Amazon is able to do (and likely prevents them from actually criticizing the awful problematic elements of Tolkien’s worldbuilding)
5. Ok I don’t have a fifth one.
SO BASICALLY:
Yes, the Amazon series is about a bunch of original characters in almost completely original settings featuring original events and original plot points that (for the most part) doesn’t even include any of Tolkien’s actual words, and also isn’t affiliated with and doesn’t include the recognizable things like musical motifs from the New Line Cinema films. But that doesn’t make it fanfic.
Because fanfiction is when you take another’s person’s characters and stories and write your own weird personal take on them, even if you don’t legally own it. Who legally owns the copyright is irrelevant in fanfiction. Fanfic it’s about writing a story with the characters and world you love, about transforming a story you’re passionate about even if you don’t legally own the rights.
Amazon Rings of Power is what happens when an entire show is completely written around what you legally own the rights to. Every aspect of it only exists as an elaborate tap dance around copyright infringement.
Again, I think the Amazon series is more interesting as “a study of how corporations/megafranchises can do massive harm and also weaken our ability to create good art” than it is as a tv show, alskdjfsdlf.
If fanfiction is “writing something you love regardless of whether you own the rights” then Rings of Power is “writing whatever fits within the extremely narrow box of the rights you happen to own.”
And that makes it….a very strange thing to exist! It’s kinda a shining example of how giant media monopolies and copyright laws designed to benefit them end up hamstringing everyone’s ability to create meaningful art, even the corporations themselves.
the most important lesson of goncharovposting is that many existing fandoms have “Goncharov energy”, making the product goncharovcore - such that the oral tradition of the fandom itself is more important to the fandom than the original product. the original product might as well never have existed. disco elysium is goncharovcore. deltarune is goncharovcore as of 2022 but undertale isn’t. homestuck is and always has been goncharovcore
columbo was not goncharovcore in its original iteration but is in the 2020s. king of the hill is goncharovcore. serial experiments lain is, in some circles, Goncharov
But also, literally EVERY TIME THEY’RE IN A CHURCH (not to mention the entire scene with the peaches). Scorsese wasn’t even trying to be subtle, he has Sophia reading a copy of LM in the car!
@curious-georg I DID NOT EVEN CLOCK THE CANDLESTICKS, OH MY FUCKING GOD, YOU ARE SO RIGHT.
Okay so these are important thematic parallels and all but I feel like this whole thread is sleeping on the fact that there’s a young communist in Goncharov called Giovanni Tutti who is in pretty much every respect the same character as the Les Miserables character Tutti. Like, that very much is a thing that happened. He even wears a magenta suit.
Love to be on a website where I can join such hit 2022 fandoms as “century old public domain novel being read very slowly” and “half-century old mafia film that does not actually exist.”
Manifesto of the Committee for the Sick and Useless
Those of us with disabilities form an interest group with an immense number of seemingly abled people. Everyone whose culture, beliefs, age, personality, sexuality, language, immigration status or other inclination makes them less useful to society belongs with disabled people in the fight to exist without justification.
The Committee for the Sick and Useless believe it is the innate and inalienable right of all people to:
Do Nothing
Help No One
Feel Awful
And above all else
Be Useless
In this age of increasing productivity and accomplishment, we too often sacrifice the most sacred right of all living things: to simply exist, asking much and contributing nothing. We sacrifice this right not just for ourselves as individuals but for all life on Earth present and future.
Our existence has been made conditional on the work we are expected to do, whether that work is employment, education, or caring for the home. Even plants and animals must now earn their right to exist by producing food, providing beauty, cleaning our air, warming our hearts. The ugly, unpleasant and useless are abandoned.
We, the committee, do not consider ourselves at odds with health, joy and usefulness. Rather we are united with all good and joyful people in our fight against the demand for productivity. Our enemies are those who demand that the land produce wealth, that the workers produce profit, that the sick produce medical certificates, that children grow up and the elderly make themselves scarce.
The right to exist is the foundation of all human rights and duties; it cannot be made conditional, lest all rights be made conditional. We support the right of everyone, everywhere, to live.
In this admittedly revolutionary goal, we have many allies. These include, but are not limited to: queers, cripples, drug users, the unemployed, the mentally ill, the anti-colonial, the incomprehensible, the celibate, the ugly, mutes, mystics, pessimists, mosquitoes, cats, children, teenagers, the elderly, speakers of suppressed languages, and people without a driving license.
Sorry if you already know, but it looks like you got infected with the Ray-Ban bug
UGH I’m so sorry, this is what happens when you don’t change your tumblr password for ages because “who would want to hack into my tumblr anyway”. A Salutory Tale.
