re: Rings Of Power 3 casts Simon Pegg as voice of Balrog

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I believe there were even some open alliances with some Dwarf clans.

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That’s because there were a handful of dwarfs and men who sided with the dark side. That’s not the same as there being “good“ orcs.

That’s not a distinction without a difference. This alliance would only happen in one direction. Siding with evil, not the other way round.

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That’s because there were a handful of dwarfs and men who sided with the dark side. That’s not the same as there being “good“ orcs. That’s not a distinction without a difference. This alliance would only happen in one direction. Siding with evil, not the other way round.

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On a large scale level, I'm in agreement. But once you really started to drill down from the holistic view to a more granular one, it get's - perhaps ironically- much less clear. It gets even murkier if you are religious (which I kind of am, and Tolkien very much was), or deeply philosophical.

Orcs, according to Tolkien, were sentient and sapient. Also they had souls and morality. They had children in the same fashion that Men did.

Alright then:
- Did the females have maternal instincts to care and raise their children? (unknown)
- Did the the males have paternal instincts to protect and care for their family? (unknown)
- Did they love their children? (unresolved by Tolkien)
- If they did love their families, would every single one of those individuals truly be 'evil'? (unresolved - and really bothered the very Catholic side of Tolkien)

Could an orc, raised by generations of openly cynical orcs, all of whom having been consistent spies for elves and maintained those relationships over long periods of time - over those same generations - perhaps have a different agenda as an individual?

Tolkien tried everything he could creatively do to make the answer to that question an always, "No". He never even convinced himself of this (Tolkien's Moral Dilemma). This dilemma gives a thin slice of a small crack of possibility of an orc, corrupted by a lifetime of influence from cynical orcs and only ever relatively positive relationships with elves, to actually exist. It just seems so very unlikely.

What ever contortions and twists of theoretical scenarios one may want to project onto the nature of orcs, the idea that Galadriel would entertain any such alliance goes well beyond what Tolkien ended up with in his finished works.

And I laugh at the idea that we're getting any heartfelt sincerity by the writers when they've so openly mocked and derailed from the spirit of what Tolkien had intended. It's just terrible fanfic at this point, driven by Bezos and his own hubris.

JD and Patrick claim to be lore masters for Tolkien, at least one who speaks a version of Elvish. Forget which one, don't care. But the general trend in Hollywood is to NOT be familiar with the source material, (She-Hulk, The Witcher, Lanterns, etc... ) where I suppose the idea is to allow writers freedom to create their own stuff without being tied down to canon.

Knowing the detail and world building that was poured into the history of Rohan, Gondor and all of Middle Earth insisted by Peter Jackson, it comes off as a direct 180 with how Amazon has treated developing RoP.