Well by all means write your own stories!!! Crap like this makes me immediately not want to watch anything with a black/female lead or cast because I question the motives or if it’s a lecture on race or sexism but if someone I trust recommends it I’ll check it out. Well anything prior to 2014 I’ll give a chance and Denzel has an exception. I also ordered the first comic book of the Rippaverse because I feel he has earned that much. But honestly if a black dude or a woman was actually a good writer it would be hard to get traction because of this. People are turned off by this after it happens all the time. The obsession with putting blacks and women in everything is beyond ridiculous. Someone once told me “white ppl don’t have to be in everything”. I said that’s true but it applies across the board.
Sorry for my rant. I’m so tired of this. Yes GRRM okayed this but forgive me for being cynical but since you get awards based on diversity you can’t tell me he just decided the dude was the best for the job.
I’ve been reading sci-fi and fantasy for years. Never once whined about representation. I must be a unicorn. Lol
I've been going through old 50s and 60s sci fi movies. Low tech, but generally quality writing, and no more ridiculous than what Hollywood churns out today.
Almost exclusively white (probably Jewish) people though. Very problematic.
Same. Mostly watch old stuff. My general rule of thumb is avoid stuff after 2014 unless someone I trust recommends it. As a life long reader of sci-fi and fantasy as well as comic books there are so many old books and comic books that I’ll spend the rest of my life reading them. Same with old movies and tv shows. Plus the free streaming apps and you tube have a lot of older BBC stuff.
If it’s entertaining I’ll watch. I tell the ppl obsessed with representation to find content that has the perfect diversity they are seeking. Leave the classics alone
Do not go gentle into that good night. Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
They can call us all manner of names under the sun but all that will do is devalue more and more names. Now everyone is a racist, or sexist, or incel, or deplorable. Soon there will be a new word because the current ones no longer work. The more people tarred with the mislabelled brushes the more people will realise the mob cannot be sated and that nothing will ever be good enough to stop it.
If they say we are to be an -ist because wokesters are utterly shit at writing while pissing all over long term fans' hobbies then we will be -ists because sooner rather than later we will get called it anyway.
Very true. Just makes me mad we are called horrible things for not liking it when corporate clowns who don’t care about the IP take over. Plus there have always been minorities and women in the hobbies. They just act like evil white men are what nerds are when it’s one of the most open things when you show an interest in the hobby
Also it's cash into his pockets. It's also his last paycheck, because his book will either never come out (or will be ripped to shreds by the public) and this show will fail, due to the ending of GoT.
I can respect the grift.
I never paid attention to race in media until the wokesters started whining about it. Now I'm extremely wary of anything new with a minority even though I am one too. I just expect it to be shit and full of "magical negro" syndrome where the racial minority is super special and solves all the problems by being a fountain of wisdom.
Yes! Or it rehashes slavery or civil rights movement. Like I said someone I trust needs to recommend it. Same here I’m black and I’m tired of it. I did buy Eric July’s comic. Well I ordered it. Ships in august. You familiar with him?
Only a little through FNT. I'm not pre ordering but I'll probably check out his comic at some point because it looks interesting. I'm also black I just forget that not everyone here is from the og KiA so I don't usually state it
Yes! You are right about non whites in Ice and Fire world. Also there are the summer isles which is essentially Africa. A story based on Gilgamesh would be cool actually. I think I mentioned to you I’m working on a satire where a Shaka Zulu movie is being done and they hire a Scandinavian woman to play Shaka Zulu
Idea: one of the requirements is that she must speak Zulu; she can only pretend but that's OK since the translator who translates the script also only pretends and in fact wrote nonsense.
Good point. I’ve done some writing. Mainly trippy sci fi but this is tough to do comedy. I may do a big outline and consult someone. But that’s the premise. I want to mock the current Hollywood mindset and race/gender swapping obsession. In my mind I can see “Shaka Zulu” riding with the Zulu nation to fight neighboring tribes.
I hate how they're doing this to LoTR now that the family is dead and Amazon is going to butcher it.
I said the same things as you as well. LoTR is a vast world and Tolkien extensively outlined Middle Earth but didn't have much to say about the rest of said world. Amazon had a huge variety of stories they could make about non white characters. There are stand ins for Asian and African and middle eastern people in his books.
But no, instead of taking their creative license and exploring what those kingdoms could be like, they decided to fuck with the groups that are extensively outlined in multiple books, change ethnicities, and appear to generally butcher the series.
There's this amazing mod for the original Rome: Total War (a game that's almost twenty years old but still boasts a modding community many times larger than those of later TW games) that's made as a hypothetical sequel to the events of Lord of the Rings, appropriately titled Fourth Age: Total War. It was painstakingly put together by fans for free over 12 years (2007-2019, when the last patch came out) based on nothing more than Tolkien's scant few notes for a 'New Shadow' sequel which he ended choosing to never write, the appendices of Return of the King (same source Amazon is supposedly relying upon for Rings of Power) and the general lore in addition to their own conjecture for how a Fourth Age Middle-earth might look.
It's a decade-spanning labor of love and it shows, being one of the best LOTR games I've ever played. I have no doubt that vastly more care & passion went into it than Rings of Power, even though the creators had no more lore to work with than Amazon and probably actually a bit less (as I said, Tolkien barely wrote anything about his 'New Shadow' before deciding that actually he didn't want to write a sequel to LOTR after all). Their love for the Professor's work has not abated and now even though development on FATW is over, the dev team has immediately segued into making another LOTR mod for RTW set in a more canonical timeframe which has more lore in it, the Wainrider invasion during which Gondor was badly mauled and Arnor was already on its last legs.
I have no doubt that if Amazon possessed even one hundredth of the talent, determination and passion of this handful of devs on a dying forum for a nearly 20-year-old game, they wouldn't be getting a hundredth of the shit they're rightfully getting for Rings of Power, billion dollar budget or no.
You are forgetting that they don't use the actual definition of diversity. Diversity to libtards means "not white people". If you have a show that is all black or all brown people and add a white person, you're "reducing diversity" rather than increasing it, in their terms.
Obviously that isn't what diversity means, but you can't expect English majors to be able to read.
Unfortunately Martin's world is poorly constructed, and the societies of Essos & Sothoryos make even less sense than the worst parts of Westeros' worldbuilding. The Dothraki for example, with their insistence on fighting unarmored and charging headlong into enemy formations over & over as their primary tactic (most infamously doing that eighteen times against an Unsullied phalanx, resulting in their crushing defeat even though they outnumbered those Unsullied like 8:1), should not realistically pose a threat to any enemy past the Stone Age.
Also, GRRM has been catching increasingly vitriolic attacks for 'orientalism' over the years thanks to how he depicts Essos/Sothoryos as, bluntly, a jumble of the most negative Victorian Era stereotypes of peoples like the Mongols & ancient Carthaginians than anything remotely accurate or sensible, when he isn't just writing a big question mark over them and declaring them to be a mysterious land that nobody sane would want to explore (Asshai, Sothoryos). I don't like it either (because it's shit worldbuilding) but I wouldn't call him a fascist over it as SJWs have and I can imagine why he wouldn't want to show, say, the Ghiscari in all their harpy-haired, stilt-walking, puppy-eating glory these days. Man almost certainly doesn't have it in him to muster up even the slightest response to the hate he'd get for it.
"We wanted to find a way to put diversity in the show, but we didn't want to do it in a way that felt like it was an afterthought or, worse, tokenism."
So, you want to add your token black people to meet a Woke Quota, but don't want to get accused of trying to meet a Woke Quota? Sounds like you failed
In English: according to them (and according to other woke sjws), nonwhite people are not able to write stories, nonwhite people don't have any stories about themselves etc. Interesting.
I am actually not sure what's wrong with dramatizing African stories. I read some of them in school. They exist. Stuff that the old griot recounts, from any culture, doesn't have quite the flair of a Hollywood movie, but it's not like they're beyond "makin' shit up."
Fair enough. Leave it to Hollywood/Burbank to sex everything up.
But on the other hand, I hate being blue-balled when it comes to long, involved stories (which is one of the things that bugs me greatly about modern serialization of all things "television"; I'm at the point where I don't really want to invest in anything until I'm sure the writers are going to be allowed to finish their stories.)
This kills what ever hype I had left for the end of Song of ice and fire
As revealed in the EW article, the decision to show House Velaryon as the first Black family with significant power in Westeros came from Martin himself
We wanted to find a way to put diversity in the show, but we didn't want to do it in a way that felt like it was an afterthought or, worse, tokenism.
So what you did was turn white characters black to fill your quota, because that is somehow not tokenism?
Brilliant move there, geniuses.
According to Condal, Martin toyed early on with the idea of depicting the Velaryons as Black conquerors who came to Westeros from the west
According to that lazy fat fuck, he initially thought of making Valyrians as a whole black, yes. But he ultimately didn't, he made them particularly fair-skinned even by Westeros standards. So get fucked with that disingenuous bullshit.
So what you did was turn white characters black to fill your quota, because that is somehow not tokenism?
The 'diversity and inclusion' doctrine is literally tokenism. That's why you never hear anyone say that word any more - they know what it used to be called and how it used to be mocked. This guy fucked up by reminding people the word exists at all. He's probably a recent convert to the church who doesn't know the proper prayers.
Well by all means write your own stories!!! Crap like this makes me immediately not want to watch anything with a black/female lead or cast because I question the motives or if it’s a lecture on race or sexism but if someone I trust recommends it I’ll check it out. Well anything prior to 2014 I’ll give a chance and Denzel has an exception. I also ordered the first comic book of the Rippaverse because I feel he has earned that much. But honestly if a black dude or a woman was actually a good writer it would be hard to get traction because of this. People are turned off by this after it happens all the time. The obsession with putting blacks and women in everything is beyond ridiculous. Someone once told me “white ppl don’t have to be in everything”. I said that’s true but it applies across the board.
Sorry for my rant. I’m so tired of this. Yes GRRM okayed this but forgive me for being cynical but since you get awards based on diversity you can’t tell me he just decided the dude was the best for the job.
I’ve been reading sci-fi and fantasy for years. Never once whined about representation. I must be a unicorn. Lol
No need to apologize. We all are.
I've been going through old 50s and 60s sci fi movies. Low tech, but generally quality writing, and no more ridiculous than what Hollywood churns out today.
Almost exclusively white (probably Jewish) people though. Very problematic.
Same. Mostly watch old stuff. My general rule of thumb is avoid stuff after 2014 unless someone I trust recommends it. As a life long reader of sci-fi and fantasy as well as comic books there are so many old books and comic books that I’ll spend the rest of my life reading them. Same with old movies and tv shows. Plus the free streaming apps and you tube have a lot of older BBC stuff.
If it’s entertaining I’ll watch. I tell the ppl obsessed with representation to find content that has the perfect diversity they are seeking. Leave the classics alone
No.
They can call us all manner of names under the sun but all that will do is devalue more and more names. Now everyone is a racist, or sexist, or incel, or deplorable. Soon there will be a new word because the current ones no longer work. The more people tarred with the mislabelled brushes the more people will realise the mob cannot be sated and that nothing will ever be good enough to stop it.
If they say we are to be an -ist because wokesters are utterly shit at writing while pissing all over long term fans' hobbies then we will be -ists because sooner rather than later we will get called it anyway.
Very true. Just makes me mad we are called horrible things for not liking it when corporate clowns who don’t care about the IP take over. Plus there have always been minorities and women in the hobbies. They just act like evil white men are what nerds are when it’s one of the most open things when you show an interest in the hobby
Of course GRRM OK'd it, he'd be crucified if he didn't.
Also it's cash into his pockets. It's also his last paycheck, because his book will either never come out (or will be ripped to shreds by the public) and this show will fail, due to the ending of GoT.
I can respect the grift.
I never paid attention to race in media until the wokesters started whining about it. Now I'm extremely wary of anything new with a minority even though I am one too. I just expect it to be shit and full of "magical negro" syndrome where the racial minority is super special and solves all the problems by being a fountain of wisdom.
Yes! Or it rehashes slavery or civil rights movement. Like I said someone I trust needs to recommend it. Same here I’m black and I’m tired of it. I did buy Eric July’s comic. Well I ordered it. Ships in august. You familiar with him?
Only a little through FNT. I'm not pre ordering but I'll probably check out his comic at some point because it looks interesting. I'm also black I just forget that not everyone here is from the og KiA so I don't usually state it
I don’t either unless it’s relevant. I discovered a lot of people through FNT. Him being one.
Yes! You are right about non whites in Ice and Fire world. Also there are the summer isles which is essentially Africa. A story based on Gilgamesh would be cool actually. I think I mentioned to you I’m working on a satire where a Shaka Zulu movie is being done and they hire a Scandinavian woman to play Shaka Zulu
Idea: one of the requirements is that she must speak Zulu; she can only pretend but that's OK since the translator who translates the script also only pretends and in fact wrote nonsense.
Good point. I’ve done some writing. Mainly trippy sci fi but this is tough to do comedy. I may do a big outline and consult someone. But that’s the premise. I want to mock the current Hollywood mindset and race/gender swapping obsession. In my mind I can see “Shaka Zulu” riding with the Zulu nation to fight neighboring tribes.
I hate how they're doing this to LoTR now that the family is dead and Amazon is going to butcher it.
I said the same things as you as well. LoTR is a vast world and Tolkien extensively outlined Middle Earth but didn't have much to say about the rest of said world. Amazon had a huge variety of stories they could make about non white characters. There are stand ins for Asian and African and middle eastern people in his books.
But no, instead of taking their creative license and exploring what those kingdoms could be like, they decided to fuck with the groups that are extensively outlined in multiple books, change ethnicities, and appear to generally butcher the series.
There's this amazing mod for the original Rome: Total War (a game that's almost twenty years old but still boasts a modding community many times larger than those of later TW games) that's made as a hypothetical sequel to the events of Lord of the Rings, appropriately titled Fourth Age: Total War. It was painstakingly put together by fans for free over 12 years (2007-2019, when the last patch came out) based on nothing more than Tolkien's scant few notes for a 'New Shadow' sequel which he ended choosing to never write, the appendices of Return of the King (same source Amazon is supposedly relying upon for Rings of Power) and the general lore in addition to their own conjecture for how a Fourth Age Middle-earth might look.
It's a decade-spanning labor of love and it shows, being one of the best LOTR games I've ever played. I have no doubt that vastly more care & passion went into it than Rings of Power, even though the creators had no more lore to work with than Amazon and probably actually a bit less (as I said, Tolkien barely wrote anything about his 'New Shadow' before deciding that actually he didn't want to write a sequel to LOTR after all). Their love for the Professor's work has not abated and now even though development on FATW is over, the dev team has immediately segued into making another LOTR mod for RTW set in a more canonical timeframe which has more lore in it, the Wainrider invasion during which Gondor was badly mauled and Arnor was already on its last legs.
I have no doubt that if Amazon possessed even one hundredth of the talent, determination and passion of this handful of devs on a dying forum for a nearly 20-year-old game, they wouldn't be getting a hundredth of the shit they're rightfully getting for Rings of Power, billion dollar budget or no.
You are forgetting that they don't use the actual definition of diversity. Diversity to libtards means "not white people". If you have a show that is all black or all brown people and add a white person, you're "reducing diversity" rather than increasing it, in their terms.
Obviously that isn't what diversity means, but you can't expect English majors to be able to read.
Unfortunately Martin's world is poorly constructed, and the societies of Essos & Sothoryos make even less sense than the worst parts of Westeros' worldbuilding. The Dothraki for example, with their insistence on fighting unarmored and charging headlong into enemy formations over & over as their primary tactic (most infamously doing that eighteen times against an Unsullied phalanx, resulting in their crushing defeat even though they outnumbered those Unsullied like 8:1), should not realistically pose a threat to any enemy past the Stone Age.
Also, GRRM has been catching increasingly vitriolic attacks for 'orientalism' over the years thanks to how he depicts Essos/Sothoryos as, bluntly, a jumble of the most negative Victorian Era stereotypes of peoples like the Mongols & ancient Carthaginians than anything remotely accurate or sensible, when he isn't just writing a big question mark over them and declaring them to be a mysterious land that nobody sane would want to explore (Asshai, Sothoryos). I don't like it either (because it's shit worldbuilding) but I wouldn't call him a fascist over it as SJWs have and I can imagine why he wouldn't want to show, say, the Ghiscari in all their harpy-haired, stilt-walking, puppy-eating glory these days. Man almost certainly doesn't have it in him to muster up even the slightest response to the hate he'd get for it.
So, you want to add your token black people to meet a Woke Quota, but don't want to get accused of trying to meet a Woke Quota? Sounds like you failed
In English: according to them (and according to other woke sjws), nonwhite people are not able to write stories, nonwhite people don't have any stories about themselves etc. Interesting.
And yet they love bastardizing classics from Europe
I am actually not sure what's wrong with dramatizing African stories. I read some of them in school. They exist. Stuff that the old griot recounts, from any culture, doesn't have quite the flair of a Hollywood movie, but it's not like they're beyond "makin' shit up."
If you thought the last season of GoT was a disaster, wait until you see the woke prequel.
fanfiction made by non-fans.
Glad I never bothered. The first I heard of it, it sounded like a goddamn porno wrapped up in medieval make-up. No thanks.
First time watching HBO?
That's literally why they exist.
Barbarians at the Gate was pretty clean.
Fair enough. Leave it to Hollywood/Burbank to sex everything up.
But on the other hand, I hate being blue-balled when it comes to long, involved stories (which is one of the things that bugs me greatly about modern serialization of all things "television"; I'm at the point where I don't really want to invest in anything until I'm sure the writers are going to be allowed to finish their stories.)
I couldn't get into the series and I'd read much better books that did gritty politics in a fantasy setting
This kills what ever hype I had left for the end of Song of ice and fire
For me it was the (ongoing) 11+ year wait for the next book plus the arrogance of its writer.
Stop capitalizing "black," you grammar-raping ideologue fuckwits.
Medieval lip gloss is okay tho.
So what you did was turn white characters black to fill your quota, because that is somehow not tokenism?
Brilliant move there, geniuses.
According to that lazy fat fuck, he initially thought of making Valyrians as a whole black, yes. But he ultimately didn't, he made them particularly fair-skinned even by Westeros standards. So get fucked with that disingenuous bullshit.
The 'diversity and inclusion' doctrine is literally tokenism. That's why you never hear anyone say that word any more - they know what it used to be called and how it used to be mocked. This guy fucked up by reminding people the word exists at all. He's probably a recent convert to the church who doesn't know the proper prayers.
I’ve reimagined the likelihood of me ever watching this garbage. The chance is now zero.
Are there really so many shows these days that are a "bunch of white people" on screen. Cuz they all seem like they have diversity quotas to me.