I finished the last of my current wave of commissions earlier this week, and I'm looking forward to using this less busy period for personal art and, most importantly, Bloodkin work. I've closed one of my Fiverr gigs so I can avoid getting overwhelmed while I focus on the comic and related material for this website.
On a related note: I draw people and critters! My more comic-y, simple and quick style might not impress the general populace, but I have done a great many fully rendered semi-realistic pieces. I want illustration work, but for some reason everyone seems to want design from me. I guess every freelance artist wants to be an illustrator, and that side of commission work is extremely oversaturated. Meanwhile, the businesses and individuals out there tend to want more practical things like design and layout. Design is not my strongest suit, and while it's been good to get more experience with it, I am really excited to focus on drawing some characters for a while.
My non-art thoughts of the week have been writing thoughts, which works for me--writing is just as important to my work as visual art. Most of my thoughts have been prompted by shows I've been able to watch recently. I have, unfortunately, realized that I cannot engage with narrative entertainment casually, which explains why I primarily listen to/watch documentaries while I work instead of fictional movies and shows. Everything I watch or read I think about, painstakingly picking it apart until I feel I have reached a satisfactory understanding of it.
And Amazon's The Rings of Power makes that really hard, so it's haunting me. The show has a lot of issues, and sometimes baffling ones. But most egregiously of all, it doesn't mean anything; the characters undergo no meaningful journey, and we don't learn anything about them and their motivations beyond a very basic level lacking in nuance. At times, there are really cool ideas and scenes, but there's a general sense of thematic aimlessness, and those ideas are not fully explored in a satisfactory way. I am left with a vague sense of confusion: "Why is this the writing decision?", "Why was this subplot prioritized?", "What makes this feel so far from the atmosphere and nature of Tolkien's work?", and "Why, oh why, does that armor look like the thinnest cardboard in the world?" While I don't have this show fully figured out yet, it has offered me an interesting insight and a new writing realization.
Slight SPOILERS Ahead:
There is a scene relatively early on in which Elrond visits the dwarves, and he invokes the "Rite of Sigin-tarag" in order to get into the mountain when he is initially turned away. The rite sees him and Prince Durin engaged in a rock-crushing contest. Whoever tires and ceases the rock-crushing first loses, and if the outsider (Elrond) loses, he is forever forbidden from dwarven lands.
However, it is clear relatively early on that the outcome of the rite is meaningless, so this moment of conflict fails to engage me. Like many things in the show, I do not find it compelling or believable. The worst part of this scene, however, is just how meaningless and irrelevant it is from a character and thematic standpoint. Sure, it establishes that there is conflict between these two characters, but what does it say about them as people?
As I was thinking about it, I realized what my main issue with the series is. While the people in it never seem to act out of character, so many of their actions and the events around them are utterly irrelevant to character. This problem is significantly subtler and harder to pinpoint than out-of-character moments, which is why it took me so much time and thought to reach this conclusion. This is what I mean when I say that The Rings of Power has no meaning or point; I mean that it is simply events happening, and all events seem to mean nothing more than what they are on their face. The rock-crushing contest is a rock-crushing contest, and the scene and its outcome have no bearing on what happens next. Arondir is briefly enslaved by Uruks, and after his escape, there seem to be no lasting consequences to him as a person, not even a new insight to bring to his allies. Theo has a seemingly evil and certainly spooky blood-drinking sword hilt for most of the season, and it seems to mean nothing in regards to his character, his morality, or his personal conflicts. The entire subplot with the Harfoots has no effect on the rest of what's happening. While I understand that this is because it's setting up future plots, I am really tired of this pattern where modern shows and movies use massive fractions of its story just to set up future stories, instead of giving more depth to the most important things happening right now.
Who are these people? What are their core wants, their fundamental needs? What lies in their souls? Where is the connective tissue joining the shallow outer plot to what ought to be the real story--the characters' inner worlds? How do they change? What new understanding do they or the audience reach?
It's all so irrelevant. This show has nothing to say, no ambition to fulfill, no passion to bring to bear. It's so excessively and offensively basic and shallow, something no Lord of the Rings show should be. Ultimately, I'm glad I watched the show, and I will probably watch the second season when it drops to give it another chance and see if things improve going forward--and also to see if there's anything more hilariously and confusingly stupid than Galadriel's self-inflicted oceanic misadventures. For now, I really dislike the show. The most impressive thing about it, in my view, is that it took eight whole hours to say nothing.
But I do value what I've learned, and I now have a new tool for evaluating my issues with fiction and avoiding them in my own work. While it's easy to spot and be bothered by characters acting out of character, it is almost as severe a problem when they are acting in a way completely irrelevant to character. That's my takeaway.
But what do you think? Did you like or dislike The Rings of Power? What do you think about the idea of "irrelevant to character" actions and events? Let me know!
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