[Spoilers]Rings of Power 3: Tolkien’s actual writing… who needs that?

[Ser Scot A Ellison]

26 minutes ago, Spockydog said:

No idea. I'll ask my brother. 

Anyway, it seems to me that superfans of books, any books, would be happier in life if they just ignored any TV or movie adaptations of the things they love. 

Because they are never going to meet expectations, and watching these terrible, terrible adaptations is just going to make them miserable and send them ranting to the internet. 

Personally, I never read WoT, loved the adaptation. Same with RoP. Same with Shadow and Bone. Same with HotD. Same with Warcraft.

Compressing events that take place over three millennia to a few months or years… is… a really poor adaptation?  Magic silver needed to heal Elves?  Really?

[Spockydog]

4 minutes ago, Heartofice said:

I've never read WoT, the Witcher books, Shadow and Bone, Fire & Blood or ever finished the Silmarillion, but I can still tell when something is objectively good or bad outside of that. I can judge RoP on what it does on screen, in IMO it falls down on most of the basics. 

You can't say it's objectively bad. Because not everyone shares that view.

 

[Heartofice]

2 minutes ago, Spockydog said:

You can't say it's objectively bad. Because not everyone shares that view.

 

I think there are elements of the show that are objectively bad yes. It's whether it bothers you or not that is the issue.

[Spockydog]

21 minutes ago, Ser Scot A Ellison said:

Compressing events that take place over three millennia to a few months or years… is… a really poor adaptation?  Magic silver needed to heal Elves?  Really?

As I said, perhaps you'll be happier if you just watch something else. It seems to me you've already decided that this show is trash. 

Having said that, I recognise that Season 1 isn't perfect. Far from it. But if they can fix some of the problems they certainly wouldn't be the first show to become much better after a dodgy first season. 

If I were you, I'd give it until midway through season 2. If you still hate it, bin it.

Life is too short to watch stuff you hate and then take to the internet to tell everyone, in great detail, precisely why you hate it.

See also: Telling people who like the things you hate that they are wrong. I mean, yesterday, I was going to post about how much I was looking forward to seeing Bombadil next season. But then I considered the probable response, and decided it wasn't worth opening this particular can of worms. 

[Ser Scot A Ellison]

4 minutes ago, Spockydog said:

See also: Telling people who like the things you hate that they are wrong. 

Well… my son comes by his habit of doing this… very honestly.  

[Spockydog]

2 minutes ago, Ser Scot A Ellison said:

Well… my son comes by his habit of doing this… very honestly.  

I don't know what that means. 

[Ser Scot A Ellison]

3 minutes ago, Spockydog said:

I don't know what that means. 

That this is a bad habit of mine.  I enjoy arguments.

[Spockydog]

Just now, Ser Scot A Ellison said:

That this is a bad habit of mine.  I enjoy arguments.

Me too, man. Me too. 

[HexMachina]

l didn't love the show but didn't dislike it strongly enough to give it too much thought or discuss in great detail. But the eruption and the number of survivors bothered me more than Galadriel swimming for days. Both were a bit stupid but I was able to just handwave away as I wasn't too invested one way or the other

[Myrddin]

Having not read the First or Second Age source materials beyond the high level timeline, I can't fault the writers for condensing events that take place across a few thousand years. Otherwise, you get a scene with Sauron starting to build Baradur (c. 1000). Then another scene that take place 500 years later where he tells Celebrimbor how to forge the Rings of Power five hundred years later. Then he sits back for another 100 years until he finishes building Baradur and also forges the One Ring. Ninety-three years later, war breaks out. Then a few thousand until the Fall of Numenor.

There's no dramatic tension with events so far apart, even when you take immortals into account. 

Now, this does not mean I think they've done a good job on the show at condensing the material into a cohesive narrative. Just that time and character/event compression it's necessary to build a narrative with any kind of tension. 

[Farerb]

House Of The Dragon wins Best Drama Series at the Golden Globes. Just a reminder that Rings of Power wasn't even nominated.

[felice]

3 hours ago, HelenaExMachina said:

But the eruption and the number of survivors bothered me more than Galadriel swimming for days.

I just assumed that they were far enough away from the eruption that it wasn't that deadly where they were. The heat and force must dissipate as the affected area grows exponentially as the radius expands...

3 hours ago, Myrddin said:

Having not read the First or Second Age source materials beyond the high level timeline, I can't fault the writers for condensing events that take place across a few thousand years. Otherwise, you get a scene with Sauron starting to build Baradur (c. 1000). Then another scene that take place 500 years later where he tells Celebrimbor how to forge the Rings of Power five hundred years later.

I would assume the big time skips would mostly be between episodes, not scenes. Maybe even between seasons. Adjusting the timeline to keep each group of humans around for one full season seems reasonable. But in almost any show we're only shown the important moments, with the vast majority of the time experienced by the characters skipped over. What's the difference between skipping half an hour of driving across town, a week of a starship monitoring a mysterious anomaly, or a century of elves getting better at making magic rings?

[Week]

On 1/9/2023 at 12:21 PM, Spockydog said:

Life is too short to watch stuff you hate and then take to the internet to tell everyone, in great detail, precisely why you hate it.

This seems to be a raison d'etre for some folks. Baffling way to spend one's life IMO.

[Myrddin]

12 hours ago, felice said:

What's the difference between skipping half an hour of driving across town, a week of a starship monitoring a mysterious anomaly, or a century of elves getting better at making magic rings?

If you have human or hobbit characters, then you would skip whole generations or dynasties while the elves get better at making rings. If the show only focused on elves until the Fall of Numenor, the time jumps would work (even be interesting as you see you human assistants grow old in the background to be replaced by their descendants).  If mortal characters are going to have multi season arcs (i.e. Isildur) you have to condense thousands of years into ten or twenty.

[Werthead]

16 hours ago, Myrddin said:

Having not read the First or Second Age source materials beyond the high level timeline, I can't fault the writers for condensing events that take place across a few thousand years. Otherwise, you get a scene with Sauron starting to build Baradur (c. 1000). Then another scene that take place 500 years later where he tells Celebrimbor how to forge the Rings of Power five hundred years later. Then he sits back for another 100 years until he finishes building Baradur and also forges the One Ring. Ninety-three years later, war breaks out. Then a few thousand until the Fall of Numenor.

There's no dramatic tension with events so far apart, even when you take immortals into account. 

Now, this does not mean I think they've done a good job on the show at condensing the material into a cohesive narrative. Just that time and character/event compression it's necessary to build a narrative with any kind of tension. 

Indeed.

That's why I think a better solution would have been to have had just one time jump mid series. You condense all of the early events into just Annatar deceiving Celebrimbor and the forging of the Rings. You could perhaps tie in the creation of Mordor with that, and stuff going on in Moria. You then have the war and end the first half with Sauron's first defeat and driving back to Mordor.

In the second half, you pick up centuries later with Numenor's fleet capturing Sauron and taking him back home. He then corrupts the Numenoreans and we have the events leading to the Downfall and the Last Alliance.

In both cases, the events are still compressed into a few years apiece, but you still have the separation inbetween for things like Numenor becoming a massive colonial empire.

You could even still have non-canonical things like the Harfoots, Gandalf arriving and Galadriel having a more active role than she does in the actual source material. You'd just have a stronger focus on the OG source material and you still have the epic scale of events unfolding over centuries, but in a more accessible manner.

[Darryk]

1 hour ago, Week said:

This seems to be a raison d'etre for some folks. Baffling way to spend one's life IMO.

To be fair a lot of people have cultivated successful YouTube careers by doing this.

[Week]

11 minutes ago, Darryk said:

To be fair a lot of people have cultivated successful YouTube careers by doing this.

Even more baffling to do it just for ASOIAF board clout.

[felice]

2 hours ago, Myrddin said:

If you have human or hobbit characters, then you would skip whole generations or dynasties while the elves get better at making rings. If the show only focused on elves until the Fall of Numenor, the time jumps would work (even be interesting as you see you human assistants grow old in the background to be replaced by their descendants).

The elves would be the only characters that remain constant for the whole series, but that doesn't mean a changing cast of humans, dwarves, etc couldn't share the focus; their stories would just be completed in a single season.

2 hours ago, Myrddin said:

If mortal characters are going to have multi season arcs (i.e. Isildur) you have to condense thousands of years into ten or twenty.

The bits with Isildur in the books span nearly 200 years; there's not need to condense that. He's already a grown man when Sauron is captured, and his ninety-year-older father is still sufficiently in his prime to go toe-to-toe with Sauron at the end, so it would be no problem to keep the same actors for the Numenoreans.

[Ser Scot A Ellison]

21 hours ago, Myrddin said:

Having not read the First or Second Age source materials beyond the high level timeline, I can't fault the writers for condensing events that take place across a few thousand years. Otherwise, you get a scene with Sauron starting to build Baradur (c. 1000). Then another scene that take place 500 years later where he tells Celebrimbor how to forge the Rings of Power five hundred years later. Then he sits back for another 100 years until he finishes building Baradur and also forges the One Ring. Ninety-three years later, war breaks out. Then a few thousand until the Fall of Numenor.

There's no dramatic tension with events so far apart, even when you take immortals into account. 

Now, this does not mean I think they've done a good job on the show at condensing the material into a cohesive narrative. Just that time and character/event compression it's necessary to build a narrative with any kind of tension. 

You build the narrative over several seasons each season focusing on a different time period and its events.  Use the cast as an ensemble… playing multiple characters over different time periods.  The film “Sunshine” with Ralph Fiennes did this very well telling the story of a Hungarian Jewish family over three or four generations.  That would work very well for the 2nd Age of Middle-Earth that largely focuses on the House of Elros.

[SpaceChampion]

I'm just going to consider this show The Drunk History of Middle Earth from now on.