Thread by @NonRadix

This diatribe of mine is less just about LOTR, and more about the dilemma of adaptations as the dominant IP production method of global visual media now. (A thread 🧵)

smh.com.au/culture/tv-and…

Perhaps this is the harsh truth: at this point, facilitated no less by people who never really cared about Tolkien beyond using his flaws to shore up the very voices of Mordor in the real world, criticism of this work will remain associated in bad faith. (cont.)

(The same is already occuring with #HouseOfTheDragon, yet perhaps it's story, attuned as it is to a post-20th century world--not to mention the still living author--is more amiable to it). [Cont.]

Let us not even talk about precisely how #MarvelStudios' eclectic and near-universal expansion across multiple genres means it's questions of representation and culture (with its built-in subtexts and prejudices) are becoming more and more forefront.

The fact that #MissMarvel and #SheHulkAttorneyAtLaw are massively pilloried for faults that also exist in other franchise entries also highlight this further.

Perhaps this is the contemporary burden of literature and fiction--wedded as they are to the empathy machine (cont.)

... subset of late-stage capitalism, replacing the wars of religion in centuries past. The attitudes and inability to tolerate interpretation over dogma/continuity as if it is not evolving is surprisingly consistent. (cont.)

Politics & religion has long been superseded as the "public opium". In a world where both have already failed humanity & living is becoming more and more a prolonged hangover/relapse, it is easier to stick to the shadows of the cave than risk exposure to white light. (Cont.)

Let it not be taken though that I am falling into the false of equivalence that "we fight too many culture wars at the expense of the political fights". The point of the current century is that we are fighting not only for the pockets and civil rights of people, ... (Cont.)

... but we are also currently fighting about the very means by which they dream—the way they will later be inspired to decide what they do with their lives & society. (For what, after all, are previous generations who grew up on young adult fiction [#TheHungerGames, ... (Cont.)

... even the now-faulty #HarryPotter franchise] taking pride in how they are glad to be taught that revolution is a right? Hell, this is as old as #StarWars and Vietnam and Afghanistan/Iraq. (cont.)

The much-contradictory Slavoj Zizek once said it is perverse how cinema teaches us how to desire. Me, someone who has much more questions after reading Zizek and every other theorist of different identities (yet still dominated by the dead and dying white men of canon)... (cont.)

... am inclined to wonder why exactly do we find perverse the singular act of dreaming a world better than what we see, or is pleasuring us right now. What is the point of dreaming a world not here if we don't even want to transform or defamiliarize what we see or know? (cont.)

TL: DR: maybe I am just too inclined and evangelized by the sheer openness of Neil Gaiman (@neilhimself)'s thinking that the desire to impose canon has always been about gatekeeping and power, inequalities we should be fighting. (cont.)

P.S. Ironically, look at how #TheSandmanNetflix's casting hubbubs cannot but only highlight how progressive its side of history has been for the past decade.