Things that continue to annoy me about Amazon's Rings of Power

[galadhir]

Thought I would make a list of all the things that bug me about RoP, because I need to vent to someone.

1. Male elves with short hair. Why is this really annoying? Because Tolkien went to the trouble of saying that their long hair is a sign of vigor and beauty for them. Finrod, Fingon, Fingolfin are all high Noldorin lords, and even their names revolve about how beautiful their hair is. In other words having long hair is very important in elvish culture. Why sacrifice that for no good reason?

2. Why do Celebrimbor and Gil-Galad look so much older than Galadriel, when in fact Celebrimbor is about the same age as her (?) and Gil-Galad is her nephew? And specifically, when canonically, elves do not show signs of age until they are absolutely ancient. Is this like 'oh no, how will they look properly authoritative if we don't make them middle aged?!' What about 'elves are immortal and beautiful' is so hard to understand? And why exactly are we not allowed to have beautiful elf lords but it's so vitally important to have beautiful elf ladies? (We know why, but I'm still rolling my eyes.)

3. How the f*#k does Gil-Galad have the authority to force Galadriel to go back to Valinor, when she is an Exile and her inability and the other Noldor's inability to go home is a huge, HUGE, important plot point throughout the Silm and LotR both. Way to completely miss one of the overarching tragedies of the entire Noldor people.

4. What is this nonsense about the elves all being about to die or forced to go back to Valinor without mithril? See above about how their Exile and their Oath is still making that completely impossible. Also, mithril is a precious metal that is more beautiful than silver and harder than steel - that's enough for it to be politically important and something that people covet. Way to turn it into yet another magical item and somehow absolve the elves and the dwarves both of the responsibility of their greed.

5. I mean there is a lot of stripping of the Silmarillion elves magnificent jerkishness. It's a different book from LotR and the Silmarillion elves are proud, ruthless, dangerous, sometimes murderous, but you would not know it from this series, where they all behave just like LotR elves.

6. There's no acknowledgement that there are different kingdoms and kinds of elves who are in strained diplomatic relations with each other. Where is there any awareness of the kind of politics that is going on in the Second Age?

7. Where is any awareness of what the beef between the elves and dwarves is actually about? Is it really better to present it as some kind of irrational prejudice, rather than the result of elves having hunted dwarves for sport in the past, and dwarves having sacked Doriath and killed King Thingol fairly recently? I know that introducing that would complicate the whole "elves and dwarves are all good people!" thing, but complication is what you get when you choose to tackle the Silmarillion, which is essentially Tolkien's Game of Thrones.

8. Argh! How is it that Celebrimbor, who is a master smith, doesn't know how ores work? For goodness sake, people, make some attempt to depict forging accurately in a story where smithcraft is also a huge plot point.

9. Galadriel was in effing Lorien when the three rings were made.

10. Forever sore that we did not get the story of Celebrimbor usurping the rule of Eregion from Celeborn and Galadriel that we should have got, which lead to Galadriel and Celebrian fleeing Eregion through Khazad-Dum to go and prepare a refuge in Lorenindorinan. While Celeborn stayed in Eregion and was on hand to fight Sauron when he revealed himself and came against Eregion with an army and the body of Celebrimbor impaled on a pole as his standard. Instead we get this wishy-washy crap where the entire army of Numenor decides to go and rescue a small village in (what will become) Mordor, despite the fact that nobody on the spot has even asked for aid.

Am I less annoyed now that I've got this all out? No, not really.

Here is a series of blogs by an actual historian talking about the many things that annoyed him

Comments

[shipperslist]

I haven't seen this and I have zero interest to see this but it sounds almost like they didn't even bother with the source material. Almost like this was written by a straight cis-dudebro who wanted to make a new GoT or something but didn't actually bother to do it properly.

[galadhir]

The absolutely barking mad thing about it is that this is probably because they didn't have the rights to the Silmarillion. So it wasn't just that they hadn't bothered to read the source material, they were actually forbidden from using anything in it. They had the rights to LotR and the appendixes, but not the Silmarillion itself. So of course they decided to make a Silmarillion story anyway not worrying about the fact that there is actual canon for this era and they were trampling all over it.

I think you're right - they thought the name would guarantee that it was a huge success and they'd have a moneyspinner on their hands. But Tolkien fans hated it and non-Tolkien fans didn't love it enough to make up the difference.

[mistressofmuses]

I realize that they didn't have the rights to the Silmarillion and that's part of why they had to change things... except it also seems like they deeply Don't Get It.

I'm going to be honest and say that I have never read the Silmarillion, and I still hate all of the above, haha.

[galadhir]

LOL! Yes, exactly. What we got was nothing like the Silm, but a lot like a really derivative copy of LotR with a few Silmarillion names thrown in despite being nothing like themselves. And honestly it would have been so much easier for them to just do a LotR tie-in, which they actually had the rights to, and which the vast majority of movie fans would have probably preferred. The Silmarillion is in a whole different genre from LotR for a start ;)

[mistressofmuses]

It does feel derivative-without-infringing, which to me makes the vibes sound like knock-off store-brand diet Silmarillion, lmao. I do think they should have picked something that they DID have the rights to... or, as you said, in the same genre they were attempting to produce.

[makamu]

Agreed on all of these points (even though I decided to just not watch ROP on the basis of the trailers alone). The thing I just don't understand is this: why did they insist on doing the forging of the Rings when they didn't have the rights? With the Appendices alone, they have the whole Third Age to play with - an area that Tolkien barely touched!

Compared to that, the Matter of Eregion and the Last Alliance without the rights to the Silmarillion could only end in a mess because any Tolkien fan would complain and all the non-Tolkien fans have no reason to care for a level of detail beyond that of Galadriel's prologue in the films. Or so it seems to me.

[galadhir]

I know, it's baffling isn't it? They could have easily brought back all the LotR characters that everyone loved from the movies.

They had the cleansing of Ithilien right there, which could have featured Faramir and Eowyn battling hold-outs of evil creatures coming out of Mordor, with support from Legolas who is there to found his own elven kingdom. You can have sub-plots with Gimli as he sets up his kingdom in the Glittering Caves and has to (maybe) liaise with Eomer when he (maybe) unearths a young dragon. And Merry in the Shire is visiting Rivendell.

Plus this is a great time - now Sauron's dead - for there to be contact with the kingdoms in Rhun and Harad. Maybe they send embassies to Aragorn, or he sends ambassadors to them - and now we've got whole kingdoms full of people of colour to explore, with their own cultures and legends and monsters and magic, which I would love to see. They could even bring back the blue wizards if they wanted a supernatural big bad for everyone to have to team up against.

That's what I would have done, at least :)

So yeah, 100% agreement that they should have done something like that instead of trying to make something up and pretend it was the Silmarillion without having the rights to do a good job of it. It's so frustrating because the Silm is an awesome book but it is awesome in a very specific way that needs someone who can do justice to Norse Saga levels of laconic grim irony - and those people are few and far between.

[makamu]

That's what I would have done, at least :)

I would be so there for either of these ideas.

It's so frustrating because the Silm is an awesome book but it is awesome in a very specific way that needs someone who can do justice to Norse Saga levels of laconic grim irony - and those people are few and far between.

Speaking as someone who only got into Tolkien's sources of inspiration years after she was already neck-deep in the Silm (in fact, I grew up on the bane of Tolkien's existence - Arthuriana *heh*), I think all it really and fundamentally needed was someone willing to bring Tolkien to the screen again (which, say what you will about the changes they made, PJ, Fran, and Philippa did), without wanting to be the next big thing in fantasy (which is what broke the Hobbit films) and just like GoT (a judgement that shows a complete lack of understanding of how Tolkien and Martin differ in how they use fantasy).

And that is why The Rings of Power truly fails: all it was ever meant to be is a cash grab.

[galadhir]

Total agreement :) If only it had gone to someone who would have actually treated it with love and a modicum of writing ability. I suppose a comfort is that the actual Silmarillion rights are still available to be made by someone else. It would be good if someone would come along and do it properly and blow the Amazon thing out of the water :)

[makamu]

It would be good if someone would come along and do it properly and blow the Amazon thing out of the water

Yes, it would be ;) Though even a good writer would have to get past the Estate first (and though Amazon is definitely evil, that unfortunately does not make the Estate the good guys...)

[galadhir]

Ha! That's very true!

[makamu]

Yeah. I wish it weren't sometimes, but here we are...

[sleeplesspotato]

Should have guessed that Bret Devereaux over at ACoUP would be posting about this series; sometimes his nitpicks are more entertaining than whatever it is he's nitpicking over, and in general it's fairly educational in terms of worldbuilding and how things actually happen historically.

[galadhir]

Yes, I started following him for his Dothraki series and I was super excited when he started to do them for Rings of Power too. I think honestly the history is just as interestng as the fantasy.