The original post: /r/television by /u/virtualRefrain on 2024-08-30 18:31:33.
EDIT: People are reading this as like a big hate post I guess and leaving a lot of weirdly aggressive comments. To be clear, I am enjoying the show, and I’m explicitly not talking about “canon” or “lore” here, or whether the show aligns with or contradicts it. I don’t give a shit about that, people that obsess over their fandom like that are weird. My dad was like that and he was weird. I just wanted to talk about the show’s relationship to the mythology and literature that inspired Tolkien because I love thinking about that shit. This is a conversation about media and how it’s influenced, not a “DAE RoP bad???” post.
I don’t really have a good reason for posting this, other than that it’s been driving me crazy ever since I finished the first three episodes of Rings of Power Season 2 a few days ago, and I just gotta get it off my chest.
I’m a very old-school Lord of the Rings nerd. The Hobbit was the first novel I ever read, at six years old. It’s how I was raised - my dad had a tattoo of the art from his paperback of The Silmarillion on his bicep. He started reading me The Lord of the Rings from his decades-old leatherback copies before I could talk. I’ve spent my whole life embroiled in the incredible art, music, TV, film, radio, etc that it’s inspired for the last 50 years. I’ve read Tolkien biographies and most of his letters. I’ve seen every imaginable retelling, adaptation, interpretation, or hot take there is.
Or so I thought, until I started Rings of Power Season 2. Almost right away, I started to get a deep-down feeling of, “Oh, what the fuck? What the fuck?” that I found deeply fascinating, and I’ve spent some time soul-searching about where it’s coming from. And I’ve realized that the root cause is that Amazon has genuinely created a completely unique interpretation of The Lord of the Rings - one completely devoid of mythology or literature. A frankly incredible feat.
The opening scene of episode 1 is a prime example, and set off my “this is insane” alarm bells almost right away. The first thing we see is Sauron addressing some Orcs in a big tower in Forodwaith. Already it’s a little weird because he’s like a Scottish guy in an oversized red robe, and he’s like… Giving a stump speech to the Orcs? Like pitching his candidacy to be Morgoth’s successor?
This is already like, super weird. Like there are tons of interpretations about what form the Maiar take, whether they can change at will, etc. But I don’t think ever in my life have I seen Sauron take on a “beautiful” form while trying to dominate the Orcs. And the reason for that is deeply rooted in the series’ influences, and Tolkien’s influences. Tolkien was a Catholic, and he was also one of the world’s leading scholars of Norse mythology, and both of those influenced his worldview and his storytelling. Sauron wasn’t pulled from whole cloth obviously - he’s a pastiche of Loki, Surtr, modern fascist ideology, and above all, Lucifer. Sauron, in all interpretations, is fundamentally an evil spirit, a literal demon, a Dark Side-style warp in the natural law. The reason he takes beautiful form is because it suits his needs, which are to corrupt, manipulate, and dominate the goodness the in free people of Middle-Earth. That’s based on Biblical and Norse mythology, it’s not like an ass-pull.
All this to say, Sauron probably doesn’t just… Look beautiful all the time. It’s not like his true self or anything. And if it was a bad idea to do so, he certainly wouldn’t. Which brings me to the next part of the scene, which is when I realized that this is one of the craziest fucking things I’ve ever seen.
Sauron does like a bad job giving his stump speech, like he really flubs it up and the Orcs aren’t having it, he makes it sound really shitty to be a Sauron guy. So they laugh at him and spit on him and kick his ass and murder his ass. So now we have like a problem, because the fact that Sauron was taking on beautiful form actually made him look like a dumbass to the Orcs, so that implies that he can’t look scary whenever he wants, or just dominate Orcs at will. So uh, what… Decides that stuff? What can Sauron do? How does he become the big Darth Vader armor guy with the mace? Well don’t worry because we get an answer immediately.
Sauron empties out his robe like Obi-Wan and I guess becomes a thick bloody viscous fluid, like the T-1000. He sinks into a little pool where I guess worms drink him and he… Becomes the worms, or eats them, or maybe he just was always the worms. A rat comes along and the worms eat the rat, giving it like enough life energy to start flopping around. So okay, like Sauron is like a possessing spirit, he can sort of marionette things around and he feeds on life force? Well no, because the worms start like evolving into a tiny little guy. The little guy grabs onto a wagon and eats the driver, and somehow that turns him into a completely different guy that doesn’t look like the driver or his previous Scottish guy form.
Now at first when I saw all this, I was like, “What the fuck am I even watching, this is completely incoherent, this is like outsider art how it actually makes no sense minute-to-minute.” But after some soul searching I think I’ve put my finger on it. When the Orcs kill Sauron, he doesn’t just leave his robe on the floor kind of like Obi-Wan. It’s exactly like Obi-Wan. When he becomes the black mass of worms and starts slowly shapeshifting, it’s not a coincidence that it’s weirdly similar to the Venom symbiote and the T-1000… Those are actually its direct influences, and we can deduce this because the scene assumes that the audience will know that this thing is going to act like a symbiote and won’t find that weird. The reason Sauron’s first form was a slight Scottish guy is because they were hearkening to Tom Hiddleston’s Loki, because that’s their idea of an evil god. The opening scene is a particularly good example, but this exact theme continues throughout the first three episodes.
This is a version of the Lord of the Rings that’s completely, mindblowingly, fascinatingly ignorant of the series’ roots and influences. It has no idea what Tolkien was thinking about when he wrote his world. The writers… Don’t know any Norse mythology. They don’t see any connection to the Biblical Satan. They haven’t read The Hero with a Thousand Faces. Those aren’t the foundation of their version, their vision for Middle-Earth. Their interpretation is build on pop-culture. It shows clear influence from, and even deference to, the storytelling in Game of Thrones, the MCU, and Star Wars. It wants Sauron to be like Littlefinger and Darth Vader. It wants Galadriel to be like John Connor and Captain America. It wants the Valar to be like The Seven.
And what’s so crazy to me about that is that, to even conceptualize such a thing, you have to not only be ignorant to Tolkien’s experiences and influences… You have to be ignorant to the entire culture and body of art that’s been built up around the series for the last 70 years! How is it even possible to see art like this, or listen to music like this, and land on this for your ultimate evil? You can’t right? They never heard of that stuff. And that’s kind of genuinely amazing.
EDIT: Man I thought this would be fun to talk about for a sec but folks are fucking pissed in the comments lol. Three things:
1: First of all, I’m not claiming to be a Tolkien expert, I was talking about the culture around Tolkien. How most people interpret his work and visualize it, and the traditions there. I’m not saying I have a PHD in Sindarin and shit, and I’m for sure not saying anybody’s take, including the show creators’, is wrong. I’m saying I’ve seen a lot of versions of Lord of the Rings, a lot of people’s takes.
2: I liked the episodes. I’m not talking about production quality in this post. They were fun to watch because their version of Lord of the Rings is fresh and brought something new to the table. But I’m not gonna pretend that it was perfect either, this stuff is worth talking about. I think.
3: As I said in the comments, yeah there’s a single quote where it’s said that Orcs in the East “laughed at [Sauron].” I also watched that Nerd of the Rings video. If you want to say that my entire post makes no sense because of that then you are entitled to your opinion, but I think we can probably assume that that doesn’t mean “to his face right before also beating the shit out of him.” It’s hard to know because that is literally all the information we have, but we know that Orcs rebel and shit all the time, so yeah, it makes sense that Orcs outside his influence would be like “fuck that guy.” Sorry for not making my essay even longer and more up its ass with encyclopedic references, I was just tryin’ to have a fun little back-and-forth is all.