Few of the creative decisions that The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power has made this season have caused as much of a stir online as its choice to briefly spotlight the existence of Orc women and children. The moment in question — a blink-and-you'll-miss-it shot in The Rings of Power Season 2's premiere — marks a major difference between the show’s take on Middle-earth and, for instance, Peter Jackson’s. Whereas Jackson depicted the Orcs as malevolent creatures literally born out of bubbles in the earth, The Rings of Power tries to give Middle-earth’s Orcs the humanity they've long been denied onscreen.
That decision hasn't been received particularly well by certain fans of J.R.R. Tolkien's work, even though the existence of Orc women and children is canonically sound. Up to this point, The Rings of Power's more humanist treatment of its Orc characters has largely been in service of Adar's campaign against Sauron and the Elven armies of Middle-earth. In its latest episode, however, The Rings of Power finally fulfills the promise of its more sympathetic treatment of Tolkien's least-beloved creation — and it does so by planting the seeds for a fallout between the Orcs and Adar, their once-hailed leader.
