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OT: Movies/TV Shows

So is the whole focus of the show the mystery of who was Sauron originally?

I never paid much attention to Tolkien. I read the Hobbit as a kid and wasn’t blown away, maybe saw parts of a couple of the Peter Jackson films, but I don’t remember anything about them really. To the point that all these years I conflated Tolkien’s Sauron with Marvel’s Sauron and had it in my head that Sauron was some dragon. Wasn’t the big bad in the Hobbit a dragon?

Anyway, is the question of Sauron’s identity established in the books or is that an original thing unfolding in this series?
 
Volcanologist said:
as for WoT I'll probably watch it at some point for shits but yeah as I've mentioned I found the books overrated and pretty derivative of earlier fantasy writing thematically
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A hill I will die on repetitively if necessary is that most people who picked up and put down the series don't understand what Jordan was doing with the first book and mischaracterize it like this because of that (which is fine, if I had only read the first book I would have come away with the same opinion...just like if you only read the first 3 it comes off as a maguffin chase plot which is very tropey). Jordan spends most of the series subverting the established fantasy tropes of the day, not deriving his work from them. But because he wrote the first half of the first book specifically as an homage to LOTR, that's turned into the common critical takeaway.
 
LeafOfFaith said:
So is the whole focus of the show the mystery of who was Sauron originally?

I never paid much attention to Tolkien. I read the Hobbit as a kid and wasn’t blown away, maybe saw parts of a couple of the Peter Jackson films, but I don’t remember anything about them really. To the point that all these years I conflated Tolkien’s Sauron with Marvel’s Sauron and had it in my head that Sauron was some dragon. Wasn’t the big bad in the Hobbit a dragon?

Anyway, is the question of Sauron’s identity established in the books or is that an original thing unfolding in this series?
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There shouldn't be ambiguity about the Sauron character in this show, but they appear to be trying to create it. The short answer is that we haven't seen anything resembling 2nd age lore Sauron yet and any existing character being shown as Sauron would be a fat shit on established Tolkien lore.

fwiw, you're thinking about Smaug in the Hobbit.
 
MindzEye said:
A hill I will die on repetitively if necessary is that most people who picked up and put down the series don't understand what Jordan was doing with the first book and mischaracterize it like this because of that (which is fine, if I had only read the first book I would have come away with the same opinion...just like if you only read the first 3 it comes off as a maguffin chase plot which is very tropey). Jordan spends most of the series subverting the established fantasy tropes of the day, not deriving his work from them. But because he wrote the first half of the first book specifically as an homage to LOTR, that's turned into the common critical takeaway.
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I mean ok, but I'd have to have been interested enough to pursue reading it past the first few. which I didn't. trope city in there.
 
MindzEye said:
There shouldn't be ambiguity about the Sauron character in this show, but they appear to be trying to create it. The short answer is that we haven't seen anything resembling 2nd age lore Sauron yet and any existing character being shown as Sauron would be a fat shit on established Tolkien lore.

fwiw, you're thinking about Smaug in the Hobbit.
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Ah re Smaug.

Didn’t understand the Sauron explanation. Is this taking place before or after the LOTR stuff? I assume 2nd age is before, and we don’t know who he was in the books before he took on the Sauron name?
 
Volcanologist said:
I mean ok, but I'd have to have been interested enough to pursue reading it past the first few. which I didn't. trope city in there.
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Yeah, that's fair. EOTW was a Tolkienesque quest, Great Hunt was a fantastic book on it's own with a lot of good character work and great pacing, but was largely just the setup for the third book which was a very good Maguffin quest, but was definitely a maguffin quest. The maguffin in question turns out to not be a maguffin at all (subversion!) and the story explodes outward into it's own world with a depth that no one has even come close to doing before or since from the 4th book onward. I definitely get where the criticisms come from regarding the first few books. They're very good (and in fairness, they're older than most people realize so they're really only similar to two previous works...LOTR and a pretty blatant LOTR rip off, the Terry Brooks series from like ~10 yrs before EOTW) but definitely derivative of Tolkien. The series as a whole though is definitely something very much it's own.
 
LeafOfFaith said:
Is this taking place before or after the LOTR stuff?
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Yeah, this is second age in the show. Super rough and condensed Tolkien timeline:

Years of the lamps - from creation to about 30,000 yrs in - Basically Tolkien's creation myth and the doings of the gods prior to the awakening of the Elves

Years of the trees - From the awakening of the trees of Valinor onward for about 14,000 yrs - Lots of stuff happens here....10K years of detante/standoff between the big bad, and the rest of the gods. Elves awaken so the gods say fuck the big bad and take his ass down to protect the elves, a few thousand years of peace, big bad is released from god jail, becomes fake friends to the Noldor elves, fucks them over and kills their king, kills the trees of Valinor, flees to middle earth

First Age - 500-600 years long - Flight of the Noldor to middle earth for them to bring war to the big baddie (Sauron's boss) but the Elves largely get shit pumped. Men arrive on the scene to mixed results (some side with the Elves, some with Morgoth thus this weird dynamic we see in the Arondir storyline), all sorts of character driven stories that are in the Silmarillion. Ends with the war of wrath where they gods finally get sick of the big baddies shit, and everyone everywhere goes to war to literally kick him off the planet.

Second Age - You are here * - 3400 yrs long in total, and it's kind of hard to lay out the lore chronologically here while making the show seem even remotely consistent...because it's not.

Basically, the men who helped the gods are gifted the island Numenor and become an empire of honourable mankind. The Elves lick their wounds from the wars in peace but start to realize that middle earth isn't their long term home and they're slowly decaying and will have to go west eventually to Tolkien's physical heaven. Sauron shows up around 1500 pretending to be sent from the gods to teach the elves his art (that will delay or reverse the decay!), most high elves (Galadriel, GilGalad, Elrond, etc) call bullshit but the smiths from Eregion are eager to learn (this is the Celebrimbor character from the show's doing for the most part) so they become bros. Rings get made, bros become foes because Sauron is a dick. Sauron reveals himself (he's a shapeshifter who goes by the name Annatar previous to this) and tells Middle Earth to come get that smoke if they want it...the Elves want that smoke and there's a war. Diminished Elves get mostly shit pumped again. Elves tag the Numenoreans in and they come in hard off the top rope, Sauron now apparently realizes that he didn't actually want that smoke and prays for peace. Numerean King is a bit full of himself and "captures" Sauron. Sauron slowly becomes his main advisor, turns the men against the elves and the gods....convinces Men to go to war the gods and that ends exactly as poorly as it sounds like it should. Destruction of Numenor, but some Num's stayed faithful the elves and the gods, they left early and land on Middle Earth as Numenor is getting wrecked. Even the remnant of Numenor is overpowered and they found 2 kingdoms (north and south), one of which is Gondor that you'll recognize from the Peter Jackson films...the other is dead (the witch king kills it later in the 3rd age), but it's seat of the high king that Aragorn is descended from. Spirit of Sauron comes back like 1300 years later....Remnant of the Elves and the Numereans immediately want that smoke again and fuck Sauron's day up. Ring is cut off of Sauron's hand by Isildur which ends the age, ring is lost shortly thereafter and goes missing.

Third Age - Peter Jackson! - Elves continue to diminish, men start to become corrupted but shit is generally peaceful for ~1500 yrs. Witch King (head of the Nazgul, who has been in hiding since the end of that last war) has an army now and fucks up the northern kingdom. Plague depopulates middle earth significantly a few hundred years later, line of kings appears to end a few hundred years after that. What's left of the numereans are now "rangers" in the north. Smeagol finds the ring around 2500ish. Men from the east start to become a problem around this time as well and Gondor is more or less in a constant state of war with them. Bilbo gets the ring around the yr 3000 during the events in The Hobbit. A small pause between that and the events of LOTR.
 
Wow! What a summary, thanks.

So the Amazon show is following Sauron during his shapeshifting and conning stage, trying to convince people he’s an emissary from heaven and that’s why we don’t know which character he is?

Sounds pretty cool in concept. But so one or more of these characters is fake and the books don’t say which?
 
Volcanologist said:
I mean ok, but I'd have to have been interested enough to pursue reading it past the first few. which I didn't. trope city in there.
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Got four books in and wanted to kill myself. 12,000 pages left to go but damned if I can make it. Only so many braid tugs one man can stand. I will defer to ME on it as I had to tap out. The last half of the second book is the only memory that stayed with me....those seanchan were pretty dope.
 
Maybe they can say Wolvie was revived accidentally during the Thanos thing.

Anyway, I don't think the comics have established that Logan can ever die. Though there was some Death of Wolverine stuff here and there over the years, all of which blends together now and means nothing since he's currently alive and now the X-Men have developed a new way of routinely reincarnating dead mutants. (And just in time since now all of the X-Men get killed routinely after being nearly unkillable for decades!).

Putting all that shit aside, it's so easy to just say Wolvie's healing factor was just dormant, not gone, and he clawed himself out of there not long afterwards.
 
Wow, they're shooting some helicopter movie scene above the building across the scene.

It's fucking spinning and spiraling just above the rooftop!! Insane. I wish I had a better view.
 
That Jeffrey Dahmer show..Jesus. Beyond creepy. They did do something fantastic in episode 5 where it was all about one of his victims and telling his life story and he wasn't just a guy Dahmer killed.
 
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