#i wanted to find something...anything...

[lonesomedreamer]

“The Rings of Power” Liveblog: Udûn (Episode 6)

Or: how does this episode have by far the highest rating of the season on IMDb?!

Starting with the Orcs again. No thanks. I just don’t find the supposed mystery of Adar’s identity very compelling.

“Where is he? What happened to Sauron?” Speaking of mysteries, they were never even remotely subtle about Sauron’s in-show identity, were they?

Some obvious CG/hokey stunts ensue…the construction of buildings in Middle-earth must be really shoddy, because the tower crumbles almost instantly and was apparently held together by some ropes??

Nothing about the Southlanders’ plan is explained/clarified in any way. They’re going back to their village to “make [it] ready,” but ready for what? A siege? (As if.)

Galadriel offers Isildur some wise-sounding words about the value of humility. But she certainly isn’t speaking from her own lived experience…

“You have the look of your father.” This must have been written before any roles were cast: the actor who plays Isildur looks nothing like the one playing Elendil! Funnily enough, he does resemble Bronwyn and especially Theo, but I’m sure that’s just coincidence.

The Southlanders were feeling hopeless/powerless enough to surrender to the Orcs literally one day earlier, or did I imagine that??

This (slightly paraphrased) Tolkien quote about passing Shadow is beautiful and moving…except it doesn’t make sense to put it in Bronwyn’s mouth. It doesn’t sound like the kind of language we’ve heard these villagers use. Besides, it’s not a line of dialogue in the book.

“It is believed that one of the Valar watches over growing things.” Her name is Yavanna, and you should say that!

This scene with Arondir and Bronwyn looks good, and it would be touching if I was actually interested in their underbaked romance.

I can’t tell if this scene is ripping off the Jackson movies, Game of Thrones, or both, but either way it feels…low-stakes. The scale isn’t there. Why do the Orcs care so much about this one village? Are these the only free humans left in the Southlands? If so, they should be easy to subjugate. If not, and without Sauron, what’s their significance?

This scene is going on forever, AND it’s become unwatchable grimdark nonsense with some added eye gore/horror to revolt me, specifically.

The actors, Bronwyn and Theo in particular, are giving it their all. It’s not their fault that I’m not remotely invested in what happens to them.

How tf does time work on this show? When did the Númenórean forces land? How close is this village to the coast? And how many horses did they bring with them on their three little ships?!?

How did they know to come to this village? Is this Halbrand’s home? (iirc he’s supposed to have amnesia or something, so he wouldn’t even know!) I have to ask again: is this the only village in the Southlands???

Horrendous costume design. I award them zero points.

Isildur told Galadriel that he’s stablehand! But now he has his own armor, weapons, and a horse and is being given orders on the battlefield by the queen herself…?

“The item he possesses: he must not escape with it.” Adar: immediately escapes with it.

Halbrand asks Adar if he remembers him, because they almost could not be broadcasting his [Halbrand’s] identity any louder.

Their half-assed explanation of the Orcs’ origin story is maybe the only worthwhile thing to come out of this episode so far…(checks watch) 47 minutes in.

“I killed Sauron.” Too bad you can’t kill a Maiar (see example A: Gandalf) the way you can a normal person. Galadriel should know that.

“We are all creations of the One…the same as you.” This is great philosophy in, say, Star Trek, but in Tolkien’s universe it’s…not true? Elves and Men are the Children of Ilúvatar (Eru, lit. “the One”), while Orcs were created by Morgoth out of spite and envy as a mockery of the Elves. They’re the product of torture and evil magic. Ilúvatar reprimanded Aulë for making the Dwarves, and he made them out of love! The writers want me to feel sympathy for their horror movie monster Orcs because, idk…they have names?

“Your kind was a mistake, made in mockery.” The thing is, she isn’t wrong.

Galadriel is pretty spiteful and bloodthirsty herself. If only they’d made ambition her driving force. Less “relatable,” maybe, but so much truer to the character.

Love that all these villagers just accept the first decent-looking dude who claims to be their “true king” with no questions asked. Very Monty Python of them.

Reverse Excalibur, but make it evil and able to operate a giant Rube Goldberg machine! How stupid.

They could have just made a show about Elendil, the fall of Númenor, and the Last Alliance. It probably would’ve been better, and there would be more of his face.

“The look of his father,” apparently.

Mount Doom origin story? Incredibly dumb. So dumb. No one asked for or needed this.

The Good:

Some very pretty landscape shots

Galadriel’s chain mail is sparkly and aesthetically pleasing

They almost made me feel something re: Theo and Bronwyn.

An explanation of Orc origins at last (though I’m unsure why the show treated that as some big mystery in the first place)

Decent to good acting for the most part

The Bad:

Did we just…forget the rest of the show existed? No Lindon? No Khazad-dûm? Not even any Harfoots??? Even though I’m still mad about the idiotic mithril subplot, at least the Elves and Dwarves make the show feel fantastical and Tolkien-adjacent. To me this was dark, depressing, and unlovely—tonally, a Two Towers kind of episode but without any of the whimsy/charm that cut through the book’s gloom. A discount, low-effort GOT.

The battle scene went on forever. It was hard to see anything, unpleasant to watch what little you could see, and it all felt kind of meaningless.

To expand on that: this whole episode was UGLY. Especially for a show whose biggest redeeming feature is its lush visuals.

Either tell us Halbrand is [redacted] already or try to mislead us. Don’t just keep winking awkwardly at us!

The overall writing has serious problems. Too many things are convenient, inconsistent, contradictory, totally illogical, and/or explained either poorly or not at all. A lot of this could be alleviated by having more episodes to explore/develop the story and characters more thoroughly…some of it’s plain old bad writing, though.

Why are they earnestly trying to make us sympathize with Orcs via Adar while also making the Orcs…like that?

My already-teetering suspension of disbelief toppled out of a window watching this one. The unbelievable speed of the Numenoreans’ travel—both by sea and land—combined with the whole “evil Sauron sword-hilt that destroys a dam and starts a chain reaction that activates Mount Doom and destroys the Southlands” thing and the fake-out ending (half of the MCs seeming to be consumed by pyroclastic flow)… Someone shared a Tolkien quote that perfectly sums up the problem with this:

The moment disbelief arises, the spell is broken; the magic, or rather art, has failed. You are then out in the Primary World again, looking at the little abortive Secondary World from outside.

So yeah…this feels like a bad Game of Thrones episode—and apparently that’s what people want, because it has rave reviews compared to the other seven. But this show claims to be Tolkien-inspired, and imo it should therefore aspire to emulate Tolkien’s style more than it does Martin’s. This was not Tolkien. If this episode is your particular cup of tea—which is fine!—your fantasy is probably in another castle.

[inkskinned]

probably time for this story i guess but when i was a kid there was a summer that my brother was really into making smoothies and milkshakes. part of this was that we didn't have AC and couldn't afford to run fans all day so it was kind of important to get good at making Cool Down Concoctions.

we also had a patch of mint, and he had two impressionable little sisters who had the attitude of "fuck it, might as well."

at one point, for fun, this 16 year old boy with a dream in his eye and scientific fervor in heart just wanted to see how far one could push the idea of "vanilla mint smoothie". how much vanilla extract and how much mint can go into a blender before it truly is inedible.

the answer is 3 cups of vanilla extract, 1/2 cup milk alternative, and about 50 sprigs (not leaves, whole spring) of mint. add ice and the courage of a child. idk, it was summer and we were bored.

the word i would use to describe the feeling of drinking it would maybe be "violent" or perhaps, like. "triangular." my nose felt pristine. inhaling following the first sip was like trying to sculpt a new face. i was ensconced in a mesh of horror. it was something beyond taste. for years after, i assumed those commercials that said "this is how it feels to chew five gum" were referencing the exact experience of this singular viscous smoothie.

what's worse is that we knew our mother would hate that we wasted so much vanilla extract. so we had to make it worth it. we had to actually finish the drink. it wasn't "wasting" it if we actually drank it, right? we huddled around outside in the blistering sun, gagging and passing around a single green potion, shivering with disgust. each sip was transcendent, but in a sort of non-euclidean way. i think this is where i lost my binary gender. it eroded certain parts of me in an acidic gut ecology collapse.

here's the thing about love and trust: the next day my brother made a different shake, and i drank it without complaint. it's been like 15 years. he's now a genuinely skilled cook. sometimes one of the three of us will fuck up in the kitchen or find something horrible or make a terrible smoothie mistake and then we pass it to each other, single potion bottle, and we say try it it's delicious. it always smells disgusting. and then, cerimonious, we drink it together. because that's what family does.

[morganbritton132]

Eddie, posting to Tiktok at three in the morning: I think it’s perfectly okay if you’re a restless sleeper or you sleepwalk. That’s fine. I just think you should have goals…that’s not leaving my house.

Eddie: That makes it sound like I kidnapped someone. I didn’t. It’s just… My husband has been walking around in a circle for the last fifteen minutes

Eddie: And I want to go to bed but I can’t until he does because he has this bad habit of escaping and ending up at a hospital…or the woods.

Eddie: And yeah, I’m glad he’s not trying to break my ribs or- *flinches in surprise when a hand is suddenly shoved in front of his face*

Eddie, eyes flickering off screen: …yes?

Steve, after a long pause: Six dollar

Eddie, who adores sleeptalking Steve: For what?

Steve: Book fair

Eddie: …I have never wanted to live in your brain more than I do right now.

[ciderjacks]

despite Laios low self esteem making him think that if he’d been eaten, Chilchuck and Marcille wouldn’t have helped Falin,

theres a small part of me that thinks the reason Chilchuck stayed with the party and went back in the dungeon in the first place was because he didn’t want to leave Laios alone. That Laios was moreso the reason he stayed.

[umblrspectrum]

my text disappeared here when i posted. what happened

[egophiliac]

CROWLEY SSR THOUGHTS

there is zero basis for this, but I can't get this thought of my head

I don't know why I decided to draw it this way

[anghraine]

It's interesting (if often frustrating) to see the renewed Orc Discourse after the last few episodes of ROP. I've seen arguments that orcs have to be personifications of evil rather than people as such or else the ethics of our heroes' approach to them becomes much more fraught. Tolkien's work, as written, seems an odd choice to me for not wrangling with difficult questions, and of course, more diehard fans are going to immediately bring up Shagrat and Gorbag.

If you haven't read LOTR recently, Shagrat and Gorbag are two orcs who briefly have a conversation about how they're being screwed over by Sauron but have no other real options, about their opinions of mistakes that have been made, that they think Sauron himself has made one, but it's not safe to discuss because Sauron has spies in their own ranks. They reminisce about better times when they had more freedom and fantasize about a future when they can go elsewhere and set up a small-scale banditry operation rather than being involved in this huge-scale war. Eventually, however, they end up turning on each other.

Basically any time that someone brings up the "humanity" of this conversation, someone else will point out that they're still bad people. They're not at all guilty about what they're part of. They just resent the dangers to themselves, the pressure from above, failures of competence, the surveillance they're under, and their lack of realistic alternative options. The dream of another life mentioned in the conversation is still one of preying on innocent people, just on a much smaller and more immediate scale, etc.

I think this misses the reason it keeps getting brought up, though. The point is not that Shagrat and Gorbag are good people. The point is that they are people.

There's something very normal and recognizable about their resentment of their superiors, their fears of reprisal and betrayal that ultimately are realized, their dislike of this kind of industrial war machine that erases their individual work and contributions, the tinge of wistfulness in their hope of escape into a different kind of life. Their dialect is deliberately "common"—and there's a lot more to say about that and the fact that it's another commoner, Sam, who outwits them—but one of the main effects is to make them sound familiar and ordinary. And it's interesting that one of the points they specifically raise is that they're not going to get better treatment from "the good guys" so they can't defect, either.

This is self-interested, yes, but it's not the self-interest of some mystical being or spirit or whatnot, but of people.

Tolkien's later remarks tend to back this up. He said that female orcs do exist, but are rarely seen in the story because the characters only interact with the all-male warrior class of orcs. Whatever female orcs "do," it isn't going to war. Maybe they do a lot of the agricultural work that is apparently happening in distant parts of Mordor, maybe they are chiefly responsible for young orcs, maybe both and/or something else, we don't know. But we know they're out there and we know that they reproduce sexually and we know that they're not part of the orcish warrior class.

Regardless of all the problems with this, the idea that orcs have a gender-restricted warrior class at all and we're just not seeing any of their other classes because of where the story is set doesn't sound like automatons of evil. It sounds like an actual culture of people that we only see along the fringes.

And this whole matter of "but if they're people, we have to think about ethics, so they can't be people" is a weird circular argument that cannot account for what's in LOTR or for much of what Tolkien said afterwards. Yes, he struggled with The Problem of Orcs and how to reconcile it with his world building and his ethical system, but "maybe they're not people" is ultimately not a workable solution as far as LOTR goes and can't even account for much of the later evolution of his ideas, including explicit statements in his letters.

And in the end, the real response that comes to mind to that circular argument is "maybe you should think about ethics more."

[always-a-king-or-queen]

The ache will go away, eventually. 

That was what the Professor told them, the day they got back. When they tumbled from the wardrobe in a heap of tangled limbs, and found that the world had been torn from under their feet with all the kindness of a serpent. 

They picked themselves off of the floorboards with smiles plastered on child faces, and sat with the Professor in his study drinking cup after cup of tea. 

But the smiles were fake. The tea was like ash on their tongues. And when they went to bed that night, none of them could sleep in beds that were too foreign, in bodies that had not been their own for years. Instead they grouped into one room and sat on the floor and whispered, late into the night. 

When morning came, Mrs. Macready discovered the four of them asleep in Peter and Edmund’s bedroom, tangled in a heap of pillows and blankets with their arms looped across one another. They woke a few moments after her entry and seemed confused, lost even, staring around the room with pale faces, eyes raking over each framed painting on the wall and across every bit of furniture as if it was foreign to them. “Come to breakfast,” Mrs. Macready said as she turned to go, but inside she wondered. 

For the children’s faces had held the same sadness that she saw sometimes in the Professor’s. A yearning, a shock, a numbness, as if their very hearts had been ripped from their chests.

At breakfast Lucy sat huddled between her brothers, wrapped in a shawl that was much too big for her as she warmed her hands around a mug of hot chocolate. Edmund fidgeted in his seat and kept reaching up to his hair as if to feel for something that was no longer there. Susan pushed her food idly around on her plate with her fork and hummed a strange melody under her breath. And Peter folded his hands beneath his chin and stared at the wall with eyes that seemed much too old for his face. 

It chilled Mrs. Macready to see their silence, their strangeness, when only yesterday they had been running all over the house, pounding through the halls, shouting and laughing in the bedrooms. It was as if something, something terrible and mysterious and lengthy, had occurred yesterday, but surely that could not be. 

She remarked upon it to the Professor, but he only smiled sadly at her and shook his head. “They’ll be all right,” he said, but she wasn’t so sure. 

They seemed so lost. 

Lucy disappeared into one of the rooms later that day, a room that Mrs. Macready knew was bare save for an old wardrobe of the professor’s. She couldn’t imagine what the child would want to go in there for, but children were strange and perhaps she was just playing some game. When Lucy came out again a few minutes later, sobbing and stumbling back down the hall with her hair askew, Mrs. Macready tried to console her, but Lucy found no comfort in her arms. “It wasn’t there,” she kept saying, inconsolable, and wouldn’t stop crying until her siblings came and gathered her in their arms and said in soothing voices, “Perhaps we’ll go back someday, Lu.” 

Go back where, Mrs. Macready wondered? She stepped into the room Lucy had been in later on in the evening and looked around, but there was nothing but dust and an empty space where coats used to hang in the wardrobe. The children must have taken them recently and forgotten to return them, not that it really mattered. They were so old and musty and the Professor had probably forgotten them long ago. But what could have made the child cry so? Try as she might, Mrs. Macready could find no answer, and she left the room dissatisfied and covered in dust. 

Lucy and Edmund and Peter and Susan took tea in the Professor’s room again that night, and the next, and the next, and the next. They slept in Peter and Edmund’s room, then Susan and Lucy’s, then Peter and Edmund’s again and so on, swapping every night till Mrs. Macready wondered how they could possibly get any sleep. The floor couldn’t be comfortable, but it was where she found them, morning after morning. 

Each morning they looked sadder than before, and breakfast was silent. Each afternoon Lucy went into the room with the wardrobe, carrying a little lion figurine Edmund had carved her, and came out crying a little while later. And then one day she didn’t, and went wandering in the woods and fields around the Professor’s house instead. She came back with grassy fingers and a scratch on one cheek and a crown of flowers on her head, but she seemed content. Happy, even. Mrs. Macready heard her singing to herself in a language she’d never heard before as Lucy skipped past her in the hall, leaving flower petals on the floor in her wake. Mrs. Macready couldn’t bring herself to tell the child to pick them up, and instead just left them where they were. 

More days and nights went by. One day it was Peter who went into the room with the wardrobe, bringing with him an old cloak of the Professor’s, and he was gone for quite a while. Thirty or forty minutes, Mrs. Macready would guess. When he came out, his shoulders were straighter and his chin lifted higher, but tears were dried upon his cheeks and his eyes were frightening. Noble and fierce, like the eyes of a king. The cloak still hung about his shoulders and made him seem almost like an adult. 

Peter never went into the wardrobe room again, but Susan did, a few weeks later. She took a dried flower crown inside with her and sat in there at least an hour, and when she came out her hair was so elaborately braided that Mrs. Macready wondered where on earth she had learned it. The flower crown was perched atop her head as she went back down the hall, and she walked so gracefully that she seemed to be floating on the air itself. In spite of her red eyes, she smiled, and seemed content to wander the mansion afterwards, reading or sketching or making delicate jewelry out of little pebbles and dried flowers Lucy brought her from the woods. 

More weeks went by. The children still took tea in the Professor’s study on occasion, but not as often as before. Lucy now went on her daily walks outdoors, and sometimes Peter or Susan, or both of them at once, accompanied her. Edmund stayed upstairs for the most part, reading or writing, keeping quiet and looking paler and sadder by the day. 

Finally he, too, went into the wardrobe room. 

He stayed for hours, hours upon hours. He took nothing in save for a wooden sword he had carved from a stick Lucy brought him from outside, and he didn’t come out again. The shadows lengthened across the hall and the sun sank lower in the sky and finally Mrs. Macready made herself speak quietly to Peter as the boy came out of the Professor’s study. “Your brother has been gone for hours,” she told him crisply, but she was privately alarmed, because Peter’s face shifted into panic and he disappeared upstairs without a word. 

Mrs. Macready followed him silently after around thirty minutes and pressed an ear to the door of the wardrobe room. Voices drifted from beyond. Edmund’s and Peter’s, yes, but she could also hear the soft tones of Lucy and Susan. 

“Why did he send us back?” Edmund was saying. It sounded as if he had been crying.  

Mrs. Macready couldn’t catch the answer, but when the siblings trickled out of the room an hour later, Edmund’s wooden sword was missing, and the flower crown Susan had been wearing lately was gone, and Peter no longer had his old cloak, and Lucy wasn’t carrying her lion figurine, and the four of them had clasped hands and sad, but smiling, faces. 

Mrs. Macready slipped into the room once they were gone and opened the wardrobe, and there at the bottom were the sword and the crown and the cloak and the lion. An offering of sorts, almost, or perhaps just items left there for future use, for whenever they next went into the wardrobe room.  

But they never did, and one day they were gone for good, off home, and the mansion was silent again. And it had been a long time since that morning that Mrs. Macready had found them all piled together in one bedroom, but ever since then they hadn’t quite been children, and she wanted to know why.

She climbed the steps again to the floor of the house where the old wardrobe was, and then went into the room and crossed the floor to the opposite wall. 

When she pulled the wardrobe door open, the four items the Pevensie children had left inside of it were missing. 

And just for a moment, it seemed to her that a cool gust of air brushed her face, coming from the darkness beyond where the missing coats used to hang.

[mecachrome]

then vs. now

[ohitslen]

Twitter doodles!

(close ups for the first one below and a small extra as well :D)

[slavhew]

And I just have to tell you that I

Love you so much these days,

[the-judicial-assistants-notebook]

not enough discussion about the gavins' complicated relationship with feminine-coded/beauty products, i don't think.

[sandflakedraws]

blessed day of days i remembered that i can post wips

pictured: a man having a good time

[cloud-ya]

not to be coming up with another character design,

[starry-bi-sky]

thinking about Dan in CFAU and just how different he needs to be (in my opinion) in order for Danny's whole thing to work. Canon Danny with Dan's influence, would never even consider thinking of killing anyone even after losing people close to him because he'd be scared of becoming like him. CFAU Danny however has been festering in this hurt and anger for years and wants the Joker dead and is plotting it. I don't think he'd do that with Dan's influence.

I explained how Rath came to be in this post here. Things happened in TUE as normal -- Danny's family dies, he lives with Vlad, Vlad rips out his ghost half. The difference here is that not only was Danny in a grieving state (something exclusive to banshees that the post goes into) but he also doesn't end up fusing with Vlad.

What happens instead is that Danny's ghost half, consumed already with grief and now enraged by being murdered and lied to by Vlad, destroys him completely and disappears into the ghost zone. He traps himself unintentionally in a negative feedback loop of grief, and as a human spirit banshee, cannot mentally handle the constant agony and sorrow he's experiencing. What happens is that he ends up driving himself insane with misery.

So the difference here, ultimately, between Dan and Rath, is that at the end of the day; Dan is fully aware of his actions. He knows what he's doing is wrong, and delights in it. He acknowledges his lack of humanity and feels no remorse in doing what he does.

Rath? He's... not. Not really. Dan is a hulking mass of muscle; tall, towering, terrifying. He loves what he does and does what he loves. Rath, however, appears as a scrawny young boy in raggedy clothes far too big for him, hunched in on himself while dirty, unkempt hair curtains his face and hides whatever he doesn't have ducked down in his curled-in form.

Rath is locked in a constant, unending state of sorrow and misery. He, for lack of better words, is unable to perceive the world around him properly and lashes out terribly and violently at anyone or anything that catches his attention. The only thing that he knows is that his family is gone, his other half is gone, that everyone he loves is gone, gone, gone.

He is a zombie apocalypse wrapped up in the form of a malnourished child, wandering the world in search of people who are not there, and becomes furious if you're not them. He is constantly crying, but he's been crying for so long that he's all but lost his voice. Meaning anyone trying to keep an ear out for him has to listen for soft, pained gasps and quiet whimpering, and wonder if the sound they're hearing are hurt survivors, or the very thing they're running from.

As a result, Rath's influence on Danny isn't that he's scared of doing something bad and becoming like him. He's scared of losing control of himself and dooming himself and others to eternal misery. As a result, he's adamant that things that he's done were not done out of pure emotion, but were active choices he made.

Up to and including killing the Joker. There's enough grief and rage behind his views on him that anyone could argue, especially knowing that Danny's a ghost, that he was not in the right mind when he did it. He was blinded by his emotions and was not in the right mental capacity, he had no control over himself. It'd work as a convincing argument.

If it weren't for Danny himself arguing against it. Killing the Joker was a choice he made, fully and willingly. It was autonomous, premeditated murder and he won't accept anything else -- it was not a fit of passion, it was not act of insanity, it was a decision. He won't accept it being anything else but revenge either, and if anyone tries to claim that it was a necessary evil he will yell at them. He didn't do this for the betterment of the public, that was just a fortunate side effect. He did it for himself and Jason. If you wanted it to be a necessary evil, then you should've killed him yourself. It was a selfish evil and he knows it.

In the end, Dan’s existence would prevent Joker’s death. Rath’s existence only solidifies it.

Rath's complete difference from Dan is one of my favorite parts about this au even if he never makes a direct appearance.

[xxrat--punkxx]

Repair day