The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power series

Despite myself I quite like Arondir and Bronwyn but that’s probably because I am shallow and they’re both quite pretty.

xpost definitely — i have tried to dig into even just the appendices & i have such a hard time retaining any of it, it’s just not an enjoyable read for me compared to the novels. He’s a beautiful writer but the specificity is just too much for my small brain, i never had much recall but now that i am middleaged, yeesh nope sorry

I don’t want to insult any of the actors but the ease and confidence with which many if not most of the original LOTR actors execute their parts is crucial to making that world believable. I don’t believe most of the actors in their roles here, it all feels too soap opera elevated and not ground level. I can see them hitting their marks on the floor of the stage, not existing as people. Some of the trilogy actors could get stagy but they were going for Shakespearean (hi Denethor), not Cave Dwellers. Part of good acting is sheer charisma too, and that’s largely missing here. Think about how much better the Halbrand role would be if there was a Mortenson-level actor in the part, for example (and it wasn’t a poorly conceived character of course.)

I actually enjoy the slightly more gore and the fairly brutal albeit brief battles tbh, and any destruction that’s been rained down has been viscerally effective if not always…not dumb.

The Bronwyn/Theo/orc fight in episode 2 was quite excellent, Bayona handled that brilliantly. As ever with this show, there are great moments in a sea of sludge.

Huh, I thought "not all who wander are lost" was a LotR thing originally, and made its way from there to memehood. But if Ned hasn't corrected it, then I guess it must not be.

I’m thinking about it in comparison to the sweeping vistas of the landscape as seen in the trilogy films, these massive mountain ranges and endless expanses of rocky terrain thru which the characters journeyed, giving the feel of a place which really did extend as far as the eye could see.

Totally agree with this. A huge amount of the appeal of LotR is the endless journeying, walking through amazing landscapes. The harfoots just seem to trudge through the same little sound stage fifty times.

i'm nowehere near as down as ned on the pure inventions of the show: the tunneling, the volcano-key, the mithril beef, the seafaring digression, harfoot twig-hat lore, fierce bad ugly elf, 3 blue witches, nine saurons for mortal men doomed to die, HOT DARK LORD SEXYTIEMS: i feel like every one of them could have been developed effectively if the writers had some kind of object permanence. but instead they flourish an idea for one or maybe two eps and then just forget it's part of the landscape they're developing? i guess the tunnels did reappear but their role just abruptly shifted

e.g. the idea that a nice green space full of humans getting grimly by was poised above a world like a vast rotten pulullent cheese was GREBT (and a perfectly good extension of tolk's orc-lore)

but it was also given nearly no time to develop, it just hopped from the idea (a couple of scary scenes) to the denouement (a battle) to a -- long break -- totally different purpose = lava-plumbing. and yes, the switching on of orodruin woke everything up abruptly (also good, why not) tho it also afterwards left u thinking "when sauron left mordor did he wind up the clock turn off the volcano and leave the key in someone's cupboard?"

sauron being good with machinery isn't an awful idea? nor is sauron using the volcano as a device! but sauron lost at sea -- that backstory has never emerged -- carefully maintaining the volcano as a device is ancient stone cogs/crystal skull plot silliness (and not in a good way), ie it's a movie cliche (and not a videogames cliche)

on the whole i'm really hesitant to argue that oh, the terrible dialogue, here-and-gone narrative turns, and piously boring characters are all just a product of video game culture (tho i'm seeing various otherwise perfectly smart ppl who play a lot of videogames apparently enjoying this: or shall we say giving it a lot more leeway than we are here): and much more inclined to argue -- as above -- that the show-writers are faced with a near-insuperable problem of differential levels of spoilers (some viewers just know too much lore bcz there IS too much lore, just insanely detailed, closely written crabbed lore; others are coming in semi-cold and just constantly assuming oh this must all be in the silmarillion no matter how often they're told that none of it can be from the silmarillion; and still others are arriving knowing nothing at all) and the origins-backstory problem (which is a general IP plague these days and not a videogames-derived flaw)

anyway faced with this they fucked up a LOT getting us from point zero to ducks-in-a-row at series end -- i think by triangulating hurried between the differentials -- and that included converting several promising in-medias-res set-ups into a generalised viewer anxiety abt Who Someone Is and what The Lore™️ will be that explains their motivations… give us their motivation scene by scene ffs, it doesn't matter who they "are" outside the show.

nori is fine, leave her alone (she's stuck with a poorly rendered and cliched society but luckily she just walked away from it! of course she shd have done this in e2 as is canon)

in conclusion: the lore is the problem, time to fuck sauron

is there a broader point about this series that rubbish is ok and it's ok to be rubbish?

yes but it applies to the whole of tolkien :D

ivnetions i forgot: "im istari but i have -- AMNESIA!"

potentially also a terrific plot-point tho i think v hard to develop effectively via tumbling among the harfoots (whose internal culture hits none of the right plot points really)

the harfoots shd have been less fake-racist-irish and more like a clan of cheekily elusive bugs bunnies SITO

xp yes, reasonable

It is trying desperately to do a Mulder & Scully-style "will they, won't they" scenario.

I'm not sure this works - they seem very fond of each other by the start of the episode, much screentime is spent on why both elves and humans think that theirs would be a doomed relationship, and they're holding hands by the end of it.

i thought they were both just super-boring characters: arondir totally has aragorn disease, bronwen is just a gesture at a role with a simplistic narrative purpose

Oh yeah absolutely! The only saving twist is he's actually a Vulcan.

Huh, I thought "not all who wander are lost" was a LotR thing originally, and made its way from there to memehood. But if Ned hasn't corrected it, then I guess it must not be.

No you’re right on that one, I guess just taking the inspirational poster line from LOTR and sticking it in a new cloying harfoot song was just particularly eye rolling to me.

It's from a poem Bilbo wrote about Aragorn isn't it?

maybe bilbo copied it from the LORE

mark s is right: Very Much In Character for Bilbo to find a cute little half-remembered scrap of something in an old book (or a folk song heard by a busker at the Hobbiton Farmer's Market) and pass it off as his own. Sly laziness is kinda his jam. He will cheat, lie, steal, and dissemble and then play it off with a goofy "who, me?" look.

i mean he totally stole that dude's ring

while employed as a BURGLAR

I hasten to note that I'm not necessarily dissing Bilbz. He's a fun character and sometimes even admirable - but it is fair to say that he's modeled on tricksy Odysseus.

But it's not just the ring; he cheats at riddles and he lies to a dragon and lies to a wizard and to all of his friends and stages an elaborate vanishing act and and and. We can like him without trusting him.

As the writer of his own saga, he has every reason to make himself look good and take the credit. Which he very much does. I don't have enough biohazard gear to wade into Hobbit fanfic, but I hope someone has Rashomoned the story from the perspective of, say, Gimli.

(Long way of saying, yeah, he totally stole that line from an old Harfoot walking song, and basked in the admiration he got for it.)

#ISTANDWITHLOBELIA

lolz

Woolfian lolz

I wake up to all this. (And yes, “Not all who wander” is from Tolkien; “always follow your nose” is from Jackson, and much of this series is from hell.)

is this anything: SHELOBELIA

Hell of a slashfic

Props to SHELOBELIA

But what about

SHELOBELIARAGORN

Or

BOMBABILBO

Sauron Jeremy

Son of Groin

i'm angry because danny devito should be sauron

on the whole i'm really hesitant to argue that oh, the terrible dialogue, here-and-gone narrative turns, and piously boring characters are all just a product of video game culture (tho i'm seeing various otherwise perfectly smart ppl who play a lot of videogames apparently enjoying this: or shall we say giving it a lot more leeway than we are here): and much more inclined to argue -- as above -- that the show-writers are faced with a near-insuperable problem of differential levels of spoilers (some viewers just know too much lore bcz there IS too much lore, just insanely detailed, closely written crabbed lore; others are coming in semi-cold and just constantly assuming oh this must all be in the silmarillion no matter how often they're told that none of it can be from the silmarillion; and still others are arriving knowing nothing at all) and the origins-backstory problem (which is a general IP plague these days and not a videogames-derived flaw)

It feels like a video game because as you describe, it is trying to address a lot of the same problems a (D&D RPG) video game has - those BioWare cRPGs from the 90s had the D&D license, and they were trying to write a compelling game that would satisfy both gamers who had spent their entire lives playing D&D and gamers who knew absolutely nothing about D&D at all except it might be fun to kill monsters with swords and fireballs. You also have the same tendency to spend big on graphics and skimp on paying writers, because visuals sell in a way good writing doesn't.

I think you also see viewer response shaped by having grown up playing video games these days. An essential problem in designing narratives for video games is that the player will always end up doing whatever the fuck they feel like doing. So those here-and-gone narrative turns are something players get used to - you'll have moments where you do what the designers expected you to and the writing clicks, but usually you end up piecing together your own narrative from what transpired from the choices you made. Like, I watch Rings of Power and think "this is terrible writing/plotting" but clearly a significant number of fans are taking this mess and shaping a narrative by filling in a lot of the gaps themselves. Same thing with the newer Star Wars movies. Their most fervent defenders end up doing a lot of heavy lifting to make sense of things that the creators didn't intend. That's par for the course when you're playing computer/console RPGs.

Fwiw I have apparently never played a video game (of the type under discussion).

Like, in the 1980s I played Pac-Man and Pong and Gorf and Galaga and Frogger and Tetris etc. In the 2010s I played Angry Birds and Plants vs. Zombies and Candy Crush.

Personally I skipped everything in between, and it is a whole world that I know nothing of, except for what I have observed and heard from people I know who do the gaming.

If that whole world is like these rather dreary plodding shows, with fake swords hitting fake armor over and over again, with temporary lulls to discuss a magic potion or amulet or whatever? Okay if that's what you're into but I don't think I can realte, at this point.

*relate

There's a difference between playing a video game and watching someone else play a video game--although my kids' generation is inexplicably interested in the latter.

If that whole world is like these rather dreary plodding shows, with fake swords hitting fake armor over and over again, with temporary lulls to discuss a magic potion or amulet or whatever? Okay if that's what you're into but I don't think I can realte, at this point.

That's the point, people who grew up playing those sorts of video games are both writing and reacting to a show like Rings of Power in a fundamentally different way... they're used to players/viewers doing some of the work of making sense of events. What is incoherent to a non-gamer will simply be the usual raw materials you're presented with in a video game to have fun with. As narratives, video game RPGs can be dreary and plodding, but that is missing the point - when the player controls the narrative, even dreary and plodding is a lot of fun. So they focus (consciously or not) on world-building.

if mck@y had posted in my CRPGs thread on the stylus staff board, this show would probably be better

F hazel, are you saying that folks like me are never going to grok these pieces of entertainment, because we are not the audience? Or rather that gamer folks will just process them differently and that's okay?

Nah, your critique is valid - TV as a medium is not video games, and the writing on this series just isn't very good. What I'm talking about is more of an explanation of how video games might affect how the creators approach the series/what they focus on and definitely how some viewers are so weirdly enthusiastic about a show that isn't even really on par with like Krull in terms of dialog and story.

To me, someone who has spent thousands of hours playing cRPGs and jRPGs, Rings of Power just feels like one of those games in so many ways. And it isn't just that the DNA of RPGs is Tolkien either. It's a resonance of structure, not content.

https://i.imgur.com/LzSiUqy.png

I just watched the first episode of House of the Dragon and the difference in quality is enormous. Even though it's very talky, there's no contest.

"i'm angry because danny devito should be sauron"

I get more a Radagast vibe

season 2: another man falls from the sky.
blue wizards: “sauron?”
radagast: “nope”

i want to know more abt the 3 blue wizard-witches -- are they gone for good or is literally everyone in the elf show immune to fire lol?

internet chat (apparently citing the credits for the final ep) (no i will never check) -- is referring to them as "The Ascetic", "The Nomad" and "The Dweller" (great work getting a dweller and a nomad to work in a team i guess)

also i see we're being what-colour-is-the-dressed abt their garb: no they are not wearing white #ffs

I will never not think of them as Zod, Ursa, and Non. Sorry not sorry.

https://i.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/newsfeed/001/353/199/3c5.png

Ascetic and Nomad are from the closed captions - Ascetic has the wimple, Nomad the helmet, Dweller I guess is the non-speaking shapeshifter

they're used to players/viewers doing some of the work of making sense of events.

This is definitely a thing, but I'd struggle to describe it as a gamer thing rather than a general modern fan thing, where everything now has its own wiki site?

Elrond and Durin laffin it up over beers - this is what Tolkien wanted

Strong Enya vibes at Numenor

So....we had thoughts. We SURE had thoughts.

https://www.megaphonic.fm/bythebywater/44

This is definitely a thing, but I'd struggle to describe it as a gamer thing rather than a general modern fan thing, where everything now has its own wiki site?

I'd say that sort of fandom is the result of growing up playing video games, although you could make a case for the Internet also affecting how these shows are consumed. Like, at some point the show itself becomes less than 50% of the phenomenon, and the majority of fan interaction with a franchise happens online. Whereas in the 80s, you watch a show and you can maybe tape it and watch it again and then talk about it with your friends who are interested. It's hard to see how eventually this wouldn't affect how shows are produced, where you begin to focus on creating stubs for this sort of activity to hang off of instead of a fully-developed story that can stand alone.