Lord of the Rings - [Amazon] *Spoilers*

Accents attached to troglodytes is in fact racist. Have some dignity, assuming you are Irish. If the monkeys in planet of the apes had nigerian accents what would you be saying then?

EDIT: You have to look at it in the context of the show. The elves are essentially the protestant ascendancy who naturally have no people of colour in the ruling classes. Then you have dwarves, humans and hobbits who are inferior races with people of colour and specific real world accents to accentuate their place in the world. It also implies that only inferior races can have people of colour leading them. Just think about it for a few minutes. It is an unusually and incredibly racist in every way.

Just wondering on the below as it's the most vital thing to happen on the show.

When they captured Oren, They assumed they got the dagger off him but no one bothered to take the two seconds to see if they actually had it? When they eventually checked it was too late?

Or did they actually have it all along and Halbrand/Sauron swapped it at a later stage behind their backs?

Nope, they didn't bother checking. Pretty much every story beat in the show is only explainable by the characters being morons.

The entire dialogue between Galadriel and Sauron in that last episode was quite simply unbelievable. Sauron says that she saved him on the raft? What in the name of suffering jaysus were these writers smoking. He literally pulled her from the sea. Then there was the whole "the other elves cast you from their ship". Again, no such thing happened.

These aren't plot holes, it's an entire team forgetting what they put in their own show which is unforgivable.

They go the whole series, not having Halbrand tell lies, then in last episode when revealed he starts the lies to Gladriel?

Have a watch of the clip again, he never said 'from their ship' he said 'the elves cast you out', which in his mind is what did they did by sending her to the undying lands (Valinor).

Back to article quote:-

Here they went with the rings poem and not the true lore of how/when the rings where made, Elven rings last.

Non-book reader here, I enjoyed every bit of it up until the finale which I found a bit meh.

The writing/plot line development needs a major overhaul for season 2 but again it didn’t bother me too much until the finale.

And Davos Seaworth in GoT, an ex-smuggler and slumdog, is a slur on Geordies? Of course that's ridiculous but it would be clearly be a diss on working-class Dubs if Liam Cunningham did the character in his native accent...

I, as a proud, born-and-raised Irishman who is proud of his heritage and accent....... couldn't care less really. My only problem was that some were better than others. And then I remembered: They are NOT Irish accents. They are not Irish people... They are NOT REAL!!! 😀

As for the show itself. I enjoyed it for what it was. Not as a faithful adaptation of Tolkien's related work but as a TV series. Like many, I think Galadrial was the weakest link in the show. Some down to the actor, some down to the writing/direction. Yes, it is unfortunate for Irish people that the Hardfoot accent is Irish-based. But, as has been pointed out, maybe there are a bunch of Londoners going "Why are orcs ALWAYS puting on bad 'SAFFF LANDAN' accents?" and why are Dwarves always Scottish? ALWAYS! (Again, not real, folks).

I thought Galadrial was too straight, Elrond too smiley (Although I did really like is friendship with Durin. Thought that was great). Thought Arondir was great. Loved the dwarves in general. Thought they were fantastic. Compare the funeral scene with Durin's wife to the song-and-dance of the washing-up scene in The Hobbit...

Thought the production values were great. I have no interest in trawling twitter for some blurry shots of "poor" effects work, thank you very much. Bear in mind: This is a TV SHOW!!! My God, remember seeing the Argonath in the cinema years ago? Remember how fantastic they looked? They did similar for a TV show (albeit with a mega-movie budget).

I understand that people are upset with the treatment of Gladrial and the lore in general. But this show is not just for them. This show has to appeal to as broad a base as possible. They don't care about the "W" word. They don't care about having strong or weak female characters or strong or weak male characters. They have no agenda other than making money.... As they should. The show (Any show) is a product that they wish/need to sell to as many people as possible to make as much money as possible.

So I'm interested to see where this goes. I will look forward to when it comes back. But I won't exactly be counting down the days. I won't be buying the extended DVD box-set. But I will certainly watch it when it returns.

Although I REALLY could have done without the Stranger being Gandalf...... Or that "I'm Good" line

Edit: Fixed typos

I know !

I bloody love it !

And it just smells of quality too! :D

How many of those 600 million are The Hobbit and Lord of The Rings itself? How many of these readers pored over the appendices? Of course they would like to please the fans but these appendices and other source material were not structured in a narrative manner. And I am not defending the "molestation of Tolkien's works by a trillion dollar cooperation". I'm just saying that it is a business decision. Movies, TV, music, books, these are products that need to return an investment. As repugnant as that may be, it is a fact. Of course the creators ideally want to do both: Create something that is art, but the money people? It's a product. And a company's obligation is to make money.

I'm one of the 600 million readers. I read The Hobbit first when 10 and LoTR first when 12. I think I bought just about every version of Jackson's Trilogy (Again, ignoring The Hobbit movies)..... Hell, if it had come out on VHS, I'd probably have bought those too. And NZ is on my bucketlist at least partially to see WETA and the locations (Even though most are rightly removed). But I can still watch this without feeling offended. I am not as precious (no pun intended) about LoTR as many are. And I think you'll find that the vast majority of readers are similar. More "casual", if you know what I mean. Enjoyed the books but that's it. And I'm not saying that being "Precious" about something is bad. At all. Everyone is about something. I am quite precious about Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy.

So what do they do? Not make it at all? If that was the case then nothing would ever be adapted. Everything would stay in their original format. All I'm saying is that there are more people out there who are NOT as knowledgeable and invested as there are people who know and love them passionately.

It's a pretty baffling aspect of all this. Many of the people who like the show openly admit that they just switch their brain off and enjoy the show. These folk would like anything that the writers put in. As long as there were a few spectacular sweeping vistas, some orchestral music and an assortment of other special effects and action scenes they would literally forgive anything done with the characters or plot.

Nothing at all would have been lost by simply following the narrative of the existing work. Maybe they would have angered one or two Twitter mobs if, like Tolkien's work, the show was a bit light on prominent female characters. Maybe. That's really it though.

Halbrand being Sauron makes so little sense that you kind of have to just not pay attention to the story for it to actually work in any way. Galadriel is moments away from being transported to Valinor, she then decides to swim all the way back to Middle-Earth but on the way she somehow crosses paths with Sauron. Then they just happen to be picked up by Numenoreans and Sauron then finds himself sailing back to middle-earth in a weird attempt to stop a completely new character from creating Mordor. That fails and he then gets transported to the elves where he gives them advice on making rings, is found out by Galadriel and then flees back to Mordor. It's so convoluted and as the main plotline of the series it just falls flat. People still love it though so what can you do?

I can see the argument that if they were going to invest all this money in a new TV show they needed to get the general audiences on board. It just seems to me though that the people who enjoy the show don't really care too much about the actual quality of the content. I am sure that there wouldn't be too many people out there who would have loved exactly what we got in the show but somehow would have hated it if they had followed the story in the books.

It just really seems here that every time the path was opened up to follow the content from the books the writers of this show decided to put their own completely random spin on things.

Complete change of tack: Didn't Peter Jackson say years ago (Maybe jokingly) that he shot so much extra that we haven't even seen, that they could make a mini-series of it? I seem to remember some photos surfacing of Gimli showing Legolas the Glittering Caves for example.