Numlock Sunday: Susana Polo on The Year of the Ring

By Walt Hickey

Welcome to the Numlock Sunday edition.

This week in the Sunday edition I spoke to the brilliant Susana Polo, the author of the book The Year of the Ring, which collects an incredible project that was launched by the games and culture website Polygon diving into The Lord of the Rings.

I loved the book, and when the news was announced that Polygon had been sold and much of its staff laid off I wanted to have Susana on to talk about the book, the work she and her colleagues did at Polygon, and why this franchise has been just so enduring and touched so many people.

The book is available wherever books are sold.

This interview has been condensed and edited.

Susana Polo, thank you so much for coming on.

It's a delight.

I'm such a big fan of your work. I was such a big fan of Polygon, the site where you have spent the past couple of years. I want to have you on because there was a project you worked on at Polygon that you eventually turned into a book that I really, really love. And I guess I just want to talk to you a little bit about The Year of the Ring and just how The Lord of the Rings remains startlingly relevant all the time. I guess I'll just back out: what got you interested in The Lord of the Rings?

I was a kid who liked science fiction and fantasy, and I think I read The Hobbit in middle school, and it took me a few tries, then I finished. And I did read The Lord of the Rings in middle school for the first time. It’s something that's been simmering back there for a really long time. I think I came to The Lord of the Rings in the same way that most nerds do; it's just this big classic work. Then it gets your hooks into you, and you start playing Dungeons and Dragons. And it just becomes a gateway to a lot of other stuff.

Yeah, and obviously, the films, I think, have just left such an indelible mark on pop culture. Do you want to speak to those a bit, too?

Oh, yeah. I was a sophomore in high school when the first one came out. I remember in middle school using the school Wi Fi connection. We were still using QuickTime then, and so you had to wait for the video to buffer all the way to this reel that I have never seen since. It was the first behind-the-scenes footage that was posted of a film before, all the trailers for all of that, of people working on stuff behind the scenes. That’s footage that I've never seen anywhere else, and may never, because it's by memory, from being 13 years old.

I got into this cycle with my friends, we would all go see the movies that holiday season. Then, when the DVD editions came out, which is usually in the fall of the next year, it would be like, “Well, everybody's home for Thanksgiving. Let's watch The Lord of the Rings DVDs. Let's get back to these movies. And the special features were.”

The special features on The Lord of the Rings DVD set, I think, are still the gold standard. I don't think I've ever seen a release of a cinematic or television project that had that like. Maybe that's a piece that we should have had in The Year of the Ring: figuring out who is in charge of producing all of those interviews and recording all of that process, and then who cut it together, who decided how it would go, who edited, because it's brilliantly edited to bring out these narratives of the actors relationships. I think that is also a part of just keeping The Lord of the Rings in my percolating young adult brain: the charisma and the camaraderie and this narrative created by those documentaries. This in-house documentary about the making of those films taught me a ton, certainly, about film production. It prepared me to know, to a certain extent, how things work when I eventually wound up in my career covering media,

They were remarkably candid. It's almost as if they knew that they were producing a historically crucial film.

That's what's wild about it. They say all the time that the idea for making this movie is “We're not making a fantasy film. We're making a historical epic.” The set and the production design and the costumes and all the languages need to be as researched and as accurate as we can get. We need to treat it with that gravitas. But it is also this sense of “This needs to be preserved.” That's another question I would love to ask somebody. Does that come down to New Zealanders being really proud to be trusted with this property, and like this project does? Is it that everybody working in this industry is already a fan of the books? Do they feel inspired by the story itself, or is it just that it was so big? Yeah, some of my lingering questions to dig more into how those came to be.

Not to get too sidetracked, but my favorite part of the behind-the-scenes is…did you ever see the one with the armorers where there's just two dudes whose job is to make all the chainmail? They went mad!

The book is such a great labor of love for a thing that is very clearly a labor of love. There was basically just a year where you all decided, “Oh, this would be a good year to have a lot of content dedicated towards this franchise and this lovely series.” Where did the idea come from, and what was your role in executing it?

Yeah, we were in the waning days of 2020, and what we learned over that year was that we had to be prepared to create our own news cycles to play with. Not exactly news cycles in the sense of “We're gonna make stories about the things that don't deserve to have stories made out of them.” But we need to invent our own reasons to write about things that we're interested in, because we can't count right now on the pandemic entertainment industry to have a steady cadence of stuff coming out. We have to give ourselves reasons to talk about things that we know we can talk about eloquently and interestingly.

My editor at the time, Matt Patches, brought up that 2021 was going to be the 20th anniversary of the release of The Fellowship of the Ring. And he was like, “Could we do a weekly series of features about The Lord of the Rings movies in a real moment of, oh, that's cute. They're like, “That's so naive.” I was like, “Do I think we can come up with 52 interesting things to say going through these movies? Yeah, of course.” If you asked me, “How's it going? Susana,” in 2021, the first thing that I would say was, “Well, I don't know what I'm doing for Year of the Ring next week. I’m terrible. I'm so stressed out, life will never be sweet again, and everything's awful.” That or “I know what we're doing for Year of the Ring next week, and it's fine. I'm doing pretty okay, actually.”

That was the barometer of my emotional state. We have to get another feature up on Wednesday. And we made it. We always get it up on Wednesday. Sometimes it was like 6 p.m. on a Wednesday, but it was always Wednesday. We did 52 of them, and most of them are in the book. Some of them didn't make it into the book for really boring editorial reasons. There are about 50 pieces in the book. Some from the original project were taken out and swapped in for other reporting we've done on Lord of the Rings and interesting features. And there's one original piece in the book that is not on Polygon, the website at all, that I wrote because I felt like there should be something in the book that you couldn't get online.

I remember reading all these stories in real time, and it was like, exactly the stuff that I wanted to read and talk about. You dove into some of the classic stuff. Whether it’s like all the things that make you a little bit annoying when you're watching The Lord of the Rings, and like, “Oh, did you know he broke his toe?” And even the debate over which towers are the two towers which as a long-time fan of the series is as enraging as you describe. You hit all the big, great notes, but also get into the depth of stuff that I had no idea about.

There's just an amazing story about the body double of John Rhys-Davies that genuinely changed how I viewed these films and just the art of filmmaking in general. I believe the writer was James Grebey.

James came to us with that story and really just executed it. I think a lot of what we publish, and I think a lot of the stuff in Year of the Ring, is explainers and a few personal essays and critical takes on fandom culture, and they're all, they're all great pieces, and they all fit the bill. But there are a couple of pieces that are just straight up, like old-fashioned reporting: James' piece, and we've got a piece on the original two-movie pitch that Peter Jackson and his collaborators turned in when Harvey Weinstein was on the project. There are a couple of pieces in there that are really just “Tell a story that had never been told before.” And they're special to me.

From my own side, I feel very comfortable in media criticism. I feel very comfortable doing an interview and making a feature out of it. I feel very comfortable in opinion work. It's the in-depth reporting, going out, discovering something, investigating it, finding and bringing and telling people about it; that is still up on a high mountain, mystical to me. It was very special to be able to work with folks who were doing that, get it on Polygon and get it into the book.

Yeah, yeah. That was just an amazing story that got it one of those mysteries that you read about on a forum in 2004 of like, “Hey, why John Rhys-Davies doesn't have the tattoo that the other nine do, but his stunt double did?” And it just addressed a true piece of lore in a way that was just so defining of what this project could be.

Speaks to all the folks from the New Zealand film industry who didn't get on a red carpet in Los Angeles and are are a huge part of these films, but aren't the folks in the in the GIF sets on tumblr and aren't like the faces that we imagine when we say the quotes that got put into the movies.

So again, one reason that I wanted to talk to you a little bit about this was number one: really love this series, really love this book, folks should definitely check both of them out. But also, you mentioned this has personal essays, analysis, explainers, in-depth reporting. It just felt really, really so Polygon. And I don't know if folks have necessarily followed this entirely, but the site recently suffered a really significant setback and had a very substantial layoff that gutted the core staff. I mean, do you want to talk a little bit about Polygon in general and what your time there was like and what it was like working for one of the hottest hands in entertainment journalism?

I mean, I loved working at Polygon. I came to Polygon from Abrams Media, where I'd been running TheMarySue.com, founded it and was the senior editor on it for four years, I think. I didn't leave under great circumstances. It was a very demanding job (not great management), and Polygon wound up being the only job that I actually applied to out of that. Luckily enough, I got it.

The joke between me and one of my friends is that I got job heaven. I got to work in a unionized workplace (I mean, it wasn't unionized when I started there, but we unionized while I was there), covering stuff that I love, doing the writing that I love to do. It was constantly challenging. It was constantly rewarding. I got to work with some really incredible and brilliant people.

Yeah, it's tragic, but we're all staying in touch, and we're all trying to figure it out. This morning I had a thought like, “Gosh, it's been so long. Some people reached out to me on the day of the layoffs, and I really need to get back to them.” And then another voice appeared in my head that went, “It's been less than two weeks, and you were on vacation when it happened. Calm down.”

But we're all figuring out what's next. Yeah, it's been a blow. It's a really precarious industry, and in a lot of ways, I know a lot of folks in it, and I consider myself very lucky to have only been fired twice in my career. I've been doing this for like 15 years. Only being fired twice in 15 years in media reporting is phenomenal. What's different for me now is that I just know so many more people in the industry. My cohort has grown up, and we are in better positions than we were 10 years ago when I started at Polygon, and the world's very different. But also my connections are very different, and like the place I'm at right now is like, “Well, I got some severance, and I got some time, and I'm going to be figuring it out.”

I'm still early in the process of figuring out what's next. For me, at least, it's in the realm of “What if I wanted to do some different writing?” I don't know exactly what different writing that's going to be, but I figure if I don't look into it now, when? When would I do that? So yeah, I'm going to be looking at maybe going somewhere else outside of daily reporting and daily writing, maybe in the creative realm. Like I said, it's still very early, and I might wind up back in media, but I think the important thing for me right now is to just take some time to rest and evaluate without rushing right into something.

Yeah, I mean, that's extremely reasonable. I feel like Polygon is such a loss, but on the other hand, I think that a lot of the best parts of entertainment media are unrecognizable without the influence of Polygon. It feels like Polygon, in many ways, has really changed things for the better, whether it's how labor gets treated or what pieces can get published and things like that. It does feel like it did make a very substantial impact.

Yeah, I hope so. I don't want to entirely speak like the site doesn't exist anymore. Because I have beloved co-workers who are still there and still working as hard as I can under Valnet. We were always in this really interesting place of having to explain ourselves to studios and companies. I think in the video game world, people understood what we were, but on the entertainment team… I've seen a lot of coverage of Polygon layoffs being like, “Oh, this is terrible news for video game journalism.” I'm like, “Yes, but did you know that we also talked about movies and television and comic books?”

We're in this place of like, we have professional design shops. We say to the studios, “If you give us access, let us visit film sets, let us talk to your people, we are gonna produce stuff that looks professional. Like, we're not a fan site. We have the knowledge base of a fan site to get really deep on whatever genre thing you are pursuing. Just to take it to Lord of the Rings, this was our pitch to Amazon when The Lord of the Rings TV show came out: I know that Gandalf isn't just an old man with magic powers. You can put me in front of the showrunners, and I'm just gonna ask something about Melian the Maiar, maybe not that, because they can't actually put that in the show because they don't have the rights to The Silmarillion. We can do that, but we also have this beautiful website that stuff looks really good on. We're not gonna bury it under a million ads, we're not gonna put it in some crappy slideshow gallery. We have the chops to do, really, really cool trades-y stuff, but with this knowledge base that comes from a fan world

In the lead-up to the Villeneuve Dune movies, there were all of these exclusive press events that were very explicitly motivated by the idea that we need to explain to the normie press what Dune is about. Like we need to get Stephen Colbert in here to interview the cast of Dune about Dune, not for reporting, just to bring the press corps up to date on how Dune works, what it's about, and why it's important.

You can skip that with Polygon. We know why Dune is important, we know why it needs to be talked about. It was difficult to be in that mid-level position, where we could say, “Hey, we have the same traffic as Entertainment Weekly, you can talk to us about it and we have an audience for it.” But it was often difficult to make that pitch. I think that being in that mid-level space really was our value. We can do really good-looking stuff that you're going to be excited about, the stuff that respects the source material with a level of journalism and integrity and earnestness. But it is also deeply informed and deeply seated in how people interact with these properties and what they mean to people on a personal level, on a cultural level, or on a subcultural level. What The Lord of the Rings means to people who are fans of The Lord of the Rings, and not the broad audience of folks who will go see The Lord of the Rings movie in the theater. Yeah, I think I came around to a point.

By the way, the one original piece that I wrote for the book, I would love to ask you about it, because it's the only one I've never gotten audience feedback on.

Which one was it?

The only one I can't read the comments for. Well, I might not want to read the comments for this one. It was the one about orcs and racism. I interviewed, I can't remember his name now, but he works on diversity consulting and tabletop games. My favorite Tolkien piece, Leaf by Niggle.

I was just thinking about that essay the other day, because I read a thing that was really interesting about Andor, and how all of the atrocities that are played up in Andor are atrocities against human species. No one's speaking for the Geonosians, no one's speaking for that. It's a really pervasive idea: these built-in fantasy systems that have very complicated relationships with race, and particularly the interpretations of it in a cinematic medium, can oftentimes specifically draw on that.

Yeah, yeah. I've been thinking about Andor a lot. One of the pieces I was halfway through writing, and that now can't be published, was going to be a real banger of a piece for the third arc of Andor this season. But yeah, I was thinking about Andor going like, “Man, there are not a lot of aliens on this show.” And I guess part of that is, it's hard to infiltrate the human supremacists if you're a Wookiee. It's hard to go undercover in the Imperial Machine if you're a Wookiee. But yeah, it would be something very different if Ghorman were a planet full of aliens compared to Ghorman being a planet full of diverse actors.

Or just French people, specifically.

Right, yeah, yeah. But I love that they made a planet. I respect this so much, like 100 percent fully. Earnestly, I love that they were like, “We're going to make a typical Star Wars one resource planet. But that resource is going to be really integral to the show. It's going to be woven in. We're talking all about it. But ultimately, it's also going to allow us to create a planet where everyone wears just gorgeous coats.” And that's going to be a whole planet. This is a planet of people who wear gorgeous coats. And when they have their death scenes, and when they do cool fight stuff, their coats are going to spin out.

As a nerdy male person, the challenge of my life has been resisting a fundamental urge that I just possess, which is “I think I might look fetching in a cape.” And no show has challenged that resilience of not wearing capes more than Andor, where all the dudes wear capes, and they look amazing.

Everybody wears a cape in Star Wars

On that note, I know you're going to take a little bit of time, but where can folks find you, and where can they find the book?

Well, the book is available at pretty much all retailers. I recommend bookshop.org personally. I am on BlueSky @susanapolo.

I will also just say the book makes a great gift.

Oh yeah, well, I gave it to my dad and my brother for Christmas. I told them, under no uncertain circumstances, that they were not allowed to buy it for themselves. They could buy it for other people, but they were not allowed to buy their own copy. I'm on blue sky, and I'm at suzannapolo.com. I still need to update all my stuff, but like I said, it's been less than two weeks.

Susana, thank you so much for coming on.

Edited by Crystal Wang

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