It’s cute that some of you still think the writers of this show give a shit about Tolkien’s text or intent.
It may be a personal preference, but it’s one shared by a lot of people who are so very, very angry with this show. Maybe I’m totally off-base here, but to me it feels like a lot of the ultra-hardcore Tolkien fans wanted to go into this show knowing exactly what was going to happen at every turn, as if they’ve been training for this moment their entire lives. So when the show diverged from the established lore, they felt that they no longer had the upper hand over the unwashed masses that they so disdain.
I mean, everybody who knows anything knows that Sauron is Annatar and that the only Istari in the Second Age are the Blue Wizards and JFCD()S!# illegal operation WTF IS A HALBRAND? FUCK YOU WHEN DO!!!
Then their brains short-circuit and all that remains is rage-posting. Sauron was supposed to fool the elves! He wasn’t supposed to fool me! :(
For what it’s worth, Sauron didn’t fool me because I wasn’t really paying close enough attention. I watched a fair bit of Rings of Power in a window while doing something else. You know, like how most TV works! When something cool is happening, you shift your attention. Like when an elf is doing tricks on horseback or saying Super Serious Middle Earth Lore or just standing there looking quite fetching in her gown. But when there’s boring talk about junior varsity sailing team and who gets to go on the mission with Galadriel and…wait…have I been confusing Theo and Issulldore for several episodes? Why, yes I have!
So when the season finale ended, I thought hobo wizard was Sauron, but he was going to try being a good guy with the hobbits for a while. And boy did he give those Lady Nazguls a surprise! I mean, to turn on them like that and decide to throw in with hobbits! So there’s some good in Sauron after all, just like Darth Vader! Meanwhile, I thought SmarmyBoy from the raft rescue was Morgoth (?), or whatever the other bad guy’s name was who I had thought was one of Sauron’s lieutenants, or whatever. I was confused about why they made such a big deal about Morgoth going to the Mordor Volcano Terraforming Zone while Sauron was going to just wander with a girl hobbit for a while. Uh, okay? Season finales gonna season finale.
As god is my witness, that’s how I thought Rings of Power ended! As for all the stuff about who was tricking whom why and how and about what topics, well, I dunno, but I did know I never liked that SmarmyBoy Hal Brand guy, so naturally that was just a fake name. I knew he was no good for cute little Galadriel. Good riddance, I say. Whoever he is!
It was only through having a conversation with a friend who’d paid closer attention that I was set straight. Pretty sneaky, Rings of Power. You might have fooled me if I hadn’t been preoccupied with something in another window!
Wow way to start out with some agreement and then turn to judgment and personal attacks @Penny_Dreadful. I am trying very hard not to impose my subjective preferences on others and not to insult those who enjoy the show even though I personally have big problems with it.
Your insults and mockery are not cool. Why do I have to be arrogant and disdainful if I don’t like what they’ve done to Tolkien? Where the fuck do you get off implying that Tolkien fans assume superiority and disdain non fans? Have I ever said anything like that?
If you want to fight Roguefrog have at it but don’t disparage me in the process. That was uncalled for.
I don’t mean to speak for anyone else, but I didn’t get the impression @Penny_Dreadful was talking about you, @Sharpe. Any derision seemed aimed at “some ultra-hardcore Tolkien fans”, and not necessarily anyone in this thread.
Well he did quote me and then made those comments without differentiating.
Needless to say, I’m not referring specifically to you. Just merely saying that the specific problem you were referring to is something that I think a lot of people who don’t like the show agree with. And while a huge number of people out there are being arrogant and disdainful, you aren’t one of them that I can recall.
Ok then.
Also my anger with mystery box deception is not limited to Tolkien - I hate it in most forms, similar to how Tom views jump scares.
Nobody. All I am saying is that’s how the scene can easily come off to people with no familiarity to the original works. Galadriel has spent hundreds of years hunting Sauron down, when she finally learns he’s been standing right next to her for months now, is anyone supposed to believe that she’d be tempted by his offer for even a second? That she would hesitate to kill him for even a second? Is anyone supposed to believe that Sauron, knowing how long she’s been hunting him and knowing why, would actually think she’d accept his offer? And yet that’s how the scene is written, a long drawn out crisis of faith and eventual hardening of resolve that ends with him becoming angry and violent (drowning her) when she inevitably declines because duh, he’s SAURON.
To be fair to the show, it didn’t seem like a crisis of faith situation to me. It looked like he was casting Deception Magic and she was having to resist and hold on to what was real.
Deviating from established lore is not the same as focusing on pointlessly deceptive mystery bullshit. These are totally different critiques.
Yeah Penny_Dreadful’s conflation of those two ideas is what really set me off. It’s wrong on multiple levels and very insulting as well.
There may be some mustache twirling Tolkien-nazis out there somewhere I suppose, but for most of us we wanted an adaptation that brought what made Tolkien’s work great to life, as the PJ films did. PJ made a number of changes, but he understood the core of Tolkien: the mythological feel, the contrast between good and evil, the importance of resistance and fighting the long defeat, the mix of breathtaking epic set pieces with a bittersweet overall tone. Tweaking some details did not detract from the core majesty of the work. PJ “got it”. That’s what I was hoping for with RoP. It did not have to be a perfect exact word for word adaptation (which would have been impossible given the lack of detail in the LotR appendixes). But it needed to “get” Tolkien.
And this show did not. Saying that is not an expression of disdain for non-Tolkien fans.
Again and again, it was not the “divergence from established lore” that killed this show’s quality. It was the poor and inconsistent writing and the failure to get what was good about Tolkien and bring it to the screen. And the quality of the work matters: if they had changed a lot but had gotten the core concepts right and had replaced Tolkien’s ideas with high quality scenes and characterization, I would have loved it. But instead they just wrote what I consider to be a bunch of nonsense, driven by a desire to deceive and misdirect viewers to “create engagement”.
If you liked it, fine. I’ll leave you folks alone. But don’t get all pissy with us folks who hated it.
What core concepts are we talking about here?
Sauron’s deception of (some of) the Elves. Check.
Celebrimbor’s hubris. Check
The 7 and the 9 being crafted with the aid of Sauron. To be determined.
Elves making their 3 rings absent Sauron’s hand or knowledge. Check
The eruption of Orodruin, creating the land of Mordor. Check
The building of Barad-dur. To be determined.
Istari / Glorfindel being sent to Middle Earth to help defeat Sauron. Check / To be determined.
The One Ring being crafted by Sauron alone. To be determined.
Sauron sacking Eregion and killing Celebrimbor. To be determined.
The Faithful and King’s Men factions in Numenor. To be determined (but seems likely).
Sauron’s deception of Numenor, combined with their King’s hubris, leading to its demise after their assault on Valinor. To be determined.
Men, Dwarves, and Elves aligning to destroy Sauron. To be determined.
These are the core concepts of the Second Age vis a vis the Rings of Power. Only 20% of the intended series has even been shot to this point.
He didn’t just ‘make an offer.’ Sauron was using magic. It had visions and everything. Sauron was once a good guy, a Maia. He himself was seduced, probably by magic. This is him trying to do to Galadriel what Melkor did to him.
The difference is that Galadriel resisted, where Sauron did not. She’ll do the same thing when offered the ring in the third age.
Great, now I’m mad at this TV show again. I would’ve been happy with just one of these. They really whiffed on every one with every faction.
Those are plot points, not core concepts, and I don’t agree with your check marks on most of them even as plot points.
As to the core concepts of Tolkien, Tolkien was writing myth more than anything else and thus his work needs to be understood that way. The whole “humanization of Sauron” is a misunderstanding of Tolkien. Sauron is a force of darkness more than an individual personality; almost a force of nature. The Elves are long lived and have been resisting the corruption of Middle Earth for thousands of years; they are not going to suddenly wither because some trees got sick. The whole “fighting the long defeat” is a huge theme of Tolkien and the show did not get that.
In addition to not getting those core concepts, the writing was substantively poor, even nonsensical in several key areas. The whole “Galadriel jumps into the sea” thing never worked for me. I was very pro-RoP those first 3 or 4 episodes so I just rolled my eyes and hoped the show would “pick up” but in hindsight, that was a harbinger of the disappointment to come. That scene made no sense. The battle sequence at the tower and the village were poor - no sense of scale or tactics. The constant teasing of “Oh Bronwyn is dead! Nope, she’s alive!” - “Oh, Theo is dead, Nope here he is.” and “Oh Isildur is dead” (we all know he’s not.) are just poor writing.
On top of all that we have the intentionally contradictory and deceptive “clues” about Halbrand, Meteor Man, Adar and Sauron. Now this may be a personal preference of mine but I hate that stuff. Just tell the story. Don’t try to “excite” me with “clues” that can be interpreted many different ways in service of the script. There are good ways to build a mystery in shows; I just rewatched Veronica Mars Season 1 and that’s a master class in how to do it. There was an actual legit mystery there, not a manufactured one, and the clues were all there in the show organically in the script and events and visible to the characters but didn’t come together until the end. That’s how to do mystery. By contrast, the JJ Abrams “mystery box” idea is not really a true building of mystery but rather revealing “clues” to the viewers to generate excitement.
So I found this show a severe disappointment for 3 reasons: 1)It didn’t get Tolkien, 2)the writing was inconsistent, relied on cheap dramatics and was often poor and nonsensical, and 3)I personally hate the Mystery Box stuff.
So your two core concepts are that Sauron is a force of darkness more than an individual personality, and that the Elves should be “fighting the long defeat”.
Firstly, I would say that Sauron, during this timeline, is very much more an individual personality than a force of darkness. He may certainly be that in the Third Age, but in the Second Age he is a very real, tangible form who commits his primary evil through direct deception. So I completely disagree with you there. Beyond that, Sauron revealed himself at the end of the final episode of the season, so I’d say you’re jumping the gun a bit.
As far as the Elves are concerned—fighting the long defeat is kind of a supremely vague description of what you want actually on display here. Some of their backstory was told in the beginning of the show which told of their trials and longevity. The Elves of Eregion created the Rings of Power out of a desire to preserve their lands and protect it against decay. Protect it against decay…
This is exactly them “fighting the long defeat”. In the Third Age during the War of the Ring, they are resigned to the fact that their fate goes with the fate of the One Ring, and that with its destruction their power and realms will fade, and so shall they if they remain in Middle Earth.
I already defined what I considered core concepts in the post you responded to but you ignored that. Then I tried to explain a bit more and at this point, and you paraphrased my explanation to diminish the meaning. I’m done engaging with you Penny_Dreadful. I don’t feel you are participating reasonably in this conversation.