Pretty nuts the prices on those... like 20% the price of a regular gaming keyboard. Stresses me out honestly. But if it's working for you, you did alright.
i feel like if your fretting over keyboards of all things your living your life wrong.
(Edited 31 seconds later.)
@previous (G)
The final piece of the sequence is that Adar’s orcs do find Sauron in the ruins of Ost-in-Edhil and Sauron instantly takes control of them, using them to get close to and them murder Adar, which he then does, easily. Adar’s orcs have to ask Sauron, “are you Sauron?” because they do not know, which loops back to the staggering idiocy of Adar’s plan: he has brought an army Sauron can easily control and even his handpicked lieutenant is incapable of actually recognizing Sauron standing right in front of him and has to ask.
Now we’ve spent five posts and goodness knows how many words discussing the historical, tactical and operational nonsense of this sequence. Trebuchets deliver high explosive yields at modern artillery ranges, armies teleport through empty countryside and seem to require no need or logistics, Elves and Orcs fight non-stop hand to hand for a day straight and at the end of it the Respawning Orc Army just respawns. Again.
Meanwhile, neither the tactics nor the character moments of the battle matter in the slightest. Not one but two unexpected relief armies arrive behind the orcs and neither has any meaningful effect on the progress of the battle. The Master Elf Archer makes her heroic shot in her heroic sacrifice and it doesn’t matter a jot; you could take it out of the story and nothing changes. Adar fails to defend his camp, launches an ill-advised assault on the city with weapons made of nonsense and it doesn’t matter, he wins anyway. Both Elrond and the Dwarves’ arrivals are the culmination of character arcs stretching the entire season and neither impacts the story at all: if both had stayed home and let the city fall, nothing of consequence would have changed, except that slightly more faceless Eregion_Civilian_01 extras would die and slightly less faceless Elf_Warrior_01 extras would die.
Arondir is stabbed, in the chest, with a massive two-handed sword and is running around and fighting in the very next episode, which takes place at most minutes after he was left dying in the mud.
I will, for a moment, give Game of Thrones and A Song of Ice and Fire some credit: one of the emotional beats that George R. R. Martin has mastered is the one in which the fellow with the best tactics, rather than the best character, wins the battle, where the emotional blow is that storylines are abruptly cut off because someone dies and that is just how war is sometimes. But to make that storytelling work successfully, those results still need to be the result of character decisions, carefully tracked and planned and paid off: maybe Stannis deserves to win the Battle of the Blackwater, but he doesn’t because Tyrion is more clever and found a weapon – previously discussed! – to turn the fight in his favor.
Now I would argue such ‘subversion’ is already the wrong fit for a story told within Tolkien’s legendarium, which runs on different rules than Westeros does (for one thing, armies in Middle-earth have to move at reasonable speeds). But it is also clear that the showrunners here haven’t even mastered the subversion correctly: GRRM’s storytelling works because the subversions are set up, they are the carefully laid consequences of well-established character personalities and decisions. The late seasons of Game of Thrones fell apart precisely when that careful setup was abandoned in favor of getting to the Big Scene quicker (and further ‘subverting audience expectations’ when I suspect GRRM’s end-game, should he ever finish the books, is that the final subversion will be heroic tropes played entirely straight when the remaining Starks really do save the world with the Magic of Destiny and whatnot).
The failure in Rings of Power‘s Siege of Eregion is that if you treat the mechanics of the battle itself as merely set dressing, then the decisions the characters are making stop mattering too: no decision Elrond, Gil-galad, Galadriel, Arondir or almost anyone else makes changes much of anything about this sequence. Small ‘hope spot’ victories amount to nothing, immediately reversed because the plot has somewhere to go and is staggering there, slightly drunk, no matter what. That break of cause and consequence, a problem I noted in the first season, doesn’t simply damage the usefulness of, say, using a movie sequence to teach about historical warfare, it damages suspension of disbelief and audience enjoyment.
If nothing matters, why am I watching?
And this is Rings of Power, where nothing matters.
A song of fire and ice; the unending tale...