Thank each one of you for clicking on this video! I hope this can be a good start for some of the great stuff coming on the channel! I want to dive deeper into Tolkien's lore and philosophy and I hope you'll join me on this journey. The Rings of Power seemed like a fine spring board to this topic, as it gets pretty much all of it wrong. This is also why I couldn't keep watching. Hopefully the vastness and depth of the lore makes it even easier to understand why the Rings of Power bothers me so much. There's one more video to go, and then I hope not to think or speak of the Rings of Power in a VERY VERY long time! Cheers and have a great weekend! 🧙♂✌
hey council, what do you think is a great rebuttal for RoP super fans who keep saying "stop watching it if you hate it" lol. I've been replying with lore related reasons but it just makes them more stupid and incessant 😂
You haven't yet shared your reactions on Grand-Elf and Sore-Man. How Balrog went to sleep after killing durin (Mission achieved). How Adar swore never to make war on middle earth and orcs betraying him for no reason at all . The show just dived deeper than the pits of Moria
@@CounciloftheRingsthanks for the reply Council. It makes sense. I might say something like that as well, that I need to review it for academic or study purposes😊
Great work. I knew the show was rejecting Tolkien’s philosophy in the first episode when Finrod said one must touch the darkness to know the light. That is antithetical to Tolkien in every way.
@@CounciloftheRings this is where I feel the Mormonism of the showrunner comes into play, inserting Mormon philosophy into Tolken, where Mormons believe that mankind is inherently evil, and must choose good over evil. “Choose the right “
It just makes me wonder if this is one of those Mormon Easter eggs in the show I had heard about since one of the show runners is a devout Mormon. Mormons believe that people are inherently evil and must choose good over evil, (“choose the right”, a Mormon motto) which seems to rub the wrong way with the Saint Augustine philosophy
@@CounciloftheRings but many people got introduced to Tolkien's world with this 💩show and that is just saddening. These days most of them definitely won't read the books and probably won't even watch the movies, so they will just accept this mindless, disrespectful BS for the sake of zombie consumption. :/
Bad writing. Sauron, in the second age, was supposed to be a pseudo Promethean figure generating religious engineering in Harad and Rhûn with the metallurgical revolution he made in the east and south. He was like Mephistopheles from Goethe's Faust or Azazel from the book of Enoch. Galadriel, in Eregion, was supposed to be a sage and a political opponent of Annatar's reformist ideas. She could be like a philosopher-queen archetype.
@@eskanda3434And that is exactly where Amazon went wrong -- why go to all this effort to water down the source material to appeal to some committee-derived "Average Person" when you spent millions on an IP with a devoted, built-in audience? Even the head writers have spoken about their efforts to trick and surprise the serious fans. They singularly fail to understand that is not what makes adaptations appealing. Amazon wanted the cultural phenomenon of GoT, and probably could have achieved it if they'd done a more politically driven story that stuck closer to the lore, cut the proto-hobbits and Gandalf completely, and taken their time with intricacies. Audiences are smarter than dead cows, in actuality. People followed GoT's large cast and scheming just fine and to HBO's great success. It was only when the show's runners started to act like the RoP show runners that GoT became a disappointment.
That's exactly that the root of all the problems are. They had no intention of bring any of the Tolkien-world to life. They just needed a big IP to attract views to generate more Prime subscribers and generate revenue, while also pushing their social narratives.
@@christophermalpede924 Yeah, but Simon's the one who wanted Sauron to be like Walter White. I don't think even he has a very firm grasp on Middle Earth.
@@christophermalpede924 and he had daddy issues and major disagreements about family involvement in The Peter Jackson trilogy. In order to destroy every part of the lore, you must know what to destroy and how to go about it. It all makes sense.
They only have the same names. Everything else is different. And badly done, that thing has so little to do with Tolkien's world of Middle Earth, or his characters, that it doesn't really even count as a bad fanfic.
This is the only analysis I’ve come across that accurately pinpoints the actual heart of Tolkien’s story and why ROP fails so badly. Thanks for your work
Î think the the actors themself do a good job in this show, minus a couple of exceptions. The choice of casting certain roles is mostly a bit questionable, like certain elves, that do not have elvish features and look more like humans with pointy ears. Charlie Vickers as Annatar is very good, i think he nailed that role. But this series feels very different than the Peter Jacksons Movies. They lack this grandeur, this immensity of this world. In Peter Jacksons vision the elves are actually ethereal as they should be. They are tall and have great wisdom because of their age. You can feel a big difference between an elf and a human for instance, which you cannot see in this show. All races seem to behave like humans do. Even bullying a Prince among the dwarves, like wut? Those are highschool teenager problems.
@@JayTeeGR RoP is a disaster, no doubt, but let's stop pretending Petey respected the source material. He did his own thing especially with the characters. Still, compared to RoP, Little Petey's trilogy is great.
You're pretty much spot on here. It is a sadly common phenomenon that writers today are not only unable to see things from any perspective but their own, they often don't even seem to be aware that other perspectives actually exist.
I totally agree! It's quite sad, really. Some things I love about other films and shows is how they tangle something in a way I haven't seen before. For instance Ragnar Lothbrok questioning the existence of the gods, while all his countrymen are firm in their belief. They kinda butchered in the following episodes, but it was good until that point at least.
@@CounciloftheRings The example that comes to mind for me is The Pharaoh Key by Preston and Child. It's a total mess for several reasons, many of which boil down to Preston and Child lacking the imagination to see the world from any perspective other than that of their own time and place in history and society. It's not just writers, of course, but it's a bit less excusable and much more visible when writers have this fault. I'm surprised how many people fail to understand that the Samurai Jack universe is posited to be more consistent with Eastern religions than with Abrahamic religions. The presumption of reincarnation has major, major consequences for how the show ends. It doesn't matter if you believe reincarnation happens in the real world; in the cartoon, it presumably does.
This video is like a 2 hour massage and you've hit every single triggerpoint of each and every muscle in my body. Very thankful for your effort, and hoping it reaches many, many people.
It’s the writing. All sound and fury-no depth. They aren’t trying to tell a story. They’re just trying to make a show. EDIT: I wish I knew some people worth sharing this wonderful video with. It’s so spot on it’s nearly painful
"They aren’t trying to tell a story. They’re just trying to make a show.". These words describe it perfectly. As evident by the many, annoying references to dialogue from the lotr movies, in an effort to lure in fans of the movies to go "hey I remember that line from the movies!!!"
Great video, I loved how you delved into the themes of his work. Another thing that I find feels very anti-Tolkien about this show is it’s lack of respect for time and distance in middle earth. Characters seem to almost teleport to the other side of the map within days which is in stark contrast to Tolkien who would put thought into how many miles characters could realistically travel and how long it would take them. It’s a seemingly small thing but it helped make middle earth feel real and massive.
Yeah It's actually something that will come up in the other video "Epic stories vs Modernity". So fear not, a lot of cool stuff is coming in that regard too!
This is what made the early seasons of game of thrones so good. It took a long time for characters to get to their destination, and it made it feel like you the viewer were a part of the journey. It's also much more immersive and makes the world feel real.
@@tonysiouxfan Haven't seen GoT yet, planning on reading the books first though. I know John Howe also does a lot of illustrations for the series which is a pretty cool connection to Tolkien.
I feel the same way about the timeline compressions and the distance shortening. Year of the Trees Galadriel gets in her time machine and shows up in S.A.1590. Elendil and Isildur are alive at the time the Rings of Power were forged. Too many ugly decisions were made in regard to time and space.😞 I just laughed and shook my head when I realized that all the Elves that escaped were in the place that will become Rivendell. So Imladris is just behind the mountain on which Ost-in-Edhil is located, a few miles, instead of the 400 or so miles away that it is actually located.
And this was something Tolkien himself complained about in his notes on a potential animated screen adaptation in the 60s. He specifically called out the compression of time and geography as unacceptable.
Its a poor man's adaptation of Peter Jackson's films. They copied the scenes, the dialogue and used up 100 times the budget and still failed Spectacularly
@@CounciloftheRings taking is fine, but they copied scene exactly, the Balrog pulling the leg, Elendil unsheathing the sword, Grand-elf moron being stuck in the tree. Not even an iota of creativity was bought using a billion dollars
The thing that bothered me from the first minutes of Rings of Power was that the elves were just people with pointy ears, not ancient people. Galadriel was supposed to have walked the Earth before there was a sun to mark the days, but comes off as amazingly immature and petty. Dwarves, orcs, and hobbits were little better. A story with truly different races allows us to see ourselves through alien eyes, or to see other things that people might be.
Portraying Elves is pretty hard I think. Peter Jackson in LotR actually didn't have to give the Elves too much screen time (apart from Legolas), so he was able to pull it off by letting them be very dignified and aloof. That approach wouldn't work with all the characters and dialogue there is in RoP. Anyway RoP have managed to mess it up in their own way.
@@vindolanda6974 I agree that writing true aliens is tricky; if you make them too alien you lose the audience. I think Babylon 5 handled it best. There were "younger races" who were different but relatable, and ancient races so advanced that they struggled to communicate with humans. Strazinsky used those differences to examine what it means to be human.
@@vindolanda6974 It would have been a challenge but could have been used to raise some very interesting philosophical questions on immortality vs mortality. Things like death in battle and what it means to be a human and give up the rest of a comparably short life vs and elf who dies giving up a millennia of life. Does an elf who lived thousands of years and accumulated so much regret, emotional and spiritual wounds view death differently? How does the promise of immortality Sauron gives to the kings of Numenor mesh with the reality the elves face? Especially since the loyal Numenorians have more contact with the elves. Even things like skills and crafts, Humans with short lives must rely on apprenticeship and sharing of knowledge to ensure the future of a craft where elves can be selfish with their skills knowing they will theoretically be alive forever to make things.
@@ColoradoStreaming I agree with you. I sometimes wonder if humans lived forever if we wouldn't go insane because of the relentless march of time and the acceleration of time as you get older, so I wonder how strange the elves must be to be able to handle immortality. You would think they hardly pro-create, so the sexual drive must be very low. And you would think they would be terrified of death because it means losing so much. On the other hand, after death they are reincarnated after some time in the halls of Mandos, so it can't be that bad. Ultimately I believe the elves must have been incredibly strange by human standards and capable of extremes of despair and of joy, but when they interact with men they just just put on this somewhat aloof, distant manner.
I think one scene exemplifies this and that is the scene of the two towers when the battalion of elves arrives and enters Helm's Deep, although it is not canonical it is great, and you can feel the grandeur of the elves, as magical, powerful beings from another world, and then when Haldir speaks poetically, but beautifully. All the money in the world could not have gotten The Rings of Power to show a scene like that.
I totally agree with you! They had majesty, they came at nightfall, a detail which so much sends to the very nature of elves, who woke up under the moonlight. Aaand, they were tall and young-looking, something you would have expected from the elves. So, even if it was a twist in the original material, the scene with the music and the horn sound before was so beautifully handled!
'Long ago we fought and died together. ' - Haldir What did he know and when did he know it? Aragorn, nedin dagor hen ú-'erir ortheri. Natha daged dhaer. 'They cannot win this fight. They are all going to die!' - Legolas Haldir wants Gimli blindfolded in The Lord of the Rings book The Fellowship of the Ring: Explanation Haldir, an Elf, initially doesn't want Gimli to enter Lothlórien because he doesn't trust Dwarves. Haldir says, "We have not had dealings with the Dwarves since the Dark Days. They are not permitted in our land". Gimli's reaction Gimli protests, saying he should not be treated like a prisoner or beggar. He threatens to leave the Fellowship. Aragorn's solution Aragorn suggests that everyone in the Fellowship wear a blindfold so Gimli doesn't feel singled out. Gimli and Legolas are still unhappy, but they agree. Gimli's experience When Gimli's blindfold is removed, he becomes the first Dwarf to see Lothlórien in over 3,000 years. He comes to love the Elven realm and Galadriel, its leader. Film adaptation The blindfold plot point was not included in Peter Jackson's film adaptation of The Fellowship of the Ring. However, the film did show the animosity between Haldir and Gimli.
I think something else that makes ROP feel so hollow compared to Tolkien’s work is how inconsistent the characters are. Tolkien is known as the man who defined archetypes through consistent characters. Some do grow and mature (just look at Bilbo in the Hobbit), but it’s never at the comprising of their core. In ROP, characters will flip on the whims of the story the show thinks it’s trying to tell. I’ll list some examples. - Adar. Supposedly he cares for the orcs deeply. They are his children. And yet in the first season alone he is reckless with their lives in battle, does not punish Arondir for killing several, and needlessly burns one just to monologue. Nor does he do anything to curb their darker impulses and behaviors, and this attitude continues into season 2. Now I’m sure the showrunners might say that was the point, that he has become what he despised Sauron for. But there can be no fall if the character was never consistent with his desires in the first place. It’s lip service to an arc, not actual development. - Sauron. In this show Sauron starts out supposedly remorseful, wanting to start a new life away from his role as the Dark Lord. He even makes the repeated claim that his fall to evil was Morgoth’s fault, and that upon Morgoth’s defeat it was “as if a veil had been lifted”. Yet we see in the prologue for season 2 that this is not true. Sauron was ready to continue being evil of his own free will and only stopped because the orcs mutinied against him. Yet his resistance to Galadriel’s attempts to get him involved in events seems genuine, and season 2’s prologue supports this as a genuine attempt to turn over a new leaf, even remarking to Galadriel in Mordor that fighting by her side for a good cause made him feel good. Yet all of this is down the drain once he wakes up in Eregion because he is now fully back on board with being evil. It’s an abrupt shift in his personality and goals with no catalyst for the change beyond “it had to happen sometime”. (TBC)
Aye - I think the writing is some of it's weakest points. It feels like too many had their hand on it, which is why each episode also feels disconnected. "Too many cooks in the kitchen" one is tempted to say.
@@CounciloftheRings It’s like you say, it’s the writing. I watched a bunch of old sci-fi shows from the early 2000s, and what keeps me hooked aren’t the pretty visuals (they didn’t have the budgets for those) but the strength of the characters and story. That is what survived. Hope you’ll continue your 2nd Age series.
For me, a big part of why the show doesn‘t feel like the movies is the music. It just is not reminiscent of the great and unique themes which Howard Shore wrote for the movies. The only exception is the Intro theme, which - would you look at that - is written by Howard Shore.
All due respect, I completely agree. Think what you will of the quality of the rest of the show, but Bear BcCreary's score is by far and away the best part of it. Listen to or read one of his interviews about his creation of it and his passion and respect for the gravitas of the material really seeps through.
I think that the mindset was to fix lotr instead of adapting it. Fantasy inspired by Tolkien has evolved and the showrunner want to "modernize" lotr. Orks were at the beginning mostly swordfodder, but in latee depiction they got more nuanced. Do these modern interpretations of the orks work with lotr? I think not. Also the grey in grey morality that is more in common in modern media doesn't work with lotr. If Sauron is not that bad, then it is not that bad when he rules middle earth. Rings of power has more in common with these infamous bad live action adaptions from Disney then their source material.
Excellent analysis, you managed to express in one 24 minute video what other youtubers tried to say in hundreds of hours of videos, and thousands of viewers in tens or maybe even hundreds of thousands of comments. Congratulations! 🏆
what’s missing are enough extras on set. Galadriel’s “northern army” is but a handful of soldiers. The Northern half- platoon, more like. Durin’s army is like 8 dwarves 😂
Why did the "hobbits" name Gandalf? He was given that name by the men Anor! Oh and he doesn't appear until the 3rd age! The Balrog fought and killed Durin the 6th, hence the name, Durins Bane!
The Rings of Power doesn’t feel like Tolkien’s world simply because it isn’t. It’s beyond disrespectful and delusional to think they could do better than his work.
When the Elves being the Firstborn and greatest creation of Eru Iluvatar looks like a cosplay meet up at NYC with a mix of different skin colours and being short and old which btw is a TOTAL MISCAST so the uniqueness and awe and beauty and grace of the Eldar feels like discount Target.
What really got me was that the used spandex/fabric with chainmail pattern...instead of real chainmail like the OG movies did. The passion and LOVE for the source material shows in those movies, and RoP has...none of that imo. I dont feel it at all. It feels like a cash grab. I couldnt even finish a single episode, it made me so depressed.
Watching the Wrongs of Power is like watching a poor quality exploatation film: Terminator vs CyberCop etc. If Roger Corman got the budget of the Wrongs of Power he would create a Masterpiece but those dumb talentless Amazon people can't do anything right. Even the visuals of P.Jackson films made decades ago look way better using miniatures, limited cgi and camera tricks
You summed up The Rings of Power perfectly at the end. It has no soul. A jumble of weird, pointless plot lines, shallow characters and no sense of a heroic tale being told. The mystery and majesty is stripped out of the characters in place of over art-directed CGI locations. Well, it was written by Americans. They walked away from all that Tolkien breathed into LOTR probably because they don't have the education to understand it fully. They threw out the over-riding Catholic morality, the Nordic and mythic richness of the story-telling and create what? A perky, silly, rambling quasi sit-com set in Nowhere in Particular. They would probably have produced a version of the Odyssey, for example, that would feel more like a current season of Survivor.
Your analysis of how characters of different ages are presented and the "young ones know better" was fascinating to me. Especially given that the show makes out that Galadriel is relatively young when she's actually the second oldest Elf in the story after Cirdan. Ironically the show writers think Galadriel knows best when she's actually a complete moron the way they present her.
Thank you for this spot-on analysis, that was refreshingly in-depth and philosophical! The foundations of our morality are at war with modern entertainment. We must take on this fight and bring back the tales and heroes of the past. Loved your structure and conclusion! Subscription well-earned!
This video found me because I have been watching a lot of content about what is wrong with RoP. And I think your video has the best analysis I have seen so far. I look forward to watching your previous videos on the topic as well as Tolkien in general.
Thanks! It’s currently on hold while the channel grows. It’s still in development though. I hope to have some free-time again in February, but first I have to finish my bachelor ☺️
Well, what is missing apart from the team's worldview being completely antithetical to Tolkien's? They are msising all the literary theory of the early XX century, like all the theory of fiction the Inkling's themselves developed, take for example Talking of Bicycles of C S Lews. Hell, if you take what the actors and producers talked about overtly in interviews and such, it is almost a item by item opposition to what Tolkien explains of his process and goals in On Fairy Stories
Appreciate the perspective you bring to this! I have a contrary thought: As a filthy lefty atheist who also despises what they've done with Tolkien's world, I wanna throw out that the rejection of the religious undertones of the Legendarium isn't the REASON for it not feeling like Lord of the Rings-the Jackson films, for example, are at best agnostic on the religiosity and theology of the work, yet are still able to brilliantly capture its tone and themes (despite a few alterations to the story). Rather, the rejection of these elements is a SYMPTOM of the actual problem. One can reject Catholic theology/doctrine and still respectfully portray Tolkienian themes around power and its corrupting influence, death and the desire for deathlessness, the nature of heroism and suffering, great people from humble beginnings, and the importance of mercy even for "evil" people while opposing evil forces at every turn. (Even the idea that there is an All-Good Creator Being *in the fiction of the story* can be written by an author who does not believe that is how the real world works, in the same way that one can write a story about a magic ring needing to be thrown into a volcano in the absence of real magic rings.) The problem is ultimately that the writers (and/or the executives behind the project) have a fundamental disinterest in portraying these themes *in a way that respects the world Tolkien built*. The writers have an idea of the story they want to tell, the scenes they want to show, and the characters they want to play with, and they'll do it regardless of how it impacts the source material. This is MILES worse than disagreeing with the Legendarium's philosophical underpinnings, or even fundamentally misunderstanding them-it is consciously *DISREGARDING* them. This is, of course, aside from the story itself simply being mediocre even on its own terms: disengaging dialogue, inconsistent characterization and worldbuilding, poor thematic cohesion, and a problem with TELLING us about the scale of events while lacking the ability to convincingly SHOW that scale. Even if they completely bought into Tolkienian philosophy, these issues would remain.
Well, leaving aside the deeper themes, the series just didn't capture the epic scope of Middle Earth or the nature of the ancient beings that populate it. Just as a brief comparison, Cate Blanchett managed to find the nobility, grandeur, power and even the torment of a being too strong to be corrupted by the ring but destined to fade from the world just the same. Morfydd Clark on the other hand, is utterly incapable of conveying anything about the Galadriel we all know. Worse than that, she's terrible at portraying the absurd version of Galadriel the show gives us.
There is at least one reference to Eru in Amazon’s show. Adar refers to Orcs (sorry, Uruks) as being children of “the One” too. None of that excuses the awful writing in so many places (the Elves will take our jerbs!), the plots that don’t make sense (a wizard needing Tom Bombadil as a teacher???), and the jamming together of whatever they do have licensed (Tom Bombadil, Ents, Barrow Wights), et cetera. Re: Peter Jackson though, his films show “presentism” as well. Let’s recall that many people who knew the books were furious about PJ’s films for their many deviations from the books - which among other things were called politically correct and done for corporate profit and to please a younger, modern audience. Christopher Tolkien hated the films (“eviscerated the book,” “a monster, devoured by his own and absorbed into the absurdity of our time”). There was fury over Arwen replacing Glorfindel and being a female elf with a sword!!! on a horse!!! taunting the Nazgûl!!! It was expressly called “politically correct,” which term has simply been replaced by “woke” now (and that Arwen would be called a “girl boss” now). Think of how PJ made Aragorn a reluctant hero to suit modern tastes. Same with making Frodo a ~20-year-old ingénue, instead of a tougher 50-year-old. And PJ erased the class hierarchy in the Shire, making Sam Frodo’s drinking buddy instead of his servant. Personally, I find almost all of PJ’s changes to be no problem as adaptations for film (don’t get me started on the phony scene where Frodo shows the Ring to a Nazgûl in Osgiliath though). The Amazon show’s deviations could be more tolerable if they just made some kind of sense - which they just don’t in so, so many ways.
Have any one of you felt any thing similar to all the "characters" dying in epic scenes in RoP like you felt when you saw the death of Boromir in LotR? Not even when Galadriel fell to her death 100 of meters after being stabbed to her heart I felt anything ... but like heroes in modern StarWars films don't die when cut with laser swords, a stab in the heart and a fall of more than 100 meters doesn't do anything to your body ...
It is true that friendship and unity are two of the many rich themes of the Legendarium, and there are many examples in the Trilogy that illustrate that beautifully. But the world of this series is steeped in allegory of modern day politics, trading on contemporary ideologies revolving around content that wasn't there in the text to begin with. Gone is the moral certitude of the world and its author, in its place is this typical Hollywood moral relativism, resulting jarring experience. You haven't created a series that supports a great aspiration of people coming together in friendship to resist a great evil, you've taken the most superficial veneer of that great Secondary World and corrupted it with moral myopia and abysmal characters who range from incompetent oafs to to being little different from the orcs and the Dark Lord.
I have seen many people accuse the show of being morally reativist, filled with morally grey characters etc, but I don't see it. The villains are evil and at the most they (claim to) have good intentions (which doesn't make one good) and the heroes have mostly minor flaws and do small bad things like lying or yelling (which doesn't make one evil) None of the villains felt symphatethic: Sauron never does anything selfless and does a TON of heinously evil stuff - he says he wants to "heal the world" but that is an obvious lie given his actions; Adar claims to just want to be in peace but goes out of his way to hurt people and make war, making him a liar as well; the orcs are consistently violent and cruel - there's that one orc with the kid but 1. one not-evil orc doesn't make all orcs not evil, 2. having a kid doesn't make one not evil, and 3. that orc goes ahead and does evil stuff anyways, confirming that he is indeed evil. Which one of these was I supposed to sympathise with, again? As for the heroes, how is any of them evil, let alone as evil as *Sauron?* They are stupid and incompetent (mostly by accident because the writers can't write) but not evil. I can't recall any genuinely bad thing any of them does, the worst probably being Galadriel lying to Celebrimbor and other people, and Elrond to Durin (which those characters shouldn't have done, the writing is bad). Which of the heroes was I supposed to hate? You can argue that the heroes in the story (ancient elves) shouldn't have these flaws, but it's a far cry to say lying makes them as bad as the villains who consistently commit horrid deeds like murder, torture, slavery, destroying villages etc
Because it is not remotely close to Lord of the Rings. It's nothing more than a thin veneer of Tolkien slapped on the story the people behind the show decided to tell and using Tolkien's name and various other things lifted from Tolkien's writings to attract an audience they would have otherwise never gotten. And they couldn't even make their own story anything close to being a good one.
I just wanted to hop in and say how much I resonated with what you discussed in your video. In so many ways I have struggled to convey why I felt this show lacked any real relation to Tolkien, and why I have always felt it be more a very average fan-fiction or generic fantasy show. It lacks a soul, specifically the soul Tolkien gave his work. Thank you for this video! I am defs going to reference it whenever I want to explain these points to my friends!
It doesn't feel like Middle Earth because of the contempt for the source materiel (that they consistently ignore), the bad writing, the inept direction, the mediocre acting.
Nowadays everyone treats the LotR movies as the gold standard for Tolkien's work and everything is compared to that. The gold standard should be the books themselves. The movies were very good but far from perfect and deliberately altered things which meant they also 'felt' different to the books. Don't forget Christopher Tolkien himself completely dismissed them. When the movies are used as the main reference point things from Tolkien get lost, like making a photocopy of a photocopy.
It's the same story as the Star Wars sequels. What happened was an example of a corporation buying the rights to an existing franchise and story for purposes of brand recognition. Having the right to reuse R2-D2 or Gandalf will result in commercial success, according to these people. They just buy the rights and then all the effort just stops there.
Not sure I agree with you completely on gender roles and presentism. After all, pre-presentism, female characters in Tolkien’s world are pretty amazing. Not all of them but enough to be significant. I don’t like the term “girl boss”. There are bosses who are girls. The problem is they didn’t capture Galadriel. She’s both awe inspiring and a slender elf woman. The idea that she would be as deferential to Gil-Galad as the ROP makes her is absurd. But it’s also absurd that she’s a commander of an elf army. That’s like a standing army? Really? Not likely. The tears are excessive and the depiction of the orcs is unlikely to be warm and fuzzy. I doubt they reproduce peacefully. I’ve always pictured orc reproduction as more along the lines of a puppy mill. Yeah, we should feel sorry that they were corrupted at the beginning but there are limits. You are absolutely right about some casting taking us out of the story. Disa makes sense; Asian elf archer doesn’t. And I don’t really buy the idea that for a viewer to feel included and represented, there must be characters that look like them. We don’t make these demands on TV series like Succession. Even Game of Thrones didn’t do this and it was still wildly entertaining for 6 seasons. So, why ROP? For that matter, why is the Wheel of Time so diverse? If diversity is what the audience is craving why not pick a more suitable SF/fantasy series like the Broken Earth Trilogy by NK Jemison? Why not do the book Maia by Richard Adams? I just don’t buy the argument the showrunners are pitching wrt this approach especially after I sat through Beef on NetFlix and can’t remember a single non-Asian character. I didn’t feel excluded by that because it was a good story with great characters. And in the end, that’s what ROP lacks: a good story with great characters whose motivations make sense.
how does Disa make sense? She's actually one of the worst depicted characters in the entire show. She looks, nor acts, anything like I'd imagine a female dwarf to be. One, she has no beard. Female dwarves have beards. Even Gimly spoke at length about this in Return of the King. Second, she's obnoxiously over confident and not sub servient to her husband and king. From every bit of lore I've ever read about dwarves, they're a very male-dominated society. So, for ROP to go against that and insert a female dominant character into that type of society is just plainly wrong.
@@DJCyRo well, since we’ve never seen a female dwarf, and for all we know, they shave, I just think she easily meets my expectations of a female dwarf. She was one of my favorite characters in season 1. In season 2, no character was safe from the people they call writers. And male dominated societies are not a good thing.
@@DJCyRo Actually Dísa is one of my few new characters in TRoP that I actually like.😅 She is a perfect wife for Prince Durin and will make a perfect Dwarven Queen.
@@kimhaas7586 I think modern men need a wife like Dísa. My wife is very close to that. Men need to be called out, stopped from doing stupid things, and encouraged when things are going badly. Dísa does that and more for Prince Durin.😁👍
@@kimhaas7586 Again, well established lore clearly shows that female dwarves have beards. Your reasoning is doing the same thing RoP is doing…..putting a modern and incorrect spin on lore. Whether you think a male dominated society is a good thing or not doesn’t matter. It isn’t America, it’s Middle Earth. If RoP is going to tell the story, at least do it right.
When you strive for moral relativism in a setting that is founded on actual moral principles of good & evil, you end up with a narrative that is as shallow as a puddle because that's ultimately all that can be produced when you seek to inject "equality" into a good & evil dynamic. All of a sudden Sauron isn't a fallen angel figure and an elemental force of evil and darkness in the world... he's a misunderstood and nobly driven woobie who's just trying to cope with his own abuses at the hands of a tormentor and wants to make the world a better place... The Elves go from being a people of high ideals and paragons of moral principles... to just guys and gals with pointy ears and despite supposedly centuries and even millennia of wisdom have no more intellect than a millennial hipster The Numenoreans go from being the absolute pinnacle of humanity and representative of all the best _and_ worst aspects of Man who are driven by pride (and to a degree justified pride) and a fear of mortality and jealousy of the supposed divine favor of the elves... to a bunch of poorly conceived Cali Elitist concept of rural Americans worried about "Dem Elves comin to take er jerbs!" The Hobbits, who weren't even a thing in the 2nd age to begin with, go from being a rustic and simple rural community of chill weed-smoking lovers of the land... to a cultish group of muderous nomads who's crazy belief system would have resulted in their extinction a long time ago... basically just hippies complete with an utter lack of any understanding of how to run or manage a community. Gandalf went from a wise angelic being in the form of a mortal who wanders the world and moves pieces around the grand board of Middle-Earth in a desperate attempt to counter Sauron while still appreciating the peoples of the very world he's trying to save... now he's just a dumb hobo wandering around a desert with a couple of child-sized people in search of a shaft he can grab and ultimately "gets his name" in the dumbest way possible despite Gandalf not even being his true name at all but merely one of the many names he was most fond of because the people who like to call him that, the hobbits (the real ones not the murder hobos of RoP) are pretty much his favorite group to hang out with. Arandir is just pointless, his story was pointless his presence was pointless, and what little story he was gonna have was pretty much scrapped when the more important character in his story, Branwen, was written out because the actress had the good sense to bail on this failure of a series. The Orcs, a vile yet tragic race of creatures literally created and molded into tools of war and destruction... nope now they just wanna grill and have a place where they can raise their little orclings... no, wait now they're psychotic and evil again and seem to relish in destruction... oh wait, nope they're just misunderstood again and are feeling sad that they're being used as fodder for a war they don't wanna fight... and now they're gleefully slaughtering elves and having a grand old time... what are the orcs supposed to be in this show again? I don't think the writers really knew themselves. Then there's Galadriel, the Lady of Light, one of the oldest and wisest of all the elves in Middle-Earth... now just an butt kicking warrior chick who's supposed to be the greatest warrior and commander of elves yet the actress is terrible at choreography so it just makes her look silly while trying to be badass... and despite all this her character is massively diminished from the _actual_ badass she was in the source material, a woman of great age and wisdom who was never fooled by Sauron even for a moment and who stood against him as he sought to undermine and corrupt the elves... nope now she's part of Galadrion Ship or whatever. And finally, the eponymous Rings of Power themselves... which apparently now are all The One Ring since they all seem to just instantly corrupt their wearers and make them incredibly bonkers in a matter of hours if King Durin's sudden shift from a semi-interesting character into a cartoon caricature is anything to go by. The 16 rings, all of which were intended to be given to the elves in the first place and thus would not have different designs and certainly not "dwarven" designs, are now specifically made for the different people Sauron attempts to corrupt, but are made out of order which shatters the cohesion of the plot and now requires characters like Celebrimbor to be unbelievably stupid just to keep the broken remnants of the plot limping along... but given that Celebrimbor didn't even know what an alloy was I guess that's in character for him.
What is missing? Er, let's see: talent, competence, intelligence, imagination, creativity, integrity, sense of ridicule, respect, common sense; knowledge and understanding of the source material... I think that's it.
besides the coherent writing and narrative structure, the secret sauce of peter jackson's films is that they felt REAL. hobbiton felt like a real place. the world felt lived in. this is rare among any fantasy adaptation and unfortunately ROP is one of many that fail to pass the test.
@@Corungil not even necessarily the writing, although obviously it's not as good. the set designs, costumes, etc. in LOTR felt very real. ROP is very good visually, but it still feels like you're watching a fantasy rather than a depiction of real places and stories that could've existed.
@@Corungil also feel like the way the characters talk plays a factor. the writing was better, but the actors all delivered their lines normally. in ROP it feels like all the characters are putting on airs and trying to make themselves sound profound.
@@MDK384 And, .. if I am to be fair, I loved Morfydd Clark (Galadriel) in "Saint Maude". I think maybe this role is not right for her. Mainly because of the way the character is written.
Your Frodo as a priest parallel got me thinking how the Old Testament highpriest was prescribed to enter the Holy of Holies in the Temple, bringing the blood of atonement for the sins of all people and spill it on top of the Ark of the Covenant. Frodo enters mount Doom to drop the physical embodiment of sin into the fires that would destroy it, and thus bring salvation for "this year"
5:20 A lot of the more fantastical elements found in The Hobbit, like the trolls' talking purse and the talking birds, can be attributed to the book being Bilbo's autobiography, which he frequently embellished for his audience, and I don't read Turin's sword talking to be literal as much as a projection of his own conscience. But that's one of the many things that makes Tolkien's writings so fascinating to read, his narrators are unreliable, which combined with the many different versions of some of his stories, allows for a lot of freedom of imagination and speculation. (To be clear, I am NOT trying to excuse talentless hacks for disregarding the things that Tolkien did make abundantly clear.)
Aye, I agree! It's true we can't know for certain if these two objects could actually talk - but it is still presented as 'the truth' without anyone questioning it. For long I too also thought it was just Túrin's mind, but I find it more interesting if it's not. The sword certainly had a personality of its own and also had a unique origin. It's fun to never know the true answer. I think the talking birds are correct enough, whether you mean the ravens, thrushes or Great Eagles. Those can be found elsewhere too - They can't all be making up stuff, haha. Cheers! 🧙♂️
I've been watching a lot of LOTR UA-cam channels and I feel confident in saying that you just spoke to an aspect of LOTR which was very dear to Tolken but it's one that isn't spoken about much by content creators. To that end, I don't have any feedback on your content in this video other than to say, you're spot on. Two small editing suggestions, - Your editing of each chapter is a continuous stream. It's unnatural. Readers need to take breaths, and they would also have the occasional pause. It seems that you've edited out most of these pauses while you've stitched everything together. Leave those pauses in, they are valuable. An easy place to start adding more pauses would be around your chapters. You tend to read the chapter title and then immediately get into it. - The second suggestion would be inflection. The range of your voice started to come alive in chapter 9. If you could speak with your whole register like you do in Ch. 9 then your narrations would be more engaging. Ch 2-4 sounded like you were reading from a script whereas 9 you were reciting from memory and from the heart.
Thank you..another thoughtful and interesting analysis of both Tolkien’s work, and the limp ROP. I always feel smarter after your words. I have enjoyed Tolkien for over 50 years, but I am no scholar. I made a study of his work, specifically LOTR as my year 12 English, as a full project, year long, and yet I barely understood the most important aspects at that age. Tolkien managed to make the world of fairies, elves and goblins into a serious and deeply moving world. The origin of man, from the ancient Numenorians was especially significant, at least to me. It created a deep and ancient past, something to aspire to in life. Overall, it is a masterpiece of wide expanse. ROP is so flawed and shallow, and the writers and producers have absolutely failed to portray any worthy aspects to any race of beings in this world. Truly worthless, pop culture garbage that is insulting and offensive to the original material. They failed to give us one single character that I deem worthy to survive…even Gandalf…seems to me the writers cast every single character as a weak, flawed facile being that lacks the essential essences of the race depicted. All are greedy, egotistical, unreliable, driven by anger, and lacking patience, wisdom, courage. ROP has stripped the most important and fundamental traits from every race. Including orcs. A waste of effort by Amazon, and a blight on filmmaking. It deserves mockery and contempt.
If you want a good introduction to the deeper stuff, I highly recommend Bradley Birzer's "J.R.R. Tolkien's Sanctifying Myth" then followed by Tom Shippey's "The Road to Middle-earth". Not exactly easy reads, but if you love the subject you'll certainly keep reading. My only complaint is that they are too short! Hahaha
Probably the first analysis video I’ve seen to really hit the nail on the head and tackle the underlying problems that most critics dance around or don’t understand themselves. Great video!
@@CounciloftheRings Sorry - that’s a line from a Skyrim npc. I was tickled by you calling the RoP version of Grey Havens as a Skyrim town. I was thinking same thing - it’s meant to be this grand city and then you get there and it’s two houses and an inn. I guess if you have to explain it, though, it didn’t work. Apologies!
Excellent video. I think I'm going to watch this again to really consider what you brought up, but on a first pass viewing there were some really interesting points I'd like to personally explore. I recently read Tolkien's essay on fairy-tales and it was a fascinating read, if not simply to show how much thought he put into each and every decision made in the crafting of middle earth. There's no frivolity in it, and it's not "Just fantasy, get over it".
It's a great read! I read it some months ago! Keep in mind he wrote it in 1939, before The Lord of the Rings. You can still see how it's all woven together and LotR is truly a work that proves his line of thought.
Thoroughly enjoyed this thank you, especially the idea of presentism. For me the source of the problem is modern writing 'courses' or writing 'education'. I did a screenwriting course and there you are taught to create all characters with understandable motivations, and that you should understand your characters or see them as a person sitting in front of you with whom you can have a conversation. All characters MUST have a backstory or reason (point of view). The whole process feels like a writing 'recipe' that you should follow. I get that for many genres or stories this works, but in the case of Tolkien, exploring the point of view of evil should not be touched- it should not be seen as a character that you can articulate. All characters should have a point of view yes, but you don't need to show it.
“Low quality props” I will at least defend the props-work of my dear friends and fellow swordsmiths; Peter Lyon and his apprentice Chris Menges at Weta Workshop who made all the swords for season 1! (They did not work on season 2) While the designs they were given and tasked to make were unfortunately not their own designs, and sadly they were not given creative-freedom to make them as good as I know they wished they could’ve: they did the damned best with what they were given, and I know that’s true of many other friends & colleagues who are artists and craftsmen that worked on the show. I can’t defend every prop and design, but had to at least defend my friends at Weta who did the weapons and orc makeup for season 1. It’s just a sad damn shame that so much good art for the show was overshadowed and wasted on such a cringey terrible script.
Yeah I don't think the swords are a weak point of the show - I think it's some of the best elements actually (Even though I don't think the horse-association with Númenor makes sense). Narsil looks good, Pharazôn's sword, Aranrúth & Tuor's axe (at least the concept art). The Dwarven axes are a bit crude (not as weird as in The Hobbit, though). I think the make-up for the orcs is some of the best parts of the show (there's a few extras with questionable performances, but that's a different issue). It was mainly regarding the rings, the costumes, armours, helmets (especially these), the pickaxe of king Durin (looks like plastic) and in a few instances the teeth of some of the orcs. There's probably some more stuff, but this comes to mind. And yes I totally agree that so much of the good stuff from the show gets overshadowed by the bad elements. I think the concept art is 10 times better than the end result, which also seems to indicate the ideas were better, but the execution dragged down some things. I also think the music is decent - not on par with Howard Shore, Hans Zimmer and James Horner, but who really is? I think Bear McCreary could in time become almost that good, but he needs more experience (not through games, but actual shows).
@@CounciloftheRings The helmets of the Elves in the battle of Eregion were bad. Really really bad. Not saying your friends did that, CedarloreForge. I'm just pointing it out.
The one time this show got something right was when Sauron was revealed as Anatar, Lord of the Rings, in supernatural form. Did these producers even read Tolkien's books? Tolkien's Bombadil was a colorful, happy, excentric person. ROP Bombadil seemed drab, dreary, and depressed. At least the Balrog seemed to be like the Balrog, in Jackson's LOTR.
To me, TROP feels like I am watching Krull, or Ator the Fighting Eagle, or Beast Master, or Barbarian Queen.... It just plays like a campy 80s sword and sorcery movie to me. Those at least I could enjoy because they didn't take themselves seriously.
It doesn't feel like a world that has geography. The later seasons of GoT had the same problem people and armies just appearing because the plot wants them to.
@@daruddock well I don’t really want to give Amazon any excuse for writing such a crap show, but if they had any excuse it would be the licensing. Some things they simply can’t touch because they aren’t allowed to. Which is one of the reasons why to not watch. It’s a pure money grab by Amazon.
Presentism - the most important time is...now. The most important place is here (wherever that is). The most important person is me - and my close coterie. ROP in a nutshell both as presented and the mindset of the conceivers
Because there are no good actors except for the guy who plays Sauron. And even he is a stretch sometimes. They also aren’t even close when it comes to the order in which things took place
One thing I've noticed with modern interpretations of fantasy and science fiction is that modern writers can't seem to allow for non-humans to behave in a non-human fashion. I think it's a huge problem in ROP, but I've also noticed it happening with Doctor Who and Star Trek. The elves in ROP aren't ethereal, don't stand out physically from humans, and seem motivated by the same factors as humans despite not being human. I saw one critic mocking a scene in the last episode (or might have been second to last - my brain is trying to tune it all out) where Galadriel rescues the elf women and children, and several of the elf women are chubby and short. And you could probably have black or Asian or whatever race elves if you felt it was necessary, but they should be tall, ethereal, and have a bearing that clearly marks them as "elf." The model Iman, for example, might make a great elf. And it's not just a race thing - the same problem carries over to the white elves - they're short, Gil-Galad looks like a 42 year old gym teacher with a double chin, Galadriel is short and just "regular" pretty - she's not an imposing ethereal beauty oozing grace and wisdom, and if Celebrimbor wasn't introduced as an elf, no one would think he was anything but some middle-aged man who is good at making rings. I know many have said it, but it's really true - the whole thing looks like either cosplay or community theatre acting out fan fiction. A big issue related to the first is that Galadriel should not even be the main character here. Something that works well in LOTR is the insertion of the Hobbits - they represent the "every man" who just wants to live a decent life, but gets caught up in evil. In the face of evil, the "every man" can either submit or stand up and fight despite knowing they are physically no match for the evil threatening them and everything they love. The reader/viewer can relate to this. It inserts genuine heroism into the story beyond the heroism of characters one would expect to be naturally strong and brave. When you make elves the main characters, you have to try to make the viewer relate to them - so in the case here, the showrunners did that by making the elves more like regular people. Which ended up making the elves feel lame and unimpressive. I guess they tried to have the side story with the not-Hobbits, but that was so not-compelling that they backed away from it in season 2, leaving the viewer to try to connect to elves who don't look or act like elves. Overall, I just find this whole show depressing. The world could use a story about true good triumphing over true evil right now. We don't need villains who cry while they torture people. ROP had everything going for it - a basically unlimited budget, Peter Jackson willing to help, Tom Shippey, a ready-made audience craving something warm and alive and triumphant and beautiful - but they threw it all in a dumpster for seemingly no reason. It's just confusing.
Yes, the elves feel rather pedestrian here and too disparate. They aren't ethereal; they're too human. The Gil-galad comment made me bust out laughing. I was going to suggest tax accountant, but gym teacher works too.
"One thing I've noticed with modern interpretations of fantasy and science fiction is that modern writers can't seem to allow for non-humans to behave in a non-human fashion." The same thing happens with contemporary D&D.
A possible (probable?) answer to your question - the missing sense of ‘authenticity’, that was so clearly in evidence in the love and care on display, in Jackson’s masterly trilogy.
Because it's not. It's the fever dream of two nitwits who were handed the reins to a show for which they were completely out of their depth and massively unprepared to work on.
I don't share all of your observations, for example about Tom being just a hermit. I found it fitting. However later in the video you absolutely nail it: longing for the past was the essence of the Tolkien's writing. For times of legend, heroes, long forgotten myths. This presentism totally flips the script.
Then why is he doing a show where the characters are smitten with evil? Why was he promoting empathy to an evil character who is supposed to be the literal devil incarnate.
Excellent video! Perfect description of the point of TLOR as Tolkien put. As a religious person (Christian), I agree completely. Thank you for your hard work and honouring Tolkien's work.
![The Complete History of the Rings of Power [COMPILATION]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/rsCaXGvMypM/mqdefault.jpg)
![The Dragons of Middle-earth [COMPILATION]](/img/n.gif)
Thank each one of you for clicking on this video! I hope this can be a good start for some of the great stuff coming on the channel! I want to dive deeper into Tolkien's lore and philosophy and I hope you'll join me on this journey. The Rings of Power seemed like a fine spring board to this topic, as it gets pretty much all of it wrong. This is also why I couldn't keep watching. Hopefully the vastness and depth of the lore makes it even easier to understand why the Rings of Power bothers me so much. There's one more video to go, and then I hope not to think or speak of the Rings of Power in a VERY VERY long time!
Cheers and have a great weekend! 🧙♂✌
hey council, what do you think is a great rebuttal for RoP super fans who keep saying "stop watching it if you hate it" lol. I've been replying with lore related reasons but it just makes them more stupid and incessant 😂
You haven't yet shared your reactions on Grand-Elf and Sore-Man. How Balrog went to sleep after killing durin (Mission achieved). How Adar swore never to make war on middle earth and orcs betraying him for no reason at all . The show just dived deeper than the pits of Moria
@@markgregorygacosta531 My excuse have been I've reviewed it, but I don't any more, so I'm not watching any more.
@@CounciloftheRingsthanks for the reply Council. It makes sense. I might say something like that as well, that I need to review it for academic or study purposes😊
They admitted to having no script in the NOTR interview, they didn't know who the wizard was going to be.
Great work. I knew the show was rejecting Tolkien’s philosophy in the first episode when Finrod said one must touch the darkness to know the light. That is antithetical to Tolkien in every way.
Thank you! And yes I totally agree
"You must try on the One Ring so you can know how super evil it is."
@@CounciloftheRings this is where I feel the Mormonism of the showrunner comes into play, inserting Mormon philosophy into Tolken, where Mormons believe that mankind is inherently evil, and must choose good over evil. “Choose the right “
It just makes me wonder if this is one of those Mormon Easter eggs in the show I had heard about since one of the show runners is a devout Mormon. Mormons believe that people are inherently evil and must choose good over evil, (“choose the right”, a Mormon motto) which seems to rub the wrong way with the Saint Augustine philosophy
Personally, I think there are more sinister reasons why they are trying to blur the line between good and evil (cough… Bezos).
The only good thing this show did was get me to rewatch the LOTR series again and appreciate its beauty
That's something at least!
Yes, when i watched Return of the King extended edition, I was blown away at the beauty of a 2 decade old film, unparalleled to this day
EXACTLY!
@@CounciloftheRings but many people got introduced to Tolkien's world with this 💩show and that is just saddening. These days most of them definitely won't read the books and probably won't even watch the movies, so they will just accept this mindless, disrespectful BS for the sake of zombie consumption. :/
It also makes the Hobbit trilogy shine in comparison, so if you are ever wanting more of LOTR, that's available now!
Man's even citing Augustine of Hippo, this is several levels above so many popular channels.
Amazing work.
Thank you! ❤️
Bad writing. Sauron, in the second age, was supposed to be a pseudo Promethean figure generating religious engineering in Harad and Rhûn with the metallurgical revolution he made in the east and south. He was like Mephistopheles from Goethe's Faust or Azazel from the book of Enoch.
Galadriel, in Eregion, was supposed to be a sage and a political opponent of Annatar's reformist ideas. She could be like a philosopher-queen archetype.
THIS!
Ghezz just your words wore far more engaging than 20 hours of rings of poooo
I'd 100% watch that series.
@@DrStrangefateyes you would but sadly the average person isn’t interested in that and they want gurl power and sauron simping over her
@@eskanda3434And that is exactly where Amazon went wrong -- why go to all this effort to water down the source material to appeal to some committee-derived "Average Person" when you spent millions on an IP with a devoted, built-in audience? Even the head writers have spoken about their efforts to trick and surprise the serious fans. They singularly fail to understand that is not what makes adaptations appealing.
Amazon wanted the cultural phenomenon of GoT, and probably could have achieved it if they'd done a more politically driven story that stuck closer to the lore, cut the proto-hobbits and Gandalf completely, and taken their time with intricacies. Audiences are smarter than dead cows, in actuality. People followed GoT's large cast and scheming just fine and to HBO's great success. It was only when the show's runners started to act like the RoP show runners that GoT became a disappointment.
For Amazon, Lord of the Rings is just a name. A marketable and profitable name they don't wish to understand deeper or present it with care and love.
That's exactly that the root of all the problems are. They had no intention of bring any of the Tolkien-world to life. They just needed a big IP to attract views to generate more Prime subscribers and generate revenue, while also pushing their social narratives.
Crass commercialism over refined art, good taste and skilled craft; it's what capitalist 'corporate' America does.
Simon Tolkien signs off on it
@@christophermalpede924 Yeah, but Simon's the one who wanted Sauron to be like Walter White. I don't think even he has a very firm grasp on Middle Earth.
@@christophermalpede924 and he had daddy issues and major disagreements about family involvement in The Peter Jackson trilogy. In order to destroy every part of the lore, you must know what to destroy and how to go about it. It all makes sense.
What's missing? Love for Tolkien, soul, respect, passion, interest...
Aye!
They only have the same names. Everything else is different. And badly done, that thing has so little to do with Tolkien's world of Middle Earth, or his characters, that it doesn't really even count as a bad fanfic.
Simon Tolkien signed off on all of it my guy
Simon Tolkien signed off on it
competence
This is the only analysis I’ve come across that accurately pinpoints the actual heart of Tolkien’s story and why ROP fails so badly. Thanks for your work
Thanks for taking the time to comment! Truly 🙏
-Lack of creativity and skill.
-No respect to the source material.
-Horrible casting.
That's certainly important elements for it's downfall
Î think the the actors themself do a good job in this show, minus a couple of exceptions.
The choice of casting certain roles is mostly a bit questionable, like certain elves, that do not have elvish features and look more like humans with pointy ears.
Charlie Vickers as Annatar is very good, i think he nailed that role.
But this series feels very different than the Peter Jacksons Movies. They lack this grandeur, this immensity of this world.
In Peter Jacksons vision the elves are actually ethereal as they should be. They are tall and have great wisdom because of their age.
You can feel a big difference between an elf and a human for instance, which you cannot see in this show. All races seem to behave like humans do. Even bullying a Prince among the dwarves, like wut? Those are highschool teenager problems.
Adherence to a strict DEI policy.
@@SaithMasu12they're all ugly as sin though unfortunately
@@JayTeeGR RoP is a disaster, no doubt, but let's stop pretending Petey respected the source material. He did his own thing especially with the characters. Still, compared to RoP, Little Petey's trilogy is great.
Lack of respect for source material and specially no writing talent there.
The best that Hollywood has to offer.🙄
Plus poor casting and costumes
So you actually wanted some secret love affair between elves?
The show isn't that bad. Could be better, sure.
To be fair, Jackson didn't respect a lot of the source material. He did make Frodo wimpy and Gimli a buffoon after all. RoP is obviously worse.
@@BinaryBunyip I bet you really loved the diverse cast.
You're pretty much spot on here. It is a sadly common phenomenon that writers today are not only unable to see things from any perspective but their own, they often don't even seem to be aware that other perspectives actually exist.
I totally agree! It's quite sad, really. Some things I love about other films and shows is how they tangle something in a way I haven't seen before. For instance Ragnar Lothbrok questioning the existence of the gods, while all his countrymen are firm in their belief. They kinda butchered in the following episodes, but it was good until that point at least.
@@CounciloftheRings The example that comes to mind for me is The Pharaoh Key by Preston and Child. It's a total mess for several reasons, many of which boil down to Preston and Child lacking the imagination to see the world from any perspective other than that of their own time and place in history and society.
It's not just writers, of course, but it's a bit less excusable and much more visible when writers have this fault.
I'm surprised how many people fail to understand that the Samurai Jack universe is posited to be more consistent with Eastern religions than with Abrahamic religions. The presumption of reincarnation has major, major consequences for how the show ends. It doesn't matter if you believe reincarnation happens in the real world; in the cartoon, it presumably does.
Bad Robot is a blight on all creative media. Doesn't surprise me Payne and the other dude worked for them.
Amazon have tried to contemporise a mythological fantasy, and it just doesn't work. It's lost all its epic grandeur and heart. PJ had more sense.
It can work, though. Troy was a great movie, even if it does modernize/change things.
@@justachannel8600 Don't give Amazon ideas. 5 Seasons of The Iliad, "the story that Homer should have written". Lolol
@@justachannel8600 it wasnt popular and was considered a flop
@@richardPhilips2 Really? Interesting.
@@justachannel8600 you heard folks recomending it ? I certainly havent
This video is like a 2 hour massage and you've hit every single triggerpoint of each and every muscle in my body.
Very thankful for your effort, and hoping it reaches many, many people.
It’s the writing. All sound and fury-no depth. They aren’t trying to tell a story. They’re just trying to make a show.
EDIT: I wish I knew some people worth sharing this wonderful video with. It’s so spot on it’s nearly painful
"They aren’t trying to tell a story. They’re just trying to make a show.". These words describe it perfectly. As evident by the many, annoying references to dialogue from the lotr movies, in an effort to lure in fans of the movies to go "hey I remember that line from the movies!!!"
Great video, I loved how you delved into the themes of his work. Another thing that I find feels very anti-Tolkien about this show is it’s lack of respect for time and distance in middle earth. Characters seem to almost teleport to the other side of the map within days which is in stark contrast to Tolkien who would put thought into how many miles characters could realistically travel and how long it would take them. It’s a seemingly small thing but it helped make middle earth feel real and massive.
Yeah It's actually something that will come up in the other video "Epic stories vs Modernity". So fear not, a lot of cool stuff is coming in that regard too!
This is what made the early seasons of game of thrones so good. It took a long time for characters to get to their destination, and it made it feel like you the viewer were a part of the journey. It's also much more immersive and makes the world feel real.
@@tonysiouxfan Haven't seen GoT yet, planning on reading the books first though. I know John Howe also does a lot of illustrations for the series which is a pretty cool connection to Tolkien.
I feel the same way about the timeline compressions and the distance shortening.
Year of the Trees Galadriel gets in her time machine and shows up in S.A.1590. Elendil and Isildur are alive at the time the Rings of Power were forged.
Too many ugly decisions were made in regard to time and space.😞
I just laughed and shook my head when I realized that all the Elves that escaped were in the place that will become Rivendell. So Imladris is just behind the mountain on which Ost-in-Edhil is located, a few miles, instead of the 400 or so miles away that it is actually located.
And this was something Tolkien himself complained about in his notes on a potential animated screen adaptation in the 60s. He specifically called out the compression of time and geography as unacceptable.
The "signifying nothing" reference was perfect
Thank you! I always try to sneak in a Shakespeare reference, if I can get away with it 😂
@@CounciloftheRings
Those clowns who run the show try to sneak in Shakespearean sounding lines too.😂
@@moon-moth1
Great point!😁👍
Bear's music made each episode "bear"able for me. Pun intended.😅
Its a poor man's adaptation of Peter Jackson's films. They copied the scenes, the dialogue and used up 100 times the budget and still failed Spectacularly
Aye there's a lot of stuff taken from PJ's adaptations, no doubt!
@@CounciloftheRings taking is fine, but they copied scene exactly, the Balrog pulling the leg, Elendil unsheathing the sword, Grand-elf moron being stuck in the tree.
Not even an iota of creativity was bought using a billion dollars
"do you know why a ship floats and a stone cannot?" 💀💀 the writing is so beyond absurd and retarded... it should be called The Retards of the Rings.
I VERY much agree. Even Elrond’s casting was meant to look like a younger version of Hugo Weaving. Why was that even necessary?
poor man's , except their budget was WAY bigger than PJ's films. Amazon just doesnt care.
The thing that bothered me from the first minutes of Rings of Power was that the elves were just people with pointy ears, not ancient people. Galadriel was supposed to have walked the Earth before there was a sun to mark the days, but comes off as amazingly immature and petty. Dwarves, orcs, and hobbits were little better.
A story with truly different races allows us to see ourselves through alien eyes, or to see other things that people might be.
The writers probably behave like how Galadriel behaved in the show. Immature, grumpy and self-centered.
Portraying Elves is pretty hard I think. Peter Jackson in LotR actually didn't have to give the Elves too much screen time (apart from Legolas), so he was able to pull it off by letting them be very dignified and aloof. That approach wouldn't work with all the characters and dialogue there is in RoP. Anyway RoP have managed to mess it up in their own way.
@@vindolanda6974 I agree that writing true aliens is tricky; if you make them too alien you lose the audience. I think Babylon 5 handled it best. There were "younger races" who were different but relatable, and ancient races so advanced that they struggled to communicate with humans. Strazinsky used those differences to examine what it means to be human.
@@vindolanda6974 It would have been a challenge but could have been used to raise some very interesting philosophical questions on immortality vs mortality. Things like death in battle and what it means to be a human and give up the rest of a comparably short life vs and elf who dies giving up a millennia of life. Does an elf who lived thousands of years and accumulated so much regret, emotional and spiritual wounds view death differently? How does the promise of immortality Sauron gives to the kings of Numenor mesh with the reality the elves face? Especially since the loyal Numenorians have more contact with the elves. Even things like skills and crafts, Humans with short lives must rely on apprenticeship and sharing of knowledge to ensure the future of a craft where elves can be selfish with their skills knowing they will theoretically be alive forever to make things.
@@ColoradoStreaming I agree with you. I sometimes wonder if humans lived forever if we wouldn't go insane because of the relentless march of time and the acceleration of time as you get older, so I wonder how strange the elves must be to be able to handle immortality. You would think they hardly pro-create, so the sexual drive must be very low. And you would think they would be terrified of death because it means losing so much. On the other hand, after death they are reincarnated after some time in the halls of Mandos, so it can't be that bad. Ultimately I believe the elves must have been incredibly strange by human standards and capable of extremes of despair and of joy, but when they interact with men they just just put on this somewhat aloof, distant manner.
I think one scene exemplifies this and that is the scene of the two towers when the battalion of elves arrives and enters Helm's Deep, although it is not canonical it is great, and you can feel the grandeur of the elves, as magical, powerful beings from another world, and then when Haldir speaks poetically, but beautifully. All the money in the world could not have gotten The Rings of Power to show a scene like that.
I totally agree with you! They had majesty, they came at nightfall, a detail which so much sends to the very nature of elves, who woke up under the moonlight. Aaand, they were tall and young-looking, something you would have expected from the elves. So, even if it was a twist in the original material, the scene with the music and the horn sound before was so beautifully handled!
Fat Haldir?
'Long ago we fought and died together. '
- Haldir
What did he know and when did he know it?
Aragorn, nedin dagor hen ú-'erir ortheri. Natha daged dhaer. 'They cannot win this fight. They are all going to die!'
- Legolas
Haldir wants Gimli blindfolded in The Lord of the Rings book The Fellowship of the Ring:
Explanation
Haldir, an Elf, initially doesn't want Gimli to enter Lothlórien because he doesn't trust Dwarves. Haldir says, "We have not had dealings with the Dwarves since the Dark Days. They are not permitted in our land".
Gimli's reaction
Gimli protests, saying he should not be treated like a prisoner or beggar. He threatens to leave the Fellowship.
Aragorn's solution
Aragorn suggests that everyone in the Fellowship wear a blindfold so Gimli doesn't feel singled out. Gimli and Legolas are still unhappy, but they agree.
Gimli's experience
When Gimli's blindfold is removed, he becomes the first Dwarf to see Lothlórien in over 3,000 years. He comes to love the Elven realm and Galadriel, its leader.
Film adaptation
The blindfold plot point was not included in Peter Jackson's film adaptation of The Fellowship of the Ring. However, the film did show the animosity between Haldir and Gimli.
@@Miqlintock Awesome Haldir.
I think something else that makes ROP feel so hollow compared to Tolkien’s work is how inconsistent the characters are. Tolkien is known as the man who defined archetypes through consistent characters. Some do grow and mature (just look at Bilbo in the Hobbit), but it’s never at the comprising of their core.
In ROP, characters will flip on the whims of the story the show thinks it’s trying to tell. I’ll list some examples.
- Adar. Supposedly he cares for the orcs deeply. They are his children. And yet in the first season alone he is reckless with their lives in battle, does not punish Arondir for killing several, and needlessly burns one just to monologue. Nor does he do anything to curb their darker impulses and behaviors, and this attitude continues into season 2. Now I’m sure the showrunners might say that was the point, that he has become what he despised Sauron for. But there can be no fall if the character was never consistent with his desires in the first place. It’s lip service to an arc, not actual development.
- Sauron. In this show Sauron starts out supposedly remorseful, wanting to start a new life away from his role as the Dark Lord. He even makes the repeated claim that his fall to evil was Morgoth’s fault, and that upon Morgoth’s defeat it was “as if a veil had been lifted”. Yet we see in the prologue for season 2 that this is not true. Sauron was ready to continue being evil of his own free will and only stopped because the orcs mutinied against him. Yet his resistance to Galadriel’s attempts to get him involved in events seems genuine, and season 2’s prologue supports this as a genuine attempt to turn over a new leaf, even remarking to Galadriel in Mordor that fighting by her side for a good cause made him feel good. Yet all of this is down the drain once he wakes up in Eregion because he is now fully back on board with being evil. It’s an abrupt shift in his personality and goals with no catalyst for the change beyond “it had to happen sometime”.
(TBC)
Aye - I think the writing is some of it's weakest points. It feels like too many had their hand on it, which is why each episode also feels disconnected. "Too many cooks in the kitchen" one is tempted to say.
@@CounciloftheRings It’s like you say, it’s the writing. I watched a bunch of old sci-fi shows from the early 2000s, and what keeps me hooked aren’t the pretty visuals (they didn’t have the budgets for those) but the strength of the characters and story. That is what survived. Hope you’ll continue your 2nd Age series.
@@zirkalda9502 Yeah exactly a well-written story lives for longer than flashy explosions. That's the stuff that sticks to the soul! I certainly will!
I think their most egregious sin was what they did to Galadriel. I can't stand her, the way she is presented in the series.
@@zirkalda9502
That's why the original Star Trek series was so successful for so many decades.
"Full of sound and fury, signifying nothing."
Very well put.
You can sum it up with this, Galadriel has seen the light of the trees, and whoever wrote ROP doesn’t understand what that means.
Well their Galadriel sure doesn't act like she's older than the Sun, which she is in universe.
The points regarding the over-analysation of evil and importance of heeding wisdom were very well-thought out. Splendid stuff!
Thank you! I think Bradley Birzer also dives into the topic very well in his book; “J.R.R. Tolkien’s Sanctifying Myth”. 😁
For me, a big part of why the show doesn‘t feel like the movies is the music. It just is not reminiscent of the great and unique themes which Howard Shore wrote for the movies. The only exception is the Intro theme, which - would you look at that - is written by Howard Shore.
I was going to comment similarly. I always thought the intro music was good. I had no clue who created it! Glad i know now!
The score is arguably the best part of rop
All due respect, I completely agree. Think what you will of the quality of the rest of the show, but Bear BcCreary's score is by far and away the best part of it. Listen to or read one of his interviews about his creation of it and his passion and respect for the gravitas of the material really seeps through.
I think that the mindset was to fix lotr instead of adapting it. Fantasy inspired by Tolkien has evolved and the showrunner want to "modernize" lotr.
Orks were at the beginning mostly swordfodder, but in latee depiction they got more nuanced. Do these modern interpretations of the orks work with lotr? I think not.
Also the grey in grey morality that is more in common in modern media doesn't work with lotr. If Sauron is not that bad, then it is not that bad when he rules middle earth.
Rings of power has more in common with these infamous bad live action adaptions from Disney then their source material.
Yeah, well, if this is before Lotr, where did all the diverse people go in the third age ? Makes literally 0 sense.
Excellent analysis, you managed to express in one 24 minute video what other youtubers tried to say in hundreds of hours of videos, and thousands of viewers in tens or maybe even hundreds of thousands of comments. Congratulations! 🏆
@@Herbert_Eder thank you!
You never fail to make me think about Tolkien's works in a different way than i did before.
Glad to hear it! It's what the channel is all about, really! My own view has also developed over time!
what’s missing are enough extras on set.
Galadriel’s “northern army” is but a handful of soldiers. The Northern half- platoon, more like.
Durin’s army is like 8 dwarves 😂
Why did the "hobbits" name Gandalf? He was given that name by the men Anor! Oh and he doesn't appear until the 3rd age! The Balrog fought and killed Durin the 6th, hence the name, Durins Bane!
The Rings of Power doesn’t feel like Tolkien’s world simply because it isn’t. It’s beyond disrespectful and delusional to think they could do better than his work.
When the Elves being the Firstborn and greatest creation of Eru Iluvatar looks like a cosplay meet up at NYC with a mix of different skin colours and being short and old which btw is a TOTAL MISCAST so the uniqueness and awe and beauty and grace of the Eldar feels like discount Target.
Maybe your just bigot who can't handle a few asian hobbits
What really got me was that the used spandex/fabric with chainmail pattern...instead of real chainmail like the OG movies did. The passion and LOVE for the source material shows in those movies, and RoP has...none of that imo. I dont feel it at all. It feels like a cash grab. I couldnt even finish a single episode, it made me so depressed.
Solid analysis.. The more I watch ROP the more I want to read Tolkien's LOTR books to educate myself on his lore.
Simon Tolkien signed off on it
@@christophermalpede924Simon Tolkien signed off on pumping his grandfathers work so he can summer 365 days a year.
To answer the question in the thumbnail:
The soul.
Watching the Wrongs of Power is like watching a poor quality exploatation film: Terminator vs CyberCop etc. If Roger Corman got the budget of the Wrongs of Power he would create a Masterpiece but those dumb talentless Amazon people can't do anything right. Even the visuals of P.Jackson films made decades ago look way better using miniatures, limited cgi and camera tricks
You summed up The Rings of Power perfectly at the end. It has no soul. A jumble of weird, pointless plot lines, shallow characters and no sense of a heroic tale being told. The mystery and majesty is stripped out of the characters in place of over art-directed CGI locations. Well, it was written by Americans. They walked away from all that Tolkien breathed into LOTR probably because they don't have the education to understand it fully. They threw out the over-riding Catholic morality, the Nordic and mythic richness of the story-telling and create what? A perky, silly, rambling quasi sit-com set in Nowhere in Particular. They would probably have produced a version of the Odyssey, for example, that would feel more like a current season of Survivor.
Your analysis of how characters of different ages are presented and the "young ones know better" was fascinating to me. Especially given that the show makes out that Galadriel is relatively young when she's actually the second oldest Elf in the story after Cirdan.
Ironically the show writers think Galadriel knows best when she's actually a complete moron the way they present her.
Thank you for this spot-on analysis, that was refreshingly in-depth and philosophical! The foundations of our morality are at war with modern entertainment. We must take on this fight and bring back the tales and heroes of the past. Loved your structure and conclusion! Subscription well-earned!
Thank you! And welcome to the Council 😁🤗
This video found me because I have been watching a lot of content about what is wrong with RoP. And I think your video has the best analysis I have seen so far. I look forward to watching your previous videos on the topic as well as Tolkien in general.
Thanks! 😁
Good work as usual. Whatever happened to your second age series ?
Thanks! It’s currently on hold while the channel grows. It’s still in development though. I hope to have some free-time again in February, but first I have to finish my bachelor ☺️
Well, what is missing apart from the team's worldview being completely antithetical to Tolkien's? They are msising all the literary theory of the early XX century, like all the theory of fiction the Inkling's themselves developed, take for example Talking of Bicycles of C S Lews. Hell, if you take what the actors and producers talked about overtly in interviews and such, it is almost a item by item opposition to what Tolkien explains of his process and goals in On Fairy Stories
Appreciate the perspective you bring to this! I have a contrary thought:
As a filthy lefty atheist who also despises what they've done with Tolkien's world, I wanna throw out that the rejection of the religious undertones of the Legendarium isn't the REASON for it not feeling like Lord of the Rings-the Jackson films, for example, are at best agnostic on the religiosity and theology of the work, yet are still able to brilliantly capture its tone and themes (despite a few alterations to the story). Rather, the rejection of these elements is a SYMPTOM of the actual problem.
One can reject Catholic theology/doctrine and still respectfully portray Tolkienian themes around power and its corrupting influence, death and the desire for deathlessness, the nature of heroism and suffering, great people from humble beginnings, and the importance of mercy even for "evil" people while opposing evil forces at every turn. (Even the idea that there is an All-Good Creator Being *in the fiction of the story* can be written by an author who does not believe that is how the real world works, in the same way that one can write a story about a magic ring needing to be thrown into a volcano in the absence of real magic rings.)
The problem is ultimately that the writers (and/or the executives behind the project) have a fundamental disinterest in portraying these themes *in a way that respects the world Tolkien built*. The writers have an idea of the story they want to tell, the scenes they want to show, and the characters they want to play with, and they'll do it regardless of how it impacts the source material. This is MILES worse than disagreeing with the Legendarium's philosophical underpinnings, or even fundamentally misunderstanding them-it is consciously *DISREGARDING* them.
This is, of course, aside from the story itself simply being mediocre even on its own terms: disengaging dialogue, inconsistent characterization and worldbuilding, poor thematic cohesion, and a problem with TELLING us about the scale of events while lacking the ability to convincingly SHOW that scale. Even if they completely bought into Tolkienian philosophy, these issues would remain.
"filthy lefty atheist"
How is that "filthy"?
Well, leaving aside the deeper themes, the series just didn't capture the epic scope of Middle Earth or the nature of the ancient beings that populate it. Just as a brief comparison, Cate Blanchett managed to find the nobility, grandeur, power and even the torment of a being too strong to be corrupted by the ring but destined to fade from the world just the same. Morfydd Clark on the other hand, is utterly incapable of conveying anything about the Galadriel we all know. Worse than that, she's terrible at portraying the absurd version of Galadriel the show gives us.
It's missing a lot. But if you want to summarize it in one word:
HEART
Why doesnt deadpool feels like LOTR ? ... i feel like answer is the same.
There is at least one reference to Eru in Amazon’s show. Adar refers to Orcs (sorry, Uruks) as being children of “the One” too.
None of that excuses the awful writing in so many places (the Elves will take our jerbs!), the plots that don’t make sense (a wizard needing Tom Bombadil as a teacher???), and the jamming together of whatever they do have licensed (Tom Bombadil, Ents, Barrow Wights), et cetera.
Re: Peter Jackson though, his films show “presentism” as well. Let’s recall that many people who knew the books were furious about PJ’s films for their many deviations from the books - which among other things were called politically correct and done for corporate profit and to please a younger, modern audience. Christopher Tolkien hated the films (“eviscerated the book,” “a monster, devoured by his own and absorbed into the absurdity of our time”). There was fury over Arwen replacing Glorfindel and being a female elf with a sword!!! on a horse!!! taunting the Nazgûl!!! It was expressly called “politically correct,” which term has simply been replaced by “woke” now (and that Arwen would be called a “girl boss” now). Think of how PJ made Aragorn a reluctant hero to suit modern tastes. Same with making Frodo a ~20-year-old ingénue, instead of a tougher 50-year-old. And PJ erased the class hierarchy in the Shire, making Sam Frodo’s drinking buddy instead of his servant.
Personally, I find almost all of PJ’s changes to be no problem as adaptations for film (don’t get me started on the phony scene where Frodo shows the Ring to a Nazgûl in Osgiliath though). The Amazon show’s deviations could be more tolerable if they just made some kind of sense - which they just don’t in so, so many ways.
Adar’s line got me confused though. “Uruks are also children of the One…” isn’t correct though, is it?
So the one mention of Eru in RoP is wrong.
It just doesn't look like Middle Earth. From then on there's no polishing a turd.
Have any one of you felt any thing similar to all the "characters" dying in epic scenes in RoP like you felt when you saw the death of Boromir in LotR? Not even when Galadriel fell to her death 100 of meters after being stabbed to her heart I felt anything ... but like heroes in modern StarWars films don't die when cut with laser swords, a stab in the heart and a fall of more than 100 meters doesn't do anything to your body ...
It is true that friendship and unity are two of the many rich themes of the Legendarium, and there are many examples in the Trilogy that illustrate that beautifully. But the world of this series is steeped in allegory of modern day politics, trading on contemporary ideologies revolving around content that wasn't there in the text to begin with. Gone is the moral certitude of the world and its author, in its place is this typical Hollywood moral relativism, resulting jarring experience. You haven't created a series that supports a great aspiration of people coming together in friendship to resist a great evil, you've taken the most superficial veneer of that great Secondary World and corrupted it with moral myopia and abysmal characters who range from incompetent oafs to to being little different from the orcs and the Dark Lord.
Couldn't agree more. Postmodernist crap.
I have seen many people accuse the show of being morally reativist, filled with morally grey characters etc, but I don't see it. The villains are evil and at the most they (claim to) have good intentions (which doesn't make one good) and the heroes have mostly minor flaws and do small bad things like lying or yelling (which doesn't make one evil)
None of the villains felt symphatethic: Sauron never does anything selfless and does a TON of heinously evil stuff - he says he wants to "heal the world" but that is an obvious lie given his actions; Adar claims to just want to be in peace but goes out of his way to hurt people and make war, making him a liar as well; the orcs are consistently violent and cruel - there's that one orc with the kid but 1. one not-evil orc doesn't make all orcs not evil, 2. having a kid doesn't make one not evil, and 3. that orc goes ahead and does evil stuff anyways, confirming that he is indeed evil. Which one of these was I supposed to sympathise with, again?
As for the heroes, how is any of them evil, let alone as evil as *Sauron?* They are stupid and incompetent (mostly by accident because the writers can't write) but not evil. I can't recall any genuinely bad thing any of them does, the worst probably being Galadriel lying to Celebrimbor and other people, and Elrond to Durin (which those characters shouldn't have done, the writing is bad). Which of the heroes was I supposed to hate?
You can argue that the heroes in the story (ancient elves) shouldn't have these flaws, but it's a far cry to say lying makes them as bad as the villains who consistently commit horrid deeds like murder, torture, slavery, destroying villages etc
20:45 finally somebody mentions this. thank you.
There is no Tolkien in rings of power, just cheap imitation, and not even a good imitation at that
If the LOTR trilogy was a graceful beautiful unicorn, Rings of power would be a bloated diseased rhino pretending to be a unicorn
Because it is not remotely close to Lord of the Rings. It's nothing more than a thin veneer of Tolkien slapped on the story the people behind the show decided to tell and using Tolkien's name and various other things lifted from Tolkien's writings to attract an audience they would have otherwise never gotten. And they couldn't even make their own story anything close to being a good one.
True. And Season 3 is on the way to a Prime Video channel near you.😞
It's because the choice of actors is ridiculous, and the scenario is written like it was meant for kids in kindergarten.
I just wanted to hop in and say how much I resonated with what you discussed in your video. In so many ways I have struggled to convey why I felt this show lacked any real relation to Tolkien, and why I have always felt it be more a very average fan-fiction or generic fantasy show. It lacks a soul, specifically the soul Tolkien gave his work. Thank you for this video! I am defs going to reference it whenever I want to explain these points to my friends!
Awesome! Thank you and I'm glad you liked it! Maybe your friends will like it too 😁
It doesn't feel like Middle Earth because of the contempt for the source materiel (that they consistently ignore), the bad writing, the inept direction, the mediocre acting.
Rings of power doesnt feel like LOTR because its too fantastical. Nothing feels believable.
Nowadays everyone treats the LotR movies as the gold standard for Tolkien's work and everything is compared to that. The gold standard should be the books themselves. The movies were very good but far from perfect and deliberately altered things which meant they also 'felt' different to the books. Don't forget Christopher Tolkien himself completely dismissed them. When the movies are used as the main reference point things from Tolkien get lost, like making a photocopy of a photocopy.
Comedic Relief Gimli who suggested to Aragorn that he should break an oath.
Probably my favorite video that you've made so far. Thanks!
Wow, thanks! Glad to hear it! There's so much more coming like it! This was only a smooth transition, to some extend 😁
@@CounciloftheRings
Great! Bring 'em on!!😀👍
It's the same story as the Star Wars sequels. What happened was an example of a corporation buying the rights to an existing franchise and story for purposes of brand recognition. Having the right to reuse R2-D2 or Gandalf will result in commercial success, according to these people. They just buy the rights and then all the effort just stops there.
Not sure I agree with you completely on gender roles and presentism. After all, pre-presentism, female characters in Tolkien’s world are pretty amazing. Not all of them but enough to be significant. I don’t like the term “girl boss”. There are bosses who are girls. The problem is they didn’t capture Galadriel. She’s both awe inspiring and a slender elf woman. The idea that she would be as deferential to Gil-Galad as the ROP makes her is absurd. But it’s also absurd that she’s a commander of an elf army. That’s like a standing army? Really? Not likely. The tears are excessive and the depiction of the orcs is unlikely to be warm and fuzzy. I doubt they reproduce peacefully. I’ve always pictured orc reproduction as more along the lines of a puppy mill. Yeah, we should feel sorry that they were corrupted at the beginning but there are limits.
You are absolutely right about some casting taking us out of the story. Disa makes sense; Asian elf archer doesn’t. And I don’t really buy the idea that for a viewer to feel included and represented, there must be characters that look like them. We don’t make these demands on TV series like Succession. Even Game of Thrones didn’t do this and it was still wildly entertaining for 6 seasons. So, why ROP? For that matter, why is the Wheel of Time so diverse? If diversity is what the audience is craving why not pick a more suitable SF/fantasy series like the Broken Earth Trilogy by NK Jemison? Why not do the book Maia by Richard Adams? I just don’t buy the argument the showrunners are pitching wrt this approach especially after I sat through Beef on NetFlix and can’t remember a single non-Asian character. I didn’t feel excluded by that because it was a good story with great characters.
And in the end, that’s what ROP lacks: a good story with great characters whose motivations make sense.
how does Disa make sense? She's actually one of the worst depicted characters in the entire show. She looks, nor acts, anything like I'd imagine a female dwarf to be. One, she has no beard. Female dwarves have beards. Even Gimly spoke at length about this in Return of the King. Second, she's obnoxiously over confident and not sub servient to her husband and king. From every bit of lore I've ever read about dwarves, they're a very male-dominated society. So, for ROP to go against that and insert a female dominant character into that type of society is just plainly wrong.
@@DJCyRo well, since we’ve never seen a female dwarf, and for all we know, they shave, I just think she easily meets my expectations of a female dwarf. She was one of my favorite characters in season 1.
In season 2, no character was safe from the people they call writers.
And male dominated societies are not a good thing.
@@DJCyRo
Actually Dísa is one of my few new characters in TRoP that I actually like.😅
She is a perfect wife for Prince Durin and will make a perfect Dwarven Queen.
@@kimhaas7586
I think modern men need a wife like Dísa. My wife is very close to that. Men need to be called out, stopped from doing stupid things, and encouraged when things are going badly. Dísa does that and more for Prince Durin.😁👍
@@kimhaas7586 Again, well established lore clearly shows that female dwarves have beards. Your reasoning is doing the same thing RoP is doing…..putting a modern and incorrect spin on lore. Whether you think a male dominated society is a good thing or not doesn’t matter. It isn’t America, it’s Middle Earth. If RoP is going to tell the story, at least do it right.
Woah, final line quoting Shakespeare??
Subscribed.
Welcome to the Council! 🧙♂️🤗
When you strive for moral relativism in a setting that is founded on actual moral principles of good & evil, you end up with a narrative that is as shallow as a puddle because that's ultimately all that can be produced when you seek to inject "equality" into a good & evil dynamic.
All of a sudden Sauron isn't a fallen angel figure and an elemental force of evil and darkness in the world... he's a misunderstood and nobly driven woobie who's just trying to cope with his own abuses at the hands of a tormentor and wants to make the world a better place...
The Elves go from being a people of high ideals and paragons of moral principles... to just guys and gals with pointy ears and despite supposedly centuries and even millennia of wisdom have no more intellect than a millennial hipster
The Numenoreans go from being the absolute pinnacle of humanity and representative of all the best _and_ worst aspects of Man who are driven by pride (and to a degree justified pride) and a fear of mortality and jealousy of the supposed divine favor of the elves... to a bunch of poorly conceived Cali Elitist concept of rural Americans worried about "Dem Elves comin to take er jerbs!"
The Hobbits, who weren't even a thing in the 2nd age to begin with, go from being a rustic and simple rural community of chill weed-smoking lovers of the land... to a cultish group of muderous nomads who's crazy belief system would have resulted in their extinction a long time ago... basically just hippies complete with an utter lack of any understanding of how to run or manage a community.
Gandalf went from a wise angelic being in the form of a mortal who wanders the world and moves pieces around the grand board of Middle-Earth in a desperate attempt to counter Sauron while still appreciating the peoples of the very world he's trying to save... now he's just a dumb hobo wandering around a desert with a couple of child-sized people in search of a shaft he can grab and ultimately "gets his name" in the dumbest way possible despite Gandalf not even being his true name at all but merely one of the many names he was most fond of because the people who like to call him that, the hobbits (the real ones not the murder hobos of RoP) are pretty much his favorite group to hang out with.
Arandir is just pointless, his story was pointless his presence was pointless, and what little story he was gonna have was pretty much scrapped when the more important character in his story, Branwen, was written out because the actress had the good sense to bail on this failure of a series.
The Orcs, a vile yet tragic race of creatures literally created and molded into tools of war and destruction... nope now they just wanna grill and have a place where they can raise their little orclings... no, wait now they're psychotic and evil again and seem to relish in destruction... oh wait, nope they're just misunderstood again and are feeling sad that they're being used as fodder for a war they don't wanna fight... and now they're gleefully slaughtering elves and having a grand old time... what are the orcs supposed to be in this show again? I don't think the writers really knew themselves.
Then there's Galadriel, the Lady of Light, one of the oldest and wisest of all the elves in Middle-Earth... now just an butt kicking warrior chick who's supposed to be the greatest warrior and commander of elves yet the actress is terrible at choreography so it just makes her look silly while trying to be badass... and despite all this her character is massively diminished from the _actual_ badass she was in the source material, a woman of great age and wisdom who was never fooled by Sauron even for a moment and who stood against him as he sought to undermine and corrupt the elves... nope now she's part of Galadrion Ship or whatever.
And finally, the eponymous Rings of Power themselves... which apparently now are all The One Ring since they all seem to just instantly corrupt their wearers and make them incredibly bonkers in a matter of hours if King Durin's sudden shift from a semi-interesting character into a cartoon caricature is anything to go by. The 16 rings, all of which were intended to be given to the elves in the first place and thus would not have different designs and certainly not "dwarven" designs, are now specifically made for the different people Sauron attempts to corrupt, but are made out of order which shatters the cohesion of the plot and now requires characters like Celebrimbor to be unbelievably stupid just to keep the broken remnants of the plot limping along... but given that Celebrimbor didn't even know what an alloy was I guess that's in character for him.
What is missing? Er, let's see: talent, competence, intelligence, imagination, creativity, integrity, sense of ridicule, respect, common sense; knowledge and understanding of the source material... I think that's it.
besides the coherent writing and narrative structure, the secret sauce of peter jackson's films is that they felt REAL. hobbiton felt like a real place. the world felt lived in. this is rare among any fantasy adaptation and unfortunately ROP is one of many that fail to pass the test.
It would require quality writers to bring the universe to life.
@@Corungil not even necessarily the writing, although obviously it's not as good. the set designs, costumes, etc. in LOTR felt very real. ROP is very good visually, but it still feels like you're watching a fantasy rather than a depiction of real places and stories that could've existed.
@@Corungil also feel like the way the characters talk plays a factor. the writing was better, but the actors all delivered their lines normally. in ROP it feels like all the characters are putting on airs and trying to make themselves sound profound.
@@MDK384 Except Peter Mullan who plays king Durin. That guy can really bring a character to life. He's an amazing actor.
@@MDK384 And, .. if I am to be fair, I loved Morfydd Clark (Galadriel) in "Saint Maude". I think maybe this role is not right for her. Mainly because of the way the character is written.
Your Frodo as a priest parallel got me thinking how the Old Testament highpriest was prescribed to enter the Holy of Holies in the Temple, bringing the blood of atonement for the sins of all people and spill it on top of the Ark of the Covenant. Frodo enters mount Doom to drop the physical embodiment of sin into the fires that would destroy it, and thus bring salvation for "this year"
5:20 A lot of the more fantastical elements found in The Hobbit, like the trolls' talking purse and the talking birds, can be attributed to the book being Bilbo's autobiography, which he frequently embellished for his audience, and I don't read Turin's sword talking to be literal as much as a projection of his own conscience. But that's one of the many things that makes Tolkien's writings so fascinating to read, his narrators are unreliable, which combined with the many different versions of some of his stories, allows for a lot of freedom of imagination and speculation. (To be clear, I am NOT trying to excuse talentless hacks for disregarding the things that Tolkien did make abundantly clear.)
Aye, I agree! It's true we can't know for certain if these two objects could actually talk - but it is still presented as 'the truth' without anyone questioning it. For long I too also thought it was just Túrin's mind, but I find it more interesting if it's not. The sword certainly had a personality of its own and also had a unique origin. It's fun to never know the true answer.
I think the talking birds are correct enough, whether you mean the ravens, thrushes or Great Eagles. Those can be found elsewhere too - They can't all be making up stuff, haha.
Cheers! 🧙♂️
Who could have heard Gurthang speak at that time? No one but Turin and a dead Glaurung were there. So someone made it up.
I've been watching a lot of LOTR UA-cam channels and I feel confident in saying that you just spoke to an aspect of LOTR which was very dear to Tolken but it's one that isn't spoken about much by content creators. To that end, I don't have any feedback on your content in this video other than to say, you're spot on.
Two small editing suggestions,
- Your editing of each chapter is a continuous stream. It's unnatural. Readers need to take breaths, and they would also have the occasional pause. It seems that you've edited out most of these pauses while you've stitched everything together. Leave those pauses in, they are valuable. An easy place to start adding more pauses would be around your chapters. You tend to read the chapter title and then immediately get into it.
- The second suggestion would be inflection. The range of your voice started to come alive in chapter 9. If you could speak with your whole register like you do in Ch. 9 then your narrations would be more engaging. Ch 2-4 sounded like you were reading from a script whereas 9 you were reciting from memory and from the heart.
Thank you! Really useful feedback! Cheers
Thank you..another thoughtful and interesting analysis of both Tolkien’s work, and the limp ROP. I always feel smarter after your words. I have enjoyed Tolkien for over 50 years, but I am no scholar. I made a study of his work, specifically LOTR as my year 12 English, as a full project, year long, and yet I barely understood the most important aspects at that age. Tolkien managed to make the world of fairies, elves and goblins into a serious and deeply moving world. The origin of man, from the ancient Numenorians was especially significant, at least to me. It created a deep and ancient past, something to aspire to in life. Overall, it is a masterpiece of wide expanse.
ROP is so flawed and shallow, and the writers and producers have absolutely failed to portray any worthy aspects to any race of beings in this world. Truly worthless, pop culture garbage that is insulting and offensive to the original material. They failed to give us one single character that I deem worthy to survive…even Gandalf…seems to me the writers cast every single character as a weak, flawed facile being that lacks the essential essences of the race depicted. All are greedy, egotistical, unreliable, driven by anger, and lacking patience, wisdom, courage. ROP has stripped the most important and fundamental traits from every race. Including orcs. A waste of effort by Amazon, and a blight on filmmaking. It deserves mockery and contempt.
If you want a good introduction to the deeper stuff, I highly recommend Bradley Birzer's "J.R.R. Tolkien's Sanctifying Myth" then followed by Tom Shippey's "The Road to Middle-earth". Not exactly easy reads, but if you love the subject you'll certainly keep reading. My only complaint is that they are too short! Hahaha
Probably the first analysis video I’ve seen to really hit the nail on the head and tackle the underlying problems that most critics dance around or don’t understand themselves. Great video!
Thanks a lot! Really glad to hear it! 🙏❤️
20:45 Do you get to the Grey Havens very often? Oh, what am I saying - of course you don’t.
I think I'm missing the point here?
@@CounciloftheRings Sorry - that’s a line from a Skyrim npc. I was tickled by you calling the RoP version of Grey Havens as a Skyrim town. I was thinking same thing - it’s meant to be this grand city and then you get there and it’s two houses and an inn. I guess if you have to explain it, though, it didn’t work. Apologies!
@@Goldenspiderducck Hahhaha now it makes sense! I haven't played Skyrim in years! I guess it's time to get back to it!
I understood that reference
Lol, RoP's "Gray Havens" wishes it had a cloud district.
Well, I guess the easiest way to answer that is to say that they're not using a Tolkien story at all.
Excellent video. I think I'm going to watch this again to really consider what you brought up, but on a first pass viewing there were some really interesting points I'd like to personally explore.
I recently read Tolkien's essay on fairy-tales and it was a fascinating read, if not simply to show how much thought he put into each and every decision made in the crafting of middle earth. There's no frivolity in it, and it's not "Just fantasy, get over it".
It's a great read! I read it some months ago! Keep in mind he wrote it in 1939, before The Lord of the Rings. You can still see how it's all woven together and LotR is truly a work that proves his line of thought.
Thoroughly enjoyed this thank you, especially the idea of presentism. For me the source of the problem is modern writing 'courses' or writing 'education'. I did a screenwriting course and there you are taught to create all characters with understandable motivations, and that you should understand your characters or see them as a person sitting in front of you with whom you can have a conversation. All characters MUST have a backstory or reason (point of view). The whole process feels like a writing 'recipe' that you should follow. I get that for many genres or stories this works, but in the case of Tolkien, exploring the point of view of evil should not be touched- it should not be seen as a character that you can articulate. All characters should have a point of view yes, but you don't need to show it.
“Low quality props” I will at least defend the props-work of my dear friends and fellow swordsmiths; Peter Lyon and his apprentice Chris Menges at Weta Workshop who made all the swords for season 1! (They did not work on season 2)
While the designs they were given and tasked to make were unfortunately not their own designs, and sadly they were not given creative-freedom to make them as good as I know they wished they could’ve: they did the damned best with what they were given, and I know that’s true of many other friends & colleagues who are artists and craftsmen that worked on the show. I can’t defend every prop and design, but had to at least defend my friends at Weta who did the weapons and orc makeup for season 1.
It’s just a sad damn shame that so much good art for the show was overshadowed and wasted on such a cringey terrible script.
Yeah I don't think the swords are a weak point of the show - I think it's some of the best elements actually (Even though I don't think the horse-association with Númenor makes sense). Narsil looks good, Pharazôn's sword, Aranrúth & Tuor's axe (at least the concept art). The Dwarven axes are a bit crude (not as weird as in The Hobbit, though).
I think the make-up for the orcs is some of the best parts of the show (there's a few extras with questionable performances, but that's a different issue).
It was mainly regarding the rings, the costumes, armours, helmets (especially these), the pickaxe of king Durin (looks like plastic) and in a few instances the teeth of some of the orcs. There's probably some more stuff, but this comes to mind.
And yes I totally agree that so much of the good stuff from the show gets overshadowed by the bad elements. I think the concept art is 10 times better than the end result, which also seems to indicate the ideas were better, but the execution dragged down some things. I also think the music is decent - not on par with Howard Shore, Hans Zimmer and James Horner, but who really is? I think Bear McCreary could in time become almost that good, but he needs more experience (not through games, but actual shows).
I think the Orc make-up in Season 1 was better than that of Season 2, which in many cases went overboard on applying prosthetics and make-up.
@@CounciloftheRings The helmets of the Elves in the battle of Eregion were bad. Really really bad. Not saying your friends did that, CedarloreForge. I'm just pointing it out.
The only positive I can take from this show, impressive visuals aside, is the hope that more people are brought to the Professors works.
Yeah it sounds like it at least
RoP feels like LotR reimagined by orcs.
🤣🤣🤣
Second hand Orcs at that.
Orcs who have somehow been corrupted into an even more degenerate mockery of life 🤔
The one time this show got something right was when Sauron was revealed as Anatar, Lord of the Rings, in supernatural form. Did these producers even read Tolkien's books? Tolkien's Bombadil was a colorful, happy, excentric person. ROP Bombadil seemed drab, dreary, and depressed. At least the Balrog seemed to be like the Balrog, in Jackson's LOTR.
Beautifully encapsulated
I agree with everything shared here. I have found my place!
To me, TROP feels like I am watching Krull, or Ator the Fighting Eagle, or Beast Master, or Barbarian Queen.... It just plays like a campy 80s sword and sorcery movie to me. Those at least I could enjoy because they didn't take themselves seriously.
It doesn't feel like a world that has geography. The later seasons of GoT had the same problem people and armies just appearing because the plot wants them to.
Incredible video. You nailed it. Agree 100% with every point made in the conclusion! Thank you!
Thank you! 🙏
Because its written by people who do not know or even like LOTR. They have completely disregarded the lore, timeline and what made LOTR
It's missing Tolkien.
@@daruddock well I don’t really want to give Amazon any excuse for writing such a crap show, but if they had any excuse it would be the licensing. Some things they simply can’t touch because they aren’t allowed to. Which is one of the reasons why to not watch. It’s a pure money grab by Amazon.
missing: any connection to the source material. just some names taken from it
Presentism - the most important time is...now. The most important place is here (wherever that is). The most important person is me - and my close coterie. ROP in a nutshell both as presented and the mindset of the conceivers
Because there are no good actors except for the guy who plays Sauron. And even he is a stretch sometimes. They also aren’t even close when it comes to the order in which things took place
One thing I've noticed with modern interpretations of fantasy and science fiction is that modern writers can't seem to allow for non-humans to behave in a non-human fashion. I think it's a huge problem in ROP, but I've also noticed it happening with Doctor Who and Star Trek. The elves in ROP aren't ethereal, don't stand out physically from humans, and seem motivated by the same factors as humans despite not being human. I saw one critic mocking a scene in the last episode (or might have been second to last - my brain is trying to tune it all out) where Galadriel rescues the elf women and children, and several of the elf women are chubby and short. And you could probably have black or Asian or whatever race elves if you felt it was necessary, but they should be tall, ethereal, and have a bearing that clearly marks them as "elf." The model Iman, for example, might make a great elf. And it's not just a race thing - the same problem carries over to the white elves - they're short, Gil-Galad looks like a 42 year old gym teacher with a double chin, Galadriel is short and just "regular" pretty - she's not an imposing ethereal beauty oozing grace and wisdom, and if Celebrimbor wasn't introduced as an elf, no one would think he was anything but some middle-aged man who is good at making rings. I know many have said it, but it's really true - the whole thing looks like either cosplay or community theatre acting out fan fiction.
A big issue related to the first is that Galadriel should not even be the main character here. Something that works well in LOTR is the insertion of the Hobbits - they represent the "every man" who just wants to live a decent life, but gets caught up in evil. In the face of evil, the "every man" can either submit or stand up and fight despite knowing they are physically no match for the evil threatening them and everything they love. The reader/viewer can relate to this. It inserts genuine heroism into the story beyond the heroism of characters one would expect to be naturally strong and brave. When you make elves the main characters, you have to try to make the viewer relate to them - so in the case here, the showrunners did that by making the elves more like regular people. Which ended up making the elves feel lame and unimpressive. I guess they tried to have the side story with the not-Hobbits, but that was so not-compelling that they backed away from it in season 2, leaving the viewer to try to connect to elves who don't look or act like elves.
Overall, I just find this whole show depressing. The world could use a story about true good triumphing over true evil right now. We don't need villains who cry while they torture people. ROP had everything going for it - a basically unlimited budget, Peter Jackson willing to help, Tom Shippey, a ready-made audience craving something warm and alive and triumphant and beautiful - but they threw it all in a dumpster for seemingly no reason. It's just confusing.
I couldn't agree more with you
Yes, the elves feel rather pedestrian here and too disparate. They aren't ethereal; they're too human. The Gil-galad comment made me bust out laughing. I was going to suggest tax accountant, but gym teacher works too.
"One thing I've noticed with modern interpretations of fantasy and science fiction is that modern writers can't seem to allow for non-humans to behave in a non-human fashion."
The same thing happens with contemporary D&D.
A possible (probable?) answer to your question - the missing sense of ‘authenticity’, that was so clearly in evidence in the love and care on display, in Jackson’s masterly trilogy.
Because it's not. It's the fever dream of two nitwits who were handed the reins to a show for which they were completely out of their depth and massively unprepared to work on.
I don't share all of your observations, for example about Tom being just a hermit. I found it fitting. However later in the video you absolutely nail it: longing for the past was the essence of the Tolkien's writing. For times of legend, heroes, long forgotten myths.
This presentism totally flips the script.
Amazing and beautifully structured! Great insights!
Thanks so much!
3 things are missing: morality, intelligence and soul.
What I truly do not understand is how Payne, a devout Mormon, has managed to excise almost all of the spiritual aspects of Tolkien's work.
@@michelibarra191 do explain
@@michelibarra191 which rings and realms?
Because Mormons hate Catholics
Christianity is not a monolith.
In his interview with Matt of Nerd of the Rings, he said he drew inspiration from the Book of Mormon.
Then why is he doing a show where the characters are smitten with evil? Why was he promoting empathy to an evil character who is supposed to be the literal devil incarnate.
Tusind tak for denne gennemgang! Keep it up! ;)
❤
Excellent video! Perfect description of the point of TLOR as Tolkien put. As a religious person (Christian), I agree completely. Thank you for your hard work and honouring Tolkien's work.
Thank you very much! ❤
Nice touch with Macbeth quote at the end, quite fitting. I wish it were not.
Thanks! It’s even more fitting considering my other channel is called Macbeth of Gondor 😁
Great take on that! I always felt similar, but I couldn't quite put my finger on it or put it into a concise words, as you did.
Easy answer to what is missing: Good writers