Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power

[hammerofglass]

All of the LOTR fans I know IRL are waiting to watch it when the season is fully released.

[Lazerlike42]

Question. Is it an indication of the general quality of this series that the entire thread so far has been taken up with a discussion of the original trilogy and not of the Rings of Power?

That seems to be the general statement i'm getting across the internet. Once you get past the haters and the fanboys etc, this series just doesn't seem to be all that interesting compared with either the trilogy or GOT. I've even seen Youtubers claim that the Hobbit trilogy has now been ''Vindicated By History'' on the back of this.

I think the biggest problem with this seriesto both hardcore Tolkien fans and the average non-Tolkien superfan - the kind of person who maybe has seen the Jackson films once or twice or maybe hasn't even seen them at all - is the presentation of the elves. They're just so... human.

To a Tolkien lover they're supposed to be these borderline angelic beings - not Valar or even Maiar but a step or two below. They are supposed to have all kinds of qualities and characteristics which really set them apart. I'm actually doing a pretty lousy job of describing it, but the point is that to someone who has read the books and knows Tolkien the Elves are just wrong, which is a real problem because of how central they are to everything Tolkien created.

Yet to the average person who doesn't know all of this, the consequence is that they're just nothing special. They're human beings who have pointed ears. It's like if Spock had worn the prosthetics but otherwise acted just like every other character on the ship - chances are Star Trek wouldn't have been as successful without one of its key characters being just an normal guy. The most common thing I've seen in both professional reviews and in comments from "average people" has been that it's boring, and having this entire race that is so central to the series just be so normal is probably a big part of that. On top of this, the hobbits and the dwarves are already a lot closer to humans in a lot of ways where a superfan might see the difference but the average person may not and so for the "regular" viewer you have this fantasy world with a bunch of different races that all seem the same. It must be a bland experience. (This is, by the way, all the more reason why I do think that even some of these superficially minor nitpicks like beardless dwarves are actually pretty important: they all add up to homogenizing everything and making it dull).

[Madner Kami]

To a Tolkien lover they're supposed to be these borderline angelic beings - not Valar or even Maiar but a step or two below. They are supposed to have all kinds of qualities and characteristics which really set them apart. I'm actually doing a pretty lousy job of describing it, but the point is that to someone who has read the books and knows Tolkien the Elves are just wrong, which is a real problem because of how central they are to everything Tolkien created.

Only those who never read the Silmarillion. Elves are very much human-like in their qualities or, rather, spectrum of qualities. The main distinction to humans is in fact, their ability to age beyond reason and thus giving them a very distant view of things. They've been around since the dawn of time. They've seen it all. This is what gives them their "angelic aura", their distance and aloofness in human eyes, their wisdom aquired through literally ages. Beyond that, they can be as energetic as a human child, vengeful like the staunchest dwarf and have a capacity of evil on par with the orcs and Morgoth himself. Of course, otherworldly magic oozes out their ears as well, but that's not exactly a character-trait in the same vein as those mentioned above.

As for the white-washing or, rather, black-washing of the show, I don't like that. I'm ambivalent in my opinion of that in general. On the one hand, a person is playing a role. I wouldn't care in the slightest, if my white friend roleplays an asian, a black man roleplays a white female and so on. But, those are media lacking a visual component. Movie/TV/theatre are distinctly an audio-visual medium and so the visual attributes of the actor leak into the character and it can be quite out of character to have a black elf or dwarf or Numenoran (at least within this timeframe), where there logically shouldn't be one. I mean, in reallife we've got stories like the one of Yasuke, the black samurai. An ex-slave ending up in Japan and becoming a samurai. Sure, a black man wouldn't be out of place playing that role, but putting the same man in the role of, say, Tokugawa? Or doing the opposite, Yasuke being played by a white man (sans black face makeup, of course). Very out of place. Same here. It just does not fit within the confines of the world-building and is outright distracting.
And I'm not opposed to the thought of black elves, say it's a tribe that lived way further south, in lands near the Haradrim or something akin to that. There has been plenty of time for men to adapt to the conditions of their surroundings, so why shouldn't the elves, too? But placing a black Nandor into a group with a distinct lack of black people? Who are his parents? How did he end up there? A random genetic mutation? A one in a million chance? Now I know I am trying to apply scientific logic to a distinctly magical setting, but then I am left to wonder: If we "diversify" an otherwise homogenic group of people by infusing a single distinct character with traits that shouldn't be present in said group, then why not go that single step further and not make him the only black elf? He sticks out like a sore thumb for all the wrong reasons and it's the same for a number of such characters, like for the Halfling's Eldest. They're all white, more or less, but somehow that single Hobbit is black? What's his background? And unlike with the Elves, the Halflings as a whole are very much regionally locked to what is Arda's equivalent of northern Europe on top of their very clear exclusive tribalism, so there's even less reason to have someone like him in the first place... Just... Why? It's immersion-breaking, precisely because it sticks out like a sore thumb. It's like Sauron appearing on screen in disguise, while playing the nice-guy (I don't think Halbrand is Annatar/Sauron btw. - or at least: not yet). There's just something intrinsically wrong with that picture and it's apparent to the viewer, except in Annatar's case it would be intentional.

[Lazerlike42]

To a Tolkien lover they're supposed to be these borderline angelic beings - not Valar or even Maiar but a step or two below. They are supposed to have all kinds of qualities and characteristics which really set them apart. I'm actually doing a pretty lousy job of describing it, but the point is that to someone who has read the books and knows Tolkien the Elves are just wrong, which is a real problem because of how central they are to everything Tolkien created.

Only those who never read the Silmarillion. Elves are very much human-like in their qualities or, rather, spectrum of qualities. The main distinction to humans is in fact, their ability to age beyond reason and thus giving them a very distant view of things. They've been around since the dawn of time. They've seen it all. This is what gives them their "angelic aura", their distance and aloofness in human eyes, their wisdom aquired through literally ages. Beyond that, they can be as energetic as a human child, vengeful like the staunchest dwarf and have a capacity of evil on par with the orcs and Morgoth himself. Of course, otherworldly magic oozes out their ears as well, but that's not exactly a character-trait in the same vein as those mentioned above.

As for the white-washing or, rather, black-washing of the show, I don't like that. I'm ambivalent in my opinion of that in general. On the one hand, a person is playing a role. I wouldn't care in the slightest, if my white friend roleplays an asian, a black man roleplays a white female and so on. But, those are media lacking a visual component. Movie/TV/theatre are distinctly an audio-visual medium and so the visual attributes of the actor leak into the character and it can be quite out of character to have a black elf or dwarf or Numenoran (at least within this timeframe), where there logically shouldn't be one. I mean, in reallife we've got stories like the one of Yasuke, the black samurai. An ex-slave ending up in Japan and becoming a samurai. Sure, a black man wouldn't be out of place playing that role, but putting the same man in the role of, say, Tokugawa? Or doing the opposite, Yasuke being played by a white man (sans black face makeup, of course). Very out of place. Same here. It just does not fit within the confines of the world-building and is outright distracting.
And I'm not opposed to the thought of black elves, say it's a tribe that lived way further south, in lands near the Haradrim or something akin to that. There has been plenty of time for men to adapt to the conditions of their surroundings, so why shouldn't the elves, too? But placing a black Nandor into a group with a distinct lack of black people? Who are his parents? How did he end up there? A random genetic mutation? A one in a million chance? Now I know I am trying to apply scientific logic to a distinctly magical setting, but then I am left to wonder: If we "diversify" an otherwise homogenic group of people by infusing a single distinct character with traits that shouldn't be present in said group, then why not go that single step further and not make him the only black elf? He sticks out like a sore thumb for all the wrong reasons and it's the same for a number of such characters, like for the Halfling's Eldest. They're all white, more or less, but somehow that single Hobbit is black? What's his background? And unlike with the Elves, the Halflings as a whole are very much regionally locked to what is Arda's equivalent of northern Europe on top of their very clear exclusive tribalism, so there's even less reason to have someone like him in the first place... Just... Why? It's immersion-breaking, precisely because it sticks out like a sore thumb. It's like Sauron appearing on screen in disguise, while playing the nice-guy (I don't think Halbrand is Annatar/Sauron btw. - or at least: not yet). There's just something intrinsically wrong with that picture and it's apparent to the viewer, except in Annatar's case it would be intentional.

Regardless of the reasons they are the way they are, the point is that elves of the 2nd age in Tolkien should be markedly different from humans well beyond what this series portrays. If anything an awareness of the real history of the elves makes matters worse because it implicitly "denies" all of that history that led to them being where they're at in the second age.

[McAvoy]

All of the LOTR fans I know IRL are waiting to watch it when the season is fully released.

My brother is this. He did try during the first episode and said it was too slow. He said he will wait until the whole season is out. Me personally I am doing the good ol' fashioned way of watching it each week.

It does seem to be stepping up now. It's not much of a drag as it was before.

[Madner Kami]

It does seem to be stepping up now. It's not much of a drag as it was before.

Star Trek: The Next Generation Interactive VCR Board Game

[McAvoy]

It does seem to be stepping up now. It's not much of a drag as it was before.

Star Trek: The Next Generation Interactive VCR Board Game

Huh?

[Madner Kami]

It does seem to be stepping up now. It's not much of a drag as it was before.

Star Trek: The Next Generation Interactive VCR Board Game

Huh?

Oops, this was supposed to be a reply to your post over in the Lower Decks thread.

[McAvoy]

It does seem to be stepping up now. It's not much of a drag as it was before.

Star Trek: The Next Generation Interactive VCR Board Game

Huh?

Oops, this was supposed to be a reply to your post over in the Lower Decks thread.

Ahh ok

[clearspira]

I'm hearing a lot of rumours that this has been a financial loss for Amazon. Or at least, it hasn't made them too many bags of money with dollar signs on them.