Extreme opinions and rapid emotional reactions emerge in the debates, even if they are expressed only by a fraction of the audience measured in per mille.
Fans are angry because modern moralism has ruined it JRR Tolkien heritage. Headlines along these lines have been read in the world media over the past week, as produced by Amazon The Tale of the Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power –the trailer for the series was released on February 14th.
The truth behind the headlines is different.
From the world’s most expensive TV series, which starts in September The Tale of the Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power has seen a 60-second ad and a series of images. As is often the case with genre entertainment, the loudest ones reported that the series had failed based on such evidence. Outrage was reported loudly on the internet because it is customary to do so now when you feel bad.
This time the reasons for feeling bad are mainly that the elf woman has armor, the dwarf woman has no beard and most of all the fact that the brown woman depicts the dwarf and the black man the elf. There are still a lot of people in the world who want to keep their fantasies white.
In the chain of events recurring structural problems in our media system. First, the angry unravel their feelings in the echo chambers of forums and Twitter. The impression is that “all the fans agree on this”. Youtube channels and news pages that specialize in genre entertainment, whose click-through rates and thus revenue streams often depend on following the opinions of fans, are associated with reproducing extreme views. The cycle feeds itself. Thanks to the algorithms, this stratification of the initial reaction emerges and gives the impression that this is the main content of the discussion on the topic. The big media deliveries draw a conclusion, fans are not happy – this is news.
Is not.
Most of the audience is curious and can wait until the series is released before forming an opinion. The series has a budget of $ 1 billion, with the advice of experienced screenwriters and Tolkien experts at their disposal. It still involves big potential problems. But time is running out.
Always has been a jealous fan guarding his favorite things. The problem arises from the fact that during the internet, people’s emotional reactions are considered news. Each media makes its own news choices. When I wrote a story about the series last weekI acknowledged this topic in one paragraph.
It’s about proportions and how easily they disappear. One could estimate that there are perhaps a hundred thousand of the loudest angers, based on Youtube comments, for example. The trailer for the new series has been viewed tens of millions of times. So this is a few per cent of the audience. Also, keep in mind that numbers are not always reliable. Negative feedback from viewers in recent years has often been mechanized and even automated. Especially when targeting non-whites and non-men.
Are the feelings and extremities of a small group in the news? If, in the name of fairness, a voice is given to racism for a small group, to the outbursts of anxious feelings and to the desire to own cultural works, all the conversation will be entangled in emotional and narrow-mindedness. Talking about the work itself becomes very difficult.
New the starting point of the series evokes emotions, of course. The richest man in the world Jeff Bezosin Amazon acquired the rights to Tolkien to allow its streaming service Prime to compete with Netflix and others. The same Amazon that deprives workers of their rights is now making Tolkien, the holiest, most modern TV series. Is it Tolkien anymore?
The comments on the Youtube ad copy the Tolkien quote in many languages, which is thought to describe how Amazon and political correctness destroy Tolkien’s legacy: “Evil cannot create anything new, they can only corrupt and ruin what the forces of good have invented or done. ”
Illustratively, the quote is not even Tolkien, but a linguistically clumsy abstract Lord of the Rings from the text.
It should be noted that there are also friends of Tolkien who criticize the new series, who just do not want changes to the “canon”. However, dramatization is always an interpretation made over time. Tolkien’s decades-long career and the texts edited by his son provide grounds for a wide variety of interpretations.
Where from will the desire to keep the fantasy world pure white?
Tolkien’s books are the products of their time, but their hearts are fundamentally multicultural. The different peoples, races and species of Central Earth understand how to work together. The fantasy world is diverse, as is this real world of ours. Most people in the real world are of a color other than Nordic white, so isn’t the world that is quite well received by a series that realizes this spirit.
After that, one can focus on the real issue that is worth the news. Is the series good?
#Columns #Tolkien #fans #fantasy #world #white #focusing #extremes #small #group #distorts #conversation
