Living in the small town where your wife grew up is like:

me: Gotta call the Kronbergs tomorrow! Do you know them?
waxjism: The family? Yeah, they're my cousins. Well, some of them. One of my grandmother's sisters married one. For example, Whatsisname Johansson, he's my second cousin. He's a Kronberg. His mom was.
me: Yeah, well, no, it's their company. They do IT stuff. Yep, here we go, the CEO is Kasper.
waxjism: Oh yeah, he's one of them.

However, she is not aware of the nature of the controversy surrounding which local taxi firm is hired. I'm really curious because people made "Ugghh" and "Oooooh" noises about the board of directors' stated taxi firm preference, and then instead of explaining it to me someone said "there's some controversy" and someone else said "They're fine! They're perfectly fine."

O... k

House of the Dragon going fully Bad and Rings of Power's mysteriously vanishing budget

House of the Dragon continues entertaining me, but at this point I'd say it's not that much above the quality of latter-season Game of Thrones, either. It's definitely jumped beyond any possibilty of plausibly spackling or fanwanking its narrative into cohesion and logic, or many of its important characters and plot points. I'm increasingly fascinated (as well as frustrated obviously though - we had to pause the last episode because we were both yelling about how bad and badly-judged the scene was, and then after Wax wanted to unpause it I still had to rant for another few minutes) by just how it chooses to be bad, because all this unbelievable psychology, missing and inconsistent characterization, and overdramatic and implausible soap opera trash is built on the skeleton of a story from the books that wasn't implausible in and of itself in any way! I feel like even at the basic outline stage of this more fleshed-out plot, there remained a perfectly clear and plausible route to the story being coherent and believable and compelling. And then they just didn't... do... that.

The actual scene-level writing, as opposed to the... underlying story or detailed outline or whatever you call it... is still mostly pretty good: better than Rings of Power, anyway, which has inexcusably bad dialogue in multiple ways. As far as I recall, there's only been one "Wow, that's just completely not what that word actually means!" on House of the Dragon, whereas I stopped keeping count of Rings of Power's offenses in the "That's not what that means/That's not how Tolkien characters talk" column.

I saw a post on Tumblr mocking Rings of Power's low-rent-ness, saying something like - paraphrasing - 'They didn't even hire any name actors, they didn't bother buying any wigs, and they aren't even filming in New Zealand, so where did they manage to use up their billion-dollar budget when the special effects are also so bad that they are just printing scale armor pattern on fabric shirts instead of making actual armor costumes?' After I got done laughing because

1. they really didn't hire any name actors, and


2. there hasn't been any even remotely plausible in-verse explanation (or worldbuilding, e.g. more background characters sharing the style) for the random short hair on Elrond and Celebrimbor and Galadriel's brother, which mostly feels jarring and weird, so the suggestion that they were just saving money on wigs struck me as no less plausible than anything else I've thought of,

I paused and said, "Didn't they though? Then where did they?" So we googled it and no, yes, they DID actually film in New Zealand.

The costumes are not cheaply executed, or badly executed, on Rings of Power, as I've said at length before. The scale armor is a case where the Númenorean regent is wearing a sort of ceremonial scaled armor parade outfit, and she's got physical scaled armor gauntlets and a chest piece, and then under them she's just wearing a long-sleeved shirt that inexplicably appears to have had scales painted on it. It probably escaped most people's notice while watching actually, but it's more an example of terrible decision-making behind the costumes, because... the reason there's no scales on the armor there is that it's physically impossible for scales to go around the curve of the armpit! They'd have to have chunks cut out of them to let the arm bend or else they'd have to get super tiny! And that's why the actual scales she's wearing aren't there, not any issue of cost - it wouldn't be possible to make them go there, but then, given that it also wouldn't be possible for the Númenoreans or anyone else to make scale armor where the scales just carry right through the armpit unbroken, why did they try to make it look like they had? Again: an army of skilled craftspeople carrying out some very bad orders. A complete lack of appropriate judgement, knowledge, and logic in the decision-making department.

The special effects aren't actually bad, either. I think they're mostly in the setting, though. There aren't a lot of fantasy creatures or characters or a lot of magic on Rings of Power. They're probably simply passing mostly unremarked because it's easier for good CGI to be mistaken for practical effects when it's used to make backgrounds. But on the other hand, I'm not sure if you could really use a billion dollars that way? I mean, surely there should be some dragons or something in there for that price? But idk.

Speaking of dragons, the dragon CGI on House of the Dragon remains incredible. I love the dragon execution and the dragon characterization, for that matter. I'm amused to see reactions emerging to House of the Dragon on Tumblr, including those disturbing cases where you just read a text post pithily and scathingly critiquing some purportedly vast trend of wrong reactions. Apparently there's a faction of angry anti-Daemon/Rhaenyra shippers contending that he is not a feminist icon - if the reaction post is to be believed anyway - prompting a wave of sarcasm. It's hard to parse at this level whether they are ultimately reacting to earnest contentions from some third group that Daemon actually is a feminist icon, which is laughable but not unbelievable. I mean, there's always SOMEONE earnestly shouting anything. Including that Daemon obviously doesn't want Rhaenyra to be free, because if he liked independent women he would prefer his first wife, who is hot and hates him and spends her time hunting on her country estate in leather armor, to Rhaenyra. (This was one of the wrong reactions that I actually saw with my own two eyes.) Babes. Hannibal didn't want Will to be "free" in the sense of a healthy, happy, and self-actualized professional psychologist; he wanted him to be "free" to commit murder. Hope this helps!