A Historian's Take on a "Flat" RoP - The Barrow-Downs Discussion Forum

***Mister Underhill*** · 12-17-2022, 04:13 PM

This is a very enjoyable and insightful blog post, and while RoP defenders will surely dismiss much of it as nitpicking, or say that, oh, to take one example, there's no time, or budget, or even much dramatic interest in explaining the finer nuances of Númenorian political organization, it does a great job of articulating a major weakness of RoP: not only is it not, from a worldbuilding standpoint, internally coherent, it is sometimes aggressively incoherent.

The author buries the lede a bit -- it's not that we necessarily want a long explanation of a political situation, or a proto-Hobbit migration pattern, or whatever. We want to feel that the writers have thought about these things, or I think more pointedly, what we really want is not to think that much about the worldbuilding. When it's working right, it's almost subliminal. It's not tugging at our conscious mind -- "Wait a minute... given this setup, how do these proto-hobbits have all this fabric?" (I actually did have this thought as well.) We want to sense that the world clanking away in the background makes sense.

The heavy implication in the blog is that if the creators of the show had thought more deeply on some of these topics, this is not the show they would have created. There are DNA level problems here.

If you were going to do a Tolkien show, I think you could get away with a lot in terms of deviation from established lore, time compression, and so forth, so long as you tick a few essential boxes, and one of those is "Middle-earth must feel real."

12-17-2022, 04:13 PM	#1
*Mister Underhill* Dread Horseman Join Date: Sep 2000 Location: Behind you! Posts: 2,743	This is a very enjoyable and insightful blog post, and while RoP defenders will surely dismiss much of it as nitpicking, or say that, oh, to take one example, there's no time, or budget, or even much dramatic interest in explaining the finer nuances of Númenorian political organization, it does a great job of articulating a major weakness of RoP: not only is it not, from a worldbuilding standpoint, internally coherent, it is sometimes aggressively incoherent. The author buries the lede a bit -- it's not that we necessarily want a long explanation of a political situation, or a proto-Hobbit migration pattern, or whatever. We want to feel that the writers have thought about these things, or I think more pointedly, what we really want is not to think that much about the worldbuilding. When it's working right, it's almost subliminal. It's not tugging at our conscious mind -- "Wait a minute... given this setup, how do these proto-hobbits have all this fabric?" (I actually did have this thought as well.) We want to sense that the world clanking away in the background makes sense. The heavy implication in the blog is that if the creators of the show had thought more deeply on some of these topics, this is not the show they would have created. There are DNA level problems here. If you were going to do a Tolkien show, I think you could get away with a lot in terms of deviation from established lore, time compression, and so forth, so long as you tick a few essential boxes, and one of those is "Middle-earth must feel real."