Le Cygne

Oh this is making me so happy!

I saw this on wiki but am not sure where the date came from: The first season of the series will have six episodes to be released on HBO and Max on June 15, 2025. (the footnote articles just say sometime or late 2025)

Good point! It was kind of like a game of musical rings. Maybe a show titled rings of power could spend some more time on the why, what, where questions! Indeed! What they haven't really answered is what's it like to be an elf? This is a very important elf marriage, so the audience really needs to see it. The rings, as well as marriage, which is a key theme, are tied to what it's all about, death and immortality. Like Arwen's choice to marry a mortal. Here's Tolkien on LOTR (and this is all about LOTR/appendices, like the show): Power-seeking is only the motive-power that sets events going, and is relatively unimportant, I think. It is mainly concerned with Death, and Immortality; and the 'escapes': serial longevity, and hoarding memory... I am only concerned with Death as part of the nature, physical and spiritual, of Man, and with Hope without guarantees. That is why I regard the tale of Arwen and Aragorn as the most important of the Appendices.

The S2 one just dropped. Barely an inconvenience! And the S1 one:

Good example! He was second to a sea monster, too. Family matters in Tolkien, but it's woven into the fabric of the story. Devotion, to family, to friends, to the natural world, is everywhere. On RoP, it's just tacked onto a meaningless soap opera plot.

Yes! And it is possible to retain this this appeal of classic works about ancient worlds in adaptations. Some adaptations retain enough of the source values to make it watchable (although the flaws are apparent and observed), and some hardly at all (like Rings of Power, where the result is an empty shell). And then there are the great adaptations, that capture the magic that readers have always loved. The RoP showrunners lacked the skills to do a passable job of adapting a story of long ago without turning it into an empty shell, and that's largely why they lost much of their audience and have received so much criticism. It is, as that person in the video said, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. Also, the test of time is, in a few months, RoP will be mostly forgotten (it would have been already but for all the interesting conversations about what went wrong), but Tolkien's masterpiece will be loved by generation after generation. So it turns out the sensibilities of his works are, indeed, an asset.

Indeed, it's got a category of its own in award shows for a reason. Music, costumes, makeup, set design, these are all part of telling a story in a visual medium.

I agree with what everyone said. I was thinking about this, what if we had movies with really wonderful, faithful writing, would that make it better? The thing is, the only ending I really want is the one that GRRM writes when he gets to the end of writing the last book, and that's something even he says he won't know entirely until he does. How can anyone else set up movies properly without knowing the importance of what's to come, something that even GRRM, with his gardening ways, may not yet have articulated, but knows deep inside? So like you all, I don't want this.

Good one! I like that he explored the context of Tolkien's stories. One good thing to come of this show, finding all of the good Tolkien podcasts/channels out there! Oh, he sums it up nicely here, middle earth is not the modern world: We even get origin stories of stuff we didn't need, something that kills the mystery, and also takes out the divine element... The show is filled with modern ideas... That is exactly why Rings of Power fails... They try to update and change his work, which results in a soulless product full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.

Yeah, exactly. There's no way, without a brain transplant, this could be the same person. The people at the video above were funny but right when they said nobody on the show likes her! How could she be a leader? She has none of these qualities she had in the source material. Also another thought, something they could have done: Eventually she takes Nenya to Lothlorien, where one day she will be called Lady of the Golden Wood! They could have played up her love of trees, and hinted at living there one day with the woodland elves. Something to give her a more rounded personality and to set up her story, to make us love her. And this would have been easier to do if they had someone who loved her by her side, Celeborn.

This is a good video, they were really trying to like the series, then just gave up. Anyway about 28:00 they talk about Elendil, and that was another wasted opportunity. I actually like the actor who plays him and he could have played him well, but they gave him nothing. This is someone Aragorn was inspired by, there could have been so much done here, they might have actually fed into LOTR, like a prequel should, instead of just mindlessly copying a sword scene that as these guys say, was not earned at all. Anyway just seems like such a waste.

Interesting! It's the opposite of Tolkien. Tom is a grouch instead of jolly, and living in the scrubby desert instead of in the lush forest with the river daughter. The three rings are created first instead of last (before the one). We could guess it was they just want to do the opposite of the books, but... They also do the opposite with their made up stuff. They present one thing, then go in the opposite direction, with no explanation at all. I think it's like you said, just randomly placing characters as they see fit, at any given time.

So many easy to fix things that would have made the characters more appealing, and they were largely not likable characters, so they needed all the help they could get. They don't look or act like elves, or Numenorians, or much of anything Tolkien. And just basic rules of storytelling, you don't want to diminish characters like they did. The goo scene alone, it's hard to think of Sauron as this powerful mysterious villain after seeing him as an icky blob of slime flip flopping down a hill. Isildur is some creep who bizarrely makes out with a random girl from Mordor who stabbed him, then tries to run off with her right in front of her husband. Galadriel behaves like a petulant human teenager who was asked to the prom by Sauron and kissed by Elrond, but not her husband, for no reason at all. And Gandalf was just some clueless moron for most of the series.

Ha ha ha! That's next! All the guys are so disappointing. How you style a character is an essential part of the story in a visual medium. Why do they get something so simple so wrong? This isn't rocket science. (Not quite the Gil-galad we got... or the Celeborn...)

Groping! Laid bare! There was also a teenage boy vibe to the writing of this nonsense. This sounds like they ripped it off from a bad pop song: "If I could just hold onto that feeling." "I felt it, too." And then the gleeful plotting to get Elrond to kiss Galadriel! They must have high fived each other. She gets caught, she gets released, nothing happens but that stupid juvenile kiss. Also the remembrance of Celeborn was silly, too. "We met in a glade of flowers... His armor didn't fit properly, I called him a silver clam." That's million dollar writing right there. Ha ha ha good comments for that video: We’re to believe that elves didn’t prepare armour that fit them? Elves who seem to have great capability of reforging a sword couldn’t fit armour for a literal prince? "I used to have a husband, he looked like a silver clam in armor, lol. Anyway, ya know who is really hawt? Sauron. I've been chasing after that bad boy for centuries." Knowing she fell in love at First sight with him, why only mention him there ??? And make her look like an unmarried woman for 7 whole episodes Oh my God...This is such a travesty on just about every level....Bad writing, bad acting, no context, no subtext, just a complete destruction of Tolkien's work... She spends so much time searching for her bro and whining about how much she loved him and how much she wants vengeance, and only just now mentions she was married to a dude who went MIA.

Why not just get someone who looks and acts like Hugo Weaving, I mean, we all loved him, and he is supposed to be the same character. At least give him the same hair, for goodness sake. Why was it so hard for them to copy success? We know they liked to copy LOTR, they sure did it enough out of context. I guess it was too much to consider doing it when it mattered.

Agree. I think Galadriel was badly miscast, they were all big misses to me, too. Galadriel was the nearly the oldest character on the show and acted like a human teenager, sassing and sulking and making faces. There's a certain grace an elf is born with that was just not there. In the LOTR commentary, Orlando Bloom said he worked really hard to capture the way elves carried themselves in the books. And he said when Cate Blanchett arrived on set, she nailed it right away. And the styling didn't help. Elrond and Celebrimbor's bouffant hairdos and Gil-galad's missing sideburns made them look goofy, like oddballs who didn't even know how to groom themselves properly. It was just all wrong, at no point did I think they were elves. And I didn't like any of them.

Ha ha ha, Celebrimbor was very hobbity! The casting of the elves should have been completely scrapped and done over to get it right. Here's the love story of Galadriel and ole what's his name (and there was plenty in the available LOTR and appendices to tell the story): Poor Celeborn. And Celebrian! Funny comments: "yeah, whats-his-name is probably dead, or whatever." --RoP Galadriel Amazon: He's dead. Nah, he's definitely just some rando who disappeared so that Amazon could ship Galadriel and Sauron. Wait where does the Sauron and Galadriel love story factor in?

I was watching this (I stopped at the part where they talk about elves) and if only the RoP showrunners had taken the same care with their portrayal of elves. On RoP, elves are a hodgepodge of humans instead of the very special beings they are in Tolkien, and it is scaffolding that's missing from RoP, and without it (among other supportive things), it crumbles.

Well, my annual LOTR watch and I've reached The Two Towers, and once again it bugs me! that they used Eowyn to build up Aragorn in the story, and yet didn't allow less than a minute! for the resolution of her own story, along with Faramir's, in the theatrical version. How strange it must be for people who only watch the theatrical to suddenly see Eowyn happily standing with Faramir in the end... so Jackson skipped how that came about, and yet had time for endless closeups of orcs? And the fanfic-y made up bits with Aragorn? Well, just had to say that again. Also here's the extended scenes, and look who shows up a lot, Faramir and Eowyn. The scene that would have showed their story resolution was 51 seconds! Come on, Jackson, you could have found 51 seconds. It's a lovely scene, that says so much. https://screenrant.com/lord-rings-extended-editions-all-extra-scenes/

This has been a good listen, the part about Tom is really funny (I stopped the video there): "Tom Bombadil represents such an important aspect to Tolkien and his story, he is the explanation of the the greater world outside of conflict... he enjoys his life, he enjoys his work, it's peaceful, it's without strife, and that's what everyone wants to get to, and in order to do that they have to deal with all the problems in their life, they have to deal with the Saurons and all that. This Tom Bombadil is nobody, he's literally just a dude mumbling in his hut in the middle of nowhere, there's no river, there's no Goldberry, and then they have the audacity, the sheer gall to slap you in the face with it at the end of the episode and have them singing the Tom Bombadil song... and it's like, you have none of these things, you're just a dude, get off my screen!" Adding more good points, just finished listening: Isildur: If they wanted to make this look like a forbidden romance, how about we show Isildur feeling literally any guilt at all. Sauron: What RoP is telling us is in order to be the dark lord of evil, you don't need to be evil as much as you just need to be lucky. Galadriel: You can mess with stuff, but what you can't really do is just destroy the intent, destroy the theme. If you go back to change the story because you can, but then the things that happened later no longer make sense, it's not just like a level of vagueness, it's not even just like a historical, oh we have contradicting sources, it's like we have a complete divulsion from what is established. Galadriel is the easiest character to point this out with, Galadriel was a well-respected character before she showed up in Middle Earth, but in the show she is not respected by anybody, her husband is absent presumed dead, her child absent, and we kind of needed her. Her whole life is completely different from the one that we were exposed to.

Enjoy Tolkien wishing he could talk to trees and having fun watching fireworks: All my works are full of trees... I should have liked to make contact with a tree and find out how it feels about things!

This is hilarious, another one where the LOTR gang watches watch RoP: Gandalf: So then, what this prologue is telling us is basically that Sauron was a loser Elrond: I always was under the impression he was an all mighty, terrifying force, who commanded nothing but terror from his minions Gandalf: Turns out he was an uncharismatic pretty boy who got murdered by his own hand

Good point, the movies have very wide popular appeal, even the people who aren't Tolkien fans or settle for less, so many love them, and have loved them for many years. When they had Tom (badly) reuse Gandalf's lines to Frodo about destiny, the payoff of the story, Gandalf making his decision, giving weight to what Tom said, was left out! In the movie, there were multiple scenes that led to Frodo's decision, and then they showed him remembering what Gandalf said, and this gave him the courage to go on. This is basic storytelling. There are lots of problems with the show, but it boils down to, they just aren't good storytellers. Many more love the movies because they told the story well. (Just noticed this again on a rewatch of Fellowship)

Another good one, for those who are not watching, to see what we were talking about with the misappropriated lines: