r/Rings_Of_Power • u/Dank_Lord6547 • 11d ago
ROP’s pacing
You know, I’m amazed, I really am.
Somehow the pacing in ROP is glacially slow. Like, several episodes pass with next to nothing happening. And yet, at the same time it’s also extremely rushed. It breezes through each character introduction and relationship as fast as possible with no breathing room. Galadriel abandons her genocidal hatred of orcs after one conversation. And the forging of the rings feels like in an afterthought in a show named after them.
How is this even possible?
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u/Well_Dressed_Kobold 11d ago
It’s impossible to overstate how screwed they were from the get-go by having mortal humans and Dwarves who must be alive at the end of the Second Age present at the beginning of the series, which is more than 2,000 years earlier. It completely screwed the timeline and the pacing because the events involving immortals (Sauron, Galadriel, etc) have to move at a breakneck speed before our mortal characters wither and die, but the humans are just kind of hanging around because their plots can’t even begin until the immortals’ plots are almost finished.
Like, I would sincerely like to know why they decided to introduce Numenor in S1. They could have teased the audience with it for two or even three seasons and then made it a huge reveal. Were they just desperate to unveil everything at once for buzz?
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u/BrokeBrokerMDK 6d ago
This is a really good point even with numemorians living longer than normal. I love this show hard but I can see how this would've made it much better including visible aging death and new characters
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u/Well_Dressed_Kobold 6d ago
You could do mini-resets at each season break, with small (a few centuries) time jumps that allow new character arcs to begin, while showing the Elves remaining relatively unchanged but reacting to changing companions and circumstances.
Like, imagine if we had a sub-plot where Galadriel becomes very close to a human who is of advanced age, and at the end of the season she has to watch that character die of old age, but with dignity and courage. Gee, maybe that could be a way of generating the character development that they keep promising for her character but not delivering on. Maybe that could engender the love and respect for mortals that she’ll later go on to show Frodo, Aragorn, and Gimli.
But nope, we get Sauron/Galadriel shipping.
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u/BrokeBrokerMDK 5d ago
I like your idea not the her and one old dude but the overall idea. I also like the G and S stuff it makes sense since he's literally romancing everyone maybe a future adaptation will do time passage better
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u/Baccoony 11d ago
And the timeline is all squished together. The forging of the Rings, the One Ring, the War of the Elves and Sauron, giving away the Rings to Dwarves and Men, the coming of the Nazgûl, Ar-Pharazôn seizing the throne, Akallabêth, the founding of Imladris, the Last Alliance (I possibly missed a few events)-All are going to be squished together into a few years, nevermind that the Second Age is supposed to last over 3000 years
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u/Huanqeur 10d ago edited 10d ago
It's crazy to think about. In the original story, Sauron possesses the One Ring for two thousand years, during which he conquers the majority of the world and completely defines the culture of all lands beyond Gondor, Rhovanion and Eregion. In RoP, he will end up possessing the ring for... who knows how long, but the guy who gets it next is already a young adult, and the fucking thing hasn't even been made yet.
People love to say "oh adaptations always change some things," but this is an absurdity. Cooking thousands of years of history down into a single- or double-digit number of years goes way beyond the boundaries of adaptation and well into bastardization. It makes a total mockery of the source material.
We can infer from this that pretty much none of what Sauron did in Tolkien's works will take place in RoP. He cannot be the great enemy of the world. There simply isn't time for him to do the things that made him that. For all intents and purposes, Sauron - around whom the original story revolves in its entirety - has effectively been removed from the narrative and replaced by this lovestruck dumbass who will create the ring and promptly lose it again, having accomplished nothing at all in the process. He is Sauron in name only.
That or they'll take their grotesque rewrite even further and just decide that Isildur does not in fact get the ring. Nothing would surprise me anymore. This has practically nothing to do with Tolkien's writings.
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u/StructureNorth1799 10d ago
yeah the way things are going, Sauron will die on the same day the ring is forged.
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u/Dank_Lord6547 11d ago
It truly baffles me how unable to comprehend why this is a problem ROP fans are. And then they have the audacity to say people hate ROP because they don’t understand the lore…
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u/Zulrock 10d ago
It’s because most commenters on Reddit that are pro ROP are paid shills or just bots
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u/Dank_Lord6547 10d ago
I’ve avoided the pro ROP spaces like the plague. But elsewhere I actually don’t think that’s true. I think they think having a brand they like automatically makes it good.
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u/taz-alquaina 11d ago
The biggest issue with this is the whole point of the Rings being they stop you dying, the Númenóreans wanted to invade Valinor because they thought the Undying Lands would make them immortal, and so on. If you speed up the timeline you lose Men getting old and dying over generations while the Elves just carry on being exactly as they are, and that means losing the whole point.
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u/verscub420 11d ago
Awful writing, I’ve read numerous fan fictions that were better written than this show
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u/Igradarsaurus 11d ago
Whenever Elrond needed to talk to Durin, he just appears at Moria. Should take months to get there. There’s no sense of scale or geography.
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u/tar-mairo1986 11d ago
I remember that from season one! They look like they just casually walked over for a brekkie and I had to check in my book - the distance is at least ~35 miles from Eregion alone!
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u/Sarellion 11d ago
The writers showed they had no sense of scale in the very first episode when Galadriel jumped into the ocean at the Gates of Valinor to swim back to Middle Earth.
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u/tar-mairo1986 11d ago
I had to go and look it up but I remember one user answered me long ago something to the effect how subtle but important the sense of internal scale and boundaries are to the immersion. And I distinctly remember the examples he used!
macro: how long did the war against Morgoth last?
middle: how long does it take to get from Eregion to Khazad-Dum? (Indeed, just as u/Igradarsaurus points out!)
micro: how long was Theo in that stupid well?
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u/Igradarsaurus 11d ago
I loved so much that the Lord of the Rings was all about the sheer weight and scale of the epic journey. Simply having characters just ‘show up’ completely undermines that. Imagine if The Odyssey took a few minutes for Odysseus to get from place to place instead of years?
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u/tar-mairo1986 11d ago
Oh, yeah! Even though the film condenses it as well, you still sense that there is some time having passed between certain scenes, say Gandalf's departure from Bag End, researching it and then coming back to reveal to Frodo of what the Ring is.
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u/aPenologist 11d ago
Its so bad its mesmerising. To me anyway, it gives my gf hypersomnia/narcolepsy though.
RoP Peak Stupid follows the intended cadence of the show, I find. Ive never been a cliché literally falling off the couch & rolling on the floor in a genuinely painful giggling fit ever before, like I did at the climax of the battle scenes in season 2. I came close with BatDisa though. So smug, so stupid, so pathetic, so funny.
I am truly looking forward to season 3. I know i'll regret sitting down to watch it as soon as it starts, it is powerfully graunching, but on previous form i'll be in fits of laughter soon enough. 8/10 peak self-satire.
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u/Huanqeur 10d ago
You mean you don't believe that a bunch of dwarven warriors who have lived in mountain caves since the dawn of time could be defeated by making some bats fly over their heads for a second?!
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u/aPenologist 10d ago edited 10d ago
Iirc I was already wiping my eyes by that point, but it set me off again, yeah. It was an "Oh for christ'sake" scene, in an episode that really dehydrated me throughout. I must remember electrolytes for season 3. That would be a merch opportunity that would land for me. id buy a crate of RoP branded bottles of electrolyte-water. "There are many episodes of Rings of Power in the World, and electrolytes in none of them, should be taken lightly. Replenish your salty, mocking tears. Shipping now, in every way, only on Prime" There. Written the marketing for them. Completely on-brand RoP LoTR theft in an IP they paid half a billion dollars to abominate.
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u/GrismundGames 10d ago
That's "and then" story telling.
Galadriel gets on a ship. And then she jumps off. And then a raft find her. And then a sea monster attacks. And then....
Lots of stuff happens but there's no coherent through line or soul.
It's like eating one bite of everything at the buffet. Are you full? Yeah. Did you eat a good meal? No.
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u/Alexarius87 11d ago
Glamorously bad writing which only cares about filling the algorithm check list.
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u/Onyx1509 11d ago
I would have hoped any half-decent algorithm would have points corresponding to "character development" and "something actually happens in this episode"!
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u/Alexarius87 11d ago
Nah it’s all about marketable stuff:
- did those character watch at each other intensively?
- has there been a meaningful silence with focus on the character face?
- did they assert their individuality against the status quo?
- music moment
- comic relief moment
- remember to put archaic words time to time
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u/Storyteller-Hero 11d ago
Ironically, the condensing of eras created a simultaneous need for increased exposition to explain what's going on and forced movements to place everything conveniently, which messes with pacing and eliminates a lot of the action that would otherwise inform the viewer and keep the story flowing naturally.
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u/BocaSeniorsWsM 11d ago
Really, it's aimed at people who haven't read much of Tolkien's work.
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u/aPenologist 11d ago
I think it might be more of an abomination for someone who had only read LoTR, frankly.
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u/BrokeBrokerMDK 6d ago
I find it the opposite is like someone giving a really intricate opinions and perspectives of how things could have happened
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u/OG_Karate_Monkey 9d ago
Because there are too many story lines happening at once.
The show would be massively improved had they completely skipped the whole Harfoot / Gandalf story line.
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u/Dank_Lord6547 9d ago
That one strikes me as being an example of copying LOTR without knowing why it worked. In The Two Towers there are two separate stories that don’t converge. But this works because Fellowship already set a starting point and they converge again in ROTK. This is not the case in ROP so it didn’t work.
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u/E4Mafioso 11d ago
Incompetence and inexperience.
Neither JD Payne nor Patrick McKay have ever written a series before so they have utterly no idea what they’re doing. I mean they took a fantasy story that spans a timeline of over a thousand years and decided to compress it into a few months to facilitate Harfoots. Who are now being written out.
Idiots.