Actually! I Have Another Question! I Know Youve Said That ROPs Holistic Reception Was Rather :/ But How

actually! i have another question! i know you’ve said that ROP’s holistic reception was rather… :/ but how was the show’s true quality? was there any memorable/fitting music? was it plot accurate? was the film quality high? and a bonus, do you have a favorite scene?

not to offload all this on you at once, but i just want to know your opinion of its quality uwu

hi again! ❤️

I just wanna begin by saying I'm no expert on film- and tv-making, so I don't think I'll have much professional input, but. here we go!

(this is gonna be a spoilery review, just a warning)

overall, the quality was pretty uneven, I'd say. the show was advertised as the most expensive series ever made, and... I personally couldn't see that. especially regarding costumes and cgi, i feel like there was a lot of room to improve. some views and wide shots of locations were pretty nice (lindon, eregion, also khazad dum was just beautiful in some shots), but the scene where they were sailing to valinor looked really bad to me, especially those cgi seagulls.

the acting was a mixed bag. there are characters whose acting i really enjoyed (miriel in the second half of the series, elrond, arondir had his moments, adar was GREAT, elendil was pretty cool, durin was good even when the script wasn't), but it only made the rest look worse in comparison, i'm afraid.

I'd say the music was good. I'm not sure i'd call it memorable, because apart from the opening credits music i well. don't remember it, but that may just be my shitty memory jshkjfhjdk but I don't think there were any moments where music felt unfitting or jarring. it was fine.

about the writing... okay, that's a long one.

as for the plot - they didn't have many rights to tolkien's works, so their options were limited, plot-wise. even the intro with some information from the years of the trees and the first age was very general, and didn't even mention the kinslaying.

but while they had to invent a lot of plot, the characters were RIGHT THERE. all they had to do was do them justice, and in my opinion - they didn't. galadriel isn't wise or power hungry (in my opinion), and it's a shame. her arc is in most part just the writers screaming ISN'T IT IRONIC HOW SHE CAUSED THE THING SHE TRIED TO STOP, it lacks any subtlety.

(on this topic, why did sauron tempt her, and not celebrimbor? does it stink a bit of homophobia or...? it's like they were deadly afraid of even a hint of homoerotic subtext. like im sure that's what happened, but it still sucks)

it's a story about forging of the rings of power, and celebrimbor is barely there. i'm really baffled by some of the writing choices, because they clearly had the rights to the rings, celebrimbor and sauron, so why not tell the story that was written? there is enough material there to tell a compelling story, and in my opinion choosing to omit and overwrite it was a bad one. neither galadriel, nor the original plot benefitted from the writing choices, i think. they both ended up heavily flattened and less interesting than their original versions.

galadriel especially had many of her ambitions and stuggles taken away from her - by making her conflict with sauron central to the plot, the show takes away from the fact that galadriel's biggest stuggle has always been with herself - and in lotr, she wins when she resists the ring (NOT sauron - she resists her hunger for power and her huge ambition. it's about HER). it was one of the changes that made me the saddest, because they had a truly amazing, iconic female character right there, and they wasted her potential so painfully.

it WOULD feel wrong to say i wish they just hadn't chosen her as the main character, because we DO still need more female leads - many, many more. but i can't not be angry at the way they stripped her of her ambitions, best strengths and defining flaws.

there are also many changes to the lore, to which my reactions switched between "why add that?" (isildur's sister, the priestesses? witches? whoever they were), "why change that" (mithril lore (im still all "???" whenever i try to make sense of it)), and "oh my fucking GOD" (halbrand as sauron, mordor's on/off switch). especially the last one was... ridiculous. mordor is a country that's seeped through with evil because of the dark forces inhabiting it for ages, and you're telling me they decided to make it so that it was created within a few minutes because a guy put a sword into a keyhole? fuck off

the whole sauron thing is a material for a separate post and this is already long enough, but I'll just say. i don't get why they had to make drama around sauron. everyone and their mother knows who sauron is, you can just use the impact that this character has instead of creating conflict with a weak plot justification. of course it was going to be hard to create a character from someone who in LOTR is more a symbol than a person - but in my opinion, they didn't make any right choices regarding him. and they didn't even tell the actor he was going to be playing sauron until they were shooting episode three, which is a trend that seriously needs to stop.

all in all, if you're looking for bits of story and lore that tolkien came up with, they are not there. solid 90% of the show - maybe more - is something new or changed

the costumes are... meh, mostly. there is one thing in particular that makes my blood boil, and it's Numenorean armor, best visible on Miriel. take a look at her sleeves:

(id in alt text)

it's fucking. fabric with the scales pattern printed on it??? which is either a pretty bad costume idea/design, or THE cheapest, laziest, almost insulting execution I've ever seen.

also, many costumes are only like two layers of clothes, they usually have few details like jewellery and such, so they often look simply unfinished. especially elven costumes are underwhelming. I think as far as i remember, the dwarves' costumes looked best. I'd recommend watching LanaMarie's videos on youtube, I've stumbled upon them while looking for video essays on rop and it's clear she knows what she's talking about when it comes to costuming.

(also, I stand by what i said when the first promo pics came out - why would you get rid of long-haired male elves? I hate that they did that. are they THAT afraid of breaking gender norms?)

last but not least - i was seriously not impressed by the actors' accents choices. you got English elves, irish harfoots, scottish dwarves, cockney (? i'm not sure) orcs... it was a mess of really ugly stereotypes.

(EDIT: I worded this poorly - it sounds like I mean to say it's the actors' fault, but that's not what I meant. I wanted to say that the actors playing certain races seemed to have been assigned certain accents by the creators and along with some script choices it created a few ugly situations that felt very stereotypical and harmful towards real life people who speak with those accents)

HOWEVER, despite all that i'm gonna end on a more positive note and refer to your last question, my favourite scene. this spot is easily taken by the scene where disa and some other dwarves sing to the mountain to let go of trapped miners. it had amazing impact, to me it was a beautiful piece of lore, and it showed the love and respect and trust the dwarves have for the mountains. it was so short and simple yet so amazingly effective in conveying everything it had to convey. also disa's singing gave me goosbumps, the actress has an amazing voice.

okay, i think that's all i wanted to say (wow, that's. a lot). thank you a lot for asking, I hope that tells you what you wanted to learn! and i really enjoyed this opportunity to talk some more about my thoughts :)

touching grass is not enough i must psychically connect to a mushroom colony

I just don’t get it. How can our society act so goddamned normal about seahorses. How can anybody so casually accept that that’s a fish???

This is one of nature’s most anatomically perverse of all beasts. A FISH, like a carp or a bass or a beta is a fish, but it bent its body straight up only to bend its head permanently back down. It stretched its skull into a pipe. It tapered its tail like a lizard, specifically like a chameleon. It can also move its eyes independently by the way, you know, like a chameleon. Fun fact, it can change color to express its mood, like you know whatever does that. It doesn’t properly swim anymore. It buzzes its few remaining fins like an insect’s wings to float itself around at a snail’s pace. It lives its whole life clinging to coral branches or seaweed, which means it decided to become a “tree dweller” in an environment where gravity didn’t even matter anyway. The males get pregnant. They make noises at each other by rubbing some of their neck bones together. Every day, EVERY DAY a mated pair does a little dance and a little neck bone song so they remember which two seahorses they were. They’re a beautiful precious obscenity. Nothing so adorable ever made such a strong case against a logical creator.

They have as little skin and meat as they could get away with. Their skeleton is almost all they are.

mosaics in my contemporary era :D

anything new from ROP? im still reluctant to watch the show, and i trust your judgment most in review

a few weeks after the season ended I can say the only things that will stay with me is frustration and also the sheer amazement at how hard I can deny things. I literally lived in denial about halbrand being sauron until the very last moment. and don't get me wrong, I had been seeing the theories about it, I just completely waved them off because i thought it was way too stupid to be true and so every hint that appeared on the screen wasn't processed as a hint by my brain and I forgot it as soon as I watched it. i refused to connect the dots SO HARD i actually thought there were no clues for the reveal until I looked back at the season again. I didn't even know my brain could do that, just Not See something so hard that it really, genuinely misses what's right in front of it. truly amazing

and the thing is, I usually DO see the connections in shows and books and shit, but here i was expecting something else (sauron being well. sauron and not Just Some Guy) to happen so hard that it legitimately, utterly blinded me to everything. it's so fucking funny to me

(thank you for saying you trust my judgement! ♡♡♡♡♡ it means a lot)