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Rings of Power: Three Threads for the Elven Lords (book spoilers)


Werthead

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36 minutes ago, ASOIAFrelatedusername said:

Honestly we should not even have the debate over who is or isn't Sauron (if the show is interested in actually adapting Tolkien). Annatar should show up in Eregion, seduce Celebrimbor (not like that) and clash with Galadriel. End of story, no hobbits, no Numenoreans (yet), no people on a raft in the middle of an occean. If people ignorant of the books get spoiled, so be it as to his true identity. The strength of your actors and writing should make up for a spoiled mystery.

People enjoy mysteries.  I’m enjoying basking in all the places and people in Middle-Earth and the charachters in this story.  Why do you want to hurry the story along so much?

 

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Time scale has always been odd. So Sauron makes the rings and crushes Eregion. Then Numenor shows up and his army gets wiped out. But then literally nothing happens for 1300+ years. There is no way it would take Sauron that long to rebuild his forces. I know they’d be loath to attack Numenorian enclaves to prompt another intervention from the island but they would have long since wiped out anyone else. Especially post 2000 when the numenorians turned from the Valar and the elves. He has the one ring and all so the elves can’t use their rings. 


No real reason that Lorien survived in the second age or Rivendell. It just all moves too slow to be realistic or compelling. First age has a much more logical timeline from when the Noldor arrive. I do wish they could have gotten those rights. But since they went with second it’s pretty clear they weren’t going to make a story time hopping centuries or millennia.

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Still wondering who the Stranger is (really cool idea, to make people wonder about this).

Not Sauron, no pointy ears. Not Saruman, he was pretty clueless about hobbits. Could be the blue wizards, which would be interesting, but... I guess I want it to be Gandalf.

Pro Gandalf, hobbits were his thing, as was fire. RoP got me wanting to see LOTR again, and I got to the part where Gandalf whispers to the flying insect to escape Saruman.

He doesn't do that in the books, the eagle comes to him "unlooked-for" so maybe they were copying Gandalf, to give people a clue, since they are matching visuals of the films.

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30 minutes ago, TheReal_Rebel said:

People enjoy mysteries.  I’m enjoying basking in all the places and people in Middle-Earth and the charachters in this story.  Why do you want to hurry the story along so much?

Because I want the story to actually flesh out what Tolkien wrote and not do filler as season 1 shapes up to be. It has nothing with "hurrying". If the story does not need 5 full seasons to be told, then so be it. I have no desire for more material that claims to be Middle-earth just for the sake of having it.

There was no need to tell the entirety of the 2nd Age in one single  series with 5 seasons, just as there was no need to have three Hobbit movies.

34 minutes ago, Arakasi said:

If you did the story as written well it would be one 8 episode miniseries with multiple time jumps over it. Wouldn’t be terribly compelling though.

Speak for yourself, although you could actually do more by fleshing out what is there (as opposed to what the show seems to be doing).

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1 hour ago, SeanF said:

Aragorn and Faramir don’t enjoy war, but they just accept it as a fact of life.  And, no one was in the mood to take prisoners at the Pelennor Fields.

I think that's why it was important that they both not be tempted by the ring, like in the books. They were the hope of the future of men (humans! but to use the LOTR venacular of men).

The Faramir and Ewoyn stories were resolved to "make a garden" together in the books, the metaphor for a family, the new line of humans. As were Aragorn and Arwen (the "tree grew and blossomed").

(That's also why it was important that Jackson show the Faramir and Ewoyn scenes, like in the houses of healing where they come to this realization and joining of stories.  He could have given us a couple less minutes of orcs to show that in the theatrical version.)

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50 minutes ago, Arakasi said:

If you did the story as written well it would be one 8 episode miniseries with multiple time jumps over it. Wouldn’t be terribly compelling though.

Any good scriptwriter could pick Tolkien and make a 2 seasons out of the mid-Second Age stuff. As said numerous times, show Numenor, show Eregion, show the Elves, show Annatar, show the forging of the rings, and end season 1 with Sauron forging the One on his own, and the Elves freaking out. Season 2 will be the war. That's 2 seasons with the exact same cast without any time jump. The tricky part would be to show how Numenor evolves over the next 1500 years.

If they're not even ending season 1 with the Rings, then they'll only be able to butcher it in the next 4 seasons, or will need more than that to come to the Last Alliance. You need at the very least 3 seasons to cover Ar-Pharazon and the War of the Last Alliance.

 

29 minutes ago, Arakasi said:

Time scale has always been odd. So Sauron makes the rings and crushes Eregion. Then Numenor shows up and his army gets wiped out. But then literally nothing happens for 1300+ years. There is no way it would take Sauron that long to rebuild his forces.

First age has a much more logical timeline from when the Noldor arrive. I do wish they could have gotten those rights. But since they went with second it’s pretty clear they weren’t going to make a story time hopping centuries or millennia.

Morgoth had millennia to develop his forces and breed bazillions of Orcs before the First Age even began. The bulk of Orcs were actually wiped out during the War of Wrath, and for centuries they were barely a threat anywhere in the Western half of the world - if not all of Arda. Basically no Orc in Mirkwood, no Orc in Misty Mountains. Only Orcs in the far East and a tiny few lost in the frozen North. It took many centuries to build back their numbers before they could become a threat once again - besides, Sauron was mostly acting undercover until he forged The One, so he had to be careful in building up Orc troops in the West of Middle-Earth. (when it comes to Orcs being nearly wiped out and ensuring peace for centuries, the same goes with the Third Age, the bulk of Sauron minions were killed during the War of the Last Alliance and the Siege)

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3 minutes ago, Le Cygne said:

I think that's why it was important that they both not be tempted by the ring, like in the books.

The problem is that in the books, there's a whole stream of characters who're either not tempted by the Ring or quickly reject its temptation. Tom Bombadil, Gandalf, Aragorn, Galadriel, Faramir, Sam, even Bilbo masters his desire for the Ring, with an effort, and he's had it in his possession for decades. Poor Boromir is just about the only character who is tempted by the Ring, apart from Denethor and I guess Saruman, but they never actually encounter it so that doesn't count.

Yes, there are individual reasons why all those characters reject the Ring. But it does tend to undermine the mystique of the lure of the Ring if everybody's like 'you carry on Frodo, doing a great job there'.

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Most of the listed people tell Frodo to carry on because they know that possessing the Ring for even a moment will cause them to be unwilling to give it up. So they can resist enough to know they want nothing to do with it, but if circumstances forced them to hold it... they'd never give it up.

Bilbo managing to possess it so long without being corrupted is extraordinary, and part of the reason he is honored by the Elves and permitted the grace of going to Valinor. Ditto Frodo and Sam. There's something about the hobbit spirit that makes them less likely to be corrupted, seemingly. The virtue of the rustics.

 

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But it’s not really realistic to take that long. Europe had multiple plagues that wiped out huge percentage of the population but kept growing bigger. Sure it can set you back a century or so but between Eregion and the War of the Last Alliance is 1600 years. With the improved breeding/fertility of orcs you don’t need anywhere close to that to rebuild the force he lost in 1700. I just find it hard to believe when the Numenoreans turned from the elves in the early 2000s why didn’t Sauron wipe out the small kingdoms that weren’t on the coast. The war in 1700 made clear that the intervention was the only thing that saved the elven kingdoms.

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8 minutes ago, mormont said:

The problem is that in the books, there's a whole stream of characters who're either not tempted by the Ring or quickly reject its temptation. Tom Bombadil, Gandalf, Aragorn, Galadriel, Faramir, Sam, even Bilbo masters his desire for the Ring, with an effort, and he's had it in his possession for decades. Poor Boromir is just about the only character who is tempted by the Ring, apart from Denethor and I guess Saruman, but they never actually encounter it so that doesn't count.

Yes, there are individual reasons why all those characters reject the Ring. But it does tend to undermine the mystique of the lure of the Ring if everybody's like 'you carry on Frodo, doing a great job there'.

The books were filled with people who were or would have been tempted. Tom, a wizard, elves, a few hobbits... those are exceptions to the wide world that would have been tempted.

There was a group put together for their special qualities that included resistance (aside from Boromir, but he had his purpose, too, to highlight the difference between him and his brother).

I think it was important that Aragorn and Faramir were not tempted, as in the books, since they were the hope of the future. It went with their arcs, which I thought were perfectly shown in the books.

Overall, I liked the movies, but this I didn't like. Oh, I also forgot to mention another thing, that Aragorn was inserted into Eowyn's killing of the witch king. I think Jackson overplayed the Aragorn is special thing.

Yes, he was special but... he was also a man. I like the way Tolkien spread that virtue out a bit more.

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23 minutes ago, Le Cygne said:

I think that's why it was important that they both not be tempted by the ring, like in the books. They were the hope of the future of men (humans! but to use the LOTR venacular of men).

The Faramir and Ewoyn stories were resolved to "make a garden" together in the books, the metaphor for a family, the new line of humans. As were Aragorn and Arwen (the "tree grew and blossomed").

(That's also why it was important that Jackson show the Faramir and Ewoyn scenes, like in the houses of healing where they come to this realization and joining of stories.  He could have given us a couple less minutes of orcs to show that in the theatrical version.)

Hey yes... It was a very nice scene that should have been in the theatrical version. 

Also miss Bombadil yeah. And Ghan Bhuri Ghan, I thought the interaction with the wildmen was particularly important in the story. They should have made like 6 LOTR movies for each of the books, and just one Hobbit. 

Then, a fantastical artistic interpretation of the Silmarillion which actually gives a very wide platform to showcase special effects at least, if not narration and storytelling. We could easily have gotten this very epic series with large scale battles, big time shifts, celestial events and interactions of beings of various power tiers... Instead we got an overproduced, very predictable GOT killer. 

It is almost as if GOT killed itself anticipating this would happen. 

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17 minutes ago, Ran said:

Most of the listed people tell Frodo to carry on because they know that possessing the Ring for even a moment will cause them to be unwilling to give it up.

Yeah I think this can eliminate Gandalf, Galadriel, and Aragorn.  And as mentioned Sam and Bilbo are intertwined with Frodo anyway.  So really we're just talking about Bombadil and Faramir.

7 minutes ago, polishgenius said:

To be fair, it's not really realistic for a despot to be destroyed and killed in a devastating war and then come back again hundreds of years later.

Hitler 2330 is gonna knock your socks off.

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6 hours ago, Veltigar said:

How do you explain the fact that he breaks the leg of that one Harfoot? 

Everything points to this guy being evil. Perhaps he's not Sauron, but he's definitely not one of the good guys I'd say.

He doesn't break that Harfoot's foot.  The scene of Elanor's dad's foot breaking is intercut with Elanor trying to help the Stranger to emphasize that Elanor wasn't around to help her dad, and he got hurt.  And while Gandalf's magic powers are never clearly well defined nothing in canon suggests he can break a random foot a mile away.  

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2 minutes ago, Gaston de Foix said:

And while Gandalf's magic powers are never clearly well defined nothing in canon suggests he can break a random foot a mile away.  

 

This is a somewhat circular response to a post suggesting it's unlikely to be Gandalf if he's breaking random people's feet. 

In any case I can't judge for myself till I see it myself but clearly the creators got something about that moment wrong if your take is what they intended, because multiple people are assuming he did break the guy's foot. 

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56 minutes ago, ASOIAFrelatedusername said:

Because I want the story to actually flesh out what Tolkien wrote and not do filler as season 1 shapes up to be. It has nothing with "hurrying". If the story does not need 5 full seasons to be told, then so be it. I have no desire for more material that claims to be Middle-earth just for the sake of having it.

There was no need to tell the entirety of the 2nd Age in one single  series with 5 seasons, just as there was no need to have three Hobbit movies.

 

Can you give me an example of what you mean by “fleshed out from what Tolkien wrote”?  Because as I see it, they are doing that.  They are limited by the fact of not being able to reference the Silmarillion or other Tolkien works.  Can you give me an example of another adapted series that did this well?

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This:

2 hours ago, Werthead said:

Chomsky was an infamous apologist for the Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia, going to quite extraordinary lengths to try to discredit eyewitness accounts from refugees of atrocities, and spent years arguing the death toll in Cambodia was exaggerated (if anything, it now appears to have been undercounted). He praised the Chinese and North Vietnamese Communist Parties even after it became public knowledge that both regimes had killed thousands during their rise to power, and more since. He was a Mao fanboy and only barely acknowledged the great Chinese famine that killed millions in the late 1950s when it came to light. He tried to justify the 9/11 attacks on the United States by al-Qaeda, and subsequent attacks on allied Western countries, and infamously claimed less people had died on 9/11 (2,977) than in the American missile attack on the Al-Shifa factory in Khartoum (1). He then tried to manufacture fake death figures by invoking Human Rights Watch to back up his claims, and they told him to fuck off.

Chomsky has also demanded that American military and civilian leaders face war crimes tribunals and potential execution for dropping the atomic bombs on Japan and bombing dams in North Korea, whilst also demanding the same for Israeli leaders engaged in military action against the Palestinians, but rejected the same for Pol Pot or Mao or anyone who, basically, isn't American or an American ally.

Is a textbook example of this:

5 hours ago, Rippounet said:

That is either a remarkably poor understanding of everything he has ever said or written or a very bad attempt at attacking an intellectual without using actual arguments.

1. Regarding the Atrocities under the Khmer Rouge, Chomsky and Herman were arguing that the death toll had been exaggerated and that some of the numbers used to arrive at the "2 million" number were actually attributable to the U.S. bombing campaign, which Chomsky also says are inflated. Arguing that the death toll is closer to a few hundred thousand than a few million doesn't even come close to making him "an apologist" for Pol Pot.

2. Regarding deaths under the Vietnamese communist party, Between their war of independence against the French and their war with the Americans, there were somewhere between 3.5-4.5 million dead Vietnamese and a comparable number of refugees. After effects linger to this day from chemical weapons. Laos is the most heavily bombed country in history and still incur dead/wounded to this day due to unexploded cluster bombs. Why did the bomb Laos? Who the hell knows. I'm not trying to absolve the Vietnamese; Civil wars are ugly and bloody and scores get settled one way or another. But let's put things into perspective.  

3. I'm going need to see some primary sources on the "Chinese communist party praise" and "Mao fanboy" stuff. 

4. Regarding the bombing of the pharmaceutical plant in Khartum, He wasn't the only one:

Quote

Germany's ambassador to Sudan at the time of the airstrike, Werner Daum, wrote an article in 2001, in which he called "several tens of thousands of deaths" of Sudanese civilians caused by a medicine shortage a "reasonable guess" but this claim was described as "hard to take seriously" and implausible by historian Keith Windschuttle.

Human Rights Watch reported that the bombing had the unintended effect of stopping relief efforts aimed at supplying food to areas of Sudan gripped by famine caused by that country's ongoing civil war. Many of these agencies had been wholly or partially manned by Americans who subsequently evacuated the country out of fear of retaliation. A letter by that agency to President Clinton stated "many relief efforts have been postponed indefinitely, including a crucial one run by the U.S.-based International Rescue Committee where more than fifty southerners are dying daily".

Chomsky's response to Human rights watch. Note the date. You think HRM was concerned about accuracy or just not rocking the boat regarding the Americans?

5. War crimes trials for dropping the bombs? Good idea. The bombings were likely unnecessary. Do the people responsible for the bombings of Hamburg and Dresden too while you're at it. 

 

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