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[SPOILERS] Rings of Power: "I am Sauron" "I'm Sauron" "I'm Sauron!"


Ser Drewy

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At least this thread helps me understand why the reactions to the show are so different.

Someone like Caligula is watching something nonsensical like the The Hobbit or Merlin and, of course, if that is the expectation, RoP is probably perfectly serviceable.

I thought I'd watch an adaptation about the second age, which is pretty grim stuff all in all, so clearly I'll be disappointed by this fantasy light show that does not care about the source material at all.

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19 minutes ago, Le Cygne said:

I broke out laughing at sultry Sauron brooding on a hill in the end. After the series of tacky nonsense leading up to it, it was quite fitting.

He was better suited to show the way Sauron corrupted the men of the Southlands. What we saw was not Tolkien, and he was not Sauron.

That end scene is just another callback to Jackson's movies. Fellowship ends with Frodo and Sam climbing to the top of a hill in Emyn Muil and seeing Mordor in the distance with the fires of Mount Doom. 

Unless Sauron has regained his strength somehow, he might have a hard time challenging Adar who is worshipped now by his freedom loving Orcs. So Sauron ought to go to Pelargir and reclaim his kingship and build an army. Also make rings for Men and Dwarves to start corrupting them. Although, what will Galadriel do now? Logic dictates that she should go to the Southlanders, too, to reveal the deception, but will she? Considering how she acted now, I doubt it.

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12 minutes ago, Corvinus85 said:

Unless Sauron has regained his strength somehow, he might have a hard time challenging Adar who is worshipped now by his freedom loving Orcs. So Sauron ought to go to Pelargir and reclaim his kingship and build an army. Also make rings for Men and Dwarves to start corrupting them. Although, what will Galadriel do now? Logic dictates that she should go to the Southlanders, too, to reveal the deception, but will she? Considering how she acted now, I doubt it.

That Galadriel would keep Sauron's identity a secret is just so wrong, it's difficult to even type, but as you say considering how she acted... Logic is one thing, and this show is another.

That Galadriel would say to the Southlanders, "Hey y'all, here's your king!" and then not tell them "Nope, he's Sauron!" just to cover her own whoopsie renders her a villain.

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2 hours ago, Caligula_K3 said:

I don't have my Tolkien books with me. But here are just a few samples I found on the internet. I know we're all fantasy fans here, and so have an innately higher tolerance for cheese than the general population, but..."

Tolkien was emulating mythological prose with arch characters and storylines. And myth will sound “cheesy” to the modern reader with a lot of poems and ballads. Chest pumping lines and incessant introductions of peoples names, titles, glorious deeds and courage is a common thing in mythologies. So are overtly expressive phrases. After all, Tolkien was an Oxford professor and a philologist. I’m sure he could have written a non “cheesy” book if he wanted to. 

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6 minutes ago, Le Cygne said:

That Galadriel would keep Sauron's identity a secret is just so wrong, it's difficult to even type, but as you say considering how she acted... Logic is one thing, and this show is another.

That Galadriel would say to the Southlanders, "Hey y'all, here's your king!" and then not tell them "Nope, he's Sauron!" just to cover her own whoopsie renders her a villain.

This version of Galadriel should just give up and go to Valinor. It would be better for middle earth.  

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30 minutes ago, The Bard of Banefort said:

I’m guessing we’ll probably see multiple different Saurons next season. The main one we’re familiar with, but probably also other disguises. I’m curious if he’ll resume his role as King Halbrand of the Southlands and try to corrupt the Southlanders that way, rather than declaring himself as Lord Sauron. It would seem likely, since the writers have decided to have Galadriel keep his identity a secret.

Oh I hope not.  But, the Southlanders are stupid enough to follow Sauron, since they declared him King when the line of kings was broken 1000 years earlier but I guess they don't know their own history.

It will be interesting how they get around Galadriel betraying everyone and everything she supposedly holds dear by not bothering to mention that she found Sauron and the rings of power were his idea.  Cough cough.

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2 hours ago, Caligula_K3 said:

I don't have my Tolkien books with me. But here are just a few samples I found on the internet. I know we're all fantasy fans here, and so have an innately higher tolerance for cheese than the general population, but..."

"I am Aragorn son of Arathorn, and am called Elessar the Elfstone, Dunadan. The heir of Isildur Elendil's son of Gondor. Here is the Sword that was Broken and is forged again! Will you aid me, or thwart me? Choose swiftly!”

"Hey dol! merry dol! ring a dong dillo! Ring a dong! hop along! fal lal the willow! Tom Bom, jolly Tom, Tom Bombadillo!"

"Whoa! Whoa! steady there! Now, my little fellows, where be you a-going to, puffing like a bellows? What’s the matter here then? Do you know who I am? I’m Tom Bombadil. Tell me what’s your trouble! Tom’s in a hurry now. Don’t you crush my lilies!"

Tolkien on love: "And Éowyn looked at Faramir long and steadily; and Faramir said: 'Do not scorn pity that is the gift of a gentle heart, Éowyn! But I do not offer you my pity. For you are a lady high and valiant and have yourself won renown that shall not be forgotten; and you are a lady beautiful, I deem, beyond even the words of the Elven-tongue to tell. And I love you. Once I pitied your sorrow. But now, were you sorrowless, without fear or any lack, were you the blissful Queen of Gondor, still I would love you. Éowyn, do you not love me?'  Then the heart of Éowyn changed, or else at last she understood it. And suddenly her winter passed, and the sun shone on her."

Look, I know Tom Bombadil is low-hanging fruit. But Bombadillo aside, Tolkien's dialogue is in general written in a very formal, ornate style, accompanied by many songs and poems. It's often beautiful. It often works. It's in conversation with medieval epics. Many have imitated it and nearly all have failed. But by the sensibilities of his age and ours, yeah, I'd argue there's a hell of a lot of cheese in his works. This is one of the reasons many people I know have been unable to get into Tolkien, even though I constantly proselytize him. But maybe we just won't convince each other here. I just think that if you love Tolkien and can't stand any cheesiness in visual adaptations of him, you're bound to have a bad time.

Okay, cheesiness debate aside. Let's get back to Halbrand.

I really like the actor: I think he's worked well as a swashbuckling reluctant hero, as a trickster, and in that scene with Galadriel, as a dark lord. I also think it's to the show's credit that they aren't just presenting Sauron as pure evil. There is of course still ambiguity about whether or not Sauron really just wanted to heal middle earth, and that makes things more interesting. As I said in the last post, my only real problem is the pacing: his seduction of Celebrimbor just went way too fast. An extra episode with him and Galadriel in Eregion would have helped out here.

(Then again, in comparison to House of the Dragon, even the pacing in this last episode felt leisurely).

I also have a lot of trouble seeing how it doesn't make sense for him to be Sauron. Ever since he violently flipped out on some Numenorians in one of the early episodes, it has seemed very likely he's more than human. So much of his dialogue with Galadriel has had subtext about him embracing darkness (including her encouraging him to!). And then there were the Adar scenes in episode six, his obsession with forges, not to mention "King of the Southlands..." aka Mordor. This is a twist that's going to stand up very well to repeat viewings. And while it didn't take me by surprise, it did many of my friends, especially those who haven't read any Tolkien. So I give credit to the writers for this.

And sure, we don't know why he was on the raft, and we don't know what his exact motivations were and whether he was genuinely attempting to reform or settle down for a nice Numenorian retirement. If in two seasons, none of this has been explained, then y'all can justly complain. As it is, we're clearly going to learn a lot more about Sauron in season 2, including his exact backstory with Adar. But right now it feels like complaining because we still don't know who killed Jon Arryn by the end of the Game of Thrones book or season 1.

:mellow:
 

The dialog and story feel nothing like Tolkien.

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3 minutes ago, Cas Stark said:

Oh I hope not.  But, the Southlanders are stupid enough to follow Sauron, since they declared him King when the line of kings was broken 1000 years earlier but I guess they don't know their own history.

It will be interesting how they get around Galadriel betraying everyone and everything she supposedly holds dear by not bothering to mention that she found Sauron and the rings of power were his idea.  Cough cough.

In the first episode there's that kid that has an outburst at Arondir and says something like Just you wait, when our king returns. So there are people who believe that the king will return. But why? Is there a prophecy? We don't know, just another sort of callback to LOTR.

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28 minutes ago, Scott_N said:

At least this thread helps me understand why the reactions to the show are so different.

Someone like Caligula is watching something nonsensical like the The Hobbit or Merlin and, of course, if that is the expectation, RoP is probably perfectly serviceable.

I thought I'd watch an adaptation about the second age, which is pretty grim stuff all in all, so clearly I'll be disappointed by this fantasy light show that does not care about the source material at all.

Thanks for this really condescending post. I've never watched Merlin and didn't like The Hobbit movies, but I'm so glad you now understand that the reason some of us like the show is because we just like nonsensical schlocky shit. That must be it.

Also, read any interview with the showrunners. You may think they did a bad job with the show, but they are clearly huge Tolkien nerds and care about the source material. Frankly, it must really suck for them to have access to some source material but not other parts, like Annatar.

@teej6 that was exactly my point! I'm again not saying the cheesiness is bad. It's part of the effect of what Tolkien was going for. My whole point on this has been that it's part of the tone of Middle Earth, but it is a tone that's really hard to adapt given modern sensibilities.

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I like the way he wrote the Eowyn and Faramir romance, and I know I'm far from alone. It's very poetic, and there's a lot of depth in a small space, in the context of both of their stories. (This was shown nicely in the Houses of Healing scene in LOTR.) There are lots of wonderful moments like these between characters that tie into the overall story. Tolkien endures because of these moments, and it pays to capture them faithfully.

This show, sadly, talked the talk of appreciation, but didn't walk the walk.

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9 minutes ago, Caligula_K3 said:

Frankly, it must really suck for them to have access to some source material but not other parts, like Annatar.

Then why do a show about the Second Age? The Appendix is full of information about the Third Age, why not do a show about the Kings of Gondor or the Rohirrim? Why did they decide to limit themselves to two and a half pages?

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11 hours ago, Scott_N said:

I'm not sure it does imply that he didn't want to be another Morgoth/dark lord. Yes, he said he wanted to heal what had been destroyed but the motivation is two-fold: Firstly, the eternal jealously and resentment of Eru - neither Morgoth nor Sauron can create life, they can only degrade and mimic it. Secondly, through proposing to heal the world, gain by deceit (as he and his master have done so many times previously) and always with the obvious ambition of him ruling this new world single-handedly.

Just to be clear, Sauron was never obsessed or concerned with Melkor's beef with Eru. He did not want to create beings or worlds of his own, he just had a perverted sense of order, leading him down a path of perverted/twisted/evil dominion.

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I do not even understand how Tolkien's language is "cheesy". The dictionary definition is "cheap, unpleasant, insincere" or "shabby". Fine, Bombadil is an outlier, strange and different from everything else, but much of the rest of the language is patterned after Jacobean and even Anglo-Saxon predecessors. The scene where Háma, the doorward of Théoden King, questions the Walkers is almost word-for-word from Beowulf

5 minutes ago, farerb said:

The Appendix is full of information about the Third Age, why not do a show about the Kings of Gondor or the Rohirrim?

At least we have The War of the Rohirrim anime film...

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3 hours ago, Corvinus85 said:

I honestly believed that, too. She was acting weirdly around Celebrimbor and Elrond.

Yes, I thought that quite some people might have that impression.

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Yeah, I think Tolkein's use of language is beautiful, and wonderfully evokes the mythological feel that he was going for.

To me it's reminiscent of Thomas Mallory's Le Morte D'Arthur, and has the sense of a grand epic.

It's unorthodox to today's parlance, but I wouldn't call it cheesy (Tom Bombadil excepted). No more than I would call Shakespeare cheesy.

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29 minutes ago, Ran said:

I do not even understand how Tolkien's language is "cheesy". The dictionary definition is "cheap, unpleasant, insincere" or "shabby". Fine, Bombadil is an outlier, strange and different from everything else, but much of the rest of the language is patterned after Jacobean and even Anglo-Saxon predecessors.

Well, to clarify, it's not the language that bothers me.  But fair enough, cheesy is perhaps the wrong slang to use.  "Corny" works better - "mawkishly sentimental."

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33 minutes ago, Ran said:

I do not even understand how Tolkien's language is "cheesy". The dictionary definition is "cheap, unpleasant, insincere" or "shabby". Fine, Bombadil is an outlier, strange and different from everything else, but much of the rest of the language is patterned after Jacobean and even Anglo-Saxon predecessors. The scene where Háma, the doorward of Théoden King, questions the Walkers is almost word-for-word from Beowulf

At least we have The War of the Rohirrim anime film...

I think using the dictionary definition is a bit limiting. Most people use cheesy to mean something that’s a bit clumsy yet earnest. 

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1 hour ago, Scott_N said:

At least this thread helps me understand why the reactions to the show are so different.

Someone like Caligula is watching something nonsensical like the The Hobbit or Merlin and, of course, if that is the expectation, RoP is probably perfectly serviceable.

I thought I'd watch an adaptation about the second age, which is pretty grim stuff all in all, so clearly I'll be disappointed by this fantasy light show that does not care about the source material at all.

Comments like these are why people hate Tolkien stans.

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Just now, The Bard of Banefort said:

I think using the dictionary definition is a bit limiting. Most people use cheesy to mean something that’s a bit clumsy yet earnest. 

Perhaps, but I think "corny" is probably closer to that. I don't think it's corny either, but then I've read Milton for fun, so what do I know?

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