Brown M&Ms and Dwarven Beards

[Peter Rybski]

Do you remember the stories of Van Halen’s rather obnoxious request that they be provided with (among other items) a dish of M&Ms that, under absolutely no circumstances, should contain brown candies? I stumbled upon an article several years ago that shed some light on this (true) requirement set by the rock legends. The story goes that Van Halen had a very complex concert set up for the time, including equipment that was larger in size and had a significantly greater requirement for electricity than their contemporaries. They spelled all of this out in the rider to their contract- the same rider that banned brown M&Ms from the green room.

So, when Eddie and the crew arrived for rehearsal, they could check the bowl of M&Ms and see if the concert promoter had carefully read (and followed) their requirements. If there were brown M&Ms in the bowl, they would very carefully check the set up to avoid lights dropping from the overhead or unplanned power outages.

What does this have to do with Dwarven Beards? It seems to me that many who truly love and appreciate Tolkien’s world are going through every bit of information from Amazon like David Lee Roth looking for those brown M&Ms. If something doesn’t fit the written works (or someone’s idea/memory of what the written works say), some people seem to assume that the writers/producers/show runners have, like the lazy venue crew, failed to closely read and understand Tolkien’s works. Dwarven women without beards- like brown M&Ms- are not themselves a problem, but rather signal that the management doesn’t know what it is doing.

I am still concerned that the LOTRonPrime team does not fully appreciate the religious and Catholic nature of the work. Now, I’m not expecting this religious aspect to prominently feature in the adaptation. My hope is rather more limited- that like in the Tokien biopic, they will simply not ruin it.

Source:

There's a brilliant reason why Van Halen asked for a bowl of M&Ms with all the brown candies removed before every show

It wasn't because they were a bunch of a**holes.

www.insider.com

 

[Haerangil]

I do not understand.

Peter Jackson introduced Dwarven women without beards, but silly looking sideburns walking around normal and undisguised openly in Dale. That is not what they are supposed do be like according to how jrrt imagined Dwarf women, with or without beards.

The tv show could have corrected that, but as well as with Gil-Galad's hair color they just went with it...

I guess they just thought they'd give a mainstream audience what it wants and that is some female characters, and some for the popular dwarf race as well. Same reason probably why they introduced hobbits and some people of color on all sides.I doubt they even imagined they'd be thrown into some silly antiwokes vs sjws cultural war because of it...

Yet...
Their choices on time compression and weird storytwists for Galadriel concern me too.I get it is an adaption and adaptions are always sort of diverging from the source material... sometimes even for the better.
I just hope they still get it right in tone and message, not just in visual style. I also hope most of the leaked names are codenames and not the final ones... language matters in tolkienverse and so far too many are quite horrible!

 

[MithLuin]

The idea that Peter is pointing out is that sometimes small details are considered an indicator of larger issues - a warning sign. So, in the absence of full information (in this case, before we've seen the final product), some details are treated as 'canary in the coal mine'. Even if, in and of themselves, the detail might not be that big of a deal, it's considered an alert to something that may be more serious.

If someone starts talking about 'feudalism' a lot, you're going to clue in that this person probably hasn't actually spent much time studying medieval European history. Because it's a word lots of people know and use in the general public, but historians in that field tend to treat feudalism as a bit of a dirty word! Likewise, if someone discussing science says an idea is 'just a theory', they have outed themselves as a layman who doesn't understand the usage of the term 'scientific theory.' Most of us haven't had the opportunity to speak with the writers or showrunners, though, so we don't get to consider their knowledge or understanding of their subject matter based on what they actually say. So, we're left picking at crumbs, turning them over, and trying to deduce meaning.


For instance, one of the earliest pieces of information released to the public concerning this project was, 'They've hired an intimacy co-ordinator.' In and of itself, that is rather meaningless - that has become standard practice in the industry for scenes where actors are expected to be nude, partially nude, or engaged in kissing scenes (ie, it's not just for pornographic sex scenes). So, okay, at some point some character is going to be at least partially undressed. Not that big of a deal. But. That was one of the *ONLY* details available about the production at that time. By itself, it seemed as though the marketing team were trying to signal that this was 'not your father's Tolkien movie' or somesuch...an attempt to lure in Game of Thrones fans who would be expecting a full TV-MA experience. So, while 'They've hired an intimacy coordinator' does not necessarily mean that there will be graphic sex scenes in the show, the public was certainly invited to consider that possibility...and naturally that would be cause for concern if that meant they wanted to make a fantasy show like Game of Thrones rather than a fantasy show like Lord of the Rings.

Obviously, it can be pointed out that the source material includes Ar-Pharazon forcibly marrying his first cousin Míriel and seizing the throne of Numenor. Second Age politics, as written by Tolkien, would not be wholly out of place in a Game-of-Thrones-esque fantasy world. But. Naturally, everyone is aware that the worldview presented by Tolkien and the worldview presented by Martin are practically polar opposites. Tolkien has a focus on goodness, truth, and beauty - Ar-Pharazon is a villain, contrasted with characters who are very different from him. Martin takes delight in presenting honorable characters as fools who get themselves killed and dishonest, violent characters as people who succeed and survive (at least for a time). So, while the marketing team may be keen to add "Game of Thrones" viewers to the fanbase, any attempts to say this new show is "like Game of Thrones!" naturally raises some concern and alarms about it being very unlike Tolkien's view of Middle-earth. The marketing people are just doing their jobs; I don't know how much any of that information actually points to the new Amazon show being anything like the world of Westeros. But I see how people got from "they hired an intimacy coordinator" to "this is going to be all about rape and court intrigue and nothing like Middle-earth."



Why didn't Peter Jackson get subjected to that level of scrutiny concerning his portrayal of dwarf women? Well, first of all - he certainly WAS subjected to this level of scrutiny in 1999-2001 in the lead up to the release of the first Lord of the Rings films! Every scrap of information, detail, leaked set photo, etc was devoured and analyzed on internet messageboards at that time. And some of the conclusions were faulty or blown out of proportion. But some nuggets were clues to adaptation choices. For instance, the descriptions of the characters for casting was available well ahead of the films' release. The description of Gimli suggested that he liked drinking beer and chasing women. Fans were outraged that this wasn't at all what Gimli's character is like in the book! Some people explained that the casting sheets are just giving broad strokes about the character - that didn't mean we'd actually see a drunken Gimli flirting with dwarf women in the film. But others (it turns out, rightly) pointed out that this casting sheet seemed to point to a comic interpretation of Gimli's character. Gimli *did* turn out to be treated as comic relief in the film, and that casting character description gave some clue about how his character would be portrayed in Jackson's adaptation.

But...once people saw the films, the discussion moved on to people's reactions to the film as a whole. So, those dwarf women in Dale? They are considered in the context of the entire Hobbit films. Which, quite frankly, have a lot of serious issues of concern in their interpretation of Tolkien's story. Skimpy beards on dwarf women who are out in public simply wasn't the biggest issue once you could see all of the other issues. If that clip was the *only* clip released before the films came out, they might have been subjected to the 'what does this tell us about the movies?' scrutiny.


So, yes, when a show says 'look, here's our photo of Elrond!', it's not hard for me to look at that and say, 'uh, have you read a description of Elrond? Because it clearly says his hair is dark as the shadows of twilight, and that is a blond dude.' And if they didn't get his hair color from the description in the book, what other aspects of his character are they simply not even reading about to include in their story? I'm stating that as a question for a reason. It's not rhetorical. For all I know, their characterization of Elrond is SPOT ON, and they just thought their actor looked dumb with a dark-haired wig or something. At this point, I don't know anything about their Elrond. But when the one detail they gave me is wrong...that does not inspire confidence that they got other details correct. So, it's not so much that Elven Hair Color is SERIOUS BUSINESS (though, uh, in this fandom...it totally is), but rather that an easily-verifiable detail is wrong.

Like overlooking the instruction to pick out the brown M&M's.