#Anti The Rings of Power

[technoturian]

Branching off of my RoP rant, I am completely unsurprised to find out that the showrunners and entire writing team are six white men and two white women after feeling the whole season that the women were underwritten and the POC felt token-ey.

I’m getting serious deja vu to the Star Wars Sequels from this whole situation. J.J. Abrams giving lip service about making something inclusive and everyone getting excited about the diverse casting and then we find out it was all calculated and performative, Finn becomes a joke and Poe becomes a stereotype and Rey is a Strong Female Character who doesn't need narrative consistency she just needs a damaged white boy foil and a male relative to make her whole story about. The way everyone who criticizes it gets lumped in with bigots, which makes it super easy for them to be ~progressive~ without actually doing anything.

Seriously though:

- The obscene budget and corporate overlords looking to leverage it into merchandising/franchising.

- Comments about being super diverse but then the ~diverse casting~ is mostly side characters who aren’t given nearly as much narrative weight as the white characters.

- The Strong Female Lead who was clearly designed by white men, too busy punching her way through problems to listen to anyone or communicate effectively.

- The dark ~bad boy~ narrative foil who forms a ~connection~ with her and whose storyline somehow seems to have both the most time and least thought put into it of everything. (Sure dude, you were on that raft in the middle of of the sea on purpose. That makes total sense.)

- The shallow and unsatisfying writing. Scenes and dialogue written to make good trailers or twists but don’t make any sense when you’re actually watching them.

- A convenient shield for all criticism in the form of a large contingent of bigots who make it really hard to have legitimate conversations about its massive flaws, with the fans and the (reminder, white and male) creators being way too quick to let everyone know that if you don’t like it, it’s because You’re One Of Those.

The one difference is that we made fun of the Star Wars sequels for crashing and burning because they didn’t even bother to have an outline before they took off. Meanwhile RoP has actual cliffs notes to reference and they managed to make the same soulless mess of things. I’m not sure if that’s more impressive or less.

[unknown-terrain]

Yikes. Amazon get a clue.

[talesofsorrowandofruin]

It gets even better! They killed off Celeborn to ship Saurondriel!

I can't believe I'm saying this, but I'm almost glad they killed Celeborn. If they'd let him live they might have shipped him with Gollum.

[vermithorrr]

Me to Galadriel from rop:

FFFFOOL!!!!

(I’m kidding but not, if you enjoy the show that’s fine, hope this makes you laugh too lololol)

[lilys-books]

Test

Just using rings of power fandom as an experiment

@staff @wip this sucks

Ohhh Ooohhhhh I tag staff blogs and the post disappears from the search entirely? So others won't see the complaints? H I L A R I O U S

[ariminiria]

remember to do your part by giving Amazon's Rings of Power show the Morbius treatment

[middle-earth-mythopoeia]

(source, 11/30/22)

KING

[aragornsrockcollection]

Isn’t it funny that you never see anyone throwing a hissy fit over the inclusion of flora not native to Medieval Europe in Tolkien or other fantasy works.

Tomatoes, tobacco, POTATOES, tea and sugar, are all perfectly acceptable and normal for Tolkien to have included in Middle earth, but depict a single character with brown skin, and suddenly it’s not realistic, and WHAT ABOUT OUR HERITAGE.

Forget that we don’t analyze the heritage of white actors playing these rolls to make sure they’re from the proper culture to represent Tolkien’s extremely English story. Has a single person ever complained that Frodo and Sam were played by Americans when Hobbiton is CLEARLY based on rural England?

According to some, Hobbits can grow food and other crops that were only introduced into Europe through the violence of imperialism, but to have the hobbits look like the people who originally grew those crops is sacrilegious.

Medieval Europe, which wasn’t as homogenous as people think anyways, is only ever trotted out to justify hating the inclusion of black and brown characters.

If Sam can wax poetic about potatoes, he can look like came from Peru, like potatoes did.

And if that idea bothers you, maybe examine why.

[wanderingwolfwitcher]

[madame-helen]

[technoturian]

I gave it a whole season with an open mind but Rings of Power is just... bad.

The writing is just bad. It’s all just so Intro To Creative Writing. I don’t even care about Middle Earth lore so I don’t mind any changes. What bothers me is if you’re going to adapt something and then change it, you’d better be changing it into something good. Instead, we got ALL the cliches. The fact that every episode I would guess the cliche line I was about to hear and then there it was, but I would still be stunned because I couldn’t believe they were THAT lazy, THAT obvious. I’m not exaggerating here, I literally made a joke several times and then one of the characters said the same thing but they were serious! The dialogue is flat. The characters are the most rote tropes. They think they have to spell everything out to their stupid audience (”You’re not Sauron! You’re the other one!”). They have the characters do random stuff or neglect to tell each other stuff not because it’s in character (lol) but because it makes a WHAM moment later (that falls flat because it’s so obvious).

Look, I’m pretty genre savvy, but I am not the only one who guessed how this all was going from several episodes ago. I knew it was Gandalf from episode one. I knew who was Sauron for several episodes. My mom is a big Tolkien nerd and kept saying “But that doesn’t make sense! Because in the lore-” and every week I had to remind her that these writers aren’t following lore and they don’t seem to care what makes sense, but they’re still easy to predict because of all the tropes and borrowed story beats.

The way they cut through travel made the world seem incredibly small. Then all the flip-flopping to drag things out because they’re bad at pacing; in Numenor, in the Southlands, with the dwarves, they decide things and then suddenly it’s undecided because they need more time. The absolutely garbage lines like “the elves are stealing your jobs” or “I’m GOOD”. The constant pulling of lines from the source material and putting them out of place, which is annoying for two reasons, first because it’s unearned but also because the stolen lines are the only good dialogue in this mess.

The casting of non-white actors in completely tokenistic roles. The fact that the harfoots are mostly white and are played by average sized actors. The fact that they have a few non-white actors and then cast white actors for their family members (Nori and her mom, the queen of Numenor and her dad) which just screams “we want it diverse, but not too diverse”.

And yes, Girlboss Galadriel who is peak perfomative feminism akin to W*nder Woman and She-H*lk, mass produced girl power with none of the depth or grit. Galadriel who is one-note in all of her motivation, who comes across as embarassingly stupid at times because it’s more important for her to be brash and stern. Writing out her husband in a random throwaway line because she couldn’t want to go out and fight while also being married or a mother (something so many weird defenders of this show seem to think means the opposite of what it is, like wanting her to be married and have a kid and still be out doing awesome things instead of becoming a tradwife is the ANTI-feminist view, and as if there’s a scarcity of single young action girls out there). The “I’ll never join you!” conversation with Sauron. Randomly just telling people to “trust her” instead of being like, “Yeah that was Sauron” so he can come back and screw stuff up later. Why? Why? Because they need her to, that’s why. But why, in-character would she do that? ~Don’t worry about it.~

Basically everything about badboy Halbrand, the Kylo Ren of Middle Earth. But especially his Jason Bourne moment in Numenor and the whole cringy “reluctant king” story. The one woman in town who wears color because she’s the Main Character. The sweet girl getting too close to Gandalf and he accidentally hurts her and she shies away. That may have been the worst one. Made me shout “I am not a gun!” because my goodness, these writers. They just steal everything. Every single twist was artlessly telegraphed and stolen from something better. A few times, this worked. The Stranger was predictable from the start, the dwarf storyline didn’t do anything particularly groundbreaking, Arondir’s star-crossed romance was incredibly bland. But the characters were fun to watch and the actors did well with the parts. It’s just unfortunate that, where a few of the characters managed to elevate the sea of cliches surrounding them, the majority just coasted on the surface.

This is giving me Star Wars Sequel vibes, even though I’m not a LotR fan like I am a Star Wars fan. It feels like plastic. It feels like they thought of everything but actually making a show worth watching. This show won’t be a classic, it’s just another revenue source. I don’t know if I would be this harsh if it were some small production and an original story. But for the money this cost, the fact that it’s so bland, so uninspired, so absolutely lazy is honestly insulting. I’ve seen so many lower budget fantasy stories with a hundred times more heart and brains than this. The bottom line is this: Amazon had all of the money to hire all the talent in the world and they’re giving us this??? The gall.

[unknown-terrain]

For a show that had a 30% completion rate it's first season, Amazon really shouldn't of have bothered releasing fake spoilers, I doubt many people are even checking for S2 leaks anyways as most have already checked out after S1. First Amazon lies and inflates their viewership numbers (also see Citadel) and now this lol. If the show had been a worldwide phenomenon like Game of Thrones was back in the day then I understand but what Amazon is pulling here with this flop show is pure clownery. I bet season two's viewership will fall even more.

[talesofsorrowandofruin]

Where’s that post that goes “the bar was so low it was in hell but you’re limbo-dancing with the devil” because that’s the best description of Amazon’s ROP.

[hedgehogoftime]

Hi, I'm still angry about Amazon trying to turn Galadriel into a shitty YA romantasy protagonist by making her generic sword girl and taking away her entire backstory as one of the most powerful and revered of the Noldor and Queen of the Sindar and giving her a shitty enemies to lovers relationship with fucking Sauron.

[lady-byleth]

Like, listen. Listen, okay. The moment I learned they were making Galadriel's character revolve around needless revenge over a man (her brother who is currently happily traipsing across Valinor because that's how death works for elves) I was already mad enough to never touch RoP with a ten foot pole

But this? Taking one of her most iconic lines and attributing it to Sauron? I am livid.

The real Galadriel, the book Galadriel, was always an ambitious woman. She left Valinor to rule a realm of her own, to shape a land the way she thought right. She watched her male relatives do shit and was like "I can do better" and that's what she did

She was driven, intelligent and gifted, she was one of the greatest things that ever happened to the elves, and it all came from herself.

But now they changed her story. This Galadriel isn't traveling Middle-earth to find a place for herself, she's traveling it to avenge a man who doesn't need avenging. And then Sauron pops up and tells her she could be a queen "stronger than the foundations of the earth"? The line she originally said about herself?

The way this is all set up makes it look like a man planted the idea in her that she could be a queen, a man tempted her into becoming a queen, and then continued to tempt her until she refused the ring.

Her whole thing in the books was overcoming the temptation of power and choosing what was right and good. But it wasn't the ring that she needed to beat, she needed to overcome the desires and ambitions inside herself that the ring was using against her

She was her own greatest enemy and she won.

But now they made it all revolve around a man. A man gave her the idea, a man tried to tempt her, a man is who she quotes when she's overcoming temptation...

Do I really need to spell out why the story of a woman whose biggest enemy is herself being changed to so heavily focus on a man's effect is bad? Do I really??

[libertasexmachina]

Tolkien, 1938: FUCK NAZIS. Jewish are very noble and respectful people. I refuse to let my book be sold by nazis.

Some Karen, 2022: Tolkien clearly was antisemitic