[+] The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power - SPOILERS ALLOWED

[doctorbadwolf]

And like most "great literature" is a tedious read.

Nah, it’s as far from tedious as you can get without reading an action comic book.

But people in the US tend to be very bad at telling British accents from Australian, and they are a lot more than a 100 miles apart.

Well, that’s because Australians have British accents.

 

[Tonguez]

Can I just say that it’s kinda sad that the first original Middle Earth stories we’ve had are being crucified by book fans who are insisting that the books that largely no one has read must be adhered to?

I was actually quite excited when I heard these would be new stories. Now? All I see in my feeds are endless hate and worse. Has totally sucked any desire I had to watch these.

Twelve year old me would have sold a kidney to watch this. Fifty year old me just can’t get past the wall of noise.

Ignore the noise, dont be sucked in by the few ranters on social media

50 yr old me is enjoying that tale and the world building

 

[Olgar Shiverstone]

The Lord of the Rings is great literature. The Hobbit was a clumsily written prototype with minimal characterisation, an uneven tone, and a plot ripped off from the third part of Beowulf.

That's it. WORDS!

Blurp. Thweek. FLIBBERTIGIBBET!

//
I mean, it's not exactly surprising that a scholar of Beowulf would rip off Beowulf, even unconsciously.

On the topic of accents, has anyone listened to the Andy Serkis audiobooks of Lord of the Rings? He does different British accents for each of the hobbits, and all of the characters for that matter. My problem is, while I can tell they are different, I don't know enough to know where they are from and if that origin has any particular meaning for the character.

Can anyone share insight?

 

[Dire Bare]

Can I just say that it’s kinda sad that the first original Middle Earth stories we’ve had are being crucified by book fans who are insisting that the books that largely no one has read must be adhered to?

I was actually quite excited when I heard these would be new stories. Now? All I see in my feeds are endless hate and worse. Has totally sucked any desire I had to watch these.

Twelve year old me would have sold a kidney to watch this. Fifty year old me just can’t get past the wall of noise.

Shows and movies being review-bombed by toxic fans is the new normal. Those of us who are a bit more rational, need to adapt in order to continue enjoying our fandoms.

I expected the hate and vitriol, and it bothers me not a whit. I decided to simply watch the first few episodes and make up my own mind . . . . and so far I'm loving it!

Not to say that everyone who dislikes the new series is a toxic review-bombing troll . . . the next level down is fans-with-unrealistic-expectations, based on books very few have actually read. If one is a big Tolkien apocrypha fan, and is disappointed that the new series isn't adhering slavishly to the "History of Middle-Earth" books . . . that's a fair enough point-of-view, but it is incredibly unrealistic to think this show (or one like it) would have ended up any other way.

The only issue I've had so far is watching a show very visually and tonally reminiscent of the Jackson films, but with the pacing of a television series . . . but I'm adapting. I'm also irritated at the licensing situation, that Amazon could only land the appendices and can't pull from the Silmarillion or the history volumes . . . . the Tolkien estate needs to get their house in order. But I never expected an adaptation that didn't change the source material, and I'm enjoying the show so far.

 

[Page]

I'm not a Tolkien scholar. I have read his works, and I found them occasionally beautiful but mostly stodgy and inept as works of narrative fiction. They are clearly the product of a professor more interested in mythology, world building and linguistics than storytelling. But his imagination and writing stands the test of time for good reason. I think the first two episodes of The Rings of Power serve his legacy better than anything Jackson produced after Fellowship.

 

[Rabulias]

Yeah. That's doable. Just don't condense the timeline. Skip around.

I have only read The Hobbit (a couple of times over the years) and The Lord of the Rings (once, long ago, and I did not read the appendices), so I have no sense of the timeline outside of "the big four."

I don't see how the story is enhanced by such a long timeline, unless some element of the tale is something that would take centuries to accomplish (like, say, the construction of The Wall over in Game of Thrones). In fact, to me, it strains my suspension of disbelief that they searched for Sauron for hundreds of years and failed to find him (assuming he still is in Middle Earth).

 

[FitzTheRuke]

She was younger, yes, but not enough to make that large of a change. The current show is set about 2000 years before the war of the ring, which means she is already 6000 years old. Elves don't really change that much and by the ripe age of 6k, she's not really going to change anymore. The show should be portraying her like the movies did.

This part I agree with.

That said, I'm not sure she is introverted. She went with Fingolfin and his followers from Aman to Middle Earth across the Helcaraxe and then took part in the wars that followed. It wasn't until around 400 years from the time of this show that she went to dwell in Lothlorien and it was another 500ish years before she assumed control of that place. By that time all the elves had retreated to their strongholds.

Here I think you're misunderstanding me. Introversion has nothing to do with deeds.

Yeah, we saw Galadriel in LotR for a very short window at a very particular point in time. If you met me at a dinner party where I was talking to friends of mine who went into politics, it wouldn't be accurate to think that was my life, at all.

Of course. But I would get a pretty good idea of the very basics of who you are.

We're seeing a lot more of Galadriel and Elrond than we have previously. They are going to do things they haven't done before -- which mostly consisted of war councils -- and show other sides of their personalities.

Sure. Other sides aren't usually opposite sides, though.

It would be a lot less plausible if we never saw other sides of them in this show.

Absolutely, but to use an exaggeration to make a point, one does not often go all the way from a dudebro jock to an introspective nerd. It feels to me like Galadriel has gone (in reverse) from a wise calm quiet telepath to a brash angry soldier. I get that she's younger, but it seems like too far a leap to me.

Don't get me wrong, I don't really care. I like the show. She can be a tough elf fighter named Galadriel, that's fine. But she doesn't seem like the same person AT ALL.

EDIT: I posted this before reading the last bunch of pages.

 

[BRayne]

I feel like this show is best viewed through the same framing device as Tolkien first wrote it, it's myth. Tolkien translated the Red Book of Westmarch and several other fragmentary passages. Payne, McKay, et al then later translate something let's call "On The Rings of Power" and some of this contradicts bits in the fragments Tolkien translated, which is not dissimilar from say Homer and Hesiod's accounts of Aphrodite's birth being contradictory.

 

[FitzTheRuke]

I feel like this show is best viewed through the same framing device as Tolkien first wrote it, it's myth. Tolkien translated the Red Book of Westmarch and several other fragmentary passages. Payne, McKay, et al then later translate something let's call "On The Rings of Power" and some of this contradicts bits in the fragments Tolkien translated, which is not dissimilar from say Homer and Hesiod's accounts of Aphrodite's birth being contradictory.

Yeah, that's a good idea. Before "continuity" became a thing (which has only been something that built over the last century) tales could be told with a whole LOTTA details mixed up. Even subbing in some characters for others, mixing up names, all of these things were common in storytelling.

In this story, Galadriel is an angry soldier and Elrond is a smarmy politician. (Maybe. They'll probably both grow and change over the course of the story).

I'm fine with that, really, as long as it's a good story as it goes.

 

[Hriston]

The problem with Galadriel's character in this show isn't that she's depicted as a warrior. As has been noted, Tolkien's writings have many references to Galadriel directly taking part in armed conflicts, most notably that she defended the Teleri and their ships at the First Kinslaying.

The problem is her character already contained a flaw - that despite her rejection of Morgoth, her mind had been infected by his lies, and she believed she could have dominion in Middle-earth if she rebelled against the Valar. Her character arc, resolving this flaw, takes place in the LotR when Frodo offers her the Ring, and she refuses. They can't resolve this flaw in this series. It has to wait until the LotR.

So she can have an arc in this story, the writers have given her a new flaw - that she is driven to destroy Sauron by a desire for revenge for her brother's death - and this new flaw seems to drive pretty much all her decisions, so that the original character is nearly unrecognizable.

The writers don't seem to have invented this new flaw from whole cloth, however. Galadriel is Sauron's chief enemy throughout the Second Age, and according to this reddit post, at one point, in conversation with Celebrimbor after the forging of the One Ring has been revealed, she vows to remain in Middle-earth until she has defeated Sauron.