carry on whatever it is that you're saying go ahead well sure but like probably we should probably provide like the context i guess for why this discussion has arisen doblin died he was my favorite doblin was a real g doblin doblin what was that was his official name is was dobby short for doblin i just i just find it funny to call him doblin doblin because he's a little goblin he's supposed to be an elf dobby the goblin what he's what he's a fucking oh yeah that's right the goblins are the ones who run out of banks i forgot the goblins just straight up look evil but then yeah the house elves dobby no not him he doesn't he's all cute nice but he's like slavery it's so awkward and dead it's really weird it's just slavery active for the wizards it's so like oh gee that's the sentient creatures sentient magical creatures just they're just your slaves that seems a bit however you can give them a fucking sock sock and so how i feel like if we were to rewatch those movies we'd be like oh this is shit actually like ready people it's so different now they're right i mean when these films or what the books were written and when the films came out they probably weren't that many people sort of on twitter going around looking for allegories for the jews for example which oh no no no yeah it was just shit for its own reason that that was that's never gonna be a fucking argument for me for why it's bad that's the goblins own in the banks or whatever like i don't it's the same it reminds me of the whole orcs of black people thing it's like oh you got to be careful saying shit like that so it makes it sound like you're seeing it where it may not necessarily exist so stuff you got to be careful but um harry potter was filled with all kinds of crazy shit like it's um the all of the casually introduced time travel into the third boss gave it to a girl so she could go to class i was aiming more for well that's you know what that actually is an extension of what i was about to say the dangers for the students the insane levels of ways people could just die easily it was it was absolutely nuts if you touch any random object it could be enchanted to teleport your ass to a different totally new location that's not going to be used to kidnap children forever it was um it was something else undeniably uh and and and you know we should do an e-fab arc on that i think those movies would be funny i would be totally down for an e-fab arc absolutely would you be up for it though oh my goodness i will be up like i'm flying through the air on my quidditch is that what the kids say the quidditch quidditch yeah i'm on my new this 2000 you're going on your quidditch with doblin are you gonna yeah well and i are gonna go in the quidditch together through Hogwarts the reason why this is a risen is because somebody on twitter said that like that doblin guy dying is like the sadest thing in cinema so i haven't even seen the movies past dobbers dobbers was a real word i'm just saying it i haven't seen it in a while but i'm just going to take a wild guess and say that schindler's list was a little bit more removing than dobby dying just a bit little tiny tiny yeah tears and rain ain't got shit on doblin i watched the uh the last two was that one like little dobby guy like i think he died in one of those two yeah that tells you how much of an impression those films left on me i can't remember anything about them wait who died first doblin or dobble door doblin door doblin door i don't know that was that was a big thing on the internet when was a big thing when doblin door was killed oh before the book came out she had said that a major character will die and and everyone was speculating who could it be how it's going to be this person is it going to be that person nobody expected it doblin no one expected it to be doblin in that major character what was the term that the most powerful three words in the english language at that time where snap kills dumbledore because you could just ruin so much because it was it was really a good time to be an absolute but it was like a superpower because you knew you knew something that people did that they wanted to ruin the rest of your year with these three words and then it happened again with the force awakens harm solar dies harm solar dies harm solar dies harm that's right like when when the force awakens came out like people were just tweeting like if anybody ever said anything about the film or like there were videos people would just say like harm solo dies so you couldn't like you just couldn't be on the internet if you wanted that wonderful movie that great movie the force awakens i will say when that scene starts it's like so he's dead like just if well if you understand like common filmmaking language like you know what's about to happen yeah and then if you know anything about the matter you'd be like oh he's definitely dead well because a lot of people have pointed out that like that harrison ford at the disney expo talking about like the new indiana jones movie that he looked way more excited about it than he's looked for like any star wars thing like in the last 30 years i've never understood that because i i quite love han solo i love indiana jones but he seems to think only one of them is worthwhile and it's worthwhile so much so that they'll continue to make bad movies instead of just letting him rest leaving him alone get back in the fridge harrison do you have any expectations at all for indiana jones five no who's directing it steven spover i think the guy who made logan the guy made logan is doing it yeah didn't he have a big old thing on twitter though i think he did it's super embarrassing also do you guys like the thumbnail i do i have to put slight effort okay i'm like oh my god wow you did put some effort into that you got a little aid out to like oh well maybe even photoshop like to do maybe even photoshop i am not an elf that is loved i'm an idea oh no yeah i guess i guess that would be the one she's most associated with that's the classic walkie and associating her with a good one yeah even though you've chosen to do that i will not do that she is she is what's that guy's name who is always in the bad movies um jared listen jared leto jared leto's joker that's who i'm associating her with you remember his movies i just knew he was in the suicide squad the snider cut in morbius what's the what's the inspiration behind the galadriel joker like what what's the uh what's the her crazy grin i thought i thought the grin just landed itself to a joker smile um but then of course when she's on their horse i would i would argue it's personifying the show is clownish you know more clowny elements oh i see well i would say that the show has gotten more clown like uh as it's progressed i would say three and four are very clowny i didn't feel that one and two were very clowny they were more dry as fuck to me yes i think i think i would say that uh maybe i'm jumping the gun a bit but i think the impression that i had of after the first two episodes was like meh whereas now it's like no it's just bad like it's just bad yeah i realized by the way we managed to not talk episode two was bad the end of episode two is sort of that's what kicks it off because then you have the entire sort of freaky fish guy thing yeah yeah well to clarify i thought one and two were bad i i just i think they were yeah i were bad but in really firm bad territory maybe you'll agree would you hear our arguments precious audience maybe um but i was just gonna say we managed to not talk about the thing we were going to talk about which is our guest last short no that wasn't even that wasn't no no no that's the broader topic that was raised by the the dobby thing which is um what is what does it mean to try and claim what is the saddest scene in like that's like how i try to introduce our guest and bring back to the dead elf yeah you could you dead elves are much more i like dead elves i'm all fine with that okay that's fast track guest intro which happens after the intro intro and then after that is the intro and the gosh was the conversation which is how do we quantify what it means to be the saddest scene in like a film or in in the cinema you know i would be curious to see what people like in general would say but i don't know how i we just go with general trends as the closest you could do well i guess the difficult most people mm-hmm well i the only way to maybe say this with any objective measurement would be to get a study of people who have written down elements of a scene that they find sad so now you can put an objective number to how much a trend applies and then see what scene has all of those elements in it that's something of course it's it's just based off of what people generally tend to think or generally tend to feel what i guess that's like that's something but um what what's going to make people sad is always going to vary to some degree based on the things that are meaningful to them or maybe personal experiences that they have so like even even if we could develop some like rule set that's gonna feelings are pretty subjective you know like what is the way that you the way that something makes you feel is uh that's pretty uh personal and subjective and so something that makes this i'm pretty sure mauler and i've talked about this before i get probably sad a lot easier with like animation is something i've noticed that just seems to be the case animated films of of often whereas i think you often said like live action seems to yeah and i've been at peace with that for a while live action gets to my heart quicker and i've always assumed it's because i can more easily believe it's happening uh because it's just real people doing it as opposed to drawn or animated or designed people but that doesn't stop me from possibly shedding a tear with i could already think of an example i'd give for one of the most emotionally affecting scenes recently and it was animation would have been go to arcane probably episode three i it's one less layer like one less barrier between an actor humans emotions it wouldn't want to imply is it worse in any way it's just that it's it gets to me faster maybe faster is the way i should go for rather than more or something yeah probably you have to overcome that barrier between you know the actor acting and me i guess i uh i don't know if like i would say that animation like the character being animated is a barrier in like um i yeah i'm not sure that i would see the barrier i guess if it's that you have to take something like you have a human actor who is you know acting out and emoting and everything and then you have to do things on top of it or there are steps in the way in terms of yeah but i uh and i said that like when it comes to animation that there are some what when you think about like some if you if you look at like an animated character where like certain aspects of the face maybe like exaggerated or certain aspects of the face is downplayed that like by doing that by in some ways i don't want to say like stripping away complexity because i don't think that that's what it is like deliberate choices that you can make to emphasize certain parts of the face like visually compared to other parts of the face like increasing the size of like parts of the face that like that may have some effect on how potent the effect is well that could go both ways right um maybe i would like emphasis with like cinematography i would agree like like what parts of the face that you choose to focus on with like the real human because i'm following what you're saying it might actually like tap into in the same way that larger and softer eyes will always make us feel like something is cuter and safer but it could be that there are plenty of people out there who see that and they're like oh now i don't believe this is a real thing now it looks ridiculous you know that sort of thing well maybe that would be like the nature of the craft right how effectively you're able to convey that through animation it's a slightly different question as well from the one with which you began because then you're talking about what individually on the individual level it is it's the greater feelings of sadness within the individual and then of course you can form sort of group assessments based on that but if you're talking about what the overall saddest most sad inducing thing happens to be um then in a way starting at that level probably isn't the best way to do it i mean what you do is take a very sort of a meta analysis of it first just ask people to you know compare scenes score one to ten did you feel sad or not and how sad did you feel once you've got that basic idea then you've got a broad brush sense of what type of scene is creating more sad feelings among people then you can go into sort of the individual aspects of scene construction or narrative construction and try and identify what the common themes that emerge are um some people would find it easier to cry to animation and some people wouldn't but if you were to start with that sort of meta analysis then you'd you'd sort of you'd encompass both in whatever result you got i think that's probably the way that you would want to do this if you're gonna actually try to to uh like figure something out there in terms of sadness as like some sort of uh something that you could track and like figure out you know like sounds like being suggested is to pull the audience on how sad they were from one to ten when doblin died and we need to see because that's animated and realized at the same time i think that an important question to ask these people is like yeah but have you consumed more stories than harry potter like have you have you watched lots of other movies or why would you why would you why would you yeah what's there's nothing that will surpass doppy yeah yeah it was i wonder um how uh something i've noticed is that uh when like a story is based on on like historical events and is like in some i've noticed that like if a story is based on historical events that it can um it can become like uh more uh don't like it can be effective in in uh evoking like those emotional responses because you're like yeah but this this happened right like you're like these things happen you know like if you do you get what i mean like that sometimes it seems like films or stories that are based on historical events uh can like like you're invigorated by a sense of you know those people existed and they did something approximate in this and i can feel even more sort of invested by that imagine a real person well i mean like saving private rhyme like all of the characters in that film like they're you know they're not they're not real people but like the experience the experience that they went through like that those characters went through was felt by real people yeah so like if you're like watching that film you're like you'd like it's it's almost that the the events themselves like world war two the the reality of world war two like sort of uh maybe that's like an example of something where it almost like has that direct direct connection like that fast-tracking that expediting of that emotional response yeah i think that's true because there's that thing right where like some veterans are watching that film and they had to like leave because they were getting uh incredibly uncomfortable with how especially the opening scene um yes the um ah beach was um it was uh very intense yeah a lot of veterans so yeah that's definitely going to be a layer as well i mean yeah like yeah just an individual stuff has access to a lot a lot of different well it has access to different narrative devices but it also has access to essentially this sort of culturally permeating sense of emotionally everyone growing growing up has heard stories about world war two most people at some point would have encountered a poem by uh william oh and for example wilfredo and even um like everyone already knows how to imbue specific war scenes especially the second world war with an entire sort of cultural memory of emotion but then if you also go for something like i don't know taking in a way it's this isn't just unique to historical things but it's it's sort of a general thing to prequels and i guess you could say that a world war two film is kind of a prequel to the modern day but you also have the the access to sort of the the doom aspect of it so if you like if you take something like what's that film is um is it tom valkyrie is that the one with tom cruise when he tried to kill hitler you already know how that's gonna go um and that sense of doom that it brings the desperation but our own foreknowledge that we're also trying to suppress at the same time um in order to keep the story going adds an extra sense of i think poignants that alas it's not in the sense that oh my god that wasn't unexpected death but it's actually it's this tragic fulfillment of something we already knew was predestined noble i have access to all things like you know like the firefighter oh yeah it's like you know that that what's gonna happen to him um but like seeing it play out with the knowledge of how it's gonna go or like even though the broad story in general with like because i'm pretty sure a lot of people before they watched that film that film that show probably didn't like fully know like what happened with noble but i mean everybody's heard of it um so like yeah that and i think i guess like prequels in general can leverage that too like um if the prequels the start was prequels were better like could you imagine how uh how like intense it would have been as it was leading to the conclusion of Revenge of the Sith where like you know to be fair like it really was for a lot of people anyway uh like that's true i remember like hype as fuck to see that movie um the trailer the trailer for Revenge of the Sith i remember being awesome it was really co-travelous because i had i used to buy the um empire magazine i don't know if any of you have any familiarity over that but it used to come with the i know empire yeah it's come with dvd uh for trailers for like new set of films and the one that had Revenge of the Sith on it i think i watched that quite a few times i was i was like i want to go see this my dad was like all righty let's do it i think even my dad was like oh shit when uh christmas league got his head chopped off he's like oh there he goes i um what's the saddest scene in the lord of the rings the the movies we've definitely had this conversation before i don't know what our answer would have been but um it's pertinent though now do we have to one for the three movies or one each uh maybe like one each that's just the saddest scene in the in the movies well that was just gonna borrow me a dime pretty easy for me uh yes yeah i don't know what the contest would be i even i feel a shit time when uh Gandalf dies but i don't know what it is this is a borrow me a guest to me very very personally i feel very bad when he doesn't mine's a little bit cheesy i think i though i'd go for the gray haven seen at the end of uh that's return of that's what i would go for overall um but movie to movie i don't know i i always felt really really sad i i might say the number two moment is when boormir um when when he chases frodo away and then he's like i yeah and then he's crying out sorry yeah yeah that's uh oh that's a really good scene well there's a lot of really good scenes though yeah um i mean i guess two towers is next uh fade in at his son's grave oh yeah that's a powerful one yes try and think if there are i'm not one that i have associated with sort of sad feelings really um yeah the son's grave i have to go with that one what's cool about lord rings and i said this on a couple of streams and um funny enough one of the things that was making me think about this recently it was a god of war from 2018 um movies tv or or games even that that make you feel or it's not a common common feeling we uh we're low on that in a lot of our media overall i would say like you know drama comedy i don't know romance and uh and horror and a lot of them pop up but um or doesn't try many try like lord rings of power tries it's yeah it wants to getting doing it but it wants to because i i i guess um what would commonly be considered or i think can easily be mixed up with just big like hey look isn't that like a big vista yeah because um obviously it's hard to say remember everybody was like struck by uh columbia and of course rapture uh yeah i think those two capture it even though i don't like by talking for it all i can agree that when you first into columbia it's quite epic yeah that's uh i guess um because i'm pretty sure like everybody felt that in endgame when they did their little charge like this is what i mean look at how dismissively i call it a little charge little game when they're all running there now it doesn't really do much for me but like still in lord of the rings like at the black gate it's like oh yeah oh yeah the music gets quiet for frodo he charges on and then they do the theme but they do it with an epic choir and it's like yeah this is uh this is pretty and of course the ride of the roe heron you know like yeah you know the most epic scenes in cinema you know in denith all right when denith all realizes the enemies are at the gate sort of thing that shot where he sees the entire army that's like i almost wanted to describe it as evil or like but i'm struggling for a weird like uh terror maybe or something sort of i i know what you mean like it's all but you're not like in you're not in all you're in um dread some people saying that's a negative despair kind of shock i'm i'm i'm wondering if uh the nature of or like has to do with conch because you said god of war like the new specifically um what made me think of it is when you first meet yorman gander it's so fucking cool right like maybe is it the contrast of the quite like has god of war opens on like a really quiet moment um that maybe it's the contrast of like contrast definitely definitely helps yeah because if you just have a lot of whites though wide shot of a landscape it's like okay cool cool not quite getting there though it's like what is the key thing of what we're highlighting all these moments it's like um a lot of them are reveals and surprises well one of my favorite moments in dark souls three is uh when you you find um the the snow town what's the snow town called is it irithel like the irithel that's right when like you you see ira matthew matosis talked about it and one of his uh like i think it was the the one where he's talking about demon souls like the reason why that's such a cool reveal like it wouldn't have been such a cool reveal if the whole world was um that place like there's no contrast it's the it's the variety that like gives um gives the the things they're meaning yeah because you're in a stanky cave like hours before that yeah like there's like there's the superficial aspect of like visual contrast which is designed purely to get your sort of it's designed to be visually awesome or awe-inspiring and rings of power has this when when they arrive at um uh numinal for example i mean you go from the relatively small practical set of the boat straight into this this massive vista again but we don't have any attachment to numinal we don't know anything about it yet in the show and we don't really know any of the characters involved either and that's that's what sort of marks that out as being very much less impressive and less or inspiring or awesome than say denith or when he sees the the coming of sarah's armies or the lightning flashed helms deep when they say they see the full extent of sarahman's hordes arriving there as well because we have way more actual investment in the places but also in the people we've had more time to actually come to know them it's not just clue it's not just what he shouldn't have nothing oh you cut out for a second now oh sorry no so it's um it's it's the it's the connotations that sort of are embedded by our knowledge of character and our knowledge of the places that us that it looks big and fantastic and it's a contrast is also this is what we think this means for the character whether we stated or not um that's what makes it sort of a properly awe-inspiring scene i think i think definitely onto something i would just portion that like i was trying to think with uh with columbia's reveal do we even know much of anything about point well so i think that about video games um breath of the wild like when when uh when link leaves the cave and walks walks up to the cliff and then like it does the big pants reveal the world that's a pretty that's a pretty awesome moment um but i think part of the reason why that's so awesome is because of like expectations that the player has about what they can do in this space yeah um and maybe maybe it helps with the the meta knowledge of um oh like it like if you haven't played the game up until that point like if you didn't know anything about it um you might not know that like this this world is going to be like a huge sandbox for you to to to explore like a really robust sandbox and that everything you can see is a place that you can visit but i i think that like in a lot of video games when when you get to see a place that you can visit like and then you finally get there that can usually be a really cool moment because like so often you can see stuff in games where it's like yeah but you can't go there like that's in the background like that's not that's not a place for you to go one of the things i find really um i guess it's in the similar vein but in this will seem odd but i kind of got that feeling every once in a while when i was playing battlefield one and i was in the planes because when you're in the planes you're in your first person view and you could look around and you've got your wings over here and over there and when you change positions in the plane your character actually goes in or you hop into a turret or you go through and you go into the cockpit or whatnot and so you're moving around the plane and you're looking around and the the noise and everything and if you're if the pilot's moving around and if you're a gunner in particular and you're just sort of along for the ride with him and his other planes are flying around is really really good at kind of giving you like that holy shit like this was a thing people did and this is a this it was kind of awe inspiring in that sort of way that this could give me that feeling of almost like vertigo where you suddenly realize that you maybe this happened in games for a lot of other people but i'll suddenly realize that i've like leaned in really close uh to the screen because i'm just focusing so much immersion right yeah yeah like it means to be i think video games are very well positioned to be immersive because of the interactive element all right and also the way that they could leverage perspective that films often don't do like i don't know if i'd say first person is inherently more immersive but there is something about like playing a game from a first person perspective that can be really uh valuable oh yeah for yeah the immersion is like a like when it's when it's peak is such a drug um i remember like pretty excellent when i was super into breaking bad it would just be like you're just watching it and everything else is gone around you you're just one to one with it and watching it happen yeah and the same with all like the top game experiences i've ever had it's always just been everything else falls away which is such a fun feeling i think um when we're thinking about like uh emotions in contrast i um i'm pretty sure we've talked about it but one of the problems that we've noticed in like marvel movies is an unwillingness to let you sit with an emotion for too long yeah the over the course of a video game because of like how long some of them can be or like how focused they are something that's really rewarding about a lot of games is like the types of emotions that they seem to be deliberately and consistently trying to evoke like metroid games that feeling of isolation um you think about like a lot of action games a sense of empowerment and overcoming challenges like in obstacles before you and like the kind of um the impact that can be derived from like uh you know surmounting a challenge like putting you in an intense situation that is getting you like heated to then finally overcome that challenge and it's like the the the difficulty the conflict the um adversity to then overcome it is like incredibly cathartic the the willingness to i guess um to explore emotions that are a little bit more us specific than just happy and sad like that's that's kind of where where it's at like in maybe maybe like intensity or it's it's i think contrast is yeah contrast is super important why is it that games feel so rewarding to complete it's like well because you weren't always having fun in the strictest reading of that word of like a purely happy experience like well maybe that's not fun means but i think you know if you get what it means i do and since we're up to half an hour we should probably finish the intro intro a little that was our casual conversation before the episode starts so i will say and now we're going to talk about rings of power it's all downhill it's all uphill from here i was gonna say we're a little so good got a little uphill and then it's downhill first uphill is hey welcome to ifa episode 204 with special guest the little platoon um slash do wait what what do you go by is it tlp i don't know i don't see i think normally it's always been lost cord is my screen name but the channel name is the little platoon and i'm not yet experienced enough to be savvy at marketing so i don't actually know how to do that um i i whatever you think sounds most um sonorous now little platoon makes me think of child soldiers well i've not had that one before but like i somehow like it more cold works i i i like results little little cord oh mc low cord lc you could have that i don't know do you you see the the the way in which you hold yourself i could see charles working well for you but uh i assume you don't want to choose yourself maybe eric all right eric call yourself eric you you gunning for the charles and eric being an x-man is that was that what that was or are you thinking of someone else uh i'm just thinking of eric who is he in x-men magneto oh yeah well that's totally coincidental legitimately uh coincidental i i did not know that well um yeah what the name you have we are indeed here discuss rings of power episodes three and four which by the way once we're done with that we will be halfway through the entire show can you believe that that is insane for the first season and they've already paid for five how many was well i think it's a five season like commitment um just with the way that things lock in but i i wonder if they can change their mind on that i wonder when you get to that you get to the you know midway through the you know or near the end of the second season you're like oh fuck we gotta just what do we do that's the point at which i think they're going to start going for desperation cameos it's like ed sheeran will turn up as the king of proto gondor yeah oh i think cameos in universe cameos like oh my gosh everyone it's free and he walks on the screen i mean that's where it feels like some of them have been so far like you know you know the name galadriel and then you're like stop like every time i see her it makes yeah like little pieces don't you like galadriel you do don't you don't anymore um because when we left off the totality of the are they four major plot lines i haven't trying to remember i think it's like to say right because we've got the galadriel plot line hobbits um the elf laser elf line the uh yeah the the hobbits and like uh the fourth one is elrond that's like the yeah elrond and dwarves kind of go together humans and elfman kind of go together hob uh yeah hobbits and uh and galadriel so i think those are our four major ones um not much had happened in two hours for any of these plot lines no not not much had happened in two hours that's that sucks summarize the hobbits one it's like well a guy fell out of the sky and a girl is like we shouldn't reveal him to our village people oh she was help oh wait no that's that's to come i was i was about to say more and then i was like oh shit no that's three and four yeah but literally everything that happens in the first yeah there are so many scenes though but it's just the same over and over and over again it's just why do you want to go out into the big wide world it's not natural for a not hobbit stop doing that we've had it five times she's not like other girls it's every scene so we should make a compilation of how all of her scenes are just people telling us how adventurous and off the trail she's going you know i just think i didn't understand who this character is like because it was really difficult that trail she is where she was not going on that no fucking way uh okay yeah humans and elfman uh orcs attacked a village and they ran off to um to a little elf hideout meanwhile our elfman got captured that's that's two hours done uh what uh the the elrond jesus i don't actually know what happened in the first two like where to draw the line went to moria well kaza doom and he had a chat i think that's about it he's been he's been sent to to build help help kelo brimble build a thing and he's decided to ask the doors for help yes well rather to contract them it seems yeah they walked out two hours and then uh final one is galadriel she uh she reckons saran is about and then her boss is like nah that's fine and then sends her home and then she's like nah i don't want to and then kills herself but then miraculously survives because she bumps into a raft and then bumps into a ship in the ocean which is really common that happens all the time over and i'll tell you that yeah yeah yeah the ocean is not a small and that's it that is actually it we've summarized the first two hours of rings of power um and so i'll hand it to three episodes three and four i think it would take us longer to summarize three and four and it would actually kind of yeah it's it seems thicker hmm seems thicker then they're not better it's not better ah so we basically get started that i suppose uh we wonderfully open on our elfman oh we don't yeah we do i think yeah yeah just checking he's um oh we open on the the intro of course there's not much else for us to say on that intro i think it's uh we find it rather meh it's a very very meh intro um it is is there law meaning behind it mr mr platoon i believe you're more familiar with the books than any of us three are you're a sand expert uh possibly remind me of the scenes all right how does she go oh just the uh the intro being all the sandy bits of rock and stuff floating around and oh the formation that that's the thing what the the title sequence they um yeah the one that everyone thought was CGI but actually wasn't they just made a practical effect look like CGI i think that is just supposed to symbolize the the formation of the rings i think i could be wrong about that that's not what i've looked into oh out of dirt uh symbolizing it rags god yeah what oh okay so that that's it i was wondering if there was anything more than that i i have no idea i didn't spot anything in it and i've sort of be well so are you you sure it's practical because like it makes me wonder about the um that same thing that happened with the other trailer they did where everyone was like that's terrible CGI and then they were like how loses it's actually practical and then it's like yeah but it look at it i think they fucked with it in post like i don't believe this is just practical and the same thing happened because someone said why did you make it look CGI and then someone said haha no we didn't it's actually real um but they might make it look like CGI it's like that's George Lucas Palpatine's office so like this is a real place but why why doesn't it look real did you put a filter out what did you do yeah i feel that way about it but i'm just you know i maybe it's a suitable intro because i feel bored by it i'm like yeah there we go and you think so all the sand is real apparently but they made it look like CGI well because that's what i'm saying it looks like CG to me but um it does yeah i thought it was in fact when we were watching the last episode when we were watching the intro i thought came into my mind which was it must have taken them ages to animate all these little pebbles for a worthless intro but because it looks animated it looks like it's CG or something i don't know what they did to it maybe they like slowed down the speed of it so it didn't look like they're vibrating too much and so that i don't know what it is point being it's a waste of an intro i learned virtually nothing from it there's no relevant artistry here that i feel the music's kind of meh i expect better from Howard Shore i'll give you the benefit of the doubt that maybe there's more to it than i can see or understand for now that's all i can say maybe it's like the arcane intro where it gets better as the show progresses maybe but there's been a few things in the show where i've thought no maybe there is more to it than i'm giving it credit for but invariably the answer is no there isn't anything to it and i don't know it's actually i know that i'm looking at the shapes i'm looking at all the shapes as they form and i'm like i'm trying to put those onto things that i've seen before and you know it's we're after four episodes i'm still like i i don't know is it's do you think they just had one of those weird vibrated tables they just had one and they're like oh we can use this for our intro i guess so i might be making this up i thought i'd read somewhere that there were magnets involved but i could just be making up completely yeah if you have if this dust stuff is you know it's metallic of some sort yeah you could use magnets and then sound waves are a very light vibration on this panel could make it all you know shift about well uh yeah it looks like we're kind of used to Game of Thrones and House of the Dragon and actually giving us introductions that mean something and oh god the and the purpose house the dragon intro is downright cool at this point like right the more you understand about it and the fact that it's changing to be fair the game of thrones one did as the show went on as well to match the events and i appreciate that that's cool shit yeah chat for those who don't check out the streams with nerderotic uh the fifth episode of house the dragon came out recently and it's probably my favorite and it was uh it was quite quite good to the point of like downright like man the show's fun i'm liking this i'm in now ain't recommending it yet though no need a bit more time mm-hmm um so anyway we do begin on elfman being dragged into the well wherever he's going to end up and i suppose i can't remember as early as this that we find out exactly the nature of this place but it's uh obviously like big shenanigans are going on the the orcs have been up to no good but we also see like lots of people doing like mining and stuff and what you know as the scene is moving along those um those coverings they have on the top to prevent the sun from getting in they're not very effective those are sunbeams just shining in or precisely what the orcs do not want orcs just pissed me off straight from the beginning because apparently like okay they can't they don't like the sunlight in the law they just they fear the sunlight but they don't actually fry like vampires but in this though it turns out all they need to do to be able to move around in the sun is just wear clothes so look at this look how ineffective they're covering is here for the rooftop it's like you guys are you can barely walk in here if a single beam burns you yeah that's not good that is definitely like style over substance they like the god looks cool yeah coming through yeah and so they didn't care whether or not orcs would be happy with this arrangement for this their ceiling just walking down the tunnel out out out out out guys gotta put more blankets up there guys please we should have just done tunnels we already did that ah no giant truck um so yeah i think all we learned at this point is he gets he gets chained up with his uh he sees his elf friendos yeah so that's the realization you have is like holy shit all of the elves that we were aware of are all here um as well as obviously the townsfolk from that one village that got completely ransacked I guess and they're all being forced to dig a big old trench now we'll talk more about that a little later I think for now we'll just be like yes how shocking and terrifying I wonder what this could all mean and where it's all gonna go my god this plot line is dumb as fuck but we'll get there it's a it's a big old shock it's terrifying and they even show like an orc is just whipping someone meanly those cruel bastards as they do as they do indeed um so yeah then they cut to gladrile and legit uh especially after three and four whenever a scene starts with her at this point I'm just like oh not that I'm like super excited for any other scene but I'd rather see others than her I'd rather see anyone else dare I say yeah I'll say this she's very consistent in this episode with how she's been portrayed in the first two however that way that she's portrayed is inconsistent with what her life has been described as to us um because my god she is reliable in terms of how much she'll fuck up a conversation with somebody like every time she's her own worst enemy and I don't know if the show's aware of that or if the show thinks she's being strong I can't tell anymore I'm somehow supposed to believe that she is about 3 000 years old no way she's actually old she's older than Elrond at this point in the law um and yet he's much much more sort of measured and calm and mature my sister when she was 12 was probably a better nicer human being than than this uh gladrile yeah I got uh six-year-old cousin who is actually pretty civil and polite and well-spoken and she could get way more out of the Numenoreans than gladrile ever could because she's not stupid as fuck well she's glad to kill them all the concept of diplomacy is utterly foreign to gladrile gladrile it seems the way she speaks it's as if she's been given everything she wants always for thousands of years or however the fucklong her life should be the because like as it's seen right now she's she's had to fight like persistently like she if anything she should have that attitude right that she needs to fight for everything that she can she can get like in service of her goals instead of just fighting everybody like all the time you know like by the way she was given a lot necessarily given shelter food and boarding of all of this journey and she's already like aggressive when she gets up here it's so annoying to watch why would she be like what would you prefer to just be out on that little raft in the middle of the ocean like going nowhere in particular it doesn't help that her fucking buddy who is like on the path of becoming the evil bad guy for the show apparently is like way more reasonable than her in most of these scenes because it's just like this comparison it kind of reminds me of like uh what they ended up doing with walker right and uh talking with a soldier we're just like you know what they want you to feel but like unfortunately really bad at it so it's often the opposite of the two goals they have and ends up flipping like the results um also uh it was talked about by everybody so i feel like people will be upset if we weren't to mention it the uh the armor for these lads i think it gave shad and aneurysm um what is everyone's thoughts and feelings on it i think it looks really shit but like in terms of i think it's the it's what it's the materials because you have um it looks like i this doesn't strike me as armor that you'd wear on a on a ship if you're going around messing with sales and stuff like that i don't feel like this is what you'd wear out and about all the time um it just it doesn't seem like it fits with their job i mean let me scroll this see it here like the the shot that i've got right now like the the distinct impression i get irrelevant of like practicality is just good god they look ugly like i don't know what yeah it's like a it's like a leathery looking breast i think i'm not so yeah it's they look super ill-fitting the the sort of the the indents for his boobs a dot look at good this is why everyone's calling it the boob harbor um yeah that doesn't seem necessary i guess that's a stylistic choice it just looks so awkward and can you see much of the gap there is in the like belly portion of the armor to his actual belly yeah i was i guess that was the thing that was um that seems to be like really weird i assume if you're on a ship you have to i it seems weird because it's like they want both without committing like this looks like something that seems it would be very difficult to work on the ship with because even as high as that breastplate goes up like imagine like bending forward like to pick something up or like moving around to pull on sails or to to to trim or to lift or to to work on a ship it just doesn't seem like something that you could work in and they have like these these bracers on the side of the arms and i'm like man i don't know those just would probably just uh it looks like you're probably hot as fuck in that thing because that looks like a gambeson looking kind of yeah out and underneath the blue there's the added inconvenience as well if you fall in you're probably going to drown if it weighs too much yeah i think you probably wouldn't get i don't i don't know that i'm right but i don't think if you were just sailors on a ship of this kind you probably wouldn't have them wearing very much armor at all you'd have like a division the equivalent of like the marines which would be tasked with going and doing the fighting and you might expect those to be armored but if you're just a seaman um using that word advisedly uh then you might not expect them to be wearing this kind of thing but and it's not likely that you're gonna get snuck up upon out here you know so if oh no there's an enemy ship over there we should put our armor on before it gets here like yeah let's do that so that we don't have to wear this all day the 99.99 of the time we're not actually in combat we don't have to wear this fucking get up well you know it sucks thinking about that it's prompted me to say like oh well new minorians though they are like faster stronger and live longer than your average human right but like did you guys get that impression at all in this show do wait do they are they supposed to the far away they're supposed to be there i don't think yeah they live to about 300 years old i think and they're just supposed to only supposed to like they bet a stats than your average human in general yeah maybe i certainly didn't get that impression from the show that's what i'm suggesting remember and bring it up even they seem kind of meh like i don't know they do seem very meh for a very sailing heavy focused culture it seems they're i don't get the sense that there is this this the seafaring marshal prowess that they have um yeah i think a lot of it starts with how these outfixes just don't seem to match they don't look good they don't seem i wouldn't want to wear it the blue is a fine color but it's everything that i like the belts are fine and the blue color is fine there i said nice things i said nice things uh yeah it's the color it looks leather it looks like it's a piece of leather that's been it doesn't look like metal you know it what you were saying about this they might have difficulty bending over so i'm sure they're fine because it's not actually hard it's going to be floppy because well no they ain't real because it's it's fastened to you because you could see like the the buckles where it holds it tight to you so even if it bends a bit if you bend down and that thing is held to you it doesn't really have anywhere to go i see what you mean yeah so it would like um it's all you have you ever worn shoes right you have shoes right you guys wear shoes i think i've heard of them if the front of you've got the hole at the top of the shoe where your foot goes in and if it's too if it's fastened too tightly or if that hole is too small then whenever your foot or your leg bends forward or your foot lifts up you get that crease that kind of digs into your the the bottom of your shin on the front that's what i feel would happen with these if you ever wanted to like lean down apparently it was the one of the elven armor that shad had an aneurysm of it but as far as i know shad fucking hates the show and pretty much everything in it just don't want to make and want to make sure i'm specific about my shad details okay i haven't caught up with every episode of shads i uh uh there's so many every everyone's covering everything okay it's impossible i have to like plug all the videos directly into my brain um yeah i feel bad for him i haven't deal with this but he likes house the dragon so there's a bit of a preview for him as well another medieval show there's dragons in it neat everyone likes dragons anyway the dialogue begins and we're pretty unlucky because it's uh it's as good as you'd expect it to be um the the exchange in total is glad you'll be in like what vessel is this she's like my betters will answer your questions and she's like what port do we sail see for yourself and then i think uh halbrad is like yeah but where though he goes home it's just like oh i hate i hate the conversations in this show like this is the you may not understand just from that one example this is how they always talk everyone talks to this nobody listens to each other everyone says things yeah it's all one nice thing about this exchange is there was no metaphor that they use though for once that that's the other thing they always do and they are painful he did say that he did say we're going home instead of where we're actually going yeah oh god yeah that's like uh like how would that you know i i i would like to point out my one of my biggest gripes with a scene is galadriel's continuous total lack of anything approaching gratitude yes or respect to anyone else around her or common decency that she just had her life saved on the open seas by this ship and to understand where does this ship the way that morphid plays this role gives me the impression along with the writing that galadriel feels entitled to all of this like yes and it's unacceptable that they're not giving him more that's the impression i get if i were to read this as i believe it's intended but i have imagined i imagine the rise like no she is she of course she's thankful and the rise was like oh shit we probably should have written like saying thank you or something i don't know yeah thanks for saving my life that was you didn't have to do that but you did especially learning that you broke like a big social is big a bit of a social faux pas in numinor to bring an elf and an elf and you brought me so thank you for bucking with that cultural tradition of yours in order to save my life i legitimately appreciate that let me show you my gratitude no give me a ship bitch i'm going to middle earth also bring your army because i saw a vision no she sold the mark of oh yeah that's right because i saw the mark of sauron and your buddy brought me we'll get there we'll get there god it's dumb but uh yeah just the the the issue i take with this moment though is just that if you just see what they're saying subtextually it's like asks question i'm not gonna answer any of your questions my bosses will okay asks question he refuses to answer question asks question and then gives a vague answer of the question i'm just like uh so annoying like nobody's life i feel like the question will well can you not tell me anything surely this is the course after you're like thankful and you show gratitude and respect for your your rescuers you know yeah because when he says like um my bet is will answer your questions like the first thing you'd want in snappy dialogue is for you to make some kind of commentary in response to that concept like can you not speak for yourself you not have things to say yourself like something that has a back and forth but she sort of just ignores and moves on and even changes the question but it's it's fine because we wait wait new manure new manure this place is amazing is um it costs to hold on really yeah it looks like it did it looks expensive and yet i just i can't shake i see stuff like this i'm like oh i just it's not real it's kind of what we were talking about i think as well the uh i'm not awestruck by this because of the context that's in maybe if this series of like showing off numinal were in um something that i was much more invested in i could be awestruck by it but i was just sort of like okay this is a big place we're here now yeah like yeah i think you know it's our opening conversation was turns out to be hyper relevant all right guys that was all on purpose um i i bug bug bears with this this this entire thing because it looks very fake when you get the first i don't think this is a particularly good example of the show cgi but like this is an example of when you don't blend the practical with the cgi properly so you go from largely practical set on boat to without any sort of intermediate step there's no blurring of the lines you're then immediately into cgi and it looks the texture is different the lighting is different everything about it it's like you're watching a different show completely and um if you compare it to say the way that jackson did the Lord of the Rings films there was a there was a blend all the way through those anyway so a lot of the shots where the backdrop was painted rather than cgi or the buildings for example jackson went to locations that too he went to places we got so many gorgeous shots of the new zealand landscape and the mountains and the hills i don't think they're going to be real so there's quite a lot of drone shots in this show as well i mean i think the difference is because even the studio shots with the Lord of the Rings films like for or thank the tower at isengard for example that they would actually build the entire base of the tower they would green screen the top of the tower but the backdrop would be painted and so you get this this blend all the way through every single shot so there's not this hard cut between this is entirely practical this is entirely cgi everything in it is designed to minimize the the sort of uncanny valley aspect of it whereas with rings of power it doesn't have that i don't think it's just the locations because they do have these lovely drone shots from time to time i do think it is just i don't think they understand contrast no no they just do it randomly because there's a scene transition that they need something to be on screen for so it's just to have a mountain it feels like those scenes are just like when when you got those shots in the Lord of the Rings it would it was used for some effect but here it i feel like they're trying to kill time in this show so much that even environmental shots they get lumped into the oh you're you're just you're just killing time you're just lingering so that the so we could so that seconds pass yeah and then there was there was another thing about it i mean the boat is obviously because everything about the um the way the cg moves in the background is way too still as well if you watch the bow line of the boat and there's no movement at all i live on a boat or i haven't lived on a boat for like most of the last few years and it's just like slightly uncanny when you see that the thing i do i quite likes the music i think for the i'm just sort of undecided on the soundtrack for the approach to new and all but like the music has been really underwhelming so far and there's not been any kind of motif that you can really well there's nothing memorable about it there's a there's one motif that i've noticed it's like like i keep hearing that a lot exactly i think it is gladrials thing well the dwarves definitely have one they've been hearing it all the time yeah you have uh yeah durin durin's there and then all the dwarves they slide in from the side they've had a couple guitars and they're like are you ready to rock and they're like dwarves and they're always ready to rock um because they might yeah i would say though like that yeah the the score hasn't made that much of an impression on me nope oh oh oh speaking of score though this score try for how much we've talking we've been talking about how it doesn't really grab you or you know anything like that they try very hard to use it to do that thing where music and the soundtrack swells very prominently when something is supposed to be revealed or shown to us or they want us to feel something the soundtrack is working very very hard to try and make this um a forging emotional grandiose or drama yeah yeah when nothing really of any seeming importance happens or there's that disconnect between how i feel and how the show's really trying to make me feel because it's not it's not nailing the foundation um well how come these guys these other guys on the boat they don't have the breastplate they just have the blue and that looks so much better they look more normal they look like ike is like yeah i'm probably a bit hot and sweaty in this but it it i could move around i don't have this stuff strapped to me i'm that lovely because a lot of the aesthetics of the new minorians are great like it looks really lovely with the it's it's almost like um uh like grecian or my knowing it has that you know the white and blue prominently which i i really like i think it looks good it's a shame i don't care about anyone here which is kind of the most important part yeah it's it's a shame because people clearly worked hard on this show absolutely but anything that i like about the show is completely overshadowed by the people who didn't do a good job well it's all all great work like by set designers visual effects artists costume designers and what wow barring the the the suits that the guys are wearing um like everybody it's it's all in service of what a pretty bad script so like doesn't doesn't have the impact that uh yeah probably should have you know like it was never in doubt that this show would look expensive it's amazon they have more money than god and they're willing to put a lot of that into this show but that was never in doubt you know i'm i'm not you know i was expecting it going in for it to look expensive yeah so uh for the people who don't know a lot about the lore of the books this even comes from i i get baffled by their approach with the information they provide because basically like as these two walk in he's she's like there was the there was the big war and they were men who fought with morgoth the men who fought with the elves were rewarded numinor and then they stopped allowing elves to come to numinor that's all we get the show does this all the way through the show backfills it's well-building it's it has no idea of how to set things up for payoff later so so yeah the basic idea of of numinor is that you have to fight against morgoth the men who side with the elves as you say against morgoth they are given numinor by the valour um and we spend you know the opening monologue of episode one in valinor itself which is where the valour live you might think given you're going to it seems at least be introducing gods with the power of intervening in the world into this show might have been a good idea to do that from the off you wouldn't have even even needed to do very much different you could have inserted a line saying the elves wanted you know they besieged the valour for help against morgoth and the valour turned them down at that time so they left on their own account um but because they didn't do any of that at the time when they really needed to do it they get to this point in when they first arrive at numinor and they have to start building a lot of stuff that's going to become very relevant later as well because if they're doing the fold of numinor which i think they are going to try and do then the end point of the fold of numinor is that the valour themselves will actually flood the city because the numinorians try to invade valinor now you wouldn't know any of that from what the show is telling you but also you wouldn't know about the existence of the valour anyway unless they decided in episode three that it was relevant for the point of that episode and things going forward but it's this this backfilling of information in this show it's not the first time they've done it and they'll do it again later as well it just it's really really really sloppy writing but i guess we shouldn't be surprised about that i mean i i just think it's baffling writing i don't know why they chose to do it this way it is fucking confusing like yeah the state of the world i don't i don't i don't you you're telling me galadriel knows that elves are like shooed away from this place even though they're supposed to be on like amazing terms because they fought a war together and this is reward and stuff but she is she lacks any sense of curiosity as to that throughout her entire visit here at least in the two episodes we have i was like then also what's definitely weird well what do you say she doesn't know about her not in no no she doesn't because the dialogue here is she's she says well she's he says do you do i detect a note of envy and she says no sorrow or sadness whatever it is she uses and then they have the conversation and then and then he asks her you know what happened and then she's we might be about to find out about to find out so like all she knows at this point is that the elves their ships are being turned away that's all she knows they don't she doesn't know what's changed about numinor itself so she doesn't really have any reason to be sorrowful she should be intrigued about where she is and what's changed about it not what she learns that she's not like even really allowed to be here necessarily like it's a big deal for her to be here she she is simultaneously not at all curious as to this change in attitude towards elves but she uses their old alliance with the elves to try and get her way she appeals to that she almost um i wasn't blackmail is not the right word she's you she almost tries to like use it as a debt um kind of yeah you we gave you this yeah it's the whole you know paid and blood thing we'll get to in a moment but it's i guess we could yeah when that line comes up we can we'll talk about it a bit more but the only thing i want to say here is that as someone who's trying to take this and trying to judge it without without a sense of anything even even not even involving the movies right um like i'm taking this for what it is you're telling me like one of the most prominent elves of all time it's like yes these are our allies but they don't like us anymore and it's like i'm gonna find you know hopefully we'll find out why and then she like doesn't ask about it at all yeah she doesn't ask about it and yet she relies on it not being the case which is like one of those things has to be addressed yeah it's like if you go to someone's house thinking that your friend is there and then you learn he's not there but you still tell the people at the house oh well i need to be here because my friend's here like no no you you miss that first bit of info he's not here you can't use that as a reason for you to get what you want um and i guess before we move on the the rowboat here i just noticed this uh those oars on that little thing i don't know what the thing that holds the oars on the side of a boat are but if you're gonna go backwards you can't because your ore will just slip out of that it is that's for a seafaring people um that's kind of a that's a pretty substantial fuck up actually for being a seafaring people who are big into boats in the water you can't back up your boat yeah because it's supposed to be that it's like a like a u-shape right not a yeah oh you could yeah you don't have to keep it down you have to keep it from you know forward and back so you could row that's what you are pulling i'd say that's what yeah that's you need that that's necessary so that means like this is like they would have to spin the boat every time uh yeah they'd only have to have one person rowing on one side to help it's just like man i guess they i guess they never needed to back them up in the water so they or maybe they noticed it like well it's not going to be in the shot so fuck it mind you if they don't ever need to back them up then they're gonna have a really tough job getting out of where they are because haven't they gone in front of us one guy that goes forward it spins the boat on spot easy done it's gonna look great it's not like stupid as fuck it's like they're about let's see sorry so sorry rags their boats always look to the front that's what makes them float better of course yes you see their boats don't go down yeah up up and forward ish you know up and forward he said up um didn't he say to go forward or something the point being is that you can ignore all practicality if there's some flowery something behind it some metaphor the scene whatever there's a walking scene sort of ends with uh hull brand looking at a forge and i swear to fucking god if if he really is saaron and he's looking at the forge he can't wait to forge the rings this is one of the lamest charts in the history of foreshadowing it's not the ford because the rings they are for that's what kelly brimboar and elrond are trying to build i think is the forge over in irregion which is where it's it's foreshadowing because saaron is supposed to be it is one of those things where they try and appeal to people who have like read the book or do know the law but they're also appealing to people who are going to be disproportionately annoyed at them for ditching the rest of it but saaron is is a smith not just a smith of the rings but when he is uh when he is sort of in his pre big super villain form he is a famous and noted smith so his long sort of lingering glance of ironworking is supposed to be kind of foreshadowing for people in the know it's just that it's not really a good guide for people because again everything else has been ditched so are we supposed to take from this that the show will be following the book that most people haven't read anyway or is it then gonna throw a a curveball and just ditch the rest of that again it's just very strange that they should try and make these particular knots when they've also proudly gone and said we're not going to be basing what we're doing on the stuff we're now nodding you toward i was gonna say i think it's a lot shallower than that i think the the rise of just like it's so neat when you go back into season one after you get the reveals that you can see him eyeing up a forge and and no excited because he's gonna be making the one ring eventually just want to give you a few shots here because of course i've just only seen these give me just a second here we go so if you have amazon money then i don't expect you to be making these kinds of continuity fuck ups look at the people that they're passing here in this shot on the back side red hat blue uh blue red hat blue hat and then there's this one guy with the orange hat as well they passed they clearly passed them and then the next shot they passed them a second time to get their money's worth out of a yeah so they actually did that in she-hulk but you'd expected of something like she-hulk because there's an office sequence when she's walking through there's a guy with a briefcase who appears on two floors at once uh well obviously Dr. Strange had a class example of that as well oh yeah the guy who was in times see the screenshots it's swapped to arabic see in between the two screenshots the the subtitles swapped to arabic and i don't know why they're doing that mine did it to spanish last night maybe it's just a general problem i don't see in in between the screenshots you could see it's sending a message there's a cell it's elvish kind of warn you stay away all righty yeah so uh and we we go to the i don't know city hall i'm having a big old discussion we have uh the the nature of numinal right now is there's a king who they quietly asked to fuck off and he's in his bed i guess like from what i was trying to gather and then you got the queen regent is currently running things which is his daughter correct yeah that's yeah he's removed because he likes the elves i think i think they do actually mention that later in this episode they do um he's too fond of the elves but then she's queen region they say they deposed him but if she's queen region she's exercising somebody else's royal authority which is presumably his so that he hasn't really been deposed so i was actually going to ask you to clarify for me because i don't understand if they got rid of him as a ruler why would they accept his daughter it doesn't i mean legalistically it would work if she for example had a male heir i think this is how basic monarchy works like if she had a male heir who was next in line to the throne but was underage then she could exercise the royal prerogative on his behalf as queen regent um but the region if it's a queen regnant then she's ruling in her own right if she's queen regent then she's ruling on behalf of somebody so she's queen regent and this the father is still there he still lives in the palace he's just sort of a vegetable so we assume she's rolling on his path in which case she wasn't he wasn't deposed exactly i agree it would make sense if she's ruling while he's alive but unable to give orders as if like yeah on his behalf as i remember it they they say that like he was he was like he was pushed off he was like go away we don't like you and then she's in place and it's like why would they why wouldn't they just elect their own chosen leader why would they get his daughter that that's a weird choice it's because he didn't want to it almost seems like it's because he didn't want to it's very confusing i guess we'll get to there in just a little bit but he it's it's like the library right that they go to he wanted to tear it down but they said no he didn't want to tear it down everyone else did so they said oh yeah well we're gonna depose you because of that but they didn't tear the tower down anyway and they let him stay in the tower to be king but not really king and they put his daughter to be in charge instead of him it's all very confusing and goga said apparently there's a line to say that they did actually vote her in but then why would you do that but why would they do that yeah i she's the last person you want to vote in she's literally got his ear like he was in well vice versa actually he's got her ear it's weirdly and unnecessarily complicated because you get the two main characters they're both introduced here so you get the queen regent um and you get al-farrison who's the guy with the big bushy beard yeah and if you're going from in the book version the king king uh palanteri is his tar palanteri is his name he dies and then al-farrison forcibly marries the queen regent and then becomes king instead but the the the point being they managed to kill off the king in the in the book version which sort of does away with this weird complexity which i don't that they must have done it for a reason like the the continued existence of the king must serve a purpose but oh yeah she has to go gladrile has to go in you know that but then she just discovers he's a vegetable maybe we assume too much when we say oh they must have done that on purpose for because you know there's a lot of stuff but yeah well so as you can as you can hear chat we're a little little confused we're a little like what i don't really i'm a little lost but that's fine you know just because nothing's made sense so far doesn't mean it won't start making sense at any point the thing is it should be so easy to make sense of there are two factions on numinal there's just two there's the faithful who like the elves and there's the king's men who don't that's it like there's no you don't it's it's kind of hard to fuck that up but well they've managed to find a way of doing it so congratulations i suppose um one of the things i think whole brand says when they're walking on their way here is essentially like don't antagonize these people um which is hilarious i think uh he says that you have to tell someone that yeah and does this is this advice listen to it's like no um no she doesn't listen to advice she does as everyone has called it her Daenerys moment um when introducing she's like i am gladrile of the doldor daughter of the golden house finar fin commander of the door that it's like shut the fuck up no one cares people don't even like you this look that she does this anti elves it why wouldn't you want to introduce yourself as like i am gladrile friend of numinal something like that you're like just something simple like i'm gladrile of just whatever is customary like i'm i'm gladrile i'm you know that's daughter of tata da you could even say you know like descendant of and then person who provided numinal slash fought in the war something to appeal to these people that would be clever well i know that would be clever but i know that the show looks down on cleverness but yeah and so she does all that and then she's just like give us a boat to middle earth and it's just like wow did anyone else think that they turned howlbrand into brawn in this scene because everything about him accent and the type of human like when she she comes off her big spiel of titles and he just goes on howlbrand oh yeah you're right i thought and the mannerisms as well he just sounded and looked exactly like brawn so for those who don't know uh season one of game of thrones um tirion is with tirion hires a sell sword to fight sivardus for his life it's fucking great and and the sell sword wins his brawn he's fucking great uh because he's really fast and he's against someone who's super amazing armored but he keeps just slicing between the seams and eventually gets him to kills him by several cuts basically and that's brawn's introduction everyone fucking loves brawn he's a fan favorite manages to he's one of the many characters that gains intense plot armor as the episodes go on because people really like him um which is a shame however when they're heading back to tywin's sort of encampment during the wars that are going on in the first season they have to head through like loads of woods and they eventually get hit by like bandits and stuff but uh tirion manages to talk his way out of it by telling them he'll give them all kinds of riches and and weapons and armor and stuff if they take him to his father because another thing that game of thrones had was really awesome tirion would always talk his way out of every last like threatened danger he ever got himself into it was really cool um when they arrive tywin sees him with like three of the these these these big dudes and brawn and so it's like you got he's like i am tirion this is my father tywin and then tirion is tywin is like and who are your friends and he's like this is shagga son of dolph this is uh he's the leader of the stone crows that like he introduces all these people that he goes uh this is broad uh they're broad just goes you would know by dad you know it's like it's like a fun just like ha ha everyone's doing their names and then he doesn't have his one and then yeah the equivalent is done here where she does her whole set of names and then uh whole brand is like um i'm just i'm just whole brand all okay um which uh you know it's the closest this show probably got to making a decent joke i guess feels like we've seen it before i'm trying to think there i think there might have been one thing that i was like oh that was clever and amusing i can't remember what it was maybe i'm maybe i'm just crazy i guess we'll find out oh fuck yeah the the the one is is more similar to i guess would be it's like season six or seven of game of thrones where denaris does all of his names and then john snow is introduced by davos and he just goes this is john snow and that's it there's no like loads of extra names which is probably a good comparison of why people like john snow toward the end and didn't like denaris there's um a level of vanity that comes with a billion names on top of your name that is uh unappealing if you're not exactly doing great in the appealing factor for a character anyway i mean that's how they introduce zerk sees in uh 300 he's got all those names and all these titles that goes on and on yeah anyway she wants a boat and then she's like no we don't do that because we're not a fan of elves and then she's like yeah well you got this place thanks to elves and then she's like oh yeah well we paid for that with blood and like i'd argue the conversation as much as i hate her strategy all right let's let's kind of make sense there's you know these backs and forth it's kind of working for me and then gladrile says if blood is the price then i will pay it one way or another i will depart so that's just like a threat and i was just like fucking hell like did she seriously just threatened to kill them this is this a lot what are you thinking woman that are you so fucking cocksure and full of yourself and spoiled that by the way still no thanks still no gratitude still no you know wow you you you pull this out of the water you brought us to your palace to talk with your ruler none of that um it's just instantly into death threats so that's great he's literally she's doing a terminator is he giving me your clothes and your motorcycle this guy's giving me your clothes and your boat well so for later i thought what a chat just kind of pointed out if we to take it as almost literally let's say she said like it cost blood to get numinal and then she's like well if it costs blood then fine like as if to suggest i will bleed in order to like i'll die in order to get out of here or something i'll die to get out and get what i want yeah which um like i don't i don't know are you sure i wonder when they wrote that line i wonder what we would think that's supposed to me do do they intend to have this be a like a death threat is that the intention because a part of me wants to go like surely so do that right when she says one way or another i will depart i think that's supposed to be a badass line but i was just like oh what are you doing you nutcase you fool the intention of it is the intention is that's a badass line but the reality is you just threaten to the ruler of this place right here in front of everybody right now yeah and everyone's like the whole crowd and stuff yeah and then she's like i welcome you to try it she's like i have no need of your welcome this is the only equivalent of that is is when someone goes um i don't know about that man and then you go i'm not your bad we are like are you trying to like you trying to get an own at every sentence it's like this is just pathetic stop it this is right i'm not your body pal i'm not your body is because it goes on after as well because you said and you are quickly out staying yours welcome and they just carry on they got this welcome wordplay that they're really really proud of they're very proud carry it going someone said rags these are the same people who unironically wrote there's a tempest in me that would make some level of sense we'll get to that one it's not good but like compared to this it's bonkers this yeah but you are right this is like i have to score some clever wippy point all the time regardless of context and regardless of what it actually is because i i yeah i have to be the best at all times during conversations i have to be the best like you suck and then she goes you suck more there's like i suck more meaning i'm better at sucking than you and you're like yeah which is worse than being and then she's like wait so then you accept defeat i'm the master sucker i'm a better sucker than you um but yeah part of the really crazy thing of this hundreds of years more than you um is that they have whole brands say like oh man looks like uh yeah seems that leaving presents some complications how about you think about it for three days and then and then we'll move on everyone just like yeah okay yeah great yeah okay yeah that's fine just like that's all you have to say well that's it my guns be my guns like it was there was no uh like silver tongue nature here there's nothing of him appealing to anything he'd learned so far or making note of lever yeah it's just it's just give us three days okay that should be the default for them though is like oh you want you have this request let's assume that she made this request in a very charismatic and in intelligent way right let's assume all went well and then they would say maybe something along the lines of well we will consider your request but you just got here surely you need to rest and da da da and is like we'd have to prepare a ship is it give us some time to think about it um in the meantime just hang out and enjoy our hospitality this is um because a lot of people like the great deceiver though that's the sorrow thing it's like no that's my point is it would be really cool to see him do that but he's not doing that this is because they don't they can't write that can they they can't write him doing something really clever oh yeah that's clever writing in order to write to clever you have to be clever as a writer at the end of episode four i think it is they actually do have him the almost clever so they can do it it's just they're incredibly so and then they can maybe do it once every four hours is their problem and so they couldn't do it and this thing i know you're gonna have our that's their power and it has a four hour recharge time you can't pay gold to get rid of this one either they paid it all but um she even even interrupts him like halfway through trying to appease these people who are on the verge of fucking killing them or jailing them gladrials like it's literally what she's like yes that noise is what she's like it's shockingly true oh my god i will not be made a prisoner like you know what that's not up to you yeah i think like being a prisoner does not require your consent as it happens to be so um no right she'll kill everyone i mean you know what she probably is capable of doing that with this how they would edit it yeah she could single-handed lead destroy entire nations absolutely she's that much of a boss man uh she's very cool she is very cool and so like if in case you're not grasping our issue with this it's the gladrials been alive for a fucking long time she is uh not only an incredible warrior but she's also pretty high up in the political game you should be fully aware of how these interactions work she should have full knowledge of histories that happen between all these different places why is she so beyond stupid with her approach to all of this she can't speak to anyone properly no better exactly is incredibly unsatisfying to watch this like random scruffy dude managed to outwit her at like everything to do with speaking and if someone was to say to me like no no no but it's saran it's like no no no no no they've just made her incredibly stupid to his relatively stupid so he looks that that's what they're going for right so what they're going for is she is she's trying to depict her as being the biggest bestest strongest smartest toughest person around but she is she gets taken under the sway of this relatively charming man she met on a random motion raft and then by her this is this is sort of the fulfilling the prophecy that gilgalla mentions in episode one when he sends her away is that when she looks for the thing she accidentally fans the flames of the fire or whatever the fuck he was talking about so the the idea is they're bigging her up so they can bring her down by having her betrayed by the one person she ends up coming to trust which is how brand so you can see that's what they're going for but the problem is the you can't just pretend that like 3000 years of character history don't exist just because you want to do that with your character she has a background and they've just had to forget it yeah no i think you're right that that's part of what they're going for but my god they've not built it properly it's almost more embarrassing when you can see what they're building but it's just so poorly done that you're just sort of embarrassed for them like oh see what you want but yeah that back and forth is really funny i will depart i welcome you to try i don't need your welcome you're wearing out yours well done right as you could string a sentence together um and yeah they're like you'll be a guest you're not a prisoner don't worry about it right um a woefully unsatisfying opening scene and then this happens where uh uh because he's a lend deal right the the salesman who saved a salesman i meant i meant that is like sale on a boat like uh the boat oh it sails me yeah yeah he's a steedman uh he's a steam and sees a sales seamen seamen's man so when this uh when this happened um when i first watched the episode i was like so hull brand's definitely taken something from him i'm not sure what it is but he's probably taken something then we find out he's taken galadrials it's safe to call it a sword right i think it's a soldier um it's it's long enough that it makes me think a dagger might not be accurate but i don't know i i think a dagger is as is very what do you call a thing between the lengths of a sword and a dagger uh sword sword i get maybe i i still think it's i still it's oh wait no you're right it is definitely a dagger i remember pulling it out later i was thinking of something longer um as i often do but uh yeah so he's he's taken that off a lend now if maybe we could um first pump the brakes her it's just the second tier okay yeah what do you want to talk about i yeah just in regards to what you're going to say like like this is like one of those hold up moments did that just happen sort of things well so i was gonna start with what would his motivation be to do this to make galadriel happy is that it so if generally when you steal a weapon from someone i know technically it's hers but it's stealing off of him to give back to her he's trying to is it literally only to curry favor with her that so this is why i want to get this sword first so that we can really highlight how fucking stupid this was because let's pretend for a second that sword was the key to opening some ancient doorway that's the the the big goal of their whole adventure would be like okay i could see why he had to get it back but if it was literally just to be like i know you like your little steward your little dagger here you go and i bet you like me now uh so yeah just just be clear i'm pretty sure that's it great pretty that is the only thing that comes to mind even though i the last thing that i would be doing after she said all those things is to give her a weapon yeah especially if i was in her company like the way that they perceive her is probably gonna rub off on me because we're like a pair in their perception at least and she's threatened to like kill people and spill blood to get what she wants i shouldn't give her a weapon because she might be insane and crazy enough to actually do something about that um then again i mean she is she is the person that he needs to accomplish what isn't you know inevitably going he wants to curry favor essentially he must see the potential in what she's doing but again it does require the the leap of trust obviously and that she's not just going to go and randomly commit genocide on an island but i don't you know the point i think they're trying to make is this is him this is his ground deception this first stage of the ground deception is deceiving her he wants to gain her trust and you see the pay off probably in subsequent episodes which is when you know he betrays her and then is revealed to be the thing that she was sort of warning against she but like so that this is the thing like how much carried carried favor does he have compared to already she's probably likes him most the most out of everybody in this whole city right now he already likes him because he saved her life technically twice um so like the idea that it's like how much is he really gaining from stealing this this thing uh versus the risk and it's like maybe we should talk about that so let's talk about the risk shall we let us talk about the risk let's discuss we're in what is quite possibly one of the most important like rooms in the in the entire city with most important people in the entire city you're being treated pretty much as prisoners and you've got your like guards surrounding you who have taken your weapons and you're stealing one right off him when you're meters away from the queen region and you've already you're with someone who's threatened to kill everyone all eyes are on you all attention is focused on you in this room full of dozens and dozens and dozens and dozens of people he's got nowhere to hide it by the way more guards yeah i was wondering how the hell he did it is he's got no sleeves he can't like hide it it's out of frame like look at this guy that's the thing putting it up your sleeve is the the most like believable thing but he ain't doing that so where's he putting it it's like up his little shit i guess he's gonna have to awkwardly do that hopefully don't look at it when he does it yeah where did where did he actually put it it doesn't look i don't know man i think i watched that probably four times over to try and figure out what he did and i cannot figure out maybe there's a magician in chat who knows how this works but i couldn't and he would have to use his left hand to do it because his right hand was around his shoulder hugging him true and you have to rely on elendil not detecting it whatsoever which is lame but hey yeah he'd notice he has an empty scabbard right was it in one forget i'm not sure how it's attached but obviously it needed to be relatively loose for this to work i'll take a look real quick but the other thing is that these two you have to remember that the the vibes in this place is that everyone's like ew these two get them out of here like the idea that he was lucky enough to not have anyone looking at him when he did this just like fuck mate all right risky move that way slight of hand oh yeah absolutely um and it you know he does it later with the uh the crest as well but um yeah stealth 100 drunk man in pub doesn't notice when crest or does notice sorry when crest is stolen train soldier does not who's sober as well does not notice when dagger is stolen no one else in the room i guess or anyone else yeah nobody else everyone's too busy talking to people that are probably staring at him i legit have no idea where he put it yeah i have no clue how he was able to yeah i've what are you uh yeah he's so he's gonna yank that out of there without without a lindy you'll notice in all right sure whatever you say definitely and then to make things worse it's pretty like this standing at the like on the stairs to the entrance and exit of this place and he's handing it to her like you might want to do that at a different place just saying yeah this isn't a good time for that my stuff i was on back to arabic but you of all the you pick the it sure is lucky you know that no one notice yeah they're all like everyone's turned their backs to him that's lucky yeah no one's interested in this elf and this guy who got picked up and this chick who made threats against her queen that's that's not a small thing the i don't even know where he where did he pull that from like was he was he trying to just sort of wrap it into his his arm itself to try and like because that is not a good way to conceal it but sure it's fine well here there's a scene here where he's uh ah yeah that there you go so you can stay with that so yeah this is this is his incredible sleight of hand he managed to get that past everybody you know i wouldn't be able to spot that it's just too good good as they're walking to the um yeah as they're walking away he just clearly doesn't have it and then it appears in his arm as they're and remember we have two guards right behind them who are watching i'm sorry like what's in behind these stairs i think it actually probably would be better but they didn't show us this though that we like is telling me this is how he did it is just like oh he can almost hope there's like a little cut in his uh the upper portion of his outfit there that he can slip it into and then slip it out of that's something i could imagine but now i have to see that and be like oh that's how he did it okay sure no one notices the guards are of course not looking at their charges that would be ridiculous for that no one in this room is watching them now they've lost all interest uh ellendil doesn't notice he's been it do you see like how the mechanics of things happen matters because i don't believe that what you told me happened could have happened and it's not and it's not clever i guess it's supposed to show that he is capable of stealing things very effectively which maybe isn't true but if this ain't the way to show it you could claim that that's what this is but i don't believe you there's a disconnect between what i think that a skill should allow it for you know him to be able to do and what you are writing him to do so uh also they don't get him any new clothes that's kind of weird isn't or do they later does he still does he still wear these eh rags but oh they do eventually he does eventually get a shirt okay okay it's just a very similarly colored shirt it's nice that they gave him a shirt that's nice so you got yeah uh queen region and far farazah i think was his name al on our farazah even farazah okay al because it's not harabic it's our farazah yeah um he's like solve this quickly and then he's like she's one l four i can't remember whose dialogue was who's in this part but they just say like yeah he could be the beginning of something real bad which will give us more context for next episode but now though they're like what of uh what of the seaman and uh it's just what of the seaman it's very just the same way they always do everything like his name is a lead deal he is of a noble line he is now a sea guardsman with a son who wishes to follow in his career it's like what all right well we got no that's great we we we we're filled in now thanks show all right we got it we got all our info now that's nice the obvious criticism we would be able to see this in all the scenes we go about how with the sildur why would you do that why why was it necessary for that to be said between them what how did that help anything like mad if the first time we see him sitting down with his son and he just casually refers to him as a sildur in the conversation that would have been far more interesting than just ah yes his son a sildur it's like oh come on man sometimes subtlety is the way to go how they just he just matter of faculty refers to a son by his name a name that you recognize and that's like that's so much more interesting yeah um and then we got a scene and I remember seeing gary's review of this where he just like we take about five minutes and in total is sildur is like staring off into the like his mind is in the clouds you might say and then um he's like almost fucks up a thing we're just doing stuff doesn't hear a voice doesn't the voice say his name yeah he's he's looking to the west and also west numeral which is where his family comes from um and this constant there is a constant sort of undergirding thing that the show occasionally remembers it wants to do because they do mention it maybe three times across the entire thing but the first time they mention it it's as though we should already know what it is um and you know I I've read the film brilliant and I can't really remember what the distinction is it's just it's yeah so he has this weird sort of whispery voice as he's glancing over and then he lets go of a rope and some guy goes flying but the captain of the ship just doesn't he doesn't care he just goes on about talking about the ocean being a harsh mistress or master or whatever it is and that's a really interesting comparison to what happens the next time something like this happens it makes the next one so more irritating because it's like I've seen you do it a thousand times and you've never fucked it up but we'll gather you saw him do it and like the last time he didn't do it so there's no harsh our master that the sea that guy is weird dude and then they do this thing of like they're like they're like worshiping the sea and he's like the sea is always right that's like there is so much you can do with that I don't actually know what that's supposed to mean the sea is always right um I've heard way better quotes about the sea that are way cooler than that you can't fight the sea you the sea's right you have to work with the sea is that what they're trying to say I think yeah like the sea is just a force of nature that it's never don't fight it you work with it some some bullshit like that I don't know the sea is always right it doesn't come across very well it's just like the rest of the shit they put in this the sea is always right it's like okay this is this is naval terminology should be the sea is always starboard right see what you did there oh oh oats and hose by the way in microcosm okay this is such a nitpick but just he's sealed or your sister is here I was like right like in case I had to figure that out from the way they talk to each other I'm sure I'll be fine now we know that I guess I guess they'd want to let them know if she showed up yeah but you could do it in this is why I said it's a nitpick I just prefer dialogue that doesn't feel to me like you the writer was like that's the sealed or sister and I'm like okay you didn't have to do it that way but they do it again stage directions when they do it like this it's like sister enters stage left but a character is actually speaking it as a line yeah you can blend it into your natural conversations so much more easily and believably than that you have I think the same character like a few seconds later is like come see us later don't be like your brother like yes yeah yeah yeah we're later this brother insists that you don't stand that you follow and you're like yeah I do yeah it's the Han Solo Millennium Falcon thing your father Han Solo do you remember your father Han Solo I remembered for you I know you forget there's loads of that in this show all the time it's keep telling everyone tells each other stuff they already know it's great nothing is nothing is emergent in this show it's all on the nose and it's directed at you in this in this clumsy clunky way you don't you don't learn things maybe that's it you never learn things you're told things yes um so moving swiftly on Queen Regent is like you know I will be right back when the when the petals fall from the the pretty white tree it means that the Valar are looking and it's like they're crying which is going to be relevant later at the end of episode four even and they didn't have the balls not to repeat the line when they do it then I thought they were gonna do it they were gonna let us try and remember what she said but then they played the thing I was like okay I don't know why I thought otherwise um I sort of had an argument with myself in my last video on this is is it because the writers think that the audience is stupid or is it because the writers actually are this stupid themselves and this is how they are with each other all of the time it's you wonder because when they played that scene and the the petals are falling and originally it was just that and it's just shown and then you see the reactions they were like wait is the audience gonna remember what she said all that time ago then some of the writer was like it was like an hour and a half it's not that long and someone else was like yeah but it might be this is a bit long in an hour and a half and it's like yeah we wouldn't want somebody to not fully understand like a seed we don't want that we don't want it to be possible to misunderstand anything in this show we gotta gotta get them to feel the feels because otherwise they won't know why the characters are freaking out and it's like well I guess they could go back and check right it's like they're not gonna re-watch this come on well alternatively if they were paying super close attention to this so great show you know they would uh maybe they'd remember it it's like oh shit I don't know apparently not apparently they don't trust it just to be safe just to be sure you know just in case so then we get quite I thought this was funny okay like some some of this stuff I'm trended on it I don't even know if it if any of it is directly from any source of any kind so you know but just just being like what does uh what does your name mean that he's like it has one meaning so it's a little bit more obviously she's like there's another meaning for your name and he's like elf friend that she goes are you an elf friend I was just like this sounds so stupid what the hell like he's like I'm a servant and then she's like yet you saved her why and I was like in my own head just like really he's gonna how are you supposed to be able to tell what like he picks her up sees her ears and then goes out fuck off and kicks her off the boat like did you really expect that to happen is that is that like the the standard protocol at this point it's tricky because yeah yes and no in that because you have these two factions the faithful are the elf lovers and then you have the kingsmen the kingsmen really don't like the elves but this show isn't tracking the timeline so the the the reason they don't like the elves isn't actually established in this show so if you're just critiquing by this show it doesn't make a huge amount of sense would they later on in the timeline in the book have potentially kicked an elf into the ocean yeah maybe actually because that they go and become these sort of fascistic tyrants so that's the thing it just doesn't make any sense had he kicked her off and then she managed to swim back to new manure and then we everything around the same way I would be baffled because it'd be like why are they so aggressive at that point but now they're so chill because if if this this is what I mean it's not matching up to me like their approach with the the elf reaching their shores in this show is pretty chill if they're supposed to be in a position where they want to kill them on site or at least not help them to the point of them dying on site I didn't get that impression at all um nor I'm not even sure what impression to give this is what I'm like their attitude towards elves this is what I'm trying to say like you've got to give some space for people who have not seen anything from the source this show is trying to tell its own story but it's absolutely confusing at this point because obviously they're pulling some stuff and then they're leaving other stuff so the fact that she's like why didn't you let her die baffles me because of how well they're treating the elf right now and how well they go on to treat her like why aren't you killing her what's the difference yeah later though you hear that you know for the reign of the grandfather and the grandfather's great grandfather they've hated the elf so for all of that time apparently they've they've been on very bad terms and yet there's not been this this mass build-up of of antipathy that's that's there that creates a sort of this murderous antipathy it is just oh well she's here now so house arrest darling that's that's all we're going to give to you um but it's because it is condensing about 2000 years of history at this point so there is this is the problem with its selective law-citing because it's borrowing events that really are contingent on events that it hasn't borrowed and so it's supposed to be filling in the gaps that arise as a result it hasn't filled in any of these gaps it's just trying to sort of breeze past them usually with stupid dialogue but the the next bit when she's still interrogating him and he says well i bought her back because the sea is always always right and she says well the sea doesn't commit treason i love that line i don't understand what any of this means what are you doing the sea is always right yeah but it doesn't commit treason what does that even mean he says that in his experience it's not a good idea to you know decide what you're going to do guessing after signs importance which is portents which is a line i really like but then he says i brought her back because the sea is always right which is yeah it's like that's but but so there was no real reason actually it's just because the sea is always right that's not it conducive with what you said before well then he follows up with i did what i believed is most prudent which is um can you just say like yeah i just didn't want it to die i guess i mean i don't i don't i don't follow it if she felt this way if she's condemning him for allowing the elf to live then why isn't she killing the elf yeah would it look bad in front of your people if it would look bad in front of your people then why do you have this attitude in the first place exactly that's why i'm so confused like it seems like they've adapted half and half and it's caused a huge problem here because like i'm now lost as to what the fucking the approach with elves is and then even if you read it so the other way and the way it does pan out as is that you know she's sort of putting on appearances here but secretly she is much more like her father in that she doesn't actually have a massive hatred for the elves and she is at least amenable to making deals with them but then you get back to the earlier question as to why she's on the throne to begin with because you know that was to be expected you would think um but the dialogue just continues to make no sense because they say she says okay the sea is always right but the sea doesn't commit treason which just invites you to play that clip from fellowship when gladrile says treacherous is the sea and then it goes on later on when she says if that is your wish then i have a mission for you but i don't know what the wish part of that refers to either because he says i did what i believe to be right so then she says if that is your wish does she mean that it was his why did you believe right yeah well yeah not if that is your wish it's why did you think that to be right if that is what you believed not if that is why do you believe what is yeah what is he wishing is he wishing to do what he thought was right or is he wishing to do the right thing that he then thinks is right at the entire conversation on the pointless yeah this this conversation feels pointless because i don't feel like you need to have a conversation with him saying why did you pull this elf out of the water and bring her here when he found her in the middle of the ocean like i feel like the answer to that is obvious and he would have like you do you have to what is the state of this kingdom and attitude that gets her in a position to where she even needs to have this conversation with him to interrogate him about that in particular to be clear by the way uh the new step sort of has to dragon is conversation conversation conversation conversation conversation and then right at the end someone dies um it is like an hour and five minutes of people talking and then an action thing happens um the the conversations are that good that you just like you just like oh yes i lindelof and i lindelof these ones like almost every time i don't feel like these are real people talking to each other and i'm often very confused in calories there's just nothing here they don't feel like people to me uh yeah this isn't how people talk to each other this isn't how well human beings talk to each other what's been highly these conversations are like needlessly convoluted i was going to say complex complicated but like that's not they are convoluted because everything that these characters are saying to each other could be achieved with so much more clarity but they feel the need we talked about it in there in the previous coverage like everything is purple prose like the way that these people talk to each other it's like you know what i need to make this more confounded i need to throw in more yeah like uh it it's incredibly unnecessarily needlessly convoluted but it's usually a compensating strategy though and is it any and anyone who's ever written like undergraduate pros will know people who go in for colorful pink purple pros they usually have nothing to say that's the reason they have nothing to convey either it's it's all it's a massive language game to trick you into thinking that and actually meaning has even been exchanged here which really it hasn't right i can't there's no real there's not even basic meaning that's being conveyed between these things like the house of the dragon example is really useful for another way because you know you are you are actually being thrown into if you compare the two you're being thrown into a really similar setting you're in you're being thrown into a kingdom with which you're not previously familiar unless you've read the book it's both kingdoms are in there relatively or they're mid to late stage of development shall we say and let's say you have no equivalent you have no foreknowledge of either of them by episode five of house with the dragon you're pretty up to speed with the dynamics of the kingdom itself the place it's set in the factions involved yeah the different alliances that are that are in play episode four it's okay we had one fewer episode but episode four of rings of power you don't get that like there's no understanding of what numinal really is and it's such a simple it's a relatively simple kingdom to depict again there are just two factions you have to work with here you don't need to do a lot to make this make sense but they haven't even managed to do the bare minimum to make it make sense because they don't know how partly because they don't have to write the fucking dialogue which is just a solution the meaningless the last house of the dragon discussion I said like on rings of power it feels like we're not done with the intro yet and we're halfway through the season and it's not it's not like a short these episodes are long they're longer than the average show like the average show hour long it used to mean like 43 44 minutes these are an hour and 10 minutes these are long episodes we got time nothing like these conversa I think the impression I get is that like in the writers room they're like so fantasy is when the characters speak I guess elegantly you know like everybody everybody is uh they've got the big words that like you know they're very pros and charismatic and like something that they've lost in that and that reading is like yeah but they are people right like they're people just like you and me they're trying to actually communicate ideas yeah that's the purpose of a conversation is to like convey something to somebody else in a way that they'll understand that's like the point of a conversation I'm trying to tell you something but these conversations don't play out like people trying to tell each other something it plays out like they know that there is an audience watching them that they need to like impress with with their words I knew yeah like you don't talk like this when no one's watching exactly um and I mean it's like you mentioned um the it's like Chad Chad simple writing in a sense like the like the lord of the rings as it seems if you because I actually read a little bit yesterday because this came up in a different conversation but the lord of the rings as a as a book is it's not complex at all it's it's written very matter of factly and it's easy to tell what's happening um it's not it's it's you don't have to have this grandiose kind of this extensive you know lexicon to know what's happening we talked about contrast before something that's often been said about pros and how to use it effectively is that when a scene is straightforward and normal you know like the I guess you could call them the connecting scenes between the big payoffs and the big moments that a good way to contrast those big moments is to have regular scenes play out in a straightforward way and to save like really descriptive um like descriptive pros for the potent like big payoff moments because that way it's like oh wow we're like you know the more involved it becomes the more it draws attention to itself but like because you're being selective about what you're drawing attention to it just makes those parts more effective here there is no restraint every every scene everybody I mean you were talking about it before like how many times have they tried to inject these weird allegories these weird I don't know how to write them they're terrible and and sayings that are just confused they're just really weird and yeah what are you trying to tell me like seriously the whole point of a conversation is to get your ideas into my head and I have no idea what you're exactly what like what are you saying I don't want me to say what you're trying to convey the other the other problem with that of course is that it seems everyone of every race every background and every origin speaks in exactly the same allegorical way so like the harford's use the same speech turns as the elves do and the elves use the same speech turns the dwarves use and if you have a writing team which is making every single one of this massive disparate cast sound exactly the same what you're really listening to there is the writers not the characters that they've made because the characters they are just conduits for the same writer putting their own words into the mouths of disparate peoples it just doesn't make for a believable world either it makes for a nonsensical one because the metaphors just don't make sense but it also makes for a less believable one because it's so obvious that there is one guy who's just been sitting there coming up with these for probably a week and he's really proud of the the fire and the the sweeping the salt from the table and the chopping the head from the prairie grass and the whatever else he's come up with it's very transparently the writer coming through and um this writer is not good you don't want to see him you you know I now that you mentioned that it excluding Galadriel because uh I think that a lot of a lot of her lines can be directly attributed to her because of how standoffish a lot of them are if you took like the lines of dialogue for any other character in the show and took the name away from it I don't think that you could you I think it would be like virtually impossible to figure out who said what line like it would be so difficult if you took a line that was um I guess as contextless as possible but like still a line yeah like blurt out the name so yeah like and then you maybe some of the hard foot talk is a bit more vulgar but maybe like even then could you identify specific hard foot you wouldn't be able to tell which one yeah probably not they're all too I mean I guess maybe the fat hard foot is really like timid and that might come through the fact that you had to say maybe timid though yeah and you have to describe her as the fat hard foot you don't even know her name it's great yeah I don't believe you you have to watch the entire time I don't know what her name is either it's it's something but maybe that element of her personality would come up in text so that's one character maybe the fact that it's even maybe in a what 20 character how many characters does this show have that's a lot of characters well I feel like the most um individual dare I say might be durin I feel like he's the most you always stand out to me and I have many issues with this characterization and yet still yeah I think it's the actor that's doing it for me I'm not sure oh his acting is wasted on this show well maybe it's um because this show is devoid of levity this is exactly the way that I would phrase it yes they they're not willing to ever have like a joke um it's the same problem I have fucking the halo show like the halo show there's no fucking jokes it's yeah it's no and like the games have lots of jokes like full of character yeah yeah like and it's not even just the lord of the rings was full of jokes and that's that's the reason I bring up a lot of the rings has tons of jokes it has characters who are funny and funny moments there's no no contrast it's all plays it's all ours serious and yeah land but it's not very interesting because there are stories that don't have much levity at all there are stories that like are very serious strictly um but in this case there's nothing of there's nothing of real value in that like that you you sacrificed any level of um you know uh whiteness for nothing but you know yeah what did you gain nothing I want to like because it's not even just the fact that the existence of jokes in lord the rings it's the the way they weave them in is fucking phenomenal like organic it's not even like the the joke in and of itself I think is pretty good but the way that it's contextualized and placed where it is in uh in two towers when he says uh would you like me to describe it to you or should I find a box um gimley's fucking reaction and then it's one of the best laughs I fucking love that moment just because it's it's it seems to me ghibli things for a second motherfucker would you with that smirk on his face his fucking elf smirk and then gimley is he's down for it they're they're at that point in their relationship now where they could go right yeah like he can make a fucking short joke he there though exactly that's what makes the joke part of the ongoing constant relationship and the development of those two characters and how they interact with each other from the massive antipathy of the fellowship of the ring to the point where they're starting to be at ease in each other's company to the point where they are starting to make jokes to the point where their best friends at the end of return of the king like that that's an earned payoff if you were not if you were just randomly inserting that without any build up in that scene at helms deep it would seem crass and cheap and like you were just doing marvel quota humor but they've actually earned the payoff by building these characters out first whereas like if i think it rings its power with other funny line is not doing i didn't work dude the the the bro ship between harrigan legolas and gamely is fucking great throughout the trilogy it is incredible when when we don't get that much like a huge amount of time with them really as a trio talking but it's very efficient yeah you could you pull so much from how it progresses i mean pippin as a character like pretty much all of his funny lines and everything it's just him being him in a situation he's clearly not familiar with or used to and then even by the end he changes into a different character but he still has that element of his personality in him that never goes away so his kind of humor sort of changes over time but what i just wanted to bring up there was just like not only are the jokes very much present in the original trilogy if i'm calling it that the jackson trilogy uh it's the that they have so much purpose in the script this this is just dour this this whole show it's just been and it's not like not even with purpose you know that you can watch uh they can they can be media that's built deliberately to have a very low and difficult tone to consume sort of thing but this they are trying to have highs and lows in this they even do have what i think they would call jokes but like it's a struggle for us to call them jokes um it is it is why the depiction of the dwarfs as i think freeman mentioned is it that's why that sort of works even the half of it's in the first two episodes until they become evil um that also kind of works because at least at least there's some kind of charm there there's some personality i think the key to that is sort of can you imagine them actually enjoying themselves off screen and you can imagine that with jiren and deezer i think you cannot imagine that with i can't imagine any other character durin and deezer i deezer is a character i i like um she almost seems out of place in this world yeah a lot of people have been commenting on this i i think it's just the actress is she's she's i was about to say jolly i don't know if that's offensive like just because you can't call people jolly i don't know i don't know the rules like she has like a i it is an actress playing a role as i like well i i like her in terms of her personality and how she like behaves and she seems maybe it's directly as a result of that but she seems so out of place like you like you could like talk with her and have conversations with her and like she has a she just seems she seems so out of place because no one else really is like she is and it's not that i can't believe her i do believe her it's just it makes everyone else seem out of place almost as an inverse like you're the only real person in this show and everyone else is just a skin walking weird talker especially the elves especially anyway um we're we're even oh oh no is that what's next because yeah she she basically she tasks a land deal with uh personally watching over galadriel whatever and then they take us back to the southland this is where we start to get all the information and this is i mean 20 minutes in and we've really only done the new minor intro so long they take with everything we didn't gain much 20 minutes is a whole episode of the simpsons guys you must go by simpsons time you you can tell a whole story in 20 minutes you know you can tell a whole story shorter than that but like in 20 minutes you can tell a story and if we kept this pacing which is really slow in terms of like plot stuff happening and things progressing but if all of these but if but if that 20 minutes was just oozing with different characters and general competence i would be totally fine with that i would be totally engaged if galadriel was a good character and if everyone we met was like a good well-written character i'd be like yeah sure i'll listen to him talk all damn day exactly dude that's pretty much what house the dragon is right now it's been it's been five hours and there's been what you would probably call a ratio of like 10 to 1 walking to action but they're able to carry it because the talking is getting more and more and more and more tension filled more and more betrayals more and more secrets more and more all this stuff that keeps building up and everyone's getting characterised and everyone's got like getting louder and angrier as time goes on just like oh shit this is all coming to a to a head at some point woo but um here oh i mean because like uh i was about to say like what the first criticism i've got for this this scene is the dialogue again so we see this big old trench we're not getting the wide shot yet i'm gonna wait until we get that before i unload several bazillion criticisms but we have our character and he's walking through here he's like lugging something with a friend and he says uh this is how they escaped our detection and it's how they shield themselves from the sunlight allegedly i did like i don't even like why do you hate me so much like surely that was for me to be able to figure out at least vaguely but you just have him say all of that to a person who obviously knows that like the person who was kidnapped before him if you felt like you had to like insert that line like if you needed to then there's way better ways to do it like an orc could mockingly talk to an elf slave and say you dig faster you don't want the elves to see us and then this laughs like that's it's the reason and it's an orc being mocking to an elf that's already better than just the the the character just saying it out loud because we don't gain anything else nothing is multi-pronged nothing serves more than one purpose i feel in this show but this is the point at which these purposes start really contradicting themselves like every line of dialogue in this contradicts some previous part of the setup it's a little bit astonishingly bad so i'm already slightly confused with the timeline because i don't know when the elves before including the tower warden that was supposed to care about i don't know when he was captured but he was i don't know how they were captured that's so that's the thing right so that he says these tunnels are how they've been evading our detection for so long next line of dialogue they've been ransacking villages all over the south lands like you might well with the elves have spotted that the elves are incredibly fast and they have watched how as well none of the people escaped you did that with perfect capture rates no one escaped nobody was out in the fields while it was happening so bad no one noticed well you see rags whatever someone goes to inspect they jump down into the holes themselves and get kidnapped because they're dumbasses that's what's happened that's true yeah well luckily they have people who care about them very very deeply who would be really concerned about their absence so we rewind zoom out and just picture for a moment where is this enormous trench is it it's just the south lands okay where is it in reference to our main village like to the to the left or right of it or something or goes directly through it or like because when they show us the white shot had a there was an advantage to i get what you're talking about in terms of like spatial relations in the show is quite confusing often even as much as they use a map it's still kind of confusing the way they presented and the lord of the rings for the most part it's a we're going from point a to point b so you're going along the way it's not as remnant in the story that you need that but here it's just like we're just sort of here but we're trying to stay hidden and we're in the south lands but not that part of south