The (Tinny) Rings of Power

 If you want to know what homeschooling looks like, chez Darwin: for the last week my two oldest school children, ages (almost) 17 and 14, have been assigned to read through Bret Devereaux's series at A Collection of Unmigitated Pedantry on why Rings of Power was the monumental, stupendously, pompously, ahistorically awful flop that it was. (H/T to Brandon.) Along the way, there's enough military and economic history to satisfy the discriminating viewer, who sat agog and aghast at the compounding missteps and outright idiocies of the show. 

From the introduction to the series, the first of four posts: 

This week we’re going to take a look at the worldbuilding of Amazon Studio’s Rings of Power from a historical realism perspective. I think it is no great secret that Rings of Power broadly failed to live up to expectations and left a lot of audiences disappointed. In the aftermath of that disappointment, once one looks beyond the depressingly predictable efforts to make culture war hay out of it, I found that many people understood that they were disappointed but not always why. Here I am going to suggest one reason: the failure of Rings to maintain a believable sense of realism grounded in historical societies and technologies (something the Lord of the Rings, books and films, did very well) makes it impossible to invest in the stakes and consequences of a world that appears not to obey any perceptible rules.

...When making a speculative fiction world, the author(s), can either plan out the system’s unique function or they can adopt a real world system, but they generally must do one or the other or risk sacrificing audience investment from a world that lacks consistency.

And as noted above, Middle Earth and the broader Tolkien legendarium draws its sense of consistency when it comes to the world and its societies mostly from a firm sense of rootedness in the realia of historical societies and historical literature. Tolkien has not reinvented new systems of farming, new laws of physics or new systems of social organization. In The Lord of the Rings the world’s consistency depends on its feeling of historical rootedness.

In good speculative fiction then, the creator has a choice: import recognizable, real-world systems that will feel real to an audience or build new systems and then explain their fantastical workings to the audience in a way that renders them understandable. Rings of Power does neither and in the process manages to construct a Middle Earth that is not only ‘flat’ in the sense that the the cataclysms of the Changing of the World have not yet happened and thus the Straight Road to Valinor can still be traversed, but unfortunately this Middle Earth is also flat in the sense that it is rendered dull and uninteresting by the lack of perceptible rules and consequence.

The introduction deals with problems of Scale, Sail, and Social Detail; the three follow-up posts are more specific critiques of metalworking in the world of Rings of Power, the failures of physics and tactics in the climactic battle in the Southlands, and The Problem of Numenor.

Devereaux makes the point that the writers of the show consistently prefer concept art, clever tricks, and "gotcha!" reveals over solid and time-tested techniques like character or plot development and the accumulated wisdom of the well-documented practices and development of our own pre-industrial societies. Things like ships' sails or the transport and use of horses in battle or the social and economic structures of nomadic peoples have analogies in our world; the customs and practices they developed were not arbitrary, but based in the realities of the technologies of their age, and were often studied and improved upon by the best minds of the age. Any creative artist worth his or her salt would draw on this accumulated wisdom. The creative minds behind Rings of Power seem to want to surprise the viewer at every turn with startling twists, and they mostly succeed in that ambition because their twists are so entirely unmoored in any historical or practical consideration.

This pattern of disregarding precedent when it doesn't suit also applies the to the show's much-vaunted race-blind casting, which is notable only for the specifically modern and piecemeal way it is applied. There is no reason why there can't be racial diversity in Middle-Earth, and indeed every reason why there should be. Tolkien has developed an extensive history of the Elves, which involve three different lines of divergence and settlement, with numerous sub-branches. Why not construct whole societies based on these groups, which differ linguistically and culturally? But in the world of the writers' room, each character is an island, unconnected to parentage or any larger culture except where it suits. Subgroups -- Elves, Dwarfs, Men, Proto-hobbits -- share an arbitrary accent picked from the U.K., but no character is expected to look like he or she descended from his or her screen parents. What, indeed, has reproduction to do with sex?

This leads me to a larger weakness of the show. I think Devereaux's emphasis on not reinventing entire fields that have been the extensive study of countless generations underlines a failing of Rings of Power, and of many other modern endeavors: because the creative minds believe that certain patterns of historical human behavior in the realms of racial and sexual mores have been wrongheaded and made up out of whole cloth, they want to also throw out any other historical norm as being arbitrary. Women didn't sail? Sexist! Sails themselves? Just as reinventable!

 Like Chesterton's fence, however, one needs to be able to explain why these standards were the way they were before one jettisons them into the rather shallow abyss of the Balrog. Else, as Devereaux emphasizes:

And that is the recurring problem with the worldbuilding in Rings of Power, that the audience rapidly finds that cannot have much faith at all that the creators involved have given much thought to these questions. And each crack in the worldbuilding in turn damages the stakes of the peril and the significance of character choices because if the story itself doesn’t have to obey any real rules of cause and consequence and thus the creators can merely opt to have anything happen for any reason then there is no reason to invest in any of it at all. If there are no consistent rules to this world then nothing matters and if nothing matters…why should I care?