Its definitely their little petri dish. I see a lot of stuff you have written about echoed by our local rep. She is a dirty lying racist grifter that parallels just about everything you’ve described in Lewiston.
Me too. I was hardcore Tolkienist when I was young.
I don’t make much Tolkien references about world politics though, since they don’t really make any sense.
I mean, Tolkien was great, but his world is as black and white as it can be, and most characters have clear roles as being ”good” or ”bad”. It does not really fit in to real world, except as shallow (but still funnish?) satire.
About the topic. There seems possibility that an actual social democrat is rising to the top in NYC. Any thoughts?
NYC is about to get shittier in a variety of ways and will hopefully serve as a lesson to the rest of the country.
Policy wise, Mandani isn’t too far off from an average Maine Democrat, but he leans much harder into outright Democratic Socialist rhetoric. He and Graham Platner here in Maine are in basic policy alignment, just packaged differently to appeal to different audiences.
I suspect most people would if they peer past the newspaper headlines, watch local and state government wherever possible, and pay attention to the policies that are enacted.
Maine and especially Lewiston Democrats aren’t brilliant people reasoning themselves into DSA policies. They are cunning and know how to follow a script, and it’s the same script being run on all of western civilization at the moment.
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As far as Tolkien goes, it is really quite an illustrative piece of the culture that has been an actual battleground in the culture wars, which is where the political relevance comes from.
Star Wars was first up on the chopping block, and they had way more success turning that world into a bunch of Democratic Socialists in space, still losing out on a lot of money in the process.
Rings of Power was so awful I couldn’t make it past the first episode, and I’m a guy who consumed nearly every piece of Tolkien media prior to that. I’ve read everything he wrote, own the animated adaptations, and even played the bad 1990’s video game adaptations.
The real Ring of Power in modern politics is race and now identity based social justice. Hitler wielded it to terrible effect, and the social and cultural imposition of woke Nazi ideas across German pop culture art (gleichschaltung) was quite similar to how modern woke social justice ideas have spread across our art, which is why our art has sucked so bad lately.
There is no woke Lord of the Rings, just like there is no Nazi Lord of the Rings, built from the ground up as politically charged artwork with broad levels of appeal. Like Morgoth twisting and torturing elves to create orcs, trying to fit Tolkien through a woke shaped hole resulted in a foul monstrosity that ultimately functions as a tool of dominating the world of men.
It isn’t a coincidence that our culture isn’t producing as much original artwork as it did in the 20th century and even the 00’s. We’re still making reboot after reboot while “reimagining” old franchises through a neo-Marxist lens.
Historically-speaking, we as a society were actually quite fortunate to have Peter Jackson’s brilliant filmmaking when we got it. The technology was mature enough to bring the world to life, stay quite faithful to Tolkien’s vision, and not be subjected to massive corporate pressure to incorporate modern social justice politics into the art. There was really only a 10-15 year window for that to happen the way it did.
Denis Villaneuve’s Dune adaptation exceeded my expectations, but even that couldn’t resist a race/gender swap with Dr. Kynes. Would LOTR have been ruined if Faramir was depicted as a black woman or Legolas as gay? Probably not, but it would’ve been a big WTF moment in the film that wouldn’t serve to enrich the story at all.
We got a gay dwarf in The Hobbit adaptation, along with a girl-boss wood elf character with an elf/dwarf romance that Tolkien never depicted at all. Gimli never tried to get into Galadriel’s pants in the books. That could’ve been a great adaptation, but it fell short in many ways, mostly by trying to scrape a little bit of butter over too much bread.
1917 was well-done overall, but depicting mixed race infantry units didn’t enrich the story at all when they were obviously just checking a diversity box for the sake of incorporating modern social justice politics into the art.
It appears as though that type of western woke gleichschaltung is on the decline. The last few films I’ve seen in theaters were all refreshingly free of over-the-top woke social justice themes. The Conjuring Last Rites didn’t have any, Superman barely had any that I could detect, and even Disney’s Lilo and Stitch was just a good film that I’d take any of my nieces or nephews to see.
It just gets worse. And apparently in the new season there’s some kind of Sauron and Saurman are brothers angle. It’s just a shitty money grab.
Yes. Audiance representation shouldn’t superceed the representation of the character.
I’d watch the hell out of a badass Shaka Zulu trilogy. Or something about the sacred band of Thebes.
Instead of this.
I just watched Nerdrotic’s reviews of Rings of Power, and maybe some Critical Drinker as well to get the gist of the rest of the series.
I think we’re due for an epic Mongolian film, like a Subutai biopic or something that depicts steppe nomads accurately without Tom Cruise or Kevin Costner becoming a better steppe nomad than any of the Asian guys.
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Wtf. I’ve luckily never watched the series.
Destroying The Foundation and The Witcher was enough for me. In 4 cases of 5, modern TV adaptations are terrible and very far from the original source.
I haven’t read The Wheel of Time, but I’ve understood that the adaptation is quite mediocre too.
I actually just watched the first part of the Jackson’s LOTR with my oldest. It still holds up as a great adaptation, even against the time.
I actually liked the Fallout series on Amazon, but I never really got into the lore beyond playing some of the games a bit when I was younger, so I’m not sure how accurate it is. It is literally the only new series I’m currently looking forward to.
Saruman and Sauron are kinda sorta brothers I guess, insomuch as they are both members of the same angelic order, but that would also mean that Gandalf and the Balrog are also brothers along with Radagast, which of course they were not at all.
I’m not sure Rings of Power can even be called a money grab, as I seriously doubt it made any. It is more like a vanity project that will hopefully come to represent the high water mark of wokeness in pop culture.
Somewhat related, for the first time in 35 years, there are no rap singles in the Billboard top 40. The entire genre has run such a strange course that somehow sapped all of the creative energy out of it when compared to what was being released in the 80’s and 90’s. Woke politics are only partially to blame for that phenomenon.
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There’s also the problem of lazy and stupid writing. I can take the gender swaps if they work, but the writing, dialogue and characters usually just suck in these adaptations.
Nobody has a problem with strong female characters, just make them well and don’t force them in some models they don’t fit. Critical Drinker had a good take about this when appraising Arcane (the first season was phenomenal).
Fallout was good. So was Arcane (mentioned above). But most adaptations seem to be terrible.
We’re not living a peak era of cinema, that’s for sure.
What were all the other ones?
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If I understood correctly he’s calling himself as a sos.dem. and is a part of the party.
It would not be a big news in Europe, but in US it kinda is.
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Basically he says the quiet part out loud and owns it.
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Exactly. Maine Democrats have been playing the game of implementing as much policy straight from the DSA’s platform as possible, all while pretending to be moderate Democrats and using extremely vague language, along with lots of plain old gaslighting. Maine’s largest city actually elected an open Democratic Socialist as mayor and currently has a council with open DSA members. As of today, Maine Democrats want us to believe that no public funds go to migrants, that our elections are secure, and that all of the radical policies they’ve enacted have nothing to do with the worsening conditions in Maine, which are the fault of billionaires who don’t live in Maine.
The big question is whether or not the entire party apparatus at the national level goes all-in on the woke DSA wing of the party. Harris was supposed to win, after all, and four more years of open borders overwhelming social services, driving up the cost of living, and generating massive dysfunction would’ve put us on a path that’s quite similar to the UK, which continues its descent into actual fascist levels of state control.
Will the Fetterman wing prevail? It might, in the long run, as Democrats’ ability to rig elections diminishes by the day. I’m very eager to see if voter ID passes the referendum here in Maine this week. If not, I think it’s time to start looking for work elsewhere. A de facto one party state of radical social justice warriors has never been a pleasant place to live.
Unfortunately, the part at the end where Lex Luther accuses Superman of being an alien invader, & Superman goes off on this rant about how he’s just like the rest of us….
@twojarslave this seemed like a not even thinly veiled message about illegals in our country, how the poor things are just like you and me. While neglecting all the negatives that go with it. At least Superman has a job, pays taxes, AND protects the entire world from harm. That’s an alien who is more than earning his keep!
Rings of Power was unwatchable
Yeah I remember that part of Superman but it struck me as vague enough to not be overtly woke. I can deal with a little bit of woke in film, especially if it is vague enough to be open to interpretation. It’s when they beat the audience over the head with it that drives me nuts, like re-writing Galadriel as a character into a petulant kung-fu fighting girl boss who is better than the boys at everything, or Rey not needing to train at all in the Star Wars debacles.
I even enjoy woke movies that are made well. Mad Max: Fury Road is one of my favorite films of the 21st Century but it didn’t beat audiences over the head with all of the feminist themes or by diminishing the character of Max.
Alien and Aliens are also great examples of strong, believable female characters, and so was the transformation of Sarah Conner as depicted in Terminator vs. in Terminator 2. She actually looked the part of a bitch who got really serious about fighting the machine overlords.
Give it 20 years or so and we’ll have movie villains who plot to overthrow the United States government by importing tens of millions of illegal immigrants with public money funneled through a shadowy network of NGO’s, who are then empowered to vote in blatantly rigged election systems. It’ll be hard to believe, but with good writing it could make for a great plot for James Bond reimagined as a Sri Lankan transgender trained in ninjitsu to thwart.
That made me LOL! That was good. And would the helper secret agents be social workers who sought to psychoanalyze the bad guys, trying to get to the root of their anger or world-domination goals?