So, I remember after the Lord of the Rings trilogy came out not the books I don't remember when the books came out, but when the movies came out,

I remember that there was not a popular appetite for fantasy storytelling.

That was for nerds, it was for kids, for babies, it was for comic book readers, and people who play Final Fantasy on their

PlayStation and Dungeons and Dragons and

understand the physics of a 20-sided dies, it was for people like that.

But then Lord of the Rings was just so dang good with themes that I'm not even

sure people understood why they resonated with, why they loved it, because I mean it's so rooted in a story that makes sense. It just resonated across the board, across

the political spectrum. It was awesome. One of those movies, the third one, one best picture.

Are you kidding me? And all of a sudden there's this big

appetite for more of that as soon as those movies are over we can do more

fantasy storytelling that was great and of course then a bunch of executives come along

and they're like hey guys I have an idea what if we do something

that's like Lord of the Rings but dark and gritty and super adult then a whole

bunch of those kind of shows movies series come out now most of them probably didn't work super well a couple of

them worked pretty well but what they all had in common regardless of their

goodness or badness what they all had in common those shows that came out

inspired by the Lord of the Rings is that they all had some kind of

opening moment where they tried to shock you in the first few scenes to say this isn't middle

earth this isn't your father's fantasy story. This one's going to be dirty.

And it worked. I always got the message. I always knew what to expect after that for better or

for worse. And in a way, if you have a genre that people are already

familiar with but you are going to do something very different with it, it makes

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