Spoilers Rings of Power is back!

[Parmandur]

Thanks, I didn't know that. I haven't followed the development very closely, to be honest.

The behind the scenes stuff is very fun, everyone seems to be enjoying their work.

I recommend checking out Bear McReary's stuff about making the music, he is having the absolute time of his life.

 

[ART!]

I might be misremembering, but I think that the series does not have the rights to the Silmarillion or other posthumous books. They can use only the appendices in LotR, IIRC.

Yes and no - they have access to all of LOTR, but are mostly using just the Appendices. They have also negotiated use of non-LOTR material here and there.

 

[Maxperson]

Nah. Not glaring errors, just minor technicalities easily explained by unreliable narrators and the ridiculously huge timescales we’re talking about. Plus the habit of Tolkeinistas to interpret waaaaaaay more into a couple of lines of text than is good for them and then claim it’s incontrovertible fact.

Unless you have a humdinger of an example which is going to blow us all away with its clear and obvious merit?

1) Elendil is looking pretty good for someone who is -1519 years old.
2) The rings of power were forged over a 100 year period(SA 1500-1600), not a few months like the show is portraying.
3) Tar-Surion and Tar-Telperien were the kings of Numenor during that 100 year period, not Mirel/Pharazon who didn't take power until the year SA 3255.
4) Gil-Galad did not have the authority to order Galadriel to Valinor.
5) Galadriel not being Galadriel. She wasn't a bloodthirsty warrior. Like ever. The show is a massive misportrayal of her.
6) The Numenoreans are misportrayed as an ordinary, superstitious peoples, rather than the High Men that they were.
7) The Istari don't come to Middle Earth until around 1100 years into the third age. There are no wizards around to be in this show.
8) Elves don't need the rings of power to have the senses, visions and precognitions the series is putting forth.
9) The idiotic premise that elves need mithril to stay alive in Middle Earth.
10) They completely re-wrote Finrod's death in order to give Galadriel the need for revenge on Sauron. They didn't need to make that silly change in order for Galadriel to have a reason to oppose Annatar(Sauron).
11) Her magical powers have been stripped away from Galadriel for the series.
12) They made Galadriel a widow, except we know that she never was. She never lost her husband.
13) The turned Elrond into a beauracratic putz, rather than the accomplished, wizened leader/healer that he was at the ripe age of 1800 years.

The timeline is borked beyond repair. I'm also certain that if I rewatched season 1, I'd come up with many more glaring errors that I can't remember just now.

 

[ART!]

The behind the scenes stuff is very fun, everyone seems to be enjoying their work.

I recommend checking out Bear McReary's stuff about making the music, he is having the absolute time of his life.

His music is one of my favorite things about the show. His character and location themes are unbelievably good, IMHO.

 

[Maxperson]

My issue with that is…there is no Tolkien vision. Tolkien didn’t write the Silmarillion, it’s just an edited collaboration of notes and drafts that he had no oversight over. It’s not a book, and certainly not a book Tolkien wrote.

people are trying to pin Rings of Power to a story that doesn’t exist.

An edited book of his notes and drafts. His thinking. His stories. Just because he didn't publish them doesn't make them less valid or not his vision.

 

[Paul Farquhar]

That doesn't mean they didn't make big departures nonetheless.

Err that’s the point. Tolkien only wrote two complete stories. So anything else has to be a complete departure from Tolkien because he never wrote it. Faux-history and family trees aren’t a story, and certainly aren’t a TV show.

 

[Micah Sweet]

I wonder if the Mithril thing was an attempt to show in a more clear-cut way one of the reasons the rings are as powerful as they are.

Technically, Tolkien never said there weren't Istari in Middle-earth in the 2nd Age...

Why wouldn't there be Barrow Wights lots of places?

What do you not like about how they've depicted Tom?

The mithral thing is just too divergent from how the nature of the Children of Iluvatar are conceived for my tastes, no matter what they were trying to accomplish with it.

The Maiar were recruited as the Istari and sent to Middle-Earth 1000 years into the Age after the show takes place for the specific purpose of helping the people of Middle-Earth should Sauron ever return. If those particular Maiar were there earlier, they wouldn't be referred to as the Istari.

While the barrows themselves were there back in the Second Age, the wights were put there as evil spirits inhabiting the barrow corpses by the Witch-King, who does not yet exist.

Tom is not a mentor figure, for anyone. He cares only about his own space and not for the evils threatening Middle-Earth assuming he heven had any reason to be where the Stranger found him. He is excised from most adaptions because he serves very little narrative purpose.

 

[Maxperson]

Err that’s the point. Tolkien only wrote two complete stories. So anything else has to be a complete departure from Tolkien because he never wrote it. Faux-history and family trees aren’t a story, and certainly aren’t a TV show.

Sorry, but no. Never published =/= never wrote.

 

[Sepulchrave II]

What pushback? That Harfoots and elves couldn’t possibly be black?

Something which Amazon has executed very effectively is to deflect any legitimate criticism of the show under the very convenient aegis of labelling its detractors as racist. The showrunners have branded any critics as "trolls" and have failed to address more substantive issues, i.e.:

The poor writing, bad casting, bad acting, embarrassing dialogue which isn't even sophomoric, lack of continuity, inconsistency of characterization, dark and indistinct cinematography, shameless insertion of memberberries/easter eggs from both the books and the Jackson movies, appropriation and repurposing of dialogue without context, lack of characters who evoke any kind of emotional investment, absence of any sense of the passage of time, excessive use of a stupid trilled "r," gaudy sets and lackluster costumes, and the over-reliance on pointless mystery boxes.

Fidelity to the lore isn't even on my list of complaints, and I don't give two hoots about the ethnos of the actors. I'd just like a good show.

But, let's be honest - you're not going to be able to convince me that RoP possesses an iota of artistic or cinematic merit, and I'm not going to be able to convince you that the show is a steaming heap of garbage.

As to why I still watch it, despite my odium? A kind of morbid fascination, I suppose.

 

[Micah Sweet]

Err that’s the point. Tolkien only wrote two complete stories. So anything else has to be a complete departure from Tolkien because he never wrote it. Faux-history and family trees aren’t a story, and certainly aren’t a TV show.

Departures from we do have, not fill-in-the-blanks stuff. Generally I like the original characters better than the ones that have been adapted.