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lucymonsterAKA a primer for the best character (she says, without bias) to come out of The Rings of Power.
Credit:
Who is Adar?
Adar is - or was - one of the first Elves, awakened before the First Age of Middle-Earth. Taken by Morgoth (Satan expy, a fallen angel rebelling against the supreme creator-god), Adar was transformed by a process of long torture and sinister magic into a new life-form: an orc, or Uruk, as they prefer to be called. A slave race created to serve Morgoth in his war over Middle-Earth.We don’t know his proper name. Adar is the title his fellow Uruks address him by, meaning ‘father’ in Elvish. It’s unclear in canon whether he is meant to have been literally involved in breeding his ‘children’, but what’s important is the symbolism - it’s an honorific to reflect the role he occupies in their lives. At some point after Morgoth’s defeat, Adar rose up against Sauron (Morgoth’s chief lieutenant, who was still using the Uruks as cannon fodder and scientific guinea-pigs in his quest for renewed power) and led his newly liberated people away into the wilds. Since then they’ve come by their survival the hard way: they can’t touch the sunlight without burning, and the other sentient races view them with equal parts terror and disgust - a sort of cockroach infestation, if cockroaches could carry swords. Adar’s goal is to establish a homeland where the Uruks can live in peace and safety, by triggering a volcanic eruption that will blot out the sun over the surrounding lands and free them from its debilitating light.
The slightly sticky point is that the lands around the volcano are already spoken for, and Adar isn’t squeamish about removing the inhabitants by force.
Why do you love him?
To me, Adar sits at the most compelling possible meeting point of ‘actions clearly wrong’ and ‘motives clearly right’. As far as making better choices goes, he’s not exactly spoilt for opportunities: the heroes openly view his people as an infestation in need of an exterminator, so nonviolent advocacy is kind of off the table. To illustrate his situation, here's a scene where Galadriel has captured him for intel on Sauron:
To be honest, pre-Adar, I never gave much thought to Tolkien’s orcs. I had a vague notion that the idea of an ~inherently evil~ race of sentient beings was … er, problematic, to borrow an overused term. But they fulfilled their role in the story so well - not characters, but nameless enemies for the heroes to cut down guilt-free - and, moreover, both Tolkien’s prose and Jackson’s adaptation did such a good job at making them viscerally repellant and scary, that the temptation to pull on that thread just wasn’t there. So it’s not without an awkward feeling of narrative complicity that I've watched this new ‘orcs are people too’ plotline.
But Adar occupies a really interesting place on the person-to-monster spectrum: he's Elvish enough to provoke intuitive sympathy, but Orcish enough to make that sympathy uncomfortable and question-raising. The performance by Joseph Mawle is (again, very objective here) far and away the best in the show. He has an incredible moral and physical presence: powerful yet vulnerable, visibly bone-weary, yearning for peace but capable of horrific violence in its pursuit. He feels deeply with his Uruks and sacrifices readily for them (aside from using himself as live bait during the home stretch of their volcano mission, it’s worth noting that Adar doesn’t share his children’s weakness to sunlight - he loves the sun and mourns its loss even as he works tirelessly to darken it for their sake).
His children are homeless, desperate, and - here’s the part that kills me - doomed to failure. Rings of Power is a prequel. We already know what becomes of the Uruk race: Sauron reenslaves them, the (literally so called) free peoples continue to revile them, and Adar’s dreams of liberation die - we can safely assume - with him.
I'm still working on that - the fandom isn't huge, so it takes a bit of searching to find the content I want. But here are a few tidbitsL
This AV Club article is a very good and Correct (TM) take on the character. Also this meta (from reddit, reposted to tumblr) does a good job summing up my feelings of alksjdhfalkjsdhfa.
Two piece of fanart (1, 2) of Adar hanging with his wargs. Also by the same artist: Adar getting a nice hot meal (yes thank you, Waldreg, he does need to eat!).
This beautiful art of Adar as an Elf, back before his capture and torture.
A gorgeous illustration of Adar on the battlefield.
And some more lighthearted fanart: fangirled by his Uruks, making them sun cloaks, reading them bedtime stories, taking care of a little kid.
