#rop criticism

[soul-spices]

watch me age 10 years after reading the short interview with ROP’s script writers

they are so lovingly applied, they aren’t even visible. Amazing.

having to take the passive aggressiveness of a 40+ year old white man-child in a Tolkien adaptation is something I never thought I would experience, but here we are, Mister Payne.

also, can you maybe stop using the “Well Tolkien never mentioned x thing” argument? You can use this as a template excuse to justify basically anything. Which is probably why you’re overusing it in the first place.

 the hairstyles changing over time seem to apply solely to male elf characters, who now sport short, gelled up hair, mullets, fades and buzzcuts; and not the female elf characters, who still have long hair. How very gender normative of you! Truly, the public applauds you for your backwards views in this very contemporary adaptation.

amazing Mister McKay. I’m left in awe at your lore knowledge, yet I cannot help but notice you didn’t gave Galadriel her iconic braided crown hairstyle; the hairstyle that TOLKIEN DESCRIBED HER WEARING during the first age. You show that you know the lore, yet you seem to have put little of your knowledge into the show itself. This is truly and quite an amazing feat. Bravo.

i forgot who created this month old meme, to credit them, but it seems to be still valid to the discussion:

firstly, the fault is not that Galadriel is portrayed as a warrior. The issue is how piss-poor you’ve written her as one ( among other things I won’t go into here). You’ve basically written her as the most generic and unlikable manchild-warrior-protag ™

secondly, Nerwen is not a “nickname”, it is the name given by her mother because Galadriel was the tallest female elf among her peers ( and in all ME history, if we’re going meta), and because she was athletic, and liked partaking in sparring with other elves. She wasn’t called Nerwen because she was manifesting the manchild-warrior-protag ™  vibes you cursed her with. Maybe Mister Payne is projecting his own inner man-child into the character he’s likely writing for the script.

thirdly, since we are playing ‘taking the names as literal as physically possible’ game, did you know that her birth name, Artanis, means “noble woman” in elvish? Funny how we don’t see any of the diplomacy of a noble person in her character during your show. Interesting how you wrote her character to be brash and muscle headed :) with the social skills of a petulant child.

no. no, I don’t think I have anymore patience for this.

Source: The Hollywood Reporter Interview

[sindar-princeling]

rop season 2 episode 1 thoughts

at this point you gotta admire the creators' dedication to absolutely bizarre choices when it comes to sauron. 15 minutes in I'm already going what the hell and fuck. like what was that supposed to be. genuinely

Charlie Vickers has grown on me; he still doesn't have much to work with in terms of the script or the plot though

this whole introductory sequence was there....... I'm not sure why? we could already extrapolate all that, and I mean All That, from the previous season

it still pisses me off that Galadriel is The Main Idiot and Everything Is Her Fault

also, I am reminded of all the plot and worldbuilding choices that annoyed me before. why is mithril important for the elves' survival again?

CIRDAN HIII CIRDAN <33333

I'm so glad they kept his beard

believe me, I AM trying to find things to like about this show, but the plot choices feel like so much unnecessary drama. Galadriel and Elrond fighting feels.... tiring. I feel like all Galadriel does is fight with people

oh are we getting Rhun?? 👀 Nice

this is a personal opinion but the elven women have wayyy too strong and modern-looking make-up

it's a shame galadriel gets the ring because she's power-hungry and reckless, not because she's one of the mightiest elves in middle-earth. she SHOULD be power-hungry, don't get me wrong, it's one of her best traits, but this way you don't put any sort of accent of how very important and mighty she is

sauron having a Badass Walk into mordor at the end of s1, which was a really cool shot to end a season on, only to then get himself in chains and then turn away and come back to Celebrimbor has got to be the most '???' moments of this show. they really have no idea what to do with him

overall I'd say my main gripe, apart from the plot solutions, is that this show doesn't have much to say. it's showy, it's lore-heavy (even if I don't like the lore they came up with), but so far it still has little heart and thought behind it. to me at least it doesn't feel like it really wants to tell you something

[lesbiansforboromir]

Tom Bombadil was just as superfluous and unnecessary as I expected but I have to say the accent was just a little worse than I predicted and physically hurt me a lot more than I anticipated, he really couldnt hit those 'a's right.

And more seriously, his whole conciet for being there was JUST as aggravatingly-put as I expected. 'This all used to be green, now it is just a desert' Tom says as he gestures at a perfectly flourishing desert ecosystem with hundreds of plant species in every single shot, as if that's some tragedy.

The racist elements of the Stranger's plotline are not only getting worse but are bleeding into other aspects of the show. The only non-english accents we hear are from evil moth cultists worshipping a dark wizard and skull-mask wearing lepers(?) who just hit people for no good reason. The Stoors have lived in Rhun for centuries apparently, why do they have westcountry accents? It's absolutely bizarre!

And now we've seen the barrow wights, who apparently were laid to rest by some long gone civilisation, and they are in... Keffiyahs? RoP I would be delighted for you to place an arabic-inspired culture in the middle of Eriador, but that is not what you have done you have just orientalised these evil ghosts.

In general there is just no effort whatsoever to actually explain human society in middle earth currently, the only people we've seen are all just brown tinted hollywood peasent-core. In comparison to the costuming for elves and Numenoreans it's kind of dire, and Pelargir is apparently just a tiny collection of huts in the middle of ruined Numenorean architecture. Like... ow, firstly, that's the city from my blorbos, but more to the point if all human 'cities' are currently so 'primitive' then where the HELL was that ship Sauron took with the refugees drydocked?? That was like a pirate-golden-age schooner or something, how the hell was it maintained? Who sails it? Who built it, it's not a numenorean design- WHAT is going on with men in middle earth right now!! I am disappointed and frustrated!

I did like the big worm though. Couldn't get enough of that big mud bobbit worm.

[skyeventide]

the amazon tolkien show was already pretty bad for a number of writing, characterisation, and thematic reasons, and profoundly mid the rest of the time.

then, in the last few weeks they proceeded to publish a magazine cover with barrow wights that are an orientalist caricature that looks like it came out of pre "don't dress up as sexy cleopatra for halloween" discourse. it's cursed wraiths bedecked in coin jewellery, sporting a belly-dancer outfit that is not sexy just because they're undead. that of course birthed the most insanely stupid discourse you can imagine. on one hand having the racists bemoan that the anglo-saxon-inspired burial sites magically transformed into middle-eastern-looking monsters because of woke. on the other hand, the "akshually the lore" people, trying to prove that, in the second age, these humans might well have been remnants of those who came from the east and not the shire-adjacent barrow wights we're all acquainted with, so, gotcha racists! par for the course for insanely stupid tolkien discourse. the point, as usual, being that it doesn't matter whether it's possible by lore. rather, what if we look at the reason why, in this day and age, a magazine SO ironically called "empire" puts on the front page the first glimpse of aesthetics/concept art that are markedly not western, and that art showcases a known orientalist look that doesn't even get the dubious dignity of being put on people and is instead sported by undead monsters? diversity win!

then yesterday they dropped a narvi look and a dwarf poster. we already knew they barely moved past the scottish dwarf stereotype set by peter jackson, a director with whom this series is continually in conversation. we already knew the prosthetic noses of the dwarves in the hobbit movies were silly at best. yet again, narvi is given a fake nose of such proportions that you might think he was about to play cyrano de bergerac. and then there's the poster, where a ring with a giant gem glinting gold in the foreground, in the company of the other rings, stands against a darkened background where a shadowy dwarf grasps forward with clawing, avid hands. of course, after doing some orientalism, it's time to throw some antisemitism in and make sure to hit every box in the bingo. if that poster hadn't appeared on the official account, I'd have thought it a parody.

I've never posted about the show because as a rule I don't feel like wasting too much time on things I think are bad. I sure hope I never will again. I'm also not looking forward to the next bit of corporate diversity we'll certainly be graced with soon enough.

[verecunda]

s1 Sauron: If I am ever to be redeemed of all the terrible things I did before, I must heal Middle-earth.

s2 Sauron: FIRE! SLAUGHTER! DECEIT! TORTURE! WARFARE! MIND CONTROL (MAYBE)! LOTS OF EVIL SMIRKING!

[sempermoi]

Look I just gotta get it off my chest here:

I simply can't understand the costume design in RoP. I just can't. For me, it looks awful, the outfits tell me nothing character- or worldbuilding-wise, there's no character cohesion (either in colour palette, silhouette, fabric or motifs), the fabrics often look cheap (even if they're not in reality, they still look that way), and the aesthetic they ty to implement oftentimes reminds me to much of the 2013 idea that a golden leaf circlet is the height of fanciness (it is not).

Like idk why they thought that this one fabric they keep using, looks good on any of the people when to me, it looks like that kinda wrinkly crafting paper you got to use in elementary school to make paper flowers out of.

I don't even watch to watch the show because the costume design choices just put me off that much. (I mean, it's also bc of many other reasons tbh, but the almost seemingly nonexistent worldbuilding in the costumes is not a good look)

[zorosroronoas]

I felt so bad for earien this episode. And elendil is so set in his way he doesnt realize that if he just put in some effort earien would fully take his side. Also earien is somewhat placing herself in danger advocating for elendil when pharazon clearly wants to get rid of him.

yes! i agree 100%. he's not trying to have an actual conversation with her at all. he just talks AT her, which is not the same thing. he doesn't actually listen to what she has to say.

like i said in the tags of one of my posts, he will be quicker to listen to miriel than his own daughter. he'll actually care for & accommodate miriel's feeling, but he won't do the same for earien (or isildur) & it's so heartbreaking bc she KNOWS this. like i can't get over her begging pharazon to let miriel talk to elendil, bc she knew he wouldn't listen. the shot of her standing there watching her father comfort & talk to miriel breaks my freaking heart.

elendil has completely shut himself off to earien & yet ppl complain that she won't listen to him? has he ever listened to her? fuck, it's so clear they've never had good communication between them. elendil didn't even know she'd reapplied to the builder's guild last season. isildur was the one who pushed her to do so & she LOST HIM. & elendil won't even speak of him! does she even fully know what happened in middle-earth?

honestly i do love elendil & i love mirendil too, but the neglect elendil subjected his children to is obvious & it's okay to admit it.

[aadmelioraa]

When your oldest brother dies on a religious crusade just as you feared he would and your father refuses to deal with his grief just as he refused to deal with it when your mother died (you were a baby btw) and then again when your other brother left home (because your dad was impossible to live with) and in spite of feeling entirely abandoned by your dad you use your newfound higher status to put yourself out on a limb in order to downgrade his punishment and that of your close friend despite grieving their involvement with the queen who led your brother to his death but instead of your father acknowledging your pain and your attempts to do what you believe will bring justice he lashes out at you by comparing your current position to the horrific way your mother died…just Eärien things

[haldanare]

frankly baffeled at what r*p is doing with season 2... it thought the whole reason they didnt do the annatar plot was because they didnt have the rights to it, but theyre doing it (badly) this season so i guess they were just insistent on making the story worse?

[ask-zaukodar]

So because I hate myself I started watching Rings of Power. Putting aside meta discussions about hate-watching things, one of the things I've been noticing a lot is just how *small* everything feels, in part because of terrible production values. (If you don't believe me look up the scale-armor printed t-shirts, it's crazy as shit.)

But there's one point where Cirdan The Shipwright, the oldest Eldar whose love is for his ships and the sea, kicks off part of the plot by saying "perfection is no longer in Valinor alone!" which is some of the less offensive writing in the entire thing but then you remember what Galadriel's ring looks like and you just get this...ring-pop thing with a completely uncut gem loosely set in the middle and I'm just here like...this is perfection? Look at the 2001 LOTR ring for comparison, THAT looks like something a master smith made.

It's just hard to feel a sense of wonder and amazement when you have this basic-ass prop instead of Amazon, the largest megacorp on the planet, hiring the world's greatest artisans with their megabux. Hell they could have gone to WETA. But, alas, it just isn't so.

By the way this is not the greatest offense of the show. There's that many offenses.

[anghraine]

Speaking of ROP, I saw one of those posts that puts a random ROP costume beside a PJ!LOTR costume to argue that ROP's costuming is objectively bad rather than just a moderately different aesthetic using very detailed and high quality materials at a difficult time IRL.

Ordinarily I do find these posts deeply annoying as someone who much prefers the ROP aesthetic and likes many of the costumes, but this one was contrasting ROP's Númenor costuming with the films' Gondor and I just burst out laughing.

[sindar-princeling]

absolutely heartbreaking to hear what they're doing to Galadriel because of rop............... "haha from s1 she learned not to trust handsome men", "yeah you can expect more Hot Sauron and Galadriel things in s2" why can't she just be her own character why does it all have to be about some pulled-out-of-someone's-ass romantic tension. what if we all killed ourselves

[lesbiansforboromir]

Admittedly kind of amused by the implications of posts I've seen in the rop tags, are people really 'concerned that rop will ruin Tom Bombadil's lore'? What lore. Potentially the one possible bright spot of Tom's introduction into Rings of Power is that they'll retroactively justify the agonising length of time he's given in LotR. I'd settle for like... a SINGLE reason I should care about him, since his character quite literally revolves around the fact that he doesn't care about anything but himself and his wife. What are they going to do, give him a tragic backstory? Show his romance with Goldberry? Suggest he has internal conflicts and depth? God forbid, give him a character arc? Don't threaten me with a good time.

[brynnmclean]

I don't want to be pedantic or anything, but I admittedly am one of those people who rolls my eyes really hard about the assumption that the eye of Sauron was a giant fireball of an eye on top of Barad-dûr. Jackson film brainrot non-canonical design.

[child-of-hurin]

Truly the one actual criticism I have for ROP right now is that it all feels fast and almost rushed; I keep wishing we had seen how things had progressed from point 1 to point 2, I find myself having to fill in between the gaps and interpreting characters and relationships based on small scenes and dialogues...in that sense it truly captured the spirit of the Silmarillion lol