Hello everyone, welcome back to article number eighty-four! Eighty-four ladies and gentlemen I cannot believe we’re nearing the one-hundred mark. I honestly never thought I’d make it this far given the amount of work I’ve assigned myself, such as the editorial of Ep2-Rise, we’re currently sitting on Chapter 15 out of 60 and 16 is on its way, we’ve the production of Ep3’s short movie in the works, the individual pieces of music I am co-creating with Atlas Audio and an extremely talented independent artist, there is the website that constantly needs attention the list just goes on and on. At the expense of sleep and my social life, I am happy at the rate I am turning over these articles as with the other projects, it fills my day with joy to do so, like a mental exercises that leaves you refreshed and satisfied, but more importantly, I hope you too take away something positive from such essays. It might not be something you necessarily agree with or like, but I at least try (in articles such as these) to do my best to present a new angle of thought to the subject matter, finding a voice after all is part of what makes you a writer, experienced or not it’s essential, and then you use it to the best of your ability. Don’t get me wrong, I’ll be the first to admit that it’s not about the quantity of work you have, it is more about its quality. There are some posts on this blog for example that aren’t written with as much skill as the others, some have not aged gracefully and in some cases, a few could use an update, but I think I am on the right track especially with the last few. Speaking of which, something pleasant to note, a couple of months ago I broke through the five-thousand viewership mark, it’s a relatively small milestone to shatter but it’s a milestone nonetheless, one that is deserving of some recognition. I’m proud of clearing this hurdle, it’s given me a little more incentive to keep going, to keep writing, a reminder that hard work really does pay off and it’s okay to feel good about it from time to time. My last post particularly I thoroughly enjoyed writing, it was a review on the 1997 science-fiction horror film, Event Horizon, one of the scariest Lovecraftian movies I’ve ever watched directed by Paul W.S Anderson. If you’ve seen it, I’d like to tell you that the ending is not as bleak as it might seem, I wrote a whole segment on why I think this, so if you’re curious to find out more, please check it out and read a step-by-step breakdown of the film from beginning to end. The article is easily found on this site, all you need to do is keep scrolling down until you find it. I’ll leave a link for your convenience or you could visit my new Official Website where you can gain free access to all of my work thus far; You can read more of my articles, watch some low-key videos from trailers to small-production documentaries, there is some inspiring music to listen to written and performed by various musicians, interviews conducted by radio presenters and former students of psychology; There’s a gallery you can flick through loaded with plenty of cool artwork, recent updates on my film project which I intend to shoot around this time next year and soon I hope to stock and sell some of my own merchandise, things like mugs and t-shirts. So please, check it out if you’ve the time, it will be very much appreciated, I could use your support. I would love to talk further about what is in the pipeline, I would much prefer (and I say this with complete transparency) to talk to you about some of my most recent gaming experiences with some hidden gems like Phantom Dust and Vagrant Story. I finished some mainstream titles for the second time, Resident Evil 8 and Resident Evil 7 which I’d love to break down. I’d like to review and recommend some indie films I’ve been absorbing lately in fact I’ve just come away from one called The Woods. I’d like to dive deeper into the Oddworld series, I finished Abe’s Exodus and Munch’s Odyssey (again) yesterday in preparation for when I play Soulstorm, so much cool stuff to talk about but today is not that day unfortunately, today I feel like I have to cover something that’s rather important, something that has come to my attention which has been growing and growing over the years to the point to where it cannot be ignored any further, as if someone is blowing up a balloon in your vicinity until it gets so large, so enormous that you have to deal with it, that you have to put a pin to it and move on, and that balloon is called The Rings of Power (RoP). The production is being led by Patrick Mckay and John D. Payne, Amazons new TV show based loosely on a sliver of the Lord of the Rings mythos written by John Ronald Reuel Tolkien, one of the greatest fantasy writers that ever lived, a huge inspiration of mine and to a lot of others especially those who write epic fantasy, something that I am enthralled with and have been for almost two decades and counting. My love for this genre is not waning, I’ve always had a love for mythical worlds, grand adventures, and otherworldly experiences. While embarking on my own writing journey similar to the Professor himself, you cannot help but relate to him, when you listen to some of his old interviews or read some of his letters to his fans and critics, you cannot help but empathise with the pleasure this work gave him, you can hear it in his voice when he talks about it, you can read it in his words as he writes about it, you can also sense the frustration he felt when things didn’t quite work the way he wanted it to, a sense of feeling you can get on board with when you’re a writer too. You feel somewhat closer in some small way when you’re engaged in the same faucet of work, when you share in a vision and will do anything and everything to liberate it from the cage in your mind, it’s both a blessing and a curse. Am I saying you need to be a fellow writer to appreciate Tolkien and his works, no, of course not, many people in fact appreciate him, those who come from all walks of life, but for me, when it comes to my own path, when I look at the road that stretches on behind me and think back to where it all started, I realise that if Final Fantasy VII and Legacy of Kain, a pair of the greatest stories ever told were the parents of my own work, then the Lord of the Rings is undoubtably its Grandfather. One of my most treasured articles is called, The Irreplaceable: Final Fantasy VII and is one I recommend you check out, just to learn what impact it has had on my journey as an aspiring author, and what it left me with going into adulthood. It’s found on this blog and too can be located on the website, translating my adoration for this story and those who made it happen. Not only is it a one-of-a-kind, industry defining game, but it tells a powerful, unforgettable story, one that I was never able to let go of and to this day its message and themes still resonate. It’s important for you to understand this before we move forward, I adore what the creators of Final Fantasy VII did, it lit a spark inside me that never went out, it inspired me and regardless of how many playthroughs it still hits an emotional beat as does Legacy of Kain. Alright, enough backtracking, here we go, it’s time to tackle my latest article and one of the most important I’ve ever written because it strikes so close to home, I’ve called it The Last Bastion, and you’ll soon learn why this is in the pages hence. Know that I flicked through several other title ideas such as; Stand Men of the West, or it could have been called, I’m sorry Tolkien, and for good reason because there is more than enough evidence to suggest that this will be nothing more than a bastardisation of an inspiring legacy. This essay has taken a long time to write due to the mountains of material surrounding this topic, it will be impossible to cover absolutely everything. I am writing in defence of J.R.R. Tolkien while in direct opposition to Amazons new TV show The Rings of Power, it is of my firm belief that this is NOT what Tolkien would have wanted and why I am both ashamed and appalled at what I’ve seen so far, everything from the generic trailers, the ghoulish marketing campaign, and the degenerate behaviour of the showrunners on social media, this all needs to be called out because it has become an affliction of our culture, a sickness that needs healing, and what better way to do that than effective argumentation. Bear in mind that the amount of information in circulation around this hot topic is enormous as previously mentioned, so for a one-man operation it was unrealistic to cover it all, but I did my best however, to focus on those key pressure points which not only strengthen my argument, but I’ve heard no reasonable counter to – other than mindless slurs and vapid abuse, or at least no worthy argument against the points I am about to make, so to my mind they still stand as a solid defence for Lord of the Rings and J.R.R. Tolkien’s best interests. With all that said, I hope you’ve parked yourself comfortably because you’re in for a long one, if you’ve not something to drink and snack on nearby I’d recommend you fetch something now because I’m about to dive into something I wish I didn’t have to, it honestly pains me to do this, it truly does but I am passionate about fantasy, passionate about the art of storytelling and have grown sick and tired of what woke Hollywood and all its elite are doing not only to our beloved franchises (former bastions) but our culture as a whole and I really do mean that, everything we are seeing, everything from our advertisements, our entertainment, music, sports whatever, everything is being corrupted by this Godless ideology and if it has not reached the thing YOU love, then just wait, it will get there. I’ve even met some women who cannot attend their Knitting gatherings because they’re not inclusive enough, the space having become labelled as toxic, and that’s a fact. The bastardisation, the disrespect has to stop and as a lover of fantasy this is my contribution in the fight because I cannot stand by and just let this happen, I cannot make a difference but if millions act and feel the same then we can make a dent. I hope you find meaning within this essay and should you wish to respond to me whether it be with information I missed or something I might need to know, that you do so with honesty and integrity which is more than I can say for the activists (pardon me) the showrunners themselves who should feel deeply ashamed at not only at how they’ve handled this beloved property but how they’ve responded to people such as myself with ist’s, phobes and ism’s cemented in their botched replies in an attempt to shut down argumentation, arguments that I feel like they know are more powerful than they are, ironically the number of people who are speaking out against RoP is more diverse than the show itself and that’s a fact; I hate using their own language to defend myself but if I can use the weapon they have made to destroy me then that only goes to show that their arguments are weak. People like myself, who are coming out in full force against Amazon are simply those who want to see Tolkien’s work preserved and respected, to see a faithful adaptation instead of a rotten skin suit. So, before I begin picking a part what I’ve seen so far from this show and the marketing around it, let’s get the obvious out of the way first and talk about the things that I do find positive, sadly this will be the shortest section of the article, but in order to do this fairly you must give credit where credit is due, and there is some to be found. Also just so you know I am not attacking the people behind this who have worked hard behind the scenes, I’m sure there are many talented, passionate and dedicated people at work who are excited about this (I know I would be had I worked on it) but my crosshairs are not aimed at you, in fact I like you, and if you’re reading this, I know that you’re very intelligent and I’d prefer it if you’d stay and read this to the end. My problem is with the showrunners, the writers, the activists pulling the strings doing their best to manipulate the masses with a show that they know is corrupt at the core, but they are selling it anyway as something that is Tolkien, and that is not simply the case. I will get around to covering how I know this, believe me I have been doing my research (which I’ll do my best to share with you via the links below) hence the lateness of the release of this article but as I said, before I do, I have seen some positives, there looks to be some good in here, I am anxious to get started, this is a subject very dear to me, I’ve read the Lord of the Rings books twice, once when I was about nineteen, and again in my mid-twenties and I thoroughly enjoyed them given in parts they were hard to read. I’ve watched the extended cuts of films countless times and the appendices which you could argue inspired me to get into filmmaking. I’ve read the Hobbit twice, once in school and once again when I was on the road, picking it up at a train station between changes and not being able to put it down, as a writer I can only dream to be this good. I’ve not read all of the Silmarillion or The Children of Hurin, honestly I find these books a little difficult to read, coming across as a historical textbook rather than a story, but if you know anything about Tolkien, anything at all, you’ll know that his goal was to write a mythology, and the story was simply written to give people a hook, a way into his mythos, doing what all of us fantasy writers do just off the cuff, what a genius and I say that with the highest form of respect and utter sincerity, but I’ve finished a fair few chapters, grazed through The Unfinished Tales and I do plan on returning to these masterpieces of literary fantasy at some point in my life. As a gamer I’ve played most of the games, I’ve not finished the most recent one which is called Middle-Earth: Shadow of War, a sequel to Middle-Earth: Shadow of Mordor, because I simply have no more time to embark on another massive epic adventure, but over the course of ten, maybe fifteen years I have sunk many hours into each game I’ve come across because I do love Middle-Earth. Sure, some of these games aren’t great and some mess with the lore more than I’m comfortable with, I’m looking at you Shadow of War, I’m looking at you, but the games at least made efforts to try and make it fit into the story in a believable way, for example we have Eltariel, the blade of Galadriel who I thought was awesome, and Baranor of Heradrim heritage, a Sergeant of Gondor’s army, commanding one of the last doomed strongholds in Mordor called Minas Ithil, and it worked. The lengths the games go to, to make their adaptations weave into Middle-Earth is somewhat impressive and is far more than what Amazon is doing or at least from what I’ve seen, but it’s pretty obvious at this point as to what they’re doing, they don’t even own the rights to The Silmarillion or The Lord of the Rings (or at least I do not think), equating to about a hundred or so pages a mish-mash of the appendices scattered throughout Tolkien’s work, that’s all they own, and worse yet they are trying to compress a thousand’ish years of history, history of the Second Age into a single lifetime and that’s a very, very bad move considering it took Sauron generations to fool the Kings of men (and other hierarchs of the other races) into accepting the rings of power, but Amazon wants to tell this story over the course of not even a human lifetime, fucking keck!…Oh we’ll get there, we will get there…Seeing as we’re on the topic of gaming (apologies for going on a tangent) my favourite game when it comes to Tolkien’s universe is The Battle for Middle Earth for the PC, I really enjoyed this strategy game back in the day, I sunk many hours into it and got involved in some grand battles which were indeed a struggle to win, especially when you’re heavily outnumbered, but the intensity, the way how the screen quickly fills up with hundreds if not thousands of orcs and soldiers is beautifully done, you really feel a sense of dread when the Trolls and Oliphaunts show up and you have to make the choice to engage or flee, mimicking that which you see in the films, it’s exhilarating, or if you’re cornered in a stronghold, figuring out how to survive until help arrives. A few years ago, I visited a museum in Oxfordshire which displayed all of Tolkien’s work, his legacy compiled into one room, and I flicked through some of his personal notebooks and sampled lots of his drawings, on napkins, old newspapers and among his drafts – this world was on his mind all of the time and it shows, a testament to his ultimate passion, something writers like myself look up to. When I was a teenager, I even collected and painted the Lord of the Rings miniatures provided by Games Workshop and I had a lot of fun when doing so, I still have all the magazines that came with the models, they are literally in arms reach of me right now as is the best miniature I ever painted, one of Haldir, sadly most of the other models I amassed are lost due to all the moves I’ve made in the last ten years, life has a way of distributing your possessions but there is nothing stopping me from getting back into it, which I do hope to do when I have the chance. I’d love to assemble my own army of Gondorians, there is something about the silver armour which I’ve a soft spot for, but priorities are priorities, I’ve my own epic fantasy to create and little resources in which to do it, so maybe when I am retired, when all is said and done, I will sit down and enjoy a quiet, peaceful life by the sea, painting, reading, and watching old movies, my own TAO (The Ancestral Odyssey) legacy intact inside a glass bookcase. Now that you know my history with Tolkien and my fascination with all that he created, you can assess my knowledge level on the subject, I am not a scholar, I am by no means an expert on the subject or a Tolkien purist but I feel like I know a fair amount, qualified to some degree to critique what I am seeing being presented, probably a little more than your average Tolkien fan these days, who has probably played all the games, skimmed through the books and watched the films, and if you are one of these people, I am not attacking you, you don’t need to read the books or absorb all the material to be a fan, so long as you understand that Middle-Earth, Tolkien has a particular weight and feel, an atmosphere fleshed out across his works which is pivotal to hammer home and get right when adapting his work onto screen, this is not just a generic fantasy, this is one of if not THE purest forms of fantasy even put to page. So, with all that out the way let’s begin my critique on what I’ve seen so far, and why it is I feel like Amazon and its activists (oh sorry), showrunners have not only dropped the ball but burst it and set it on fire. Enjoy.
So, first things first, what have I seen so far? Well, the show isn’t out yet, the first season airs on Amazon Prime on the 2nd of September, on the day of the Professors death…Wow, I’m just over a sentence in and already I’m disgusted; Why the day he died? Why not release this on the day he was born, the day he published or completed Lord of the Rings, why the day he passed, why even make the release date a thing to begin with? How disrespectful can you possibly be!? If it were up to me, if you want to know, I’d release this on October 24th…Those who understand, will understand this reference…So, right out of the gate I am upset, and we have just started my supposedly ‘praise’ section. God help me! Anyway, I’ve seen all the trailers, I’ve seen lots of stills online, in magazines such as Empire, I’ve read many articles and seen live interviews from cast and crew. I’ve seen some clips of certain scenes, even seen some behind the scenes footage, a making of featurette where you see Galadriel leaping up to a Cave Troll and stabbing it in the throat, killing it instantly as I audibly state “What the fuck!”… Alright, honestly things aren’t going very well, when you compile all of this together, I am alarmed, by some of the comments made in such interviews, unsettled by the attitude of certain cast members voicing their approach to this show, the way in which Amazon has gone about advertising this work is concerning to me from the Executives and Producers to the social media outlets such as the One Ring.net on Twitter, alarm bells are ringing, drowning out what praise in which there IS to be had, and from what I’ve seen, for the most part, the way in which this is being shot, the sound, the special effects, the music – I hear Howard Shore is back composing which is great, we’re almost guaranteed epic music that marries well with the world, this is a huge plus, even if the show itself is bad at least we’ll be getting some tracks to listen to outside of this when all this is finished. If you know anything about me, who I am and how I operate, you’ll know that music is a key ingredient to my immersion, without music I could not do what I do, and that is just a fact, so yes, Howard Shore on board is a good call. Inside some of the trailers there is some dynamic imagery, I recognise some locations described to me in the book, things like the island of Numenor or Numenore if you’re going to get all geeky with me, it’s also known in the common tongue as Westernesse. The sets look fantastic, some of the snaps that stretch across both pages of the magazine or over your computer screen are full of tiny details, details I certainly applaud because it is within those details that tell stories of their own, it’s the essence of not only Tolkien but fantasy world-building as a whole, it is crucial to pulling your audience in and granted, the Rings of Power show definitely looks like care and thought has been applied, not in all cases mind-you and we’ll get to that, but if I could present such imagery, and build such sets I’d be extremely proud, so if you were part of set construction and decoration, you’ve done a fantastic job. I think the casting of Galadriel, contrary to popular belief, will be played by Morfydd Clark, a part Welsh part Swedish actress, I think she is a great choice, despite her recent ill-advised political outbursts on social media, she certainly looks good in some shots, I can believe her as an ever so slightly younger Galadriel, there is a particular shot out there of her submerged in water, it looks as if she is coming out of the sea or perhaps a pond, and Morfydd holds the eyes the piercing look of Galadriel can give wonderfully well, and I know this is against popular opinion but hey, I call it as I see it and if I am in the minority I just do not care. Some of the costumes look very well-made, I need to be careful with what I say here because some look very standard borderline bad for that matter, and for a show with a billion-dollar budget behind it for the first two seasons you have no excuse not to nail this. Particularly I like the Silvan Elf outfit. Silvan Elves are descendants of the Nandor or the Nando, described as those that turn back or away from the Great Journey – The Great Journey or Great March was an endeavour that Eldar Elves undertook from Cuivienen, which is a place of their wake, to Valinor also known as The Realm of the Valar, and the Valar are the Powers of Arda, they are those that made and shaped the world of Middle-Earth as we know it, so from my understanding, this journey was the walk to heaven. The Nandor were part of one group called the Teleri, a third of the ancient Elf Clans. Under the Teleri also known as the Falmari, were the Laiquendi, the Sindar and our Nandor consisting of Silvan Elves and Green-Elves. They are very distinct in nature; they love water often live close to wide waterfalls and gushing streams. They’re forest dwellers essentially that possess great knowledge of plants, trees and have a kinship with animals specifically birds, more so than the other branches of Elves for which there are many, too many for me to name because Tolkien’s mythology is fucking massive, and if I’ve misinterpreted my knowledge on the subject matter thus far I do apologise and will happily be corrected if needs be, I recognise there are sections of mythology I have not brought up, this is both on purpose but honestly this is the magical and frustrating thing about Tolkien, there is always something more, whatever you are talking about, whatever facet about him you are studying or trying to describe, it’s linked to another branch of this magnificent tree, but understand that this is what I’ve come to know of the Silvan Elf having read portions of the books and talked about it among friends, a being that’s an adept creature of living and surviving in nature, mainly near water but almost always in the depths of the forest, typically Mirkwood. What I have seen of the Silvan Elf in Amazons new Rings of Power, I cannot say I agree with, I do not agree with the casting choice for this character, a character they have not taken from Tolkien’s world but instead made him up to portray the Silvan Elf, and I’ll be sure to touch on this later but I think there are many in story, valid reasons as to why I think the casting is misguided, but the outfit itself in isolation looks beautiful, like a white silver wrap of a cloak cut in the shapes of bark and leaves to form an Eldred face on the chest, it’s nothing but gracious and I cannot see anyone or anything other than an Elf wearing this livery, the show did a good job here. It wasn’t long ago when Amazon released some snaps of the Orcs, and I like the look of them, I’ve seen people online pick apart every detail, people I do tend to agree with more often than not, but I think this is being petty, the Orcs looks great, they’re exactly what I’d come to expect in Middle-Earth so I’ve no real complaints here, say one; I’ve questions about female Orcs, I’m not saying they don’t exist, I am just unsure about them entirely, so to see them on the front lines is questionable. If you’re breeding an army of viscous, merciless barbarians, you’d want the biggest, strongest, and fastest, equipped with the most ruthless of natures and mindsets, and I hate to say this, but it is in males you typically find these traits. A smart General wouldn’t compromise his army or risk the lives of his fellow soldiers if he could avoid it, and last time I checked, Morgoth, Sauron and Saruman were extremely intelligent beings. For another example, found in the film 300, the Greek King Leonidas asks the Hunchback to raise his shield as high as he can, and he can barely lift it over his head, Leonidas explains that in order for his force to work, each man needs to reach a standard, a Spartans power is best utilised when partnered with the men at his side, a single weak spot in the phalanx and their strength breaks, so the Hunchback cannot be part of the force. This is not an attack on women, nor am I comparing them to Hunchbacks not at all, that’s just wrong, some women are extremely competent in these fields, some even better than men, but on average males dominate the physical space and this bleeds into fantasy genres as well, it adds to the realism and believability of the piece. I incorporate this notion into my own work. The armies are made up of men, the brute physicality mainly led by men with the exception of a small pocket of adept women, while the spiritual, magical sides are female dominated. Let’s look at Warhammer 40k for another example, at the Space Marines in particular; They breed their soldiers to be the absolute best, they’re huge men who care for nothing but destroying their enemies in the most ruthless fashion, they’re huge, they’re fast, they’re essentially walking bio-mechanical tanks armed with heavy weapons made to protect Humanity and nothing else, that’s their purpose, and there are no females in their ranks because it is males who meet these monstrous standards. I know someone will point out that the Sisters of Battle were a thing in the Warhammer 40k universe, but they really weren’t, they didn’t sell, fans of Warhammer saw through this and rejected this class for the very reason that it broke immersion and compromised the lore, and before anyone is ready to call me a sexist (not that that means anything anymore given people have cried wolf way too many times) know that my favourite race in Warhammer 40k are The Eldar, led by the Farseer’s, a powerful matriarchy. Women exist in the Eldar army, and they are fucking elegantly lethal. In Warcraft 3: Reign of Chaos I love playing as the Night Elves who too employ an array of female warriors mainly archers, rangers riding on the backs of panthers, and the Druids, and I absolutely love playing as them, they’re the hardest race to play as because you cannot rely on brute strength like the other factions to win, you actually have to strategize and use your wits to outsmart and outflank your opponents, when you do this correctly under the cover of night, your opponent does not stand a chance and it makes for a far more thrilling experience than just building hundreds of warriors and storming the gates of your enemies base. When I play the Resident Evil games, my favourite character has and always will be Jill Valentine. Tifa Lockheart IS one of my all-time favourites, I outlined this in my essay on Final Fantasy VII, you cannot get Cloud Strife without Tifa, she is so important and in my top three of all-time favourite characters. I too adore the Dino Crisis games playing as the beautiful red-head Regina. From the Matrix trilogy I loved Trinity played by Carrie-Anne Moss. One of my favourite film franchises is Alien, and that has mostly to do with Sigourney Weaver’s performance as Ellen Ripley, furthermore, to do with Alien, Alien: Isolation stars Amanda Ripley, the daughter of Ellen, and I cannot get enough out of this game, I’ve played it and completed it half a dozen times and Amanda is great. As a kid I played a lot of Street Fighter and it was Chun-Li who I gravitated toward most often, her and Dhalsim, the Indian chap with stretchy limbs and fire breathing capability. In my own work (and works to come) The Ancestral Odyssey you follow a Star Caller, a woman named Isabelle Verano, and in later instalments you’ll go on a journey where females take centre stage featuring in some of the best story threads I’ve in store for the entire series, this was not done so to score political girl boss points, no, it was done because it was natural to the story, a story I’ve been working on for almost twenty-years. I could list off a bunch more examples, but I feel like I’ve digressed enough, back to Middle-Earth – I really cannot remember ever reading about female Orcs in the books, they were not portrayed in Peter Jacksons Lord of the Rings and he did his absolute best to follow the vision of Tolkien, so I cannot help but think this is Amazon pushing for equal representation, which I find amusing, I’m sure women will love the idea that they can see themselves in the Orc factions, portrayed as ghastly, cruel, sinister assholes who skin and eat their own and torture those they capture in glee, yeah great work Amazon, and on that note, my praise has come to an end, the show looks (for the most part) and sounds good, better than average I’d say but now…Now it is time to break this a part and what better place to start than at the trailers. Forgive me if the next segment is hard to follow, I will be leaping through all of the trailers one by one from memory, if I had the ability to plant visuals I would, but alas I’m not a vlogger, I am a blogger and I hope you stay with me because there is so much to say.
As I’ve already mentioned, I’ve seen all of the trailers thus far, and again I cannot deny the way in which this show is being shot looks impressive, I’ve no doubt in my mind that there is talent and passion being poured into this project, those who love and are inspired by Tolkien and his world. Going off the trailers however the most recent one more specifically, I noted that the music was out of place, in isolation it’s…Okay, I think…But it does not belong in this world, not in Middle-Earth, and according to the lore, Galadriel is NOT on a quest to avenge her brother, her brother who I think might be Finrod Felagund if I had to make an educated guess, because he was a valiant warrior, a bit of an architect too, the youngest of four children, Angrod, Aegnor and of course his sister Galadriel. Finrod (assuming it is he) does not mirror his many depictions found from every piece of source material I could find, every depiction of him and his brothers does not match the show, which left me hanging my head in frustration. I quote Galadriel directly from the trailer:-
“My brother gave his life hunting the enemy, his task is now mine.”
None of this happened, none of it as far as I am concerned, it’s just not written by Tolkien, not in the books or anywhere. I even asked a friend of mine who knows way more about this stuff than I do, just so I could be sure I wasn’t mistaken, and he confirmed it, but Amazon have just made this up out of thin air, creating a false arc for our protagonist Galadriel, building her story on a fake premise. Oh, and before I forget, the lyrics found in the music, the first line is “Speak your truth” this indeed raises an eyebrow, it hits close to home in fact because I too have used this line in my up and coming book, Rise of The Black Doves, however there is a legitimate reason why certain characters use this line, reasons I will not get into here for the sakes of spoilers, but I can attest that this phrase is called out in the later chapters, called out for being false; There is no such thing as YOUR truth, there is just THE truth, so to hear this being sung is just off-putting, had the trailers been grand, had this show been looking competent and in line for the most part with the books, then I would happily waver this, but when you compile all that is wrong here, it just adds to the mound of bullshit and it’s hard to stomach at this point. We’re not off to a great start but my scouring of the trailers has only just started. I am pretty sure though I saw The Kingdom of Lindon, the Land of the Singers, an elvish realm west of the Blue Mountains, it’s best known for its harbours and grand ships that would sail unto the West, it looked beautiful, and we did see some ships sailing far out at sea, granted they looked in keeping with elvish design. I am almost positive I saw Khazad-Dum, also known as Dwarrowdelf, but for those of you only familiar with the Peter Jackson films, this is the Mines of Moria and it would be a lie if I were to say I wasn’t a little intrigued as to what Amazon does with this property, the bits that do resemble Middle-Earth is the hook and so it should be. Inside Moria for a moment, I believe I saw King Durin the third, we also see in the next few shots the Sundering Sea’s and are teased with some of the great creatures that lurk beneath its glassy depths. I’ve no idea what sea creature this is, but because I am a sucker for massive aquatic life, I will admit this scene looks in keeping with classic fantasy. It is such as shame as I write this, if only the showrunners stayed true to the source material they’d have succeeded in every possible way, but alas they chose otherwise catering not to Tolkien purist nor those who like the films, and it’s led us down a different path, one that they should have steered clear of at all costs. Moving onto something everyone is talking about and that is the five-pointed island of Numenor, a kingdom of Men known as the Numenoreans, raised by the Valar after the ruin of Beleriand during the War of Wrath. Correct me if I am wrong but I think that the Dunedain, Aragorn’s people originated here too, but I cannot be sure, for you Tolkien experts I apologise if my understanding is false, I will happily be taken to task if I’ve made any mistakes, but I think this is the case, linking it to when Aragorn is talking to Eowyn while travelling the Helms Deep, about the kingdom being destroyed long ago. In the trailer, cross-referencing with what I saw with certain artworks, I saw Pharazon, who becomes Ar-Pharazon the Golden, Ar, means King, and he is the last King of Numenor for he is the one who sacrifices humans under direction of Sauron to Melkor, Melkor is of course Morgoth, the Dark Lord that existed before Sauron as we come to know him. I also seem to recall, seeing Ar-Pharazon in an EW (Entertainment Weekly) article, pictured standing next to what looks like Elendil, Isildur, and the Queen Regent Muriel. I find this most strange but at this point it’s not exactly surprising given Amazon’s backward approach to the material, attempting to squeeze a thousand years into a telling the equivalent of a fraction of a human life, and I quote the showrunners again from Entertainment Weekly:-
“We were not interested in doing a show about the younger version of the same world you knew, where it’s a little bit of a prequel,” Mckay explains “We wanted to go way, way, way back and find a story that could exist on its own two feet. This was one that we felt hadn’t been told on the level and the scale and with the depth that we felt it deserved.”
My response to this is but you ARE doing a younger version of the same world we know, this IS the Second Age of Middle-Earth, it’s already been established and you’re actively lifting some characters from the source material and in the same breath, by Tolkien’s lore, none of these characters (Elendil, Isildur and Muriel, who looks nothing like what she is supposed to look like as described, suffering the same disrespect as Finrod), should be interacting with Galadriel because she NEVER goes to Numenor and furthermore none of them should even be alive considering the fact that they were born some centuries AFTER the forging of the great rings of power, none of this makes sense unless you drastically twisted what Tolkien wrote! We’ll get to that but first, on with the trailer analysis and now I must talk about Elrond, who as with Muriel looks nothing like how he is supposed to look like, which is off-putting to say the least, but beyond that I read that he is an architect in Amazon’s show when in the books, he is described as a fierce warrior who fought Sauron thusly throughout the Second Age over and over, leading up to the War of the Last Alliance of Men and Elves where he witnessed Isildur, cut the ring from Sauron’s hand, more or less vanquishing him with one swing of his sword, only to then see Isildur refuse to cast the one ring into the fires of Mount Doom, setting in motion the events of the Third Age of Middle-Earth. It seems like the character of Galadriel and Elrond have been flipped, I do not recognise this Elrond, he doesn’t carry the same gravitas as the one I/we are all used to. Galadriel was never a warrior badass, her character having gone from a wise ethereal, someone who is almost a ghost like spirit transformed into a brute, going from a character who can break a man as strong as Boromir with but a look, to someone/something she is not. Amazon have besmirched Galadriel, taking away her power and reducing her to a generic soldier when in fact she transcended that! Similarly, if we flick to the Star Wars universe, Yoda was ruined in the prequels the moment he drew a lightsabre, Yoda was above this, as is Galadriel over the sword, her power resonating elsewhere. It’s not just me who feels this way, this whole show so far does not feel like Tolkien’s works, there are many reasons for this such as the general aesthetic, the tone, the total disregard of the lore but reflects most through the pronunciations of certain names, Galadriel for example is said differently each time I hear it, and pieces of dialogue, such as this exist:-
“You have not seen what I have seen”
“I have seen my share”
“You’ve not seen, what I have seen!”
Or let’s examine this famous line by one of the Harfoots that were not present at ALL in the Second Age but have been inserted as an attempt to make this show more like Lord of the Rings. Well, there should be no need for this had you followed the books in the first place, Tolkien isn’t tethered to one faction but many, carrying with it a certain weight and feel which has been totally botched:-
“One thing we can do better than any creature in Middle-Earth, we stay true to each other, with our hearts even bigger than our feet.”
Tell me you can spot it? I am positive I am not the only one, this is just embarrassing, some of these lines I suspect have been written FOR the trailer, its trailer speak simply put, made for marketing purposes, the whole trailer as matter of fact comes across as something artificial, reeking of inauthenticity. Maybe in another fantasy story some of these lines might be acceptable but this is not Tolkien, this comes across as a comedy sketch in comparison to how he wrote, it does not read nor sound like him, it belongs somewhere else and that is the crux of a lot of my argumentation. If you’re not going to follow the lore or respect what Tolkien created, then why make a show based on the Second Age of Middle-Earth in the first place? If someone else had written this story, my intrigue I suspect would be compelled to know more, the visuals alone are good enough to get you somewhat invested, but this is not just another fantasy story, this is Lord of the Rings and so far, I’ve seen very little of what resembles the books and what Peter Jackson brought to life on screen, this is not to the best of my knowledge, not what Tolkien would have wanted and to assist the backing of my statement, I found this quote from a press release from The Fall of Numenor:-
“J.R.R. Tolkien famously described the Second Age of Middle-Earth as a ‘dark age and not very much of its history is (or need be) told’.”
I find all of this thus far both fascinating and unsettling, fascinating how you can come so far knowing what you’re doing, how you can sail so blindly into this thing without knowing the fundamentals. Amazon are making their own show, this is nothing but fanfiction, we’ve more than enough evidence to suggest this, not only are they screwing with the timeline but they’re pasting in characters real or otherwise to fit whatever script/story they’re trying to tell, ripping locations off here and there from Tolkien’s world without even studying the source material, and it only gets worse the more we dig.
“The showrunners note that Tolkien never wanted his stories to directly echo real-world politics, and they feel the very same way about The Rings of Power. Still, Payne points out, there’s something deeply relatable – and timely – about the anxieties and political divisiveness wracking this fictional island, of Numenor.” – Entertainment Weekly
This is deeply worrying to me and for a lot of people invested in Lord of the Rings. In fact I remember the moment I heard that this was announced back in 2020, immediately I was struck with alarm, having heard and seen what happened to the Wheel of Time written by Robert Jordan, later finished by Brandon Sanderson, the way Amazon handled that property, I did take a step back and had to assure myself that there was no possible way that those in charge of leading the direction of the show would do this, that they would take care of the source material, this is J.R.R. Tolkien after all and it’s protected by a society of highly educated cultured people, but now we are seeing it for what it truly is, a beloved work being contorted and twisted to fit a specific narrative and they try to use Tolkien’s words against him in instances such as this:-
“For fans worried about conflicting canon, Mckay and Payne point to one of Tolkien’s published letters, where he wrote about wanting ‘other minds and hands’ to create art in his legendarium.” – Entertainment Weekly
To this I say it’s just not true, it is a hypothetical at best, I found the letter the showrunners were referring to buried in the Tolkien Gateway, the original I could not find unfortunately but I suggest you read what is written in the forum, be warned however, there is plenty to lose yourself in, but these are the lengths in which the producers will go to, as a ways to do what they want and again this is deeply misguided, insincere and dangerous, dangerous for any TV show especially so for one with a billion dollars behind it gearing up for five seasons, but this aside, this IS Amazon’s justification to make drastic changes, while forgetting about another letter found from Bounding into Comics, quoting Tolkien himself that reads:-
“The canons of narrative an in any medium cannot be wholly different; And the failure of poor films is often precisely in exaggeration, and in the intrusion of unwarranted matter owing to not perceiving where the core of the original lies.” – J.R.R. Tolkien.
As for the changes, just to drive this point home in defence of the characters, from the same article by Bounding into Comics it reads:-
“I do earnestly hope that in the assignment of actual speeches to the characters they will be represented as I have presented them: in style and sentiment. I should resent perversion of the characters (and do resent it, so far as it appears in this sketch) even more than the spoiling of the plot and scenery.” J.R.R. Tolkien.
Both Tolkien and Christopher Tolkien, would not have approved this show, to argue otherwise is foolish and ignorant of the evidence present, which is everywhere, believe it or not I have only delicately touched the surface of what’s out there, picking on said sources is low hanging fruit but more than enough in defence of Tolkien. There are other things in the trailers worth noting, Hobbits for example (or as the showrunners call them, Harfoots because they by law cannot use the word Hobbit) were not present at all throughout the Second Age, I’m sure pockets of them existed but when it comes to Tolkien there is no story connected to them, not even a mention as far as I am aware but in Rings of Power we are going to be introduced to a new branch of characters that did not exist, one that I quote by Lenny Henry who plays the leader “Travels with the fertility of the crops” Shut up Lenny Henry, you’ve never been on a farm in your life have you? Farms do not move, idiot! Tolkien does not need your help with characters, there are enough to play with! Furthermore, Galadriel did not slay Orcs and Cave Trolls, she did not wear silver armour as wicked as it looks, I’ve a thing for elegant silver armour but she never wore it, instead her character transcended it, and the sword. She would never play word games with Elrond who WAS present in The War of Wrath and she wasn’t, nor did she visit Numenor, from memory I do not even think she even rode a horse yet in the trailer we see her riding to war competently on the back of one, alongside men struggling to catch up (but of course because she need no man) wearing what looks like armour shaped for..Moobs..For those of you lucky enough not to know this word I apologise, moobs is a silly word created to describe manboobs, and yes, I feel dumb just for writing it and more so for having to explain myself, but there they are, in the trailer, in my face, armour fashioned in such a way it springs nothing but laughter, the same laughter I found when watching Batman and Robin, anyone remember the bat nipples holy fucking shit! Laughter turns to annoyance especially when I see swords being pushed into the earth to steady them, this I understand is a nit-pick, but I am trying to cover as much ground as possible, but if you’re a warrior of any sort worth their salt, or in Galadriel’s case a warrior with a broken sword “Full of piss and vinegar” yes that’s an actual quote by Patrick Mckay from a Vanity Fair article I had the displeasure of reading when I should have been playing Resident Evil 7, what a great way to describe fucking Galadriel, but as a soldier of old you do not stick your sword into the ground, ever! In Kingdom of Heaven this was done gently as a statement and gets a pass because it was used as a symbolic gesture among enemies, enemies of Christian and Muslim who eventually became friends, it’s a nice touch but outside of this Hollywood always gets this wrong, I see it time and time again, what the hell are people thinking and why has this become a thing!? The only reason one would put a sword in the earth is to outline a warriors grave, symbolising that they were one with their sword, and when the man rests, the sword rests never to be wielded again, but here it is, the sword in the earth alive and well in 2022, and don’t hit me with the ‘it’s just fantasy’ argument, fantasy has rules to abide by too, and the more you adhere to these rules, basic physics being one of them including the cost of magic, the better your story is and while we’re here, what is Aragorn doing when he reaches Lothlorien in Peter Jacksons The Fellowship of the Ring? Yes, after he is welcomed in, he’s sharpening his sword with a whetstone, something a ranger would do when finding the time, and now ask yourself when does Aragorn ever stick his sword into the ground? Exactly! Because he’s not a fucking idiot. At the end of the most recent trailer, I could not believe it when a wizard shows up, wizards were not dispatched to Middle-Earth until the Third Age, I am not entirely sure if this is Gandalf, but it certainly looks like it, and I hope, I truly hope that I am wrong. We’re also subjected to a quote pulled directly from Star Wars: The Last Jedi, this would make sense because the showrunners were recommended by J.J Abrams:-
“The past is dead, we either move forward or we die with it!”
I am lost for words. They’re not even being subtle about it, just like with Star Wars that has been left in ruin, they’re doing what they can to push forward their agenda, to destroy all cultural norms and traditions to make room for their new world, for their politics and if anyone disagrees, queue the ism, ist or phobe, it is as predictable as the setting of the sun, they’ve done this before with a multitude of other properties such as Charlies Angels, Ghostbusters, Dr Who, Terminator and so on, and it’s tiresome, it’s untrue, it’s petty and I wish they’d stop perpetuating the idea that there are bigots and racists around every corner because there aren’t, at least not in my country of the UK…What utter horseshit this is and thank God there are no more trailers to watch, there is so much wrong here, so much out of order and broken it’s hard to know where to start. Outside of Galadriel, Elrond, Gil-Galad and Celebrimbor more than half the cast would not exist for many centuries and the rest have simply been invented by the showrunners who think that they can write the story Tolkien never could, and if that wasn’t insult enough, but they think they can do it better given how progressive they are, and believe me there is a mountain of evidence to suggest this is the case and this is partly the reason why so many are failing to get on board with Rings of Power. Where is Celeborn? You know Galadriel’s husband, the elf she married in the First Age? Where is their daughter, Celebrian? I recognise whole heartedly that you cannot include everything, however Amazon are content with making up characters, they’re content on ignoring key parts of the source material while moving pieces around the board for, what exactly? I suppose we’ll see but this is not looking positive. All we want is a faithful adaptation one that captures the essence and spirit of the books, I am aware changes have to be made but going into these projects with the wisdom to do so like Peter Jackson who they ghosted by the way after having fired Tom Shippey, is crucial.
“The Rings of Power isn’t a direct adaptation of an existing Tolkien novel. Instead, it’s inspired by the author’s extensive notes, published in the appendices to The Lord of the Rings.” – Entertainment Weekly.
There it is, as plain as day written for all to see in black and white, muddle this with an article written in Empire Magazine that reads:-
“You can psyche yourself out in keeping up with the Joneses, but one of the mantras on this was ‘Go back to the source material’,” Mckay explains. “What would Tolkien do?”
No wonder people are so put off, no wonder people who are fans of the books and films alike are struck with absolute bewilderment and grief at the handling of this shows marketing, what an absolute casserole of lies and nonsense, and this reflects, it reflects in the popularity of these trailers across the board, all you need do is go and look for yourself, they are not only getting ratioed in the UK but everywhere, especially that abhorrent Superfans trailer where Amazon brought in “fans” of Lord of the Rings to view the teaser of Ring of Power in an actual castle! Ignore the fact that you can see a man pissing in the corner when they are all walking into this castle, ignore the fact that these “fans” knew nothing and when asked, when questioned about what they saw, all they could talk about was diversity, all they could address was the inclusion and equity (D.I.E. for short), none of them actually made any reference to the books, none of these paid shills (I’m sorry fans) could merit an independent thought of their own or talk about something integral to the lore of Middle-Earth, instead they just wanted to look at the attractive screen people and cheer like clapping seals, to get excited about people who represented them through skin colour alone, and no I am not making this up, watch it, watch it for yourself if you haven’t already it is utterly tragic to see, to see people unable to identify with characters unless they have the same skin tone or sexual preference as them, how horrid, what a rot of a society we live in if this is the outlook for fuck sake! I want to believe that these “Superfans” were given vast sums of money to say what they were told to say, it is evident enough because it did take several takes to get this fan reaction right, at least then I’d mildly understand why they’d sell themselves…Fuck, in this economic climate I’d love some extra cash, but not sold to me at a price like this, I would not besmirch a legacy so willingly, but that’s why I’d never be chosen to advertise a show, I would not sit there and read from a script like a good little drone, I’d take it to task, I’d disagree with what I saw and bring up what I know which is an archive more than these four Superfans…It really, really makes me sad to write this, to know that all of this has infected something I love, that it will forever be tarnished with the stink of woke, the new religion which is eating at our culture from the inside out it’s fucking appalling. Now we are here I must say that I am sorry, I am sorry we have to delve into this topic once again, but I am having to do it more and more often because it is everywhere. Defending Lord of the Rings should not nor ever be a political act but here we are, we have to talk about diversity, inclusion, and equality (D.I.E.), but these are the three pillars/masks that the woke use to shield themselves from criticism, how they evade capture and are able to slip into every home, institution and bastion that exists today. I don’t want to talk about this, but I’m afraid I have to, because I know what it means, I know what is going on, I’ve become aware of it when I see it, and if nothing else, want you to see it to, to create a pushback against something that is generally deceiving and despicable. As always, the best place to start is with origins and definitions, here we go.
Woke Definition
The politicisation of sex and race.
To have an injected or fourth wall breaking political commentary reflective of postmodern thought.
Before I touch upon the cult of woke in the form as it exists today, I must start by giving it some context. Granted, there are people who know way more about this subject than I do, I know that what I am about to say may sound somewhat obscure, maybe even a touch on the radical side, but unless you’ve been living in space or under a rock for the last few years, I am certain that you will be able to at least detect a pattern emerging here. This is my first time going into this topic in such thorough detail, but I’ll do my best to describe what exactly is going on or what I believe is going on based on the evidence, based on my own observations/the observations of others and from those who study modernity to the highest degree. I’ve been following this stuff at the earliest possible time I could, taking note of changes in our cultural dialogue when I was still in university, from 2007 to 2010. These subversion tactics that I will describe have been at play for decades, I became aware of it around the time when I finally bought myself a PC, when I had unlimited access to the internet and the freedom to do so, I cannot remember what led me down this path initially, but it is something I caught onto and was never able to turn away from, once you’ve seen it, you cannot go back, the analogy of the red pill comes to mind. As I think back, I seem to remember being involved with the conversation surrounding religion, and organised religion, I read Christopher Hitchens who became a hero of mine (inspiring the character of Master Eran Othrium in my own work, The Ancestral Odyssey), I listened to the biologist Richard Dawkins, neuroscientist Sam Harris, physicist and cosmologist Stephen Hawking, the philosopher Daniel Dennett and Lawrence Kraus who’s also a physicist and cosmologist. I watched as religious speakers fell to their (The Four Horseman’s) wit and charm admittedly with a sense of glee because something I’ve come to admire is better ideas replacing old ones, plus I’ve never been the religious type, I used to get in trouble in school for not praying when told to, I used to stir up a ruckus in class for asking too many questions about God and the divine, I never sat still nor obeyed, developing a problem with authority, so it is of no surprise that later in life I developed a siding with the atheist who were considered rebels back then, the outcasts and I was fine with this. However, as sharp as the atheists of the day were, they did not think about what would happen next whence religion was gone, what would happen after you crippled the religious doctrines, and that is when after the final hammer was brough down, when it looked like the battle was over, this was when the atheist plus movement came along. For the longest time the atheists were united in their march against organised religion, but it wasn’t until the atheist plus people came about where the movement fractured, splitting into groups, into their own echo-chambers, some if not most taking the knee to a new opponent, something called Intersectionality:-
Dictionary Definition- Intersectionality is an analytical framework for understanding how aspects of a person’s social and political identities combine to create different modes of discrimination and privilege. Intersectionality identifies multiple factors of advantage and disadvantage. Examples include gender, caste, sex, race, ethnicity, class, sexuality, religion, disability, weight, physical appearance, and height. These intersecting and overlapping social identities may be both empowering and oppressing.
As you can see, everything is brought into focus, everything can become problematic and should you find inequality anywhere, which of course there is because that’s just a fact of reality, it is to be levelled, made equal while disregarding why the inequalities exist in the first place. It was at this moment where the culture war took full swing, even modern-day fourth wave feminism (which I’ve criticised before for being a movement of insufferable, fact denying man haters) riddled with its own issues has bowed into this intersectional Godless ideology and has allowed itself to be consumed by it, because even being a woman is problematic, don’t believe me? Then answer me this very simple question; What is a woman? Just ask those who spout the label Terf and you’ll see in the eyes of the deranged, of the indoctrinated that even being a woman, someone who is concerned with preserving biological women’s rights and their spaces for adults and children, is problematic. A Terf, by the way is an abbreviation for trans exclusionary radical feminist, and the definition is as follows ‘A feminist who excludes the rights of transgender women from their advocacy of women’s rights.’ Watch the documentary made by Matt Walsh, I’ll leave a trailer linked below, but again this is a very real phenomenon, one that is well equipped to deal with those who speak out in defence, and adept at slipping past any gate and into any institution it chooses, and before long, no matter who were your allies, you can quickly find yourselves fighting among one another.Even people who were once sided, arm in arm, people I never thought would ever turn on each other were now fighting with one another, the unity we once found among our neighbours seemed to split and shatter overnight and we’ve never recovered from it, it is only getting worse, ever since intersectional hit we’ve been descending into absolute madness. I’ve witnessed this woke cult slowly grow into the juggernaut that it is today, it’s a monster obsessed with breaking down traditional barriers, crushing societal norms while ripping apart the fabric of our society, warping the truths we know, spoiling anything and everything it touches, and I genuinely mean that, because I cannot name anything that once is infiltrated by this intersectional lens is made better, it’s always made worse and left broken. I know how it sounds, it sounds like something you’d find in a fantasy book, but life is stranger than fiction sometimes and this IS as mad as it sounds, what we are dealing with is not fantasy, it is very real, and I cannot (nor can many) figure out a way to get out of this spiral, the serpent that is eating its own tail, this is indeed no ordinary enemy, and the strange thing is, we were warned this would happen, these methods are not new, we were told this would eventually come to us living in the West, the only key difference between then and now is the introduction of the internet and power of social media tech giants, the subversion weaponry has essentially been put on steroids and if you’d like me to provide evidence of all that I have said, if you still need convincing, then let me refer you to a man named Yuri Bezmenov.
Yuri Bezmenov is a Russian former KGB informant who forewarned us that this was coming, and he did so back in the early 80s, he warned the West of the tactics used by those who want to spread misinformation and propaganda designed to fight a war without firing a single shot, to divide, confuse and ultimately cause collapse, so the enemy could then capture. I’ve shared the original interview with Yuri below, it’s a little over an hour long but well worth your time if you would like to know more about Soviet Union tactics, how they created their ideological empire across the globe using a strategy known as Active Measures, a very real threat, a very real danger that exists not only in our history, but in modern life as we know it. Which is why I was very shocked to see Yuri appear in one of the Call of Duty console games, it must’ve been one of the Black Ops entries because I used to play Call of Duty: Modern Warfare with friends in my early twenties, but slipped off it and moved onto other titles, but I happened to see one of my brothers playing it, a recent one and there he was, Mr Bezmenov himself the ex-KGB militant, warning us of psychological warfare; To summarise, to categorise the stages which can also be mirrored to Sun Tzu, Sun Tzu was a Chinese General of the Eastern Zhou period, notably known as the author of The Art of War, all to do with subversion, all to do with mental battling, a sort of ideological judo where you use your opponent’s weight against themselves, altering their perception of what is real; So when the end of the process arrives (a process which I will get to explain in a moment), the populace who has been enacted upon in this way, will not only not recognise you as the enemy but will turn to you to take control, and this is what Yuri and Sun Tzu describe, it’s a spy game, it’s psychological warfare which has been shown to work. I’ll do my best to detail the stages, I’ve done my reading, listened to what Yuri has said, I suggest you do so too to get a better understanding, I will try to translate these tactics as simply as I can and will roll back around to our entertainment shortly because our entertainment fits into these stages too. The first phase is to manipulate the enemy you wish to conquer into opening their gates, remember the Trojan horse? Once inside your job is demoralisation, and this might take anywhere up to fifteen to twenty years to effectively demoralise the society you’ve found yourselves in, and one way to do this is to teach a generation to hate their own people, to hate their very own culture, to reduce their moral standard, and what happens when you do this is that the people you are subverting will not rise to defend it when the time comes, but instead will actively attack it for its sins (fabricated or otherwise), for its impurities when considering the new framing put in place by the invader. We can see this happening now, it’s not hard to find examples all over the world, but I/we’re seeing it in education, we’re seeing it in administration, law enforcement, labor, I previously talked about the fall of religion, this was one I was present for. Yuri lists this all out in his lectures, which again I implore you to find and watch when you’ve some time, but before I move onto phase two, I think it is important to point out that (as an atheist myself) as hard as religion is to believe in, it does offer a sense of spirituality enlightenment, a sense of reason, belonging and purpose, and the Soviets as you likely already know, were far from spiritual, they were far from religious and actively fought against it, burning down thousands of churches and executing millions upon millions of Christians at the height of their power, and ended up replacing the holy doctrines that organised society with cults, and on the surface I do not think there is anything wrong with cults, there are cults all over the place, you yourself are in one, they exist in innocent forms as well as malevolent ones, it is innate of living in the twenty-first century, however it is important to be able to distinguish this notable difference from the harmful to the harmless. Moving onto phase two and it is to break apart the education system, not to stop education but to re-educate the younger generation with non-essential skills, nothing that’s productive, constructive, or useful in any way but instead things like sexuality, gender-studies anything extremely niche and meaningless; You’re probably asking why at this point, why bother teaching youngsters non-essential skills? Well, the reason this happens is because it leaves these people without drive, without a flare for the world, to train them to be good little factory workers in servitude of the state, remember they’ve been brainwashed into thinking they live in a backward, heathenistic, oppressive society, what else would there be for them to do other than to go to work? This ties into phase three, which is socialization, to interfere with what people do on a social level, to invade social lives (whatever they may be) and re-establish them with fake institutions, which further erodes the sense of self, it destroys the initiatives of the figureheads who started them or the people within who’ve joined and are replaced with bureaucrats. The purpose of this is to put one of these bodies in charge of any social situation, this can be seen in places like California, more specifically in its universities. Just to list off an example, these bureaucrats are concerned with the intimate affairs their students/subjects are having with one another, they’re somewhat invested in who is seeing who so they can come between them, so they can mediate their lives – To add to this, I seem to remember South Park did a skit on this very subject, where the new PC Principle, walks down a hallway of a dorm asking for consent forms from those who have shacked up with other students the night before. This is played for laughs of course but the creators of South Park, Matt Stone and Trey Parker are not stupid, far from it, they are very engaged with what is going on around them often diving into the dark corners of reality to not only make incredibly offensive jokes (the best kind of jokes in fact) out of it, but to throw in a curve ball or two, this is what they do, they are very good at it, and I seem to remember them shedding some light on this facet of life, it is very real and it is certainly happening in some areas of the western world. Phase four is administration, and the point of this administrative phase is to hire, moderate and deal with said bureaucrats, how exactly are you going to use these bodies to take over the necessary infrastructure, because it isn’t just about the hired bureaucrats working for the government, it has to be the persons beneath them willing to adopt the position of said bureaucrat, whether it be in a public or private sector. It’s all about acceptance, to accept the authority from within the organisation they’re trying to corrupt, and Bezmenov lists an example, and that example comes from the media, the already, pre-established mainstream media who have huge amounts of power, sway, and influence in our society and yet who elected them? Who can vote them out of such positions? No one seems to wants them around polluting our political dialogue unless you’re indoctrinated into this cult yourself, how did they get this power to begin with? The bureaucrat’s purpose is not to sink the establishments ship, but to steer the course of dialogue in their politician’s favour, politicians that they’re allied with. Problems may arise when said bureaucrat or bureaucrats (defectors if you will, like Mr Yuri) start speaking the truth, when they start doing genuine journalism, dangerous reporting that they will be held to account for because the truth can damage the narrative and clue people into what is actually going on, risking detection and the operation as a whole. This is why politicians these days travel around with them, with staff rooms of journalists to manage the propaganda trail. Hilary Clinton is guilty of this in 2016, she moved from place to place with about fifteen different journalists; The trick is to hire mediocre yes men journalists opposed to good ones, those who just do as they’re told to mask and blur the scent as to what is happening, it’s a sneaky corrupt tactic that set up a labyrinth in front of people who are seeking truth, which is one of the reasons why I can find evidence for something during a discussion rather simple, and you, my opponent, can equally find counter evidence to that very point leaving us with the question as to who has the facts? It’s a never-ending circle of lies and deceit designed to throw people off the wagon and off the trail. The next phase, the fifth phase is to assault law enforcement, it must be worn down, it has to be crippled, a wedge has to be forced between the police and public, to make the enforcers of law look corrupt, to portray them as sinister, nasty, and evil while making the criminals look just, heroic, and noble. This creates a warped view of what it is to have law and order, compared to disorder and anarchy. It wasn’t long ago that the US had the Chaz/the Chop set up in Seattle’s Capitol Hill autonomous zone during the “Summer of Love” quoted by one of the useless majors of these cities in 2020, as their people’s businesses were burning down to the ground amidst the hundred days of endless rioting. The defund the police rhetoric was in full swing, and the police were indeed vilified to the highest degree. Is the police force in need of reforming, absolutely, but defunding or abolishing, no! In Seattle however, inside this zone almost ten people were killed in the space of about a month, and as bad as that is there is a sludge of other crimes beyond the pale that went on when this was in place. At the core of this phase, is the mission to break law enforcement. Moving onto the sixth point is labor relations, destroying the chain of trade and bargaining. The bureaucrats begin to interrupt exchanges and redistribute resources according to their own ideological agendas. This results in the suffering of the workforce, they lose out on their hard earned wages through strikes, damaging the corporations they work for – this too is happening and is something you can point to, you can see it taking place inside primarily left-wing news outlets, outlets like Vice and Vox media for example, who have their unions made up of communists actively acting against the structures that enrich them, biting the very hand that feeds them to coin the expression. As a result of this the economy inevitably suffers, the labourers are now not free to sell their work as they choose and are left in thrall, made subservient to the union now in place, they’ve essentially become conscripted into this overarching plan of attack, and it’s all part of an ideological mission, a conquest to fight a psychological war without firing a shot, nor have military boots on the ground.
1.Demoralisation
2.Re-Education
3. Socialisation
4. Administration
5. Law Enforcement
6. Labor Relations
There is more, there is more to this story, like where does it end? What happens when all these stages have been successfully enacted? Well, at the time of the Soviet Union, when a country, or province or territory they were trying to take was psychologically demoralised enough, when they were mentally battered, the people would look to the Soviets to take control, to clear up the anarchy they were responsible for, and make order. The native revolutionaries who started this upheaval, would be rounded up and shot, because they’re after all the dangerous revolt with influence, and hence without a war being fought the land and infrastructure spared, now belongs to the those who sort to conquer. Fast forward to the modern-day, the Soviets are long gone but their tactics still remain, so our fate as citizens of the West is yet to be determined. You can find several of Yuri’s lectures in circulation, some have been removed but there are others still active. He forewarned us about what is happening! I remember when I first saw this stuff appearing, it was not called woke back then and when I foolishly raised this concern with anyone, when I pointed to some sources, they’d shoot me down, they’d call me a conspiracy theorist, or say I am just being paranoid. I was told to shut up and be quiet, and that hurt, especially when it was among friends or those I had come to respect. Here, after all was this monster growing in popularity in the dark corners of the internet, swallowing small hobbies and toxifying niche ideas even effecting language with its rhetoric revolving around arbitrary things like sex, race, and identity, using these pillars as shields to deflect any sort of criticism. It slipped into clubs and institutions eventually beating out those loyal to the thing/hobby and replacing the gathering with what can best be described as useful idiots, consumers, not true fans or supporters of the craft, of the thing that kept it going for years if not decades, but people who just wanted to spout their politics masquerading as the good and the heroic, wolves in sheep’s clothing they’re better known as. This blob of horror branded itself the name Social Justice, and those enforcing Social Justice notions upon us normies were people called the Social Justice Warriors, SJW’s for short. Remember this was a long time ago, well over ten years at least and manifested from places like Tumbler, or at least from my perspective back then, I’m sure it was growing in other facets of society, but it wasn’t visible, not to me at least until much later. It eventually spread to YouTube and then before I knew it, it had begun to bleed its way into statuses on Facebook and tweets on Twatter I mean Twitter, invading schools, the very education system to indoctrinate children with these corrupt ideas, ideas designed to confuse and disorientate, where truth began to lose meaning and purpose, where people could argue that 2+2=5 (using this as a hypothetical) and be taken seriously. It started to appear on mainstream media, on news outlets like the BBC and newspapers such as The Guardian (a paper incapable of not bringing race into any piece they brought out), making its way to the most powerful corporations on the planet most recently the RAF, for those of you who do not know, the RAF is now not hiring white males, all to meet the quota of diversity, diversity in itself is not a bad thing but when you start to segregate people through the lens of race you cannot shake the feeling that we’ve been here before, this is regressing, and bad things ensue when you do not hire based on performance. It’s ironic, the more you push for fairness the more unfair things solidify, you become a social engineer rather than someone who values integrity and freedom, and because freedom hinges on life’s randomised nature, you don’t meet the numbers, the ‘balance’ is disturbed and it looks from the bureaucrats spreadsheet that (in this case) white males are a problem and hence steps are taken to stop this from happening…It’s ludicrous, it’s absolutely insane and it has to stop, although when people like myself try to point this out, we are branded the enemies of diversity, you’re a racist, you’re a sexist, insert whatever slur you want it does not matter because once branded with that label you’re bad, you’re a bad person and your ideas are toxic and you can now be safely ignored, the conversation is over, a dialogue cannot happen and we end up regressing, not progressing. The fireman service too has been captured by this ideology, they also have started hiring on the basis of sex and race to meet those quotas; Why not hire someone best suited for the job and not concern yourself with what their skin tone is, have you considered that? As matter of fact, I’ve a female friend, someone I speak to often who joined the fire service and took note that the standard for her to join was considerably lesser than the men! If this does not alarm you, yes you reading this, then I do not know what will, we are risking lives for the sakes of this bullshit and I wish it stopped there but it doesn’t, it keeps going, and this is the most frightening part but it has even reached a level where Presidential elections are influenced, the vote is swayed on how ‘progressive’ you are, how woke you are and at this point, I just feel like giving up, because whenever you try to raise awareness you are ostracized, you are red-flagged, you’re black listed and fuck you if you want me to bring up a list of examples of those who have been black listed because there are dozens if not hundreds. This woke cult like mob is everywhere, you cannot avoid their slander, and no one dare call me a conspiracy theorist now, no one can deny that there is a war for cultures being waged right before our eyes, and one tactic the woke are using is to get at us through our stories, through the things that bring us together, and not only through stories, but through our sports, our games, our music, art and so on. The tactic here is to divide us, the more divided we are the easier it is for us to be conquered, it’s textbook and it starts with the Trojan horse – You infiltrate with small numbers while flying the rainbow flags of diversity, inclusion, and equity, and once let inside the bastion/hobby they open the flood gates, and a base is conquered, it happens every time! This is what happened to the bastion that was Star Wars, Luke being reduced to a grumpy shadow of his former self. Anakin’s legacy of redemption and balance given over to Ray Palpatine, a Palpatine posing as a Skywalker by the end of the sequel trilogy, what a win for the bad guys and final gut punch to anyone who was a fan of this franchise that never should have gone beyond the Return of the Jedi. It’s happening to the MCU, look at Hawkeye, Loki, Hulk, Thor, all of them systematically replaced and humiliated, the rot has sunk in so deep into Marvels veins I don’t think it can be saved, just compare it to how it was ten years ago, to what we had, to what it’s like now, the difference is startling. I cannot believe how awful, how shallow and safe it has become, belittling the characters that propped it up to begin with for years, soaking in billions, capturing the imaginations of many myself included, only to tear said heroes down in the name of female empowerment, because the only way to lift women up is to rip men down, what hot garbage the MSHEU is, what a joke; It ended at Endgame for me, it is over, and I will/have not paid money toward this franchise since. Star Trek is long gone, losing its clever science fiction complexities and interesting dialogues to make way for modern day politics. Dr Who is destroyed, the lore so broken again under the guise of women good, and men (specifically white men bad) just watch ANY of the episodes in the last two seasons and tell me I’m wrong because it literally slaps you round the face. Terminator is totally fucked, John Conner being turned into humanities enemy and replaced with a strong woman. Predator has vanished, its concept botched all because a gal wanted to hunt because no one thought she could, this could be one of THE worst motivations I’ve ever heard, her reasoning to hunt wasn’t authentic, it wasn’t innate in her, she wasn’t doing it in order to provide or to protect or was forced to, she just wanted to because people thought she couldn’t, cry me a fucking river girl! I also do not think you can shove a pineapple up your pie hole, are you going to attempt that because I think you can’t!? She wasn’t a natural born leader or chief, she just wanted to prove a point! Well, what happens when you’re now leading your tribe which is what happens at the end of the movie (Prey, no I haven’t seen it but have been told this happens), she is no leader, instead she is grinning, smiling whence holding the Predators head; Compare this with Dutch at the end of the original Predator, he is left a broken man, considering what he went through, his world, his outlook has shifted and you can see it on his face at the end when riding away in the helicopter. Also contrary to what most people think, there was actually lot’s going on in the original Predator, I mean here you have these ultra-marines dropped into the jungle facing off against something that makes them wet themselves, no matter how big and how badass you are, there is always a bigger guy, there is always someone or in this case something worse than you! It is a masterpiece compared to anything we’ve seen since, and this includes the most recent film which was adequate at best. The Last of Us is broken, what was once a work of art, a near perfect game underlining the beauty, the treasured bond between father and daughter is thrown out the window and fired into the Sun, replaced with a depressing, miserable game that says nothing, that tells you nothing, that teaches you no lessons other than vengeance wrong and people are bad, running off the back of some of the most forced writing I’ve ever experienced, turning a beloved character (Joel) into something he isn’t, just to get the shitty plot moving. Not only does this game bastardise the characters we have come to love (Joel and Ellie) but forces us to play over ten hours of gameplay as the brute (Abby) who killed our favourite character, rubbing salt into the wound when it tries everything it can to MAKE you like her. I’m sorry, I don’t like her, I want her gone, I hate her for what she did despite her one-dimensional reasons, and I understand what the game is trying to do, it’s trying to show you the events from both characters perspectives, but it falls flat over and over, and by the end the vengeance you sort is not paid off, leaving you with a game that drops you as you started, in a dank depressing pit, what a waste of time, get fucked Neil Druckman, stop siding with enemies of video games like Anita Sarkeesian and write something worthwhile! Ghostbusters has been annihilated. The Wheel of Time is dead, its lore ignored. Westworld, beyond the first season is something I barely recognise anymore, same goes for The Boys which started to show corruption in season two and when season three rolled around it couldn’t be more on the nose with its political agenda, you’d have to be an absolute idiot to not see what was going on, every other scene was a slog and I will not be coming back for its fourth season, which is a shame because I really like Karl Urban, he’s one of my favourite actors first seeing him play Eomer in The Two Towers and to my mind would make a great Batman, but damn, I cannot handle being preached to anymore by worthless, spineless writers. The list literally goes on forever, all these bastions, some older than others but bastions of greatness nonetheless have fallen, one by one they’ve been infiltrated and toppled and for those of you who happen to like what has been done to these franchises, we can bicker back and forth all day and night about ideas but at least AT LEAST we can find common ground on the fact that their fanbases are shattered, what we once came together to enjoy and appreciate as a group is broken, we have been divided and not just through the incompetency of the writing but because it was designed that way on purpose, and Lord of the Rings is next, the eye of Sauron if you will, the eye of Intersectionality has fallen over this ancient franchise, the one about at its core the battle for good and evil, and we now stand on the precipice of its destruction or the hill where the winds will maybe, just maybe if enough of us stand together, finally change.
As you can see from the examples I have given, and you don’t have to agree with them at all, this is not what this essay is about, I am simply trying to find common ground, ground where we can meet on and hold a dialogue and I’ve done my best to point to something concrete, an outlined strategy, a weapon of warfare designed by the Soviets, written about in The Art of War by Sun Tzu, one that is of historical reference, something that we can point to – I am sure we can recognise that certain patterns are emerging here, the biggest one being of course is that we are divided, no one I feel can disagree with that statement, we are a polarised, irrational, emotional insecure, ill society, one that is terrified to speak the simplest of truths upon the world stage. We have adopted some of the seeds of Active Measures as described, and we are now seeing the rotten fruit this tree bears, it’s breeding a poison, a poison that is seeping into everything including the fields I am involved in or would love to be further involved with later in life, the evidence is as clear as day. Because I work in the artistic areas, because I have long-term goals of publishing my work as I want it to be, with as little tampering as possible in the hopes to one day gift it to the big screen, I have a concern about what is happening and what will come of it should I pick up some motion. I am concerned when I have to meet diversity quotas to acquire funding from old respectable institutions, when I have to cast people of every race and sexual orientation despite the pre-established characters, despite the story I am trying to tell it doesn’t matter, it has to resemble the world in which we live and if it doesn’t then you/the artist/director have to make it on your own two feet, and if you know anything about what it takes to visually tell your story, accumulating the resources and funds to bring it into existence is almost impossible, almost! I am concerned when I see language being altered to spare the feelings of the easily offended, when the message of my story, one that I have been working on for almost twenty-years has to be bent, warped and twisted into something it’s not, into something far removed from fantasy yet exists in our day, one that promotes a dangerous left-wing ideology, and this is the problem finally, finally we’ve arrived back at point a) This is the problem with woke Lord of the Rings, it is a bastion, a grand bastion and if something as powerful as this, England’s favourite book, one of if not THE greatest mythologies ever achieved by one of the greatest writers ever to have walked this Earth is not safe, if the Grandfather of all fantasy falls then what chance does The Ancestral Odyssey have and others like it have? I’ve built my own bastion, and people are working and living comfortably inside, but it is not enough, yet, nor likely will ever be strong enough to resist what is coming, because if Tolkien’s mighty bastion is to fall, to man the walls, to work the siege-engines and repel the invading forces should the same enemies arrive outside of my gates, what hope do I have? Where does this leave my future and thus this is why I have had such a strong knee-jerk reaction to what I have seen being done to LOTR’s, an inspirational story with veins in every fantasy element since its creation including my own, being absolutely bastardised by Amazon, a multi-trillion-dollar cooperation more interested in corrupting this property, pumping a billion dollars into it (for the first two seasons at least) to fuel their side in the culture war. It is more profitable to corrupt LOTR than to make it a faithful adaptation, business’s always pursue that which is more profitable than what is morally right and they’re doing it on purpose not because they like it, but because they like the idea of liking it, and this is evident in everything we have seen so far, everything from the disrespect of the story, the lore and Tolkien himself, twisting his words enabling themselves with the excuse to come in and do what they want, soaking up all the controversy while injecting the work with their world views and I oppose that! I oppose the intent that is acted upon within these titles not just with Lord of the Rings, but with all the properties previously mentioned which is nefarious to the art, which is alien to the art, there is a will operating here in the shadows and this leads me to the tone and the aesthetic of the piece of art you are trying to create, it is time to talk about aesthetics.
Aesthetic
Adjective
Concerned with beauty or the appreciation of beauty.
Giving or designed to give pleasure through beauty.
Noun
A set of principles underlying the work of a particular artist or artistic movement.
First of all, why are the aesthetics of a work important? Well, it’s wise to note, that when you’re creating a piece of art, whether it be writing a book, shooting a film, developing a game or painting on a canvas, the intent of the creator matters, what they are trying to portray is in them, it has all come from them, you would not be getting the piece in question without the artist, opposed to say natural beauty where there isn’t a designer, unless you happen to believe in a God or a deity therefore you can attribute the beauty too said higher-power. However to craft a certain aesthetic, to build tone and a sense of wonder in this regard requires a mind behind it, you need (in my case) an author to tell you a story, and a big part of that is to cast the spell of believability, the author is after all trying to draw you into this fictional world, to grant you some escapism, one that is layered with world-building that immerses you, and in order to do that you need to be mindful, respectful and consistent with the world in which you’re creating, you must abide by its rules, adhere to its lore and remember the mythos. Being faithful to your spell the more powerful the illusion will be, and you’ll leave something of a unique aesthetic which resides with your audience, one that you’ve crafted from scratch, and that is an incredibly hard thing to do, but if pulled off successfully, you’ve something to be proud of. Should you break the spell through incompetence or something else, the illusion shatters, you’ve lost the suspension of disbelief and your audience is now not watching or absorbing the art, but they are simply watching a larping session and they can no longer buy into this fantasy you’re telling. This is why it is funny when in movies you see a coffee cup in the background, or when someone is wearing a wristwatch while they’re pretending to be a Knight or a monster, because that object cannot be explained within the world you’re trying to tell and in that moment the magic is gone, the aura is lifted, and you’ve lost your viewers. A good example of this is Harry Potter. Back when Harry Potter was being made, J.K Rowling was very specific on the casting choices of her characters, verbally stating on I think it was some kind of talk show, but she said; “No Americans.” She only wanted to cast English actors and actresses to fill these roles and as amusing as this is, we must ask why? Why was she so concerned with nationality with who was to play who and the answer to this was to preserve a certain aesthetic, one that manifests in the books she wrote, the genuine feel of a posh English school. This was something she was concerned about. Had you cast anyone other, had you mixed your cast with noticeably different cultures from all over the world, had you diversified Harry Potter if you will, to the extent we are seeing everywhere nowadays, the particular aesthetic would be lost, it wouldn’t be authentic with what she was trying to create, it would come across as weird especially to those who read her work and would not hold true to the source material from which it came. So, when I see a black beardless dwarf, a make-believe character inserted, dropped into the realm of Middle-Earth to fill a quota, the spell is gone..poof..Broken at the very first hurdle, and the same goes for the black elf, Arondir. You can’t get black elves, not in Tolkien’s world they simply didn’t exist because elves are elves, they’re not men, they exist on a totally different spectrum to us, different on almost every level, from posture, life-expectancy, affinity with magic, reflexes, strength, speed, agility, their relationship with nature the list goes on and on. You cannot get a black elf, or a black dwarf for the same reason you cannot get a French or German elf, they’re described vividly in the books, they’re fleshed out to a ludicrous degree, and because they don’t exist, when making an adaptation we have to do the best we can with what we have. Peter Jacksons trilogy did a magnificent job capturing Tolkien’s vision for elves, a lot of people on my side of the house have complained about the length of their hair, but as far as I am aware and I could be wrong on this so please correct me if I am, but I cannot remember their hair length being explicitly detailed, but artists spanning back decades long before I was even born have been depicting Tolkien’s elves with long hair and no one, not even the Tolkien purists complained, so their look has been ingrained into our minds and overwhelmingly accepted. Elves have long hair, I believe having long, beautifully flowing hair is accurate for elves, because they’re gifted with long life, it’s a sign of longevity, good health, and elegance, but in Rings of Cringe oh I’m sorry, in Rings of Power, they’ve not even attempted to make Arondir appeal to the look of what an elf is supposed to look like, in fact it looks as if they drew inspiration from a certain CNN presenter, Don Lemon. People are not bothered with skin-colour, most people do not care what colour your skin is and those that do can just be ignored, what people do care about however, is in this case when it comes to these modern-day remakes, prequels, sequels whatever, is the authenticity to the piece, they want to lose themselves in another world one that they can believe in, one with integrity and consistency. It’s strange when you only see this thing happening in the Western world, you would not see this blatant race swapping with any other culture and I know that the executives know this, I know that Hollywood knows this, all you need do is look at Mulan, Black Panter, Blade or Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings, and I’d like to focus on Shang-Chi for just a moment, it did rather well I seem to recall, it was well received by audiences, I didn’t go and see it because I am done with anything Marvel up to this point, but that’s just me, but I found this from its Wikipedia page under Pre-Production:-
“The studio was adamant that actors be of Chinese descent to audition for the character.”
It’s odd wouldn’t you say? That Hollywood don’t want to insert their diversity and inclusivity rhetoric into this, because they wanted this to do well in China, because if the leads had been played by a white man or anything other than Chinese, you’d once again break the spell and the piece would be ruined, it’s really not hard to understand. This argument that is floating around the internet is entirely one sided; Why is it okay to race-swap white characters and not always those of fiction by the way, it wasn’t long ago need I remind you, when the Queen of England, Anne Boleyn, second wife of King Henry VIII was race swapped! Why is it okay for one and not the other? Well, I’ll tell you that it’s not okay, the door swings both ways, had Black Panther or a movie featuring say Martin Luther King, been played by someone who doesn’t properly represent the pre-established character or the historical figure, you should expect the same level of complaints, and the same amount of backlash when you do it to white people, and I’d be equally combative and verbal if other cultures and histories were being bastardised in the same way mine is currently being. It’s really not difficult to capture an artistic experience, it’s not particularly hard to embrace the authenticity of Shang-Chi or Lord of the Rings, all you have to do is try, try to stay faithful to the source material or if you’re doing something from history you mirror to the best of your ability what the text or time dictates. Furthermore, why would you not do this, why would you actively choose to derail in the first place? You’d only derail if you had a political agenda, and if you’ve an agenda, you’re setting yourself up for failure and actually exposing yourselves (the showrunners) for who you really are, and this brings me to my next point. I’ve a quote for you, from Lindsey Weber, the executive producer of RoP, and it reads from Indie Wire:-
“It felt only natural to us that an adaptation of Tolkien’s work would reflect what the world actually looks like” – Lindsey Weber
I beg your pardon? What world are we talking about here, are we talking about our world I hope you’re joking!? But she isn’t joking, and I can only wonder why…Why in the FUCK would you want to make Lord of the Rings reflect OUR world! What crack have you been smoking Lindsey; did you get it from Hunter Biden!? How does that make ANY fucking sense. If I wanted to find out what our world looks like I’d close my laptop and just go outside, I live it every day having to deal with insufferable twits like yourself. The idea of properties such as this is to be able to get away from reality, to slip away for a portion of time into a fantasy, again, into that illusion, the spell creative people can cast, the thing which I hope to achieve, the thing which I am invested in and understand it BETTER THAN YOU! Clearly, I know the work, I know the craft and the artform better than you and your little showrunners, all of you are just making fools of yourself, and if you’re going to go around tying yourselves in knots over race, and sex and diversity blah blah fucking blah go and do it, have a party, I don’t give a shit, but don’t ruin beloved works in the process you absolute cretins…Jesus Christ! This is as bad when Kathleen Kennedy, the President of Lucasfilm complained that when they were making their sequel trilogy abortion of botched Star Wars movies that – There was not much to draw from…Yes, I bookmarked it when I found it back in 2019, this is Kathleen Kennedy ladies and gentlemen, someone in charge of the biggest franchise on the planet, Star Wars, yet still finds time to complain she’s being oppressed by the man:-
“There’s no source material. We don’t have comic books, we don’t have 800-page novels, we don’t have anything other than passionate storytellers who get together and talk about what the next iteration might be. We go through a really normal development process that everybody else does.” – Kathleen Kennedy
That quote is real. That was said by a sentient being. That happened folks…Fuck me…It blows my mind, it blows my fucking mind that YOU BRAINLETS Lindsey and Kathleen have got to where you are, have risen through the ranks of one of the most difficult industries to compete in and you can still muster the mental energy to say things so catastrophically stupid! You’re fucking morons, you’re both a pair of fucking imbeciles and you should not be standing where you are today, you do not deserve it, you’re an embarrassment, just stop talking, do not say another fucking word about these franchises until you do your fucking homework, until you actually watch, read, absorb and understand the properties you’re supposed to know through and through, but you don’t and you won’t, it’s evident enough you’re only in this for ideology or your backward message, so just get the fuck out of my face, I hate to read such bullshit and I hate your ideology that you suck off whenever you can, stop implanting this woke religion in everything you do and find a hobby for yourselves, get a job and go to work in a dungeon like I do…But they won’t shut up, Lindsey says more from the same article:-
“Tolkien is for everyone. His stories are about his fictional races doing their best work when they leave the isolation of their own cultures and come together.” – Lindsey Weber
Okay, why bring this up? Tolkien, and you may look a gasp at this, but Tolkien is not for everyone you cultist, stop preaching your inclusivity. Don’t get me wrong, there are millions of LOTR fans out there, millions, but there is also an ocean of people who don’t like it, who it does not resonate with my elder brother being one of them, he really isn’t into it, and that is fine, that is what I come to expect from anything created, you will never, (I repeat) NEVER create a work that satisfies everyone, exclusivity is an innate part of ALL art and again, I am shocked, genuinely shocked to sit here, at my desk with a broken laptop, in a tiny little house one that I can barely afford and feel the need to teach you snobs this fundamental lesson…But you’re not going to read this, are you Lindsey, or Kathleen, you’ve made too much money, you’re too busy wrecking legacies and pushing a backward religion, but on the off chance that you are reading these words, I hope it’s worth it to you, I want you to know that you were responsible for besmirching, disrespecting and ultimately staining relics of the past, stories that gave the world more than you ever could, stories created by men (and I know you hate that word and this reality) with more integrity, passion, motivation, honour and wisdom than you will ever know, you hold this trophy one not made out of gold, but of shame, congratulations, I’m sick of it. I’m sick of seeing things like this, having to put up with such idiots talking about diversity, inclusion, and equality from deluded racist ideologs, and I mean that – Because if we were to take this SJW narrative on its face, you would not see them do what they’re doing to my culture to cultures from say Africa, you wouldn’t see it. Personally, I would like to see more movies on African history I think that would be really cool, but we’re not getting anything of the sort, at least nothing worth noting as far as I can see, I mean we are getting something called The Woman King, but when a notable error appears in the title of your movie, when you flip history on its face presenting evil people as noble people, I can hardly take it seriously, but I’d like to see more depictions of other races, other cultures, and tribes, I am fascinated with Japanese culture for instance, but we’re not getting them, why? Because the people who are making these shows and films, those who are in charge of these huge properties would rather dress black people up in white face, they believe (I don’t believe this) that they’re only relevant when their diversity hires are shown in European media, thinking that they’ve made it only when they appear in the place of a white person! To think this is fucking disgusting, it’s abhorrent and they can’t even see what they’re doing is fundamentally racist! It’s gross, I cannot get away from it fast enough but everywhere I turn I see it and when people wonder why I want no part in these butchered franchises like Marvel and Lucasfilm, when I state I want nothing to do with these woke remakes, their takeaway is “You must hate black people” or “You just hate women” NO! NO! NO! FUCKING IDIOTS! THESE PEOPLE ARE JUST USING RACE OR SEX TO MANIPULATE AND PUPPETEER YOU! It’s a mask to make you conform to THEIR POLITICS and you’re too blind to see it. God, this frustrates me beyond anything else, because I am painted as the villain by villains who’ve successfully manipulated the masses turning friends against friends, and I cannot stand it, it is even hard to fight this in the public space effectively because it looks on surface level I am punching down, which of course I am not, I mean after all I am taking on giants here!
So, what do we do, what do we normies do? Why do these people think this way? It’s through indoctrination as Yuri Bezmenov specified, the enemy has already infiltrated, they’re already inside the bastion and it is time to push back, harder than ever against those who push this ideological message found in books like White Fragility written by Robin DiAngelo and Critical Race Theory (CRT) authored by a number of writers, published in the mid-seventies, but for anyone reading this who hasn’t read or listened to anything by Alan Freeman, Derrick Bell, or Kimberle Crenshaw just to name off a few, the contributors of CRT, will come to the understanding that they believe that everything, and I mean everything from laws, principles, art and so on, is racially encoded, it’s an extremely American perspective, and this Social Justice movement, an affliction of American culture, and I apologise to any American reading this who opposes this stuff, I am not attacking you nor accusing you of being part of it, not at all, I like you and I want you to stay and hear me out, but overseas, the British do not have four to five-hundred years of racial slavery we’re the ones who policed the seas stopping this from happening; We do not have the guilt that comes along with this very recent history so I can understand that this notion is important to the US, to the American people, but this property, Tolkien’s work does not belong to you, this is old world English mythology, it does not speak to anything other than! Especially something that carries the cultural baggage of America. I am not saying Britain does not have its own burdens to bear or its fair share of wrong doings, we are by no means perfect but trying to stay on point; What the showrunners have essentially done, what Patrick Mckay, John D. Payne, and the executive producer Lindsey Weber of Rings of Power have done is they’ve torn pieces of Tolkien’s work out and colonised this English mythos with their own Americanisms. This does you no favours, this is insulting, but more importantly it makes you look ignorant (not the masses, just those responsible for the show), you’re ignorant of history, it shows you’re not very conversant with history that sits outside of your own framework, it is like you have no idea about what the ancient world looks like as if you’ve no concept of other cultures, and I find that remarkably strange. People often ask me how you know in a smug tone of voice, how do you know this is all political (beyond everything we have talked about) and I point to what they say, they after all admit to it in an article where they address Lord of the Rings biggest flaw:-
“A common complaint is that these female characters are few and far between, with males taking up almost every important role. And the same goes for Black characters, with all of the main races having fair skin. But luckily, Middle-earth seems to be moving away from this idea, as the recent promotional material for The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power reveals a wide range of diverse main characters.” – CBR Exclusives
I was unaware Lord of the Rings had big flaws, I mean I suppose you could argue that they left out Tom Bombadil and Goldberry, certain elements were gently lifted and changed to adapt the books to film effectively, but this is just par the course of making the switch from book to film, there is a right way to do it and a wrong way to do it; For example, when the fellowship run down a narrow corridor of stone steps when fleeing the Balrog in Moria and have nothing else happen; Having Arwen sing aloud when seeing a vision of her unborn son when leaving Rivendell; The age of Sam and Frodo (they are approx. fifty years old in the books); The lengthy inclusion of Tom Bombadil, having the Witch King know Eowyn is a female from the start, these are a few differences between what is in the books compared with the films, but Jackson and his team were equipped with the wisdom to weave the story into the art of film effectively without compromising the work as a hole or having to make huge changes that would do nothing but damage the story being told. It is brilliantly done when you consider the complexities of the books, the sheer amount of lore and world-building within them that Peter Jackson and his crew had to meticulously consider while staying true to the material is staggering. His films ARE the Lord of the Rings adapted to film, you’d be a fool to argue that, even Tolkien purists by majority are happy with the adaptation and it doesn’t earn that title simply because it has the rights, no, it earned it through the blood, the sweat and the tears that were needed to craft it, to spend so much time carving a masterpiece from a genius author who gave England a mythology, having to forge from scratch new technologies, employ an array of techniques just to capture the same magic and aesthetic you read when you first picked up the books. What Amazon have essentially done is be presented with the One Ring of power and immediately put it on in the hopes that they could use it to their own ends out of greed, but the ring cannot be wielded by you, nor by me, it has no other master other than J.R.R. Tolkien.
“We made a promise to ourselves at the beginning of the process that we weren’t going to put any of our own politics, our own messages, or our own themes into these movies. What we were trying to do was to analyse what was important to Tolkien and to try to honour that. In a way, we were trying to make these films for him, not for ourselves.” – Peter Jackson
I guess the only thing left to address now is…What do we do next, what do we do after having lost so many bastions in the past? How do we fight back while standing at the end on the final line that is Middle-Earth, the Grandfather of fantasy. The answer to this is difficult to answer, I needed time to consider the next few sentences, because when I look around, and see so much of what I love laying in ruin, or converted into something it is not, turning friends against one another just like Sauron would his followers into Orcs, they becoming a puppet to a faceless evil, yes, hope is hard to find when you’re exhausted, when you’re wounded and alone; “What can men do against such reckless hate?” Even I struggle to find strength, struggle to keep going when your enemies are closing in all around you, and powerful enemies they are with effective weapons, brute unyielding strength that dwarfs over anything and everything with more on the way…There is something I remember, something that they cannot take no matter how hard they try, and it’s in the hearts of stories, not just those written by me, but by all, those that talk of heroes standing on the precipice, who hold the line in the face of death, who throw themselves behind their gates of their fortress, because they are holding onto something:-
“It’s like in the great stories, the ones that really mattered, full of darkness and danger they were and sometimes you didn’t want to know the end, because how could the end be happy, how could the world go back to the way it was when so much bad had happened? But in the end, it’s only a passing thing, the shadow, even darkness must pass, a new day will come. And when the sun shines it will shine out the clearer, those were the stories that stayed with you that meant something, even if you were too small to understand why. But I think I do understand, I know now. Folk in those stories had lots of chances of turning back only they didn’t, they kept going because they were holding on to something…That there is some good in this world, and it’s worth fighting for” – Samwise the Brave
There comes a time when you’re tested, when your calling is clear, and you are pressed to make a choice. It is in that moment where you will meet your greatest adversary, the one who freezes your feet when you need to move who arrests your speech when you must speak, the one who will be forever with you should you not best him in this moment. On this day you will liberate yourself from the shackles of fear, and doubt and become the master of your own destiny or you’ll enslave yourself from within and be nothing more than a puppet. What would you rather be? The war maybe upon us, this might very well be the last bastion, but there are others, build them and build them with strength, do not bend the knee, do not let the wrong people in even when they speak with good intentions masking their evil deeds, stay true to yourself and your craft and never forget your gift that belongs to you, you too have the ability to wield a power unique to you and only you, worthy to find its way into the halls of our great ancestors. If enough people gather if enough of us spread the light upon those cursed with lies and deceit and we form a last alliance of men, we know as well as they know that the darkness does not stand a chance.
Do not subscribe to these people, do not watch their content, I’ve already unsubscribed from Prime, I cannot take my own work off of their shelves unfortunately otherwise no one can find my books, believe me I would if I could, but hopefully changes will be made in the future. Do not bow when they tell you to bow, gatekeep your properties to the highest degree and tell your stories with honesty, integrity, and most of all tell them with heart.
“There is always hope.” – Aragorn
Guys thank you for reading this enormous article today, one that really tested me. Arguably it has been the hardest I’ve ever written and easily one of the most important. I hope you found some value in it. I know this has been a long one, but for as long as it was to read, it took a very, very long time to write to make the deadline upon the release of Rings of Power, and it wasn’t easy, especially when my laptop broke down on me, twice, resulting in having to do it more than once often throughout the day and most of the night. I realise I’ve covered a lot of ground in this article which I am inclined to call a thesis, but if you feel like a certain section needs a little more coverage or perhaps a better explanation, do not hesitate to get in touch and ask a question or two. Furthermore, for the Tolkien and modernity experts I welcome challenge and course correction had I made any mistakes. I’ll be happy to go over them if any and make revisions at a later date if I am truly at fault, it is the only way we grow. Thanks again for reading, take care of yourselves, and I hope you come back for the next one.
..Happy 130rd Birthday Professor John Ronald Reuel Tolkien..
E-mail – taotome@outlook.com
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Author Page UK – https://www.amazon.co.uk/-/e/B01JMZ2BE6
Author Page US – https://www.amazon.com/-/e/B01JMZ2BE6
Twitter – @MegasTeque
The Irreplaceable: Final Fantasy VII – https://taoscribe.wordpress.com/2021/10/18/the-irreplaceable-final-fantasy-vii/
Event Horizon: Reviewed – https://taoscribe.wordpress.com/2022/07/25/event-horizon-reviewed/
Entertainment Weekly (source) – https://ew.com/tv/lord-of-the-rings-the-rings-of-power-numenor-first-look/
Bounding into Comics (source) – https://boundingintocomics.com/2022/02/16/j-r-r-tolkien-torched-a-lord-of-the-rings-film-treatment-for-being-treated-carelessly-recklessly-and-showing-no-evident-signs-of-any-appreciation-of-what-it-is-all-about/
The Tolkien Society/Fall of Numenor Press Release (source) -https://www.tolkiensociety.org/2022/06/new-tolkien-book-the-fall-of-numenor-to-be-published/
Letters of Tolkien (source) – https://tolkiengateway.net/wiki/The_Letters_of_J.R.R._Tolkien
Vanity Fair (source) – https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2022/02/10-burning-questions-about-amazons-the-rings-of-power
Yuri Bezmenov Full Interview (source) – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yErKTVdETpw
Matt Walsh Documentary Trailer What is a Woman? (source) –
Summer of Love and it’s Chaos! The Daily Surge (source) – https://dailysurge.com/2020/09/good-riddance-summer-of-love-and-its-chaos-lawlessness-wrap/
American Military News RAF pauses the hiring of white men (source) – https://americanmilitarynews.com/2022/08/report-uks-raf-pauses-hiring-white-men-they-deny-despite-diverse-workforce-goal/
LFB London Fire Brigade diversity (source) – https://www.london-fire.gov.uk/news/2020-news/july/london-fire-brigade-launches-its-diversity-and-inclusion-commitment-togetherness-strategy/
Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings Wikipedia (source) – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shang-Chi_and_the_Legend_of_the_Ten_Rings
Lindsey Weber Quote Indie Wire (source) – https://www.indiewire.com/2022/02/lord-of-the-rings-series-diverse-casting-backlash-1234698074/
Kathleen Kennedy Quote Superherohype (source) – https://www.superherohype.com/movies/472176-kathleen-kennedy-claims-star-wars-films-have-no-source-material
Lord of the Rings Biggest Flaw CBR Exclusives – https://www.cbr.com/rings-of-powers-fixing-lord-of-rings-lack-of-women-poc/
D.W.Gill
Taoteque: The Blog 