Each in their own way, the two big spectacle series of the moment – House of the Dragon and the rings of power – are taken in the debates on the representation of genres and communities. The violence of the remarks does not prevent spectators from rushing by millions on HBO Max (OCS in France) or Prime Video, to discover a new episode each week.
The very mass of this audience exacerbates controversies, leading, for example, the actors of the Lord of the Rings trilogy (produced by Peter Jackson, Room out between 2001 and 2003) to solidarize their colleagues Afro-descendants and Latinos of the rings of power, victims of countless racist parties on social networks since the posting of the first episode online, September 8.
House of the Dragon succeeds a more recent series. Game of Thrones (2011-2019) in its time had to face numerous challenges, to the point of seriously changing its way over the seasons, hiding, for example, the sequences of “sexplication” along which Male characters perorated on the meaning of their quest in the company of naked women (the reciprocal remaining an exception).
Treatment of female characters
By taking up the torch, the showrunners of House of the Dragon, Miguel Sapochnik and Ryan Condal, promised that they would not fall back in the errors of the past. Nevertheless, from the bloody sequence of childbirth of the first episode at the almost incestuous night that three episodes later, Prince Daemon (Matt Smith) and his niece Rhaenyra (Milly Alcock), the treatment of female characters of series A, as in the time of Game of Thrones, aroused Some indignation.
Of all the contributions to these debates, the one that was for the moment the most useful has arrived by a tweet of the editorialist of the New York Times Jammelle Bouie, who gave access to a text by the American philosopher- Jamaican Charles W. Mills on the racist nature of the Lord of the Rings (the author deals here with the novels of J. R. R. Tolkien).
Finully read that recently-published Charles w. Mills (RIP) Essay on Tolkien and Lord of the Rings and it is very I… https://t.co/oqd6nnjw4o
As much as by the Scandinavian sagas and the Anglo-Saxon literature which the author claimed, the land of the middle of Tolkien is shaped by a reading of the history which goes from the crusades to colonization via trafficking. The remarks of Charles W. Mills which establish an equivalence between the Orcs and the Africans are particularly disturbing for those who have long believed to find in the Lord of the Rings a haven away from the convulsions of the present. And the efforts of the creators of the rings to be able to diversify the distribution of the series seem a little vain in the face of the ultimately very rigid structure of which they inherited.
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