Yet Another Rings of Power Plot Twist That Makes No Sense to Fans
One of the more poignant criticisms aimed at The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power is that a lot of it looks like a fantasy story filmed by people who don't actually read fantasy, and base their understanding not just of Tolkien's world, but of the fantasy genre in general on the opinions of their detractors.
Let's examine a plot point in The Rings of Power which, among others, made the fans seethe, from this angle.
It involves an evil blood-powered magic sword, which is used to break a dam, which is used to create a flood, filling underground voids of Mount Doom with water, which causes the explosion of Mount Doom, which turns the Southlands into Mordor.
And well, making Mount Doom erupt through tireless work of orcs and their slaves, channeling a natural phenomenon, is sort of a workable idea. But what it has to do with blood-powered magic swords?
Just about nothing, if we even try to think about it. If we assume that Sauron was the one who commanded that massive dam to be built, the whole plan makes sense, sort of. Creating Mordor, the land where his Orc hordes do not have to fear the sun, would have been reasonably convenient for him, within the show's logic, and we have enough hints that he indeed planned to do so for centuries.
To explode Mount Doom you need to store a lot of water, and for that you need a big dam. Well, it all makes sense until you think how Sauron managed to do so without tipping anyone, including the elves watching over the Southlands, about his continued existence, never mind his schemes.
(Of course, his old boss, Morgoth, when he held dominion over nearly all of Middle-earth, had no reason to bother with making a country suitable for the lowliest of his thralls, so the dam could not have been left from his time.)
But why exactly would Sauron take the time and effort to forge a blood-powered magic sword that is used as a key to actually operate that big dam?
It is not like making things collapse is some lost art, which requires powerful magical artifacts. The sword is not anchored in any way to the logic of the world, it is an evil magic device existing solely to advance the plot in the required direction – and it is a pretty safe bet that its existence will never be remembered again in the subsequent seasons, so that existence of such artifacts can become a proper, if still not exactly good, part of world-building.
And the showrunners deemed its existence acceptable, because in their imagination a fantasy world is a place where magic devices, evil or otherwise, existing solely to advance the plot are acceptable. In other words, they do not actually read fantasy and their understanding of it suspiciously resembles opinions of people who don't actually like fantasy.