I’m always thrilled to see a great character, man, woman, child, Tabaxi, I don’t care. My issue with RoP is that Galadriel is obnoxious. The writers failed at the central task of writing—making a character the audience will sympathize with and root for. Who would root for that creature they put on screen? Didn’t they learn ANYTHING from the way audiences responded to Ray and Captain Marvel?
I had not heard the Tolkien estate was suing. What is their claim exactly? Seems you’d have to prove harm rather than stupidity, and being generous as I am, I was thinking the latter.
How do we get out of this mess, where writers can’t tell what is a compelling story? Eventually the kiddy woke self-righteousness will wear off. Seems to be dying in Europe already. That does not however automatically restore to us quality storytelling. It feels like the art is dying. That can’t be, but it sure as hell is very sickly. Don’t even get me started on Marvel and the Eternals.
I had not heard that 40k was associated with nazis. It is presenting all of humanity as sickly and dystopian. Seems too much. One can only hope they’ll tone down the twisted stuff somehow. I’m frankly a little surprised Cavill bit. He seems to only go for franchises he loves. He’d be much better off with FASA’s original Battletech and the resulting Mechwarrior than 40k, IMHO. That also had good personal stories and was not nearly so dark. Also if you’ll recall, there was a cartoon series way back called “ExoSquad” which was pretty cool and didn’t paint all humanity as lost in horror.
Going in reverse order, sorry it's rather late here. Or early, even lol
Never heard of ExoSquad, gotta look it up!
Oooh, Battletech/Mechwarrior show, now that could be something! You could do GoT style drama without the over the top sexual content and the violence just for the shock value, but with all the same drama of houses and backstabbing and so on, along with a bunch of cool mech battles!
I've seen several articles over the years from the usual suspects that the Imperium is just fascistic which in their book equals nazis so everyone who likes it is also one. You know, the same kind of big outlets that wrote about how Kingdome Come Deliverance was a racist game for not including black ppl in an Eastern European historically accurate middle age setting.
Especially around the time when GW started going with The Message, with the usual "we are all about inclusivity except if you are a ..." as in you don't agree with the message, and started striking non-woke/non-extreme-leftist Warhammer lore YT channels and such. It was a whole mess, they lost a lot of goodwill and creators. They wanted to play like the big boys , so they gotta virtue signal eh?
Then lets not even mention Warhammer Plus, the service that was supposed to pick up all the fan-artists like the guy who made Astartes. They struck a bunch of channels again, basically purging popular fan created content off of YT and social media as much as they could, hired a few of them, and then let them go. The service is being discontinued as of next year I think. They ruined the lives and livelihoods of their biggest fans for literally nothing.
They also went after 3D printed models*. This I can understand, because it is entirely possible to buy a decent printer for a couple hundos, buy a model pack for another 20, and print your whole army with the same level of detail as the originals, instead of spending that money in the official store.
But the way they did it was rather stupid. They wanted anything and everything off of sites that sold 3d models for printing, that even vaguely resembled their models. One of the creators took them to court, and won! GW apparently thought that they own the rights to basic concepts such as large pauldrons and pointy ears, and had their ass handed to em by the court. Since then they've cut back on pestering the printing community.
Yeah I understand that you would rather see something not so dark as 40K. Daily life is dystopian enough as it is lol
That said, as I think back my criticism when the first poster of Cavill as Geralt was revealed was that he is too bright and shiny for this role. Not dark and gritty enough. He would make a great actual Superman instead of the brooding emo kid he had to play. But he did his best as Geralt and he was believable. He smiled a tiny bit too much but that was it, otherwise he was rather dark and emotionless as he was supposed to be. It clearly showed that he was not bullshitting us about loving the game and the books. So if he wants to go with 40K which he seemingly is into as much as The Witcher, I'm all for it. I believe he could pull it off.
I don't know the exact details, just heard rumors and not just from random youtubers but people in the industry that Amazon is in deep shit with the Estate. They didn't own the rights to certain characters, one of them I think might be the Not-Gandalf who is clearly Gandalf, and they most certainly took liberties with some story elements that they didn't own either that if were canonized would make the events of LoTR impossible to happen. Even just the fact that they messed up the timeline so badly might be actionable if it broke some clause in the purchase. We will have to wait and see. One thing is for sure, the estate and the investors are not pleased with how this turned out. It should've been an era defining show, instead it was a fart in the wind.
How we get out of this mess is with time, as you said. Shits hitting the fan, the world will burn again, and then renew again. It's the way things were and always will be it seems. I just hope we get through the burning part without loosing much skin lol
Point is, creative types will change their tone and circle back to something we find more appealing. Look at video games, at first it was colorful, mostly because of the technical limitations but also becasue it was supposed to be fun, then it all went muddy grey desaturated as it was still supposed to be fun but more serious, and now everything's swimming in HDR colors again as ppl got bored of the previous and the tech has come a long way. There are still great stories and a ton of crap, as is usual. Same thing will happen with movies and shows.
* CIG kinda did the same when they signed that company in the UK to make 3d printed models for them, but the cost of those is ridiculous considering it's just a resin print, especially with all the taxes and shipping, and it's basically dead at this point. We still only got the 4 or 5 models they did years ago and that's it. What actually smart companies do is they promote printing by selling official digital models to print. They could make soo much more money just off of selling ship model files instead of the physical goods. Lets say 5-20 bucks if you payed for the ingame ship already, 20-100 if you don't and just want the model. I'd buy a fully detailed 890 jump for 60 bucks in a heartbeat, and I wouldn't be alone in this. It would mean work and pay for like 2-3 people but any junior 3d artist could do it along with someone who has experience in printing. It would pay for itself easily and it would be an extra revenue stream for the long run... anyways, I've gone quiet off-topic here.
