Lord of the Rings TV Series Purchased by Amazon

[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?

[rogoth]

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.

no, i'm genuinely curious to see what the rabid, frothing at the mouth vehement defenders of this show do when the people they were quoting as evidence the show is good have completely flipped their view on the product now that they're no longer being paid by Amazon (who have been proven to be buying up positive reviews from multiple sources btw), i have said on multiple occasions both here and on other platforms and sites that i have no qualms with people who enjoy the show for what it is, i take issue with people who claim to like the show because 'it's a good show trust me bro', or the usual rhetoric of 'if you don't like any of this show then you're, insert ist/phobe of the week here' or another favourite of mine is the whole 'it's not written anywhere that specifically that this COULDN'T HAPPEN therefore i'm right and you're wrong', also inserting the ist/phobe of the week for added impact.


if you're able and capable of understanding just how badly bastardised the source material is with this show, and are able to see why that might be a huge issue for some of us while still enjoying the show, got no issue with that, if you're able to see why i might dislike the cheap and chatty costume designs, while you're able to look past it and still enjoy the show, i'm fine with that, if you're able to suspend you disbelief at some of the acting in the show but can understand why it's an issue for me and others like me, again, no issue with you whatsoever, enjoy what you like and make up your own mind on it.

[Aydinx2]

So, Guyladriel

It's really hard to care about someones opinion when they can't even spell a name right.

[rhorle]

Yes, the Elves in the Hobbit were quite incompetent in letting them slip, but they were still shown to be skillful for having been able to capture the Dwarves in the first place and being able to wage war with them at the Battle of 5 Armies.

So the show is staying true to the source material by having complacent elves be incompetent but the show is bad while the original author is good? This shows the bias against the show when similar situations exist. Remember in the time period of the hobbit the elves thought Sauron was gone. It is how a large company of Orcs could show up on their doorstep unimpeded. Heck the "Watchful Peace" tolkien created even mirrors what is happening in the show. As garrisons there weren't kept up (the plague contributed as well). https://tolkiengateway.net/wiki/Calenardhon

That's a huge fucking failure then. They had one job lol

Right. Why is that a bad thing? Why is it that the only time it can be "good writing" is when the elves don't fail? That is counter intuitive because always having one side succeed just because they are the good guys is actual bad writing. There is no reason why there can't be failure and why "bad guys" can't be superior in some situations. Even more so when Tolkien did it and the show is echoing that.

[Triceron]

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.

See, that's where you're drawing a completely speculative conclusion though. The Humans wouldn't have to conquer the watchtower to carry on nefarious deeds if they were to do it the same was as the Orcs making tunnels without being seen by the Elves. Think about it this way - if the Humans loyal to Sauron had the guidance of Adar to work under the watch of the Elves, in many ways like Theo already does in finding that evil sword, then what would be the difference to what the Orcs are already capable of? They don't even need to capture the Elves considering they've practically waited them out long enough for them to completely leave. Had the intentional burning of villages been held off for say a month's time, the Elves would have been long gone from the area.

See how little sense there is in the plot overall? Everything is conveniently timed to support Arondir's story. Why have the Elves begin to leave the area? To build drama between Arondir and the Human female. Why are the orcs burning stuff now? Because the show needs a nefarious plot for Arondir to uncover. This is sadly how the narrative is being moved forward. It's all built around Arondir. The rest of the plot is very contrived when you consider how patient Adar has been shown to be with his tunnelling plans under the noses of the Elves. He could literally have kept them from burning villages until the Elves were gone and continued digging paths to every village before they even remotely attacked. But the show isn't really thinking about it from his perspective, it's all being built around Arondir instead, which is what leaves the motivations of other characters completely up to speculation and guessing, and prone to inconsistent or irrational decisions by them.

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 Saruman'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 Saruman'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.

Which makes the whole narrative purpose of the watchtower contrived. You're explaining how purposeless it is in the story overall for me. I don't even need to tell you how pointless it is to be the center of this narrative, you already realize it.

Why is the watchtower important in Rings of Power? Because they needed a reason for this Arondir Elf character to exist in the Southlands and a setting that makes sense for him to be established there. That is it.

The watchtower and the Elves stationed there are otherwise set up to fail. They were never really there to guard the place narratively, they are merely there to support Arondir's story and be fall-guys that make his story feel all the more tragic and dramatic. The way it's actually played out in this story , they're nothing more than security guards whose duty is to observe-and-report, and they aren't even able to observe anything useful until it's already too late.

[rhorle]

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.

Some did notice. Remember Arondir doesn't rely the rumor of poison grass. It is clear there is talk of strange things happening but the humans didn't want to tell the elves. Arondir takes that threat seriously when he sees the cow. Again Arondir fails to notify his garrison (or maybe they already left and he was awol.) The trench is likely something that didn't appear until the orcs were "found out" and they no longer had to be as secret. Hence why they were tunneling to villages at first.

Why does it have to be shown on screen to understand the Orcs are competent? It has firmly been established off-screen that they are a force to be reckoned with.

- - - Updated - - -

Why have the Elves begin to leave the area?

When you make comments like these it makes me wonder if you actually watched the first episode. The opposition to Galadriels hunt indicates exactly why the elves are leaving the area. Arondir's own apathy to a potential threat shows why they are leaving the area. They are all complacent. The rest is you just attacking the show to attack. Of course the story will revolve around a main character. How many stories do not? Even Tolkien created things just to conveniently support his main characters.

Yet the show is bad for echoing Tolkien himself. Strange right? It is almost as if you dislike Tolkien and some of his writing style but refuse to speak ill of him. So you funnel it all on to the show because it is a derivative and won't have that author armor.

[DarkAmbient]

Watched all 4 eps, I am confused how it manages to look quite cheap.

The difference in visual quality between this and House of the Dragon is quite stark IMO. Different shows with different themes and aesthetics of course, but besides one or two slightly dodgy CGI moments I've not looked at HotD and thought it looks cheap. I'm not sure if cheap is entirely the right word either for RoP because it's clearly had a lot of money spent on it. Maybe things seem too pristine, and some live action scenes are too obviously in a studio and poorly integrated into the CGI backdrops.