Jump to content

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


Ser Drewy

Recommended Posts

I can see how some would like the show, it isn't bad enough for me to hate it, but just based on the illogical storylines, it can't really be called 'good'.

The Sauron actor to me lacks sufficient charisma.  He needs to be someone who you would understand how people, even very wise people,  fall under his spell.  I don't see that.  Maybe he will show something new next season.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Correct me if I'm wrong here, but not even Tolkien could make up his mind about a whole bunch of stuff in the world he created.  

So criticizing writers for, amongst other things, daring to change stuff, whilst uttering phrases such as 'contrary to Tolkien at ever turn,' seems a tad unfair.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

48 minutes ago, LynnS said:

The Galadriel of the first and second age is not the same Galadriel we know from the third age.  I don't expect her to arrive at a place of wisdom without some struggle. 

Second age Galadriel being different from late third age Galadriel is not the problem. The problem is that the Galadriel we see in the show does not act as someone who is around 5,000 years old. Even if you dismiss the fact that already in the first age, Galadriel was renowned for her wisdom. She just acts as an immature teenager.

Even worse than that, she is also treated by the other elves as an immature teenager. Gil-galad, her grand-nephew, should defer to her.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Making Galadriel know who Sauron is and say nothing to anyone is more than 'daring to change stuff' it is gutting her entire character, which is an odd choice since she seems to be the closest thing to a star of the show.  Even if I hand waived away how unlikable, immature and rude they've made her, there is no getting around that Galadriel at the end of the season is a traitorous POS.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Basically, she was someone everyone could have rallied around, like they did with Aragorn.

(In the LOTR movies, Aragorn and many of the others were cool from the start, and it could have been the same for Galadriel. A brat who one day acts her age is not a character arc.)

Link to comment
Share on other sites

On the macro level the “changes” seem interesting to me. Unless I’ve misunderstood something they have Sauron as genuinely repentant, trying to escape the draws of power and then Galadriel of all people tempts him back in. On a micro level though, yeah, it’s a bit of a mess

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Just now, Spockydog said:

Correct me if I'm wrong here, but not even Tolkien could make up his mind about a whole bunch of stuff in the world he created.  

So criticizing writers for, amongst other things, daring to change stuff, whilst uttering phrases such as 'contrary to Tolkien at ever turn,' seems a tad unfair.

This is my impression too. Granted it's been many years since I've read Unfinished Tales and the History of Middle Earth series of books, but from my memory, the Second Age in particular is pretty hazy in Tolkien's writings, with not a lot of consistency. Which is one of the things that would make it appealing to writers. 

In terms of whether this "feels like Tolkien, I think that's ultimately subjective. To me, the dwarves, the orcs, the harfoots, the set design, etc... feel a lot like Tolkien. Even Arondyr, despite being a pretty boring and clunky character, feels like Tolkien to me. Other things don't, but hey, lots in the original Jackson movies don't feel like Tolkien to me- but that doesn't necessarily mean they're bad choices for their medium. The Jackson movies are great.

I did like what they did overall with Galadriel- I think it's important that she have a character arc over the course of the show. And I like that she's arrogant and singleminded. But I agree that at times the portrayal veered to close to teenage petulance, especially when she was in Numenor. Her decision to not tell the others about Sauron also needed more development.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

45 minutes ago, Spockydog said:

Correct me if I'm wrong here, but not even Tolkien could make up his mind about a whole bunch of stuff in the world he created.  

So criticizing writers for, amongst other things, daring to change stuff, whilst uttering phrases such as 'contrary to Tolkien at ever turn,' seems a tad unfair.

Considering that that it lines up with none of Tolkien's ideas, no, it's not unfair.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

56 minutes ago, Le Cygne said:

I tried so hard to love this show. I watched every episode twice. I enjoyed the pretty pictures. I put the soundtrack CD in my Amazon cart. I developed favorites (the Stranger and Nori). I even saved a shipping bag from Amazon with Rings of Power on it as a souvenir! I tried so hard to love it. Overlooking the bad, celebrating the good.

And then came the finale. And it was a cringefest, even apart from the fact that it was contrary to Tolkien at every turn.

LOL!  I tried so hard to love The Wheel of Time books and I just couldn't.  But I love, love, love the show.  Maybe I should give the books another go.  Things are never the way we imagine them in our own mind's eye.  Trollocs are my idea of what orcs should be like.  They scare the hell out of me.  Adar's children feel like they belong to the guild of Igors instead the menacing white orcs of the last alliance of men and elves.   And that guy in the Witcher... the white wolf - that's what elves should look like.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

38 minutes ago, The hairy bear said:

Second age Galadriel being different from late third age Galadriel is not the problem. The problem is that the Galadriel we see in the show does not act as someone who is around 5,000 years old. Even if you dismiss the fact that already in the first age, Galadriel was renowned for her wisdom. She just acts as an immature teenager.

Even worse than that, she is also treated by the other elves as an immature teenager. Gil-galad, her grand-nephew, should defer to her.

Not only doesn't Galadriel act her age, she also doesn't act like an Elf.

I've read praises by people here about her 'character development' when the very nature of her character should be that due to being an Elf she wouldn't even remotely having the same kind of issues a mortal woman might have. Galadriel wouldn't struggle with the issues she has in this manner, nor would she likely have such issues in the first place. She would also not be able to offer much or any meaningful advice to short-lived mortals

In that sense the writing there is disrespectful to the original character in more than one way.

The same is also true for 'Sauron'. Writing him as a character who is apparently running away from his destiny/ambition to rule all of Middle-earth, needing Galadriel's encouragement to rediscover his, well, 'inner Dark Lord' also feels like utter nonsense. That also humanizes an angelic being, turning it into, well, somebody like an industrial heir struggling with the expectation his patriarch father put into him.

I also must say that Gil-galad is a complete letdown - aloof, arrogant, and authoritarian, when in fact everything we know about this guy is that he was a very good and deep and insightful character.

The Elves in general are just long-lived humans - whilst Jackson had the grace and the determination to try to capture their otherworldliness. And this worked pretty fine in the better written/directed scenes. In a sense all peoples are either bad clichés ('Hobbits', Dwarves) or stand-ins for humans.

The longevity of the Númenóreans which would set them apart from other men is neither mentioned nor played out.

Whilst there are no great and detailed stories to be found in the SA era ... there are still great and interesting themes to be found there, simply (but not only) on the basis of the differences between the various peoples and the nature of their lives and cultures. All that has been completely erased.

I'm still flabbergasted by how they rushed and ruined the making of the Rings. This was the plot that gave the show its name, the one plot they could stretch out over multiple seasons. And there were great ways to do it - create and show the reason that the Rings are supposed to accomplish (subtle introduction of the whole Fading thing as well as the rise of men), have them make their first attempts, indicate them getting more and more problematic notions once they realize what those Rings could also be used for, have Annatar - who should have been there - give the Rings new and secret qualities and abilities Celebrimbor and his colleagues had not been thinking about. Show how the Elven wearers of the Nine and the Seven get corrupted. Then have Annatar leave Eregion, perhaps because things came to blows between Celebrimbor and him, or because Gil-galad and Galadriel finally intervened.

Then go with the Three Rings plot, which would be Rings Celebrimbor created specifically to not include any of the flaws he detected in the others.

I mean, this kind of plot pretty much writes itself.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

9 hours ago, The Marquis de Leech said:

My full review of episode 8. It gets grumpier as time goes on.

Didn’t Celebrimbor have a thing for Galadriel… or was that another Elf who was bitter about Galadriel choosing Celeborn?  Why is there a giant lake in front of Ost-in-Edhil that never appears on any maps of Eriador?

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Just now, Ser Scot A Ellison said:

Didn’t Celebrimbor have a thing for Galadriel… or was that another Elf who was bitter about Galadriel choosing Celeborn?  Why is there a giant lake in front of Ost-in-Edhil that never appears on any maps of Eriador?

In one version of the SA events Celebrimbor did indeed have a thing for Galadriel, and his jealousy for her choosing Celeborn was part of the reason of their falling-out.

They could have included such a love triangle and possibly even Celebrimbor realizing that something was amiss with the Rings they created with Annatar's help (the Nine and Seven, or the sixteen original Rings of Power since it is very likely that Sauron only created 'the Nine 'and 'the Seven' by giving nine of the Rings he captured to Men whilst seven of those went to the Dwarves) once his jealousy and anger of Galadriel/Celeborn got worse and worse while wearing and using one or multiple of the Rings of Power, snapping out of 'ugly behavior mode' once somebody either convinced him to remove the Ring(s) or took them away from him.

I'm also thinking more and more that Celebrían being there and being the female part in the Galadriel-Elrond relationship would have been much better. To pretend that this Galadriel is going to be the mother of Elrond's wife is just odd as hell.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

On 10/13/2022 at 1:34 PM, The Bard of Banefort said:

And just to clarify, there are a lot of good mysteries out there—Arthur Conan Doyle, Agatha Christie, and J.K. Rowling all got famous for writing solid mysteries. But the mystery box seems to be more of a failed experiment.

The biggest problem with whodunnits is that characterization needs to be left obscure since delving into the motivations of any potential suspect would give away the answer. 

It is not so much that emotions can’t be ambiguous, but that they require in this case to be muddled with misdirection and false attributes. 

There is puzzle work involved, but not much in the way of emotional depth that can be tackled until the reveal. So if you leave the reveal for the end everything before it is just a hodgepodge of unfounded tension and surface level speculation. 

One of Christie’s best books from a narrative standpoint was The Hollow, but incidentally it was also her worst mystery since the culprit was made obvious giving the story room to explore the implications of the murder and not just The who, what, where, and when.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

1 hour ago, The hairy bear said:

Second age Galadriel being different from late third age Galadriel is not the problem. The problem is that the Galadriel we see in the show does not act as someone who is around 5,000 years old. Even if you dismiss the fact that already in the first age, Galadriel was renowned for her wisdom. She just acts as an immature teenager.

Even worse than that, she is also treated by the other elves as an immature teenager. Gil-galad, her grand-nephew, should defer to her.

What I hear you saying is that you don't like green eggs and ham. Maybe we are not supposed to like her.  :D  Just teasing of course.  I accept that you don't like it.  I'm not that attached to Galadriel to be frank.  I'm willing to see where they go with it.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

One line from the finale that I found odd was “heal or rule?” which was framed as negative. This is a land where everyone is ruled by some kind of monarch, to the point where one of the books/movies was called Return of the King. Galadriel’s determination to crown Halbrand only a few episodes earlier was portrayed as heroic. 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

About the show, the way Galadriel pushes Halbrand aside when learning of his identity kind of undermines episodes of friendship. 
 

On a personal note, I think they should have screwed with the canon and made Galadriel go off with Halbrand. She could turn away after a while but given her genocidal speech, maybe she might have been rethinking the concept of evil and felt more inclined to give Sauron a chance. 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

6 minutes ago, LynnS said:

What I hear you saying is that you don't like green eggs and ham. Maybe we are not supposed to like her.  :D  Just teasing of course.  I accept that you don't like it.  I'm not that attached to Galadriel to be frank.  I'm willing to see where they go with it.

For one who talks about massacring orcs she is kinda self-righteous. 

But actually, I think that was a point Martin was getting at in his critique of LotR that people don’t appreciate. 

Tolkien wrote an entire race of pure evil and yet claimed evil cannot create but corrupt what is already there. 

Which means the orcs should have a fundamentally good essence rather than saying they are the twisted monsters of Morgoth. 

Which to Martin’s point, if these living creatures are just evil, do you slaughter them all, and if so doesn’t that make you evil? 

I don’t think Tolkien knew what he was doing there, and he would never write a scene where Aragorn orders the remaining Orcs to be hunted down and executed, especially not right after the holocaust. 
 

And yet that is the only conceivable given how he wrote about the dark skinned orcs from the east.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

23 minutes ago, Lord Varys said:

I'm also thinking more and more that Celebrían being there and being the female part in the Galadriel-Elrond relationship would have been much better. To pretend that this Galadriel is going to be the mother of Elrond's wife is just odd as hell.

Are they giving Elrond a paternal role with Galadriel?  If so… that is really off.  Galadriel was born thousands of years before Elrond.  She was born thousands of before Gil-Galad for that matter.  

I’m not missing much… am I?

Link to comment
Share on other sites

2 minutes ago, butterweedstrover said:

For one who talks about massacring orcs she is kinda self-righteous. 

But actually, I think that was a point Martin was getting at in his critique of LotR that people don’t appreciate. 

Tolkien wrote an entire race of pure evil and yet claimed evil cannot create but corrupt what is already there. 

Which means the orcs should have a fundamentally good essence rather than saying they are the twisted monsters of Morgoth. 

Which to Martin’s point, if these living creatures are just evil, do you slaughter them all, and if so doesn’t that make you evil? 

I don’t think Tolkien knew what he was doing there, and he would never write a scene where Aragorn orders the remaining Orcs to be hunted down and executed, especially not right after the holocaust. 
 

And yet that is the only conceivable given how he wrote about the dark skinned orcs from the east.

I believe there is a letter from JRR Tolkien on this point that says Orcs could be redeemed.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Archived

This topic is now archived and is closed to further replies.

Guest
This topic is now closed to further replies.
×
×
  • Create New...