Rings of Power is antithetical to what Tolkien wrote. For example, the whole POINT of LOTR is that you cannot use the evil of the ring to defeat evil…Boromir thought he could, and look what happened to him. Yet the message of Rings of Power is “To know the light you have to touch the darkness”. They are consciously and deliberately corrupting Tolkien’s work to be the opposite of what he wanted!
As a mild devil's advocate, the original Wood Elves in the Hobbit book are elves who live in deep shadow - shadow that utterly blinds, drives to madness, and is full of menacing eyes to the dwarves. Despite this however, the Wood Elves are still good of heart - good-folk. While they have a negative disposition to the dwarves for past misgivings, they do not stoop to torture, and feed the dwarves well (are welcome reprieve to the difficulty of the murky woods). These are elves who have never seen the light of valinor, but are still inherently good. And one of Tolkien's greater themes is hospitality in far and distant places. In the same way Thorin's company finds respite with Elrond and Beorn, they find (some) hospitality with Thranduil (who was only asking the truth of why they were in his lands and disrupting their merriment). Meanwhile in Rings of Power, Galadriel scours at the idea her food is poisoned despite being adrift, Hobbits will desert each other on superstition, and fleeing villagers didn't remember to bring more than a bag of food. Amazing.
That depends how you are defining 'evil', now doesn't it? Bottom line is that if there are no good options, the best thing to do is choose the least bad option, which I would define as the option that results in the least amount of harm. You can disagree with the general principle if you want, but to treat the whole of consequentialist philosophy as though it's some kind of evil Satanic corruption is ludicrous in the extreme.
I feel like the message should be "sometimes you have to FACE the dark" because that's the job of a hero. To face the darkness within themselves. Not give into it sometimes...
"Even if you fight for something you think is good, if you do something worse in that fight, then you become evil." They apparently write a Galadriel threatening to taunt Adar(?) by torturing and killing every one of his 'children' in front of his eyes before she kills him. By their own standards, they have written one of the greatest and noblest characters in the entire mythology as evil.
I watched that brief scene and that was exactly my thought, too. The villain was actually more empathetic than the now evil Galadriel. So, the writers are the true evil ones.
As writers they probably understand that every great story revolves around someone good but weak who faces a great foe and who experiences great hardships but perseveres to overcome their weaknesses in a final epic showdown with their nemesis. And it's great when we get that. But the writers have failed at this very basic point in RoP. They have given us a "hero" character that is so vehemently evil and so deeply flawed down to their core, coupled with being monumentally stupid and narrow minded, that no redemption arc would be believable. There isn't a shred of goodness or decency in Galadriel. Except maybe her strange love of horses. Honestly, every villain so far (Sauron, Adar, Halbrand) are being shown in a far better light than she is which is why so many people have decided to root for them instead. Galadriel appears to be the most evil person in the whole of Middle Earth. Is this the central character we are supposed to be cheering for? Gil Galad was right to try to get rid of her. Amazon should have let him.
I always found it kinda funny when people say you “can’t relate” to characters that don’t look like you. Not only do my favourite characters not look like me, most aren’t even HUMAN!
yup. a good part of my favorite characters are black. i can think of blade, cyborg, stacker pentecost, miles morales, john stewart. i never thought 'they are black, can't relate'. i looked at personality and badassery. sure, you can argue we could have more black actors, but if someone tells me it's because they cant relate to whites, i will consider them a racist.
When I was a kid, I would watch shows like Moving on up and Sanford and Son. I can distinctly remember it--I never thought of the actors as black. Sure, they were black, but it didn't even occur to me to think about them as black or white/looking like me or not. It was just a show that I was watching that was funny or not.
It’s a direct consequence of identity politics. When your self-identity becomes defined by subjectively defined checkboxes, you raise your own barriers to empathy and relation to anyone who doesn’t check the same boxes.
@@poisoncheeto9956 It's actually an important principle. Demons and hostile ETs, who are out there and real and who also are desperately fighting to remain in control of Earth, literally can't create things. If you gave them a pencil and said "draw something", then they couldn't, even if they wanted to. That's because they're disconnected from Source / Prime Creator / whatever name you choose to use for the Almighty. Creativity comes from Source.
@@poisoncheeto9956 it's not, with your illogical interpretation it will imply that good forces CAN create something meanwhile law of conservation of mass states nothing can create anything whether good or bad Damn I feel really stupid just explaining this, how did you even come to think this
Please, stop attributing that poor paraphrase of Frodo’s surmise as Tolkien’s quotation; he would never refer to the singular “evil” with a plural pronoun, “they”. In Chapter 1 of Book VI of The Lord of the Rings, Sam asks Frodo, “Don’t orcs eat, and don’t they drink? Or do they just live on foul air and poison?” Frodo replies, “No, they eat and drink, Sam. The Shadow that bred them can only mock, it cannot make: not real new things of its own. I don’t think it gave life to the orcs, it only ruined them and twisted them; and if they are to live at all, they have to live like other living creatures. Foul waters and foul meats they’ll take, if they can get no better, but not poison. They’ve fed me, and so I’m better off than you. There must be food and water somewhere in this place.”
This quote has proven to be the most correct line from any line of fiction ever. Every day I see new proof of it. Thus far, nothing has contradicted it.
I'm Papua New Guinean, Irish, Chinese and Italian mixed race... Have LOVED The Lord of the Rings since I was very young and never had a problem with relating to the characters in Tolkiens books. It was the noble actions and morals of Aragorn that made him my favourite character. Not once did I care about what anyones skin colour was in relation to my own. Characters looked like they belonged to a rich history of the land they came from... And thats the way it should be
Exactly! On a personal note, I'm curious. And only asking if you don't mind: what colour/race did Aragorn look like in your minds eye while reading the books? I often find when I'm reading, that characters will default to my own colour (white) in my imagination unless the author specifically describes them differently. I'm curious how it works for other people...
“Fantasy is escapist, and that is its glory. If a soldier is imprisioned by the enemy, don't we consider it his duty to escape?. . .If we value the freedom of mind and soul, if we're partisans of liberty, then it's our plain duty to escape, and to take as many people with us as we can!” -J.R.R. Tolkien Politics has no place in fantasy. The idea of fantasy is to get away from the real world and its issues for a time.
@@metempsychosis4062 thanks for clarifying that. Ursula Le Guin is definitely an authority on fantasy, so even if it were her own thoughts on the subject, I’d agree with them.
Except when you're ill/sick, wishing you could imagine something anything good, but instead all you get is everything bad and evil to make the sickness all that much worse Good quote when not very ill though, Nothing is good when very ill, other than sedatives, painkillers, and antibiotics, those should be good when very ill usually
You hit the nail on the head. These writers are amateurs and yet have the audacity to think they can outdo an author whose work will live on after we are all dust.
i disagree, the issue has always been the audience mostly the problem that the audience is so clearly so much smarter and well versed in the source material than the people making the show
Shows are deliberately made to get the audience angry as a marketing strategy. Diversity done right is invisible. For example, nobody watching The Seven Samurai is going to complain there are no white people in it. If you want your show to be recognized for diversity in the 21st century, you have to deliberately piss somebody off.
Fun bit of history here: at the battle of Verdun in WW1, the French slogan was “Ils ne passeront pas”. This translates to “They shall not pass”. Lest we forget, Tolkien fought in WW1. In France. At the battle of the Somme. A battle that was started in an attempt to relieve the French forces at Verdun. I have no doubt that Gandalf heroically holding a narrow point against a fiery evil while shouting “YOU SHALL NOT PASS” was inspired by the valor of those French soldiers he fought along side.
Yup. This isn´t Marvel, this isn´t Star Wars (with all respect to these creations). This is cultural heritage. And you will not get away with raping it!
@@johnstuart1338 In showing respect to all those fine good men who died at war, we shall not let them mock at a good man paying respects to the memories of good men!
Actually, the peter Jackson films played up far more of the tension between racial groups in the film. Elrond in the book never says: "men are weak, indeed it would be a stupid thing for him to say, given that he is half man himself, (his brother was the first king of numenor), and that he actually fostered Aragorn in Rivendell as a child. Elves and dwarves did have grudges, but these were based more on ancient scores not settled, EG Gimly's father Gloin complains about his imprisonment by the wood elves in the hobbit, which in turn was based on older issues and more of a history. There is no suggestion in the films that the Rohirim wouldn't! go to Gondor's aide, indeed Theoden's embittered "where is gondoer!" speech is film only, the question was more that the Rohirim couldn't! go to Gondor's aide being busy dealing with Saruman's forces from Isangard (part of the enemy's over all strategy). The only literal instance I can think of of racism in the books, are where some men, the rohirim, and in their previous ages, the numenorians, mistrust of elves. Even here however, this was less about "race", or "how they looked", than about differences in outlook. The Rohirim knew little of elves and mistrusted them because they thought them strange and otherworldly, and were quite content to change their views when they were better acquainted. The Numenorians mistrust of elves was wrapped up in their overall jealousy for the elves immortality, and their fear of death. So no, while Tolkien has a great deal of cultural grudges, complex relations and such, there is no actual "racism", in the modern sense of simply prejudging someone based on their apearence.
@@reek4062 Just finished rereading Lotr as a direct protest to rings of power; though in fairness I reread Lotr every few years anyway. Will be going on to the hobbit and the Silmarillion. would highly recommend the books to anyone who enjoys long, in depth fantasy, amazingly written, albeit not with blockbuster pacing. If the books are daunting in length, the Bbc radio play from 1978 might be a good halfway house if you like audio dramas. Indeed, there were many nods to thisin the Peter jackson films, such as casting Ian Holme as Bilbo, who plays Frodo in thee audio drama. I'd say the books are miles better than the writing in rings of power, but to be honest that's not exactly hard!
@@reek4062 is this another of those 'bait' things where you think saying something stupid without evidence won't be seen as the pathetic ramblings of a shill? because we have long established you can barely read at all, let alone have ever cracked a book by Tolkien
In defence of Elrond in Jackson's films, it is entirely possibly he would feel men, in general, are weak in his eyes. "I have seen three ages in the West of the world, and many defeats, and many fruitless victories." I certainly believe lost potential in men would make him jaded, Dunedin especially, as they are his brother's people. Numenorians became corrupted, cruel and through their actions Valinor was removed from the world and Numenor, his brother's kingdom, destroyed. Elrond has seen how weakness of men splintered Arnor, and destroyed Cardolan, Rhudaur and Arthedain. Weakness of men has plunged Gondor into medieval despondency. Kingdom of Rhovanion is no more. Weakness of men has made men Sauron's most trusted and important servants, and allowed Sauron endure. Elrond being disappointed with men is like having an elder brother that is disappointed with the choices you made, though he loves you still. It is why he put Aragorn through so rigorous training since childhood.
Their previous gig was at Bad Robot, where they punched up scripts and developed several projects, such as an abandoned Star Trek movie. “We had reached a point - we’d been writing movies for 10 years that should have gotten made,” McKay says. “Movies where the director was right, the cast was right, the script was right, the title was right and it was a big IP - and it still wasn’t happening. So [we thought] maybe we should try this TV thing.” In a way one could give them credit for not giving up, but then again everyone from Bad Reboot seems to prove the saying that, 'in Hollywood you just fail upwards.'
Here’s how bad these people are for context: Two of these writers wrote for Star Trek Discovery… and they received NO CREDIT for it. That’s the level of bad we are dealing with.
@@icecell Because they are both one in the same. Keep in mind that Jeff Bezo's ex-wife donated all the money she got from the divorce settlement to BLM. And JJ Abrams' wife was the president of the MeToo movement. Also, all the Bad Robot people are masterclass salesman. They claim they can make them SO MUCH money because they got credit for ONE successful project. For example, one of the writers for RoP wrote for Better Call Saul, a show they had no creative control over and wrote some successful episodes that they overestimated their talent. That lie has only caught up with them thanks to JJ Abrams releasing Rise of Skywalker, which made less than a Billion that he promised. You can go down a BIG rabbit hole with Bad Robot.
Its written all over Morfydds fucking face in practically every bloody scene. When she gets her armor and walks on the boat I feel like throwing up at how happy she is with herself, let alone the duel scene versus those recruits. Its cringe...
Hubris was Feanor’s downfall. And it was something Galadriel saw in Feanor early on that others missed. It was why she spurned Feanor. She knew, even prior to his overt turn towards darkness, that he would cause strife. Not in a manner of prescience- she didn’t have a vision of the future. But she knew where his pride would lead the elves-to destruction. In which case the rings of power has transposed Feanor’s hubris over Galadriel. His sin of pride that Galadriel rejected outright. From the beginning. There was never a time where Galadriel was as such. Galadriel was the very antithesis of how Amazon has portrayed her.
If I remember correctly, Sauron wanted to make the world a better place through tyrannical order and domination, seeing the evil he did as necessary and thinking everyone else were fools to oppose his good works. The directors are literally acting like Sauron.
Absolutely, these creators are literally a reflection of the very evil Tolkien wrote about "But they were, all of them, deceived". The media and show runners will claim the criticism is about racism ect to deflect the evil on others.
Unlike Sauron there isn’t even any decent craftsmanship here. Guy was a superb architect and smith regardless of his evil. This lot can’t make a decent show with a billion dollar budget.
Bravo and that's a great reference. Heresy eventually perishes after it's lies are made naked and clear upon the sight of those it hopes to blind! We must stop watching this even for negative publicity because it feeds the amazon rating system. Take heart and join us for our EXSURGE TOLKIEN counter rings of power heresy series on our channel. It will be a happy thought in these dark times.
Remember, evil is described as appearing fairer yet feeling fowler. What does everyone compliment? The visuals. Everything else feels off to anyone paying attention. Edit: I messed up “foul” and “fowl”, which is hilarious considering Tolkien would likely bop me with his pipe for such a thing lol
not even the visuals are all that good, my gf is constantly bashing the show when an elf appears because they are her favorite part of tolkien and yet in the show they are nothing more than humans with a slightly pointy ears, and even said ears almost dont appear because... make up is expensive i guess? my guess is this is why there is almost no elf with long hair, because that way the ears would probably appear all the time like in lotr, so instead we get these horrible short haired elfs that have their ears covered 90% of the time and in a vacuum cant be distinguished from humans most of the time.
I truely shivered when I heard this "sometimes you must touch the darkness to know the light" line, even more during a first episode, which is always expected to foreshadow a lot. You're right mates, this cynical "the ends justify the means" motto is something totally alien to Tolkien's work. And that's one of the many reasons why it lifts its readers' spirit up. Best example of it that comes to my mind is, say, someone facing the violent extinction of all he holds dear, with no hope to overcome the odds, is presented with a mean that can turn the tide entirely and yet he refuses to use it because it would be evil. That's what heroes do, whatever the cost. That's what Aragorn does, not once but twice, when he refuses the Ring, and when he stays true to his word by dismissing the army of the dead after the battle of Pelargir (or in the movie after the battle of the Pelennor fields). Ps : please be so kind to forgive my english, french froggy here :)
I recently rewatched the Jackson trilogy and the thing that stood out to me was how each of the characters are noble and virtuous in some way. They're not flawless, but each one embodies a trait of courage, loyalty, self-sacrifice, or some other moral virtue. Not even the GOOD characters in Rings of Power (to fully exclude people like Galadriel) really show any of these traits. What bravery does Elrond show? Or Isildur? Or new characters like Bronwyn and Arondir? Sure they stay and fight some orcs but there's never a moment when you think "this could cost their lives but they're fighting anyway". Tolkien's work has a LIGHT to it that shines through in every page, and Jackson's movies did a pretty great job replicating that, especially in the ever-present contrast between the light and the dark. Rings of Power has none of that. They try to make their villains sympathetic and tell their "heroes" to touch the darkness. And this, more than the poor casting (looking at you Grandmabrimbor) or the garbage writing or the cheap costumes, is the show's biggest failure.
@@aerinsoleris I completely agree with this. Denethor is fascinating in the books but they ruined him in the movies. He's just a big dumb selfish jerk, basically.
classic tactic that's ten years old by now. just attack the fans for not liking your show/movie because clearly the issue lies with the millions who hate what you made and not with you for making a shit product.
“ Better to die in righteousness” is a concept also seen in Buddhism, where dieing horribly in this life is less overall suffering then the suffering that will come later from bad evil deeds.
It’s been over a decade since I took a course on this subject, but I believe that the concept of dying in righteousness is also shared amongst all of the Abrahamic faiths. I remember that being a part of Buddhism, and it might be part of Hinduism as well. I’m not 100% sure on that though.
A complementary thing to say that I found in the writings of saints is that another reason why ends never justify the means is also because if you use evil to build good you'll not end up with good, you'll end up with a twisted and wicked parody of the good thing you originally envisioned. Or in very simple terms: you can't build a house of gold with a pile of shit
Also it reminds me of the saying ‘you either die a hero or live long enough to become the villain.’ The saying is most likely a retreading of the concepts your talking about. Really interesting
@@geomeopeoleo1740 That comment is pure pessimism. It's good to be aware of your own shortcommings and not pretend you're entirely good at all times as nobody is perfect but still you can be a hero for your life as long as you strive not to do evil. You don't need to die early to die a hero
"I do not love the bright sword for its sharpness, nor the arrow for its swiftness, nor the warrior for his glory. I love only that which they defend." A concept that RoP never came near.
The show somehow does the converse. Everyone that should be gloried by a shallower viewpoint commits atrocities in defense of diversity and feminism and makes us fall out of love with what they defend. Not because we don't still love the unattainable ideal but because of the what horrors that always come for wont of them. Divrsity might as well be The One Ring at this point.
Showrunners: "This is not your kingdom! These are woke lands! This is woke gold! And we will have our revenge." * Reveals Rings of Power * The Tolkien fandom is momentarily silent at the scenery budget, only for plot hole after plot hole to open up as it melts and collapses under it's own weight, trying to bury the fandom. Tolkien Fandom: * Erupts * "Revenge! Revenge!!! I will show you: Revenge!" * Flies towards Amazon, ready to destroy a billion dollars in budget * Exec that greenlit this: "....What have we done?" Here's hoping this time The Dragon wins.
eeeh have to question the latter. even outside of karen scenarios, its also common for good or at least decent media to be demonized for no reason. A weird example to throw out at ya would be homestuck. It had a sequel going on for a bit. The continuation though was a bit contorversial, some people wanted it to end proper. others joined in late and wanted more. Some decided to become offended by it entirely. the peeps who became offended used the ill behavior of one of the people working on it t ojustify an extreme irrational hatred. Said individual was an issue but there was no sign their opinions were negatively influencing the work itself, and the rest of the people were chill. Talking about a fairly small team but made up of people who were at some point just peeps in the fandom. Problem is, old spites exist, and this troublemaker attacked someone who was in the fandom still. Making basically grooming accussations, after said indivdiaul started posting other people's materials. This made the guy who made homestuck think that was true, and he acted up in a massive way. Of course this all lead to people hating the sequel not because of its contents, which were a bit questionable, but because of a sense of arrogance, and people saying that they were personally insulted and he was anti fans and etc. Even after the troublemaker was let go, which was ultaimtely obvious casue they started mouthing off online and made snide remarks against the guy who mae hoemstuck as well...... Yea. Project was put on hiatus as a result. When it comes to rings of power though, its like every goddamn individual is that troublemaker.
Awww, don’t pop her bubble of self-importance. Plenty of time for that after she gives herself diabetes and is hooked up to a dialysis machine 3x a week.
Shad: "We're both married, and i even have 5 kids." Nathan: "And I'm practicing." Lmao. Thx for the laugh to lighten my mood, needed it after all the bs from Amazon and its shill over the last few day.
I would like to point out that the reason why no elves and dwarves were present at the battle of the Pelinor fields and the Black Gates is because there were other battles occurring elsewhere in the North during the War of the Ring that LOTR never shows. The Men of Dale, the Dwarves of the Lonely Mountains/Iron hills, Lothlorien/Rivendell, etc. we’re busy fighting off Sauron’s northern armies. Specifically, his forces that had re-armed Dol-Guldur. The Appendices discuss this. Racial tensions were not the reason why Elves and Dwarves never showed up. Galadriel and Elrond already supported Aragorn and his ascension to Gondor, but their attention was at making sure Sauron’s forces didn’t come from the north. The Free Folk of Middle Earth had other battles against Sauron beyond the Battle of Helm’s Deep with the Rohirrim, and the battles Gondor fought against Mordor and it’s Southron/Umbarian Allies.
THANK you, yes. Just another example of things they could have covered FROM THE APPENDICES THEY BOUGHT that would have been more interesting. Or the orc dwarf wars. Or the story of Aragorn PRE trilogy is pretty awesome. Anonymously working his way up in the army of Gondor to be their greatest general, defeating the Pirates of Umbar, and then leaving to become a ranger - partly to avoid conflict with a younger Denethor. A new story in Far Harad that touched upon events in Umbar, with a bit of crossover with events in the north would have given the authors all the scope they said they wanted. Plus they'd have realized where the southern lands are in middle earth. It was a relief just to see them change "southlands" to "Mordor," so they could stop describing the area to the north and east of the southron lands as "southlands"
So the plan was to use a magical sword hilt that needs blood sacrifice to form a blade as a key to a dam ( both centuries old ) to release water into tunnels and channels recently dug to let the water flow down through the plain, then up the slopes of Mount Doom, then letting it fall into a gigantic magma chamber open to the plain, to let Orodruin explode... well... right. What if the dam got destroyed in the last centuries or Waldreg got to the key hole in the last decade, when the tunnels where not dug...? only a flooded plain... great plan... what could possible get wrong... My D&D group would have called me an ambulance to the next asylum if i would present a plot like this... P.S: Shad, give the show their chainmail back, they seem to need every prop for their show :)
Wasn't the tower and dam built by the Elves? Why would they build it with a secret way to open it and the key would be a magic sword made by their mortal enemy?
@@robo5013 nope, they both where built by Morgoths human followers in the FA... as you wrote... would make no sense for the elves... and an elven watchtower would not be so derelict when elves are living there for decades, anyway
It is obvious from the behaviour of characters in the show (especially Galadriel), that the show runners do not understand how decent people behave. How to sympathise with another person's pain rather than reiterate your own specialness, How to lead without bullying or manipulating, how to be strong without direct threat of physical force, how to actually cope with overcoming a challenge you do not instantly win, how to accept the "diversity!" (ha ha), of others views, beliefs and opinions without having them completely agree with you. I genuinely think the show runners do not understand why people dislike the rings of power, because they do not understand how decent, ordinary people who are not entitled narcissists behave! This is why they do not understand Tolkien, anymore than they understand their critics.
Weak people can't understand what it means to be strong. The stupid can't understand what it means to be smart. And the morally-bankrupt can't understand what it means to be good. And it shows in their writing.
It's like Sauron being incapable of understanding the idea that anyone would seek to destroy the ring. He couldn't fathom the concept that anyone could be unswayed by power.
@@scottphillips8607 And he was probably right, the one person that was trying to destroy the ring (Frodo) on the last moment, refuses to do it, he hesitated for a moment just like Isildur
I saw this article last night and just about lost my mind. Glad to see you guys not only taking a stand against it, but calling out the hypocrisy and lies for what they are. You guys are absolutely the vanguard of the Tolkien fandom. Keep up the fight, and stay on watch!
When Blade came out I, as a white male, envisioned myself as a vampire killing evil vampires. I did this not because he was black. Blade was a bad ass character. What they are putting out is a crime against literature!
Amazon thinks that you can only identify with people of the same skin color, but completely forgets that people are not fundamentally black, white or anything in between, but fundamentally human. I identify better with Lord Momonga (Ainz Ool Gown), a mage who almost wipes out an entire kingdom just to make a statement, than Galadriel because he seems more human!
None of us really thought of him as a black badass. It was the 90s or whatever. We were just people, blade was just a badass vampire killing vampire. Michael Jordan was just a badass basketball player. Michael Jackson got a little weird and stuff but maybe that was later. Shaq was just a giant basketball player. Selena was a hot singer. Jeff goldblum? was just The Dude. Gilbert Godfrey was just a fuggin guy with a crazy voice. Ms doubtfire was a hilariously fictional character. The 90s were good times. This shit today is sick and saddening but won’t last too much longer I don’t think. People are fed up and fighting back everywhere. Things will return to sanity for a time. Hopefully for a decade or more, but some new tactic will pop up by those who want power and sow division. Stay vigilant. Or stay on watch as these blokes put it
I'm Japanese, and my favorite superhero growing up was Storm. The only thing in common we have is that we're both women. I liked her because of her personality, her morality, her powers, and her look. I didn't need her to look exactly like me to empathize or admire her. And when I see some of these garbage hack writers these days turn her into a generic "angry black woman" who's racist against white people, it makes me sick to my stomach.
the reason that dwarves and elves don't like each other is because of the "conflict" between Aulë and Eru. Aulë created the dwarves deviating from the song of creation. He does that because he is impatient and he creates his own pupils. Eru finds out and instead of forcing Aulë to destroy them, he gives them true life, puts them under the mountain to sleep until elves come to middle earth, finding a way to still keep them in the world without breaking the song which prophecies that elves will be the first people to arrive in middle earth. But because of this conflict, they will inherently be cursed to be in conflict them selves. So when Gimli gets the strands of hair, it's super significant. They overcome much more than just looks.
Imma go with the reason dwarves and elves don't like each other (and the bias is mostly Sindar)... might just be the murder of King Thingol by the dwarves.
@@getfreur2458 you can tie that back to: "But Aule answered. 'That shall also be true for the Children of Iluvatar; for they will eat and they will build. And though the things of they realm have worth in themselves, and would have worth if no Children were to come, yet Eru will give them dominion, and they shall use all that they find in Arda: though not, by the purpose of Eru, without respect or without gratitude.”"
I’m rewatching GoT S2 now. The portraiting of Brienne of Tarth in S2. Everything about her introduction, her storyline, her looks, her actions, her posture, her morals, her fights, and her lines was perfect. When she was missioned by Catelyn S. to deliver Jamie to Kings Landing. Those on the road dialogues between them, oh my, still getting goos bumps. Jamie is constantly mocking her and she barely answers him, she even says «Nothing you say will make me angry»! She was so nobel, gracefull and gathered all the time. THAT’S perfect writing, perfect casting and perfect acting for a female warrior. THAT’S MY TRUE HEROINE. PS: I know that they screw up her arc in S8. But S2-Brienne was perfect.
I always default to Thronebreaker's protagonist, Queen Meve, as my example of a strong female warrior. It's in her name, she's a real goddamned queen, but she still appears on the battlefield, she still travels her country and checks in with the commonfolk and solves problems of her citizens when she can. And when the plot takes off and she's brought to her lowest point, she leads by example -and does so from the frontlines. On top of all of that, she still has moments where she is left powerless and weak, where she must rely on her allies and friends -and she does so gratefully and humbly. Nevermind that she's a woman, if she existed, she'd just be a good person.
Exactly @eyesfullofsky Leading is a way of being. It has nothing to do with gender. Mormont to Snow: «You want to lead one day? Then learn how to follow». Guladriel has one dimention. She answers before thinking, snaps before considering like a teenage chihuhua!
Gandalf said it.. "No!" cried Gandalf spring to his feet . "With that power I should have a power too great and terrible. And over me the ring would gain a power still greater and terrible.... do not tempt me! I do not wish to become like the Dark Lord, himself. Yet, the way of the ring to my heart is by pity, pity for weakness and the desire of strength to do good. Do not tempt me! I dare not take it, even to keep it safe." One of the deep messages of the Lord of the Rings is that things done easily (put on the ring and save the free peoples of Middle Earth) are inherently corrupting and evil. Don't become the thing you are fighting against, during the fight. God, the ONE, Eru Ilumtar could have sung the universe into existence without Free will... he could have created obedient slaves, not free souls who will choose to do hard things for the good of all or choose to do self serving things. He could have chosen the easy way. But that is inherently evil. Jesus didn't have to come earth and live a life and die a death.. but he chose to do so, and so, do good and not become evil. Gandalf choose to refuse the power of the corrupting ring and fight the balrog without it,. Frodo loved the peace and gentle life of the Shire.. he didn't want the chore that appeared before him, but he had to chose the hard road to Mordor for love of the Shire and everyone else. Surrendering his lifein in doing so. Evil dominates all life. Good rules/ advises justly and allows people to choose. The scene where the devil takes Christ to the high hill and offers him all the kingdoms of earth if only he bow is very similar to the scene I just quoted. In Tolkien's world, just like in Christianity, the easy way to do something leads to evil. The journey towards the end you are seeking, matters. Tolkien's Christian roots are visible in the story, in so many ways.
I mean just the whole scene/concept of the elves occupying the humans in the southlands for supposedly thousands of years because the "evil is in their blood" completely lost me. Because I am born in germany in the 90s apparently I deserve to be watched over by occupyers. Yes the past was evil, you have to talk about it so it doesn't happen again and not put all "Germanpeople" into this one boat. My Great-Grandma was sentenced to the camp and only survived because it was few months before the liberation. My Great-Grandfather from the other side of the family was a party member. Now you suggest to me that I personly can be accounted to "evil because of blood". If you really think like that with the whole "blood/family/ethnicity thing" you only strenghten the extremists on both sides of the political spectrum.
You are being treated like that and so are all germans in a still an occupied country since ww2 now being completely dismantled and destroyed right along with the cleansing of ukraine from all ukraininans.... Who is doing this? .... why?..... do you even want to live?....
@@zoebaggins90 Well as a good satirical show once said; germans are harmless unless an austrian tells them something different and never forgett, Mustacheman became german in 1936, three years after he was elected as chancellor. But dark humor is the best humor.
"Auta i lóme!" and "Aurë entuluva!" On September 3rd, the Tolkien phandom awoke and found half of the Tolkien-verse under the dominion of the corporate machine theyocracy. Thus we bring "council in these dark times,": EXSURGE TOLKIEN, our current channel's counter series. It is now beyond a doubt that The Lord of the Rings: Rings of Power" is independent of Tolkien and his world's Orthodoxy. ROP a schism that will leave a forever rift between the phandom and wrought confusion for years to come.
@@wrlSivan16 Amazon owns much of the press- those they don’t actually own are bought and paid for in other ways It’s very hard to find out who owns certain large media conglomerates-hidden under layers of corporations-I’m certain it’s deliberate misdirection
The line "To know the light you have to touch the darkness" is such a disingenuous misrepresentation of what Tolkien said in his letters on the matter of good and evil. To quote the man himself; "You have to understand the good in things, to detect the real evil."
Harfoots were a branch of hobbits. Their Wandering Days, which Amazon twisted and shoehorned into the Second Age, speaks of their migration from the Vales of Anduin to Shire in the books. Their most ancient legends "looked further back than their Wandering Days" and "glimpse a time when they dwelt in the upper vales of Anduin", where they got the name Holbytla "hole-dwellers" from the ancestors of the Rohirrim, hence the name Hobbit. The name was the most ancient name for all three branches. All three branches were originally hole-dwellers, and they remained hole-dwellers for their entire known history. I never bought this Harfoots living in carts thing.
Writers for the show stated the wheels of the carts symbolized the round doors of hobbit holes. Happy coincidence that the doors weren't square or triangular then
Of course, it's the greatest aspiration of all escapist high fantasy - reflect the most worthless and transient aspects of modern culture... Makes sense.
@@Trowa71 That observation seems very reductionistic to me. Some of LOTR's themes did address the problems with the industrial revolution (which I am very aware Tolkien was unhappy with), but I wouldn't call it a "commentary." Rather, LOTR reflected Tolkien's deep love for the goodness of the natural world, which can apply to any time or place, not just industrial Britain. In contrast, one of the major problems with RoP is that it is a social commentary (and a bad one by most accounts) more than a story. But yes, the writing and story are also unbelievably bad.
@@sggames4787 I mean, I don't disagree, I just want fans to be very wary of alt-right talking points which are muddying otherwise totally justified criticism. I would say that social commentary isn't bad in and of itself, but when it's hitting us over the head with it without a hint of nuance or quality, that's not so good.
"Road to Hell is paved with good intentions", is my most favorite quote. Im willing to bet that "Meaning well" has created more suffering than every War in History combined. It probably has caused more than half of them too.
Indeed. A great example of this was Prohibition in America during the 1920s. The people who lobbied for it did so with the best of intentions, such as ending alcoholism and domestic violence.
47:25 This is what I suspected is behind the motivation of the creators for RoP and WoT - they simply hate everyone who rejects their ideology. They don't try to convert people to their ideology and instead demonize those who disagree. They hate their dissenters so much that they feel obligated to ruin everything they cherish - just like an estranged wife after a bitter divorce.
@@SithBy11 I disagree. Yeah the Hobbit trilogy sucked big time and I honestly have no love for it but I think they did a better job there at capturing the vibe of middle earth than this show…
Let/s go Shad and Nathan! Hello from a fellow member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints! It's always fun to listen to you guys, way more enjoyable than ROP itself. Gonna miss you guys for the next two years, I'm literally prepping now to go to the Italy Rome Mission. Keep up the good work lads!
Excellent work, Knights! This vile article just reaffirms that I will absolutely not give season 2 a chance, even if they supposedly "turn things around." Keep fighting the good fight!!
As far as I understand it, the main theme within Tolkien was the concept of mortality and immortality, personified by Elrond and his brother, and the slow decline, and corruption of men due to their inability to find contentment in mortality. The fall of Numenor, one of the key events in Arda, that led to many other events, was due to the resentment of the elves gift from Eru. This, along with a love of nature, the uglyness of industrialisation, and an appreciation of the English rural culture.
i have not heard or seen anything related rings of power that does not make me feel physically ill. thank you shad and nathan for being in pain with us.
Tolkien said his writings were a thoroughly Catholic work, and it’s clear throughout all of the series. The “spirit of Tolkien” is one about God and the fight against sin and temptation.
13:49 Small correction Shad. There was 1 Elf in the movie, but there were 3 Elves at the final battle in the books Legolas, Elladan, and Elrohir. The later two were Elrond's twin sons. Just wanted to make sure to remember Aragorn's adopted brothers would not let him stand alone against ultimate evil.
Hmm, I wonder if there was a character in Tolkien’s work who talk about the light comprehending the darkness without being able to be touched by it… wonder if it is the same character that RoP has so corrupted as to earn Morgoth’s Employee of the Month award.
No this is antithetical not only to Tolkien but to Christian theology (I’m not Christian) there are some good recordings detailing this on the channel Andrea with the bangs. The whole show is cancer and literal reversal of morality not only in Tolkien and religion but objectively. The people who wrote this and assembled the ‘story’ (there is no story) are immoral people, period.
Yep, agree completely. The main message saying that “you can’t know something is wrong unless you do that action” is definitely an evil ideology. I don’t have to rob someone in order to know that it’s wrong to do that. Etc. You don’t have to do wrong at all. That’s never been a requirement in life. I’d like to see them try to explain Joan of Arc, Ghandi, Mother Teresa, Saints of the Bible, etc. with this ideology. 😂 I guess they should have been murdering and pillaging, etc. otherwise they apparently don’t know what right and wrong is. I think the real way life actually works is we are actually trying to not do wrong. Basically, even when tempted, choosing to never do evil acts. Whether that’s lying, cheating, stealing, jealousy, etc. The more you do evil the more difficult it is to get back on the right path-to make it a habit of doing good. So no, it’s actually really bad to purposely do bad things, that doesn’t lead to good habits. It leads to bad habits and takes a huge effort usually to change. You don’t become good from doing evil. You become good from choosing NOT to do evil. And you don’t need to do wrong in order to know it’s wrong.
On the creation of Mithril: so, according to Rings of Power elves had a whole story about it's creation and even knew it's properties, but they never looked for it and no one ever saw it until the dwarves?
Even though Elrond's father, Eärendil, had a whole ship, Vingilot, made from Mithril. In the 1st age he sailed a ship he made himself to Valinor and the Valar blessed it and turned it into Mithril. He killed Ancalagon the Black with it during the War of Wrath with what was essentially a Holdo maneuver.
A good person would not invent this Galadriel or these Harfoots. They are "good" in this script, and Galadriel is supposed to be rooted for by th viewer, even though she, beside all of modern "strong woman" tropes, manipulates other "good" characters, sometimes into situations of mortal danger, she's completely egocentric and smug and entitled. These are traits, even Ray - the golden standard for modern day "strong woman" - didn't show. If they wrote her to be like this, they find this an acceptable behavour. I didn't despise Abrams for SW, he's just untalanted and stuck to a formula. I strongly dislike these two, as they seem to be actually bad people!
I believe they wrote her this way so they could develop her character into the strong, powerful version of her we know later in LotR. To do that, she must start off as deeply flawed. Then have a watershed moment where all her faults are revealed to her, preferably after she has done something truly horrendous like doomed the world, and she sees how she must become better. The problem is that they have not shown any quality of her that we would want to form a connection to, so we don't. We don't care if she will become better later on. She is now a passive background character in a show with no main character or hero for us to follow. In that way, the writers have failed. High fantasy needs a hero. LotR gave us 9 heroes in the fellowship and we cared about every one of them because even though many had flaws, they also had a recognisably good spirit. Without a central hero in RoP, the show feels empty and unrewarding. And yes, those harfoots are evil too. They murder each other passively, abandoning their neighbours and friends and leaving them to die on a journey that is 4 times longer than it needed to be, while singing a song about staying together. That's pure cult territory.
@@donkeysunited would be 100% true, but given the interviews and the back-backlash from the creators and actors, we're supposed to root for her already, we should take her side even before "the moment", as her being "a minority" is a virtue by itself and enough to compensate her flaws, furthermore a few of her objectively negative traits are presented as such, her arrogance and entitlement for example, the do a small emphasis on her manipulativeness and hastiness, but that seems to be all they see as a flaw of hers. I agree, that they're setting up "the moment" but they're so bad at it!
As much as I hate Rey Palpatine, I’ve never had the urge to knock her teeth in. There have been a few characters that I’d like to slap the back of their heads, but none so revulsive as Guy-ladriel. And I’m a pretty chill dude who always tries to see things from their perspective. This is how badly they messed up.
@@LoneSilverW0lf True. Ray's exhaustingly uninteresting and unmotivated (like, really, I didn't get her overall motivation throughout 3 movies, and I tried!) while this B-word... when she unironically told the guy how her squad and her best friend betrayed her - I actually cryed something very rude outloud, while in a public place - the audacity of this "good" """protagonist""" is incomparable, I've never seen anything like it, unless in the beginning of a redemption arc, but both in the lore and in the show there is no indication there is one!
Something I found very interesting about the mentioning of the LDS take on Satan is how similar it is to Sauron's own motivations in the deeper lore, something that distinguished his evil from the evil of Morgoth. Where Morgoth's resentment was very directly against Eru (God) and the nature of creation itself (specifically that it wasn't his), Sauron's core motivation was directly caused by the fallibility of the Children of Eru (Elves initially, but he'd apply this to Men and Dwarves as well) and their perceived inferiority of decision-making and wisdom compared to the angelic beings of the Valar and Maiar. While Morgoth only wanted to destroy and ruin all of creation, both the Children of Eru and the literal land itself to spite the essence of creation, Sauron wanted to dominate and control the lesser creatures of Middle-Earth to prevent them from making bad choices and compel them to act in good and wise ways (at least what he determined to be wisdom in his deep pride). Of course this motivation rotted over time as Sauron's spite and obsession with power for its own sake grew, that I believe he had completely lost sight of any notion of "ruling people for their own benefit" by at least the end of the Fall of Numenor, but even so it remains likely that the world of Sauron's victory would have been a despotic, industrialized hellscape where all beings were enslaved or sacrificed to some vague notion of "progress" that Sauron would never truly be able to bring into being, as opposed to the wholly dead and void world Morgoth would have made. It's sort of like Tolkien split the LDS take on Satan into two characters: Morgoth is the Satan that directly seeks to usurp God, whose pride and envy causes him to hate all of creation itself because it is not his, and will be content with nothing more than the ruination of all of God's designs... and it never could be anything more than that, because he has no designs of his own to replace them with even if he had the opportunity to do so. He's a larger-than-human character, whose nature and ambitions lie pretty well outside the human experience and is well into the cosmic. Sauron is the Satan that seeks to dominate and control humans "for their own good", to "prevent them from making bad decisions", a much smaller and more localized form of usurping God's designs rather than unmaking all of creation. Sauron lies more somewhere in between the cosmic and the human, being larger and more cosmic in scale than any human could reasonably achieve but still able to see the parallels with him and the great history of human tyrants. It could have even been interesting to give us a bit of a look in the show into this nature of evil, this particular form of pride that so many humans fall into... but I suspect it's one the showrunners could never express because it's an evil they share in, their conviction that they just know better than everyone else and the highest virtue would be to control the rest of the world and force them to not make (what they have determined to be) bad decisions.
To be fair. During the Battle of Minas Tirith and Morannon, the dwarves and elves were fighting their own battles against Sauron. The dwarves were fighting at Erebor alongside the men of Dale against the Easterlings that are seen in the Two Towers, and the elves of Lothlorien and Mirkwood were fighting against Saurons armies at Dol Goldur.
You know... maybe we should just turn their own philosophy against them: "Well... sometimes you have to touch the darkness to get the enlightened ends you're looking for." Use that anytime they criticize the criticism of their story as evil/-ist/-ism. "Well, we don't like the way you're doing it; we we're just touching the darkness to get the ends we want. Ends justify the means: it's so simple." smh
and retort - fighting evil makes things worse. you have to refrain from fighting evil. Stop fighting evil - that's the worst thing you can do --- repeatedly said by the writers through their lines
@@joebobhenrybob2000 Yeah, and then the contradiction of the Elf king... we have to send our finest fighters away to stop fighting evil... but then cure the Elves in order to wage a war against evil... yet waging ware against evil is the very thing causing the thing that needs to be cured? 😕 Needless to say, they'd better have a REALLY good explanation for a lot of stuff in the final episode... or the next season... or there'll be A LOT of loose threads and plot holes and contradictions.
Andre from Midnights Edge put it the best for writers who want to write about “the world we live in today”: Maybe you should leave your postal code before you start writing. A lot of these malicious hacks don’t leave the small postal code of LA or New York that their apartment is in. So they aren’t even portraying the world that exists beyond their bodega or homeless camp.
Agreed! the Dwarves and men of Dale lost the battle in the north, so they retreated to the Lonely Mountain and were besieged by the Sauron's forces until after the Battle of the Pelennor Fields when they broke out of the siege and routed the enemy. And afterward, they pledged eternal friendship to Gondor after Aragorn's coronation. And both the Elves of Mirkwood and Lorien fought off more of Sauron's forces. Then they both united, the leaders of Lorien and Mirkwood, and Galadriel threw down Dol Guldur and renamed the forest Greenwood.
@@taddad2641 Sauron divided his enemies with different armies and prevented them from doing any Last Alliance-type strategy. He learned a bit from the last time.
@@taddad2641 The problem with that, though, is the extreme distances between each army. Even with a united front, they would be hard-pressed and eventually defeated, since Sauron had outnumbered them by a big margin.
I have been ruminating on this idea for a while now, but this video solidified my thoughts. I genuinely believe it would be hard to bastardize and completely 180 Tolkien's message more than they do in this show if that was your expressed goal. People using Tolkien's direct quotes to attack the show went from memes to now feeling legitimately evil on part of the showrunners.
The spirit of Tolkien is very simple: ordinary people doing extraordinary things and coming together to stand firm against a great threat. That is the essence of his work, according to the man himself, I might add. Saying anything other than that, would be at best, a misunderstanding. At worst it would be a wilful perversion of not just the man's work, but the man's ideals and personal beliefs.
i was born in the early 60s and most of my life the message was "racism bad, make it stop" and things seemed to be going quite well...and now, all of a sudden (in the last decade or so, i realize that's not *so* sudden) the message is all about how to be racist. i'm in the united states, btw, so that's the perspective here. they're teaching what they call "critical race theory" in schools which basically teaches racism. they don't want this pointed out, of course, because they're attempting to brainwash and gaslight young people with the propaganda. i'm glad to see, though, that there are still MANY people who don't buy this garbage. just reading through the comments here gives me hope for mankind! keep up the awesome work, Knights! ⚔💛
it was "racism bad, make it stop" when Whites were the majority and increasingly "Whites are bad and action must be taken against them" with "diversity".
It has been quoted many times so I will not repeat what Tolkien has said about Evil, I will simply say, we must stand against evil. The hearts of men are easily corrupted but those with good hearts that stand together, United under God will be able to oppose this Evil.
Bear in mind that the dislike between the Elves and Dwarves was not due to their dislike of their looks, but it goes back to historical betrayals of each other which began in the First Age due to Thingol betraying the dwarves he hired to fashion a jewelled setting for Beren and Luthien’s silmaril. This betrayal was influenced also by the the Oath of Feanor. The keeping of a Silmaril from the sons of Feanor. The elves and dwarves of Eregion got on famously until the rings brought strife upon the dwarves and the unleashing of the Balrog in Khazad Dûm likewise upon the elves. This is a cultural mistrust bearing no relation to ‘actual’ racism.
I’ve said it since the first trailer dropped: This show feels dirty. This is actually really sad to me. The potential…my goodness, the potential. It is heartbreaking and shameful. Shame on you, Amazon.
Shad was in top form in this one. Speaking only reason and logic. The problem is reason and logic both fall on deaf ears when it comes to the two fluff boys running TRoP. I like how Nathan recognized Shad's rant was well and truly on target, unwavering and didn't need much interjection... respect. Cheers, Sev
Shad, the reason Elves and dwarves didn't come to help at the battle of Minas Tirith was because they had their hands full themselves. Erebor was under siege, the wood elves were busy with Dol Guldur's fortress having been re-armed by Mordor and the high elves of Elrond were pretty busy on their side due to orks coming from the misty moutains up North. Even the Shire got it's share of battles. That's why they didn't come and help Gondor, not because they didn't want to, but because they couldn't.
I have a new level of respect for you Shad. More of us who love Tolkien need to call this out for what it is (which the vast majority of us have been doing.) This is the deliberate, spiteful subversion of one of the greatest authors of the past century. These people hate Tolkien and everything about him and the themes he weaved into his work. One day soon I’ll be publishing a high fantasy book of my own, and I can only pray that I’ll be even remotely as inspired as professor Tolkien. Even so, I know for a fact I could’ve written his work into a show better than these godawful Marxist pansies. Also, Simon Tolkien is a lesser son of greater sires, let’s not forgot about him. It was he who allowed this to happen, as a spiteful and resentful act against the shadow of his own grandfather. Rather than protect his grandfathers work like his own father did, Simon wanted nothing more than to corrupt it. The man (using that term loosely) is the embodiment of Melkor being unable to create anything of his own, so he must corrupt the work of his own father and grandfather.
Regarding Disa: if the showrunners hadn't been too lazy to write her character well, if they had explained how a brown-skinned Dwarf came to live among a Northern people who lived underground and could not possibly have evolved melanin as a defense against sunlight, her character would have been so much more interesting. Disa's journey to Northern lands would have taken years and been quite dangerous. She could have been a heroic character. For that matter, if others of her people came with her, there could have been more Dwarves of African descent in the show instead of one token brown-skinned Dwarf. The same goes for the Elves. Maybe the Elves and the Dwarves of the Southern lands made the journey together. In the hands of good scriptwriters this show could have been truly diverse.
Is it only about color? Is that why they hired British actors for these token black characters? Or did they choose a Puerto Rican for the black One Episode a Slave elf because slavery wasn't abolished in PR until 1873? How many more actors "of color" could they have hired if they had made the "diversity" actually make sense. Why, they could have even hired some African-*American* actors in lead roles - imagine!
All this always remembers me Hannah Arendt "In my report of [the Eichmann trial] I spoke of “the banality of evil.” Behind that phrase . . . I was dimly aware of the fact that it went counter to our tradition of thought-literary, theological, or philosophic-about the phenomenon of evil. . . . However, what I was confronted with was utterly different and still undeniably factual. I was struck by the manifest shallowness in the doer that made it impossible to trace the uncontestable evil of his deeds to any deeper level of roots or motives. The deeds were monstrous, but the doer-at least the very effective one now on trial-was quite ordinary, commonplace, and neither demonic nor monstrous. . . . Might the problem of good and evil, our faculty of telling right from wrong, be connected with our faculty of thought? . . . Could the activity of thinking as such, the habit of examining whatever happens to come to pass or to attract attention, regardless of results and specific content, could this activity be among the conditions that make men abstain from evildoing or even actually “condition” them against it?"
Given her behavior, my guess is Galadriel is really Sauron in this show with a surprise reveal in the end. So many good points made in this video. Good job.
If I understand correctly, and Amazon only has the rights to LoTR and the Appendices, then they seriously screwed up by sending an Istari to Arda in the second age. LoTR A states no Istari came before the third age, the Essay on the Istari states the same. The newest book, Nature of Middle Earth, is the only thing I've found (can't find my HoME) that even slightly states that istari were sent in the second age, but the only name that he mentions is Olorin and then 4 other random names never seen before or after. This wasn't even edited by Christopher, and the author cites a few pages of notes which he calls 'Key Dates'. So Amazon deviated from the source they have the the rights to (not illegal) but then used the story of something they don't own (I think thats were it becomes plagiarism). Maybe we can exploit Simon's greed and get dollar signs in his eyes with the knowledge he can sue Bezos and partially redeem his reputation.
@@belegur8108 I'm aware... but Gandalf is explicitly sent to Arda in the third age. That's where he meets Cirdan at the Grey Havens and receives Narya. The new claim by 'new fans' is that 'meteor man' is a blue wizard and they cite sources Amazon doesn't own to justify this.
@@radagast7200 i think they want to argue "But nowhere is written that Gandalf and the Istari never visited Middle Earth some time earlier then TA... it would be funny if it isn't so sad
Technically, there is also one of his late ideas for the story of the other two Wizards in The Peoples of Middle-earth, pages 384-385, where Morinehtar and Rómestámo are said to have been sent in the Second Age to undermine Sauron's influence in the East. But they are obviously not doing that, since they have just the one guy. They can't stick with the lore they have. They can't stick with the timeline they have. And they can't even stick with the map they have, as things are constantly shifted around in the Southlands and they constantly underestimate distances.
When I was a kid watching cartoons; they had a lot of characters with differing skin tones. I thought nothing of it. But now with them pushing DIVERSITY™, I notice race of characters a lot more. How is that improving race relations? You shouldn't be focusing on what makes us different. You should be focusing on what makes us the same. [Insert 'the more you know' 🌟 logo here] 😉
Well done. Well said! Most good people are blind to evil because they try to find the good in everything. It's a big part of how evil is able to exist, as well as being a part of the mechanism, or the methodology of corruption.
A corporation takes a beloved series and tries to pass it off as their own. They corrupt and twists every core concept to make more accessible for a ‘modern’ audience because it was problematic to start with. They then tell the original fans that this series is not for them and the fans are evil for daring to defend what they love. Hmm where have I seen this before? 👀 *Everyone excited for Wheel of Time season 2?*
“Evil, I think, is the absence of empathy” - Captain G. M. Gilbert, Nuremburg war trials. I wonder, Mr Payne, who has recently displayed a startling lack of empathy?
Guys, thank you! Thank you for being so specific in your criticism of this farce. Publicly they will vilify the passionate Tolkien fans and anyone else who disagrees with what they've done, but privately they can't deny it. You've laid it out for these morons so well that even they have no excuse to deny it. As stupid and arrogant as they are. This isn't just a "your show sucks" video. It's a "your show sucks and here are 100 reasons why" video. Thank you for taking the time to analyze this and having the courage to say it publicly. I'm looking forward to your next video.
Hey!! I’m more new to the channel and I am also a member! I never knew you guys were until this video!! I am so happy to discover this! I love your videos a lot!
Rings of Power is antithetical to what Tolkien wrote. For example, the whole POINT of LOTR is that you cannot use the evil of the ring to defeat evil…Boromir thought he could, and look what happened to him. Yet the message of Rings of Power is “To know the light you have to touch the darkness”. They are consciously and deliberately corrupting Tolkien’s work to be the opposite of what he wanted!
Not to mention the now commonplace thing of characters with dubious and evil traits being displayed as good things.
👆THIS, THIS and THIS AGAIN! Spot on Brotha!!!
Wo unto them that call evil good, and good evil, that put darkness for light, and light for darkness, that put bitter for sweet, and sweet for bitter!
As a mild devil's advocate, the original Wood Elves in the Hobbit book are elves who live in deep shadow - shadow that utterly blinds, drives to madness, and is full of menacing eyes to the dwarves. Despite this however, the Wood Elves are still good of heart - good-folk. While they have a negative disposition to the dwarves for past misgivings, they do not stoop to torture, and feed the dwarves well (are welcome reprieve to the difficulty of the murky woods). These are elves who have never seen the light of valinor, but are still inherently good.
And one of Tolkien's greater themes is hospitality in far and distant places. In the same way Thorin's company finds respite with Elrond and Beorn, they find (some) hospitality with Thranduil (who was only asking the truth of why they were in his lands and disrupting their merriment). Meanwhile in Rings of Power, Galadriel scours at the idea her food is poisoned despite being adrift, Hobbits will desert each other on superstition, and fleeing villagers didn't remember to bring more than a bag of food. Amazing.
Preach, Flutters.
'Sometimes you have to touch evil to see the light' sounds like.something the One Ring would make you believe.
That depends how you are defining 'evil', now doesn't it? Bottom line is that if there are no good options, the best thing to do is choose the least bad option, which I would define as the option that results in the least amount of harm. You can disagree with the general principle if you want, but to treat the whole of consequentialist philosophy as though it's some kind of evil Satanic corruption is ludicrous in the extreme.
Maybe the show's writers found the One Ring, and that's how we got into this mess.
I feel like the message should be "sometimes you have to FACE the dark" because that's the job of a hero. To face the darkness within themselves. Not give into it sometimes...
Exactly this!!👆🏻💯
"Even if you fight for something you think is good, if you do something worse in that fight, then you become evil."
They apparently write a Galadriel threatening to taunt Adar(?) by torturing and killing every one of his 'children' in front of his eyes before she kills him.
By their own standards, they have written one of the greatest and noblest characters in the entire mythology as evil.
That's exactly what I thought when I read that.
I watched that brief scene and that was exactly my thought, too. The villain was actually more empathetic than the now evil Galadriel. So, the writers are the true evil ones.
Looks like a failed attempt to sound edgy i presume.
As writers they probably understand that every great story revolves around someone good but weak who faces a great foe and who experiences great hardships but perseveres to overcome their weaknesses in a final epic showdown with their nemesis.
And it's great when we get that. But the writers have failed at this very basic point in RoP. They have given us a "hero" character that is so vehemently evil and so deeply flawed down to their core, coupled with being monumentally stupid and narrow minded, that no redemption arc would be believable. There isn't a shred of goodness or decency in Galadriel. Except maybe her strange love of horses. Honestly, every villain so far (Sauron, Adar, Halbrand) are being shown in a far better light than she is which is why so many people have decided to root for them instead.
Galadriel appears to be the most evil person in the whole of Middle Earth. Is this the central character we are supposed to be cheering for? Gil Galad was right to try to get rid of her. Amazon should have let him.
That act sounds more like Feanor, not Galadreiel.
I always found it kinda funny when people say you “can’t relate” to characters that don’t look like you. Not only do my favourite characters not look like me, most aren’t even HUMAN!
They're projecting when they say that. They can't relate to anyone who is different from them.
yup. a good part of my favorite characters are black. i can think of blade, cyborg, stacker pentecost, miles morales, john stewart. i never thought 'they are black, can't relate'. i looked at personality and badassery. sure, you can argue we could have more black actors, but if someone tells me it's because they cant relate to whites, i will consider them a racist.
When I was a kid, I would watch shows like Moving on up and Sanford and Son. I can distinctly remember it--I never thought of the actors as black. Sure, they were black, but it didn't even occur to me to think about them as black or white/looking like me or not. It was just a show that I was watching that was funny or not.
Pony’s are easier to reflect as white people than live action black actors
It’s a direct consequence of identity politics. When your self-identity becomes defined by subjectively defined checkboxes, you raise your own barriers to empathy and relation to anyone who doesn’t check the same boxes.
"Evil cannot create anything new, they can only corrupt and ruin good forces have invented or made"
- JRR Tolkien
That just a modification of the law of conservation matter. Not that deep
@@poisoncheeto9956 It's actually an important principle. Demons and hostile ETs, who are out there and real and who also are desperately fighting to remain in control of Earth, literally can't create things. If you gave them a pencil and said "draw something", then they couldn't, even if they wanted to. That's because they're disconnected from Source / Prime Creator / whatever name you choose to use for the Almighty. Creativity comes from Source.
@@poisoncheeto9956 it's not, with your illogical interpretation it will imply that good forces CAN create something meanwhile law of conservation of mass states nothing can create anything whether good or bad
Damn I feel really stupid just explaining this, how did you even come to think this
Please, stop attributing that poor paraphrase of Frodo’s surmise as Tolkien’s quotation; he would never refer to the singular “evil” with a plural pronoun, “they”.
In Chapter 1 of Book VI of The Lord of the Rings, Sam asks Frodo, “Don’t orcs eat, and don’t they drink? Or do they just live on foul air and poison?”
Frodo replies, “No, they eat and drink, Sam. The Shadow that bred them can only mock, it cannot make: not real new things of its own. I don’t think it gave life to the orcs, it only ruined them and twisted them; and if they are to live at all, they have to live like other living creatures. Foul waters and foul meats they’ll take, if they can get no better, but not poison. They’ve fed me, and so I’m better off than you. There must be food and water somewhere in this place.”
This quote has proven to be the most correct line from any line of fiction ever. Every day I see new proof of it. Thus far, nothing has contradicted it.
I'm Papua New Guinean, Irish, Chinese and Italian mixed race... Have LOVED The Lord of the Rings since I was very young and never had a problem with relating to the characters in Tolkiens books. It was the noble actions and morals of Aragorn that made him my favourite character. Not once did I care about what anyones skin colour was in relation to my own. Characters looked like they belonged to a rich history of the land they came from... And thats the way it should be
Exactly!
On a personal note, I'm curious. And only asking if you don't mind: what colour/race did Aragorn look like in your minds eye while reading the books? I often find when I'm reading, that characters will default to my own colour (white) in my imagination unless the author specifically describes them differently. I'm curious how it works for other people...
@@Mamothrept I was really into the lore so I viewed him as white but kinda dirty olive skin.
@@NarvinCheeWood that seems totally fair! Thanks for answering :)
According to the showrunners... *Checks notes* You are evil.
Apologies I hope that we can all get over this revelation together!
Here! Have some random black characters!
“Fantasy is escapist, and that is its glory. If a soldier is imprisioned by the enemy, don't we consider it his duty to escape?. . .If we value the freedom of mind and soul, if we're partisans of liberty, then it's our plain duty to escape, and to take as many people with us as we can!”
-J.R.R. Tolkien
Politics has no place in fantasy. The idea of fantasy is to get away from the real world and its issues for a time.
The showrunners missed this information. Deliberately.
that's a quote from Ursula Le Guin, paraphrasing Tolkien's ideas. Still appropriate.
If fantasy is escapism, then this show was made by the wardens of the prison of reality, to mock the possibility of an escape.
@@metempsychosis4062 thanks for clarifying that.
Ursula Le Guin is definitely an authority on fantasy, so even if it were her own thoughts on the subject, I’d agree with them.
Except when you're ill/sick, wishing you could imagine something anything good, but instead all you get is everything bad and evil to make the sickness all that much worse
Good quote when not very ill though, Nothing is good when very ill, other than sedatives, painkillers, and antibiotics, those should be good when very ill usually
The issue has never been the audience. The issue is the audacity of thinking they could improve on a story that has lasted the test of time.
with unproven writers and dismissing the only lore expert with balls
You hit the nail on the head.
These writers are amateurs and yet have the audacity to think they can outdo an author whose work will live on after we are all dust.
i disagree, the issue has always been the audience
mostly the problem that the audience is so clearly so much smarter and well versed in the source material than the people making the show
Shows are deliberately made to get the audience angry as a marketing strategy.
Diversity done right is invisible. For example, nobody watching The Seven Samurai is going to complain there are no white people in it.
If you want your show to be recognized for diversity in the 21st century, you have to deliberately piss somebody off.
@@petriew2018 Almost had me with that first half.
we shouted "YOU SHALL NOT PASS!" and we mean it.
Yep. They probably thought we were just quoting the movies in excitement for this new stuff... Oh boy...
Fun bit of history here: at the battle of Verdun in WW1, the French slogan was “Ils ne passeront pas”. This translates to “They shall not pass”.
Lest we forget, Tolkien fought in WW1. In France. At the battle of the Somme. A battle that was started in an attempt to relieve the French forces at Verdun.
I have no doubt that Gandalf heroically holding a narrow point against a fiery evil while shouting “YOU SHALL NOT PASS” was inspired by the valor of those French soldiers he fought along side.
I’m not a lore expert but I would guess the show runners probably are similar to a balrog. Lol.
Yup.
This isn´t Marvel, this isn´t Star Wars (with all respect to these creations).
This is cultural heritage.
And you will not get away with raping it!
@@johnstuart1338 In showing respect to all those fine good men who died at war, we shall not let them mock at a good man paying respects to the memories of good men!
Actually, the peter Jackson films played up far more of the tension between racial groups in the film.
Elrond in the book never says: "men are weak, indeed it would be a stupid thing for him to say, given that he is half man himself, (his brother was the first king of numenor), and that he actually fostered Aragorn in Rivendell as a child.
Elves and dwarves did have grudges, but these were based more on ancient scores not settled, EG Gimly's father Gloin complains about his imprisonment by the wood elves in the hobbit, which in turn was based on older issues and more of a history.
There is no suggestion in the films that the Rohirim wouldn't! go to Gondor's aide, indeed Theoden's embittered "where is gondoer!" speech is film only, the question was more that the Rohirim couldn't! go to Gondor's aide being busy dealing with Saruman's forces from Isangard (part of the enemy's over all strategy).
The only literal instance I can think of of racism in the books, are where some men, the rohirim, and in their previous ages, the numenorians, mistrust of elves.
Even here however, this was less about "race", or "how they looked", than about differences in outlook.
The Rohirim knew little of elves and mistrusted them because they thought them strange and otherworldly, and were quite content to change their views when they were better acquainted.
The Numenorians mistrust of elves was wrapped up in their overall jealousy for the elves immortality, and their fear of death.
So no, while Tolkien has a great deal of cultural grudges, complex relations and such, there is no actual "racism", in the modern sense of simply prejudging someone based on their apearence.
When you have different species of sentient beings, color gradations between humans is not that big a concern.
@@reek4062 Just finished rereading Lotr as a direct protest to rings of power; though in fairness I reread Lotr every few years anyway.
Will be going on to the hobbit and the Silmarillion.
would highly recommend the books to anyone who enjoys long, in depth fantasy, amazingly written, albeit not with blockbuster pacing.
If the books are daunting in length, the Bbc radio play from 1978 might be a good halfway house if you like audio dramas.
Indeed, there were many nods to thisin the Peter jackson films, such as casting Ian Holme as Bilbo, who plays Frodo in thee audio drama.
I'd say the books are miles better than the writing in rings of power, but to be honest that's not exactly hard!
@@reek4062 is this another of those 'bait' things where you think saying something stupid without evidence won't be seen as the pathetic ramblings of a shill?
because we have long established you can barely read at all, let alone have ever cracked a book by Tolkien
Oh but not enough of them were black and that's the ONLY racism they care about addressing. It's horrendously anti Irish to a hate crime degree.
In defence of Elrond in Jackson's films, it is entirely possibly he would feel men, in general, are weak in his eyes.
"I have seen three ages in the West of the world, and many defeats, and many fruitless victories."
I certainly believe lost potential in men would make him jaded, Dunedin especially, as they are his brother's people.
Numenorians became corrupted, cruel and through their actions Valinor was removed from the world and Numenor, his brother's kingdom, destroyed.
Elrond has seen how weakness of men splintered Arnor, and destroyed Cardolan, Rhudaur and Arthedain.
Weakness of men has plunged Gondor into medieval despondency. Kingdom of Rhovanion is no more. Weakness of men has made men Sauron's most trusted and important servants, and allowed Sauron endure.
Elrond being disappointed with men is like having an elder brother that is disappointed with the choices you made, though he loves you still.
It is why he put Aragorn through so rigorous training since childhood.
Their previous gig was at Bad Robot, where they punched up scripts and developed several projects, such as an abandoned Star Trek movie. “We had reached a point - we’d been writing movies for 10 years that should have gotten made,” McKay says. “Movies where the director was right, the cast was right, the script was right, the title was right and it was a big IP - and it still wasn’t happening. So [we thought] maybe we should try this TV thing.”
In a way one could give them credit for not giving up, but then again everyone from Bad Reboot seems to prove the saying that, 'in Hollywood you just fail upwards.'
Here’s how bad these people are for context:
Two of these writers wrote for Star Trek Discovery… and they received NO CREDIT for it.
That’s the level of bad we are dealing with.
Why in seven hells would something as rich as Amazon hire people that incompetent anyway?
@@icecell Because they are both one in the same.
Keep in mind that Jeff Bezo's ex-wife donated all the money she got from the divorce settlement to BLM. And JJ Abrams' wife was the president of the MeToo movement.
Also, all the Bad Robot people are masterclass salesman. They claim they can make them SO MUCH money because they got credit for ONE successful project. For example, one of the writers for RoP wrote for Better Call Saul, a show they had no creative control over and wrote some successful episodes that they overestimated their talent. That lie has only caught up with them thanks to JJ Abrams releasing Rise of Skywalker, which made less than a Billion that he promised.
You can go down a BIG rabbit hole with Bad Robot.
In Tolkiens work, pride is what brings evil and tragedy. In RoP and modern morality pride is the ultimate good.
Its written all over Morfydds fucking face in practically every bloody scene.
When she gets her armor and walks on the boat I feel like throwing up at how happy she is with herself, let alone the duel scene versus those recruits.
Its cringe...
Hubris was Feanor’s downfall.
And it was something Galadriel saw in Feanor early on that others missed.
It was why she spurned Feanor.
She knew, even prior to his overt turn towards darkness, that he would cause strife.
Not in a manner of prescience- she didn’t have a vision of the future. But she knew where his pride would lead the elves-to destruction.
In which case the rings of power has transposed Feanor’s hubris over Galadriel.
His sin of pride that Galadriel rejected outright.
From the beginning.
There was never a time where Galadriel was as such.
Galadriel was the very antithesis of how Amazon has portrayed her.
Pride parades!
Like Melkor himself, it only twists and defiles something pure into a shadow of it's former self.
On the subject of redemption for past evil, I think Angel from Buffy came to the best conclusion: redemption isn't a goal, it's a way of life.
If I remember correctly, Sauron wanted to make the world a better place through tyrannical order and domination, seeing the evil he did as necessary and thinking everyone else were fools to oppose his good works. The directors are literally acting like Sauron.
Well said Sir! Well said!
Literally Sauron's reason to join Morgoth
He was opposed to the New World Order and they are FOR it.
Absolutely, these creators are literally a reflection of the very evil Tolkien wrote about "But they were, all of them, deceived". The media and show runners will claim the criticism is about racism ect to deflect the evil on others.
Unlike Sauron there isn’t even any decent craftsmanship here.
Guy was a superb architect and smith regardless of his evil.
This lot can’t make a decent show with a billion dollar budget.
Could one sit for a moment and Imagine Sir Christopher Lee watching Rings of Power and going "What is this shit"
I can imagine him bitchslapping everyone on the simps of powah show
He'd probably stab Jeff Bezos
Better that he didn't experience this defilement.
Bravo and that's a great reference.
Heresy eventually perishes after it's lies are made naked and clear upon the sight of those it hopes to blind! We must stop watching this even for negative publicity because it feeds the amazon rating system. Take heart and join us for our EXSURGE TOLKIEN counter rings of power heresy series on our channel. It will be a happy thought in these dark times.
Remember, evil is described as appearing fairer yet feeling fowler.
What does everyone compliment? The visuals. Everything else feels off to anyone paying attention.
Edit: I messed up “foul” and “fowl”, which is hilarious considering Tolkien would likely bop me with his pipe for such a thing lol
not even the visuals are all that good, my gf is constantly bashing the show when an elf appears because they are her favorite part of tolkien and yet in the show they are nothing more than humans with a slightly pointy ears, and even said ears almost dont appear because... make up is expensive i guess? my guess is this is why there is almost no elf with long hair, because that way the ears would probably appear all the time like in lotr, so instead we get these horrible short haired elfs that have their ears covered 90% of the time and in a vacuum cant be distinguished from humans most of the time.
"So I look foul, but feel fair." 😏
@Chosen One bot
I actually hate the visuals. Feels like a AAA CGI game rather than a true fantasy world.
Bahahaha mate I'm not a grammar nazi but your comment made me laugh cause I think in pictures.
Foul=dirty fowl=a bird
I truely shivered when I heard this "sometimes you must touch the darkness to know the light" line, even more during a first episode, which is always expected to foreshadow a lot. You're right mates, this cynical "the ends justify the means" motto is something totally alien to Tolkien's work. And that's one of the many reasons why it lifts its readers' spirit up.
Best example of it that comes to my mind is, say, someone facing the violent extinction of all he holds dear, with no hope to overcome the odds, is presented with a mean that can turn the tide entirely and yet he refuses to use it because it would be evil. That's what heroes do, whatever the cost. That's what Aragorn does, not once but twice, when he refuses the Ring, and when he stays true to his word by dismissing the army of the dead after the battle of Pelargir (or in the movie after the battle of the Pelennor fields).
Ps : please be so kind to forgive my english, french froggy here :)
I recently rewatched the Jackson trilogy and the thing that stood out to me was how each of the characters are noble and virtuous in some way. They're not flawless, but each one embodies a trait of courage, loyalty, self-sacrifice, or some other moral virtue. Not even the GOOD characters in Rings of Power (to fully exclude people like Galadriel) really show any of these traits. What bravery does Elrond show? Or Isildur? Or new characters like Bronwyn and Arondir? Sure they stay and fight some orcs but there's never a moment when you think "this could cost their lives but they're fighting anyway".
Tolkien's work has a LIGHT to it that shines through in every page, and Jackson's movies did a pretty great job replicating that, especially in the ever-present contrast between the light and the dark. Rings of Power has none of that. They try to make their villains sympathetic and tell their "heroes" to touch the darkness. And this, more than the poor casting (looking at you Grandmabrimbor) or the garbage writing or the cheap costumes, is the show's biggest failure.
My gripe with the Jackson trilogy is how horribly portrayed Denethor was. They did his character super dirty.
@@aerinsoleris I completely agree with this. Denethor is fascinating in the books but they ruined him in the movies. He's just a big dumb selfish jerk, basically.
@@aperson9847 Not to mention Faramir...my heart.
Notice on how no one responsible for this show is addressing any actual criticism of things like the writing or the world-building.
classic tactic that's ten years old by now. just attack the fans for not liking your show/movie because clearly the issue lies with the millions who hate what you made and not with you for making a shit product.
They could never defend their shitty show by actually discussing these issues.
They're clearly not smart enough to understand thise criticisms, so how are they to respond to them?
“ Better to die in righteousness” is a concept also seen in Buddhism, where dieing horribly in this life is less overall suffering then the suffering that will come later from bad evil deeds.
It’s been over a decade since I took a course on this subject, but I believe that the concept of dying in righteousness is also shared amongst all of the Abrahamic faiths.
I remember that being a part of Buddhism, and it might be part of Hinduism as well. I’m not 100% sure on that though.
A complementary thing to say that I found in the writings of saints is that another reason why ends never justify the means is also because if you use evil to build good you'll not end up with good, you'll end up with a twisted and wicked parody of the good thing you originally envisioned. Or in very simple terms: you can't build a house of gold with a pile of shit
Also it reminds me of the saying ‘you either die a hero or live long enough to become the villain.’ The saying is most likely a retreading of the concepts your talking about. Really interesting
@@geomeopeoleo1740 That comment is pure pessimism. It's good to be aware of your own shortcommings and not pretend you're entirely good at all times as nobody is perfect but still you can be a hero for your life as long as you strive not to do evil. You don't need to die early to die a hero
"I do not love the bright sword for its sharpness, nor the arrow for its swiftness, nor the warrior for his glory. I love only that which they defend."
A concept that RoP never came near.
The show somehow does the converse. Everyone that should be gloried by a shallower viewpoint commits atrocities in defense of diversity and feminism and makes us fall out of love with what they defend. Not because we don't still love the unattainable ideal but because of the what horrors that always come for wont of them. Divrsity might as well be The One Ring at this point.
Showrunners: "This is not your kingdom! These are woke lands! This is woke gold! And we will have our revenge." * Reveals Rings of Power *
The Tolkien fandom is momentarily silent at the scenery budget, only for plot hole after plot hole to open up as it melts and collapses under it's own weight, trying to bury the fandom.
Tolkien Fandom: * Erupts * "Revenge! Revenge!!! I will show you: Revenge!" * Flies towards Amazon, ready to destroy a billion dollars in budget *
Exec that greenlit this: "....What have we done?"
Here's hoping this time The Dragon wins.
Amazon: "the sea is always right"
Fans: "the customer is always right"
How does a sea mannage to think or let alone be always right, that, for me, still remains a mystery
eeeh have to question the latter. even outside of karen scenarios, its also common for good or at least decent media to be demonized for no reason.
A weird example to throw out at ya would be homestuck. It had a sequel going on for a bit. The continuation though was a bit contorversial, some people wanted it to end proper. others joined in late and wanted more. Some decided to become offended by it entirely.
the peeps who became offended used the ill behavior of one of the people working on it t ojustify an extreme irrational hatred. Said individual was an issue but there was no sign their opinions were negatively influencing the work itself, and the rest of the people were chill. Talking about a fairly small team but made up of people who were at some point just peeps in the fandom. Problem is, old spites exist, and this troublemaker attacked someone who was in the fandom still. Making basically grooming accussations, after said indivdiaul started posting other people's materials. This made the guy who made homestuck think that was true, and he acted up in a massive way.
Of course this all lead to people hating the sequel not because of its contents, which were a bit questionable, but because of a sense of arrogance, and people saying that they were personally insulted and he was anti fans and etc. Even after the troublemaker was let go, which was ultaimtely obvious casue they started mouthing off online and made snide remarks against the guy who mae hoemstuck as well...... Yea.
Project was put on hiatus as a result.
When it comes to rings of power though, its like every goddamn individual is that troublemaker.
Fans: "you are not Tolkien, stop trying to be".
@@SithBy11 just like their so called "saying"
Disa isn't even the first female dwarf in the Rings of Power. You can see lots of female dwarwes in Khazad-dûm befor her first scene
😆
She's just parroting what she thinks she should. She's probably only making 15k an episode for the show.
Awww, don’t pop her bubble of self-importance. Plenty of time for that after she gives herself diabetes and is hooked up to a dialysis machine 3x a week.
No Orc females. 😞
Shad: "We're both married, and i even have 5 kids."
Nathan: "And I'm practicing."
Lmao. Thx for the laugh to lighten my mood, needed it after all the bs from Amazon and its shill over the last few day.
I would like to point out that the reason why no elves and dwarves were present at the battle of the Pelinor fields and the Black Gates is because there were other battles occurring elsewhere in the North during the War of the Ring that LOTR never shows. The Men of Dale, the Dwarves of the Lonely Mountains/Iron hills, Lothlorien/Rivendell, etc. we’re busy fighting off Sauron’s northern armies. Specifically, his forces that had re-armed Dol-Guldur. The Appendices discuss this. Racial tensions were not the reason why Elves and Dwarves never showed up. Galadriel and Elrond already supported Aragorn and his ascension to Gondor, but their attention was at making sure Sauron’s forces didn’t come from the north. The Free Folk of Middle Earth had other battles against Sauron beyond the Battle of Helm’s Deep with the Rohirrim, and the battles Gondor fought against Mordor and it’s Southron/Umbarian Allies.
THANK you, yes. Just another example of things they could have covered FROM THE APPENDICES THEY BOUGHT that would have been more interesting. Or the orc dwarf wars. Or the story of Aragorn PRE trilogy is pretty awesome. Anonymously working his way up in the army of Gondor to be their greatest general, defeating the Pirates of Umbar, and then leaving to become a ranger - partly to avoid conflict with a younger Denethor.
A new story in Far Harad that touched upon events in Umbar, with a bit of crossover with events in the north would have given the authors all the scope they said they wanted. Plus they'd have realized where the southern lands are in middle earth. It was a relief just to see them change "southlands" to "Mordor," so they could stop describing the area to the north and east of the southron lands as "southlands"
So the plan was to use a magical sword hilt that needs blood sacrifice to form a blade as a key to a dam ( both centuries old ) to release water into tunnels and channels recently dug to let the water flow down through the plain, then up the slopes of Mount Doom, then letting it fall into a gigantic magma chamber open to the plain, to let Orodruin explode... well... right.
What if the dam got destroyed in the last centuries or Waldreg got to the key hole in the last decade, when the tunnels where not dug...? only a flooded plain... great plan... what could possible get wrong...
My D&D group would have called me an ambulance to the next asylum if i would present a plot like this...
P.S: Shad, give the show their chainmail back, they seem to need every prop for their show :)
They made tunnels to the dam... Just break down the dam. It's really not that hard. The sword hilt nonsense is unnecessary.
There’s dumb. There’s really dumb. Then there’s Bad Reboot ‘writing’.
Also get this: the water flows UPHILL into the volcano.
" But but... it´s a fantasy show, who cares about physics....." the consoomers will proclaim.
Wasn't the tower and dam built by the Elves? Why would they build it with a secret way to open it and the key would be a magic sword made by their mortal enemy?
@@robo5013 nope, they both where built by Morgoths human followers in the FA... as you wrote... would make no sense for the elves... and an elven watchtower would not be so derelict when elves are living there for decades, anyway
It is obvious from the behaviour of characters in the show (especially Galadriel), that the show runners do not understand how decent people behave.
How to sympathise with another person's pain rather than reiterate your own specialness, How to lead without bullying or manipulating, how to be strong without direct threat of physical force, how to actually cope with overcoming a challenge you do not instantly win, how to accept the "diversity!" (ha ha), of others views, beliefs and opinions without having them completely agree with you.
I genuinely think the show runners do not understand why people dislike the rings of power, because they do not understand how decent, ordinary people who are not entitled narcissists behave!
This is why they do not understand Tolkien, anymore than they understand their critics.
Weak people can't understand what it means to be strong. The stupid can't understand what it means to be smart. And the morally-bankrupt can't understand what it means to be good. And it shows in their writing.
It's like Sauron being incapable of understanding the idea that anyone would seek to destroy the ring. He couldn't fathom the concept that anyone could be unswayed by power.
@@scottphillips8607 And he was probably right, the one person that was trying to destroy the ring (Frodo) on the last moment, refuses to do it, he hesitated for a moment just like Isildur
I saw this article last night and just about lost my mind. Glad to see you guys not only taking a stand against it, but calling out the hypocrisy and lies for what they are. You guys are absolutely the vanguard of the Tolkien fandom. Keep up the fight, and stay on watch!
40:00 A great example of a strong woman in a leadership role without being masculine is Queen Elinor from Brave.
When Blade came out I, as a white male, envisioned myself as a vampire killing evil vampires. I did this not because he was black. Blade was a bad ass character. What they are putting out is a crime against literature!
he was..
...new Disney movie: but probably not anymore
This is the movie I usually cite as well. When I watched Blade as a kid I never thought twice about his race
Amazon thinks that you can only identify with people of the same skin color, but completely forgets that people are not fundamentally black, white or anything in between, but fundamentally human. I identify better with Lord Momonga (Ainz Ool Gown), a mage who almost wipes out an entire kingdom just to make a statement, than Galadriel because he seems more human!
None of us really thought of him as a black badass. It was the 90s or whatever. We were just people, blade was just a badass vampire killing vampire.
Michael Jordan was just a badass basketball player. Michael Jackson got a little weird and stuff but maybe that was later. Shaq was just a giant basketball player.
Selena was a hot singer. Jeff goldblum? was just The Dude.
Gilbert Godfrey was just a fuggin guy with a crazy voice. Ms doubtfire was a hilariously fictional character.
The 90s were good times. This shit today is sick and saddening but won’t last too much longer I don’t think. People are fed up and fighting back everywhere.
Things will return to sanity for a time. Hopefully for a decade or more, but some new tactic will pop up by those who want power and sow division. Stay vigilant. Or stay on watch as these blokes put it
I'm Japanese, and my favorite superhero growing up was Storm. The only thing in common we have is that we're both women. I liked her because of her personality, her morality, her powers, and her look. I didn't need her to look exactly like me to empathize or admire her. And when I see some of these garbage hack writers these days turn her into a generic "angry black woman" who's racist against white people, it makes me sick to my stomach.
the reason that dwarves and elves don't like each other is because of the "conflict" between Aulë and Eru. Aulë created the dwarves deviating from the song of creation. He does that because he is impatient and he creates his own pupils. Eru finds out and instead of forcing Aulë to destroy them, he gives them true life, puts them under the mountain to sleep until elves come to middle earth, finding a way to still keep them in the world without breaking the song which prophecies that elves will be the first people to arrive in middle earth. But because of this conflict, they will inherently be cursed to be in conflict them selves. So when Gimli gets the strands of hair, it's super significant. They overcome much more than just looks.
To a lot of people all that is Completely 100% incomprehensible.... Do you want live anywhere near them(especialy them in power)... ? i know i dont...
@@insiainutorrt259 an ex friend of mine couldn't understand any of Tolkien and couldn't stand to read his works. Which is why she's an ex friend.
It didn't help that later on dwarfs kill a elf king to steal a symaril.
Imma go with the reason dwarves and elves don't like each other (and the bias is mostly Sindar)... might just be the murder of King Thingol by the dwarves.
@@getfreur2458 you can tie that back to: "But Aule answered. 'That shall also be true for the Children of Iluvatar; for they will eat and they will build. And though the things of they realm have worth in themselves, and would have worth if no Children were to come, yet Eru will give them dominion, and they shall use all that they find in Arda: though not, by the purpose of Eru, without respect or without gratitude.”"
I’m rewatching GoT S2 now. The portraiting of Brienne of Tarth in S2. Everything about her introduction, her storyline, her looks, her actions, her posture, her morals, her fights, and her lines was perfect. When she was missioned by Catelyn S. to deliver Jamie to Kings Landing. Those on the road dialogues between them, oh my, still getting goos bumps. Jamie is constantly mocking her and she barely answers him, she even says «Nothing you say will make me angry»! She was so nobel, gracefull and gathered all the time.
THAT’S perfect writing, perfect casting and perfect acting for a female warrior.
THAT’S MY TRUE HEROINE.
PS: I know that they screw up her arc in S8. But S2-Brienne was perfect.
You're dead right. I liked her character in the books, but Gwen absolutely owned her and made me love Brienne's story.
I always default to Thronebreaker's protagonist, Queen Meve, as my example of a strong female warrior. It's in her name, she's a real goddamned queen, but she still appears on the battlefield, she still travels her country and checks in with the commonfolk and solves problems of her citizens when she can. And when the plot takes off and she's brought to her lowest point, she leads by example -and does so from the frontlines. On top of all of that, she still has moments where she is left powerless and weak, where she must rely on her allies and friends -and she does so gratefully and humbly.
Nevermind that she's a woman, if she existed, she'd just be a good person.
Exactly @eyesfullofsky Leading is a way of being. It has nothing to do with gender. Mormont to Snow: «You want to lead one day? Then learn how to follow». Guladriel has one dimention. She answers before thinking, snaps before considering like a teenage chihuhua!
Game of Thrones is cringe.
@@WardenOfTerra You and a small bunch against millions.
Gandalf said it..
"No!" cried Gandalf spring to his feet . "With that power I should have a power too great and terrible. And over me the ring would gain a power still greater and terrible.... do not tempt me! I do not wish to become like the Dark Lord, himself. Yet, the way of the ring to my heart is by pity, pity for weakness and the desire of strength to do good. Do not tempt me! I dare not take it, even to keep it safe."
One of the deep messages of the Lord of the Rings is that things done easily (put on the ring and save the free peoples of Middle Earth) are inherently corrupting and evil. Don't become the thing you are fighting against, during the fight. God, the ONE, Eru Ilumtar could have sung the universe into existence without Free will... he could have created obedient slaves, not free souls who will choose to do hard things for the good of all or choose to do self serving things. He could have chosen the easy way. But that is inherently evil. Jesus didn't have to come earth and live a life and die a death.. but he chose to do so, and so, do good and not become evil. Gandalf choose to refuse the power of the corrupting ring and fight the balrog without it,. Frodo loved the peace and gentle life of the Shire.. he didn't want the chore that appeared before him, but he had to chose the hard road to Mordor for love of the Shire and everyone else. Surrendering his lifein in doing so.
Evil dominates all life. Good rules/ advises justly and allows people to choose.
The scene where the devil takes Christ to the high hill and offers him all the kingdoms of earth if only he bow is very similar to the scene I just quoted. In Tolkien's world, just like in Christianity, the easy way to do something leads to evil. The journey towards the end you are seeking, matters. Tolkien's Christian roots are visible in the story, in so many ways.
In truth, good without strength is like Sauron after the destruction of the ring, powerless.
I mean just the whole scene/concept of the elves occupying the humans in the southlands for supposedly thousands of years because the "evil is in their blood" completely lost me.
Because I am born in germany in the 90s apparently I deserve to be watched over by occupyers. Yes the past was evil, you have to talk about it so it doesn't happen again and not put all "Germanpeople" into this one boat.
My Great-Grandma was sentenced to the camp and only survived because it was few months before the liberation. My Great-Grandfather from the other side of the family was a party member.
Now you suggest to me that I personly can be accounted to "evil because of blood". If you really think like that with the whole "blood/family/ethnicity thing" you only strenghten the extremists on both sides of the political spectrum.
You are being treated like that and so are all germans in a still an occupied country since ww2 now being completely dismantled and destroyed right along with the cleansing of ukraine from all ukraininans....
Who is doing this? .... why?..... do you even want to live?....
It's always weird when the so-called "anti-racist" people turn out to be very racist themselves.
The German past was actually glorious and the Austrian painter was the only man who stood against actual evil.
@@zoebaggins90 Well as a good satirical show once said; germans are harmless unless an austrian tells them something different and never forgett, Mustacheman became german in 1936, three years after he was elected as chancellor.
But dark humor is the best humor.
@@schimmelbrottitanson7645 Really? You're saying the Austrian painter lied to the German people? What he said wasn't true? He was wrong?
Whether by negligence or intent, it is evil.
And it's hard to argue for that level of negligence.
"Auta i lóme!" and "Aurë entuluva!" On September 3rd, the Tolkien phandom awoke and found half of the Tolkien-verse under the dominion of the corporate machine theyocracy. Thus we bring "council in these dark times,": EXSURGE TOLKIEN, our current channel's counter series. It is now beyond a doubt that The Lord of the Rings: Rings of Power" is independent of Tolkien and his world's Orthodoxy. ROP a schism that will leave a forever rift between the phandom and wrought confusion for years to come.
It is intent.
@@SergioLeonardoCornejo definitely and by design.
Not a coincidence that Amazon owns the Washington post and has a huge mansion in DC 🧐. World economic forum theology.
@@wrlSivan16 Amazon owns much of the press- those they don’t actually own are bought and paid for in other ways
It’s very hard to find out who owns certain large media conglomerates-hidden under layers of corporations-I’m certain it’s deliberate misdirection
The line "To know the light you have to touch the darkness" is such a disingenuous misrepresentation of what Tolkien said in his letters on the matter of good and evil. To quote the man himself; "You have to understand the good in things, to detect the real evil."
Harfoots were a branch of hobbits.
Their Wandering Days, which Amazon twisted and shoehorned into the Second Age, speaks of their migration from the Vales of Anduin to Shire in the books.
Their most ancient legends "looked further back than their Wandering Days" and "glimpse a time when they dwelt in the upper vales of Anduin", where they got the name Holbytla "hole-dwellers" from the ancestors of the Rohirrim, hence the name Hobbit. The name was the most ancient name for all three branches. All three branches were originally hole-dwellers, and they remained hole-dwellers for their entire known history.
I never bought this Harfoots living in carts thing.
Writers for the show stated the wheels of the carts symbolized the round doors of hobbit holes. Happy coincidence that the doors weren't square or triangular then
@@joebobhenrybob2000 poor Bob the hobbit really got fked over when they decided to migrate and he had a sliding glass door.
Yes - the reason I read high fantasy is for it to represent the modern world
Of course, it's the greatest aspiration of all escapist high fantasy - reflect the most worthless and transient aspects of modern culture... Makes sense.
My favorite high fantasy board game is LIFE. Pretty much DnD
The original LoTR was partly a commentary on the modern industrial revolution. So, yes, yes you can. The issue is the writing is cringe and sucks.
@@Trowa71 That observation seems very reductionistic to me. Some of LOTR's themes did address the problems with the industrial revolution (which I am very aware Tolkien was unhappy with), but I wouldn't call it a "commentary." Rather, LOTR reflected Tolkien's deep love for the goodness of the natural world, which can apply to any time or place, not just industrial Britain. In contrast, one of the major problems with RoP is that it is a social commentary (and a bad one by most accounts) more than a story. But yes, the writing and story are also unbelievably bad.
@@sggames4787 I mean, I don't disagree, I just want fans to be very wary of alt-right talking points which are muddying otherwise totally justified criticism. I would say that social commentary isn't bad in and of itself, but when it's hitting us over the head with it without a hint of nuance or quality, that's not so good.
13:55 To be fair: Lorien was attacked by Orks from Dol Guldur and the Erebor was sieged by the eastlings.
"Road to Hell is paved with good intentions", is my most favorite quote. Im willing to bet that "Meaning well" has created more suffering than every War in History combined. It probably has caused more than half of them too.
Indeed. A great example of this was Prohibition in America during the 1920s. The people who lobbied for it did so with the best of intentions, such as ending alcoholism and domestic violence.
@Jon A And in their good intentions they were blinded to the destabilising red hand of feminism behind it all.
""Meaning well" has created more suffering than every War in History combined."
Not really, meaning well is always the excuse.
47:25 This is what I suspected is behind the motivation of the creators for RoP and WoT - they simply hate everyone who rejects their ideology. They don't try to convert people to their ideology and instead demonize those who disagree. They hate their dissenters so much that they feel obligated to ruin everything they cherish - just like an estranged wife after a bitter divorce.
I'm loving these videos (thanks guys), but at this point I'm starting to genuinely worry about Shad's blood pressure 😂🤣😂.
Rings of Power is the worst thing to happen to Middle Earth since Morgoth himself…
Pretty sure morgoth would admit the fake Hobbits are more evil than he is
@@randomperson-up5vt He’d probably be jealous of them lol
@@SithBy11 I disagree. Yeah the Hobbit trilogy sucked big time and I honestly have no love for it but I think they did a better job there at capturing the vibe of middle earth than this show…
Tolkien: "Deep roots are untouched by frost."
Let/s go Shad and Nathan! Hello from a fellow member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints! It's always fun to listen to you guys, way more enjoyable than ROP itself. Gonna miss you guys for the next two years, I'm literally prepping now to go to the Italy Rome Mission. Keep up the good work lads!
Excellent work, Knights! This vile article just reaffirms that I will absolutely not give season 2 a chance, even if they supposedly "turn things around." Keep fighting the good fight!!
The audio quality here is actually perfect! Hope you guys can use these settings in your live streams.
only reason im watching the show (not paying for it either) is that i can watch these breakdowns of the episode and laugh with you guys.
"If they wish to denounce us as villains, then we shall embrace out villainy."
- Crystal Exarch FFXIV: Shadowbringers
As far as I understand it, the main theme within Tolkien was the concept of mortality and immortality, personified by Elrond and his brother, and the slow decline, and corruption of men due to their inability to find contentment in mortality. The fall of Numenor, one of the key events in Arda, that led to many other events, was due to the resentment of the elves gift from Eru.
This, along with a love of nature, the uglyness of industrialisation, and an appreciation of the English rural culture.
I've been watching you a lot more lately because of rings of power and House of the dragons, but this video got my subscribe. Keep up the good work
i have not heard or seen anything related rings of power that does not make me feel physically ill. thank you shad and nathan for being in pain with us.
Tolkien said his writings were a thoroughly Catholic work, and it’s clear throughout all of the series. The “spirit of Tolkien” is one about God and the fight against sin and temptation.
Exactly this.
13:49 Small correction Shad. There was 1 Elf in the movie, but there were 3 Elves at the final battle in the books Legolas, Elladan, and Elrohir. The later two were Elrond's twin sons. Just wanted to make sure to remember Aragorn's adopted brothers would not let him stand alone against ultimate evil.
Hmm, I wonder if there was a character in Tolkien’s work who talk about the light comprehending the darkness without being able to be touched by it… wonder if it is the same character that RoP has so corrupted as to earn Morgoth’s Employee of the Month award.
No this is antithetical not only to Tolkien but to Christian theology (I’m not Christian) there are some good recordings detailing this on the channel Andrea with the bangs. The whole show is cancer and literal reversal of morality not only in Tolkien and religion but objectively. The people who wrote this and assembled the ‘story’ (there is no story) are immoral people, period.
I've fallen in love with your channel. Thanks gentleman.
Yep, agree completely. The main message saying that “you can’t know something is wrong unless you do that action” is definitely an evil ideology.
I don’t have to rob someone in order to know that it’s wrong to do that. Etc.
You don’t have to do wrong at all. That’s never been a requirement in life.
I’d like to see them try to explain Joan of Arc, Ghandi, Mother Teresa, Saints of the Bible, etc. with this ideology. 😂 I guess they should have been murdering and pillaging, etc. otherwise they apparently don’t know what right and wrong is.
I think the real way life actually works is we are actually trying to not do wrong. Basically, even when tempted, choosing to never do evil acts. Whether that’s lying, cheating, stealing, jealousy, etc.
The more you do evil the more difficult it is to get back on the right path-to make it a habit of doing good.
So no, it’s actually really bad to purposely do bad things, that doesn’t lead to good habits. It leads to bad habits and takes a huge effort usually to change.
You don’t become good from doing evil. You become good from choosing NOT to do evil. And you don’t need to do wrong in order to know it’s wrong.
On the creation of Mithril: so, according to Rings of Power elves had a whole story about it's creation and even knew it's properties, but they never looked for it and no one ever saw it until the dwarves?
Even though Elrond's father, Eärendil, had a whole ship, Vingilot, made from Mithril.
In the 1st age he sailed a ship he made himself to Valinor and the Valar blessed it and turned it into Mithril.
He killed Ancalagon the Black with it during the War of Wrath with what was essentially a Holdo maneuver.
A good person would not invent this Galadriel or these Harfoots. They are "good" in this script, and Galadriel is supposed to be rooted for by th viewer, even though she, beside all of modern "strong woman" tropes, manipulates other "good" characters, sometimes into situations of mortal danger, she's completely egocentric and smug and entitled. These are traits, even Ray - the golden standard for modern day "strong woman" - didn't show. If they wrote her to be like this, they find this an acceptable behavour. I didn't despise Abrams for SW, he's just untalanted and stuck to a formula. I strongly dislike these two, as they seem to be actually bad people!
I believe they wrote her this way so they could develop her character into the strong, powerful version of her we know later in LotR. To do that, she must start off as deeply flawed. Then have a watershed moment where all her faults are revealed to her, preferably after she has done something truly horrendous like doomed the world, and she sees how she must become better.
The problem is that they have not shown any quality of her that we would want to form a connection to, so we don't. We don't care if she will become better later on. She is now a passive background character in a show with no main character or hero for us to follow. In that way, the writers have failed. High fantasy needs a hero. LotR gave us 9 heroes in the fellowship and we cared about every one of them because even though many had flaws, they also had a recognisably good spirit. Without a central hero in RoP, the show feels empty and unrewarding.
And yes, those harfoots are evil too. They murder each other passively, abandoning their neighbours and friends and leaving them to die on a journey that is 4 times longer than it needed to be, while singing a song about staying together. That's pure cult territory.
@@donkeysunited would be 100% true, but given the interviews and the back-backlash from the creators and actors, we're supposed to root for her already, we should take her side even before "the moment", as her being "a minority" is a virtue by itself and enough to compensate her flaws, furthermore a few of her objectively negative traits are presented as such, her arrogance and entitlement for example, the do a small emphasis on her manipulativeness and hastiness, but that seems to be all they see as a flaw of hers. I agree, that they're setting up "the moment" but they're so bad at it!
As much as I hate Rey Palpatine, I’ve never had the urge to knock her teeth in. There have been a few characters that I’d like to slap the back of their heads, but none so revulsive as Guy-ladriel. And I’m a pretty chill dude who always tries to see things from their perspective. This is how badly they messed up.
@@LoneSilverW0lf True. Ray's exhaustingly uninteresting and unmotivated (like, really, I didn't get her overall motivation throughout 3 movies, and I tried!) while this B-word... when she unironically told the guy how her squad and her best friend betrayed her - I actually cryed something very rude outloud, while in a public place - the audacity of this "good" """protagonist""" is incomparable, I've never seen anything like it, unless in the beginning of a redemption arc, but both in the lore and in the show there is no indication there is one!
Tolkien said his work was about “Death and the desire for deathlessness” (Letter 203) But what did he know?
@Chosen One Are you a broken record?
Something I found very interesting about the mentioning of the LDS take on Satan is how similar it is to Sauron's own motivations in the deeper lore, something that distinguished his evil from the evil of Morgoth.
Where Morgoth's resentment was very directly against Eru (God) and the nature of creation itself (specifically that it wasn't his), Sauron's core motivation was directly caused by the fallibility of the Children of Eru (Elves initially, but he'd apply this to Men and Dwarves as well) and their perceived inferiority of decision-making and wisdom compared to the angelic beings of the Valar and Maiar. While Morgoth only wanted to destroy and ruin all of creation, both the Children of Eru and the literal land itself to spite the essence of creation, Sauron wanted to dominate and control the lesser creatures of Middle-Earth to prevent them from making bad choices and compel them to act in good and wise ways (at least what he determined to be wisdom in his deep pride). Of course this motivation rotted over time as Sauron's spite and obsession with power for its own sake grew, that I believe he had completely lost sight of any notion of "ruling people for their own benefit" by at least the end of the Fall of Numenor, but even so it remains likely that the world of Sauron's victory would have been a despotic, industrialized hellscape where all beings were enslaved or sacrificed to some vague notion of "progress" that Sauron would never truly be able to bring into being, as opposed to the wholly dead and void world Morgoth would have made.
It's sort of like Tolkien split the LDS take on Satan into two characters: Morgoth is the Satan that directly seeks to usurp God, whose pride and envy causes him to hate all of creation itself because it is not his, and will be content with nothing more than the ruination of all of God's designs... and it never could be anything more than that, because he has no designs of his own to replace them with even if he had the opportunity to do so. He's a larger-than-human character, whose nature and ambitions lie pretty well outside the human experience and is well into the cosmic. Sauron is the Satan that seeks to dominate and control humans "for their own good", to "prevent them from making bad decisions", a much smaller and more localized form of usurping God's designs rather than unmaking all of creation. Sauron lies more somewhere in between the cosmic and the human, being larger and more cosmic in scale than any human could reasonably achieve but still able to see the parallels with him and the great history of human tyrants.
It could have even been interesting to give us a bit of a look in the show into this nature of evil, this particular form of pride that so many humans fall into... but I suspect it's one the showrunners could never express because it's an evil they share in, their conviction that they just know better than everyone else and the highest virtue would be to control the rest of the world and force them to not make (what they have determined to be) bad decisions.
You make some quite profound points there.
To be fair. During the Battle of Minas Tirith and Morannon, the dwarves and elves were fighting their own battles against Sauron. The dwarves were fighting at Erebor alongside the men of Dale against the Easterlings that are seen in the Two Towers, and the elves of Lothlorien and Mirkwood were fighting against Saurons armies at Dol Goldur.
Salutations from Scotland.....fight the good fight Watchmen!
Cancelled my prime due to this today due to this.
You know... maybe we should just turn their own philosophy against them: "Well... sometimes you have to touch the darkness to get the enlightened ends you're looking for." Use that anytime they criticize the criticism of their story as evil/-ist/-ism. "Well, we don't like the way you're doing it; we we're just touching the darkness to get the ends we want. Ends justify the means: it's so simple." smh
and retort - fighting evil makes things worse. you have to refrain from fighting evil. Stop fighting evil - that's the worst thing you can do --- repeatedly said by the writers through their lines
@@joebobhenrybob2000 Yeah, and then the contradiction of the Elf king... we have to send our finest fighters away to stop fighting evil... but then cure the Elves in order to wage a war against evil... yet waging ware against evil is the very thing causing the thing that needs to be cured? 😕
Needless to say, they'd better have a REALLY good explanation for a lot of stuff in the final episode... or the next season... or there'll be A LOT of loose threads and plot holes and contradictions.
Andre from Midnights Edge put it the best for writers who want to write about “the world we live in today”:
Maybe you should leave your postal code before you start writing.
A lot of these malicious hacks don’t leave the small postal code of LA or New York that their apartment is in. So they aren’t even portraying the world that exists beyond their bodega or homeless camp.
I gladly watch 5-9 hours of roasting of the show than actually watch the show it self. Shad, Disparu and Nerdrotic keep up the roasting.
To be fair, 14:00, the Dwarves were fighting against Orcs during the final battle. Same with Lorien, I believe.
Agreed! the Dwarves and men of Dale lost the battle in the north, so they retreated to the Lonely Mountain and were besieged by the Sauron's forces until after the Battle of the Pelennor Fields when they broke out of the siege and routed the enemy. And afterward, they pledged eternal friendship to Gondor after Aragorn's coronation. And both the Elves of Mirkwood and Lorien fought off more of Sauron's forces. Then they both united, the leaders of Lorien and Mirkwood, and Galadriel threw down Dol Guldur and renamed the forest Greenwood.
different armies i take it? just not one united front in a literal sense.
would be more tactically sound.
@@taddad2641 Sauron divided his enemies with different armies and prevented them from doing any Last Alliance-type strategy. He learned a bit from the last time.
@@taddad2641 The problem with that, though, is the extreme distances between each army. Even with a united front, they would be hard-pressed and eventually defeated, since Sauron had outnumbered them by a big margin.
@@taddad2641 Would leave their own realms defenceless. Each realm had to secure their borders and fight off evil in turn, even the Shire.
I have been ruminating on this idea for a while now, but this video solidified my thoughts. I genuinely believe it would be hard to bastardize and completely 180 Tolkien's message more than they do in this show if that was your expressed goal. People using Tolkien's direct quotes to attack the show went from memes to now feeling legitimately evil on part of the showrunners.
The Rings of Power is a trap made by Sauron, so in that sense it is lore-accurate on a meta level
The spirit of Tolkien is very simple: ordinary people doing extraordinary things and coming together to stand firm against a great threat.
That is the essence of his work, according to the man himself, I might add.
Saying anything other than that, would be at best, a misunderstanding. At worst it would be a wilful perversion of not just the man's work, but the man's ideals and personal beliefs.
"ordinary people doing extraordinary things and coming together to stand firm against a great threat."
The opposite of reality so far.
Knew this one was a coming
Hoped this one was coming
I don't remember who said this, but...
"If someone shows you who they really are, believe them the first time!"
i was born in the early 60s and most of my life the message was "racism bad, make it stop" and things seemed to be going quite well...and now, all of a sudden (in the last decade or so, i realize that's not *so* sudden) the message is all about how to be racist. i'm in the united states, btw, so that's the perspective here. they're teaching what they call "critical race theory" in schools which basically teaches racism. they don't want this pointed out, of course, because they're attempting to brainwash and gaslight young people with the propaganda. i'm glad to see, though, that there are still MANY people who don't buy this garbage. just reading through the comments here gives me hope for mankind! keep up the awesome work, Knights! ⚔💛
it was "racism bad, make it stop" when Whites were the majority and increasingly "Whites are bad and action must be taken against them" with "diversity".
According to the showrunners, evil action justifies the purpose. This is the reason why Boromir allowed himself ti be seduced by the evil ring.
It has been quoted many times so I will not repeat what Tolkien has said about Evil, I will simply say, we must stand against evil. The hearts of men are easily corrupted but those with good hearts that stand together, United under God will be able to oppose this Evil.
thank you. I see that dsmn quote one more time I'm poking my eyes out
Bear in mind that the dislike between the Elves and Dwarves was not due to their dislike of their looks, but it goes back to historical betrayals of each other which began in the First Age due to Thingol betraying the dwarves he hired to fashion a jewelled setting for Beren and Luthien’s silmaril. This betrayal was influenced also by the the Oath of Feanor. The keeping of a Silmaril from the sons of Feanor. The elves and dwarves of Eregion got on famously until the rings brought strife upon the dwarves and the unleashing of the Balrog in Khazad Dûm likewise upon the elves. This is a cultural mistrust bearing no relation to ‘actual’ racism.
I’ve said it since the first trailer dropped: This show feels dirty. This is actually really sad to me. The potential…my goodness, the potential. It is heartbreaking and shameful. Shame on you, Amazon.
I agree. It really could have been something special.
Read the chapter "The Voice of Saruman" and then compare Saruman's spell to Payne's.
Shad was in top form in this one. Speaking only reason and logic. The problem is reason and logic both fall on deaf ears when it comes to the two fluff boys running TRoP. I like how Nathan recognized Shad's rant was well and truly on target, unwavering and didn't need much interjection... respect.
Cheers, Sev
#1 rule of business: the customer is always right. If most of your customers dislike your product, you're in bad business.
Great as always shad and nathan! Praying for your families.
Shad, the reason Elves and dwarves didn't come to help at the battle of Minas Tirith was because they had their hands full themselves.
Erebor was under siege, the wood elves were busy with Dol Guldur's fortress having been re-armed by Mordor and the high elves of Elrond were pretty busy on their side due to orks coming from the misty moutains up North. Even the Shire got it's share of battles.
That's why they didn't come and help Gondor, not because they didn't want to, but because they couldn't.
I have a new level of respect for you Shad. More of us who love Tolkien need to call this out for what it is (which the vast majority of us have been doing.)
This is the deliberate, spiteful subversion of one of the greatest authors of the past century. These people hate Tolkien and everything about him and the themes he weaved into his work. One day soon I’ll be publishing a high fantasy book of my own, and I can only pray that I’ll be even remotely as inspired as professor Tolkien. Even so, I know for a fact I could’ve written his work into a show better than these godawful Marxist pansies.
Also, Simon Tolkien is a lesser son of greater sires, let’s not forgot about him. It was he who allowed this to happen, as a spiteful and resentful act against the shadow of his own grandfather. Rather than protect his grandfathers work like his own father did, Simon wanted nothing more than to corrupt it. The man (using that term loosely) is the embodiment of Melkor being unable to create anything of his own, so he must corrupt the work of his own father and grandfather.
Regarding Disa: if the showrunners hadn't been too lazy to write her character well, if they had explained how a brown-skinned Dwarf came to live among a Northern people who lived underground and could not possibly have evolved melanin as a defense against sunlight, her character would have been so much more interesting. Disa's journey to Northern lands would have taken years and been quite dangerous. She could have been a heroic character. For that matter, if others of her people came with her, there could have been more Dwarves of African descent in the show instead of one token brown-skinned Dwarf. The same goes for the Elves. Maybe the Elves and the Dwarves of the Southern lands made the journey together. In the hands of good scriptwriters this show could have been truly diverse.
Is it only about color? Is that why they hired British actors for these token black characters? Or did they choose a Puerto Rican for the black One Episode a Slave elf because slavery wasn't abolished in PR until 1873?
How many more actors "of color" could they have hired if they had made the "diversity" actually make sense. Why, they could have even hired some African-*American* actors in lead roles - imagine!
@@charlesstanford1310 Yes! It's tokenism vs. diversity. You put it so well!
“Evil can not create, only corrupt”
Sums up RoP perfectly
All this always remembers me Hannah Arendt
"In my report of [the Eichmann trial] I spoke of “the banality of evil.” Behind that phrase . . . I was dimly aware of the fact that it went counter to our tradition of thought-literary, theological, or philosophic-about the phenomenon of evil. . . . However, what I was confronted with was utterly different and still undeniably factual. I was struck by the manifest shallowness in the doer that made it impossible to trace the uncontestable evil of his deeds to any deeper level of roots or motives. The deeds were monstrous, but the doer-at least the very effective one now on trial-was quite ordinary, commonplace, and neither demonic nor monstrous. . . . Might the problem of good and evil, our faculty of telling right from wrong, be connected with our faculty of thought? . . . Could the activity of thinking as such, the habit of examining whatever happens to come to pass or to attract attention, regardless of results and specific content, could this activity be among the conditions that make men abstain from evildoing or even actually “condition” them against it?"
People like Hannah were the actual evil ones but you're not gonna learn this on the internet. The truth has been censored.
Eichmann who was prevented from hearing the accusations made against him.
Given her behavior, my guess is Galadriel is really Sauron in this show with a surprise reveal in the end. So many good points made in this video. Good job.
If I understand correctly, and Amazon only has the rights to LoTR and the Appendices, then they seriously screwed up by sending an Istari to Arda in the second age. LoTR A states no Istari came before the third age, the Essay on the Istari states the same. The newest book, Nature of Middle Earth, is the only thing I've found (can't find my HoME) that even slightly states that istari were sent in the second age, but the only name that he mentions is Olorin and then 4 other random names never seen before or after. This wasn't even edited by Christopher, and the author cites a few pages of notes which he calls 'Key Dates'.
So Amazon deviated from the source they have the the rights to (not illegal) but then used the story of something they don't own (I think thats were it becomes plagiarism).
Maybe we can exploit Simon's greed and get dollar signs in his eyes with the knowledge he can sue Bezos and partially redeem his reputation.
Olorin is the name of Gandalf in Valinor...
@@belegur8108 I'm aware... but Gandalf is explicitly sent to Arda in the third age. That's where he meets Cirdan at the Grey Havens and receives Narya. The new claim by 'new fans' is that 'meteor man' is a blue wizard and they cite sources Amazon doesn't own to justify this.
@@radagast7200 i think they want to argue "But nowhere is written that Gandalf and the Istari never visited Middle Earth some time earlier then TA... it would be funny if it isn't so sad
@@belegur8108 it is though. Explicitly. Outside of some random drafts they found that they don't own the rights to.
Technically, there is also one of his late ideas for the story of the other two Wizards in The Peoples of Middle-earth, pages 384-385, where Morinehtar and Rómestámo are said to have been sent in the Second Age to undermine Sauron's influence in the East. But they are obviously not doing that, since they have just the one guy. They can't stick with the lore they have. They can't stick with the timeline they have. And they can't even stick with the map they have, as things are constantly shifted around in the Southlands and they constantly underestimate distances.
Shad and Nathan, call out the Emperor for his nakedness.
When I was a kid watching cartoons; they had a lot of characters with differing skin tones. I thought nothing of it. But now with them pushing DIVERSITY™, I notice race of characters a lot more. How is that improving race relations? You shouldn't be focusing on what makes us different. You should be focusing on what makes us the same. [Insert 'the more you know' 🌟 logo here] 😉
Well done. Well said! Most good people are blind to evil because they try to find the good in everything. It's a big part of how evil is able to exist, as well as being a part of the mechanism, or the methodology of corruption.
A corporation takes a beloved series and tries to pass it off as their own. They corrupt and twists every core concept to make more accessible for a ‘modern’ audience because it was problematic to start with. They then tell the original fans that this series is not for them and the fans are evil for daring to defend what they love.
Hmm where have I seen this before? 👀
*Everyone excited for Wheel of Time season 2?*
Over a decade at least it has happened to so many things.
I am sharing this video!!! Fantastic analysis. Just wonderful!
“Evil, I think, is the absence of empathy” - Captain G. M. Gilbert, Nuremburg war trials.
I wonder, Mr Payne, who has recently displayed a startling lack of empathy?
Guys, thank you! Thank you for being so specific in your criticism of this farce. Publicly they will vilify the passionate Tolkien fans and anyone else who disagrees with what they've done, but privately they can't deny it. You've laid it out for these morons so well that even they have no excuse to deny it. As stupid and arrogant as they are. This isn't just a "your show sucks" video. It's a "your show sucks and here are 100 reasons why" video. Thank you for taking the time to analyze this and having the courage to say it publicly. I'm looking forward to your next video.
Rings of Power poisoned our water supply, burned our crops and delivered a plague unto our houses! ;(
Hey!! I’m more new to the channel and I am also a member! I never knew you guys were until this video!! I am so happy to discover this! I love your videos a lot!
As you started describing the plan of salvation I was like...
Huh... that sounds like... wait... BROO NO WAY!
You guys are such a breath of fresh air!