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Looking at The Rings of Power's visual design, you've got beautiful sets and beautifully made costumes beautifully lit and shot.
But you've also got multiple whole environments whose visual style had to be invented. The culture of Númenor couldn't look like Gondor, or like Rivendell or Mirkwood, or like dwarf and hobbit stuff. The Harfoots, who are supposed to evolve into hobbits later, needed a new look, admittedly. But whoever was in charge of creating the original visual designs for new cultures on this show just did a... bad... job. Like, they would look fine - or even fantastic - on the stage, their construction is good, etc, but... they don't have a clear and unified logic that makes sense. They don't fit neatly into the worldbuilding. They don't bear basically... any scrutiny.
And it is clear, looking at the cultures they've tried to visually invent here, that they were trying to take their inspiration from the visual design behind the Lord of the Rings movies. Númenor features clothes and jewelry that are obviously nearly direct ripoffs of Alphonse Mucha designs, and settings that combine massive medieval stonemasonry in gray like you'd appropriately have found in Gondor and Rohan with near eastern motifs (mostly Moorish-looking), but lots of (mostly CGI) interiors in pale white and gold tones with Greek and Roman lines (their moodboard for this was certainly mostly pre-Raphaelite, particularly John Wiliam Godward and Lawrence Alma Tadema, but with Mucha for the women). Attempts have been made to bring some Greek feeling - I'm thinking they were probably actually aiming for Minoan Crete inspiration because that would fit into conceptualizing Númenor as Atlantis. There are moments that suggest Crete, and there are lots of images that suggest Byzantium, but overall there just... isn't a cohesive picture, unlike LOTR and The Hobbit's work on elves and dwarves.
The visual antecedents of dwarves are clearly Viking and Celtic (with some hints of the ancient near east in the stonework, presumably because dwarves are symbolically the jews). The thing is, Viking and Celtic iconography already had so much in common that the creation of a coherent dwarf imagery from them was pretty organic. Númenor has, instead, a bunch of pieces that don't really fit.
The problems with the Harfoots' visual design are on a whole other level. It's like they're actually designed for the stage, or perhaps for a children's tv show, and intended to adhere to a much lower level of realism with no logic whatsoever. For example, we see a lot of characters played by Black actors whose hair is shown in styles that could only be achieved with a lot of work because of the nature of their fragile kinky-curly hair - styles that have to be painstakingly teased into shape and treated with conditioners and so on - and which are laughably unsuitable to their surroundings, while they're shown asymmetrical and full of plant garnishes to simulate unkemptness (white Harfoot characters have their hair actually rather unkempt, or rather done up but then with pieces mussed up), styles that there's no way they have the time and resources to maintain at the level of technology and the lifestyle they're shown to lead. Actually nomadic people at a similar level of technology would have practical hairstyles that would look very, very different. I think we're also maybe supposed to think their culture is somehow so far back in the... timeline of cultural development... that their society hasn't yet invented the concepts of washing or being tidy, because they show lots of garments that have fastenings that nobody ever has fastened. (This is a common criticism of many portrayals of the middle ages, as you've probably heard - that everyone was dirty and nobody ever washed, among other inaccuracies.) Their portrayal is kind of like... a bunch of charming elementary-aged children who have been running wild all summer, except they're using it for adults. This seems of a piece with everything else about the Harfoots on the show, which is just as horrible from a plot/concept/fictional society perspective.
But you've also got multiple whole environments whose visual style had to be invented. The culture of Númenor couldn't look like Gondor, or like Rivendell or Mirkwood, or like dwarf and hobbit stuff. The Harfoots, who are supposed to evolve into hobbits later, needed a new look, admittedly. But whoever was in charge of creating the original visual designs for new cultures on this show just did a... bad... job. Like, they would look fine - or even fantastic - on the stage, their construction is good, etc, but... they don't have a clear and unified logic that makes sense. They don't fit neatly into the worldbuilding. They don't bear basically... any scrutiny.
And it is clear, looking at the cultures they've tried to visually invent here, that they were trying to take their inspiration from the visual design behind the Lord of the Rings movies. Númenor features clothes and jewelry that are obviously nearly direct ripoffs of Alphonse Mucha designs, and settings that combine massive medieval stonemasonry in gray like you'd appropriately have found in Gondor and Rohan with near eastern motifs (mostly Moorish-looking), but lots of (mostly CGI) interiors in pale white and gold tones with Greek and Roman lines (their moodboard for this was certainly mostly pre-Raphaelite, particularly John Wiliam Godward and Lawrence Alma Tadema, but with Mucha for the women). Attempts have been made to bring some Greek feeling - I'm thinking they were probably actually aiming for Minoan Crete inspiration because that would fit into conceptualizing Númenor as Atlantis. There are moments that suggest Crete, and there are lots of images that suggest Byzantium, but overall there just... isn't a cohesive picture, unlike LOTR and The Hobbit's work on elves and dwarves.
The visual antecedents of dwarves are clearly Viking and Celtic (with some hints of the ancient near east in the stonework, presumably because dwarves are symbolically the jews). The thing is, Viking and Celtic iconography already had so much in common that the creation of a coherent dwarf imagery from them was pretty organic. Númenor has, instead, a bunch of pieces that don't really fit.
The problems with the Harfoots' visual design are on a whole other level. It's like they're actually designed for the stage, or perhaps for a children's tv show, and intended to adhere to a much lower level of realism with no logic whatsoever. For example, we see a lot of characters played by Black actors whose hair is shown in styles that could only be achieved with a lot of work because of the nature of their fragile kinky-curly hair - styles that have to be painstakingly teased into shape and treated with conditioners and so on - and which are laughably unsuitable to their surroundings, while they're shown asymmetrical and full of plant garnishes to simulate unkemptness (white Harfoot characters have their hair actually rather unkempt, or rather done up but then with pieces mussed up), styles that there's no way they have the time and resources to maintain at the level of technology and the lifestyle they're shown to lead. Actually nomadic people at a similar level of technology would have practical hairstyles that would look very, very different. I think we're also maybe supposed to think their culture is somehow so far back in the... timeline of cultural development... that their society hasn't yet invented the concepts of washing or being tidy, because they show lots of garments that have fastenings that nobody ever has fastened. (This is a common criticism of many portrayals of the middle ages, as you've probably heard - that everyone was dirty and nobody ever washed, among other inaccuracies.) Their portrayal is kind of like... a bunch of charming elementary-aged children who have been running wild all summer, except they're using it for adults. This seems of a piece with everything else about the Harfoots on the show, which is just as horrible from a plot/concept/fictional society perspective.
