It would have been funny if they wrote it so that Florence Pugh turns out to have been a trad influencer in real life, who joined the simulation and had her memory wiped on purpose to make some kind of point, and that’s why her sexist 50s husband is a pretty boy who goes down on her all the time rather than, like,…

I want Alan Moore and Grant Morrison to have a televised wizard duel.

Moore wrote a subversion of the superhero genre, but the problem is that to write even an entertaining subversion you have to accept some of the premise. Watchmen makes the point that powerful vigilantes running free would actually be bad for society, but it still has to buy into the idea that some people are just so…

Frodo is the one who spends months carrying the ring while it is at its most dangerous. I think we’re supposed to count that towards his heroism; Tolkien tries to get across how damaging that experience was by describing how Frodo never actually fully physically or mentally recovered from it.

In fairness, Tony did try to get them some oversight, even if it didn’t work.

Bilbo/Frodo was like an 18th/19th century country squire, effectively the version of aristocracy that survived into the late modern period, whereas Aragorn and the like are the original medieval aristocrats. He’s definitely a rich guy with an outsized say in the Shire.

That said, it would be interesting to examine why AppleTV’s Blackbird didn’t get the same pushback; I suppose the real-life killer in that show was less famous than Dahmer, notably unattractive and his modus was less luridly morbid, making him probably less likely to attract fangirl/boy types, and it was the first TV a…

The Hannibal books/movies probably caused a bit of this by promulgating a popular image of serial killers as brilliant sophisticates with a twisted but consistent morality, rather than the unhinged necrophilic fuck-ups they usually are. 

I know Tolkien had some conflicted feelings about the orcs, because he wrote them as NPC antagonists but developed a Christian-lite theology for his world in which only Iluvatar could make sentient life and nothing sentient could be without the possibility of redemption. But putting that aside, there’s really nothing…

They’ll make something that can do chores in a lab environment at 1/10th speed, using the exact same objects every time that are covered in april tags and set up in the same position each time inside tape outlines, and then they’ll milk the videos for years.

Is most of the Pharazon stuff in the Silmarillion rather than the appendices? I know Pharazon does some conniving to attain power, but I thought he was supposed to be a force of nature, world conqueror figure rather than the smarmy politician they present him as.

Wasn’t there an elf lineage that just kind of went off somewhere and was never mentioned again?

Sauron isn’t supposed to know about hobbits until the LoTR, I thought?

You’re never going to find a historical badass warrior culture that isn’t also terrible by modern ethical standards. Societies develop warrior castes to advantage their own societies, and even if they only intended it for self defense, the warrior caste itself quickly starts calling the shots. Writers have to either…

I heard somebody on reddit say that you probably need to do a rah-rah, hollywood version of the story just to get it into the public consciousness so that a more historically accurate, morally ambiguous version can be made 10-20 years later. Think how much viking media had to be made before we got The Northman.

Yeah, people accused the profile of being mean-spirited, and it probably was a bit, but it seemed like the writer went to write a normal profile, talked to all Strong’s friends and coworkers, and just ended up taken aback at what an intense weirdo he turned out to be.

The manicure scene was good. They really milked the creepiness of cutting someone’s fingernails. The rest was a bit bleh.

Love a cool animatronic monster, but wow is it hard to have them not look a little cheesy. Between the limits of puppetry and the fact that humans are wired to look for human features and fixate on slight aberrations, it’s no surprise that successful horror movies have tended to go with uncanny-valley-looking humans…

As I recall, there was an offshoot of the elves that basically went off somewhere in the First Age and was never heard from again. The writers could easily have said that they went south to Harad or one of the other Africa/Asia analogues that Tolkien left as blank slates. In Tolkien’s mythology, the elves basically…

I’ve heard people say that adult Catholic converts should have just gotten into Warhammer instead and it would have filled the same void.