The Rings Of Power

Credit: Amazon

Amazon’s epic fantasy series The Lord Of The Rings: The Rings Of Power is divisive, to say the least. It has passionate fans and equally passionate detractors. It has also inspired a pretty massive drop-off in viewership: Over 50% of viewers that started Season 1 have not come back to watch Season 2. Most of these aren’t angry or hate-watching, they’re just apathetic. That’s probably worse. After all, hate-watching counts as a view just the same as any other kind of watching.

Co-showrunner J.D. Payne seems to understand this. In a recent interview he told The Hollywood Reporter he said that he’s happy to have detractors watch the series as well as fans:

The Fellowship had to look to each other, and those who support it, and remember what it’s fighting for. And when we see that millions of people are watching this and responding so positively to it — that’s who we’re fighting for. And those who watch every episode and [negatively] write about it on social media and make YouTube videos, we’re happy to have you guys, too. It wouldn’t be a journey through Middle-earth without some trolls along the way.

I’m sure Payne thought that one up ahead of time. As showrunner, of course, it’s his job to defend and promote the show, and far be it from me to wag my finger at a bit of levity. It’s a clever jab—but is it true? Are the show’s critics simply trolls? Of course there are trolls out there, but a great deal of criticism for this show is well-founded and compelling and certainly the falling viewership numbers lend credence to critics. And I’m not just saying that because a great deal of this criticism has been made by me.

Payne likens Amazon’s production to the struggles faced by Frodo and the Fellowship on their journey across Middle-earth, which I do find a bit silly. It’s a TV show, not a quest to end tyranny and destroy a great and powerful evil! But that’s neither here nor there.

Of course, because this show finds itself at the center of the never-ending culture wars, lickspittles at various publications have taken a similar approach when responding to critics of the series—though I am more sympathetic to the show’s creators than to journalists. Take, for instance, The Mary Sue. In this piece, we are told:

A question is posed here, and the author freely admits that they do not know the answer. You might think that the following paragraphs would dig a little deeper in order to understand the complaints better. You would be wrong.

The purpose of this post is to create villains. Not to understand them or strengthen the arguments against them, but simply to paint them the worst light possible. Of course, we should probably not expect much when the piece opens with “It is yet again another series that people online want to hate on just . . . because, I guess?”

The villains in this morality play are quickly placed in various deplorable baskets with “most all of them [complaining] about the inclusion in the series”. They are entirely male, of course. “Centering the series around Galadriel instantly put the angry men on alert” we are informed, as do characters of color. Then we get this truly baffling argument (with a subtle No True Scotsman in the way quotes around “fans” which is done repeatedly throughout the article) about Tolkien’s estate:

These “fans” have said that they don’t like the liberties the show is taking with J.R.R. Tolkien’s work, but that argument isn’t actually founded in what Tolkien and his family want. Do you know how I know that? Because the Tolkien estate is heavily involved in the show. You know what the Tolkien family didn’t love? (Mainly Christopher Tolkien?) The Peter Jackson movies.

I hate to break it to you, but J.R.R. Tolkien has shuffled off this mortal coil. He died long before he could offer an opinion on the series, or give his blessing to any adaptation over the past fifty years. What he wants or whether he would grant his blessing to this project can only be speculated upon. Based on everything he wrote about adaptations when he was alive, and on everything he wrote about attention to detail, I suspect he would have been horrified by this series.

It’s true that Christopher Tolkien was not a fan of the much more faithful Peter Jackson films, but Christopher Tolkien is also dead, and we can only suspect that if he took issue with Jackson’s trilogy he would recoil in horror at Rings of Powser. Simon Tolkien, like Denethor in Gondor, is the steward of the Tolkien estate and sold the rights and consults on the series in some fashion, but Simon Tolkien no more wrote The Lord Of The Rings than I did. Estates routinely make choices that the author themselves—long in the grave—would likely not make (see, for instance, the censorship of Roald Dahl’s novels).

This is among the flimsiest arguments I’ve ever encountered. It is either an example of staggering ignorance or it’s an attempt at hoodwinking us, which fits nicely with all the gaslighting going on. Whatever the case, it is neither useful or true.

After listing reasons the post’s writer enjoys the series—which is fine, but not particularly useful in understanding its critics—we are informed that angry people are ruining the show for everyone else:

It is a great time to be a nerd. Every month, we have a new show to unpack and love, but being online during this time has been miserable. All of these angry people have tried to ruin the fun for everyone else. They want to cry and complain that something they cherish (and yet miss the basic principles it is trying to teach them) is not what they want. We saw it with The Acolyte. We’re seeing it with Marvel shows. The angry “fans” are out about Star Trek. Hell, even The Boys got turned on.

This is another perplexing stance. If you want to enjoy The Rings Of Power, just enjoy it. If other people don’t and want to discuss why they don’t, fine. How does this ruin your enjoyment of a thing? I like pineapple on pizza. I don’t like it any less just because it’s so trendy for “haters” to “cry and complain” that it doesn’t belong on pizza because it’s a fruit. Tomatoes are fruit!

I also like Ewoks, which many people think are terrible. This does not diminish my enjoyment of Ewoks. Besides, isn’t it more than a little foolish to blame other fans for a show’s failings rather than the creators of the show? It might sound preposterous, but my theory is that had this show—or The Acolyte—been better written, people might not dislike it so intensely. Other series with female leads and protagonists of color, such as Fallout or Arcane or Blue Eye Samurai just to name a few, have been universally praised by fans and critics alike. What gives? Are these trolls and bigots just super selective or something? Or could it be that quality—or the lack thereof—is at the heart of the matter?

The truth is, blog posts like this aren’t designed to actually convince people that they should stop complaining. They’re designed to incense and to make people complain more. That’s the whole magic trick. All of us write for clicks and engagement, but only some of us really mean what we say.

Here’s how it’s done: Write a piece in which you feign outrage and find someone to blame, and be sure to take an easy moral high ground while you’re at it. It’s best if you never once make an attempt to understand the other side. The goal is to rile people up, and that’s not hard to do on the internet. It’s a neat trick, but one that outlets like The Mary Sue have played far too many times.

The problem? It’s not real. It’s inauthentic. There is no actual argument here, just a vague broadstroke against the amorphous “other” and a generous helping of patting oneself on the back. It doesn’t pass the smell test. It’s too shallow and too strident and too predictable. So it goes when you only ever preach to the choir.

Of course, it doesn’t end there. The post continues:

All of these shows exist in our nerdy space, and instead of celebrating the amount of geeky adaptations we’re getting, we get people attacking fans of these shows online. Why?

Two things:

 

People aren’t “celebrating” all of these adaptations because many of them are poorly made and take far too many liberties with the source material. This is like that meme “just shut up and consume stuff”.
Second, fans on all sides of every controversial movie or show attack each other constantly. This is the nature of the beast. In fact, the author of this very piece is attacking “fans” (see) who dislike the show. Round and round we go.

Are people that concerned about other people liking something? Or is this some deep rooted issue where they cannot handle people embracing their nerdy sides because they got made fun of? I’m betting it’s the latter.

I find this an incredibly revealing paragraph. Yes, many nerds were bullied and made fun of back in the day. It’s sort of like a bizarro alternative universe now where all the stuff we loved as kids is now popular and mainstream, and the popular mainstream people who didn’t like this stuff before—often mocked and derided it and the nerds who loved it—have gotten their greedy mitts on every piece of nerd culture that can be exploited. Then, when these things we loved are adapted into shows and movies that barely resemble the source material, and we get upset we are met with finger-wagging and gaslighting and all manner of scorn. It’s just history repeating itself.

This is the closest the Mary Sue piece gets to nudging up against something roughly resembling empathy. But it veers off that dangerous course—empathy is a slippery slope, after all—with its parting shot: “So how about if you don’t like something simply because you think you know more, you keep that energy to yourself? What about that?”

Oh, I can play this game, too. “How about if you don’t like that someone else doesn’t like something you keep that energy to yourself?”

Only, I don’t believe this. I believe that the author of this piece has a right to like the series and say why, and that they also have a right to be upset with people who don’t like it. This is how fandoms work. We argue about stuff. I really love Advanced Dungeons & Dragons 2nd Edition and I will argue with people who prefer 3rd or 4th or 5th. I just won’t call them monsters. You aren’t a monster because you like or dislike something, but you can’t be in a fandom if you think disagreement is bad. You don’t get to set yourself apart from or above the fray and claim that you’re part of the community. You don’t get to tell people you disagree with to just shut up. I mean, you can try that, but it won’t work. (Then again, as noted above, that really isn’t the actual purpose of a post like this).

So at last, I come to the core of my argument. Why are people upset with The Rings Of Power?

While I admit that there are indeed trolls and bigots out there, I’m hard-pressed to think that millions of people who stopped watching The Rings Of Power are all motivated by racism, sexism and anger. This is like blaming Grand Theft Auto 5 for real-world violence. It doesn’t add up or pass muster. Again, I’d wager that most simply do not care about the show enough to keep watching it and that this has nothing to do with black elves or Galadriel being a woman (a beloved character in Lord of the Rings I should add).

The real reasons are simple, and I will list several of them though by no means is this an exhaustive list:

 

The fanatical liberties taken with not just the compressed timeline, but the ordering of events such as the forging of the Three elven Rings first, rightfully upsets many Tolkien fans. The bizarre portrayal of the Numenoreans as a bunch of MAGA types who are not particularly special is another big thorn in many fans’ sides.
The mystery box style of storytelling has run its course for many fans. The Stranger’s identity is one such mystery box that many viewers have expressed annoyance with, including your humble narrator.
The constant “memberberries”—Easter Eggs, references to Lord of the Rings, dialogue cribbed from other characters in that text and given to new characters in this show—Go back to the shadow, a classic Gandalf line to the Balrog, ripped off wholesale and given to Galadriel as she charges a band of orcs, for instance—is also frustrating and cringey; it is a lazy way to tell a story when used to this degree.
Bad writing throughout, including lots of Very Deep sounding dialogue that is actually just wooden and flowery. Far too often, these characters don’t sound like real people. They just make Very Serious proclamations at one another.
The actual complaints about Galadriel are not that she is a woman, but that the show’s creators have taken one of the most popular Tolkien characters and reduced her to a petty, obnoxious scold who is easily fooled (when in fact she is one of the oldest and wisest of all the elves even in the Second Age, and was not fooled by Annatar). She is not the only Tolkien character treated this way.
Some of the events that take place in the series are laughably goofy, like the Rube Goldberg volcano that formed Mordor—and the hilarious title card that announced its name change. The Sauron Venom blog is another. There are too many to list.
“Nobody goes off trail. And nobody walks alone” the Harfoot motto goes, as they leave behind the sick and anyone whose wheel breaks. “The sea is always right!” the Numenoreans chant, which if I were feeling generous I’d call bitter irony given the fate of that seafaring nation. But I’m not feeling generous.
The writing in general is very amateurish. How can the dialogue be this bad this consistently? Then there are the wild plot conveniences. In Season 1, Galadriel jumped off a ship in the middle of the ocean and was rescued on a raft by Sauron himself (disguised as Halbrand, yay mystery boxes!) the powerful being she’d been scouring all of Middle-earth to find. What splendid luck! Then there was the fast travel and geocoding that miraculously allowed the Numenoreans to cross the ocean and find the tiny village in the Southlands that was being attacked at that precise moment by Adar and his orcs. Or weird things like Elrond and Galadriel setting out on an urgent mission to Eregion on foot instead of taking a boat, or horses. Or using the fast travel machine.
Finally, to address the racism claims, for me the issue I have is simply that there is no coherent racial makeup of the various people and places in this Medieval fantasy world and I think that having that would make the series better. As it stands, verisimilitude suffers. There were many opportunities to have different peoples from various regions have darker or lighter skin. The Numenoreans could have all been Mediterranean in appearance and more diverse in general since theirs is a large seafaring nation. The Stoors, isolated in the desert, could have been darker-skinned than the nomadic Harfoots of the forest and so forth. This would make the diversity feel more natural than the incredibly diverse—yet entirely insular—cultures we encounter in the show. Again, reducing arguments like this one to “muh racism” is absurd. But this is far, far from the biggest problem with the series. I’m thrilled to have more female characters and more diversity in this universe—but I want it to make sense within the fiction, and most importantly I want all these characters —regardless of race or gender—to be well-drawn and complex and and to interact with one another like actual people, all of which is in short supply.

 

This is an abbreviated list of the myriad problems with The Rings Of Power. There are countless others, but I’ve gone on long enough. Long enough to illustrate that there are, in fact, many problems with this show that go beyond “angry racist men.”

Dismissing all these concerns as “trolling” or bigotry is not only disingenuous, it’s irresponsible. For one thing, those of us charged as critics and journalists have a sacred charge. We are not here to defend Amazon or Netflix or HBO. We are here to hold them accountable. When it comes to adaptations, we have a responsibility to judge whether changes work or not (and I fully acknowledge that adaptations often need to make hard choices and changes from the source material).

Look no further than George R.R. Martin’s recently deleted post about changes made to House Of The Dragon. He was forced to take his concerns public because HBO would not address them behind the scenes. It is our role, as critics, to take these showrunners to task as well; we have less skin in the game than Martin, so we can take a somewhat removed perspective. (It is also our role, as critics, to take Martin himself to task when necessary—which is why, despite loving Martin’s writing, my review of A Dance With Dragons was rather harsh).

But the second reason I find this kind of thing so frustrating is that there really are bigots out there, and trolls and other ne’er-do-wells, and when you just lump everyone into this same basket and claim that they are all simply Very Bad People who have Very Bad Motives, you give actual bigots cover. We see this same thing play out constantly with gamers, fans and nerds, when members of the press make egregious claims that the only reason people don’t like a show or a game, or the only reason they do, is because they’re problematic for one reason or another. “Gamers are dead,” they told us, in one of the most ill-fated prognostications of all time. But it’s repeated, in one form or another, time and again even now.

This unequivocal mindset makes any kind of honest discourse impossible. The same thing happened with The Acolyte which, we were told in various Op/Eds, was only cancelled because of “toxic dudebros.” This isn’t true, but it’s a narrative that simplifies complex ideas for people who are uninterested in nuance, or who have an axe to grind, or who are so deeply lost within the culture wars that they are incapable of viewing anything through any other lens.

As John Cleese once said, “the biggest advantage of extremism is that it makes you feel good because it provides you with enemies” and the “great thing about having enemies is that you can pretend that all the badness in the whole world is in your enemies and all the goodness in the whole world is in you. Attractive isn’t it?”

Indubitably.

I really wanted to love The Rings Of Power. I think a lot of people had high hopes. Crushing disappointment is a bitter pill.