The Hall of Fire

Sad that the long wait now begins. :( Spoiler thoughts: They really sped through the making of the Rings and I'm not sure how we're going to get to the other 16 Rings that are yet to be made. There's even a good possibility now that we're not even going to get Annatar. That said, I really loved the ...

Found this nice review of Episode 7 (which sums up a lot of my thoughts) :

https://ravingsanity.wordpress.com/2022 ... 7-the-eye/

Was it spoken by one of the Hobbits?

As someone who dislikes melodrama (and just how melodramatic the films were) I really appreciate the understated nature of some important moments, including Míriel’s blindness. I think there's a fair bit of difference between melodrama and drama, although we clearly disagree on where that line lies...

My latest thoughts are that I very firmly believe they are NOT going for Gandalf. The one thing that has been consistent about The Stranger through all the episodes is that while he probably has a good heart, his powers have a more sinister side and even if he may not be fully aware of that, he stil...

I’m a little confused. Apart from the Mordor reveal at the end (which was bad, but easily remedied by just turning off the episode a few second early) :), and the balrog roar (I really don’t understand why they had it roar), what issue did you have with the director? I'm sure that it will come off ...

For once the writing actually worked for me on most levels. But the directing was quite a bit of a letdown. Both the Balrog reveal and the closing transition from Southlands to Mordor came off as incredibly clunky and campy in not a good way. But I loved most of the actual interactions between the c...

A new detailed interview with Payne & McKay at THR: https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/tv/tv-features/the-rings-of-power-showrunners-interview-season-2-1235233124/ Sources say HBO pitched the estate on retelling Middle-earth’s “Third Age” — essentially remaking Peter Jackson’s beloved Lord of the...

I think the possibility of Orkish redemption is nonetheless a logically inevitable consequence of the stories he wrote. I tend to approach the legendarium from a, for lack of a better term, "heretical" viewpoint. You just made me consider a new and unorthodox way to approach these texts. ...

At the end of the day, Tolkien depicted Orcs as having individual wills and preferences, and the fact that they are violent and sadistic no more implies that they are inherently evil than the existence of violent and sadistic humans implies the same about us. It should be noted that we only ever se...

I mean, Tolkien did not write Orcs as impersonal symbols of evil in LOTR . They are clearly individuals, with their own personalities and preferences. They have multiple distinct cultures, and given the clear resentment that some (not all) of them have for their non-Orkish bosses (to the point of o...

What do you mean by Eastern countries? Asian, or Eastern European? Or both, I guess. I come from a South Asian country so specifically had that in mind, where racism very much exists but is of a much different nature than the discourse I'm used to having in online circles where it skews mostly to w...

I'm conflicted about Orcs Rights being a thing. I think it's best to leave Orcs as just a completely symbolic representation of evil, just like Balrogs or Ungoliant's spawn, because if you try to give the Orcs any kind of distinguished personhood and "humanity" then you're actually making ...

To be fair the Arwen's-fate nonsense was as randomly inserted as it was forgotten so it never became a big deal.

I hope it's eventually the same for SMiLe too :/

The problem is that this institutionalised racism is predominantly an American problem yet the rest of us are expected to abide by American reactions to an American problem and apply them globally. I agree on this as I don't really know how it is outside of it and it does get annoying when Eastern ...

The battle scenes had some really weird editing so the overall effect didn't land as impressively to me. And the Orodruin explosion had some choppy visual effects. But I enjoyed the episode. A lot of fan-fiction. And Galadriel continues to stray further and further away from canon. But this is the o...

Sigh. I can tell this is going to be a pointless conversation if we can't even agree that equality means equality. If everyone agreed on what equality actually means then there wouldn't be any discussions on "reverse oppression" in modern context. On an individual level, of course it's po...

Sorry, but I don't agree with the logic that "Hollywood did it for years, so being equally discriminatory now is somehow equality" It is not even a fraction of it being equally discriminatory. Hollywood didn't just switch POC characters for white, it actively had white actors with painted...

For what it's worth, among the given suspects I think the Stranger is the least likely to be Sauron. I just can't imagine any writer and Tolkien fan ever conceiving Sauron to be the guy helping Hobbits move their carts. I think it is actually Sauron who's been wearing Celebrimbor's skin as a costume...