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Monday, October 17, 2022

Links - 17th October 2022 (1 - Lord of the Rings)

Exclusive Scene From The Rings Of Power - YouTube - "In this exclusive scene from an upcoming episode of Amazon's new Lord of the Rings (?) show, Klovbar of Numenor is ready to face orcs, trolls, and oliphaunts - but is he ready to face the racism inside his heart?"

The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power is kind of a catastrophe - "There are ways to do a prequel, and The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power does them all wrong. It takes six or seven things everyone remembers from the famous movie trilogy, adds a water tank, makes nobody fun, teases mysteries that aren't mysteries, and sends the best character on a pointless detour... J.R.R. Tolkien imagined Galadriel as an immortal who leaves a sunswept garden paradise because she yearns "to see the wide unguarded lands" of Middle-Earth and "to rule there a realm at her own will." Cate Blanchett played her in Peter Jackson's movies as a Vulcan Witch for Justice. The new Prime Video series (debuting with two episodes on Friday) soldiers her up on a vengeance kick. Millennia before Gollum, Galadriel is "Commander of the Northern Armies" and "the Warrior of the Wastelands." She free-solos up a frozen mountain alongside an ultra-mega waterfall. War claimed her brother and drenched the world in blood. She suspects vanquished Sauron still lingers and has hunted him for ageless decades. Most other elves think Sauron's gone forever. A lieutenant begs her to end the quest and go home, because their search party is approaching a land "where even sunlight fears to tread." This is not the only accidentally funny line, but it is the most brazenly dumb. Um, Mr. Elf Lieutenant, isn't the sun-scaring shadow country exactly where you should look for the wicked godmonster?... a dwarf complains to an elf: "You missed my wedding!" The mood is stilted, dull. They ride an elevator...  People keep finding a strange scary sigil, so congratulations, Rings of Power writers, you brought Sauron to television and made him a TV serial killer...   You'd think a new tale would want to explore less-traveled corners of Tolkien's wide unguarded lands. And Rings of Power does conjure the elves' previously unseen homeland, Valinor, in two embarrassing ways. First, it's a babbling brook where cute kids frolic. Then, it's a heavenly light ray pouring out of parting clouds. The latter is almost a Monty Python special effect — and that's before one person decides, against the furthest stretch of fantasy logic, to swim across an ocean. Otherwise, the first two hours stick to seen-it-before places and boring situations. Officious cliff-adjacent elves proffer blank wisdom: "The same wind that seeks to blow out a fire may also cause its spread." Nori says Chosen One things: "It's like there's a reason this happened! Like I was supposed to find him!" Rising politician Elrond (Robert Aramayo) starts prepping a long-winded industrial project which will require "a work force greater than any ever assembled."   Tolkien's saga was anti-industrialization, which makes it hilarious that Rings of Power is an Amazon product. (Imagine Saruman throwing an Arbor Day party.) Much press has swirled around the production cost, but if a huge budget made great TV, we'd be on Terra Nova season 12. Showrunners J. D. Payne and Patrick McKay show no instinct for pacing. Some characters seem to teleport far distances, while others walk slowly between villages (despite horses, like, existing). A big sea attack looks unfinished, introducing a massive threat that's quickly forgotten. Director J. A. Bayona finds isolated moments of grandeur, but the helicopter shots get repetitive fast. The fights aren't quite up to the Walking Dead level, and the battles won't make any Crab Feeders nervous. Frequent cuts to an explanatory map are more funny than informative... Owain Arthur and Sophia Nomvete have a sitcom-couple spark as Moria marrieds, while Peter Mullan is recognizably eerie under layers of dwarf makeup. Clark's a rising star who was unfathomably freaky in Saint Maud. She imports that film's obsessive mania to a role that (so far) mainly constitutes of the kind of random-encounter duels that torment Final Fantasy players. The other characters are so lame I was rooting for the orcs... this series is a special catastrophe of ruined potential, sacrificing a glorious universe's limitless possibilities at the altar of tried-and-true blockbuster desperation."

Based Aragorn IV: An Unexpected Yeeting - Posts | Facebook - "It took 8 seasons for GOT to get to the point where it flash forwards over the entire map. It took ROP two episodes. This is the Middle Earth Atlas map for comparison. We have characters go across the world of Arda in a cutscene. Elrond goes from Lindon on the west coast of ME to Eregion to Khazad Dum with no depiction of the passage of time or distance. He casually walks to Khazad dum, a journey which is hundreds of miles. Girlboss Galadriel sails from Lindon to Valinor in a single scene, again hundreds of miles on small boat, standing the entire way. She then gets to Valinor, and promptly yeets from the boat and starts swimming back to Middle Earth. LOTR involved one walking trip from the Shire to Mordor, and it took one year and three books. Even GOT had episodes of Brienne and Jamie just walking through the countryside. I'm not saying we have to see Elrond walking for three episodes, but it diminishes the world when you squish it and make it a series of sets to cut between, and not a wide expanse of open world. It depreciates Middle Earth, and reveals a lack of care for the size of scale of the world one is dealing with. Maybe this was a writing necessity, but based on how little is done to show the audience the scope of the setting, it seems lazy. No horses, no backpacks, no gear. Just people with the shirts on their backs arriving half a world away."

Based Aragorn IV: An Unexpected Yeeting - Posts | Facebook - "One of the worst scenes in the series is the troll fight. I won't touch on the lead up here and why it's damaging in my mind, but know that Girlboss Galadriel is seeking revenge for the death of her brother and goes into Strong Female Lead mode. This takes her to the northern wastes where her and her party find a troll. In short, the troll effortlessly manages to fight several elven heroes and is about to kill one, as Galadriel watches inert. Galadriel strides forward, and her male lieutenant catapults her on his sword towards the troll. Using John Wu levels of swordplay, she quickly and singlehandedly kills the troll with a series of spins and strikes. All the elves are fine but mutiny the moment Girlboss Galadriel elects to press on. First, the surface criticism. This is Hobbit style combat. It is over the top and anime style fighting. I hate it. The sword vaulting maneuver is straight out of a cheap  Bollywood action movie. The best part was when she said "I am the Amazon's Rings of Power (2022)" stunning and brave. However, lets dig deeper. The scene is meant to show Galadriel as an exemplary warrior. It is meant to show the audience that this strong female character is just that, a strong female girlboss. The issue is that it is a simpleton's caricature of what that is. Her skills are over the top, which make her seem cartoonish. Compare the troll fight in Fellowship, and how difficult that was made to be, with this fight. The single troll in Moria nearly killed Frodo, and  took the entire fellowship to dispatch. Galadriel simply dances around the troll and kills it with grace and ease. She's an excellent fighter yes, but her characterization is that skin deep. Why is it skin deep? Because to these simpleton writers, strong character means soloing a troll. It does not have any other character traits which add depth to the role. Does Galadriel help her team? No,  at most does so begrudgingly. Does she lead her team, coordinate a defense with her team? No. Does she feel loss or pain to see them suffering? No.  Does she inspire them? No. She is a strong female lead, but these geniuses in the writers' room don't understand how to make her a leader. Imagine if the scene involved her fighting alongside 7 elven heroes, crying out when one is killed, someone she has traveled with for years, maybe centuries. They struggle and overcome together, and the entire time, Galadriel is pushing them and organizing the counter attack against the beast. Once the beast is killed, they count their losses, build a cairn for the slain. And then, the company mutinies in light of their losses. How engaging and complex she could be. But nope. She 1v1s a troll effortlessly and her party refuses to go on. Such a waste of potential The failiure of the girl boss Mary Sue is that the writers did not know how portray strength. To them, they assume that means asserting her dominance over her own team and a powerful enemy will make the audience respect her. We still don't. They imagine a caricature of a toxic male action hero, add long hair and breasts, and tell us it is stunning and brave. We still aren't impressed. Strength is multifaceted, and in showing only one dimension of that, the writers neglect to portray her with the complexity she deserves  The issue with Galadriel, besides her wooden acting style, is that the writers are either too incompetent or lazy to write anything deeper than Woman Fight Good."
Gandalf is a bloody Maiar and even he isn't that powerful
One claim is that this leaves room for character development. But that remains to be seen. Given how overpowered she is already that seems unlikely

Meme - "Hey Gandalf. Should we tell Bilbo and Frodo that one of the entry requirements for Valinor is stripping down to one's underwear for no reason whatsoever?"
"Nah, it's funnier as a surprise."
"Let's hope you don't jump into the middle of the ocean like an absolute idiot this time, Galadriel."
""I told you that in confidence Elrond!"

Josh Gad on Twitter - "If you watch a show with Dragons, Elves, or Lightsabers but can’t wrap your head around people of color in the same series, the choice of casting isn’t the problem. You are."
Based Aragorn V: There and Banned Again - Posts | Facebook - "If you see a show with dragons and elves and magic, but cant accept that the wizard drives a ford f150 pick up truck with a lift kit, you're the problem"
Use the Force, Harry -Gandalf : funny - *Patrick Stewart in civilian clothing* [Ed: "Fans of Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings, Star Trek and Star Wars may find this meme offensive"] These are the same people who bitching about "whitewashing", even for fictional figures in fictional worlds, like Avatar: The Last Airbender
Comments: "Middle Earth is essentially the belief system of the Celtic Middle Ages in Europe. And it doesn't include a bunch of people we know weren't there at the time. And everyone knows it."
"If you watch a fantasy series and get upset that it doesn't have every race known to man in it without any clear sense to why it is so diverse outside of your own modern sociopolitical worldview then it isn't all the white people on screen. It's you."
"like the ppl saying there need to be black ppl in a fantasy world meant to be in ancient europe. I watched shows and films with black protagonists and never had any trouble identifying with them. Not that thats even an issue cuz you shouldnt need to identify with a character to enjoy a story. Its a work of fiction, about someone else. Enjoy THEIR story. Anyone whos incapable of this is racist, a total narcissist, a sociopath, an attention whore, or some combination of those."
"I know right. People hated Lando and Mace Windu. Oh wait..."
"It's really not the what. It's the how"
"If you found Gods of Egypt offensive, and now you're barking about how race isn't important in mythology, then I encourage you to shut up."
"I mean, lotr had people of color in it, they're called the Men of the East and they ride giant elephants into battle and live in a geographically accurate location relative to their skin tone just as what happened in real earth history due to the power of sun, melanin and evolution."
There was also a lot of pushback on The Rings of Power, a page dedicated to shilling for the series. Hilariously, one bitched that "still disappointed that though the Dwarves were based on Jews, not a single Jewish actor was cast in The Hobbit"

Meme - H. Marine: "If you cant enjoy a work of storytelling without characters of your same race, then you're the r4c1st"

Meme - "Calling my butt hole the ring of power cause my parents are really mad there's black guys in it"

Meme - "How Hollywood makes new content:
'People being honest is not racism': Internet Blasts Amazon for Suspending the Rings of Power Reviews, Gaslighting a Bad Show as Review-Bombing
Step 1: produce a creatively bankrupt, lazily written, soulless reboot/sequel/adaptation of a beloved classic
Step 2: make blatantly inflammatory casting choices and fill scenes with unnecessary Leftist political dialog
Step 3: blame literally all criticism of your shitty on racist and sexist backlash and use that as an excuse to alter ratings and filter reviews to make it seem like all non bigots love it
Step 4: collect the profits from gaslighting the masses into watching your bullshit and repeat"

'Middle-earth is not all white': Lord Of The Rings stars condemn racist backlash to Amazon series - ""We, the cast of Rings of Power, stand together in absolute solidarity and against the relentless racism, threats, harassment, and abuse some of our castmates of colour are being subjected to on a daily basis.  "We refuse to ignore it or tolerate it.  "JRR Tolkien created a world which, by definition, is multicultural.  "A world in which free peoples from different races and cultures join together, in fellowship, to defeat the forces of evil. Rings of Power reflects that.  "Our world has never been all white, fantasy has never been all white, Middle-earth is not all white. BIPOC belong in Middle-earth and they are here to stay.""
And of course, criticism = harassment. So much for "white fragility"

New 'Lord of the Rings: Rings of Power' revives racism debate (also headlined "A new ‘Lord of the Rings’ prequel quietly confronts an uncomfortable legacy") - "the elves, the epitome of purity and good, are associated with whiteness and fair skin. Elrond and Arwen (technically half-elven characters) are unusual in being part human and having dark hair... By including people of color, the series pushes back against Tolkien’s equation of evil with dark skin... The show can even be read as responding to and rejecting the racism in its own fandom, where some commenters have railed against casting people of color as elves, much as humans in Middle-earth rail against having elves as neighbors... The blonde, pure Galadriel demanding that the borders be manned forever against the poison of evil is uncomfortably familiar in an America where the right-wing continues to demonize immigrants as a source of violence and disease... “Rings of Power” does an admirable job of rejecting the animosity toward Black and Asian people found in Tolkien’s work. But like so many fantasy (and nonfantasy stories), it still ties adventure, virtue and empowerment to the righteous genocidal slaughter of some other hated race."
Great leftist doublethink: Tolkien was racist and anti-black, but if you object to blackwashing you're racist and never read Tolkien
I like how if you don't lie back and let Sauron take over the world, you're racist

Meme - ""[Tolkien] was a really complex person who wrote a really complex world," Morfydd Clark tells Inverse. "And this idea that anyone could know exactly what he would've wanted or what he would've liked is, I feel, nonsense.""
"I know, right? If only he'd left behind detailed appendices outlining the entire history of his fictional world, extensive correspondence explaining his hatred of allegory in storytelling, and his desire that no talentless hacks should ever mess with his creation."

My Rings of Power review wasn’t approved because of “inappropriate” content. : KotakuInAction
Meme - "Your review of The Lord of the Rings: T... could not be posted to Amazon...
Awful
The visuals are stunning but that's to be expected when you spend nearly a billion dollars on production. Every female character is a Mary Sue that needs to "show the boys how it's done." Seriously, Amazon, how could you mess up this bad?"
No wonder the reviews are so good

IMDB have deleted all the negative reviews for "The Rings Of Power". Out of 76 current reviews the lowest is a 5/10 and 65 of them are 8+/10 : lotr

Amazon's $1 billion LOTR 'Rings of Power' is losing the ratings and viewer battle to HBO's 'House of the Dragon' - "Though critics have praised the series' scope and ambition, "The Rings of Power" has rankled with audiences, who gave the show a 39% rating on Rotten Tomatoes. (By contrast, Peter Jackson's early 2000s Lord of the Rings trilogy earned audience scores of between 86-95% on Rotten Tomatoes.) Even on Amazon-owned IMDb, audiences rated "The Rings of Power" an anemic 6.8/10. HBO's "House of the Dragon," released last month, is performing much better. It has an 8.8/10 rating in IMDb and an 84% audience score on Rotten Tomatoes. For each show's three-day post-debut window, "House of the Dragon" attracted 51% more viewers than "Rings of Power," according to Whip Media data reported by TheWrap. The publication also looked at data from Samba TV, which tracks viewership through connected TVs in the US. That told a similar story: 3.1 million households watched the first two episodes of "Rings of Fire" in the first three days, while 4.8 million watched the HBO premier in the same window... Low ratings from viewers signals a "greater than zero" risk that some Prime members could cancel their subscriptions... On its own Prime Video platform, Amazon disabled viewers' ability to review "The Rings of Power"... "Even if it was well-meaning, turning off reviews was a bad look," Forte said. "That's only going to make things appear worse."... One hardcore Tolkien fan echoed those comments on Twitter: "Tolkien is turning in his grave," Tesla CEO Elon Musk wrote... An Amazon spokesperson did not respond to questions about how many Prime subscribers have watched "The Rings of Power" since its release... Amazon insiders, meanwhile, have said the future of Amazon Studios hinges on "The Rings of Power" being a success.  "If it doesn't succeed, there's going to be a big question from Andy Jassy and the board," one former senior Amazon Studios exec previously told Insider. "If we can't take this piece of IP and make it successful, why is Amazon Studios even here?"  "It has to succeed," this person added. "There's no option.""

Commentary: Many missteps in new Lord of the Rings TV series are unforgivable - "Like many in this new production’s target audience, as a teenager I immersed myself in the world of Middle-earth, devouring Tolkien’s high fantasy novels. Later, I happily sat through repeat family viewings of Peter Jackson’s Lord Of The Rings films and even his less gripping adaptation of The Hobbit.  As a professor of English literature, I have spent a lot of time promoting Tolkien’s masterpiece to my students, many of whom have become passionate devotees themselves. All of which to say, I had high hopes for Amazon’s new series.  But I’m going to call it. Despite its £50-million-an-episode (US$58 million) price tag, The Rings Of Power is an elvish armour-clad turkey.  It suffers from many ills. There is ponderous, often clunky dialogue. Tonally the series is all over the place and veers crazily between the insufferably pompous and (cue the harfoots, a type of hobbit) cloying. And it has some serious representation issues.   Aside from the writing, there are also a multitude of visual issues that, in an age of epic fantasy shows and films that can render entire landscapes of fire and brimstone and bring hulking dragons to life, are just not forgivable...  it’s hard to follow who we’re supposed to be rooting for.  Morfydd Clark’s ninja-like Galadriel acts in ways that are less than heroic at times. In episode one, for example, Galadriel eviscerates a snow troll whose only crime (other than not being an elf) is to have the temerity to defend his cave from the warriors who have invaded it. My sympathies were with the clumsy, inarticulate beast, as I’m sure many people’s were.  And, while the show’s colour-conscious casting is commendable, the decision to cast people of colour in key roles doesn’t inoculate the series against unthinking racism and cultural stereotyping in other respects. Take the grating representation of the raggedy, dirty-faced harfoots as, essentially, Irish travellers. This depiction, as has been pointed out, recalls the 19th-century anti-Irish cartoons of British caricaturist John Leech.  The Rings Of Power also suffers from gauche classism... There’s also a problem with the show’s retina-popping “glorious visual effects”, which I found lurid, unpleasantly gaudy and cartoonish. They’re a bit like those images of the Carina Nebula from the James Webb Telescope, colourised in such a way that opaque or even invisible clumps of non-light-emitting dust are transformed into gossamer puffs of cosmic emerald and impossibly inky blues.  They’re breathtaking, but you can’t believe in them. In the same way Amazon’s hyper-colourised Middle-earth frustrates my efforts to suspend belief. The Rings Of Power also has a predilection for shooting faces (elves, dwarfs, harfoots, orcs alike) in ultra-close-up, distorting their features while casting them in unflattering shadows. Plus the backgrounds are so blurry that many scenes look like they were shot on an iPhone in cinematic mode, with everything simultaneously too close and too far away... But the show’s unforgivable sin is that it’s boring. When anything vaguely exciting does happen, it’s over in seconds.  On the other hand, if an expositional two-hander is required (and it often is), these energy-free zones drag on interminably. Things improve a little in the second episode, but by that point, Prime Video’s “forward 10s button” had begun to exert the pull of one of the eponymous rings of power themselves. I just about managed to resist clicking it...   Individual screen shots from The Rings of Power may be sumptuous, gorgeous, awe-inspiring, even. But as a whole, the show is a mishmash of overly-staged, overly-stylised and frequently misfiring ideas. It simply doesn’t work."
Damn racist reviewer!

Linguistics expert hits out at ‘offensive’ accents in The Rings Of Power - "Natalie Braber, professor of linguistics at Nottingham Trent University, thinks the use of the non-specific Irish accent was ‘lazy’ and a ‘real quick shortcut’.   She told the Guardian: “Accent is such a huge portion of who we are. To mock that, or to use that accent as shorthand for someone who is stupid, or whatever trait it is, is offensive."  "Irish people have faced discrimination for centuries based on their identity, so I’m not surprised this has caused upset.” Braber went on to assert her belief that accents should become protected characteristics in the same way that a person's gender, religion or sexuality is - and she thinks a change to the law could be coming."

Jeff Bezos Thanks 'Rings of Power' Writers for Ignoring Him - "having it be done by creators who have few credits to their names was a big move for Amazon. The two worked together for an uncredited writing credit on Star Trek Beyond and will produce and write Flash Gordon by director Taika Waititi."
No wonder the pacing is so off

Fans slam 'Rings of Power': 'Cringeworthy,' 'dull,' 'a disgrace' - "“Nothing short of cringeworthy,” wrote Eric. S. of the show that stars Morfydd Clark as Galadriel and Robert Aramayo as Elrond. “The writing is worse than what you could expect to see on CW. It truly seems to have been written by a Barely graduated High Schooler that managed a C- average in creative writing. It’s a smoldering dumpster fire.” “Visually it was good, but man was the story slow paced and dull,” added Matt L.  Sadie S. was as unimpressed as Gollum being gifted a ring from Kay Jewelers. “This was completely awful, very artificial looking with no heart. What a disgrace”

‘The Rings Of Power’ Has A Galadriel Problem - "In the third episode of Amazon’s Lord Of The Rings: The Rings Of Power, Galadriel finally smiles.  It’s a radically expressive change for a character who, unfortunately, has virtually no emotional range. Galadriel wear—almost exclusively—various shades of scowl; perhaps the occasional glower or puzzlement—but mostly she just frowns and glares at people, either in gritty determination or impatience and frustration... in The Rings Of Power it appears Galadriel has not picked up any people skills despite being several thousand years old at this point. She shows up in Númenor—rescued by Elendil and brought safely to the island nation—with her heckles up, combatively abrasive for no apparent reason. She’s an elder of an immortal race, born in Valinor, one of the few beings left who lived through the First Age and saw the Two Trees. And yet she acts like a petulant teenager—so much so that Elendil actually tells her she reminds him of his children. I’m not sure how old Elendil is supposed to be—his people live for hundreds of years—but he’s not close to as old or wise as Galadriel. And yet here he is, clucking at her like a doting father... Once again, a massively expensive, beautifully shot TV show is slipping because despite all that money, the writing quality just isn’t there... she lacks other basic social skills like diplomacy, patience and so forth, that could make her feel like a more well-rounded and convincing character."

THE SEA IS ALWAYS RIGHT!!! : LOTR_on_Prime - "Who's the toddler that wrote this line? This is the dumbest line I've ever heard in my life. A bunch of grown ass men looking out into the ocean and just shouting "THE SEA IS ALWAYS RIGHT" at it. And Elendil says it again 5 minutes later!"
"It screws up a tonal thing that Tolkien was a master of: formal vs. informal language. In LOTR, a lot of humor and sincerity comes from the hobbits talking in informal language while the other characters mostly talk in formal language. Elves are all formal all the time. Humans are formal with an appreciation for informal. Dwarves are largely informal but they can be formal when it's appropriate. (If I remember correctly- it's been a while since I've read the trilogy, though I've read The Hobbit and watched all the movies in the past year).  So, the people of Numinor ought to be using formal language in this bit for several reasons: this phrase is supposed to be profound to them, they are human, they have historical ties to the elves."
"Adding the:
NOBODY GOES OFF TRAIL
AND NOBODY WALKS ALONE
to the list of shit lines you'd never find in a Tolkien book. That chant was torture."

Meme - "And for you samwise gamgee
This cool stick i found
You can pretend its a sword and swish it around like this
Actually, no. I'm keeping this"
This predates the Rings of Power Episode 3 but is timely given how shit the stick-as-a-weapon writing was

Meme - "You can accept dragons, elves and talking trees, but you can't accept a 2021 BMW 5 Series 530i with optional heated seating. Why are you so bigoted? *Battle of Pelennor Fields*"
Addendum: This is to address the claims of SJWs who claim that in fantasy and fiction in general, anything goes so only bigots object to black elves, for example. A similar example: Use the Force, Harry - Gandalf

Galadriel weird horse riding scene - YouTube - "Ehm... This is so out of place."
"I have no issue with her riding a horse in this context or maybe her pleasure in riding one. In this case, she is a virtual prisoner riding to an unknown destination, yet, she seems giggly like a school girl. I mean this is an august elf that was around before the First Age, she predated Elros, the founder of Numenor. It just seemed a bit jarring."
"apparently there is a small paragraph by tolkien on the moment that galadriel rode a horse. how beautiful etc etc etc. the show runners dont understand this works ONLY ON PAPER"

Meme - "Galadriel and Celeborn LOTR 1.21 [HD 1080p]"
"This is the only true way to depict Galadriel. I am worried the new LOTR show wil just bring us some random female super-hero"
"Judging by the promo photos ive seen posted you seem to be 100% correct"
"They did"
"Your fears were not ill-conceived"
"literally called it loll"

It's amazing how good Cate Blanchett was at portraying Galadriel : KotakuInAction - "Galadriel is a walking nuclear weapon. Literally, she could destroy city-sized fortifications by singing.  She's actually way, way LESS powerful in the show than she should be. She's precognitive and telepathic, which means she can fight like a Jedi. Armor will only slow you down when you already know every attack that's coming and how to avoid it. She's only slightly less powerful than Feanor, who did a Thermopylae against AN ARMY OF BALROGS. At least in Tolkien's earlier drafts where there WERE armies of Balrogs, he later considered reducing the total number to seven and they weren't all there...but still would make Feanor severalfold as powerful as Gandalf.  Galadriel's an absolute top tier. Which, frankly, is why she was never meant to be a POV character. But this sweaty, exhausted, scrappy YA heroine is not Galadriel. She should command any room she enters, literally glow like a medieval saint, laying eyes upon her should change people's whole lives. The whole damn saga happened because a dude wanted a strand of her hair."
"Gimli asks Galadriel for a strand of her hair when she is at a loss of what to give to a dwarf. She gives him three strands.  She gave Gimli three times of what she denied to the greatest elf who has ever lived."
"Hollywood hack writers: "Nah, let's just make her a stand-in for when I was bullied in middle school. Yeah, take that little Susie for mocking my braces, you're a rock and I'm a ship. Take that all the boys who told me I was bossy, I'll write you all as spineless cowards who just can't handle how perfect I am""
"hollywood : "lets give her a cringy slow motion smile while riding a horse""
"One of the things that ground my teeth in the first episode was when Gil-Galad, her little cousin/nephew/whatever, gives her orders. I cannot even imagine that... here you have Galadriel, born under the Light of the Trees, conqueror of the Helcaraxë, BFF of Melian the Maia, related to literally every important personage in Middle-Earth... and he's ordering her around?  Yeah, right."

Meme - Man: "LotR is awesome, and Tolkien was a great man"
Other man: "Agreed."
Liberal woman: "Tolkiens work is problematic! It needs to be updated to better suit my modern woke ideals! And if you disagree you are an racist incel troll!"
Men: "No. Go away."
Liberal woman: "OMG, when did Tolkien fandom turn into such a toxic, hateful place?!"
Men: "When you showed up."

Why Are the Female Dwarves in ‘The Rings of Power’ Beardless? - "In The War of the Jewels, Christopher Tolkien’s analysis of his father’s manuscripts, he states that all dwarves have beards"

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