I’m doing a fair bit of stuff over here that should be on my other blog, but really, it probably belongs here because it’s addressing a lot of the idiotic social issues of the left.

CBR.com just put out an article on Amazon’s Rings of Power, where it virtue signals the whole way and shows that none of them have learned any lessons.

Why should anyone be surprised?

Here’s the article, if you want to read it. It doesn’t start off well.

The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power was well-received by viewers and critics upon its debut last September.

Except it did nothing of the sort. Right now, it’s sitting at 38% over on Rotten Tomatoes and it came out a couple of months ago that only 37% of domestic viewers even got all the way through the series. The series sucked and it is the most expensive TV series ever, in the history of television. Let’s continue.

The show has, however, suffered backlash from toxic fandom for the racial diversity of its cast. And some cast members are firing back.

Except there aren’t toxic fans. People are complaining that Amazon ignored and altered Tolkien for their own purposes. This isn’t anywhere close to an adaptation of Tolkien’s work. It’s a travesty, infused with intersectional feminism, identity politics and really awful writing. It’s not like they couldn’t have been “diverse” while staying true to the source material. There are non-white characters in Tolkien’s work. Instead, they wanted to roll the dice to figure out what race characters should be, instead of just reading the descriptions in the actual books.

What’s worse, I figure, is that some of the actors are doubling down on their failures, pointing fingers at their potential audience, as if that’s going to get the ratings up. It’s not. So let’s check some of that out.

“I mean, it is infuriating,” actor Owain Arthur told Variety at this weekend’s Monte-Carlo Television Festival. Arthur plays Dwarven Prince Durin in the series. “Like, you go, ‘Oh, God, really? Are we still there as a human race?’ That drives me wild — the guys have been through a lot.”

No, the reason you’re having problems is because of how you’re doing things! If you had just hired the best actors and not made diversity #1 on your hit parade, nobody would have complained. The problem is that these people can’t see through their ideological blinders.

I had this same discussion with someone a couple of days ago. I said we need to stop playing the diversity game and just be entirely colorblind. I would have been entirely fine with Idris Elba playing James Bond back in the day, before he got too old. He would have been a better Bond than Daniel Craig IMO. I don’t look at him as a black man. I look at him as an actor playing a role and he’s a damn good one.

Sadly, these people don’t understand what very basic words mean. He went on to argue that the GI mortgage packages at the end of WWII excluded black soldiers and that was “colorblind!” No, you just described the entire antithesis of colorblindness! Colorblindness requires that you pay no attention, of any kind, in any way, to skin color, and I’d extend that to gender, sexual orientation and other things. when it comes to making decisions about hiring, rights, etc. You are a person. Do you qualify for this, based on whatever criteria happens to be in place? Yes or no?

When I’m hiring people, I don’t care about their race. I don’t look at their gender. I don’t care who they sleep with. I want to know their qualifications. Can you do the job? If yes, you’re hired, no other considerations required. Yet in modern day Hollywood, they seem incapable of doing that. They’re all about “diversity, equity and inclusion”. Actually, that needs to be reordered to DIE because that’s what they want anyone who doesn’t agree with them to do. DIE! Let’s do a couple more.

“What I’m looking forward to, as we move on to Season 2, is allowing that conversation to be in the past and just plow ahead,” Addai-Robinson said. “When you have progress, it’s like we’re not going to go backward from the things that we’ve established. I’m ready to acknowledge it and move on from it, because I think we’ve kind of said all there is to say, really. I know that I have.”

Except they didn’t do that. In fact, they’re doubling down on the identity bullshit by having 100% female writers on the series. That wasn’t because the best qualified writers just so happened to be female, it’s because they’re making it a sexist, left-wing workplace. Progress would be looking at the criticism of their show, made by the people who they supposedly want to watch it, and making changes based on that.

Except that’s not what they want to do. If they wanted to be successful, they could just make Tolkien. They don’t. They’re making a far-left political screed with a thin veneer of Tolkien laid over the top. That’s how Hollywood works these days. It’s not a matter of quality, it’s a matter of virtue signalling. Let’s not pretend otherwise.

Actor Ismael Cruz Córdova received threats and has faced other direct attacks. “My phone got hacked. I had bank account attempts of being hacked. My PayPal got hacked,” Córdova had previously revealed. The actor plays Elven fighter Arondir on the show. “My friends got messages. I got death threats. I got things mailed to me. People found out my address. It was a lot of that.”

Cool, where’s your evidence for any of that? This is marketing, it isn’t fact. What he’s described are crimes. What have the police or the FBI or whoever is most able to handle it done about it? Where are the statements by the police and the FBI about these supposed crimes? Nowhere, because they don’t exist. It’s the same crap that happened when Obi Wan Kenobi failed and people complained about how terrible a character Reva was. Moses Ingram came out and claimed she was being attacked. Sure. Where’s your evidence? None was forthcoming because it was just a ploy for sympathy. If you’ve got evidence, present it. These things should not be happening. Until you can back it up though, it sure looks like marketing copy, doesn’t it?

In the end, that’s all that’s going on. It’s political ideology hidden beneath a thin facade of claimed entertainment. Unfortunately, none of it is at all entertaining and the second they start to lose money,  because their jobs are to entertain a paying audience, they start pointing fingers at everyone but themselves because they can’t be wrong.

Except they are. All the time.