Lord of the Rings TV Series Purchased by Amazon

[BeepBoo]

One of the first things we learned about the series was that they'd be compressing the timeline of the 2nd age... These aren't "token" references, they're intentional changes to tell a story that isn't unnecessarily broken up by decades/centuries.

"We knew they were going to completely gut the timeline to make it more convenient for film" isn't exactly a defense against the criticism that his appearance is out of left field, because it is. It's either a huge rewrite of the timeline or a huge rewrite of numenorean lifespan. I suppose it could also be them just telling multiple stories in tandem from different parts of the timeline, but that's bad story telling IMO and certainly enough evidence for saying he felt out of place and out of left-field.

[rhorle]

"We knew they were going to completely gut the timeline to make it more convenient for film" isn't exactly a defense against the criticism that his appearance is out of left field, because it is. It's either a huge rewrite of the timeline or a huge rewrite of numenorean lifespan. I suppose it could also be them just telling multiple stories in tandem from different parts of the timeline, but that's bad story telling IMO.

They are saying that it isn't "out of left field" because Amazon made clear they were changing the time line. It isn't a defense but merely an explanation of their decision.

In the novels, the aforementioned things take place over thousands of years, but Payne and McKay have compressed events into a single point in time. It is their biggest deviation from the text, and they know it’s a big swing. “We talked with the Tolkien estate,” says Payne. “If you are true to the exact letter of the law, you are going to be telling a story in which your human characters are dying off every season because you’re jumping 200 years in time, and then you’re not meeting really big, important canon characters until season four. Look, there might be some fans who want us to do a documentary of Middle-earth, but we’re going to tell one story that unites all these things.” https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood...ies-first-look

[s_bushido]

Considering that they told us that they'd be doing this before we'd even seen much/any footage, whining that they followed through on their stated plan is ridiculous.

And they demonstrated exactly why they did this in the story itself: Durin was upset that he'd essentially lived a lifetime since his friend bothered to check in on him. But for his immortal friend, even that amount of time might as well have been a long weekend... So they showrunners decided to change the timeline in order to tell a story featuring both mortals and immortal elves without having to have a rotating cast of throwaway humans/dwarves to demonstrate the passage of time. It's pretty basic shit.

[Triceron]

One of the first things we learned about the series was that they'd be compressing the timeline of the 2nd age... These aren't "token" references, they're intentional changes to tell a story that isn't unnecessarily broken up by decades/centuries.

Just because we knew they planned to do it doesn't excuse them of doing it though. It rubs off as being inauthentic, and frankly, makes a mess of the established fiction rather enhancing what is already there.

[BeepBoo]

They are saying that it isn't "out of left field" because Amazon made clear they were changing the time line. It isn't a defense but merely an explanation of their decision.

Not everyone follows whatever garbage amazon puts forth in some press conference or article, so just because they say that doesn't mean it isn't shocking to a bunch of people who are just watching the show and only paying attention that much.

Also, that's fucking weaksauce on their part. "We want people to have longevity with characters (and more so we probably don't want to have to constantly find new talent as their characters die and new ones come on-board)"

No. Fuck u. Game of thrones proved it was fine to have characters enter and drop like flies on a dime.

It's pretty basic shit.

I don't really care what's inconvenient for the largest budget show ever made. They can find more humans to be more authentic, or they can just stick to telling a story within the confines of the timeframe that won't necessitate that type of enormous change. OR they can do what they did and catch shit about it as more people watch it without any context of what amazon already admitted they were bastardizing. Doesn't make all those people wrong for feeling like something was out of place compared to what they know.

[Triceron]

They are saying that it isn't "out of left field" because Amazon made clear they were changing the time line. It isn't a defense but merely an explanation of their decision.

I mean, their entire explanation justifies the criticism that they shouldn't have picked this section of the appendices to focus on in the first place. It literally spans more than a 1000 years, and they hope to compress it into what? Mere years, if even a decade?

It probably would have been better to just tell their own tale within a fixed part of the timeline.

[UnifiedDivide]

So, I've only lightly skimmed this thread to catch up since the last banning, because who the heck has time for this utter nonsense, but it still seems to be the same people arguing about the exact same stuff. What baffles me the most is how people that claim to be such big Tolkien fans complain like they've never actually read a book before. Who in their right mind expects every answer within the first 2/3 parts of a story? People like this do not read books like LotR.

How can people not understand the (actually quite simple) basis for how Galadriel behaves? Shouldn't someone so versed in Tolkien know the why she does? Hell, she's actually acted quite well when you have the capacity to understand her behaviour. Though there was one guy that seemed to understand that behaviour, but was still somehow unable to see the effect in the acting lol Why do people expect her to already be what we know she needs a long, looong fucking time to become? Without trying to really put people down, I genuinely think some people just don't have the ability to actually understand basic things like a character's motivation.

People bitch and moan about how poorly written this all is, and how poorly acted it all is, but they still seem to simply not get basic things. How long was wasted talking about the first 15 or so minutes (because that's all one guy has actually seen, but still...) when it was all incredibly blatant in what it was portraying and what the character's motivations were? Or taking Galadriel starting to swim and just assuming she knew she could swim however many miles it would have been, no thought given to the simple answer of "she's swimming because its better for her to move and hope to be rescued or reach any small bit of land than just stay there floating and doing fuck all, waiting to get eaten." Seriously, have some of you never read anything, or even watched anything, before? Instead, we get people that clearly should have moved on from this series they hate so much waffling on about "agenda," "tokenism," "intersectional feminism," and critical race theory of all things, as if these things are actual arguments. As for "woke," which even the folks that like to be overly verbose in attempts to appear intelligent and reasoned use incorrectly (I'm sure this line will be used to try attack me since this post is long and calls people out ), literally everyone should be woke. Do you guys even know what it actually means?

Does RoP have issues? Absolutely. But they, mostly, don't actually seem to be what a lot of the complaining has been about. The dialogue, to me, is pretentious enough to be Tolkienesque. The acting is actually good (yes, even Galadriel), not including some accents, perhaps. The overall writing has also been ok, so far. It could be edited together a little better. And while I had no issue with it, I don't think we need shots like the Galadriel on horseback one. Though I do understand what it was there to show. Again, something quite obvious that so many seem to have not understood.

Episode 3 gave us a beautiful Númenor and some of its population that we'd expect to see. I'm glad Elendil was given to a good British actor. Halbrand is absolutely Sauron and you should expect to see that reveal at the end of the season, imo. Episode 3 made it far too obvious lol I look forward to seeing what they do with the new bad guy they introduced at the end of the episode.

[rhorle]

Game of thrones proved it was fine to have characters enter and drop like flies on a dime.

And yet a criticism of House of the Dragons is that the young actors are being replaced because there are time skips and just a lot happening "off screen" because of those skips. Could Amazon have done it better? Maybe but there are real downsides to having a lot of time skips.

[Triceron]

People bitch and moan about how poorly written this all is, and how poorly acted it all is, but they still seem to simply not get basic things. How long was wasted talking about the first 15 or so minutes (because that's all one guy has actually seen, but still...) when it was all incredibly blatant in what it was portraying and what the character's motivations were? Or taking Galadriel starting to swim and just assuming she knew she could swim however many miles it would have been, no thought given to the simple answer of "she's swimming because its better for her to move and hope to be rescued or reach any small bit of land than just stay there floating and doing fuck all, waiting to get eaten."

No, it's better to not put her in the smack dab in the middle of the ocean with her being there because of her own choice to jump off the boat at the worst possible time and be put in a position that needlessly risks her life in the first place.

Trying to make sense of an unreasonable situation is equally as unreasonable. Your answer is akin to trying to defend the village idiot drinking paint again by chastising everyone for not understanding that he was 'really thirsty'.

[UnifiedDivide]

No, it's better to not put her in the smack dab in the middle of the ocean with her being there because of her own choice to jump off the boat at the worst possible time and be put in a position that needlessly risks her life in the first place.

Trying to make sense of an unreasonable situation is equally as unreasonable. Your answer is akin to trying to defend the village idiot drinking paint again by chastising everyone for not understanding that he was 'really thirsty'.

Your answer is akin to "just don't do that 4head."

She had to jump into the water so that she could be picked up, show us what people are like with elves, then reduce the survivors to the main character and the obvious (currently) support character that'll move with the story, building a rapport between them.

Basic shit to tell a story. Seriously, dude.

[BeepBoo]

And yet a criticism of House of the Dragons is that the young actors are being replaced because there are time skips and just a lot happening "off screen" because of those skips. Could Amazon have done it better? Maybe but there are real downsides to having a lot of time skips.

Then just don't do time skips. Tell actual stories that aren't massive eons long plots of immense grandeur. They'd also have an easier time shoehoring their own stuff into the lore because tolkein rarely goes down to that level of granularity as far as events go.

Also, I'd like to see the number of complaints of actors rotating in HoD vs the number of complaints about timeline inaccuracies. I know there will be people upset oon both sides, but I'm a fan of things being made for IP's original fan-bases. The ones that even made them popular in the first place; NOT trying to go for a new audience. I'd wager the people complaining about HoD rotating cast are all short-attention-spanned tiktok scrollers who haven't read the books nor care about lore minutia and are just watching because it's the newest big thing off HBO.

Basic shit to tell a story. Seriously, dude.

Spoken like someone who is expecting the show to be for people wholly unfamiliar with tolkein lore and ALSO acting like it's the only way they could have exposed us to those things.

[UnifiedDivide]

Spoken like someone who is expecting the show to be for people wholly unfamiliar with tolkein lore and ALSO acting like it's the only way they could have exposed us to those things.

More spoken like someone that understands how telling a story works lol This is how they chose to do it. The end result is the same. Some people would have complained no matter how they did it.

[BeepBoo]

More spoken like someone that understands how telling a story works lol This is how they chose to do it. The end result is the same. Some people would have complained no matter how they did it.

Not all complaints are as weighty as others. Complaints about someone doing something WILDLY outside of the known physical capabilities of the race (like swimming for hours) seem pretty on-point, though. Also, you act like every show has mass amounts of criticism about every single part/scene/minute of the show regardless of how things get done and that's just not true.

[UnifiedDivide]

Not all complaints are as weighty as others. Complaints about someone doing something WILDLY outside of the known physical capabilities of the race (like swimming for hours) seem pretty on-point, though.

Did Tolkien ever elaborate on the intricacies of elven swimming capabilities? As a person/race that was able to go on a never-ending hunt for centuries, I'd imagine they have quite impressive levels of stamina. Perhaps you could enlighten me.

Also, you act like every show has mass amounts of criticism about every single part/scene/minute of the show regardless of how things get done and that's just not true.

This is your own invented exaggeration, not at all something I expressed.

[Triceron]

Your answer is akin to "just don't do that 4head."

She had to jump into the water so that she could be picked up, show us what people are like with elves, then reduce the survivors to the main character and the obvious (currently) support character that'll move with the story, building a rapport between them.

Basic shit to tell a story. Seriously, dude.

To say she had to jump into the water for X and Y to happen really doesn't make sense because I can tell you easily that X and Y could easily be established without putting her in mortal danger. Look at Arondil's arc and how they already established how people are like with Elves.


"She had to" because the writers wanted a way to put her closer to Numenor, that's pretty much it.

Basic shit to tell a story that should have not been told in the first place. If you really break it down the story so far, it's a sequence of events that all lend to having Galadriel be at Numenor in order to progress the plot where she finds out more information about Sauron's plans.

And for that to happen, we have things like:

Gil-galad sending some of his best commanders back to Valinor even though he knows that evil is growing in the world. Hell, he shouldn't even be able to grant this offer.
Galadriel accepting the gift even though she's been established as someone who would easily refuse such an offer, and continue her hunt. Which she absolutely does at the end of the first episode anyways.
Galadriel making an irrational decision to risk her life in the middle of the ocean, which could easily lead to her drowning if not for plot armor
Somehow a raft of Southlanders making it this far west, well past Numenor. Where exactly were they headed to? Valinor as well?
Galadriel being saved by the one dude who doesn't even care about her life, much less his own at this point
Having Elendil save them and actually take them to Numenor, even though it's established that they haven't brought an Elf to the kingdom in hundreds/thousands of years
Elendil watching over Galadriel, the one person who would let her into the Archives and excuse her trying to steal ships instead of doing his duty and putting her behind bars.

The entire plot is one of convenience. These aren't stories that are coming across as authentic. Someone was paid to create this story, and it's easy to see how unnatural the progression actually is when you have sequences of events laid out in this way. Someone deliberately wrote in these obstacles and resolutions in this manner, and expects the audience to believe it to be a natural sequence of events.

That's why people are calling it out for being badly written. It's not just in the minutia of dialogue, but the whole construction of the narrative. It's convoluted. And it's being paced out very slowly and oddly. The whole Sauron plan should have been revealed in the first episode so the audience actually knows what the story is about, but for whatever reason they chose to keep it a mystery and reveal this 3 episodes in, which is close to half-way through the first season. None of these choices actually make sense from a story-writing perspective.

[Dhrizzle]

There's a difference between filling the gap in your own mind while reading his scripts than creating a story of your own with those gaps and spreading it throughout the world.

When Tolkien said his Legendarium should leave scope for "other minds and hands, wielding paint and music and drama" he wasn't talking about people daydreaming and filling in the blanks.

I challenge you to produce a single quote that would prove this. You can keep spinning this but it's just a lie.

I'm not going to go cherry-picking after criticising you for doing that. Letter #210 is available for everyone to read (probably, somewhere) and see how Tolkien's frustrations come from the lack of respect for the carefully constructed and detailed work he put in to LotR.

He might not have perfected it. But your argument was about effort. He put a lot of decades into what was already written when he died. You just don't want to respect that. That's on you. You don't get to write the story he never wrote. Well, RoP does and that's the problem.

No my argument was about the effort put in to make a completed piece of work. Your argument was about him perfecting things. Switching gear to focus on effort rather than results is a terrible goalpost shift.

The show just isn't bringing to life events or characters as written, your argument doesn't hold to scrutiny when it's blatantly obvious the amount of changes they're making not only to the storyline, events, timeline but also characters.

I understand that they need to condense the timelime, it's reasonable. They're not doing that though, they're completely re-writing the order of events and how they play out

Except they are. It's clear to anyone who's read the Silmarillion (and perhaps selected other works) that this is Tolkien's world in the aftermath of the War of Wrath, and if you've read LotR then it's fun to anticipate how the characters and society will change throughout the series so they are ready to settle into the ones we see during the War of the Ring at the end of the Third Age. The timeline compression is certainly a huge challenge and I'm not sure they can manage it without losing some of the gravitas of events but the whole thing is absolutely dripping in love for Tolkien's work.

The most detrimental thing to the series seems to be the licensing, particularly the way they can't name specific Valar or reference specific events, but arguably those absences are most notable to people with enough knowledge to fill in the blanks and there are some nice Easter eggs in there.

[BeepBoo]

Did Tolkien ever elaborate on the intricacies of elven swimming capabilities? As a person/race that was able to go on a never-ending hunt for centuries, I'd imagine they have quite impressive levels of stamina. Perhaps you could enlighten me.

Elves are regarded as no more strong or physically capable than man. They're more dexterous with keener senses and stronger convictions, but not stronger or especially enduring. What centuries-long hunt are you talking about that they didn't also sleep, rest, and eat? Certainly you're not implying they went straight walking or running without any of those things?

This is your own invented exaggeration, not at all something I expressed.

Ah, so there might have existed a way they showed us these things that didn't garner the critique, the same way plenty of other things about the show haven't garnered any noteworthy critique. Cool. If you know that, why bother saying what you did? To highlight that there definitely would be a non-zero number of people who would be upset at something no matter how they chose to do it? But that doesn't matter. No one would pay any credence to something that is a rounding error of people, especially if it weren't based in any semblance of lore/fact.

[rhorle]

Not all complaints are as weighty as others. Complaints about someone doing something WILDLY outside of the known physical capabilities of the race (like swimming for hours) seem pretty on-point, though. Also, you act like every show has mass amounts of criticism about every single part/scene/minute of the show regardless of how things get done and that's just not true.

There is Amroth: “The mariners with their Elvish sight for a long time could see him battling with the waves, until the rising sun gleamed through the clouds and far off lit his bright hair like a spark of gold. No eyes of Elves or Men ever saw him again in Middle- earth.”

It seems pretty clear Tolkien intended the elves to be capable swimmers but still able to succumb to "natural effects" of bad weather and stuff as there are also plenty of instances of elves drowning with their ships. From Galadriel encounter another wrecked ship it is possible that she was in a "busy" route.

- - - Updated - - -

Galadriel accepting the gift even though she's been established as someone who would easily refuse such an offer, and continue her hunt. Which she absolutely does at the end of the first episode anyways.

I think this clearly shows you missed the theme of that part of the show. Yes she would easily refuse such an offer but everyone is pressuring her and working to convince her it is what is best for both her and their people. We get told that the High King wants her gone even if what she says is true because the elves feared she would keep the dark forces "alive".

[UnifiedDivide]

Two solid posts to remind me of my original post and why I didn't want to properly engage further. I honestly wish I could be bothered, but I don't care enough to jump on the merry-go-round and just get banned again over something that just doesn't matter, there are other posters that will gladly do the dance. I don't have the energy for people that either just clearly aren't watching, watch via YouTube videos, or watch with a blindfold and ear plugs, and folks that seemingly imagine what you typed and create an argument around that. Tell me I'm running away or something, that's cool. You "win" the internet.

Buckle up for 5 seasons, folks. Don't expect to get every answer possible as quickly as you can humanly imagine it.

[rhorle]

Elves are regarded as no more strong or physically capable than man.

That doesn't seem to be true though since many elves fought against some of the most powerful things Tolkien created. There was even a duel with Morgoth which seems like something a human wouldn't be able to do. It may be true on average they were "close" but it seems that quite often Elves had a greater strength to them. Wasn't the "power" of elves fading over time as well? So in the Second age her ability to swim might have been stronger.