…I applaud the mad genius who convinced Jeff Bezos to turn what looked like a homebrew Lord of the Rings campaign using the 4e D&D rules into a major television series. Although your silver tongue is wasted upon such activities, my friend. You should be using your supernatural charm to promote something nobler, like clean water charities.
Seriously, this is a train wreck. I’m trying to decide if it’s enough of a train wreck to watch the second episode. Also: I get that JRR Tolkien never wanted to get into it, but humans and elves in his world must have banged. Like, a lot. And even then Tolkien kind of half-admitted it in canon:
At least the noble families, yeah.
That review was far more charitable than I was expecting. I’ve been eagerly awaiting this review, because I wanted to enjoy reading a savage beatdown of Amazon’s Tolkienian Travesty.
Yeah, the problem there is that this thing is isn’t really tripping my Tolkien-senses; it’s barely Tolkien-curious. I went batshit on Twitter over the name ‘Elanor Brandyfoot,’ though, if that helps. 🙂
That’s what really baffles me. They spent 1/4 Billion dollars on the Appendices?!? That’s enough material to paste the name on some random PrimeOriginal-level content and not much else, and it shows. Nerdy Youtube shorts like NPC Man have better results, probably *because* they had to budget.
Not just a quarter of a billion. They committed to a quarter of a billion PER SEASON- and plan at least four seasons.
And this is what they came up with. That their agenda is clear in that the minute Christopher Tolkien died they finally got going. That they eliminated Tom Shippey from the series as quickly as possible says a lot as well.
The thing is, I do not even blame Bezos for this dumpster fire- except in who he hired to do it. He obviously wanted to create a big, grand, epic series for his service. A halo brand to kind of show where amazon was at. He provided the capital.
The showrunners are who had the obvious and blatant agenda- and it is not even like they had the thought to do a well crafted story, set in tolkien’s world in name only and do their own thing. They did not have anything beyond just creating rubble and then making the rubble bounce. Bezos might as well have taken the money in 20s, set it in a big pile and reenacted the Dark Knight scene.
4e? that’s brutally harsh.
My last D&D campaign used AD&D 1st edition rules, so that particular slur sailed right over my head.
That supposedly is the edition where they let everybody have cool feats, just like in video games! …And not much else.
4e was, in a phrase, the illusion of choice. It was set up like an overly balanced computer game, with defined progression trees, and the difference between one DPS character and another being primarily description.
I hated 3e.
4e was too uninteresting to feel strongly about.