Rings of Power -- all opinions and spoilers welcome thread.

[gorice]

I basically felt every single emotional beat in the show. Every interaction between Durin and anyone gave me bug emotions, for instance

I can't know why you felt what you felt. I will say that I don't think the writers do anything to earn those emotions. I've sat through two episodes now, and it just seems that, like so much film and TV these days, RoP has the structure of emotional 'story beats', and emphasises them with all the techniques of the medium (music, cinematography, acting, etc.), but the writing doesn't really make sense. I'm expected to project emotions onto these moments, because the show is telling me that they are Important and Emotional, but the writing doesn't give me any reason to believe or care.

Here's another example. Putting aside whether it's reasonable for Galadriel to jump in the ocean (I think it's ridiculous, but w/e), I, as an audience member, have no reason to care. I knew before she left that she wouldn't really leave middle earth, both because of meta-knowledge and because everthing up to that point suggested she had no intention of doing so.

So, when she goes through the extended process of dithering about leaving, and then finally leaves on the boat, and then jumps off, and then gets rescued, and then gets attacked by a sea monster, what are the dramatic stakes? She won't be allowed to die, she will return to the world... It's just a question of how she gets there. Do I learn anything new about her? Well, she's suicidally brave, extremely competent, and she really hates Sauron. Things I already knew after the troll scene! Does she perhaps change or suffer in some way because of this? No, not really. She's still Galadriel, she's just on a raft now.

The show is just wasting my time, while insisting (structurally and stylistically) that what's happening is somehow profound and dramatic.

 

[Parmandur]

And lose. Even with the rings they aren't strong enough, and they know that. The rings were at best a protection for some of their people, leaving the rest of their people and all the rest of Middle Earth to suffer at Sauron's hands.

Again, mirroring exactly the actions that led to the Doomed and foolhardy wars against Morgoth to begin with. She is making a huge mistake, the same mistake that she lauds in the prolonged as a proud resistance.

The One doesn't exist and the Valar aren't coming back. She didn't have those options to even consider.

The One is mentioned repeatedly in the show, as are the Valar. King Durin, the wisest character running around, lays out that the Elves need to embrace hope.and follow the Doom of the Valar, which Galadriel fails to do at the end of the first Season. Indeed, she doesn't do so until she meets Frodo un this reading!

She didn't resist. She kept silent and allowed him to go free and doomed middle Earth. A complete 180 from the horribly bad characterization of her that they have been portraying since episode 1. It made no sense from any viewpoint.

She didn't let him knave, he slipped away and she had the choice to stop the making of the Rings and return to Valinor , or...jump off the ship and embrace her own strength instead of embracing hope and passing into the West.

 

[Parmandur]

I can't know why you felt what you felt. I will say that I don't think the writers do anything to earn those emotions. I've sat through two episodes now, and it just seems that, like so much film and TV these days, RoP has the structure of emotional 'story beats', and emphasises them with all the techniques of the medium (music, cinematography, acting, etc.), but the writing doesn't really make sense. I'm expected to project emotions onto these moments, because the show is telling me that they are Important and Emotional, but the writing doesn't give me any reason to believe or care.

Here's another example. Putting aside whether it's reasonable for Galadriel to jump in the ocean (I think it's ridiculous, but w/e), I, as an audience member, have no reason to care. I knew before she left that she wouldn't really leave middle earth, both because of meta-knowledge and because everthing up to that point suggested she had no intention of doing so.

So, when she goes through the extended process of dithering about leaving, and then finally leaves on the boat, and then jumps off, and then gets rescued, and then gets attacked by a sea monster, what are the dramatic stakes? She won't be allowed to die, she will return to the world... It's just a question of how she gets there. Do I learn anything new about her? Well, she's suicidally brave, extremely competent, and she really hates Sauron. Things I already knew after the troll scene! Does she perhaps change or suffer in some way because of this? No, not really. She's still Galadriel, she's just on a raft now.

The show is just wasting my time, while insisting (structurally and stylistically) that what's happening is somehow profound and dramatic.

I can't explain to you why the beats don't work for you, but they do for me. Perhaps that makes all the difference. Also, you are just two hours in, it gets progressively better on all the emotional fronts, especially.

 

[Maxperson]

The ban was that they shouldn't come, not that they couldn't. They could.literally see it, pwr the text in question.

What text explicitly says that they can see Valinor? Not the text about farseeing. That text says that if they used clairvoyance(farseeing) they could see one tall tower on an island off the coast of Aman. It never says that they could see Aman at all, let alone without their clairvoyance.

 

[Maxperson]

Again, mirroring exactly the actions that led to the Doomed and foolhardy wars against Morgoth to begin with. She is making a huge mistake, the same mistake that she lauds in the prolonged as a proud resistance.

So you think that it's okay for her to go completely out of character and doom the entire world just because she didn't want to be embarrassed that she didn't catch onto him sooner?

That's not the mistake that the Noldor made in going after Morgoth in the first place. What she is doing doesn't mirror anything other than bad writing.

The One is mentioned repeatedly in the show, as are the Valar. King Durin, the wisest character running around, lays out that the Elves need to embrace hope.and follow the Doom of the Valar, which Galadriel fails to do at the end of the first Season. Indeed, she doesn't do so until she meets Frodo un this reading!

My bad. I thought you were talking about the One Ring as the One. Yes, Eru is mentioned and of course wouldn't come help after Morgoth was captured. Nor would he allow the Valar to do so.

She didn't let him knave, he slipped away and she had the choice to stop the making of the Rings and return to Valinor , or...jump off the ship and embrace her own strength instead of embracing hope and passing into the West.

She also had the choice to stay in character and say, "Hey guys! Remember that fellow that was helping you? That was Sauron. Surprise!!" Instead she keeps completely silent about it going against her character as established in the books AND the new completely different character in show.

 

[Hriston]

It's an interesting optics question: On a flat earth, considering atmospheric haze/refraction and the limits of the human eye, how far away is it possible to identify "a city white-shining on a distant shore, and a great harbour and a tower?"

In the real world, we can see farther from a high place because it increases the distance to where the earth's curvature cuts off our view. That doesn't apply on a flat earth. But being in a very high place means that one's line of sight is passing through the upper atmosphere rather than the denser, hazier one at sea level. So we can assume that Tol Eressea was at the absolute limit of the best Numenorean eyes to resolve, and even a little bit of atmospheric interference was enough to make it lost in the haze. (And we can also assume that the Meneltarma was pretty damn tall.)

But what is the absolute limit of the Numenorean eye? Well, for us regular humans, Google tells me that human-scale objects (i.e., ~6 feet) are resolvable at a distance of ~2 miles. Let's give the tower of Tol Eressea a height of 200 feet. Then we get about 67 miles. Say the typical Numenorean has 20/10 vision (because Numenoreans are better at everything), and a "farsighted" Numenorean has 20/5 vision. That gets us to 267 miles.

267 miles seems pretty reasonable to me. But you could push it back farther, or pull it closer, by adjusting the height of the tower and/or the quality of Numenorean vision.

(More challenging to explain is the statement that Tol Eressea was also just visible for farsighted Numenoreans who sailed west to the limits of the Ban of the Valar. The Ban forbade Numenoreans to go west out of sight of their own coasts. But if you can see Tol Eressea from the Meneltarma, and the only difference between the coast and the Meneltarma is the density of the atmosphere between -- which shouldn't make that big a difference -- then someone pushing the limits of the Ban must be practically on top of Tol Eressea. At this point I'm inclined to invoke magic and say the Meneltarma granted heightened vision to anyone at the summit, because I don't see how to square these statements otherwise.)

I’m not an optics expert, but wouldn’t it be a matter of the area of the cross section of the image rather than a single dimension (height)? If so, and if we can suppose that our roughly six foot tall human is about 1.5 feet wide at the shoulders (as I am, roughly) and that the white tower is built with similar proportions so that our 200 foot tall tower has a diameter of 50 feet, then the cross-sectional image presented to the viewer would have over 1,000 times the area so resolvable at over 2,000 miles. That sounds wrong to me, but I live on a round planet. (ETA: After thinking about this for a moment, I can see I'm completely wrong. In my defense, I hadn't had my coffee yet this morning when I started writing this.)

But I agree it's likely there's something magical about the Meneltarma and the farsighted as well. This jibes with the belief of the Dunedain in later years that the peak of the Meneltarma could still be found sometimes rising above the sea and, if found, that one could glimpse from there the Undying Lands while standing at sea level.

 

[ART!]

I can't know why you felt what you felt. I will say that I don't think the writers do anything to earn those emotions. I've sat through two episodes now, and it just seems that, like so much film and TV these days, RoP has the structure of emotional 'story beats', and emphasises them with all the techniques of the medium (music, cinematography, acting, etc.), but the writing doesn't really make sense. I'm expected to project emotions onto these moments, because the show is telling me that they are Important and Emotional, but the writing doesn't give me any reason to believe or care.

Here's another example. Putting aside whether it's reasonable for Galadriel to jump in the ocean (I think it's ridiculous, but w/e), I, as an audience member, have no reason to care. I knew before she left that she wouldn't really leave middle earth, both because of meta-knowledge and because everthing up to that point suggested she had no intention of doing so.

So, when she goes through the extended process of dithering about leaving, and then finally leaves on the boat, and then jumps off, and then gets rescued, and then gets attacked by a sea monster, what are the dramatic stakes? She won't be allowed to die, she will return to the world... It's just a question of how she gets there. Do I learn anything new about her? Well, she's suicidally brave, extremely competent, and she really hates Sauron. Things I already knew after the troll scene! Does she perhaps change or suffer in some way because of this? No, not really. She's still Galadriel, she's just on a raft now.

The show is just wasting my time, while insisting (structurally and stylistically) that what's happening is somehow profound and dramatic.

I don't mind knowing the outcome of a story, as long as the storytelling is compelling or exciting. RoP works for me, but if it's not connecting with you, then I can see how it would be frustrating.

 

[FitzTheRuke]

I never said that they weren't fans. I said that I don't believe any fans would have zero complaints about the show, which isn't the same as no true Scotsman.

You can certainly work on a show and have complaints about how it all came together. You can't go around in interviews afterward saying, "Yeah, I would have liked for it to be much better, but it is what it is." (At least, not until years later, or if you want to never work again.)

 

[Parmandur]

What text explicitly says that they can see Valinor? Not the text about farseeing. That text says that if they used clairvoyance(farseeing) they could see one tall tower on an island off the coast of Aman. It never says that they could see Aman at all, let alone without their clairvoyance.

...

It sees that those with the ability to see far could see it. At this point in the story, Valinor is a physical place on the same plane as the rest of Middle Earth. That doesn't change until after Numenor falls.

Depicting Valinor as another world is a change in the show, probably necessitated by the limits of what they can talk about from the mythos.

 

[Maxperson]

It sees that those with the ability to see far could see it. At this point in the story, Valinor is a physical place on the same plane as the rest of Middle Earth. That doesn't change until after Numenor falls.

Literally nobody is arguing that it isn't on the same plane at this point in the show. Nothing in the books says that they could see Valinor, even with farsight(clairvoyance). What it says is that they could see the white tower in Erresea, which isn't Valinor. It's island off the coast of Valinor.