IMDB.com is now crediting Gavi Singh Chera as Sauron on Season 2 of Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power, making it appear as if Prime Video is either trolling fans intentionally for engagement or pushing an agenda like they never had before.
The first announcement came from One Ring, and they are deep in Amazon’s vest pocket these days. Amazon took the precaution of winning them over with the usual influencer plastic beads and shiny trinkets. It worked. A group that was once critical of Peter Jackson for leaving out the Tom Bombidil and the Cleansing of the Shire, became the worst boot-licking Stans on the internet, shilling day and night for what is without question a blitheringly incompetent fan fic burlesque of Tolkien.
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The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power from Primve Video was honestly kind of impressive in that it got every single thing wrong. The costuming was so bad it wouldn’t have been used on Xena the Warrior Princess. The sets were, in a word, cramped. Although another word would be cheap. There was nothing approaching Jackson’s sweeping epic scale. I wrote better than 20,000 words dragging an incomprehensible, and completely disjointed script. There’s a high chance the screenplay was generated by an AI.
Then there was Rings Of Power’s casting. Some of the diversity silliness was unavoidable because of the mandatory minority quotas required by the countries they were shooting in. Although, I have no doubt at all that they were going to do that anyway. What made the casting truly tedious was that it was possible to have a diverse cast and still respect Tolkien’s lore.
The Numenorians got very preferential treatment because they backed the Valar against Morgoth. They were all tall, fair, and very long-lived (Numenorians clocked out around their 400th birthday). The Men who fought for Morgoth were all various shades of brown. The thing is, the Men of the East had some pretty legitimate gripes with elves before the war and with the Men of Numenor afterward. By the time Ar-Pharazon came along, the Numenoreans were seriously into the empire and subjugation business.
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This is how you can tell that they didn’t read the Silmarillion in the creation of Rings of Power. They could have had white Numenorians being like totally mean to the brown Men of the East. They had human sacrifices, so why not slavery, too?
But no, Prime Video steadfastly resisted any urges they had to make something good and interesting for Rings of Power. Instead, they opted to make generic TV fantasy diverse and inclusive casting. It was fine for Hercules and Xena because you weren’t supposed to take those shows seriously, but high fantasy is all about detailed world-building, and you can’t possibly take any version of Middle Earth seriously if it looks like Bridgerton.
Now Rings of Power has a new Sauron for the Prime Video show. The AI must have written them into a corner, so they had to recast poor old Halbrand out of the show because now all the characters know what he looks like, which would then make it difficult for him to play the part of Annatar, the Lord of Gifts. With the introduction of Sauron 2, they are going to have to repeat the plot of the last episode. This means the characters will not have learned anything from Sauron’s last visit, and honestly, the Elves of Eregian seem to be so dim it’s actually believable.
That said, I don’t know how the producers brought themselves to cast a POC as the lord of evil. Possibly, it was a paradox loop they got caught in. Annatar was supposed to be a being of unsurpassed masculine beauty, and that might have been where the problem arose. There are still so many unanswered questions from the first season that won’t do justice to Tolkien when they are answered.
What do you think about the race-replaced casting of Sauron in Lord of the Rings: Rings of Power from Prime Video? Leave a comment and let us know.
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It would be better if they made all the evil characters darker colored, it would make it visually easier to tell good from evil. That way good could be light and fair, and evil would be dark. I suppose it is not PC these days.
Sauron was a shape shifter.
Gavi Singh Chera’s only a guest star. I don’t like it because it reeks of pandering and Amazon cynically using diversity to gain eyeballs but Charlie Vickers is the main actor for Sauron.