Lovely read! Honestly, these types of musings are the other half of why I come to Episodic Medium beyond the reviews/episode analysis.
I don't have much to add here, but my own personal take is that I _love_ that these are both airing so close to each other and with such different takes on the genre and their source material. It makes for wildly interesting conversations, as long as you can weed out the crazies. And while I am sure that even if these series were viewed in a vacuum there would still be interesting conversation, having this additional layer to it all has just be the icing on the cake.
I'll admit that I'm more interested in following how House of the Dragon and Rings of Power are in conversation with Game of Thrones and Jackson's Lord of the Rings films, respectively, but there's no denying that even I have been looking at how the two end up being in conversation with each other. The thing that has jumped out to me with regards to their intertextuality has been looking to see how literally Rings of Power takes Jeff Bezos's order to get him his own Game of Thrones. After the initial announcement, there was concern amongst some Tolkien fans that meant that he wanted to add Game of Thrones's sexposition and ultraviolence to the comparatively chaste Middle-Earth. As it turns out, those fears have (so far) been unfounded, and the real influence of Game of Thrones has been a structural one; bouncing back and forth across a continent to follow a far flung cast of disparate characters, with each basically playing out their own narrative. What makes it so interesting to me is that Rings of Power is doing that right as House of the Dragon pulls away from that structure, focusing (so far) on one group of characters in pretty much one location.
It struck me from the start that Rings of Power was essentially fighting the previous war, aping elements of of Game of Thrones after HBO had realized those elements weren't necessarily replicable. And with good reason! That kind of storytelling is hard to do, from both a logistical and narrative perspective. The logistical part can be handled if you've got endless buckets of money you're willing to spend, but the narrative part will always be a trickier nut to crack. Once the structure of Rings of Power became clear, my biggest question became "how, when, and under what circumstances will all these various storylines come together?", because as Game of Thrones proved, tying everybody and everything together in a satisfactory manner is no small feat. Rings of Power does have going for it the fact that it is building to a preordained endgame with some preordained major events throughout, whereas Game of Thrones only had that to a certain point. I'm most curious to see which of those big events (if any) Rings of Power has planned for the end of season 1, because that will give me a better idea of how they are arcing the show and what the answer to those questions might be.
What I know for sure is that I have rarely been this excited to see two fantasy shows each week, and frankly, it feels like an embarrassment of riches.
I agree with your thesis that “HotD is playing the greatest hits of GoT”, and have therefore been trying to dissect why I’m not enjoying it very much. I think the disconnect is that, while HotD is giving us GoT’s greatest hits in terms of visual spectacle, narrative themes, and general vibe, the showrunners have missed (or misidentified?) the JOY of the original. And joy is what keeps millions of people devoted to a show for almost a decade – even people who don’t normally like fantasy, or violent content, etc.
For me, at least, the joy of watching GoT was similar to the joys of Lost and “The Avengers” movies (I specifically mean the movies called “Avengers”, not the whole MCU). And that joy was, roughly, “odd couples bonding or playing off one another during adventures in attractive scenery”. My fondest memories of GoT are the moments when we settled in with the latest odd couple. Sam and Jorah together – amazing! Tyrion trying to get Missandei to tell a joke – love it! Arya and Gendry on the road to the wall – wonderful! I got the same feeling when Hurley offered Ben a chocolate bar, when Miles proselytized to Richard about duct tape, when Rocket Racoon threatened to steal Bucky Barnes’s arm, when Tony Stark and Nebula got stranded in space together. I don’t get the sense that HotD is interested in providing this. It lacks a wide variety of entertaining archetypes, and it isn’t set up to focus on rotating odd couples (for example, by this point in GoT, we already had Tyrion and Catlyn’s great road trip).
Like HotD, the mandate behind Rings of Power was “make me a Game of Thrones”, but I’m enjoying RoP so much more! The themes and vibes of RoP are totally different, but it is already providing some of that joy. Nori and maybe-Gandalf are a delightful odd couple. The juxtaposition of Elrond’s elf stateliness against Durin/Disa’s dwarfishness (aka Scottishness) is making me invested in Elrond. I actually hate Galadriel and Halbrand’s interactions, but I still appreciate what the show is trying to do there. Yes, RoP copied the original GoT’s far-flung location structure, but that’s incidental; Lost proved that you don’t necessarily need that structure to facilitate what I’m talking about.
Oddly, I feel like watching RoP (which I currently find the much more interesting series), makes HotD a bit more watchable (i.e. less noticeably disappointing), as RoP kind of fills the fantasy gap left by GoT, and HotD can do its own mediocre impersonation of its parent series. Similarly, the imbalanced, rather fast-paced story-telling of HotD (could definitely learn something from the Last Kingdom, particularly a sense of humour) is off-set by the slow burn of RoP. Here I must admit I am not that steeped in the lore of Tolkien, and I enjoy the exploring of that world. My only worry is that RoP is a bit too slow for only 8 episodes, where I have no doubt that HotD will end with some kind of spectacular battle, of which the impact will be lessened by a lack of character development.
I think the main difference for me in watching both is how I feel towards the works they're based on. I like Game of Thrones a lot, but don't really care how faithful they are to the books. Lord of the Rings, it really bothers me the more they stray from basic plot points from the story. I'm glad they have people of color in the cast, that's not an issue and all the racist creeps getting their knickers in a twist can piss off, but I'm annoyed that they're seemingly condensing the timeline. I think a big draw for LOTR is the sense of developed history, and I feel like ignoring how much time everything takes place over makes it less interesting.
Having said all that, I like the Rings of power much more , in fact I'm probably not watching House of Dragons live anymore. They never built characters that I'm all that interested to get to know, despite having a rather small main cast. Take Otto Hightower, other than being the (now former)Hand and trying to manuever for political power, mainly using his daughter, I don't know anything else of much note about this guy, other than the very vague back story of coming into power because of someone's death. And he's one of the top 6 cast members? For me there has not been much I've found all that interesting.
ROP at least I don't know where they're going exactly or how they're getting there, and I'm at least interested to see what happens.
By virtue of being on vacation the past two weeks I have fallen out of sync with these shows. Caught up on Westeros as of last night and two full episodes behind on Rings, which I hope will allow me to decouple them from each other in my puny brain space. I'm finally warming up to HoD, despite them not really fixing any of my previous complaints about pacing and levity and shoddy wigs, and can now get back to Middle Earth with a fresh reset. Agree with other comments regarding execution and abundance of riches having both airing simultaneously to spur conversation, even if some of it is redundant or wildly off base. I also love these random posts that aren't show specific, but television adjacent; really ties the blog together.
"The franchise’s existing reputations make it easier to “pick sides” than we would be with series not based on original I.P."
This is exactly me. My wife and I watched GoT so we're watching House of the Dragon. On the other hand, she never watched the original LOTR movies, and I haven't watched them since theaters; neither of us have watched the Hobbit movies. So we don't really have any attachment to Middle Earth IP and thus have passed on watching the Rings of Power so far. But if they were both original IP, not sure which, if either, we'd watch.
Lovely read! Honestly, these types of musings are the other half of why I come to Episodic Medium beyond the reviews/episode analysis.
I don't have much to add here, but my own personal take is that I _love_ that these are both airing so close to each other and with such different takes on the genre and their source material. It makes for wildly interesting conversations, as long as you can weed out the crazies. And while I am sure that even if these series were viewed in a vacuum there would still be interesting conversation, having this additional layer to it all has just be the icing on the cake.
I'll admit that I'm more interested in following how House of the Dragon and Rings of Power are in conversation with Game of Thrones and Jackson's Lord of the Rings films, respectively, but there's no denying that even I have been looking at how the two end up being in conversation with each other. The thing that has jumped out to me with regards to their intertextuality has been looking to see how literally Rings of Power takes Jeff Bezos's order to get him his own Game of Thrones. After the initial announcement, there was concern amongst some Tolkien fans that meant that he wanted to add Game of Thrones's sexposition and ultraviolence to the comparatively chaste Middle-Earth. As it turns out, those fears have (so far) been unfounded, and the real influence of Game of Thrones has been a structural one; bouncing back and forth across a continent to follow a far flung cast of disparate characters, with each basically playing out their own narrative. What makes it so interesting to me is that Rings of Power is doing that right as House of the Dragon pulls away from that structure, focusing (so far) on one group of characters in pretty much one location.
It struck me from the start that Rings of Power was essentially fighting the previous war, aping elements of of Game of Thrones after HBO had realized those elements weren't necessarily replicable. And with good reason! That kind of storytelling is hard to do, from both a logistical and narrative perspective. The logistical part can be handled if you've got endless buckets of money you're willing to spend, but the narrative part will always be a trickier nut to crack. Once the structure of Rings of Power became clear, my biggest question became "how, when, and under what circumstances will all these various storylines come together?", because as Game of Thrones proved, tying everybody and everything together in a satisfactory manner is no small feat. Rings of Power does have going for it the fact that it is building to a preordained endgame with some preordained major events throughout, whereas Game of Thrones only had that to a certain point. I'm most curious to see which of those big events (if any) Rings of Power has planned for the end of season 1, because that will give me a better idea of how they are arcing the show and what the answer to those questions might be.
What I know for sure is that I have rarely been this excited to see two fantasy shows each week, and frankly, it feels like an embarrassment of riches.
I agree with your thesis that “HotD is playing the greatest hits of GoT”, and have therefore been trying to dissect why I’m not enjoying it very much. I think the disconnect is that, while HotD is giving us GoT’s greatest hits in terms of visual spectacle, narrative themes, and general vibe, the showrunners have missed (or misidentified?) the JOY of the original. And joy is what keeps millions of people devoted to a show for almost a decade – even people who don’t normally like fantasy, or violent content, etc.
For me, at least, the joy of watching GoT was similar to the joys of Lost and “The Avengers” movies (I specifically mean the movies called “Avengers”, not the whole MCU). And that joy was, roughly, “odd couples bonding or playing off one another during adventures in attractive scenery”. My fondest memories of GoT are the moments when we settled in with the latest odd couple. Sam and Jorah together – amazing! Tyrion trying to get Missandei to tell a joke – love it! Arya and Gendry on the road to the wall – wonderful! I got the same feeling when Hurley offered Ben a chocolate bar, when Miles proselytized to Richard about duct tape, when Rocket Racoon threatened to steal Bucky Barnes’s arm, when Tony Stark and Nebula got stranded in space together. I don’t get the sense that HotD is interested in providing this. It lacks a wide variety of entertaining archetypes, and it isn’t set up to focus on rotating odd couples (for example, by this point in GoT, we already had Tyrion and Catlyn’s great road trip).
Like HotD, the mandate behind Rings of Power was “make me a Game of Thrones”, but I’m enjoying RoP so much more! The themes and vibes of RoP are totally different, but it is already providing some of that joy. Nori and maybe-Gandalf are a delightful odd couple. The juxtaposition of Elrond’s elf stateliness against Durin/Disa’s dwarfishness (aka Scottishness) is making me invested in Elrond. I actually hate Galadriel and Halbrand’s interactions, but I still appreciate what the show is trying to do there. Yes, RoP copied the original GoT’s far-flung location structure, but that’s incidental; Lost proved that you don’t necessarily need that structure to facilitate what I’m talking about.
Oddly, I feel like watching RoP (which I currently find the much more interesting series), makes HotD a bit more watchable (i.e. less noticeably disappointing), as RoP kind of fills the fantasy gap left by GoT, and HotD can do its own mediocre impersonation of its parent series. Similarly, the imbalanced, rather fast-paced story-telling of HotD (could definitely learn something from the Last Kingdom, particularly a sense of humour) is off-set by the slow burn of RoP. Here I must admit I am not that steeped in the lore of Tolkien, and I enjoy the exploring of that world. My only worry is that RoP is a bit too slow for only 8 episodes, where I have no doubt that HotD will end with some kind of spectacular battle, of which the impact will be lessened by a lack of character development.
I think the main difference for me in watching both is how I feel towards the works they're based on. I like Game of Thrones a lot, but don't really care how faithful they are to the books. Lord of the Rings, it really bothers me the more they stray from basic plot points from the story. I'm glad they have people of color in the cast, that's not an issue and all the racist creeps getting their knickers in a twist can piss off, but I'm annoyed that they're seemingly condensing the timeline. I think a big draw for LOTR is the sense of developed history, and I feel like ignoring how much time everything takes place over makes it less interesting.
Having said all that, I like the Rings of power much more , in fact I'm probably not watching House of Dragons live anymore. They never built characters that I'm all that interested to get to know, despite having a rather small main cast. Take Otto Hightower, other than being the (now former)Hand and trying to manuever for political power, mainly using his daughter, I don't know anything else of much note about this guy, other than the very vague back story of coming into power because of someone's death. And he's one of the top 6 cast members? For me there has not been much I've found all that interesting.
ROP at least I don't know where they're going exactly or how they're getting there, and I'm at least interested to see what happens.
By virtue of being on vacation the past two weeks I have fallen out of sync with these shows. Caught up on Westeros as of last night and two full episodes behind on Rings, which I hope will allow me to decouple them from each other in my puny brain space. I'm finally warming up to HoD, despite them not really fixing any of my previous complaints about pacing and levity and shoddy wigs, and can now get back to Middle Earth with a fresh reset. Agree with other comments regarding execution and abundance of riches having both airing simultaneously to spur conversation, even if some of it is redundant or wildly off base. I also love these random posts that aren't show specific, but television adjacent; really ties the blog together.
"The franchise’s existing reputations make it easier to “pick sides” than we would be with series not based on original I.P."
This is exactly me. My wife and I watched GoT so we're watching House of the Dragon. On the other hand, she never watched the original LOTR movies, and I haven't watched them since theaters; neither of us have watched the Hobbit movies. So we don't really have any attachment to Middle Earth IP and thus have passed on watching the Rings of Power so far. But if they were both original IP, not sure which, if either, we'd watch.