#the rings of power podcast

[helenvader]

Some puppy-eyed Halbrand to wrap up the weekend.

If he was lying in this scene, he truly is an excellent liar. And S2 break my heart even more than S1 should that be revealed. But I am here for it, show.

[myfavouritelunatic]

I am absolutely LOVING this podcast so much! Some fantastic discussion and super relatable fangirling, I cannot wipe the smile off of my face! Highly recommend! (Especially for Haladriel shippers 😍)

[ringsreforged]

*shy knock*

Hello???

Gosh. I guess we are reporting back to duty? Haha.

We feel the obsession coming back to sweep us off our feet as we speak! Lots to unpack here but we are EXCITED as hell (and a bit anxious over lack of Bronwyn in the teaser) and we are going to get back to it soon. Now definitely SOONER rather than later, especially with the clock counting down to Aug 29th!

But, because I just can’t help it and Nat is probably chuckling at me for being predictably me, how are we feeling about the wig? 😏

Till soon!

Pau & Nat

[lesbiansforboromir]

The One Ring Dot Net, in a desperate effort to reclaim their self-designated throne as kings of all tolkien fannish content after they were humiliated by Fellowship of Fans grabbing all the RoP leaks out from under them, has recently published a hilarious article where they uncritically present obviously bullshit 4chan RoP season 2 '''leaks''' as '''spoilers'''. These '''leaks''' include sauron having a child and Tom Bombadil being Morgoth himself. Just so you're all aware of petty tolkien non-drama.

[magicweirdos]

A completely unranked and entirely uncategorized list of non-audio drama things I loved and made me a better audio drama writer/creator in 2022:

Andor

Have faith in your audience, and remember that it doesn’t matter how fleshed out you think your world is — there’s something there no one has ever seen.

Everything Everywhere All At Once

There’s no limit to the disbelief people are willing to suspend if you can marry real emotion with outrageous circumstance.

Nope

If you can make an audience question a character’s reckless and goofy-ass decisions just before realizing they would do the same thing, they’ll leave changed.

Glass Onion

Rian Johnson has figured out how to thoroughly eviscerate greed and demagoguery with silliness and he’s my hero because of that.

The Legend of Vox Machina

Magic happens, real magic, when a group of people trust each other enough to be vulnerable with the stories in their souls.

God of War: Ragnarok

Making characters think they have no agency in their own lives is an *excellent* way to showcase their intellect and resilience.

Avatar: The Way of Water

Even with a simple core story, you can provide a rich, rich experience through layers of theme injected into setting.

Horizon II: Forbidden West

I would take a course on the way Ashly Burch gave each of her characters — WHO ARE FUCKING CLONES — the slightest tweaks in tone to differentiate character. A must for audio drama creators.

Werewolf By Night

Every story has a rhythm, and every medium can express that rhythm in a unique way. More composers should direct.

Saga: Volume 10

Grief is sneaky, and characters need time to process it properly. Sometimes the strongest way to communicate emotional distress is to make the character think they’re over it… until they aren’t.

Star Trek: Strange New Worlds

The classic struggle is between solving problems with intellect or violence, but Captain Pike teaches us that the first step is always empathy.

Rings of Power

The most touching conflict is sometimes simply “I’m mad at you because I missed you so much.”

Honorable mentions:

Last Night in Soho, Bardo: False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths, Ms. Marvel, Ghostwire Tokyo

[bookgeekgrrl]

My media this week (7-13 Apr 2024)

📚 STUFF I READ 📚

🥰 If This Is As Far As We Go (BeauRadley) - 124K, stucky no-powers AU - after a year of being phenomenal hookup buddies, bucky ends their arrangement & throws steve into a tailspin - slow burn, angsty, oblivious steve slowly realizing his true feelings, good supporting cast

😊 Bunt! Striking Out on Financial Aid (Ngozi Ukazu & Mad Rupert) - cute graphic novel about art students forming a softball team to exploit a financial aid loophole

😍 Death in the Spires (KJ Charles, author; Tom Lawrence, narrator) - historical murder mystery set in 1905 Oxford - another KJC absolute banger: incredible sense of place, fantastic characters, perfectly done 'whodunnit' tension and a HIGHLY SATISFACTORY resolution. Loved every word

💖💖 +76K of shorter fic so shout out to these I really loved 💖💖

The Man, the Myth, the Legend (sparklyslug) - Check Please!: gen, 2.9K - Holster's beatboxing skills brings all the a capella groups to the Haus - a short, fun, funny, outsider POV fic

Say it louder for the people in the back (redhook) - MCU: shrinkyclinks, 14K - reread, forever fave - sometimes you just get a yearning to reread the best glory hole fic ever written

In Focus (sparklyslug) - Check Please!: zimbits, 6K - Jack's photography eye knows what's up before his conscious brain does

Entering Orbit (museaway) - Star Trek AOS: spirk, 30K - good post-AOS canon-divergent fic where Jim goes home to Iowa to escape the press & Spock joins him

📺 STUFF I WATCHED 📺

Hot Ones - Conan O'Brien

QI - series S, ep 13

Game Changer - s6, e5 {Bingoception}

Um, Actually - s9, e4

D20: Fantasy High: Junior Year - "Dawn of Justice" (s21, e14)

D20: Adventuring Party - "We're Running on 200%" (s16, e14)

Death In Paradise - s11, e4-8; s12 e0-8, s13 e0-8

🎧 PODCASTS 🎧

Working - How to Be Both a Critic and a Creator

Worlds Beyond Number - WWW #10: Of the Reaching Green

Worlds Beyond Number: Fireside - Fireside Chat for WWW ep10 "Of the Reaching Green"

Short Wave - How Climate Change And Physics Affect Baseball

Consider This from NPR - Bad Omens Or The Cycle of Nature? How The Ancient World Viewed Eclipses

⭐ Armchair Expert - Anna Kendrick [Rerelease from 1/9/23]

Today, Explained - Is college still worth it?

The Sporkful - Jewish Food Is More Than Matzoh Balls

WikiHole - BEYONCÉ (with Zoë Chao, Nat Faxon and Poppy Liu)

⭐ All Songs Considered - Songs to make you laugh, with 'Weird Al' Yankovic

In Defense of Fandom - Season 2 Episode 2: Putting my theory to the test

Dinner’s on Me - Orville Peck

⭐ Switched on Pop - Chasing old sounds: Djo's "End of Beginning" with Joe Keery

⭐ 99% Invisible #577 - The Society of Ambiance Makers and Elegant Persons

⭐ Vibe Check - A Special Conversation with Ada Limón

The Atlas Obscura Podcast - Brown Mountain Lights

Short Wave - The Order Your Siblings Were Born in May Play a Role in Identity and Sexuality

⭐ Code Switch - How Frederick Douglass launched generations of Black and Irish solidarity

⭐ Decoder Ring - Can the “Bookazine” Save Magazines?

⭐ Imaginary Worlds - African Sci-Fi Looks to a Future Climate

Worlds Beyond Number - WWW #11: Promises Promises

Worlds Beyond Number: Fireside - Fireside Chat for WWW ep11 "Promises Promises"

What Next: TBD - Does Google Suck Now?

Short Wave - What To Know About The New EPA Rule Limiting 'Forever Chemicals' In Tap Water

Code Switch - Reflecting on the legacy of O.J. Simpson

The Atlas Obscura Podcast - Atlas Obscura Live: Two Places And A Lie

Dear Prudence - I Lost a Lot of Weight and Now I Enjoy Being a Mean Girl. Help!

It's Been a Minute - The car culture wars; plus, the problem with child stars

Endless Thread - RIP Lil Miquela

Shedunnit - You Probably Imagined It!

Armchair Expert - John Cena

Worlds Beyond Number: Fireside - [One Shot] A County Affair: Prologue

🎶 MUSIC 🎶

Presenting Bonnie Raitt

Lowrider Oldies

Huge House Anthems

Djo

Classic Soul BBQ

A LA SALA [Khruangbin] {2024}

Presenting Khruangbin

Happy Beats

'80s One-Hit Wonders

Feel-Good Classic Rock

[lowcountry-gothic]

Other Minds and Hands

fI strongly feel that anyone with an opinion (positive or negative) on The Rings of Power and/or Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings films should listen to Other Minds and Hands, a subseries of the Tolkien Professor podcast specifically aimed at studying adaptations. There’s a lot of undeserved vitriol recently around The Rings of Power, and a lot of unreflective, purely positive nostalgia about the Jackson films as the ideal form of adapting Tolkien, and these two scholars do a great job of covering the nuances between the extreme poles of opinion.

The podcast is hosted by Dr. Corey Olsen of Signum University, formerly of Washington College, a professor who’s spent decades of academic work on Tolkien studies and medieval studies; and Dr. Maggie Parke, who did her doctorate on adaptations and the many challenges of translating a story from one medium to another. Together, they’re striving to create a new set of criteria and terminology for effectively and critically evaluating and classifying adaptations, since the way people discuss them is often reflexive and unthoughtful, based primarily on nostalgia.

(In case you don’t get the reference the title is making, it’s to one of Tolkien’s letters in which he imagines describes Middle-earth and its stories in their ideal finished state, “and yet [leaving] scope for other minds and hands, wielding paint and music and drama.” In other words, Tolkien expressed hope that other people would add to the legendarium in other ways and in other mediums.)

Together, these two have been discussing adaptations of various works, from The Rings of Power to A Christmas Carol, from Dune to the Peter Jackson Lord of the Rings trilogy. They have future plans to cover other adaptations as well, like the new Dungeons & Dragons and Barbie films, among others. But the episodes I think Tolkien fans should listen to in particular are the ones about Peter Jackson’s trilogy. In the hands of these two very thoughtful scholars, they discuss how Jackson actually took quite a few significant liberties with the story, and not just the ones everyone always talks about (Faramir and Treebeard, for example).

To show how fairly and unbiased they are, there have been moments when they’ve made disclaimers of “We’re not saying the Peter Jackson films suck!” and moments when they’ve had to say “We’re not saying the Peter Jackson films are flawless!”

Below are the episodes I’ve found particularly relevant (I’ll try to update this list as new episodes are released):

#34: The adaptation of Elrond in the Peter Jackson films.

#36: The adaptation of Galadriel in the Peter Jackson films.

#37: The adaptation of Aragorn in the Peter Jackson films.

#39: The adaptation of Legolas and Gimli in the Peter Jackson films.

#44: Tolkien’s own continually changing ideas about dwarves.

#45: The adaptation of Sauron and the Nazgul in the Peter Jackson films.

#46: The adaptation of Saruman and Orcs in the Peter Jackson films.

[wtslpod]

Not one, not two, but SEVEN official casting announcements! 

Pssst don’t forget WTSL Episode 4: Discussing “The Great Wave” drops Sunday 12/4!

Catch up on episodes 1-3 now

[liminal-zone]

Halbrand!Sauron/Galadriel is healing some huge reylo wounds I still carry. GRATEFUL.

In the third age, she is Not answering that boy’s FaceTime calls and he is screaming ‘blow that piece of junk out of the sky.’

[sirioniel]

Highly recommend the official Rings of Power Podcast! (Had to fill a void after the finale, sooooo I've already listenend to all the podcast's episodes).

Cast members (Ismael Cruz Cordova, Morfydd Clark, Charlie Vickers, Markella Kavenagh, ...) are interviewed and we get some insights from Charlotte Brändström, J.D. Payne and Patrick McKayne concerning design and writing choices, Harfoots (and how their waggon wheels end up becoming front doors), Saurondriel and much more (including little hints for season 2).

Besides - it's hosted by the wonderful Felicia Day who portrayed Charlie Bradbury in Supernatural (🤍).

[kainekron]

look at him

x

[helenvader]

Halbrand's WTF faces Vol. 2.

Photoshop kept crushing on me when I did this, so thay could have been prettier, but I think they're fine like this, too. But I had no patience to keep restarting the PC every 5 minues. *shakes fist at PS*

[ringsreforged]

Hello everyone!

Without further ado… Yes, it’s up. 😁 Go give reforged ep 7 ‘The Eye’ a listen!

We managed to edit it to just under 2 hours but it’s still a long one as we talk a bunch about Gal feeling low, Theo being awesome, aww’ing over Berek (he KNOWS!) and Daddy Durin being a total contender for MVP every ep he’s in.

Thoughts? Questions? Hit us up!

Also, thank you for voting in the poll! Your input has been noted and is very much appreciated.

Thank you, again and continuously for your support and love ❤️

Pau & Nat

[garhdo]

A banner I made for the new season of my podcast, highlighting some of my most popular previous episodes, as well as some upcoming projects.

Linktr.ee/garhdo

[thesolarangel]

The German Tolkien podcast "Tollkühn" (hosted by 2 straight cis guys) discussing Rings of Power Ep. 1-3

Elendil is daddy

Short haired elves are great, because if they all had long hair, they would all look the same

Celebrimbor’s appearance is a bit meh, but the actor's performance is great

Galadriel is the oldest among Celebrimbor, Gil-galad and Elrond, but she comes off a bit too "childish". She could boss Gil-galad around more

Gil-galad is very underwhelming

First time seeing Miriel: is that the actress who plays Carla in "Scrubs" (oh god🙄)

Durin burping was a little too much like Gimli "sidekick who's just there for laughs, haha dwarfs burp haha"

[creativedifferencespodcast]

The Lord of the Rings is back! This time for the small screen and with more diversity (thank God!). The story of the Second Age is just getting started and we’ve got some thoughts on the first season. And to those select few out there, please stop trying to convince us that elves can’t be Black. Check out Episode 209 to hear our review for The Rings of Power!