CondensedFoggyAggie said:
ABATTBQ11 said:
Yeah, there's nothing wrong with inclusion or representation, but it shouldn't be driving anything either. That's not racist or sexist, it's just a good ground rule for not making something ****ty and keeping priorities straight. If you are making changes to the source material, adding unnecessary scenes, or sacrificing scenes that build characters or plot so you can jump up and down and yell, "Look at us! Look how woke and diverse we are!" then you're probably going to put out some crap because the story, the characters, and the overall finished product isn't your focus.
Amazon could have easily made a generic fantasy epic with as much diversity as they wanted, and I wouldn't care. No one would they could have all of the black, Hispanic, Asian, Arabic, etc dwarves, elves, orcs, and whatever else that what and it wouldn't matter. There wouldn't be any problems because there would be no deviations from an existing source (though Tolkien himself would likely disagree and call it a travesty, that's a digression). Instead, they chose to POC-wash a well established and popular epic to ride its coattails. They tried really hard to make something great and replicate Jackson's LOTR trilogy, and the series certainly looks like a billion dollars, but ultimately what they got is The Hobbit that WB ****ed up with their artificial demands. This series feels like a slow, generic fantasy series with a huge budget and Tolkien's brand slapped on it, and based on the entirety of the changes and the concern for DEI instead of faithful storytelling, that's basically what it is.
I get that some changes would need to be made to tell this story in film. That's just the way it is for film adaptations of literary works. However, making inclusivity a goal is not one of them. Ever. For any adaptation. It's not helping the plot or character development fit into the time or visual constraints of the film medium. It's not visually expounding written narrations or histories. It's not summarizing long passages or simplifying plot points. It serves no purpose buy to make the creators feel better about themselves. If the original work isn't diverse enough for you, find another work or create your own original one.
If anyone doesn't like that opinion, sorry not sorry.
Well that was a confusing mess.
You just said there's nothing wrong with inclusion, then go on to complain about inclusion. You say if it's epic, diversity doesn't matter, then you say diversity isn't helping the plot or character development or 'visually expounding'.
I get it, everything wrong with the show you're blaming on inclusiveness. Or maybe you're blaming it because of inclusiveness.
Lucky for you and us, you don't have to watch it for whatever reason you want.
Reading is hard. I'll try to spell it out as simply as I can...
There's nothing wrong with inclusion and representation as long as you don't do it for its own sake.If you tell an author to go write a short story, of no more than 4000 words, in 90 minutes, you will likely get a decently developed and edited plot and characters because the author is allowed to focus on and develop whatever elements they feel are necessary in their limited timeframe. Now, do that same exercise and tell them that they must now include at least one trans character, 2 POC characters, and a strong female protagonist and you will likely get a pile of crap because the task has become fulfilling these constraints, not writing a good short story. Many of those 90 minutes become wasted on figuring out who these people are, why they are there, and what they're doing. Some of the narrative development must also be sacrificed to make sure they are adequately represented and not just passing mentions. That's why diversity for the sake of diversity as a requirement detracts from story development, not diversity in and of itself. I know that's a hard distinction to make, but I have faith in you.
As for
Quote:
You say if it's epic, diversity doesn't matter, then you say diversity isn't helping the plot or character development or 'visually expounding'.
it's not, "if it's epic, diversity doesn't matter," it's, "If it's
original, diversity doesn't matter." "They could have made
a generic fantasy epic... Instead, they chose to POC-wash a well established and popular epic." I can see how the original writing might be confusing, but the point is that if they wanted to make a fantasy series for the sake of a fantasy series with diversity, they should have just made their own instead of retooling an already well regarded work and trying to play on popularity built by someone else.
Modifications are always made when literary works are adapted to film, but they are
necessary to make the story fit properly into the differing constraints of a movie or show. For instance, Tolkien's LOTR trilogy separates what happens with Frodo and Sam from what happens with everyone else in separate books in The Two Towers and The Return of The King. This really wouldn't work theatrically, and Jackson's movies shift between these story lines instead of keeping them separate. That was a necessary change. Tom Bombadil being cut entirely was necessary to keep The Fellowship of the Ring concise and smooth. Those changes and others served a purpose that was central to fitting Tolkien's literary work into films.
In Amazon's case, they made a lot of changes to the timeline to compress what happens on a timescale of hundreds of years to a few years or months depending on how everything plays out. That's a necessary change, and fine, because a long timescale like that is impossible to communicate on film when characters aren't supposed to age and you don't have a narrator giving backstory and signaling changes. Now, insisting on a diverse looking cast serves what purpose on that translation, exactly? It has nothing to do with the plot, character development, timing, or really anything at all. It's diversity introduced for the sake of diversity. That's an unnecessary, and it's bad. Had Amazon made an original work and started out with, "We want to tell a story of diversity in a fantasy epic format," and gone from there with writing, casting, etc, no one would care what the cast looked like.
