Rings of Power
Oct. 14th, 2022 11:47 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
bunn I just watched the last episode of the Amazon Rings of Power series, and am left overall with a feeling that the whole thing was very pretty, but somehow oddly small-scale, and full of missed opportunity.
I'm not entirely sure how I would have felt about it if I'd just watched it on its own, rather than seeing it heavily trailered, discussed, dissected and panned for weeks and weeks, which inevitably has an effect. I'm sure I wouldn't have noticed some of the weak points, such as the infamous printed-on scale armour.
It also didn't help that I'd been part of a long Second-Age roleplaying campaign that made a lot more effort to fit itself around the maps and events recorded in the various books, and have also written a few things set in that long empty time period, which again, I feel, fitted themselves reasonably convincingly around the dates and locations. Amazon was never going to tell the story the way I had told it to myself, and having made the timeline work for myself, I was never going to be happy with the idea of clumsily smooshing together the story in the interest of attempting to create a not-very-surprising surprise.
But I'm fairly sure that the painfully awkward dialogue would have seemed painful all on its own. And their Finrod. Argh. There are no words for how awkward his scenes felt, though I think Gil-galad was actually worse. Also the weird anti-halfelven prejudice against Elrond, which is nowhere in the text. Anything involving Valinor is complicated and difficult to do at the best of time, and I don't think they carried it off.
There were good things. Robert Aramayo made a surprisingly convincing Elrond, and I liked his friendship with Durin and his wife. The Numenorean ships were impressively weird, though oddly few in number. I liked the social darkness to the pre-hobbit Harfoot backstory. I thought Arondir and Adar, two of the original characters from the storyline set in pre-Mordor, were both compelling characters.
But apart from that... I don't know if I want to go on watching. I might wait till the end and then dip in and out, I suppose.
I'm not entirely sure how I would have felt about it if I'd just watched it on its own, rather than seeing it heavily trailered, discussed, dissected and panned for weeks and weeks, which inevitably has an effect. I'm sure I wouldn't have noticed some of the weak points, such as the infamous printed-on scale armour.
It also didn't help that I'd been part of a long Second-Age roleplaying campaign that made a lot more effort to fit itself around the maps and events recorded in the various books, and have also written a few things set in that long empty time period, which again, I feel, fitted themselves reasonably convincingly around the dates and locations. Amazon was never going to tell the story the way I had told it to myself, and having made the timeline work for myself, I was never going to be happy with the idea of clumsily smooshing together the story in the interest of attempting to create a not-very-surprising surprise.
But I'm fairly sure that the painfully awkward dialogue would have seemed painful all on its own. And their Finrod. Argh. There are no words for how awkward his scenes felt, though I think Gil-galad was actually worse. Also the weird anti-halfelven prejudice against Elrond, which is nowhere in the text. Anything involving Valinor is complicated and difficult to do at the best of time, and I don't think they carried it off.
There were good things. Robert Aramayo made a surprisingly convincing Elrond, and I liked his friendship with Durin and his wife. The Numenorean ships were impressively weird, though oddly few in number. I liked the social darkness to the pre-hobbit Harfoot backstory. I thought Arondir and Adar, two of the original characters from the storyline set in pre-Mordor, were both compelling characters.
But apart from that... I don't know if I want to go on watching. I might wait till the end and then dip in and out, I suppose.
no subject
Date: 2022-10-15 12:12 am (UTC)Finrod was in it?!
Also the weird anti-halfelven prejudice against Elrond
I'm sorry, what?
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Date: 2022-10-15 07:38 am (UTC)I have seen the prejudice against Elrond as a half-elf thing in fanfic too, and it always baffles me when it appears. Maybe it is imported from some other fantasy setting?
The volcano scene was very impressive, and I don't really mind the pyroclastic flow thing as much as I do the character-level stuff.
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Date: 2022-10-15 06:07 pm (UTC)I have seen the prejudice against Elrond as a half-elf thing in fanfic too, and it always baffles me when it appears. Maybe it is imported from some other fantasy setting?
I am 100% sure it is; I can't name a specific one because it's common to a fair number of books I read. (Just like the Elves-are-vegetarian thing is an import from other fantasy media that doesn't track with M-e.)
It being impressive is why I want to see it. I like volcanos. I can't find gifs on Tumblr because I have so many related tags blacklisted; maybe I should try Youtube.
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Date: 2022-10-16 06:50 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-10-17 08:13 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-10-15 12:19 am (UTC)Also the weird anti-halfelven prejudice against Elrond
Say what? I thought that dumb trope was left in the mid-2000s bowels of FFN.
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Date: 2022-10-15 04:40 am (UTC)IIRC (hearsay) first episode, "Only elf-lords allowed."
Never mind that by birth "right" he is King of the Sindar and is a plausible competitor with Gil-galad for King of the Noldor.
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Date: 2022-10-15 07:49 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-10-15 12:38 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-10-15 07:48 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-10-15 07:55 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-10-15 12:39 am (UTC)(Well, no; mostly because I don't have an Amazon subscription and won't purchase one. But I wasn't tempted to do so, because of the timeline issue.)
I don't understand why Amazon chose this route; if they wanted a generic, action-movie-esque fantasy property with a human timeline, they could have chosen one particular part of the Second Age to focus on, and if they wanted to show an Age in full, they should have built the show around that, because it's imcompatible with the hacked-off timeline they themselves insisted on. There's no way you can do justice to an Age when you've flattened it into such a cramped span; it would be like trying to turn time-lapse video of a redwood tree's development into a summer action movie.
The sexism in casting/costuming hasn't impressed me, either, but the timeline is still the most baffling and offputting element.
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Date: 2022-10-15 04:41 am (UTC)What's this now? I've only heard the "too much woke reverse sexism!" crowd.
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Date: 2022-10-15 07:22 am (UTC)I personally feel that pretty much all the actors (possible exception for Gil-galad) did absolutely the best they could with the script they had. Personal appearance and attractiveness is such a minefield that I'm not really happy about drawing conclusions from that, though I would have loved to see long hair on the male elves, particularly Elrond.
Galadriel was the only female elf with a speaking part, and the other female elves were mostly veiled servants. On the other hand, the show had a good range of female characters, looked at more widely, and I feel the relative lack of female elves was partly because the elves were mostly canon characters and Tolkien just did write a lot of blokes
There were a couple of characters wearing Fantasy Boob Armour, which is hard to excuse, particularly when one of them was a dwarf. Of all the people they could choose, giving that to people who are supposed to have almost no sexual dimorphism visible to outsiders felt really awkward to me.
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Date: 2022-10-15 02:57 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-10-15 03:32 pm (UTC)Arondir, to my eyes at least, is seriously good-looking and although he does go through a grubby plotline, he is clean and interestingly dressed to begin with, and cleans up again later.
None of them look gorgeously androgynously perfect, but neither do the women characters. I have my complaints about the styling and casting, but I think calling it sexist is a bit of a reach.
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Date: 2022-10-15 05:48 pm (UTC)One thing all the discussion I've seen seems to agree on is that Arondir is the most attractive of all the elves, which delights me. ♥
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Date: 2022-10-15 04:43 am (UTC)Makes me laugh, given the Return to Aman series I most know you for. :)
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Date: 2022-10-15 07:02 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-10-15 09:35 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-10-16 07:01 am (UTC)We put the last episode on on Friday afternoon when my mum was having a nap and she woke up and quite enjoyed it with minimal explaination having only seen the Jackson movies...
I thought Elrond looked all wrong to start with but the actor really grew on me. Kev spent the first episode chuntering that Galadriel was supposed to be tall but then shut up after I pointed out that the actress was excellent and there are not that many very tall actresses for them to cast 😆