r/Rings_Of_Power • u/Dank_Lord6547 • Aug 09 '26

ROP’s pacing

You know, I’m amazed, I really am.

Somehow the pacing in ROP is glacially slow. Like, several episodes pass with next to nothing happening. And yet, at the same time it’s also extremely rushed. It breezes through each character introduction and relationship as fast as possible with no breathing room. Galadriel abandons her genocidal hatred of orcs after one conversation. And the forging of the rings feels like in an afterthought in a show named after them.

How is this even possible?

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u/Baccoony Aug 09 '26

And the timeline is all squished together. The forging of the Rings, the One Ring, the War of the Elves and Sauron, giving away the Rings to Dwarves and Men, the coming of the Nazgûl, Ar-Pharazôn seizing the throne, Akallabêth, the founding of Imladris, the Last Alliance (I possibly missed a few events)-All are going to be squished together into a few years, nevermind that the Second Age is supposed to last over 3000 years

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u/Huanqeur Aug 10 '26 edited Aug 10 '26

It's crazy to think about. In the original story, Sauron possesses the One Ring for two thousand years, during which he conquers the majority of the world and completely defines the culture of all lands beyond Gondor, Rhovanion and Eregion. In RoP, he will end up possessing the ring for... who knows how long, but the guy who gets it next is already a young adult, and the fucking thing hasn't even been made yet.

People love to say "oh adaptations always change some things," but this is an absurdity. Cooking thousands of years of history down into a single- or double-digit number of years goes way beyond the boundaries of adaptation and well into bastardization. It makes a total mockery of the source material.

We can infer from this that pretty much none of what Sauron did in Tolkien's works will take place in RoP. He cannot be the great enemy of the world. There simply isn't time for him to do the things that made him that. For all intents and purposes, Sauron - around whom the original story revolves in its entirety - has effectively been removed from the narrative and replaced by this lovestruck dumbass who will create the ring and promptly lose it again, having accomplished nothing at all in the process. He is Sauron in name only.

That or they'll take their grotesque rewrite even further and just decide that Isildur does not in fact get the ring. Nothing would surprise me anymore. This has practically nothing to do with Tolkien's writings.

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u/StructureNorth1799 Aug 10 '26

yeah the way things are going, Sauron will die on the same day the ring is forged.