Lord of the Rings TV series gets multi-season order at Amazon

[William Cloud Hicklin]

Originally Posted by Michael Murry

Thanks again, Mr Hicklin, for helping me to better understand the "Jon Snow" thing. Since I'll never read the books or sit through even ten minutes of the television series, I have to depend upon others to fill me in on the plot, characterizations, etc. Given the popularity of this kind of standard television fantasy...

Game of Thrones (and the Martin books) are much better than that. Tolkien they're not, but then Martin didn't set out to write a Tolkien-esque world anyway. It's much more about sh!tty human behavior, political intrigue, treachery, backstabbing, assassination, dictatorship, religious fanaticism, human sacrifice, the awfuller aspects of war with attendant pillage, rape, massacre, refugees and suffering, and suffused by grey-and-black morality; he has said (quite truthfully) that his inspiration was as much the Wars of the Roses as Tolkien. Imagine a setting where even the Good Guys are a bunch of Denethors and Wormtongues, or at their very best, Boromirs.*

Vikings is, by comparison, a soap opera with battleaxes.

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*Literally, since Goodest Guy Ned Stark was played by Sean Bean.