Expectations VS Reality with Rings Of Power

[Galadriel55]

Originally Posted by Mithadan

We tend to seek consistency between RoP and Tolkien's writings. As I commented in other threads, such consistency may be difficult considering what rights Amazon has and does not have. This is not to say that I find RoP to be consistently in line with "canon." I do not and find many of the deviations to be jarring and distracting.

Perhaps a question that is fairer under the circumstances is whether RoP is, itself, sufficiently consistent internally to allow "the audience to engage their emotions with the characters and story."

I think that the article in question does not imply consistency with Tolkien's writings, but exactly what you are referring to - an internal consistency. And not even consistency of the story, per se, but of the natural laws of the world. Is it believable. Does it feel real. That doesn't even scrape the surface of storyline consistency and character consistency. And I think to some of the sillier (IMHO) scenes with ridiculous fight scenes, or the eruption of Orodruin, I would argue that No, the laws of physics don't really feel real. Then you have all the questions about numbers, geography, and proportions. How big is a Numenorian ship? How far away is Mount Doom from the coast? How big is the kingdom of the Southlands? And the realism of RoP breaks on those questions, again you have to forcibly suspend disbelief, because the answers don't make internal sense. So - several examples of internal lack of consistency or realism, and I did not even get to character inconsistencies, and it all relies purely on show material without referencing any additional Tolkien lore. So I would say the article statement is valid in the general sense and applicable to RoP - now, whether or not you believe RoP demonstrates sufficient consistency and realism is another question, but the criticism is applicable and I can think of several points to back it up. There will be people saying that this is fantasy, it's not supposed to be realistic - but the key here is in recognizing what basic rules of physics are you altering and what are the new rules. If you are traveling by horse, you can only travel as fast as the horse goes. If you are going faster, you need an explanation for why. Unless you are traveling by warp drive or wormhole or teleportation device, you shouldn't be able to traverse distances faster than your horse can run. In a way this goes back to some of the comments people made on the Fanfic thread, and it can be applied to fantasy/sci-fi as a "fanfic of the real world" - you can change ANYTHING, but you need to know exactly what you are changing and change ONLY that, leave the rest of the world as it was.