Lord of the Rings TV Series Purchased by Amazon

[Triceron]

I'm not. I'm saying that if Tolkien's work was newly released today the types of people who cry about agendas and think "plot armour" or "Mary-Sue" are valid criticisms would be pumping out click-bait videos.

Yeah but people do that about even popular shit today so what's the point?

And in today's age, backlash and controversy contribute to popularity in the most roundabout ways. It would probably serve your argument better to imply the story would be overlooked and ignored by the masses rather than play the controversy card.

[Dhrizzle]

I'll take whataboutisms for 500.

You'll do what now?

No they would still be very much enjoyed today, people wouldn't cry anymore than they do about it already, which is little. Jesus the lengths some people go to defending this show. If a frog had wings it wouldn't bump its ass either.

I'm not saying they wouldn't be enjoyed I'm saying that the internet hate machine that cries about "Mary-Sues," "plot armour" and "agendas" would absolutely be raging against them.

[Rageonit]

Every elf got complacent and then got captured with none having escaped to warn others to get an army? Pretty fucking massive failure, maybe if you want to do such an extreme you should show it to use, craft something at least a little believable for the audience such a screw up. I mean we are talking about Elves, they have crazy vision, and none saw the trench, or orcs coming?

So your argument is, because the elves have great vision, they are incapable of making mistakes, even massive ones?
A small unit of bored elves who haven't seen an orc for hundreds of years vs a whole army that set up to take them by surprise? Yeah, I can totally see that happening.

[rogoth]

something i'm curious to find out about, is what these white knight defenders of utter garbage will do when they see the critics who previously gave rave reviews prior to the show being made public now coming out giving scathing reviews and trashing the show for the slow paced, badly written and acted fan fiction it really is, when these so called critics aren't being paid to shill for the product and come out with their genuine impression of the media represented it's night and day, and the fake narrative that Amazon has tried to pull on social media from what i can tell has almost all but evaporated and non existent now, once again proving that what was feared beforehand came true and is now causing them massive issues once people stopped caring about their forced narrative and forced agenda.

[bledgor]

So your argument is, because the elves have great vision, they are incapable of making mistakes, even massive ones?
A small unit of bored elves who haven't seen an orc for hundreds of years vs a whole army that set up to take them by surprise? Yeah, I can totally see that happening.

SHOW ME IT THEN, having Elves being UNABLE TO SEE A MASSIVE TRENCH IN THE LAND MILES LONG with their vision and somehow get ambushed by orcs and CAPTURED is beyond logical to me. I am not saying Elves are perfect, I am saying it would take such a massive amount of bullshit for the events to play out like they did with no Elves seeing this issue (none seeing the world war 1 trench), and no Elves escaping to warn the armies/Gil-Galad.

Like mate you even point out its a whole army, and yet they ambushed the fucking Elves? Like come on man, you don't have to defend the bad of the show mate.

[Rageonit]

SHOW ME IT THEN, having Elves being UNABLE TO SEE A MASSIVE TRENCH IN THE LAND MILES LONG

Do we actually know where the trench is and if it could be seen from the tower?

[Lorgar Aurelian]

something i'm curious to find out about, is what these white knight defenders of utter garbage will do when they see the critics who previously gave rave reviews prior to the show being made public now coming out giving scathing reviews and trashing the show for the slow paced, badly written and acted fan fiction it really is, when these so called critics aren't being paid to shill for the product and come out with their genuine impression of the media represented it's night and day, and the fake narrative that Amazon has tried to pull on social media from what i can tell has almost all but evaporated and non existent now, once again proving that what was feared beforehand came true and is now causing them massive issues once people stopped caring about their forced narrative and forced agenda.

I probably count as a “white knight defender” and I’d personally say I didn’t care about what any critics has to say prior to release and I still don’t now, just like I didn’t/don't care about non critic reviews.

I’ll just keep enjoying the show until I don’t and then stop watching it.

[Triceron]

I guess when you sit on a tower for a hundred years and nothing happens, you can become a bit complacent. Isn't that the reason why sooner or later, evil tends to resurface? We grow complacent and we miss the obvious signals. It's happening to us in the real world (as we speak, actually); and apparently it can happen to elves too.

My point is that the show hasn't actually given purpose to the Watchtower because we aren't shown or told what the Elves are even capable of even IF they detected Humans going bad in the Southlands. We just know they're watching them. But what would they do if shit turns south? The show has not explained who they could signal for reinforcements, or if it's literally the job of a handful of Elves being capable of taking care of an entire uprise themselves, or what. The capabilities of the Elves were never established here, which makes it so much more suspect when they're so suddenly captured.

Seeing them now as being 'complacent and captured' rules out the idea that they were highly-skilled elite soldiers who would be able to take on any incursion should it rise on their own. Having them never actually talk about the watchtower itself and their ability to muster reinforcements simply implies there are no reinforcements and this watch tower is literally out alone. Like, how many reinforcements can come to the tower? How long would it take? Who would be the reinforcements be from and are they Elves or Elf-friends? There's so many unanswered questions that no one would be able to draw any outcome of the actual purpose of the Watchtower, other than the fact it had a handful of Elves who kept watch.

And based on what we see now, that's literally all they could do, since if the Humans did start to uprise it'd probably happen completely under their noses just the same just like that one dude is talking about Sauron's return right now. Like, the entire purpose of the watchtower is undermined by the show never having established them as a power in the first place. The story reveals that it's nothing more than a facade if anything. That's the result of the oversight in the narrative in having failed to establish the watchtower as a place of significance that actually controls anything in the area, since we're constantly being shown the efforts of the Elves being undermined, either by Orcs tunneling under them or being shown that there are still Men in plain sight who are harbouring an allegiance to Sauron.

As far as the narrative goes, the Elves at the Watchtower served one purpose - being set up to fail. With Arondir being the sole survivor that people are supposed to empathize with.

[Dhrizzle]

something i'm curious to find out about, is what these white knight defenders of utter garbage will do when they see the critics who previously gave rave reviews prior to the show being made public now coming out giving scathing reviews and trashing the show for the slow paced, badly written and acted fan fiction it really is, when these so called critics aren't being paid to shill for the product and come out with their genuine impression of the media represented it's night and day, and the fake narrative that Amazon has tried to pull on social media from what i can tell has almost all but evaporated and non existent now, once again proving that what was feared beforehand came true and is now causing them massive issues once people stopped caring about their forced narrative and forced agenda.

You're making that sentence do an awful lot of work just to ask a loaded question that makes you look desperate. Stripping out the stupid I assume what you're trying to ask is [i]"what will people who like the show do if critics say they don't like the show?"

I mostly don't care what critics say. Sometimes I agree with them, sometimes I don't. My definition of a good critic is one who can describe their experiences in a way that I can tell whether or not I'd agree with them, not necessarily ones I agree with all the time.

[Lorgar Aurelian]

Do we actually know where the trench is and if it could be seen from the tower?

Haven’t seen the latest episode yet but from the first 3 we only know that they had smaller tunnels going to a town over from the one the elfs we see were stationed at. So the trench is atleast a town away but likely Further given that the town folk were taken by surprise through hidden tunnels and could have been days before.

[bledgor]

Do we actually know where the trench is and if it could be seen from the tower?

I mean close enough to transport them in a day(?), never mind the several burned down villages. We literally just had an episode where Elrond READS LIPS from a bearded man HUNDREDS OF FEET away, and somehow the Elves never noticed burning villages, a trench, orcs, etc. You see the issue?

Like even ignoring the trench itself, we know they burned down villages and were burning all (minus the one tree that lived and had to be cut down for dramatic effect) the trees in the path. No one noticed all this smoke generated? It was a wide trench that was over a mile long, and none of that smoke was noticed? Like come on.

[Dhrizzle]

My point is that the show hasn't actually given purpose to the Watchtower because we aren't shown or told what the Elves are even capable of even IF they detected Humans going bad in the Southlands. We just know they're watching them. But what would they do if shit turns south? The show has not explained who they could signal for reinforcements, or if it's literally the job of a handful of Elves being capable of taking care of an entire uprise themselves, or what. The capabilities of the Elves were never established here, which makes it so much more suspect when they're so suddenly captured.

So you're upset because they didn't give enough background about a situation that stopped being relevant before the first episode ended? Aren't you the guy who wanted a prequel series about the guys in Galadriel's team to establish their capabilities before RoP even starts, even though they're shipped off to Aman almost immediately?

[Myradin]

So your argument is, because the elves have great vision, they are incapable of making mistakes, even massive ones?
A small unit of bored elves who haven't seen an orc for hundreds of years vs a whole army that set up to take them by surprise? Yeah, I can totally see that happening.

But a whole army would have also been easy to spot. Not to mention it also means they snuck around all the human villages. Similarly the humans also didn't notice this giant winding trench with its burnt forest.

Thats the problem. We don't see how the orcs outsmarted the elves. The elves just get abducted off screen and we're expected to believe the orcs pulled it off somehow. These same orcs who also can't best a single beaten, overworked elf the very next episode.

Why can't they just show the orcs being compotent on screen? It would have probably made the slower, more meandering episodes more exiting, and maybe even made us care when they them in ep 3.

[Rageonit]

My point is that the show hasn't actually given purpose to the Watchtower because we aren't shown or told what the Elves are even capable of even IF they detected Humans going bad in the Southlands. We just know they're watching them. But what would they do if shit turns south? The show has not explained who they could signal for reinforcements, or if it's literally the job of a handful of Elves being capable of taking care of an entire uprise themselves, or what. The capabilities of the Elves were never established here, which makes it so much more suspect when they're so suddenly captured.

I don't think it's that important how far the reinforcements are and how much time would it take for them to to come to aid (at least at that point in time). The tower would be night impossible to conquer by people who are not trained in warfare and do not posses some serious siege equipment - so I think we can safely assume the humans of the Southlands were never seen as an immediate threat, uprising or not.

As for the tower's purpose - it seems that there was none, and wasn't it the reason why the elves were finally called back? It was a relic of old times, when the threat was real and the elves were afraid of Sauron's return. But obviously it wasn't happening, and the tower & the elves were there... because they were always there. This isn't THAT surprising, really; the tower had a purpose long time ago, that purpose was slowly diminishing. There always has to come a time when you deem something useless. The elves did that, calling the people back. We don't know the whole story & the past (and the show is slow enough without additional explanations of the history). One can assume that in the past, immediatelly after the war and Sauron's disappearance, the tower was only a single element of a bigger system, and with time, it was the only thing left. And the elves finally decide even that last thing is worthless.

[Ghost of Cow]

I guess when you sit on a tower for a hundred years and nothing happens, you can become a bit complacent.

Are these the same elves that are like, "Oh man 50 years went by? Woah dude, I totally didn't notice, that's far out."

[Rageonit]

I mean close enough to transport them in a day(?), never mind the several burned down villages.

We don't know if it was a day, and even in medieval times a footman was capable of travelling 60 km by foot in a day (so easily FAR, FAR from what could be seen from the tower). You wouldn't see smoke from that distance, esp. if the terrain is not completely flat.

[Triceron]

So you're upset because they didn't give enough background about a situation that stopped being relevant before the first episode ended?

The result of the poor setup is having a lack of acknowledgement that the watchtower as a place of significant importance, and the Elves being all that important in retrospect. In repeat viewings of this show, I'm not going to ever see the Elves stationed here as being worth their salt, because they never really amounted to anything in the first place. Make sense? Everything I'm talking about here is in context to what the show is actually presenting to the viewer.

My criticism points out that the lack of explanation of the purpose of the watchtower leaves people guessing. It's too ambiguous to draw any reasonable conclusions for what would actually happen if shit went south, and with that being the case most viewers don't know what's going to happen with this arc other than it being driven to a mini Helms-deep type scenario. There's not enough information to draw any reasonable conclusion to what could get them out of their situation.

I'm not disappointed or upset by this at all, I'm merely pointing out the obvious oversights of the narrative. Anything we discuss about this arc moving forward would be based on pure speculation. Could they still signal for help with Arondir there? Could Arondir muster them to leave and find a better refuge? Could they be saved by the Numenoreans and Galadriel who miraculously travel there immediately? It's all pure speculation at this point. There's a lack of foreshadowing to imply any reasonable outcomes at this moment, and I think that's poor setup of the series. A good series leads the viewers to be able to draw at least some sort of reasonable conclusion to what could or might happen. Right now we can't do that at all with the Watchtower, and there's not enough information to reasonable theorize how they would get out of such a situation without wildly speculating one.

I'm not sure why you consider expressing criticism to be an expression of disappointment or cause to be upset. It's kind of insulting, really.

Aren't you the guy who wanted a prequel series about the guys in Galadriel's team to establish their capabilities before RoP even starts, even though they're shipped off to Aman almost immediately?

My argument is that if the viewer is intended to value the team of Elves as being strong and capable, they should establish that in some way before the fight with the Snow Troll that reveals they are all completely incapable of dealing with the problem in front of them in any constructive way.

If you watch the show more than once, and you know the Elves are just there as cannon fodder, then they'll forever be cannon fodder. Like, we can talk about them as much as we want now and they'd still be cannon fodder in the context of this show because they literally won't be back to redeem their image. They're forever established in this series as being useless tools that accomplished nothing and only served to hold Galadriel back from her greater purpose. That's what they amount to.

[Lorgar Aurelian]

Why can't they just show the orcs being compotent on screen? It would have probably made the slower, more meandering episodes more exiting, and maybe even made us care when they them in ep 3.

They did show us that when they captured black, they push him through the tunnels and into an ambush because he doesn’t know the layout.

[bledgor]

We don't know if it was a day, and even in medieval times a footman was capable of travelling 60 km by foot in a day (so easily FAR, FAR from what could be seen from the tower). You wouldn't see smoke from that distance, esp. if the terrain is not completely flat.

You admit we have no proof of anything. We have fuck all about how far they are away. We do know that villages within a days walk of at least Bronwyns village was burned though. We know this isn't the first village they have burned/sacked, and yet with Elves traveling around to the villages none of them noticed? They just all sit at the tower, not paying attention playing cards of something? You see the issue? We have to make SEVERAL large leaps of faith to even come close to justifying how this scene could make sense because the things we have been shown (like Elrond reading lips hundreds of feet away) make this scene near impossible, as at least one Elf should have noticed something.

Like even IF we take a massive leap ignore the massive trench and the burning of the forest/towns, how then did the orcs manage to ambush the Elves in a fashion to capture them without any escaping to warn others? That is the issue, this isn't a plot hole, its a plot marina trench that we are supposed to ignore.

It would have been easy to just have his elf buddy mention how the orcs surrounded the tower, and how most of the elves died, but he thinks a few got away. However he worries now that he is in the mine/trench/tunnels that the orc force is much bigger than they expected/using tunnels for ambushes, so they should try to escape to make sure the reinforcements don't walk into a trap too. This isn't perfect but it is still much better and at least lays a foundation for what occurs/occurred.

Also funny enough since Numenor is around the world is flat at this moment (in Tolkien lore, doubt they make the world flat in show).

[Myradin]

They did show us that when they captured black, they push him through the tunnels and into an ambush because he doesn’t know the layout.

But his situation was pretty far removed from the others. Are we to believe they all discovered tunnels, jumped down, and got captured without telling anyone?