The best piece I've seen so far about how awful Rings of Power is:
Collections: Why Rings of Power’s Middle Earth Feels Flat – A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry
"We’re going to take a look at the worldbuilding of Amazon Studio’s Rings of Power from a historical realism perspective. I think it is no great secret that Rings of Power broadly failed to live up to expectations and left a lot of audiences disappointed. In the aftermath of that disappointment, once one looks beyond the depressingly predictable efforts to make culture war hay out of it, I found that many people understood that they were disappointed but not always why. Here I am going to suggest one reason: the failure of Rings to maintain a believable sense of realism grounded in historical societies and technologies (something the Lord of the Rings, books and films, did very well) makes it impossible to invest in the stakes and consequences of a world that appears not to obey any perceptible rules...
This post is going to focus on what I see are the more dramatically relevant failures: scale, distance and social structures...
I enjoyed parts of it too (mostly the Dwarves; I thought those emotional beats landed best), so I’m not suggesting it was all terrible. What I am saying is that I wish those story elements that worked emotionally had been placed in a story that worked logically...
The series and the films had remarkably similar budgets to cover remarkably similar amounts of screentime. I confess I find myself confused, given the comparison, as to where all of that Rings money went; the show evidently was lavishly produced but it doesn’t generally feel lavishly produced...
Speculative fiction – be it fantasy or science fiction – is a genre where a great deal of the weight is carried by the fictional world being constructed.
We want the fictional world to feel real or at least like it could be a real world, with internally consistent rules and clear lines of effect and consequence. In part that is because the deep, rich real-ishness, as it were, contributes to the sensation (be it joy or horror, depending on the work’s tone) of exploring and discovering a new fictional world and in part it is because a world that feels real and bounded by rules, the way our world is bounded by rules, makes the stakes of the story itself more engaging. The plausible link between causes and consequences, bound by those rules, is what encourages us to invest in characters and to care about their decisions and internal struggles.
One may easily contrast a story set in a world unbounded by rules of logical consequences, like a dream. Anything can happen in a dream, unrelated to what came before or after. Dreams can break their own rules and they can exist in unreal or surreal spaces. And they also, famously, make for extremely boring stories. Nothing is quite so tedious as having someone narrate a dream to you, because nothing in the dream actually matters for anything that comes before or after. Of course nothing in a fictional story necessarily matters in the real world, but nothing in a dream actually matters even in the dream world. Thus the consistency of the rules and the setting are essential for allowing the audience to engage their emotions with the characters and story because they make the events in the story matter by making them feel less arbitrary.
Now that feeling of consistency doesn’t need to be a product of historical accuracy or realism, of course. Fantasy and science fiction, by their very nature, are built around elements that have no real world precedents. The story merely needs to be consistent with itself; we’re very willing to accept fictional worlds with rules very different from our own. Indeed, that is much the fun of speculative fiction, asking the question of how the world would change if some detail – often a minor one – of how our world functioned were different. That said, historical realism is an effective shortcut to the feeling of consistency because if something functions in the story the way it functions now or did function historically, that is going to generally feel quite real because it actually is. And more broadly, audiences generally assume that anything that does not obviously work in a fantastical way instead works in ways we commonly understand.And I’d argue – indeed, I have argued – that the works of J.R.R. Tolkien are themselves marked by using exactly this kind of historicizing strategy for producing that feeling of consistency. Middle Earth in Tolkien’s writings, feels real because it so strongly resembles historical systems and settings (or in the deeper past of the Silmarillion, legendary or mythical systems and settings nevertheless immediately familiar to us). One can see this perhaps most obviously in Tolkien’s languages; constructed with deep care they feel like real languages because they practically are real languages...
Alternately, one might just take a quick shortcut and use a historical thing itself – a system, a set of rules, etc. – because it will already be internally consistent and grounded... When making a speculative fiction world, the author(s), can either plan out the system’s unique function or they can adopt a real world system, but they generally must do one or the other or risk sacrificing audience investment from a world that lacks consistency...
Tolkien has not reinvented new systems of farming, new laws of physics or new systems of social organization. In The Lord of the Rings the world’s consistency depends on its feeling of historical rootedness...
The first problem we can delve into is how little of Rings’ Middle Earth seems to be in the right scale, particularly in terms of population and space. When watching I found myself repeatedly asking, ‘wait, how many people live here?’ Of course I don’t need the show to stop and give me a census, but in order to understand the stakes of the conflict and what the success or failure of the heroes might mean, it is important to have some sense of how big these places are, how significant the number of people involved are and so on. And at almost no point does the show do a decent job of expressing any of this.
We can start with the Southlands... It evidently is big enough to have a royal line and a traditional kingdom (that Halbrand is saying-not-saying he’s the heir to) large enough to be worth putting someone on that traditional throne. And yet from what we see, this entire kingdom consists of a pair of villages, one of which is ruined and abandoned before the action of the show in that area properly starts. It is watched over by a robust garrison of apparently five or six Elves, seemingly concentrated in a single outpost... the political seat of power in the Southlands is a small, poor village apparently run by its butcher before being taken over by its widowed apothecary.
The result is a plot, focused on ‘saving the Southlands’ which makes no sense no matter how you think about it. If these people – Bronwyn is able to address all of them in one small courtyard, there can’t be more than a couple hundred – are all of the remaining people of the Southlands than the quest to save them failed before the story got there and it makes no sense at all for anyone to suppose making Halbrand king of these 200 or so people would do anything to change the political or military situation in this part of the world. Alternately, if there are other large settlements (towns! cities!) then it makes no sense that the Númenóreans beeline to this village at top speed or that these villagers recognizing Halbrand as king would in any way be meaningful. For this plot to work, this needed to be a large political and administrative center, which is to say it needed to be a city...
(Bronwyn is a Welsh name, her son is ‘Theo’ a name root that Tolkien uses heavily in Old English Rohirric names (From þeod, ‘people,’ e.g. Theodoric) or alternately it is Greek (‘theo-‘meaning ‘God’ in compound names like ‘Theodosius,’ ‘given by God’), since he is Theo and not Theod, it seems to be the latter. Theo’s friend is named ‘Rowan,’ which is an Irish name while ‘Waldreg’s name seems entirely made up (though it could be Germanic with ‘Wald’ meaning ‘wood, forest’ and -reg meaning…well I’m not quite sure honestly; Welsh rheg meaning ‘curse’?). Naming is, of course, something Tolkien was extremely careful about; the sorts of names these folks have should tell us something about them. The fact that we have apparently Welsh, Greek, Irish and maybe Old English names all swirling around this one village is baffling; surely these people have a language which they name their children in?)
One can easily contrast the similar stakes (in the films, not the books) of the Battle of Helm’s Deep. There we’re told – again, in the films – that some significant percentage of Rohan’s people are present and thus their survival is at stake. I discussed in that series why this doesn’t quite work from a demographic perspective, but the films do put a lot of effort into selling this... This vast land likely populated originally by hundreds of thousands if not low-single-digit millions of peasants has now been reduced to the size of a middling Division 1 Football team (American football, that is).
Which is well enough given that the size of the Númenórean force is also ludicrously small. A lot of the discourse as the series was first airing seized on the Númenórean ships for the apparent absurdity of how many troops they were notionally moving as compared to how much space there seemed to be on the ships...
We’re told the expedition consists of 300 soldiers; when we see these fellows in action, they are all mounted, so this is 300 cavalry. Despite valiant efforts to salvage this, no, these ships are not anywhere near large enough to move that kind of a force. The comparison has been made between these ships and classical Greek triremes and indeed they seem to be roughly the same size, around 120ft length-over-hull. But they are very different ships; triremes were coast-hopping oared warships and the 200 men they carried were almost entirely rowers (the layout of the space is also different; because of the long prow and curved aft, the Númenórean looks to have less usable internal space than a trireme). Rowers had to eat, sleep and relieve themselves at their benches because the ships lacked space for anything else; triremes were built for speed above all other considerations and so lacked quarters of any kind (even for the officers) and couldn’t carry but a couple of days of supplies (thus the coast-hopping). Packed like a trireme, the Númenórean ships ought to be standing room only and certainly would lack the supplies for the long voyage to Middle Earth.
But the real problem isn’t the men, it is the horses. Horses, of course, are famously quite a bit bigger than humans and thus generally require specialized transports. Ancient writers like Thucydides and Polybius are, in fact, often quite careful to separate out specially refitted horse-transports from the rest of a fleet transporting an expedition for this very reason. Thucydides tells us it took one such dedicated horse transport – which was not moving troops or other supplies – to move 30 horses (Thuc. 6.43), which was conveniently all the initial Athenian expedition against Syracuse had. The capacity of medieval horse transports was similar, around 30 per ship of roughly this size. The major problem here is not only are horses large and require stalls (since they are hardly used to sea transport) they also require lots of food and water, which has to be carried too.
And 300 cavalry are going to require more than 300 horses. At the very least each rider (I won’t say ‘cavalryman’ because there are clearly some women in this force) needs a horse and a spare (realistically several). On top of that, they are likely to require support personnel (grooms, handlers, servants, pages, porters, etc.), at least one per rider. So our 300 cavalry rapidly becomes a minimum of 600 people and 600 horses, at a near-minimum. That is perhaps six ships carrying troops and supplies and twenty more carrying horses (which is why you don’t send all-cavalry expeditions by sea, infantry is far more sea-portable); twenty-six ships total. Not three (or five, as they started out with). At minimum.
But honestly all of this is burying the lede by quite a lot, because the real problem here is that this expedition is absurdly, comically small. Númenór is an island continent with multiple major cities...
This is a big society, likely with a population in the low millions. At the very least we’re talking about a polity on scale with the classical Athens at its height (perhaps c. 1.5m including the Delian League); realistically much larger given just how much monumental architecture we see (because the surplus to support many hundreds or thousands of workers building it has to come from somewhere and that requires a lot of land and a lot of farmers). My own guess would be a polity no smaller than the mid-third century Roman Republic, so perhaps 5m people or so. This is a big society with a lot of wealth.
And this is no minor expedition! The queen of this society is personally going on this expedition. That means at minimum bringing a substantial chunk of the royal household with her. That almost certainly is going to mean dozens of advisors, courtiers, servants, entertainers, retainers, and so on: where the ruler goes, the court follows and the court of even quite small rulers could be quite substantial...
(These three ships aren’t going to do it. Also, we’ll come back to this, but these are badly designed ships that wouldn’t function well. Also, is it just me or does it really look like their masts can’t fit under that bridge there?) ...
Númenór seems to be a lot bigger than even the very largest of Greek poleis. But for comparison the initial Athenian expedition to Sicily (which had to be subsequently reinforced) numbered some 136 warships (134 triremes, 2 smaller penteconters), 6,400 fighting men, 30 horses, 1 horse transport, 30 supply ships and another 100 smaller boats carrying an array of supplies and non-combatants essential to the force (bakers, carpenters, etc.; Thuc. 6.43-4). Númenór itself seems also intended visually to evoke Rome; the Romans don’t even have an independent operational maneuver unit of a few hundred. At minimum an offensive operation like this would involve a legion (4,200 infantry, 300 cavalry) and more likely two legions plus an equal or greater number of socii (non-Roman ‘allies’) for a total force around 20,000. Which would certainly not fit on just three ships. The Númenóreans expect to find a hostile enemy army potentially waiting for them (remember, they think Sauron is out there) and they also expect to need to found a kingdom for Halbrand; this is major military operations and yet they’ve sent an army too small to even function as a foraging party, much less an army of conquest.
And while we’re here I feel the need to note this royal expedition is smaller than some of the disappointing reinforcements Minas Tirith receives from the declining and depopulated outlands of Gondor; three hundred men from the Ringlo Vale, five hundred from the Blackroot Vale, a hundred fisher-folk of the Ethir, three hundred men from Pinnath Gelin and seven hundred infantry and a company of cavalry from Dol Amroth (RotK, 46). And that was, notably far fewer than had been hoped, but “less than three thousands full told,” ten times the size of this expedition, despite Gondor being a declining, exhausted kingdom...
Of course they may not have needed to pack too many supplies in those ships because they appear to have borrowed Euron Greyjoy’s late-season Game of Thrones teleporters for both their ships and their horses, which brings us to…
The physics of this world make no sense.
We can start with travel time. We’ve been through this here before, but Tolkien is meticulous in the Lord of the Rings when it comes to keeping track of who is where and how fast they can move. Such meticulousness isn’t strictly necessary in fantasy fiction – G.R.R Martin sure isn’t so careful and in his books it is mostly fine – but in a story where major events hinge on the cavalry arriving to stave the day, a plausible if not accurate sense of how fast things move really is essential.
And here episodes five and six of Rings are an absolute disaster. Part of the problem is that we, as the audience, can actually mark the progression of time here pretty well...
The Númenóreans caught site of the coast, sailed up the Anduin, disembarked on what will be the Pelennor Fields, and then rode through Ithilien and through the pass at Cirith Ungol (famously difficult to move through) and then down into the vale (what will be the plain of Gorgoroth in a few minutes) all in a single day and night (having crossed the sea to get there in perhaps a week at most). That is, by my measuring, some three to four hundred miles, half by land and half by river, accomplished in 24 hours. Gandalf on Shadowfax does not move this fast. Normally here is where I would joke that when an army moves this fast I no longer ask how much fodder they need for their horses, but how much gasoline they need for their trucks, but many a modern mechanized force would struggle to move so fast over open country without resupply set up in advance.
(The route traversed by the Númenórean expedition in its last 24 hours. Even Aragorn in his dead sprint from the Paths of the Dead to Minas Tirith did not cover so much ground and he took eight days to do it.)...
And the Númenóreans set out on this dead sprint despite being entirely unaware that there was anything to sprint to!... It sure is great that they didn’t have to waste any time scouting but automatically knew that the battle would be taking place at the only village in the Southlands.
Once again, I feel the contrast to the Lord of the Rings is notable here. There the reinforcing armies – Gandalf with Erkenbrand (or film!Éomer) and then later Théoden – know exactly where they are going on known routes and have a very good sense of when they are likely to need to get there. As we’ve discussed at length, the movements of these armies are carefully timed in the books (somewhat less so in the films, but never this egregiously). The defensive solution for Rings of Power, of course, is to argue that the two timelines are not actually moving together, that the expedition has in fact been in motion for weeks or months. There are two problems with this: first, that goes against the very clear signalling in the show where the time of day between the two sets of events is carefully tracked, which is a way of very clearly telling the viewer these things are happening at the same time. Second, the writers get no credit for solutions they didn’t put in the show because they didn’t put them in the show. Apart from the Hobbits (Harfoots), all of the different plot threads we see link up at one point or another and at no point does anyone suggest they’ve been advancing at different rates (which also has some baffling implications for Elrond too who has been racing multiple times between Ost-in-Edhil in Eregion, Forlond in northern Lindon and Moria né Khazad-dûm; the fellow has some frequent flier miles after that, I’d bet).
But frankly it also feels like physics don’t work quite right here either and here my focus goes to the catastrophic eruption of Orodruin (Mt. Doom)... The immediate silly thing was that the Special Sword acts only as a key to apparently turn a physical mechanism to open the dam, moving what appears to be many tons of stonework to do it without a pulley or a winch (or a hundred burly fellows pulling) to be seen. Perhaps there is a magical electric motor quietly hidden under the tower, but again – and I cannot stress this enough – the writers do not get credit for things they did not put in the show. Otherwise I do not believe for one moment that the one fellow with the sword can produce enough torque on it to move the massive stone blocks holding back the river.
In either case an big flood piles down through the plains. Which is a problem because we see the opening in the dam and it is only so wide, with just gravity pulling on this water (it isn’t pressurized), yet by the time we’re at the valley floor, we’re seeing great huge waves and enough water pressure to cause the orc tunnels to explode with rock-tossing force (even before any of this water has become steam). That’s not how water works; this water isn’t pressurized at all and these tunnels all have outlets...
Now steam-explosion eruptions are a thing, they’re called phreatic or phreatomagmatic eruptions. But as far as I can tell, they do not work this way...
I think this is a scene which would have benefited greatly from some actual magic, giving us a sense that Sauron, as a Maia and the lord of this land, was exerting his control to make the mountain erupt in this way from an otherwise fairly trivial cause. But of course the writers couldn’t do that because the show was at this point still obsessed with the ‘mystery box’ approach to ‘who is Sauron!?’ – a storytelling strategy I will say I found misguided and fundamentally boring.7 And once again it is no good suggesting that there is actual magic here, just not on screen because – again – it isn’t on screen.
The problem here is that the nonsensical nature of both the character’s rescue and then their defeat rob both of any stakes. I had a hard time caring about the battle in Ep. 6 because I knew at the beginning that the Númenóreans would show up just in the nick of time dramatically at dawn regardless of how little sense it made. That arrival wasn’t earned it just happened so we could have a ‘cool’ battle scene (that is a visual mess and makes no sense but more on that another week). And the downfall of the heroes didn’t feel like the result of their hubris or choices, it felt like they lost because their enemy opened up the ‘disasters’ menu in SimCity and chose ‘Volcano.’
And then in turn the heroes surviving the eruption didn’t feel earned because…wait, how the hell did they survive that? Episode 6 ends with the village engulfed in an onrushing wave of burning, red-hot ash that is expanding with explosive force and lighting trees on fire as it moves. It blasts open doors, incinerates rooftops and then we see it envelop Galadriel as she looks on. These people are very, exceedingly excessively dead.
What we see is a pyroclastic flow, a racing mass of hot gas and fragmented volcanic ash and debris. These flows are hot enough to instantly incinerate living creatures, if the debris moving 60+miles per hour doesn’t kill you first. And if that doesn’t kill you, it will literally bury you to death in ash in moments and if that somehow doesn’t kill you, the fact that most of those hot gasses are poisonous will. This is one of the least survivable things nature can throw at you. The town of St. Pierre on Martinique was engulfed in a pyroclastic flow in 1902 and of the 30,000 people there it killed all but a tiny handful of them...
That is not a survivable situation and yet not only do some of them survive, functionally all of them do. Most of them aren’t even meaningfully injured, except for the queen who loses her sight but somehow suffers no other ill-effects and requires no medical attention. Galadriel’s hair is barely mussed. The only casualty seems to have been my suspension of disbelief ...
The Harfoots appear to be a relatively isolated hunter-gatherer culture (primarily gatherer, we see little emphasis on hunting, more on that in a moment) that are nomadic, moving regularly with a collection of carts (apparently one for each family unit), that double as housing and are camouflaged but also make for a neat colorful village when set up...
I found this culture pretty bafflingly incoherent; I’m going to be honest, I think what happened was that the designers mixed elements (especially visual motifs) of hunter-gatherer nomads, pastoral nomads, and travellers without realizing that those are three very different cultures based on entirely different subsistence systems. But we can easily rule out the latter two; pastoral nomads are, after all, pastoralists and the Harfoots are not moving sheep between pastures here. Their society would make far more sense if they were and I’d argue that a somewhat cleverer reading of Tolkien would suggest this is how he may have imagined them, but in any case, they clearly aren’t pastoralists here. Meanwhile, travellers are itinerant communities that operate within larger settled, agrarian or industrial societies whose system of economic subsistence does not work without that larger society.
As hunter-gatherers though, Harfoot society explodes with frustrating questions, the first of which that occurred to me was where did they get all of the heavy wool textiles they wear and drape on everything? Because of course as we’ve discussed, wool comes from sheep that have to be herded; cotton and linen come from plants, which have to be farmed. That’s not to say the Harfoots can’t have clothes, but given the subsistence system they have, they can’t have these clothes. And what they absolutely can’t make themselves are all of these metal pots and tools they seem to have. Their leader also has several giant, parchment-paper codices, which is another thing that hunter-gatherer societies famously do not produce: neither books nor writing...
Then there are the carts...
The Harfoot carts... are quite large and fully enclosed, with an extending lean-to to make a full (if fairly flimsy and not very temperature controlled) structure when parked; the interior space of the cart, packed full of goods on the move, becomes part of the living space when parked. The Harfoots thus live in their carts, a thing the nomads above do not. And it is hard for me not to think here that the showrunners are trying to evoke Irish travellers, especially given the heavy use of Irish accents at play among the Harfoots. And I feel the need to note that this is a set of choices, so far as I can tell, that have gone over extremely poorly in Ireland. But it also makes no sense for these proto-Hobbits to work this way because, as noted, traveller society is absolutely dependent on an existing settled society for its subsistence strategy (itinerant working requires someone to work for after all), which is not at all how the Harfoots live.
And what is perhaps most striking to me is that none of this is required by Tolkien’s actual description of the Harfoots. Tolkien describes a people who “preferred highlands and hillsides,” were “the most inclined to settle in one place,””the longest preserved their ancestral habit of living in tunnels and holes” and “had much to do with Dwarves in ancient times.” To my reading this suggests not fully nomadic hunter-gatherers totally isolated from settled society, but semi-nomadic transhumant pastoralists, likely raising sheep in those highlands and hillsides and trading heavily with the Dwarves (who might supply that metalwork in exchange for the pastoralist’s wool)...
We get a hunter-gatherer society that makes no sense and is also oddly willing to dispose of entire family groups if they fall behind rather than working together, which is doubly frustrating given that (though the famous Margaret Mead quote may or may not be apocryphal), mended bones are some of the earliest signs of complex social structures we see because they indicate that an injured individual in a group was cared for while they couldn’t care for themselves. Why is this a society where no one is willing to help pull the one injured person’s family’s cart? Do none of the other families have an teenage or adult child who might be spared for the effort?
But such nonsense societies are par for the course in Rings of Power‘s Middle Earth. Bronwyn’s village is, at least initially, apparently run by the innkeeper. We don’t see any other figures of authority and that’s who Arondir goes to for his fortnightly inspection in Ep. 1; later of course the village comes to be run by its apothecary, Bronwyn. What we don’t see is, say, a village elder or a collection of village elders or an elected or acclaimed chief or perhaps a somewhat wealthier peasants with larger landholdings running the village or any real forms of political organization of the sort we might expect in a village like this. Now I understand that the writers have made a deliberate decision to dispense with pre-modern gender stratification and labor division, but a story where enthroning a new king in this land is a key goal can hardly also dispense with political systems. Broadly, this is a story about political systems.
None of the more developed political systems are quite right either. The show cannot quite decide, for instance, exactly how Númenór is run. There are guilds that issue tokens and apparently one must be a guild member to work in the city at all. Oddly, Pharazôn is at one point explicit that everyone belongs to a build, asking an assembled crowd to “look down, each of you, at the guild crests you bear;” this is not how guilds work (on how actual guilds worked see Ogilvie, The European Guilds (2019); guilds generally restricted who could be the owner-operators, not the amount of unskilled or menial labor they could employ and the whole point was to be exclusive so most people in a town were not members of any guild at any given time). And despite that, these guilds seem to have no political presence at all. Never do we see the queen having to interact with the various leaders or representatives of each guild. Instead, we see Evil Vizier Pharazôn shaking hands in the market and giving speeches to angry crowds (Ep. 4; starting at 5 minutes in). Is this some sort of Republic where the opinion of the urban populace matters and if so how?
Except it is clearly not, because there is a queen who appears to wield absolute power...
Who are the key powers in Míriel’s court and where does their power derive from? Why can’t she just sack Pharazôn and replace him with a non-obviously-treacherous advisor. Elendil seems vaguely important, was is the actual scope of his military command? Does he come from a noble family? The lack of a clear explanation or any sense that the writers even know or care is a real problem for us to get invested in what is fundamentally a political drama about the rulers of Númenór and the decisions they make.
The same problem bedevils the Elves. Apart from Gil-galad being in charge, we get little sense of the actual political organization of the kingdom he runs and how exactly his authority relates to Elrond, Galadriel and Celebrimbor. The fact that – as in the books – Gil-galad is really just primus inter pares running a loose confederation of Elven kingdoms (and thus can’t really order Galadriel to do anything, but then hell, even the Valar struggle to get Galadriel to do anything she doesn’t want to) is never really properly explained either. But all of the Elves we meet except for Arondir’s company of scouts are not random Elves but in fact elf-lords of high lineages, most of whom are or will shortly be rulers of their own quasi-independent realms and yet again we never get much of a sense of the political implications of all of this...
In a show where major plot-points hinge on political systems (what will Númenór do?) or subsistence systems (where will the Harfoots get food now that their trees are burned?) the audience is going to want to feel like the writers have thought about these questions rather than merely planning to ‘make it up as they go along.’...
Galadriel is compelled by Elven politics that are never explained, ordered by Gil-galad, whose relationship to her is not explored, to go West on the basis of an order it was never clear to me he could actually give. What is the nature of his authority over her and of her authority over others? Then she is thrust immediately into the politics of Númenór, which are also underexplained. Then she joins the inexplicably small, inexplicably teleporting expedition before surviving the least survivable volcanic explosion ever put on film (and then heads for a ring forging scene that left me profoundly confused), before heading off to forge some rings out her suddenly boundless trust for the one being in Middle Earth she hates more than all others (and has now learned has been cleverly deceiving her for essentially the whole show).
Now I know that the creators of the show didn’t have full access to the Silmarillion and so their story had to diverge in important ways from that text. But nearly all of the divergent decisions they made seemed, to me at least, quite bad, actively undermining the story, its world and setting. In particular, it seems to me that at every point decisions were made as to what would make that scene potentially cool or compelling or visually interesting. The entire ‘Who is Sauron’ mystery stands as perhaps the apex of this approach, a collection of red herrings whose emotional impact is lost the moment the audience figures out who is Sauron, creating a lot of scenes with tons of fake foreshadowing that becomes pathetic in second viewing and already feels lame in recollection. Each idea was built for the scene or maybe, maybe for the episode – and then treated as if the moment that was done it no longer mattered. And if it doesn’t matter to the writers, why ought it matter to me?
That’s because a good story – in this case a good TV season – is not just composed of a collection of visually interesting scenes strung together. There has to be a glue that retains the emotional interest of the audience; indeed that glue matters more than the scenes or single episodes because it is what fosters the investment in the scenes. Many great films and TV shows with far smaller budgets have landed far heavier emotional punches with scenes that were far less visually compelling or interesting because we actually cared about the characters involved.
Instead Rings of Power has its big ‘cavalry saves the day’ moment and I felt nothing, because the stakes were either unclear or already undermined by the unreality of what was happening and because the sudden arrival of the cavalry was both unearned and yet sadly predictable. By contrast, Peter Jackson puts a lot of work into the arrival of the Rohirrim; that is the result of hours of character development, the culmination of several character’s emotional journeys and we’ve been shown the decisions that make it possible without the need for a 400-mile teleport to luckily arrive at the one tiny village."
Clearly, as liberals say, if you think realism is important, you don't understand fiction and you're a racist/incel. And if you think dumping "miniority underrepresented people" or even gay or trans people into pre-modern societies if it doesn't fit and with no explanation is not an issue, you're racist.
