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Originally Posted by
Echoweaver
Sauron built his realm on a block of land. That land certainly had at least a few residents. The villages and villagers we've seen so far don't look important at all, but they're in an area Sauron is making important.
Lore-wise it was already somewhat Mordor-ish: the mountains were already there and so were the volcano and the plateau it sat on. Also, Shelob was already living in the Ephel Duath. Yes, the place didn't become Mordor until Sauron set up shop there but it already showed Morgoth's handiwork and there were parts of it you wouldn't want to hang around in.
Also, back then most of the familiar parts of Middle-earth were heavily forested - it was the Numenoreans who clear-felled most of that original forest for lumber. And a village of Easterlings should look a lot more basic than that (more 'Dark Ages' looking) whereas what we see in RoP has a typical fantasy pseudo-Renaissance look.
The real problem with the show's scenario is showing Gil-galad's writ running that far, as if the High Elves have an empire, and the idea of the Elves as an occupying force who are keeping Men down even that far east. As far as Tolkien was concerned the High Elves only really seemed to be bothered about their own patches in Lindon and Eregion on the western side of the Misty Mountains and everywhere else (including most of Eriador, never mind Rhovanion) they seemingly left Men to their own devices on a "if you don't bother us, we won't bother you" basis.
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I got the impression that the elves had been patrolling around areas that had once pledged to Morgoth to look for signs of trouble. Meanwhile, the villagers had rolled through a bunch of generations, had no sense of connection to whatever their ancestors did, and resented that the elves treated them as suspicious.
It had been a thousand years or so (so about forty generations of Men!). That'd be a long time even to Elves. I can maybe imagine them maybe taking a look at those Men every now and again for a century or two after Morgoth's downfall, but after that it'd be "meh, they're just getting on with their lives, leave them to it".
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Now, I'm not sure why it keeps being called the generic term "Southlands."
As distinct from the Northlands, because people know what Northmen should look like. LOTR mentions the south and Southerners in Eriador as essentially meaning people of broadly more southern European appearance (shorter and a bit darker when compared to Northmen), who we see variously as the former Men of the White Mountains, the Dunlendings, the Bree-folk and the locals in Gondor who were vassals of the Dunedain. (And also probably the locals in Cardolan, before plague and war did for the place). That's distinct from Harad where you get the dark-skinned Haradrim.
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Clearly the nation of Harad is included in the LotR license because LOTRO uses it. I would expect the lands that became Mordor belonged to someone, probably Harad. But I guess if Tolkien didn't say that, then the show is free to hypothesize some kind of political entity there.
Back then Harad would likely be just a whole bunch of different tribes. And if anything, the soon-to-be Mordor was 'east' more than 'south' so sparsely settled by more (southerly) Easterlings rather than Haradrim. The real South started hundreds of miles away. And then when Sauron turned up, those Easterlings would be easy pickings for his brand of persuasion and would fall in line. The Haradrim back then hadn't really had anything to do with Morgoth (his realm had been in the far north and so a long, long way away) and weren't so bad until Sauron got his hooks into them, after he'd set himself up in Mordor. The show had the opportunity to have fully genuine sympathetic dark-skinned (think North African, primarily) characters as Haradrim who could have been being oppressed by Numenorean colonialism or all the nastiness associated with Sauron starting to exert a hold over them. Or both.
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But also keep in mind that if Tolkien is silent on a subject -- in the appendices of LotR, not anywhere, because that's the nature of the license -- the show is free to put something reasonable there.
The key word there is 'reasonable'. The one thing they've not done, because they've largely ignored the Appendices as well.
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My hypothesis is that we'll see both conflicts, but the first one will be compressed. It might well begin AND end in this season. The important part is that the forces of Elves and Men will be victorious, and Al-Pharazon will triumphantly return to Numenor with Sauron as a prisoner. At that point, the Men of Numemor had already begun to resent the restrictions the Valar put on them and covet the elves' agelessness. Sauron will grab those threads and use them to corrupt Numenor.
The forging of the Rings has to come first. I imagine the War of the Elves and Sauron will end up being just the destruction of Eregion (I just want to see the Orcs using Celebrimbor's corpse as a banner, lol) and they'll somehow combine the Numenorean intervention then with the much later one where Ar-Pharazon turns up and takes Sauron captive. That'd be in a later season: Pharazon also has to take power first, and he can use Miriel siding with the Elves as the perfect excuse. His reason for helping fight Sauron would be self-serving (it'd look good politically to have the Elves desperately needing Numenorean help, and thus appearing inferior) and he might have been led to believe that Sauron could give a very different perspective on the Valar and thus let him find out what's 'really' going on (conspiracy theory style). Of course that'll turn out to be a Really Bad Idea.
They've already made a mess of Numenor because the whole reason for their loss of faith was death and the wish for deathlessness (and the feeling that the Valar and the Elves had been lying to them all along), not being grumpy about "dang Elves takin' ahr jerbs". And they haven't even mentioned Eru (he's referred to as 'the One' in the Appendices so they could absolutely call him that, at least) despite how the Numenoreans worshipped the guy, and they keep referring to the Valar as 'gods' despite how only ordinary Men in Middle-earth did that and both the Elves and the Numenoreans knew better.
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The rings haven't been forged, however. IIRC (not looking at the source material this moment), Sauron presents himself to the elves as another elf Annatar and works with Celebrimbor in the forging of the rings. We're running the storylines in parallel, but I'm not sure how Sauron can be Annatar with the elves while simultaneously being in prison in Numenor. We'll just have to see what they have in mind when we get there.
I don't think they'll do the Annatar thing directly. It seems likely that Sauron is already in play in disguise (they're not being terribly subtle about it) and that'll play into that in a somewhat similar way (putting the idea in Celebrimbor's head is all they need, the rest can play out much the same once they get that far).
