They've got the vibe right, which is all that matters to me. Feels like middle earth.
I'm a casual in the lore, I have the silmarillion but i use it to just look up shit in the movies while theyre namedropping stuff i dont know the context of. So I can't really vouch for how well they've kept everything intact, but it seems solid from my light knowledge.
But, yeah, it's got the vibe and if you like the way middle earth feels then I recommend the show.
Was not expecting to like it, but here we are
I’m a deep deep deep Tolkien lore nerd, and I’m honestly surprised by how little some of the (fairly egregious) lore breaks are bothering me. It just feels like an enjoyable show that still manages to FEEL like Tolkien even if it ends up going against established character history/background. That’s not to say that there aren’t things that have made me angry, but it’s definitely turned out to be good so far.
For me, the only time I really was :jesse-wtf: was Gil-Galad being a huge dumb-ass (denying the existence of your enemy is such a trite trope by now) and sailing to the west is both a privilege to be doled out and doubling as an exile for annoying people ?!? But I'm also surprised how easily I just could go along with the rest
Yeah, it's deeply annoying at some points, and I have some issue with the direction some characters have been taken (though the actors are great and clearly commit to the roles) but it's fine Tolkien fan fic, certainly better than the Wheel of Time adaptation (which was...fine...it's fine) . I rate it around Shadows of Mordor quality.
The Dwarf women don't have beards. It's the only thing Tolkien ever described about them and it got focus-grouped away.
As a trans woman who can't afford electrolysis, ya damn right I'm salty about it
All TV is marvel dialogue trash now. I declare a fatwa on Joss Whedon
1 was good, 2 was meh with great battle scenes, I fell asleep during 3.
Tbf, though, I've watched the extended versions years later, and found them to be better than the theatrical releases.
i dont know if im a fan of the main cast being young galadriel and elrond... the other folk are new and thats exciting but---stakes of life and death with characters we'll see ~10000 years later? not adventurous enough
and. the. dwarves. dont. have. beards. :angery:
Well :very-smart:, Morgoth was technically spreading corruption in Valinor for like forever when he surrendered to them, before he ran off and brought back Ungoliant to eat the trees, but truly? Who knows. :vivian-shrug:
Yeah, like wasn't Feanor's first sign of being a douche his being hostile to his brother and making the first armor and weapons ever in history? Violence was not a thing in Valinor before Feanor decided to give Morgoth the time of day.
I'm watching it alongside possibly one of the most hardcore Tolkien fans in existence, and aside from a couple moments where he yells about some parts of the show being completely different and at some points, an affront to the lore, we've both been enjoying it so far.
I figured that was the case, I know Jackson did it too. I'm glad it's still enjoyable even being that far down the rabbit hole though.
the problems i have with the show are problems i have with a lot of modern shows/movies: some terrible dialogue, overuse of CGI, and my least fav thing that modern shows and movies do, cutting away from immediate action/events. its just extremely jarring for me. just let the scene play out!! post s5 of game of thrones did this a lot, and it was frustrating then too.
a small example in ep 2 of rings of power, there is a competition in the dwarf city, but as soon as it starts it cuts away? why?? just...do the entire scene? when it comes back to the scene later on, its not even that long, so i understand the purpose of cutting away even less
I have noticed that the intro...leaves quite a bit out (since I don't think they have Silmarillion rights). It's a bit "And then Morgoth was bad and Feanor and the elves heroically sailed to Middle Earth to kick his ass and there is not a bit of moral quandary there whatsoever."
Where'd you get all the boats in that short shot Galadriel? Where'd you get them?
I really like it a lot so far. I'm a mid-tier Tolkien nerd, so I know enough to understand the deviations from the lore, without being too anal about them. I understand that there needs to be some simplification and while I'm not a big fan of original characters in established lore, I'm really enjoying the new additions. My overall impressions:
- I fucking love the Harfoots. Poppy and Nori are just incredibly adorable, and the two actresses are doing an amazing job.
- The interaction between Elrond, Durin and Disa was my favorite moment so far, really fun and surprisingly emotional. The chemistry between the three actors was out of this world.
- The show looks great, too. It really does have that Middle-Earth feel that was completely absent from The Hobbit movies, which is exactly what I'm looking for. And holy shit, Khazad-dum was pretty much perfect.
- The costume design is on point.
The new Gambo is quite good too, but Rings of Power is the show I'm most excited about at the moment. It's very light and refreshing. Gambo is good but it's also pretty heavy and dark, and I'm not always in the mood to contemplate the darker side of humanity or whatever. Sometimes I just want to have fun and enjoy a story about good vs. evil in a fantasy world.
Proto-hobbits being around thousands of years before any histories mention them but just keeping to themselves very well is excellent
not saying its bad but its weird that the harfoot (destined to become the English hobbits) are like, based on irish travelers? idk cause the english drove the travellers into their nomadism and colonized ireland yknow
nah it's definitely bad. It'd actually be good for the story to bring up why they're always in hiding and traveling. Have an england stand-in that scared them off or something.
With this said I fucking really like them whenever they're on screen lol
I'll wait a few more episodes and see the feedback of those before I give it a try. I'm not saying I know for certain whether I'd enjoy it or not, but when something Tolkien makes deliberate noise about how it required a "sex advisor" I'd rather not sit through more of the Gambo show with a Tolkien reskin, especially if it has even more, say, (CW: sexual violence)
spoiler
full frontal Ye Olde Gaynge Raype for "illustrative" purposes and totally not for hog feeding, featuring real visible distress from the contract-coerced actress in it.
Who is organised by the screen actors guild, and their job is more as an advocate for the actors, making sure they are actually informed about the detailss and actually consenting to any intimate scenes sexual or otherwise, rather than tell them how to do sex scenes.
So they’re the people stepping in to tell writers and directors their scene is fucked up rather than suggesting fucked up scenes. I imagine those headlines were the media misunderstanding (or intentionally distorting) that now very common jobs role.
When the banker trust fund failson directors of Gambo were drooling over a contract-coerced actress and her actually-real-and-not-acting visible distress during a sexually violent scene she didn't anticipate but had to do anyway, it would have been nice to have such a coordinator. Or better yet, for those failsons to be made to take a long walk off a short pier.
Pretty goofy and tame.
I find grimdark for grimdark's sake pretty goofy, especially since the gimmick's been in its modern form since at least 1995, but I get you.
Good. But since you said that it was "goofy and tame" I wanted to point out that grimdark can also be pretty goofy, especially when done for its own sake as a matter of course.
It's way more chill than that so far, but yeah better safe than sorry if it gets to you.
One of the reasons I'm liking it though is the lack of that shit
One of the reasons I’m liking it though is the lack of that shit
That sounds promising to me so far.
I am a supercasual but here are my thoughts: at the beginning I expected to like Galadriel and not Elrond but now I like Elrond and not Galadriel
Happened to me too. The sharp angles on the guy that plays elrond's face were fucking me up for about 10 minutes as well
It is kind of nice having a middle earth product that doesn't revolve around a Baggins
Question for the lore heads: if Valinor is so tight, why dont all the elves ditch middle earth and go there all at once?
Whatever the elf version of white guilt is, mixed with paternalism and chauvinism.
I'm pretty sure they're not allowed to mention this, because it happens in the parts of the Tolkien lore that they didn't pay $500 million for, but Galadriel's people were actually banished from Valinor for committing elven genocide (making it really weird that the king thought he had the right to send them back for their glorious deeds in tracking down Morgoth)
Amazon doesn’t actually have the rights to The Silmarillion. This means the series will be based on The Appendices at the end of The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King. Which, admittedly, does overlap in stories between the two books, but if it is mentioned in The Silmarillion and not in the Appendices, it is off-limits. And this has to do with the rights from the Tolkien Estate and from J.R.R. Tolkien himself.
Tolkien had never wanted to sell the rights to his books to the movie companies, but he was forced to eventually for the money in the 1970s to Saul Zaentz, and the animated Rankin and Bass productions of The Hobbit and Ralph Bakshi’s The Lord of the Rings (among a few other small budget films) were made. But those were the only rights that were sold. Even for Peter Jackson, he only had the rights to The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. So, for example, when Radagast the Brown was introduced in Jackson’s Hobbit movies, he had to be very careful with not saying that Tolkien had mentioned there were other wizards in Middle Earth (there are, in fact, a few more mentioned in other works) because he didn’t have the rights to it.
McKay and Payne might have a little more leeway due to the Tolkien Estate being involved in the project, but we can probably expect not to see significant life events in Middle Earth-like the Fall of Gondolin, as described in depth in The Silmarillion or anything else from Tolkien’s Unfinished Tales.
From here
Lol, I can't believe they decided to make a show out of the appendices, assumed it was the silmarillion.
I read elsewhere that it's on a case-by-case basis, i.e they're allowed to use certain things with permission from the estate, but they don't have free reign on it. Which is basically what that article says. They're working with the estate to get certain things even without full rights basically
Almost all of them that went there in the first place already have.
Elves are split into three types (and many subtypes). Light elves heard the call of the Valar in the dawn age and went to Valinor, Grey Elves heard it but stopped along the way (these are most of the elves you will see in the TV series). Dark Elves never listened and stayed vibing along what would become the Sea of Rhun (and in Tolkien's mythology, reside in our world to this day, faded but still able to give rise to stories of the Fair Folk.)
There's like 5% of the Noldor (the ones who came back from Valinor cause they were malding) left and of their leaders who went on the exile and haven't returned it's pretty much just Galadriel, Gil-Galad the High King (who arguably has a weaker claim than Galadriel), and Celebrimbor. Galadriel is able to return at any point, as she went over the northern ice and didn't take part in the Kinslaying.
Celeborn, Galadriel's husband (they've been married thousands of years at this point) is a Dark Elf I think. Cirdan the Shipwright is a Grey Elf of Teleri stock (though he is so old he predates the sundering of the elves and the original call to Valinor, making him at least 7500 years old by the time of lotr).
Elrond was born in Middle Earth, though he's Half-Noldor and Half-Human (of (at some remove) Beren and Luthien, the second of the famous Elf-Human tragic romances and directly of Earendil and Elwing the third tragic romance. This is why he doesn't want Arwen to marry Aragorn). His (long dead) brother choose humanity over Elfdom and founded Numenor.
So, The remaining Noldor are pretty much all absolute monarchs or otherwise near demi-gods and are Having a Good Time. Their subjects kind of want to go but are really happy to just stay awhile. And the Dark Elves won't want to go unless they sight the sea.
The Creation of the Rings, the Corruption and Fall of Numenor, and the Last Alliance are about to sour them on Middle Earth.
I thought the internet was collectively boycotting this one, cause Amazon poured a shitload of money in it, workers got hurt, ans amazon is removing negative reviews on IMDb?
There's some stuff I like in there, but I feel like the production values feel cheap, and the writing is kinda eeeeh. Not full bad, but like, half the time when the characters say stuff I just kinda cringe. The acting has been good so far though imo, aside from Arondir (He is not selling the 'forbidden love' subplot to me at all).
I'm a huge Tolkien nerd, and while I noticed the lore breaks, they don't really bother me. Worst was them leaving out Ungoliant eating the trees in the beginning, but that's just cause I wanted to see her eat the trees.
But in general, I don't like watching stuff, so I'd have been surprised if I liked it TBH; just not a TV or movies person.
