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god bless you for using ps1 footage instead of the hideous remasters

what a great video👏

DINKY LITTLE PIANO??!? that's the best sounding dinky little piano on the planet 🤍🖤

I played this game over 20 years ago. Fell in love with it and its music, probably my most played soundtrack ever, and it keeps surprising me, such a masterpiece on its own. Great analysis, thank you for sharing!! ❤

Lmao by this logic Malazan isn’t fantasy either.

Nice green lighting, friend.

Great thoughts. These are the reasons I am so sceptical of the new PJ movies that seem to be connecting pieces of the journey which did not need their pieces placed. I just hope they become films that focus more so on relationships and character progression that adds on to the PJ Aragorn for example, which was very different from Tolkien's depiction. I'd rather it not be more CG spectacles and smelly cheesy lines (we got a lot of that in the hobbit movies...)

"Frodo heard a sweet singing running in his mind: a song that seemed to come like a pale light behind a grey rain-curtain, and growing stronger to turn the veil all to glass and silver, until at last it was all rolled back, and a far green country opened before him under a swift sunrise" This is all the description of Valinor that is necessary, by depicting it as a real, physical place in detail you kill the magic or better in line with your thesis: You kill all the fantasy.

Burst out laughing at the shot of Jeff Bezos in that context 😀

Actually it is too bad that it is good.

Spoiler: In Unfinished Tales there is a 60 sites description of Numenor.

Thank you.

This is such a bad take. Just read your books and let us enjoy the show! None of this is canon. It’s no different than someone uploading fan art. If you don’t want to have your vision of Valinor spoiled, don’t watch. To say it’s not fantasy because they’re filling in blanks is insane. As someone who never read the books, I love the show and can’t get enough.

While I can agree with most of what he laid out. Nothing he mentioned disqualifies RoP from being a Fantasy, so his central thesis was just essentially ‘clickbait’. You can be fantasy and answer questions, even ones that may not need an answer. I’m really enjoying Rings of Power. I see it is an adaptation, not “the definitive version”. It’s Amazon playing around in the IP and telling an entertaining story. Is it perfect? No. Is it enjoyable? I think so. I’ve always liked the “unreliable narrator” take on people who do remakes or prequels. It’s one persons vision - but the only TRUE definitive version comes from the creator, who has been dead longer than I’ve been alive.

Imagine wasting your life like this guy.

I don't think the worm is supposed to be one of the nameless below, definitely not on the level of a primordial being

Woah! That intro was excellent!

Imagine if Robert Frost wrote a sequel to his classic poetic masterpiece "The Road Not Taken" called "Oh By the Way, Here's What Was Down the Other Road."

it sounds like "uncomfortable wonder". Perfect for the feel of the movie!

I wish this video went on longer. I was enjoying it so much.

I don't totally agree with this take. I think that knowing more detail only deepens our emotional attachments to these characters, and transforms them in our minds from legendary heroes/villains into real, dimensional beings. It actually deepens the tragedy of the story presently being told in RoP because we already know their fates: civilizations will fall, people will die, characters will become corrupted shells of themselves. It's just so melancholy to see a city like Khazad-dûm in its glory days when we know they won't last much longer - the Mines of Moria in the original LOTR feel all the more desolate and empty since RoP has given such rich detail to that place as it used to be.

"Rings Of Power Isn't Fantasy" - I don't care, like it.

Uematsu is the greatest composer of all time. Period.

07:33 I thought for sure you were about to say "...would not be complete without a message from today's sponsor", hahaha. Great video, wish it was five hours long and covered the whole soundtrack (do it!)

People really say anything they want on this website and call it true. "Rings of Powers isn't fantasy." Yes it is. It is indeed a fantasy show.

Clickbait poo

I agree with your general point but not with some of the examples. Showing Valinor and Numenor is precisely what Tolkien wanted to do with the Silmarillion. Showing the way the elves remembered the stories about Beleriand and the First Age is the point of much of his life writing. He did not intend it as a "novelization", or a historical account. He intended it to be Middle Earth's Saga of the Volsungs or Heimskringla, while the Lord of the Rings is his Beowulf (in the sense of, a much smaller, less mythical, semi-historical adventure). The show, I agree completely, gets mired in mundanity (the dwarves cannot grow crops in the caves because the sun can't reach them, for example), and when you bring the mythical down to earth, you start to use a down-to-earth ruler to measure how well it holds up. And the story the writers are weaving doesn't hold up as a coherent story, and it's not elevated enough to be mythological and let us forego implausibilities for the sake of theme. Tolkien's world does not hold up to scrutiny if you look at it from this angle, it was never concieved as a world that could be lived in, it was a background to mythology.

The great sin of RoP is that you can feel that the creators care only about money and cloaking themselves in the LotR fame. It’s not made from a place of integrity. We can feel the difference. The things that succeed to that level are the products of years of care & craftsmanship - the LotR books and PJ trilogy, Harry Potter, The Witcher 3 and recently Arcane and Baldurs Gate 3. They are all deeply meaningful and speak to us deeply about what makes the human experience so precious. RoP and so many others are the opposite: the nihilistic pursuit of vanity and greed and pride.

As much as I dont like Rings of Power, I think you are wrong on this account. Tolkien is NOT the guy that leaves things to your imagination, he literally wrote down a whole history of Middle Earth from literal creation of the world in a very biblical sense, his story didnt have much empty space left, he didnt left Saruman's death to your imagination, nor he left characters stories finale left to imagination, he did give them closure. What you described is basically something he just added to give the wolrd much larger perspective that its not just Shire, Gondor and Rohan, that theres other places out there, things that we dont know about, but not detailed because its not relevant to the story. I could imagine if Tolkien would live longer, he might have expand several things that were previously just mention. And I can agree that Rings of Powers DOES NOT expand the world of Middle Earth indeed, instead it focuses on the whole ring concept rather then showing us things many people would love to see and explore, like the Morgoth, instead they just basically lure people who only know about LoTR from movies and added their usual flavors of DEI.

I can still remember as a teenager how weird it was to be playing a game where I had an emotional attachment to the characters, and all that happened within the first 15 minutes of the game. I especially remember how meeting Aerith and visiting her home and her mom felt somehow intimate, vulnerable, and fragile. In days since, I've listened to the soundtrack a million times, but back then I wasn't even a musician. But you don't have to be a musician for the music to bypass your conscious mind and insert its message right into your heart.

considering the quality of tv shows and movies as of late , i consider rop to be quite well , and despite what anyone might say i'm looking forward to what comes next , and please stop comparing ppls work humans are different and as such every one has its own interpretation oppinions and imagination -Cûr en-Menel

i think you missed the biggest difference . in the books they lost frodo succumbed all came to naught , the good guys failed at the last, Frodo had taken the ring every step he could and not one further and it was not enough. in the film the hobbits kind of win , for me it totally changes the entire context and meaning of the whole thing.

for me the scene that sums it up is Mines of Moria when Gandalf says "That is not for us to choose. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given to us”" its always about making the right moral choice, not based in fear but in allowing the best possible outcome a chance to come. side note on Tom i dont think its strength or power that gives him immunity to the ring he just doesn't have the mental aspects it works on , the hobbits dont want any power thats why they are so resistant. tom is just further along that way.

I honestly already have this issue with the Silmarillion. It explains too much and takes away the mystery. Tolkien cannot live up to the hype that is created by my imagination. The gaps in Lord of the Rings hinting at a much richer world supporting our story are inspiring, but the Silmarillion itself takes away that richness. I think the Rings of Power is a continuation of this trend. It should have been another story that hints at a larger world behind it that we are dropped into without knowing all the context, but instead it's more like the Silmarillion

I can't agree with this take completely. I don't like the cringe fan service moments that reference the films, but how on earth are the writers supposed to tell the story of the Second Age without showing Numenor etc? You make it sound like it is inherently bad to explore these previously unadapted parts of the lore.

That "foul creatures" image was chef's kiss!

That little piano you have reminds me of the twilight zone. Especially when you play those chords

Ok, what I'm getting from this video is that rings of power is bad, not because of the writers writing it this way or that way, but because venturing into the mysterious past is bad. Much wow.

Beautifully expressed. I haven't been tempted by the Rings of Power show, and this is definitely confirming what I suspected about, that the showrunners wanted to use the familiarity of the Lord of the Rings to rope audiences into a pure television experience, Succession with swords and pointy ears. A while back, I played a video game set in Middle Earth called Shadow of War, which played rather liberally with the Tolkien world, making many small but significant changes. One of the main characters was the decaying spirit of Celebrimbor, and the story suggests he made another ring in an attempt to defeat Sauron. It also tells the origins, however briefly, of the nine Ringwraiths, many of whom were lifted from Tolkien history. Helm Hammerhand, the tale suggests, got his name and his strength from a ring of power, before it ultimately claimed his soul. Shelob also is depicted as a former elf corrupted and transformed by the evil influence of Sauron. There's even an entwife in the story. And of course, a Tolkien purist might hate all this playing fast and loose with the canon. But I loved it for the very reason you don't like the Rings of Power. They did it right, they retained mystery, just offering tantalizing pieces of lore without spelling anything out. This is the core of fantasy. It's not elaborate, comprehensive world-building that amateur writers think is so important, but an ever-incomplete glimpse into a world that always suggests there's more to see. That's what's so wonderful about the idea of the elven lands beyond the sea, the primordial tunnels deep beneath Khazad-Dum, the mysterious spirit world one sees when one puts on the ring. It's all unknowable. Having a character pull a monster from those tunnels and eat it for breakfast may seem like a fast track to showing off what a bad-ass that character is, but in truth all it serves is to diminish the weight of this world. It declares, "this isn't the Middle-Earth you love, but a cheap imitation we can belittle to show off what big-shots we are." It announces that what they're doing has nothing to do with Tolkien, or even fantasy. This reminds me of a project I'm working on, where an ancient fairy queen becomes a governess for two lonely kids in a Victorian setting. After a few chapters of her going around being Scary Fairy Poppins, I thought it'd be fun to have the kids take her to the natural history museum, where she's confronted with a t-rex skeleton, a creature the like of which she'd never seen before. When she learns that these creatures lived over sixty-five million years ago, the very idea of that amount of time makes her have to go sit down for a bit, feeling suddenly mortal. It turns out, the real world has primordial darkness far deeper than any fantasy a fantasy author can dream up. Perhaps that's why we like fantasies. They create the comforting illusion that the universe is fathomable, when in truth, it really isn't.

Wow this was so dumb it almost made me want to deffend Rings of power. Fantasy can't be boiled down to just escapeism, at least no more then any other form of fiction. I would say often its romance and thrills more often fall into the realm of escapism. Still i would not say they are just escapeism.

I honestly don't understand the industry. How can you spend hundreds of millions without first making a good script?

Excellent nerding. Much appreciated. I too saw the Matrix opening weekend, with a bunch of game designers very shortly after we'd all gone to see The Phantom Menace, which felt far more like an attempt to recapture the past in comparison to this movie, which felt like the future. Me and my ultra-goth boss already knew the movie was going to be something special because of the style, which we'd both grown up with, but had never seen in big media before, or indeed anywhere outside our nightclub scene (except for The Crow, obviously.) The 90s was the decade when alternative became the mainstream. In 1990, the alt band music festival Lalapalooza became the biggest event of the summer. Bookscan technology swept record scores, ending to the dominance of bands like Bon Jovi when the industry discovered, to their endless befuddlement, that everyone was actually buying Nirvana. The Matrix felt like a sort of final mythification of this, the unveiling of the social illusion to reveal what's really going on beneath. Of course, little did we know how deed the rabbit hole went. The notion that this opening motif acting as a musical suggestion of above/beneath, illusion/reality, blue pill/red pill, is absolutely delightful. I'll have to remember this for my next viewing of the film. So thanks for bringing it to our attention.

Excellent pick. Thank you

I laughed out loud at the image of Jeff Bezos at 3:08

"Now without getting too deep into music theory...". but that's exactly what i want

So everyone is joining in on TH-cam hate farming now? Congrats on your most popular video, I guess.

While watching s02 I found myself wondering where the tension in the show is. They show things we as viewers already know are going to work out in a certain way. We know what will happen to the rings, Gandalf, the elves, Dwarfs etc. So like you said, the show just explains. There is no new drama or mystery or tension to be explored.

The Big Wrong for me was how out-of-place most of the things were, and I'm not even talking about the accuracy here. E.g. all the 'politics' in Numenor looked terribly like something that I can watch in daily news rather than a fantasy story. There was nothing epic or tragic about it. E.g. Imagine Troy focusing on all the modern agenda and all the 'social' details rather than telling us a grand story about war, love and fates? Because that's what they did to Numenor. I could switch the scenery to some modern setting in my mind, and...it would've just worked same. All those hollow sitcom relationships, petty problems and uninteresting details? like a poor rendition of 'Friends'. Look here - a daughter struggling to be recognized, look there - a troubled father-son relationship. Now how about some military colledge friendship between the pals? Would you, perhaps, love a detailed report about how that Bad Politician is Scheming to get more votes?..Surely we want ALL THAT in our epic fantasy story?.. :/

Truly well done breakdown and expanding of our understanding of the greatness of FF7 storytelling through the music motifs. You said it would be in the beginning and I was intrigued to see how as a life long fan and watcher of TH-cam video breakdowns of FF7

I think you fundamentally forgot the definition of fantasy