Say what you will about the Nazis but it's frankly hilarious that they were so ideologically committed to their myth of superiority that they were thoroughly unable to deal with getting rocked from Stalingrad straight down to Berlin.
It's such a short step between criticizing character design and :reddit-logo: getting racist about the whole thing ("see, diversity bad! :so-true:") that I've decided I kind of just don't give a fuck. PJ's LOTR is only one visualization of the novels, and Tolkien himself had like one line in an appendix about how dwarves of both sexes have beards. Shit, Hugo Weaving was way too old to play an elf that's meant to be ethereally beautiful and youthful, and we all laud that depiction regardless. Tom Bombadil had more narrative impact than the beards of dwarves and that dude's cut from everything.
It might be that self-replicating chemistry is an anomaly and life is extraordinarily rare. It might be that life is common but multicellular life isn't. It might be that whenever a biosphere pops up it gets swiftly eradicated by some cosmic event. It might be that we're extremely early to the game, and the heavy elements that are required for life just didn't exist, or don't generally exist in the right ratios, until around the time our solar system formed.
It might be that evolving sapience is a crazy unlikely dice roll, or that sex as a means of reproduction is extremely rare to evolve, and thus the genetic mutation rate is way slower.
Humans have also been around about 250,000 years, of which maybe the last 100 have been us sending out signals, mostly accidentally.
Also, physics is a real bitch to deal with, and a society that doesn't have some inherent drive to commit to space exploration probably won't bother, even if they otherwise have advanced technology.
I'm waiting for it to fully release so I can pirate it, but as I understand it's a tighter retelling of one of the big narrative arcs of the first campaign, the Briarwoods.
Gonna pirate it because fuck giving Bezos any dollars and because Critical Role (the company) did the Kickstarter backers (me among them) dirty. It's increasingly become a corporate entity when before it was just a group of friends livestreaming their games, but I won't get into all that here.
There's something like 1000 hours of campaign you'd have to get through for the sake of understanding the in-jokes and references and it stands on its own without it.
It's a similar sense of humor but paced a lot faster since they're not spending 6 hours doing fictional shopping. The characterization is tighter too.
All in all it's a pretty good fantasy adventure animation. First episode goes over the top on gross-out humor and blood spatters to establish that it is an Adult Show That Pulls No Punches and it chills out from there on the farts.
Honestly it must be exhausting constantly spewing uninteresting bullshit. Never mind the millions of dollars he makes. You look into that :live-tucker-reaction: face and you see the abyss gazing back.
Say what you will about the Nazis but it's frankly hilarious that they were so ideologically committed to their myth of superiority that they were thoroughly unable to deal with getting rocked from Stalingrad straight down to Berlin.