The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power series

pil galad

the question on everyone's minds: where is cirdan?

gimme cirdan. i want cirdan.

computer art provides the answer! (DALL-E doesn't appear to recognise the name círdan)

https://i.imgur.com/1YZOQjP.png

longish read but a really good primer on all things Galadriel: https://www.tor.com/2022/08/31/where-in-the-world-is-galadriel-in-the-second-age-and-for-that-matter-where-is-celeborn/

especially how her story differs between LOTR / Silmarillion etc and how this might affect her storyline on the show considering what they can use and what they can’t

3rd episode and....boy did I guess Halbrand, that's for sure.

Again, some solid moments and some other things that are just what-in-the-hell, and the overall 'here is the obvious arc of things' is not as engaging as they hoped.

time for the elf show!

good to know that orcs remain stoutly cockney (evil)

galardiel setting to sea in her nightie is a move

Was kind of a dull episode. I’m still enjoying it, I guess.

neither master nor commander

hoping we get to sail on the sea of núrnen as it seems to be nearby right now

That would be nice, now that you mention it.

terrible picture of elrond in the library (numenor art is worse than elf art)

My cohost Jared was VERY nonplussed about that art.

i know this is just bcz it's how my dad said it when he read me the hobbit 50+ years ago but it shd be warg to rhyme with war not warg to rhyme with car :(

agreed, even though the second pronunciation implies the potential existence of "wargio"

when i read the trilogy aloud to my kids i found myself apparently unable to settle on galADdriel or gaLADEdriel, a uncertainty that i will surely pass on to my kids, as i suspect it was passed on to me

gaLADriel bible

this is some cheesy shit

Yup

Looks great, though!

Everything in this, particularly the sound design and junior high dialogue, feels 110% like playing Baldur’s Gate

there is something deeply reassuring about the fact that even if you’re jeff bezos and even if you have an unlimited budget it’s very very hard to engineer a hit show

i mean you can market the hell out of it and get its initial numbers looking respectable but making a show that has a long tail, that is loved and returned to again and again - very difficult. there is an element of witchcraft involved

i said above that all the name characters except galadriel were insufferable (one of the choices i like): well galadriel was also being a spoiled PITA this ep so 👍🏽 🚀

loved the weird-shit harfoot ceremonies even tho the actual front-of-stage story and harfoot dialogue is still (and i suspect will remain) a bit will-this-do (i.e. doesn't advert to the ceremonies)

also making yung sauron a peaky blinders type lol: charming, lethal, capable sailor, knows which end of a mattock is which

the theory I saw that seems plausible is that the seafaring king isn’t Sauron, he’s the king that becomes the lord of the Nazgûl

holding out for yung ren the unclean (the only rpg nazgul name i can ever remember, for obvious reasons)

yung stimpy

yung ren the unclean's latest mixtape was decent

I like the idea that Halbrand is the future Witch-King. That could be a compelling arc. Even though I don't like his character, he seems to be one of the only ones who is written to *show* you who he is, rather than telling you. This show would be 10% better without all the "let me tell you what kind of person I am" dialogue.

Also, I like that it turns out the Númenoreans seem to be mostly ordinary folks, rather than a race of supermen, as the lore seems to indicate.

Halbrand as Witchking is an interesting idea but the demi-meet cute deal with Galadriel unfolding is a clunker.

TBF Numenorean armies rather than everyone in general are the ones seen as most supermen like, and Tolkien's sounding out of a continual resistance/rejection of that approach in the society is one of his best choices. (Highly recommend "Aldarion and Erendis" if you've not read it; they don't have the rights for adaptation but honestly it's the story I'd love to see someone finally do at some point.)

show title shd have been ringwraiths assemble tbrr

A maverick elf who drives her bosses crazy but gets results (not yet but at some point)

— Fleetwood MacRib (@JimHenleyMusic) September 10, 2022

I'm liking that the king of the southfolk is in fact from Manchester.

They should've cast Wayne Knight as the king of Númenor. Missed opportunity.

Serious question: given the money Amazon is willing to heave around, why DON’T they have the rights to the Silmarillion?

negotiations with the family became quite frosty after hobbit 2 dropped

https://imgflip.com/i/6sznbv

2 hobbit 2 quit

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

MC Harfoot

Serious question: given the money Amazon is willing to heave around, why DON’T they have the rights to the Silmarillion?

Whatever else is going on, the Tolkien estate has proven canny about how they manage what they have. Essentially they were able to lock in that $250 million for themselves on a hell of a technicality: there was a carveout in the original film rights deal back in the late 60s or so for TV in a specific capacity when it came to LOTR material, which at the time seemed unlikely to ever be realized for any number of reasons. The estate and Amazon negotiated around that -- without having to give up or sell the rights to anything else, which is why the opening credits specify clearly it's LOTR and the appendices they're drawing from -- and got that huge chunk of change, at a time when streaming money and budgets were always looking like they'd continually explode through the roof in turn. Theoretically they could have offered up Silmarillion etc. directly as well but given the money just for that carveout rights deal alone the estate would probably be thinking "Yeah how many billions are you willing to spend?" Which, frankly, fair play to them! Soak Amazon for all its worth; my guess is even Bezos would baulk at some point back then, and of course it's possible the estate just aren't interested no matter what. Christopher was still alive at the time and was pretty clear about where he stood on adaptations in general but as I noted when I started the thread, he stepped down from active management of the estate around the same time the deal was announced; in retrospect he possibly wanted to make sure that what Amazon got was all it ever did.

Aha, thank you, Ned. That makes a lot of sense. Though in some ways you’d think if there were going to be adaptations, they’d like them to be faithful ones. But on the other hand, fuck Amazon.

And the latest episode…man I’m watching with bemused fascination more than anything else now.

Dwarves way cooler in this than in the Peter Jackson films

true but until their plan proves against all odds to be a success also the actual group of dwarves in the hobbit are considered massive losers and weirdos by dwarf society at large (which is why thorin can only gather 13 of them and has to resort to making plans with a wizard and hiring a hobbit)

a joke the films are clearly running with (bcz it suits PJ's animator history and sensibility) is that they've basically run away to join the circus: they are not an army but a troupe, and tbf circus behaviour and skills is how they eventually win out