`Rings of Power: a Restrained Analysis
This Substack post has a budget of 1 billion dollars.
Okay, it’s time: we’ve got to talk about Rings of Power.
For those of you who have been around since my Hobbit movie reviews, you’re probably (maybe?) on the edge of your seat, waiting for the epic smackdown. If so, I’m sorry to disappoint, but there will be no smackdown today.
Allow me to explain.
Peter Jackson’s adaptation of The Hobbit is just that—an adaptation. He had a full-length, masterfully crafted story to work with, and was charged with transferring it faithfully from the page to the screen. If he chose to transform a beloved piece of children’s literature into a bloated, 3-movie-length disaster of mind-blowing incompetence, that’s 100% on him.
Rings of Power is different. All they had to work with was the appendices to Lord of the Rings. They took a relatively sparse amount of information and ran with it, ballooning it out to a possible five seasons. Everyone went into this (hopefully) realizing that, essentially, Rings of Power is glorified, high-budget fanfiction.
Does that let Rings of Power off the hook? No. But it does mean that it must be judged by a different standard from a book-to-movie adaptation. I promise not to go easy on it—I’ve read some truly excellent fanfic in my day. But I am going to try not to go on too many unhinged rants (even though the unhinged rants are so much fun).
(With apologies to Strong Bad, I’m going to be using the word “fanfic” throughout this post. Also, this video is required watching for this post. Also, here’s your spoiler warning. Spoilers, spoilers everywhere.)
So, how do we judge fanfic? My personal criteria are as follows: writing quality, canon consistency, and appeal of original content. By these criteria, Rings of Power is often enjoyable, but ultimately kind of…meh.
Writing Quality: 5/10
It is a truth (that should be) universally acknowledged that no matter how good you are at writing, you’re not as good as J. R. R. Tolkien1. So I feel for those who are tasked with creating stories set in Tolkien’s world, almost from whole cloth. Without his skill, knowledge, morality, or even any transferrable dialogue, things are always going to feel a little off, but overall I think Rings of Power succeeds at telling an interesting story in a world that more or less feels like Middle-earth.
Unfortunately, the writers occasionally fall into a lazy but tempting trap common to a lot of LotR fanfic: misappropriating Tolkien’s quotes. Why put in the effort to write anything beautiful when you can just tweak something someone else said until it almost fits the characters’ situations?
In season 2, Arondir and Isildur are nearly devoured by a weird…swamp…worm…thing. Isildur asks what it was, and Arondir gives us this gem:
There are nameless things in the deep places of this world. This one…we shall call supper.
The original line worked better when Gandalf used it to describe the Watcher in the water. Then, it was menacing. Here, it provokes eye-rolling and makes the writers look juvenile. I get that it’s difficult to come up with profound dialogue. But instead of being pretentious, they could have kept it simple:
Isildur: “What was that thing?”
Arondir: (holding up still moving chunk of worm meat) “Supper.”
This would have made Arondir, a character I already have little patience with, a little less insufferable. It also solidifies him as the stoic bad boy the writers clearly want him to be, and makes him more relatable by setting him apart from the more poetic, scholarly, high-Elven types like Elrond and Gil-Galad.
Here’s a more pernicious example. In season 2, when Gandalf—whom, I want to declare for the record, I knew was Gandalf since he fell from the sky in season 1—is torn between looking for a staff and saving his Harfoot friends, a horrible man whom we’re supposed to call Tom Bombadil (but who is certainly not the Tom Bombadil I know and love) says,
Many that die deserve life. And some that live deserve death. Who are you to give it to them?
You may recognize this as a bastardization of something beautiful Gandalf said to Frodo, to explain the value in Bilbo’s act of mercy toward Gollum. Instead, Not-Bombadil is spitting on Gandalf’s love for his friends and desire to save them. “Who cares if these two teenage girls die? Lots of people die. Are you gonna just go around saving people? You’ve got better things to do, bucko. Like stare at this field of dead trees until you find one that’s magical, because if you don’t do that right now, you’ll never find it.”
Leaving aside the fact that Gandalf does find his staff after he saves Nori and Poppy, making Not-Bombadil a filthy liar at best and a comic book villain at worst, the writers have taken a core idea at the heart of Lord of the Rings, twisted it around, and made it into something awful—which, if you think about it, is pretty Sauron-like behavior.
Although honestly, when the writers do take the time to try for originality, they don’t fare any better. In season 1, their explanation for the existence of mithril literally boils down to: once upon a time an Elf warrior fought a balrog over a tree, and then the tree got STRUCK BY LIGHTNING!
Season 2 in particular also had some massive pacing issues. The first few episodes are agonizingly slow. Watching Sauron be horrifically murdered should be shocking—maybe even thrilling. But when you drag it out for as long as the show did, it’s just…boring. And then we get to watch him reform as a mass of worms and sort of…slink across the countryside for about twenty minutes…and oh yeah, this is all backstory, nothing new yet. Roll opening credits. I’m hungry. Who signed off on this?
Also, what’s the point of spending a whole episode giving Elendil Miriel to the “Valar” for judgment if they’re just going to completely discredit her miraculous survival in the next episode? And what is it with Amazon and sea monsters? The weirdness of that bit detracts from the fact that the Numenor story arc is quite well done in general.
Overall, the writing quality of Rings of Power is decent. It’s generally fun and entertaining, but has some issues that keep it from sticking the landing. 5/10.
Canon Consistency: 6/10
(I need to add a caveat here: some fanfic plays with canon in interesting or amusing ways, such as setting stories in alternate universes or crossing over characters from different works of fiction. In these cases, canon consistency needs to be relaxed. But none of those apply here, so *cracks knuckles* it’s canon time!)
I actually think Rings of Power is reasonably consistent with canon, at least in terms of big-picture stuff. There’s plenty to quibble about (Finrod’s death, when the Harfoots and Istari show up in Middle-earth, Elrond’s awful haircut, THAT KISS, etc.), but there’s a lot to appreciate. Celebrimbor’s death scene, in particular, comes to mind. That’s about as close to canon as you can get without completely grossing out your audience (and straying into Unfinished Tales territory, which RoP doesn’t have the rights to). I also really like how they handle Numenor, the Dwarven arcs, and everything to do with Annatar in general.
That said, I have one giant, petty, nit-picky issue to address, and her name is Mirdania.
Mirdania might be the least-Elven Elf to grace the screen since Rankin-Bass Thranduil. She’s short, has poor posture and a weird accent, and spends her whole life skulking around looking concerned. It took me some time to figure out what really bugs me about her, but I finally figured it out—it’s her name.
The first part of her name is fine. Mirdan is Sindarin for “jewel-smith,” and Celebrimbor and his employees are collectively known as the Gwaith-i-mirdain (“brotherhood of jewel-smiths”). Credit where it’s due.
The problem is, the suffix -ia never appears in Tolkien’s Elvish names. The man gave us like six different feminine suffixes to pick from. She could have been Mirdanel, Mirdaniel, Mirdaneth, Mirdanwen, etc. I personally prefer Mirdanel, because it hearkens back to Nerdanel, the wife of Feanor. The name “Mirdania” is a big red flag.
Mirdania’s name bugged me enough that I was actually relieved when she died—which probably says more about me than about the show, but that’s a story for another post. Like I said, it’s a petty issue that probably bugs nobody else in this world.
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Okay, I know I said one issue, but I have to address The Kiss. I’m not going to go into too much detail—the interwebz are already plastered with the rage of the faithful at Elrond smooching his own mother-in-law. Guys, whatever. WE know it’s icky, but his wife hasn’t even been born yet, so we should give him a break. Except…
The real problem is that Elves mate for life. They are reincarnated if they die. Even if Celeborn is dead (of which there is no indication), Galadriel is still married to him, and will be until the end of the world. Elrond knows this. The one time an Elf wanted to get remarried, it was such a big problem that Manwe had to get involved, and the marriage and subsequent children probably caused all the problems in the Silmarillion. My issue with The Kiss is that it would be so taboo it probably wouldn’t even occur to Elrond as an option, even in a desperate situation.
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One more thing: Not. My. Bombadil. What on Arda is he doing in Rhun, anyway? He’s supposed to—
(At this point, the author is gently, but firmly, removed from her soapbox in the town square and returned safely to the lab.)
So, yeah. 6/10 on canon consistency.
Appeal of Original Content: 5/10
As the saying goes, Rings of Power is both good and original; but the parts that are good are not original, and the parts that are original are not good.
Every fanfic is going to have some sort of original content—a new location or character or scenario made up by the author. There’s a long and awkward tradition of self-insert characters, in particular—just ask the thousands of teenage girls who wrote themselves into the Fellowship of the Ring in 2002.
(This is one of several reasons why I don’t mind the ethnically-diverse cast of Rings of Power. Since it’s unapologetic fanfic, you don’t have to be a stickler about the demographics of Middle-earth. Although it cracks me up whenever I remember that Tar-Miriel is known as “The Fair.” What can I say? I’m immature.)
Unfortunately, the original characters (“OC’s” in the fanfic world) in Rings of Power are almost uniformly horrible. We’ve already covered Mirdania in detail as one of the worst offenders, but here is a quick list of others:
Arondir, aka Great Value Legolas. Typical perma-brooding, invincible Gary Stu, complete with forbidden love and the ability to shrug off mortal wounds by the next episode. Also, I’m not buying for a minute that he’s not Theo’s dad. The laddy doth protest too much, methinks.
Bronwyn, the only woman in Middle-earth who wears sleeveless dresses. Maybe instead of mysteriously “succumbing to her wounds” between seasons 1 and 2, she just caught pneumonia and died.
Someone needs to fire her costume designer Every single Harfoot. They eat roaches, have bad hygiene even by medieval fantasy standards, and oh yeah—they leave their injured people to die on their yearly migration. When the Stoors showed up in season 2, I really wanted Gundabel to be Sadoc’s wife who got left behind on some migration, refused to lay down and die, and started her own thriving proto-hobbit civilization because she was tired of his murderous ways. It’s a better story than that twisted nonsense they came up with about walking songs and trying to find the Suzat (because anyone who isn’t deep in the lore knows what that is). I wonder if Rings of Power is hiring…
Earien, aka Great Value Hermione. I’m not sure why Elendil needs a Strong Independent daughter who serves no purpose other than to make me want to repeal the 19th.
Mirdania again. Ugh.
Estrid. Her betrothed seems like the nicest guy, and he deserves better than her waffling between him and Isildur.
Glug. I don’t want sympathetic orcs with wives and children. That’s not the point of orcs. Not everything needs nuance, guys. Just let evil be evil.
Basically, just say no to RoP OCs. 4/10.
Overall Rating: 5/10
That feels too low, considering that for the most part, I enjoyed watching Rings of Power. Husband Tom and I watched it on Sunday nights, and I looked forward to that time each week (maybe hanging out with him made the experience more enjoyable than it otherwise would be). I’m going to keep watching RoP and enjoying everything that’s good about it, and probably keep shaking my head at their more questionable choices. I’ve stuck with serialized fanfics that are far worse.
But I want to know what you guys think. Are you caught up on Rings of Power? What did I get wrong? Does anyone in the world hate Mirdania as much as I do? Please let me know!
Fight me on this. Actually, don’t. I had the flu over Christmas and I’m tired.