As the question marks suggest, I haven’t gotten into either one of these yet and I don’t know if I should. I’m not sure what to put that down to other than neither one really grabs me. This might be entirely unfair, but prequels never seem to live up to the hype, much the way the Star Wars prequels disappointed. I never wanted or needed to know what Darth Vader was like as a teenager, and I can’t say I’m any more interested in the prehistory of these two franchises either. Having said that, I did enjoy Kenobi which was both new while also being a prequel.
House of the Dragon and The Rings of Power???
January 18, 2023
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Very late with this but I would go with house of dragons inter family politics are great the characterisation is in line with early GOT the writing is nearly as good, held back a bit by the fact they time skip a lot past stuff that would be better served by time to breathe, I don’t think they expected it to be as huge as it has been which has been reflected in the 2nd series not coming till 2024 and more importantly the structure of the 1st season could have been stretched without padding to two or three seasons which suggests they hadn’t planned for this series to be a 5+ plus season endeavour.
Rings of power was very sterile I am a fan of character and plot over world building generally though I do love my building but here there’s a very anemic good vs evil going on with characters bent to fit the story and not the other way around. Basically I can buy dragons and magic enough to get absorbed in the story but tolkiens particularly brand of selfless do Gooder , without his skill in writing, and evil for the sake of being evil as a mass representation of too sides is just boring it’s not a bad series just considering the source material and a 100 plus budget per episode I was expecting something more epic this isn’t it.
Rings of Power is visually stunning, but you’re right, the characters aren’t developed enough. I think they focused too heavily on laying the groundwork and the immense history that they lost sight of just telling a compelling story. I hear that they’re now going to be doing more LOTR, perhaps as a streaming series. That feels like it would immediately be more interesting because the world building is already established so the focus can be on character.
One of the main issues they have is a rights issue so they have the rights to the lord of the rings trilogy and the characters in it but not the histories , the similiarion ext and I think they realised that lack in trying to do the rings of power which ny definition is world building heavy series.