500 Sauron begins to stir again in Middle-earth,” reads one. It’s even more sparse than Martin’s textbook - much of the Tolkien appendix is a bulleted timeline of events covering several millennia. Tolkien’s Return of the King, which also exists via an in-text explanation that was collected as part of a fictional archive. The Rings of Power comes from an appendix to J.R.R. Martin’s Fire & Blood, a history textbook written from within the Song of Ice and Fire universe told from the point of view of a Westerosi academic trying to organize various primary documents. House of the Dragon stems from a particular chunk of George R.R. Like the dubious Fantastic Beasts movies before them, they are essentially encyclopedia entries turned into television series. It’s not just that they’re both prequels, though. We live in the age of Cruella but also Better Call Saul.) If you can’t keep explaining what happens next, your best option is to rewind and explain what happened before - never mind that you’re inevitably boxed in by the existence of the original thing, and never mind that “how Galadriel became Galadriel” is perhaps fascinating ground for Galadriel to explore in therapy but far more difficult to make into a surprising story. Both land on similar solutions to find their central premises: Faced with the question of how to keep going after a blockbuster story reaches a definitive end, they cast backward. Both are born of the same franchising drive: Extend, expand, capitalize on, and continue. You can watch both, of course, but it’s hard to shake the flick-of-a-light-switch sensation in moving from one to the other.īut underneath all that Luigi-Waluigi folderol, it’s striking how alike the two projects are. Westeros believes in a Sisyphean embrace of struggle until death. Characters in Middle-earth can be friends any friendship in King’s Landing, conversely, is just a betrayal that hasn’t happened yet. There’s still violence and evil, but its magical landscape is peopled with do-gooders. The Rings of Power, option B, is positively heartwarming by comparison. Two options have been set before us, both appearing weekly through September and October: HBO’s Game of Thrones spinoff House of the Dragon, option A, offers a brawny, bloody extension of a familiar fantasy universe, one where brutal interpersonal violence and petty power struggles are occasionally interrupted by shrieking dragons and the threat of large-scale catastrophe. Photo-Illustration: Vulture Photos Courtesy of HBO and Prime Videoįantasy television in the fall of 2022 looks like an A/B test. Thus, these works reflect the artistic taste of the Emperor at the time.From left: House of the Dragon’s Rhaenyra Targaryen (Emma D’Arcy) The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power’s Galadriel (Morfydd Clark). However, Western painted enamel bronzeware may also have been a source of inspiration, as the floral patterns on such works resembled the rich floral patterns on silk embroidery, and conformed with the edict by the Qianlong Emperor to produce works that "add flowers to silken embroidery (meaning to enhance a good situation)," as recorded in the Imperial Workshop Archives. The faces of the painted maidens were especially marked in white, so as to heighten the three-dimensional contours, and as they were typically accompanied by backdrops of Western landscapes, it was once thought that such designs were closely associated with the missionary and court painter, Giuseppe Castiglione. In contrast to strict rules prohibiting the import of Western nude paintings during the Kangxi and Yongzheng reigns, images of Western maidens with bared bosoms on painted enamel porcelain of the Qianlong reign indicated a clear break with past taboos. On the underside of the vessel, a blue four-character inscription in Song-style script reads, "Qian Long Nian Zhi (Made in the Qianlong Reign)." The inscription is surrounded by a double-square frame. Just underneath the rim, a ring of Western-style patterns in red ink can be seen, and the sides of the belly are densely adorned with floral patterns. On both sides of the belly, Western-style frames enclose a painting of Western landscapes with women and children. The mouth and ring foot are encircled by ink rings with a white border marking. The body of the vase rather thick, and is completely coated in white glaze. The shoulders are symmetrically adorned with dragon-shaped handles. This vase has a wide mouth, ridged rim, short neck, slanting shoulders, a long broad belly, and short ring foot.
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