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The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power

So, this began! I don't have a lot to say about it, but I assume we have enough nerds around here to merit a dedicated discussion thread.

Amazon launched the show by dropping two episodes and also by disabling user ratings because it was getting review-bombed. The motivations for those bombs seemed like it was mostly ugly racist/sexist in nature, but also Amazon spent 750 million dollars to make this season and also it's Amazon so lol.

I'm not remotely a Tolkien fan by any stretch, but to my normie-eyes, so far this felt like more of the Peter Jackson LotR, just even better looking and with more minorities in prominent roles. (Yay!) My guess is if you like LotR, and if you aren't horribly racist and misogynistic, you'll probably enjoy this. But if you found those movies dull, then you'll probably be bored by these.

I liked the part where the dwarves were doing dwarf-things.

I like that my girl Galadriel is finally getting her due.

I think from a production stand-point, this show is marvelous and incredible. It all evokes Peter Jackson's visual oeuvre for Tolkien's stuff. But to my eyes, there's been a very conscious design effort to showcase the different fantasy race's attire, abodes, and living spaces as feeling very Bronze Age technologically compared to the LotR's high Middle Ages. And that's just super neat. The not!Hobbits look like they're living in Bronze Age tribal units; the humans in Bronze Age hamlets. The Elves and Dwarves are technologically lightyears ahead, with some ornate designs that evoke some of the splendor and wealth of say, Egyptian royalty in antiquity. But the craftsmanship is a step down from LotR in very subtle ways evoking an idea that their tools and practices just haven't fully evolved yet.

I liked the parts where the scene transitions between different povs included looking at a map of Middle Earth. Whoever did that, you're a real one.

This show is going to draw a lot of natural comparisons to HBO's Game of Thrones prequel that I don't think is particularly fair to either - as they're both very different things trying to do different things. But one point of comparison I do think is worth discussing is that House of the Dragon has a very top-heavy focus on society and realm politics, but The Rings of Power is almost democratic in fashion in how it's attempting to showcase the immense variety of the many walks of life that can be seen across Middle Earth which is very nice and I enjoyed quite a bit.
 

Adrenaline

Post Reader
(He/Him)
It's funny that both the LotR and GoT franchises are currently doing TV series based on stories that existed in the lore but were never previously dramatized in a traditional fashion. So far I think HotD is doing a better job of telling an interesting story, but RoP gets points for the astounding production value. Also both shows are getting hate for diversifying their casts. It's gotta suck to be a racist fantasy fan these days and have no options for entertainment with no black people in it.

My guess is that the end point for this series is the prologue of the LotR films. And then they can make another prequel series based on the prologue of this one!
 

Isrieri

My father told me this would happen
If I can find a venue to watch this I'd like to take a peek. As I understood it way back in 2018 or whenever it was first announced, I thought this new show was going to be episodic re imaginings of scenarios from the Silmarillion. Which would have been just fine because that's exactly the sort of way you should approach it. Looks instead like it will be about the Second Age which is also fun because there's a lot more creative liberty to be had there. I'd like to see what sort of story they make of it.
 
If I can find a venue to watch this I'd like to take a peek. As I understood it way back in 2018 or whenever it was first announced, I thought this new show was going to be episodic re imaginings of scenarios from the Silmarillion. Which would have been just fine because that's exactly the sort of way you should approach it. Looks instead like it will be about the Second Age which is also fun because there's a lot more creative liberty to be had there. I'd like to see what sort of story they make of it.

I think what they initially had rights to were the appendices of The Lord of the Rings (but explicitly not The Silmarillion), which is why this show ended up like it did...
 

Bongo

excused from moderation duty
(he/him)
Staff member
I'm into this show. I feel like it has convinced me that it has substance. First, there was line Arondir had about how, for Elves, the task of a healer is to make things of beauty to heal the spirit, because the body will heal on its own with time; and second, there was Celebrimbor describing his ambition to create something of real (and titular) power because of the effect his work would have on others. That was enough to make me think that the script definitely has the Tolkienian motif of "subcreation" on its mind.

They're playing fast and loose with the timeline of the source material, since it seems to imply Finrod was killed in his duel with Sauron after Morgoth's defeat. That adds some intrigue to the plotline they've got going with the weird old meteor man: it makes it so that no matter how much lore you know, there's some mystery to it. If you're a total neophyte, you're like "What's up with the old guy?" If you kinda remember the movies, you're thinking "Is this Gandalf?" If you were really into the books, you might wonder "Is this misdirection? It could be Saruman." If you remember your Silmarillion, the question might be "The Istari aren't supposed to show up for like a whole 'nother Age, so are they changing things up?" And if you've gone deep into The History of Middle-Earth, you're wondering "Are they going to show us one of the Blue Wizards?" Nobody can know what the deal is, and I think that's smart.

They've certainly put Galadriel in the chief protagonist role. Her opening narration glosses over a lot of the drama of the First Age - check out the host of the Noldor sailing over the sea in their legitimately acquired ships - but it seems to reflect her perspective, fixated on the many griefs inflicted by the Enemy and desirous of authority commensurate to her strength. Seeing the experience of mortals with loss might be what helps her mature into the wise and serene Queen of Lothlórien.

However, among the familiar characters, at the moment I'm most impressed with how they're treating young Elrond, who's showing layers. A budding diplomat, literally Gil-Galad's speechwriter, he's ambitious, glib, and overconfident, yet his chief aspiration is to make the world a better place.

I loved the scene where the Harfoots threw back their camouflage and like instantly transformed bare wasteland into a cluttered little village. If you're gonna make The Most Expensive TV Show Ever, that's the kind of visually imaginative stunt I want to see. I also think that the part where a bunch of elf warriors simultaneously break into song, and not only song but a polyphonic hymn, is just about one of the most Tolkien things ever put to video.
 
I'm of the neophyte persuasion who was like, "Oh dang is this Gandolf?" So I don't know nothin', but everything definitely *feels* like it's uber-Tolkien. So just that feeling is giving me a lot of nostalgia despite not really being a gigantic Tolkien fan.

Someone more intelligent and eloquent than I will inevitably write a lot of compelling words about a lot of the show's underlying themes too, which so far seems there's a LOT of meat to. For example. No doubt a lot of the review-bombing of the show so far has been due to misogynists because there's very real feminist themes being worked into the story in natural ways. Galadriel, that one human healer, and fem-Frodo are all capable women who are continually talked down to and shut down by patriarchal structures who dismiss their very reasonable concerns in very patronizing ways. And they have to roll their sleeves up to get shit done, it's awesome.
 

Phantoon

I cuss you bad
They're playing fast and loose with the timeline of the source material, since it seems to imply Finrod was killed in his duel with Sauron after Morgoth's defeat. That adds some intrigue to the plotline they've got going with the weird old meteor man: it makes it so that no matter how much lore you know, there's some mystery to it. If you're a total neophyte, you're like "What's up with the old guy?" If you kinda remember the movies, you're thinking "Is this Gandalf?" If you were really into the books, you might wonder "Is this misdirection? It could be Saruman." If you remember your Silmarillion, the question might be "The Istari aren't supposed to show up for like a whole 'nother Age, so are they changing things up?" And if you've gone deep into The History of Middle-Earth, you're wondering "Are they going to show us one of the Blue Wizards?" Nobody can know what the deal is, and I think that's smart.
You see, I don't think this is clever at all. They're adapting - at astronomical expense - the work of someone else. Very few people who watch this will read the Silmarillion, so they don't see subversion. They're just making this up whole cloth. They'd have been better off making something original, but then the only reason anybody wants to see this is because it has Lord of the Rings in front of it.

Their attempts at Tolkien style dialogue is also wince inducing. "Evil doesn't sleep; it waits". Just like Chuck Norris then.
 
Very few people who watch this will read the Silmarillion, so they don't see subversion.
I don't understand how this is a logical argument to say that the subversion Bongo articulates doesn't exist or doesn't matter.

On the contrary. It's also worth noting that in general - in big pop culture tentpoles like this - just because the general populous might be ignorant of the source material, that doesn't make adherence to it or clever subversion of it is not meaningful. I witness it all the time. The hardcore fans for media properties who know the lore inside and out are often the 'taste makers' who will scream at the top of their lungs if something is faithful or not, and the casuals very often will take note/heed and will affect their patronage.
 
It just dawned on me that all the positions of authority that are ignoring people sounding the alarms about the Orcs returning is just one big climate change allegory.
 

Phantoon

I cuss you bad
I don't understand how this is a logical argument to say that the subversion Bongo articulates doesn't exist or doesn't matter.

On the contrary. It's also worth noting that in general - in big pop culture tentpoles like this - just because the general populous might be ignorant of the source material, that doesn't make adherence to it or clever subversion of it is not meaningful. I witness it all the time. The hardcore fans for media properties who know the lore inside and out are often the 'taste makers' who will scream at the top of their lungs if something is faithful or not, and the casuals very often will take note/heed and will affect their patronage.
The point being that we're going to get one chance for a big budget Second Age on the TV. This is it, and they seem to have no interest in doing it faithfully.

Subversion only has value when someone is familiar with the story. You can subvert Robin Hood or Star Trek because people know how it's supposed to go. With something that almost nobody knows, it's not "subversion" any more, it's just a bad translation.

This may yet turn out to be an incredible series. It's always possible. It's expensive fan fiction at the moment.

Edit: I'm only one episode in, so from things I've seen I may regret my impetuousness soon enough. I hope so.
 
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Büge

Arm Candy
(she/her)
The point being that we're going to get one chance for a big budget Second Age on the TV. This is it, and they seem to have no interest in doing it faithfully.
Can they? Like, I'm not defending their choices, but they don't have much to work with.
 
Can they? Like, I'm not defending their choices, but they don't have much to work with.

Yeah, I think you're right and they're significantly constrained by what they've licensed. I was under the mistaken impression that they'd acquired more at some point, but watching the credits more closely after the second episode this show is definitely still "based on the Lord of the Rings' appendices." They can't do a faithful adaptation because they don't have the rights to it, so instead the show is like this, for better or for worse.
 
You can subvert Robin Hood or Star Trek because people know how it's supposed to go.
People literally don't have the first idea about how Star Trek is 'supposed' to go. The Star Trek that exists in the mind of pop culture has almost no relation to the Star Trek that actually exists as a piece of media. Even among its self-avowed die hard fans, on a daily basis I see people claim "Picard would never!" while I can routinely throw at least five example of him doing just that.
 

Phantoon

I cuss you bad
Yeah, I think you're right and they're significantly constrained by what they've licensed. I was under the mistaken impression that they'd acquired more at some point, but watching the credits more closely after the second episode this show is definitely still "based on the Lord of the Rings' appendices." They can't do a faithful adaptation because they don't have the rights to it, so instead the show is like this, for better or for worse.
I can see that the Tolkien estate could very well be an issue.
People literally don't have the first idea about how Star Trek is 'supposed' to go. The Star Trek that exists in the mind of pop culture has almost no relation to the Star Trek that actually exists as a piece of media. Even among its self-avowed die hard fans, on a daily basis I see people claim "Picard would never!" while I can routinely throw at least five example of him doing just that.
And there you prove my point. Star Trek has a cultural footprint. It doesn't matter what Star Trek actually is or isn't - you can subvert what the popular image is.

Ask somebody their opinion of Númenor some day. If you get anything beyond "errrrr" you can report back.
 

Isrieri

My father told me this would happen
What I remember about Númenor is that it was an Atlantis expy in Tolkein's world. The men on the island were able to build up a powerful and very impressive civilization that was leagues ahead of the then, simple agrarian lifestyles that the majority of humans were living at the time. That's was one of two pretty overt reasons for giving humans a bronze age aesthetic in the show. The second being they are also a race who have arrived more on the scene more recently than Elves, Dwarves, or even Orcs. However this Númenorean / Regular Man comparison is present in the original trilogy as well. The people of Bree out in western Middle-Earth and maybe to a lesser extent the people of Rohan, are simultaneously different cultures from that of Gondor with their own identity and also a separate ancestral line from the Númenorean ancestors that would found Gondor and other cities. Its in the architecture.

If I remember right the reason they were able to build a powerful civilization was because of their friendship with the Elves, fighting alongside them during the wars against the enemy, while other human tribes chose to remain neutral or oppose them. They settled the island and made it great, but it became corrupt overtime because Sauron was actually hiding out on Númenor in disguise and worked to change the culture from within. Eventually their hubris became so great they made a great fleet to sail west and conquer the lands where all the gods and high elves were living, and the entire fleet was sank in a storm. The storm then became a cataclysm that broke the entire island and sank it into the ocean.

In the Silmarillion this is all explained in a chapter that bridges the first age (the majority of the book) with the second (the epilogue). The whole book covers very long spans of time in very broad strokes due to it's essence of being like a mythological chronicle, and only goes into big details in individual stories. I personally recall very little about the rings of power themselves or any accompanying vigenettes that would shed some light on their significance other than as plot maguffins. Ergo, chalk me up with those who think the Second Age has large opportunities to make stuff up whole cloth and actually enrich the overall narrative. Whether the show writers can do that seamlessly and not clumsily remains to be seen.
 

Phantoon

I cuss you bad
Ah, but in Cause and Effect Picard reads the same page of his book over and over again for weeks and never notices

Does he sounds like a competent screenwriter to you?
 

Rascally Badger

El Capitan de la outro espacio
(He/Him)
I quite enjoyed the first two episodes. On brand for me*, but I want more dwarfs. My purist brother has some problems with condensing the timeline, and a bit of a problem with making Galadriel a swordfighter, but I thought it worked in the context of the show. I'm up for six more episodes.

*In high school I was nicknamed 'Gimli' after the movies started coming out.
 

Phantoon

I cuss you bad
So far they've avoided the elf problem for me: if you do them even slightly wrong they're insufferable pricks. I'd sooner have a Boromir in any given story than an Elrond.
 
after watching the third episode and reading more reactions to it and the show in general, i'm increasingly struck by how so much of the online discourse around this (positive and negative) is just a dull political proxy war that's totally unmoored from the show as a text

for example, there's a lot of discussion that EITHER "galadriel is a power fantasy and she's always right—and that's Bad" OR "galadriel is a power fantasy and she's always right—and that's Good."

but as much as i have a long list of problems with the show, one of the things that works for me is that galadriel and a lot of the other sympathetic characters are making mistakes that seem reasonable in the moment, which is extremely appropriate for the kind of story this has to be.

preemptively: i didn't say i found this surprising
 

Bongo

excused from moderation duty
(he/him)
Staff member
Númenor is coded Hellenistic because they're the antiquity underlying Gondor, and Gondor is the (sub-)Roman endpoint of the journey backwards through British history in The Lord of the Rings, starting with the early modern Shire, venturing into the late medieval in Bree, the high middle ages of Rivendell, and the Anglo-Saxon Rohan. Tolkien himself called it a coincidence that this crypto-Atlantis could legitimately be called "Atalantë," but he went with it because when you have the shot, you take it.

Halbrand's story taking up the theme of Men seeking redemption for their people for having served the Enemy looks like it's going to make a nice counterpoint to the theme of Númenor, a kingdom granted to those who were on the right side of the War of Wrath, falling into the Shadow. Lore-heads already know a few spoilers based on the names dropped this episode, but that largely adds some cool dramatic tension, and it's not like the future villains aren't villain-coded already.

A lot of events are happening much closer together than I would have expected, but then again, Peter Jackson once cut between two scenes that were separated by over a decade in the book in The Fellowship of the Ring, so it's all good. In particular, the condensation of the timeline also seems to let all the major players exist at the same time, helping to further the series' themes of distrust and isolation. Sauron's gonna be keeping a busy social calendar if he's going to be teaching Celebrimbor how to make Rings of Power and raising enough of a ruckus in Mordor that Pharazôn shows up to tell him to knock it off all in the span of a couple of years instead of literally over 1500. Then again I suppose some big timeskips might be possible.
People literally don't have the first idea about how Star Trek is 'supposed' to go. The Star Trek that exists in the mind of pop culture has almost no relation to the Star Trek that actually exists as a piece of media. Even among its self-avowed die hard fans, on a daily basis I see people claim "Picard would never!" while I can routinely throw at least five example of him doing just that.
I believe you're referring to Kirk Drift, an article I think most users of this forum would appreciate.
 

Bongo

excused from moderation duty
(he/him)
Staff member
I'd go even farther and call it ubiquitous in pop culture.
 
I'd go even farther and call it ubiquitous in pop culture.
Oh absolutely. It just manifests in different ways. Some are benign like getting the famous quote slightly wrong but still keeping the spirit of it. But there's a LOT about Star Trek that most fans' impressions/memories of the franchise is just a straight up 180 completely different from reality though. To the degree that I almost reflexively distrust what Star Trek fans have to say about the franchise.
 

Bongo

excused from moderation duty
(he/him)
Staff member
So, now taking bets on what Halbrand's deal is going to turn out to be:
  • Receives one of the Nine, is tricked into becoming a Nazgûl
  • Becomes a king but turns heel, is cursed to become the King of the Dead
  • Renounces kingship, becomes the first Steward of Gondor
  • Everything just works out fine for him
  • In a further deviation from canon, is somehow related to Eorl, the founder of Rohan
  • Is a different character in a clever disguise (please specify)
 
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