“Collections: Why Rings of Power’s Middle Earth Feels Flat”, 2022-12-16 (; backlinks):
This week we’re going to take a look at the worldbuilding of Amazon Studio’s Rings of Power from a historical realism perspective. I think it is no great secret that Rings of Power broadly failed to live up to expectations and left a lot of audiences disappointed. In the aftermath of that disappointment, once one looks beyond the depressingly predictable efforts to make culture war hay out of it, I found that many people understood that they were disappointed but not always why. Here I am going to suggest one reason: the failure of Rings to maintain a believable sense of realism grounded in historical societies and technologies (something the Lord of the Rings books & films did very well) makes it impossible to invest in the stakes and consequences of a world that appears not to obey any perceptible rules.
…Speculative fiction—be it fantasy or science fiction—is a genre where a great deal of the weight is carried by the fictional world being constructed.
We want the fictional world to feel real or at least like it could be a real world, with internally consistent rules and clear lines of effect and consequence. In part that is because the deep, rich real-ishness, as it were, contributes to the sensation (be it joy or horror, depending on the work’s tone) of exploring and discovering a new fictional world and in part it is because a world that feels real and bounded by rules, the way our world is bounded by rules,2 makes the stakes of the story itself more engaging. The plausible link between causes and consequences, bound by those rules, is what encourages us to invest in characters and to care about their decisions and internal struggles.
One may easily contrast a story set in a world unbounded by rules of logical consequences, like a dream. Anything can happen in a dream, unrelated to what came before or after. Dreams can break their own rules and they can exist in unreal or surreal spaces. And they also, famously, make for extremely boring stories.
…Historical realism is an effective shortcut to the feeling of consistency because if something functions in the story the way it functions now or did function historically, that is going to generally feel quite real because it actually is. And more broadly, audiences generally assume that anything that does not obviously work in a fantastical way instead works in ways we commonly understand.
And I’d argue—indeed, I have argued—that the works of J. R. R. Tolkien are themselves marked by using exactly this kind of historicizing strategy for producing that feeling of consistency. Middle Earth in Tolkien’s writings, feels real because it so strongly resembles historical systems and settings (or in the deeper past of the Silmarillion, legendary or mythical systems and settings nevertheless immediately familiar to us). One can see this perhaps most obviously in Tolkien’s languages; constructed with deep care they feel like real languages because they practically are real languages, based heavily in his own knowledge of linguistics and modeled in function off of real languages that exist (eg. Finnish was, according to Tolkien, the ‘dominant influence’ in the early construction of Quenya).
Alternately, one might just take a quick shortcut and use a historical thing itself—a system, a set of rules, etc.—because it will already be internally consistent and grounded. Whereas Tolkien invented his Elvish languages, he used Old Norse and Old English to ‘translate’ the tongues of the Rohirrim and the Dwarves. Or, to take a science fiction example, the language of the Fremen (Chakobsa) in Dune feels really real and grounded when its words and phrases appear because a lot of it is just Arabic (with a lot of admixture). When making a speculative fiction world, the author(s), can either plan out the system’s unique function or they can adopt a real world system, but they generally must do one or the other or risk sacrificing audience investment from a world that lacks consistency.
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