 The Rings of Power is not actually based on the Selma Rillian. I saw some elves, I saw some not hobbits. So even though it's not fair to compare these two, let's compare them anyway. Setting aside the fact that the studios have very obviously put their shows in competition with each other, comparing Rings of Power and House of the Dragon should be a no-brainer. In fact, it should be a fascinating opportunity to compare two extremely similar things. And I'm not just talking about the Mink Fantasy shows, because that is not what makes them extremely similar. House of the Dragon is based on the book Fire and Blood, which is a history of Westeros. Rings of Power is based on the Selma Rillian, which is a history of Middle Earth. House of the Dragon is a prequel for the Game of Thrones TV show. Rings of Power is a prequel for the Lord of the Rings films. House of the Dragon is a spin-off for their existing Game of Thrones show. Rings of Power is a spin-off for the Lord of the Rings films. Fire and Blood, the book that House of the Dragon is based on, is told in broad strokes, like a history book, meaning that the showrunners would need to fill in the details. The Selma Rillian is a history book that is told in broad strokes, meaning that the showrunners would need to fill in the details. House of the Dragon is an extremely high-budget adaptation. Rings of Power is an extremely high-budget adaptation. House of the Dragon is banking on the fact that the existing Game of Thrones fan base will show up for this. Rings of Power is banking on the fact that the existing Lord of the Rings fan base will show up for this. House of the Dragon has to navigate the fact that the existing fan base has pre-existing expectations based on the books that these shows are based on, and based on the show that already exists within this universe. Rings of Power has to contend with the fact that the fans already have preconceived expectations based on the books that their show is based on, and the other films that are based in this world. Then they are completely different in terms of the fact that, in the case of House of the Dragon, George R. R. Martin is still alive and is also very actively participating in the creation of the show. For Rings of Power, Tolkien is long dead, and as far as I know, none of his relatives are participating in the creation of that show. As concerns House of the Dragon and George R. R. Martin's writing style, he leans toward a realistic, gritty, grim, dark style. Rings of Power and Tolkien's writing style is mythic, his lore-filled, feels more like sagas and legends. HBO is adding on to something that they themselves previously adapted with Game of Thrones. Amazon is adding on to something that someone else adapted. But we can't do any of this lovely comparing and contrasting, because the thing is, the Rings of Power is not actually based on the Silmarillion. It can't be based on the Silmarillion, because Amazon doesn't have the rights to the Silmarillion. So we can't ask the question, is Rings of Power being true to the source material? Because they couldn't be if they wanted to be. We can't say, is Rings of Power being truer or less true to their source material than House of the Dragon? Because again, they don't have the rights to the source material. They cannot be true to it, it's not an option. But with that said, let's compare them anyway. Now HBO does seem to care about adapting George R. R. Martin's works fairly faithfully, and they also of course have George R. R. Martin participating in the adaptation. Amazon doesn't seem to give a shit about being loyal to any source material, even the stuff that they do have. And if it had been a priority for them, I feel like they would have made more of an effort to acquire the rights to the very story that they claimed to wish to adapt. But even if they don't have the rights to the Silmarillion and could not get them for love nor money, fine, the material that they do have, that they have access to and rights to use, they don't really care about sticking to that in any way, shape or form. Now when Rings of Power dropped its first two episodes, at that point we had two episodes of House of the Dragon out. So at that point, each show has been able to show us what it can do in two episodes. House of the Dragon in two episodes gave us extensive awareness of the political situation of the character dynamics, setting up the conflict that will be the conflict of this show, and told us tons of information about the specific nuances of that situation and the various parties who currently have a stake in that situation. In two episodes, Rings of Power has told me that this is taking place in the Tolkien-esque world. That's about really all I can say with certainty that I know about Rings of Power. I saw some elves. I saw some not-hobbits. I saw Galadriel, that's a name I know. There were some dwarves. That's really all I can say for the first two episodes of Rings of Power. What will that show be about? I couldn't tell you. Now House of the Dragon in adapting Fire and Blood has not chosen to adapt the entirety of Fire and Blood. Fire and Blood is a very long book that covers 300 years of Targaryen history. Instead of trying to do all of that, HBO decided, no, we're going to zero in on this one piece of that history, a very, very exciting piece of that history. And we're going to zero in and we're going to really, really flesh that out. Whereas Rings of Power, well, again, I'm not exactly sure what the show is going to be about at all. But it's introduced us to a bunch of different places and a bunch of different people. And it's not really told us about any concrete conflict of any kind. And it's told us about kind of thousands of years. And I think a thousand years past, at least several hundred years past in the first episode, I think. And it's just kind of all over the place. And there's no sense of like, so who is though like, I mean, I guess Gladriel, who's just kind of in it the most. But I mean, she's not really pitched as the main character so much as just kind of like the character that she most recognize. And you're like, she's like one that's like naming the name of Sauron. You're like, I know that name too. So like, I kind of know what her deal is. But there's just kind of a lot of different things that have been introduced. It's not clear how they fit together, other than they all take place in the same world. And there's just, it's both a lot happening and also not very much at all. Because again, I have no idea what the story is essentially going to be. It didn't offer a hook to make you really want to find out what's going to happen next, even if it's going to be a slow burn show. A slow burn book or slow burn story does not mean that nothing's happened. It means that it's taking a while to develop the thing that is happening. But it doesn't mean that you don't know what is happening and it doesn't mean that they don't still have to like get your interest with something. That you're going to be like, okay, I'm going to stick around to find out how this shakes out. Even if that takes a while. So if Rings of Power wants our buy-in, it should tell us who our main characters are and what it is that should hook us about their situation and really flush them out and really show us who they are. That should be the first priority of the show because it doesn't really matter what else happens if you haven't hooked us with who we're going to be following. Game of Thrones did this in the very first couple of episodes of Game of Thrones. We spent a lot of time getting to know who are going to be our main characters, seeing their dynamics, their political situations, their families, what is going on with them so we could be like, okay, these are our people. So that when the inciting incident happens, we already are, we have buy-in. We already care about these characters and we are already invested in finding out how they're going to handle what happens after the inciting incident. And Lord of the Rings, the films, they do this as well. They have less screen time than a TV show does. But the Fellowship of the Ring, it gives you a prolonged to kind of catch you up on the lore of the world. You know, like, here's the situation. You know, like, here's, here's what's the cliff notes of, like, the world we're going to be in and what the sort of big conflict it's the backdrop is. So you have some context. And then it spends a very long time with Frodo in the Shire so that this is our home base. This is our main character. This is where, this is where we are getting buy-in. This is where the audience is becoming invested in the characters. And then, then we can go on our quest and when we go on our quest, we add in some characters to the Fellowship. So they now become part of the core group and they, we start to learn about where they've come from, what their priorities are and the buy-to towers. The Fellowship is fractured so now we have sort of diverging plot lines so we can follow multiple plot lines in different places of the map for doing different things that are generally connected to the overall conflict of this story but we can follow different different situations and not be like who's over here and who's over here and what's over here. Like we, we organically got to that point and then it split off and by Return of the King we have several spinning plates at once and we're following them all and we care about all of them because the growth to expanding what's happening and who we're following happened over time. We weren't just like, I mean can you imagine if Lord of the Rings started with the amount of perspectives that we have in Return of the King? We were already following Aragorn and Boromir and Legolas and Frodo and all these people were introduced to us in the first you know hour of Fellowship of the Ring. That would be exhausting, insane and we wouldn't have the time to be able to care about any of those characters. So that's essentially what Rings of Power has done. It's been like, well we're going to want all these people to be involved so we better show them all to you immediately. What's the story going to be about? Who are they really? I guess you'll have to stick around to find out. Do you care to you? Probably not. So even though it's not fair to compare these two, I opened with the position that it's not fair to compare these two. However much we should be able to imagine how fun that would be if we genuinely could to prequel history texts being turned into premier fantasy television shows. Except one has taken the position of being more like the way we moderately think of historical texts with like gritch and politics and the other one is told like ancient lords and saga and origin myth for our people. How fun would it be to compare and contrast these studios approach to adapting these books and also to adapting this type of history which is necessarily different. One with having the author alive and the other with having the author past. Like this should be a fun opportunity to compare and contrast those things but we really can't because anytime you start doing this anytime you feel the inclination to start doing it you're like okay but Amazon can't do that but you know Rings of Power doesn't have access to the Silmarillion. Well you can't really say it's not canon because they're not doing the Silmarillion. So you're like what are they doing? What is that thing over there? Like how do we categorize it? What is that? In my personal opinion if I didn't have the rights to the Silmarillion which they don't it is still possible to just pick another part of the map. Ideally a part of the map that Tolkien didn't explore very much that he didn't write a bunch of stories about it and you can be like you know what we have the rights to like general world information and we can write some stories of our own over here where we can't really conflict with canon because he didn't write about this part. So we can write our own story over here but they're like no we need name recognition. We need to pretend like we're actually adapting a thing even though we don't have the rights to adapt it and it just feels shady and weird and it feels like it's in this limbo where they're in this place where you're like you want to be able to talk about how similar is this to the book but then you can't because the answer to it is it's not because it's not based on a book so it can't be and it's weird and awkward and it's not being extremely well executed in my opinion either as I already explained about it being all over the place and wasting screen time. So I would love if right now I could post a bunch of videos week to week comparing and contrasting these shows but I really don't think that I can and I really don't think that I want to because rings of power is not based on the Silmarillion. I should really really wish that it was. So those are my thoughts let me know in the comments down below if you agree or disagree with me about this discussion whatever you want me to know I post videos on Saturdays other random times will upload on Saturdays so like and subscribe join my patreon if you feel so inclined and I'll see when I see you