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FWIW, Palpatine also came back in the original storyline past ROTJ before Disney retconned the EU. Though they didn’t gloss over the “how” bit (he always intended to survive forever and had a clone factory hidden on some planet and used something similar to the force ghost, only he was able to posses his clones).
In the original story, he threatens Luke and his friends while Luke is alone, so Luke goes, “ok I’ll join the dark side”, gets some training, then switches back the first time he gets ordered to do something he didn’t like.
The basic message was “turning to the dark side was only so final for some Jedi because the order itself considered it something that couldn’t he undone, while Luke did it easily”. Some of the video games touched on this, too, where the light side and dark side were just tools and it was how you used them that determined good and evil. It was also a big theme in ROTJ itself, though not heavily explored after Vader turns back.
There’s hints of this in the sequels, but IMO they didn’t handle it that well, especially with Luke and Kylo.
I feel like when people make fun of this, it isn’t so much Palpy coming back that they have a problem with, but the sudden and unexpected nature of it. It’s such hack writing, and it only happened that way because audiences didn’t like TLJ and the people making ROS decided to backtrack on every single one of TLJ’s plot threads out of fear instead of making expanding on them for a satisfying finale.
Yeah, it’s less about “returned” and more about “somehow”.
Yeah, watching those three makes it seem pretty clear that they where made by different people who didn’t like what the previous one had done and had an entirely different vision of where star wars should go. Plus a dose of “we want to bring back old characters for fan service, but those characters need to gtfo of the way of these new stars”. And then for the two of the biggest ones, they had them die in the dumbest ways.
Sauron checks under the couch cushions and BOOM, more profit!
Through means never fully explained (unless you buy the comics and video games), the ring getting destroyed was all part of Sauron’s master plan. The villain for the first two sequels is Samwise’s son Bobbit, who Sam tried to kill when he learned he was dabbling in dark arts. He’s redeemed by our hero, an orc that broke rank with Sauron after learning about his plan to, IDK, blow up the whole world or something, but he’s killed anyway to make room for our third movie reveal that Sauron was behind it all. Our brave orc hero must meet up with a haggard looking Aragorn, Gimli and Legolas to painstakingly re-enact the events of the Fellowship of the Ring, wander around with Gandalf and learn how to become a wizard, then kill Sauron and take the last name Baggins.
This is painfully accurate and I hate it.
Aragorn: “Somehow, Sauron has returned”
Elrond: “We’ll need a good plan to defeat him.”
Legolas: “And a new fellowship”
Gimli appearing from off camera: “and…my axe” looks directly at the camera while holding for applause
The ring was destroyed. But little did we know: it’s true purpose was to aid in the construction of a Death Star, which is now almost complete…
Well, Arda is Melkor’s ring. He’s going to re-shape it into a death star and blow up Illuvatar.
Imagine all the Hobbits solo spin off shows that i you cant pay me to watch.
I would absolutely pay money for a slice of life hobbit spin off. No grand quest to save the world, just a few hobbit friends getting into trouble around the Shire and stealing veggies from some farmer’s garden before getting drunk at the inn. It’s exactly the feel good type of show I like.
I would also be interested in the high stakes political drama of trying to win the gardening competition every year.
Long ago I read some incredibly cursed parody along the lines of “if LotR was a Disney animated film”. The songs were absolutely horrifying. I can’t find it right now, and I think it’s best not to subject you to it anyway.
Please do subject us, if you find it.
2 Lord 2 Rings
Two rings to rule them all!
Blursed comment
❝But they were all of them deceived, for another ring was made. In the land of Mordor, in the fires of Mount Doom, the Dark Lord Sauron forged, in secret, a Ultra Master Ring™️ to control all others. And into this Ring he poured all his spare cruelty, his extra malice and his leftover will to dominate all life. An Extra Ring to rule them all.❞
“Now look at this hologram showing the original The One Ring. And now here’s The Ultra Master Ring. You can see it’s almost three times bigger than The One Ring.”
I know this is all in jest, but I imagined a One Ring the size of a hobbit bracelet and then imagined a cave troll discovering it and what sort of dark Lord a big dumb bastard like him would become.
This is ripe for fanfiction.
A cave troll could have actually worn the One Ring in actual LOTR canon. One of the Ring’s powers was to change size. That’s how it slipped off Gollum’s finger at just the right time to have Bilbo pick it up. If the Ring wanted to abandon a Bearer, it could simply expand in size at an opportune moment. You think Frodo and Sauron had the same ring size?
The only real issue is that in order to fit on a cave troll’s hand, the Ring would have had to want to be worn by a cave troll. It certainly could expand large enough to fit a cave troll’s hand, but only if the Ring desired that for some reason.
If I was the one ring, I would grow so big and wear middle earth
Well, that would have been one way for Sauron to quickly find the damn thing.
Right perpendicular to the “axis” going through Mordor so Sauron couldn’t easily find me. Because it would be funny!
(Note: I have no idea if the world in which middle earth is set/embedded is actually spherical to make this possible. Although a flat-ish world, provided its perimeter was round-ish enough could also work…
Someone who has read the silmarilion or similar please inform/correct me, thank you!)
And the shape of that ring? A key blade.
🤮
Extra lord of the extra rings, the return of the extra king
How long til LOTR enters the public domain?
Disney doesn’t make movies. They make cringe fan fiction.
Tolkien himself considered revisiting Middle Earth for a new “uprising”, but discarded it because it didn’t and probably couldn’t recapture the magic. Plus it probably felt too much like reality.
IIRC, he began writing another installment set in the 4th age, but abandoned it, because now that the main evils were dealt with, all that was left to happen was the world of men betraying each other, and it very quickly became a boring, depressing tale that just didn’t need to exist.
Introducing the newest Middle Earth installment: “Tom Bombadill Kicks the Shit Out of Everyone”
Wherein Tom Bombadil restores the balance of nature by skipping across the lands, singing ditties, and punching everyone in the nuts real hard.
The 4th age is game of thrones.
“The New Shadow”. He wrote about 13 pages and discarded the idea for reasons you mention.
Hollywood producers: “13 pages, you say? That’s enough for a new trilogy!”
[laughs in Disney executive] “each page is enough for at least a 12 episode season of a one hour drama!”
And we can always add filler through nostalgia bait. For goodness sake, audiences still don’t know where Aragorn got the boot he wore when kicking the helmet!
We need a light-hearted but edgy sitcom based around the the flawed but lovable family that runs the Prancing Pony.
‘It’s Always Sunny In Brandywine’.
So basically he was going to write game of thrones? Although he may have actually finished it…
And maybe dany wouldn’t have kinda forgot about the iron fleet
“The Ring was destroyed.”
If disney does what disney usually does, LOTR will be dead to me.
They’re already doing it with TV shows, animated films etc. Disney would just do more of the same, I’d imagine…
I can only imagine what Jolkein Rolkein Rolkein Tolkein would make of it all.
Who cares what any of the movies do? The LotR is originally the written work. The books are the substance.
Now is about the time I need to make my obligatory recommendation that you check out the [free] fan-made audiobooks by voice actor, Phil Dragash:
https://archive.org/details/lotrdragashtracked
I have listened to these at least once per year since 2015 (holy smokes, that’s a decade!), and they are still the best audiobooks I have ever listened to. They utilize music and sound effects from the movies, and Phil has an uncanny ability to replicate many of the movie star’s voices. I cannot recommend it enough!
Technically, he had like 15 of them things.
20 to be exact, 9 human, 7 dwarven, 3 elven and his own
Yes, but it was a bit like having a radio station and 14 small radios laying around 📻.
So one ring is a transmitter and the others are receivers.
“Welcome back to Radio Free Mordor. Now to tell you the story of how I taught the Elves craftsmanship, a story that Elrond doesn’t want you to hear.”
one ring to rule them all
To be fair, the resistance being flabbergasted and in the dark at the return of their dead arch nemesis is actually quite reasonable. The return itself also harkens back to the prequels when Palpatine mentions Darth Plagueis.
The reason the Disney era movies are so underwhelming is a lack of soul and other writing blunders.
The movies feel like toddlers making up the story as they play with figurines.
Episode 9, absolutely.
The Last Jedi is an anarchist critique of Star Wars that somehow got made into a Star Wars.
That got me a chuckle. It does look like that.
Checklist movies. It becomes more important for the movie to have X element due to marketing reasons rather than plot reasons.
If the movie has more marketing elements than plot elements, it’s a checklist movie.
Honestly, I’d rather them have let toddlers make up the story while playing with figurines. I was certainly coming up with better plotlines than what they shat out with the sequels when I was a kid.
Honestly, the idea that the good guys win and then forget that they have to continue to be vigilant and let the evil they defeated come back is as topical now as it was in 2015
How is the last Rings of Power seasons? Haven’t watched it yet
The production quality? Fantastic and even better than season 1.
The story? I ended the last episode actually angry. I haven’t been angry at a piece of media like this in a long time.
Orcs fighting in direct sunlight, Grand-Alf talking with some guy called Bombadil, and other Shenanigans.
It’s a nice fan fiction with high production quality.
Story wise, it’s as if trying to write the Silmarillion but only using characters from LOTR… It feels a bit flat.
They couldn’t get the rights to the Silmarillion sadly. The only canon resources they’re allowed to use are the appendices at the end of LOTR. I think they’re doing a fantastic job with such limited material. The last two episodes are awesome.
From what I’ve read no, that has expanded some since the first season. In season 2 they literally said the word Silmaril in one scene.
How on earth do you cope with the last 2 episodes being awesome? Each one is rising action to a battle that has no climax, they built and built to nothing. And then…
Elrond falls in love and kisses Galadriel…the MOTHER of the woman he eventually married…
Haha yeah I was laughing at that and explained it to my wife. I just really enjoyed it, I don’t know what to say.
I’m not a Tolkien superfan, and for me it was mostly just kind of boring.
Also, this portrayal of Middle Earth seems to have very limited ontological inertia. Everything not on screen might as well not exist. Even the things that are shown feel static and shallow, like there isn’t enough “stuff” to actually fill out the world and support the complex societies within.
S1 was alright for a LotR fanfic - so not that great. I didn’t get to S2 yet but I heard it’s not exactly going up in quality
Why is it so many fiction works that get expanded would do so much better if they just search out actual fanfic and pay those people for their imagination? Instead they get people who aren’t invested in the world who do a halfass job that is “canon”, yet so far off the mark.
Because actual fanfics are done by people that love the source material and wish to remain true to it.
Expanded works are done by people who want to: make changes for the sake of their own “artistic” originality, do what they think will make people watch it (doesn’t mean it has to be good), which are both tied to studio execs all wanting to push their pet version of whatever the product will be based on budget or ego.
I really like the visuals and music. Otherwise, it’s polarising to most people.
Yes, went into the first episode all giddy. That was the high point. Seemed to start dropping down after the prologue about Galadriel. I’d have to say that Bombadil is the low so far for me. Of many lows.
I just wish the dialogue and story-telling was better. I don’t even mind (too much) the liberties they took with all the characters but it would’ve been more palatable if they’d done it nicely.
I’ll still watch though. Although, I haven’t rewatched most of the episodes.
Rewatchability is a great measure, isn’t it? I’ve rewatched LotR and even some Hobbit scenes so many times. I don’t have the desire to bother with this.
It is! I’ve rewatched only the first couple of episodes when the first season came out. I’m unable to rewatch anymore without getting angry at how badly they messed up most of it. LOL
It does have a fascinating “how many times can this train keep wrecking” quality to it. I kind of hope the producers next turn The Room into a mini-series.
I feel the best advice is to simply watch it and try not to let online opinions sway you until after you’ve watched it.
I was dreading it, because I saw a lot of online voices saying it’s genuinely the worst thing that has ever been on television. Surprisingly to me, I mostly enjoyed it, although I found season 2 to be stronger than season 1.
A few parts I didn’t like, a couple of parts I mentally even groaned and thought “…why did they do that?”, and some other parts I found great.
Controversial, but overall I’ve liked it more than parts 2 and 3 of The Hobbit without a doubt.
A lot of the “why did they do that” is explained by not having access to the Silmarillion. They only have the appendices from LOTR. For such crippling limitation I think they’re doing a great job. I’m a lifelong LOTR-Silmarillion superfan, I say fuck the Tolkien estate.
it was great. ill definitely watch the whole series again but ill probably torrent the thing because the amazon video player sucks ass.
I’m trying to watch it in bits. I’ll watch for 20 minutes or so, then go do something interesting.
I couldn’t make myself watch the last episode of season 1. There was a lot of eye-rolling and the story just didn’t really capture me.
The best scenes I can remember was the conversations between Elrond and the dwarf.
