Crafted during the age of Sauron’s rise to power, this will include HEAVY SPOILERS and opinions to how the series was receipted, the broken expectations, disappointments and enjoyments.
Before I even dared to watch the episodes of this marvellous piece of story that is Lord of the Rings, I was met with tons of opinions to how it was infested by woke, how everything was bad, how it ruined everything that the world was about. Naturally this repulsed me from giving the series my time for many years.
But then I decided to take a gander, because I listened to the soundtrack. And the music was marvelous. Where the Shadows Lie and The Stranger.
There was also the curiosity to truly how bad it was, as something that all need to learn is to not trust blindly ‘what the TV says’.
And to my huge surprise, I was hooked. Yes the criticism of dark skin characters was true, they were there, but it was easy to ignore as something that mustn’t have any special meaning. Black dwarves was actually epic, and they look incredible.
Galadriel was a force of nature, yet blind and incapable of gulping down her pride which gave her zero benefits, only trouble and misfortune. Sauron was expected to be the Stranger fallen from the sky, whom all the time I thought to be Sauron himself, due to the prophecy and how flames lost their heat in the presence of evil.
All the time expectation that the Stranger was Sauron, while the threat of Orcs grew in the Southlands. Why were they really a threat, and were they just digging to unearth more of their kin? Sounded more like a pest problem than anything major.
But then we witnessed the creation of Mordor, the forging of the 3 Rings, the realization to who Sauron really was, and how Galadriel was steps away from joining him, if not for his vice of desire to rule, rather than liberate.
I even felt sorry for the orcs and their fate. This distinction between evil and good, where neither can be true in certainty, it was always something that bugged me in Lord of the Rings, because having someone as just evil is just propaganda meant to dehumanize someone and give them no voice to explain their motives, which can have merit and reason. Doesn’t mean their reasons are good, but they can be a necessary evil in shade of gray.
Now Season 2 did not have the same spark. I believe things were a bit all over the place. And the mystery of things wasn’t there anymore. Also Tom Bombadil sucks. Horrible creature, worse than Morgoth. Parts which were thrilling to follow were Celebrimbor and Sauron, Elrond and Galadriel, and the dwarves.
Seeing the corruption of the dwarven ring brought memories of behaviour, and it was beautiful.
The deceit upon Celebrimbor and the entire city by Sauron was really something. It was so nice to understand how the deceit wasn’t as good, because Celebrimbor knew to what was likely going on, yet he went on with it because he for sure could see this work as one of his greatest achievements in life. But in the end he saw it as an error, as he saw the real Sauron who’d stop at nothing to bend the world to its knee. The destruction of the city, the tactics of extreme deceit and sacrifices in the name of getting what he wants. There was nothing noble or grand in that. It is why in his last moments he gave Sauron one of the biggest mental scars that teared the Dark Lord’s eye in grief.
Adar’s journey was a special one, as he sought for peace and a place for his children, the orcs. But in his quest of finding peace, he pushed the orcs’ fears and cowardice into betrayal, despite his history and kindness he’d given them. Them attacking Lindon and destroying a big chunk of the elves was a great victory, as said elves were surely to strike Mordor to try and get rid of its evil. So despite the many orcs lost, it was quite the victory and blow to their enemies who sought their eradication. The orcs lost my sympathies as their fate was one of their own doing. A fate of cowards and bloodthirsty animals.
Overall I’d say the series was great. And if we remove the redundant filler from Season 2, it’s a pleasant addition to Lord of the Rings. I can care less to how much things deviated from the source material, because this allowed me to see more of the world that was only history in the tomes of elves.
Seeing Galadriel and her journeys, Elrond’s diplomacy, Moria and the skulking Balrog of the deep, where it was said the dwarves got too greedy, yet it was the elves that pushed for their mithril, for the creation of the rings, which led to more rings and corruption to spread inside the mountain.
Can we learn something from all this? As a person in psychosis once said, “See with your own eyes, don’t trust the eyes of others.” So likely you mustn’t trust any of what I’ve said, and the only way to truly know is to see things for yourself.
And such can be a universally useful rule about anything. So many narratives, so little meaning.
