We Have a Sauron And We Hope This Choice Pleases You
My Beloved Darklings, I have a chip fracture on my index finger which means I’m going to be typing one-handed for a couple of weeks. Adjust your expectations of my output accordingly.
Meet Sauron II.
Initially, I couldn’t decide if this was just fanfic engagement farming or if it was for real. The first announcement was from One Ring’s Twitter account and they are deep in Amazon’s vest pocket these days. Amazon took the precaution of winning them over with the usual influencer beads and shiny trinkets. It worked. A group that was once critical of Peter Jackson for leaving out the Tom Bombidil and the Cleansing of the Shire, became the worst boot-licking, ass-kissing Stans on the internet, shilling day and night for what is without question a blitheringly incompetent fan fic burlesque of Tolkien.
The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power was honestly kind of impressive in that it got every… single… thing… wrong. The costuming was so bad it wouldn’t have been used on Xena the Warrior Princess. The sets were in a word, cramped. Although another word would be cheapThere was nothing approaching Jackson’s sweeping epic scale. I wrote better than 20,000 words dragging an incomprehensible, and completely disjointed script. I remain convinced that the screenplay was generated by an AI.
And then there was the casting. Some of the diversity silliness was unavoidable because of the mandatory minority quotas required by the countries they were shooting in. Although, I have no doubt at all that they were going to do that anyway. What made the casting truly tedious was that it was possible to have a diverse cast and still respect Tolkien’s lore.
The Numenorians got very preferential treatment because they backed the Valar against Morgoth. They were all tall, fair, and very long-lived, (Numenorians clocked out around their 400th birthday). The Men that fought for Morgoth were all various shades of brown. The thing is the Men of the East had some pretty legitimate gripes with elves before the war and with the Men of Numenor afterward. By the time Ar-Pharazon came along the Numenoreans were seriously into the empire and subjugation business.
This is how you can tell that they didn’t read the Silmarillion. They could have had white Numenorians being like totally mean to the brown Men of the East. They had human sacrifices, why not slavery too?
But no, Amazon steadfastly resisted any urges they had to make something good and interesting. Instead, they opted to make generic TV fantasy diverse and inclusive casting. It was fine for Hercules and Xena because you weren’t supposed to take those shows seriously, but high fantasy is all about detailed world-building and you can’t possibly take any version of Middle Earth seriously if it looks like Bridgerton.
Now we have a new Sauron. I think the AI wrote them into a corner so they had to recast poor old Halbrand because now they all know what he looks like. Which would make it difficult for him to play the part of Annatar the Lord of Gifts. So now we have Sauron 2 and as far as I can tell they are going to have to repeat the plot of the last episode. This means they will not have learned anything from Sauron’s last visit and honestly, the Elves of Eregian seem to be so dim it’s actually believable.
That said I don’t know how the producers brought themselves to cast a POC as the lord of evil. Possibly it was a paradox loop they got caught in. Annatar was supposed to be a being of surpassing beauty, that might have been where the problem arose. I’ll never know for sure because my brain isn’t defective. There are still so many unanswered questions from the first season that I desperately don’t want answered.
Can. Not. Wait.
Okay, I’m done here.
