I don't see it. The LOTR CGI looks bad. Where Galadriel is falling? The Statue...

Etc. I see the same quality. *shrugs*

 

Well that's certainly a take. I think half of yall just want it to be bad so yall are right about your skepticism and can throw around toldyasos.

 

The trailer feels off to me, but I can't point my finger as to why. I just don't get the sense of LOTR from it.

But it's just a teaser trailer, so I will wait to judge.

 

Was it the lack of Howard Shore music? Because that is very jarring to my brain. He is confirmed to be doing the score though.

 

I'm very intrigued by this whole 'Meteor Man meets Harfoots' thing that was leaked, and now seemingly confirmed by 00:46 - 00:48.



I cannot for the life of me think what this would be lorewise, beyond some original content Ainur shenanigans.

Like, Sauron didn't fall to Arda. The wizards shouldn't be arriving yet, and they came by the Grey Havens. Eol found a meteor but that dude doesn't look very Elf-y.

 

Trailer looks good. I am hyped.

Just don't try to share your excitement on the internet. Discussion around this seems to be completely dominated by (i) relentlessly negative basement dwellers larping as edgelord indy!Harry and (ii) alt-right trolls.

@KHAAAAAAAN!! man falling from sky makes me think Eärendil but obviously him coming to Middle Earth would be a massive deviation from the established lore. I am beginning to wonder how much leeway they have to go AU - the more that is revealed about the show, the more leeway they seem to have (compared to the earliest rumours which said they couldn't change anything and couldn't even cover characters and events which were known).

 

I think reaction depends what space you're viewing. YT is basically Mordor, filled with nothing but hate and darkness. Twitter is Rhun, i.e. lots of hate, but not everyone is pure evil (probably). r/lotr is Numenor, half of them are corrupted. r/lotr_on_prime is Gondor, they're fighting the good fight but there are still bad seeds. r/tolkienfans is the Shire, where everything is sunshine and rainbows.

FellowshipOfFans, who has been 100% accurate on all leaks so far, has said while their rights agreement is just for LOTR, Hobbit, and appendices, they are able to go to the Tolkien Estate on case by case basis for rights to depict anything they want. That could also include a case by case agreement to make changes, which the time compression does seem to indicate.

 

What an absolutely retarded stance on things. People are reasonably cautious, this is most likely not going to do justice to Tolkien's work, and to be dismissed simply as a "basement dweller" or "alt-right" is such a low effort at hand-waving any potential criticism. Reminds me of the Wheel of Time shills, dismissing any negative views and trying to equate those who spout them to the Whitecloaks from the setting.

If you wish to participate in echo chambers, where nothing impacts your hype, where you gleefully ignore the shortcomings, I'm sure there's official forums of some sort that will shelter you from all the wrong-think you might come across otherwise.

 

Yes, you have correctly identified that you are precisely the kind of person I am talking about.

It is possible to have reasonable concerns. Steelbadger for example has some reasonable concerns which he expresses in this thread in a fair and measured way.

The people I am talking about - and you - are not expressing reasonable and fair concerns. They are frothing at the mouth with rage over minor or inconsequential points and often are just plain wrong. They're the kind of people who saw the title reveal and immediately took to the internet to rant about bad CGI only to be shown up when it turned out the entire thing was a practical effect and they were in fact looking at real fire.

 

No, not really. You just see me fitting into that mold because you're not capable of differentiating between a multitude of people who don't like what is to come of this. It's not as simple as you'd like it to be. Though I haven't posted like SB or approached the show-to-be from the same perspective, that does not invalidate concerns and worries about the show.

You yourself come up short when it comes to justifying your hype. Why be hyped in the first place? Because it's LOTR-related? Because you saw something you liked? You haven't explained the reasoning for your hype, so why should others try to justify their suspicions about what the show might be like? It can't work just one way. By what measure is someone else wrong and you right? By some vague definition, you're an absolute moron for thinking a company like Amazon has anything good in store for this show simply because they invested a great deal of money in the making.

What's minor or inconsequential? What makes them wrong? Genuinely asking here, not trying to bait or do shit.

I don't keep in touch with all the talk about the show online as I have minimum interest in it, though I will give it a watch once a few episodes come out, just to see what they did with the setting.

 

There's another Vanity Fair article which positions itself as an analysis of the trailer, but which seems to pluck information from out of thin air: https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2022/02/the-lord-of-the-rings-teaser-trailer-amazon

As far as the trailer is concerned, it's tough to get a good idea of how the CGI is going to feel in action from such fleeting scenes. I thought Rómenna (it was almost certainly Rómenna, with Meneltarma in the background, and the honkin' statue of a guy with a bird at his shoulder would seem a shoe in for Earendil) looked fine. Very Jackson's Grey Havens-esque. I think there's a tendency to look at 'clean' CGI and to say it looks unrealistic, but this is Númenor at its height of glory and power. If it looked dirty or run down like Minas Tirith in the Jackson movies I think I'd be disappointed. My primary gripe here is that it's pretty small for the primary port of Númenor.

I guess it could be some other, more minor, port, but that would be a strange choice. It's a common trope that fantasy cities are often far smaller in representation than they realistically should be. Case in point: Literally every settlement in the Jackson movies, and every settlement in every fantasy movie/series ever.

The CGI of Galadriel climbing the ice wall is a bit shonky. It lacks a lot of weight in how she moves, like she doesn't seem to swing out much after driving her dagger into the ice despite her momentum. A scene like this once into the actual show will be fairly blink-and-you'll miss it though, so they may simply have deprioritised it compared to bigger scenes. Additionally, the freeze-frame looks off too, again due to a lack of weight.

The problem there is that Elves have a slightly loose relationship with gravity as it is (I'm sorry, Legolas, but being 'light footed' doesn't mean you can walk on snow if you still weigh about as much as a similar Man). The seeming ease with which Galadriel is dangling here could potentially be put down to some aspect of Elvish grace.

The Vanity Fair article says this is 'clearly' Forodwaith, and that she is hunting down the remnants of Morgoth's followers, which presumably includes the big ugly thing later on (as the Elf in that scene is dressed very similarly to Galadriel in the climbing scene). Presumably it has been hiding in a cave. I will say that the big ugly thing looks very Netflix Witcher.

Arondir continues to exist. This is fine. The Vanity Fair piece claims once more that he's a Silvan Elf, and that the implication is that he's from the eastern forests of Middle-earth and does not interact much with High Elves, but then goes on to say that he 'keeps the peace in the Southland inhabited mainly by mortals'. What this means remains to be seen.

It also seems to be Arondir doing the jump with the axe in a later scene. I note that he has a chain attached to his leg. Some kind of escape attempt?

I got nothing when it comes to the whole meteor thing. The trailor seems to imply that Gil-Galad sees it, but we all know that means nothing. Could be almost anywhere, at almost any time.

In the Galadriel horse scene I see the riders with her seem to be wearing scale mail rather than plate like the majority of the known Elves. Amusingly, if we were to be true to Tolkien, the go-to armour for pretty much everyone should be chainmail. The presence of chainmail in Galadriel's 'adventurer' getup (seen in the monster scene again with Random Elf wearing a chainmail shirt) is actually a bonus, I think.

We have to assume Gil-Galad is going to be a main character, if only so that his death in the final battle can hit home properly. Given the Vanity Fair article, I'm going to assume that he's initially against Galadriel's hunt for baddies.

Elrond, according to the Vanity Fair article is going to be trying to rekindle the alliance between Elves and Dwarves, with Durin IV being his opponent/counterpart on the Dwarvish side. A possible precursor to the friendship between the Gwaith-i-Mirdain and the Dwarves?

The Vanity Fair article also claims that Disa is Durin's wife, which continues to match my more hopeful expectations. From the initial description, there was a bit of concern that she might be a sister of Durin, which while not impossible (different skin tones in siblings is possible), would have stretched credulity with Durin being as pale as he is, and Disa being as dark as she is.

We see a brief glimpse of some Mellyrn trees and a gathering of Elves. It seems to be bunch of warriors kneeling to another couple of Elves. One seemingly male with long dark hair, the other probably a woman with long blonde hair. I've been trying to work out who this may be, assuming they are a couple. Honestly, my first thought is Finwë and Indis, but it could be that the two are not in a relationship, and it is Galadriel and someone else. If it is set present day, and not in flashback, then the presence of Mellyrn would almost certainly be non-canon.

Then there's the scene of some Elves under attack by Orcs. My initial thought here is that this is Dagor Bragollach, in which two of Galadriel's brothers died (and the other, Finrod, nearly died, only to be saved by Barahir. This is where the Ring of Barahir came from). The Elf in the centre of the frame may therefore be Finrod shortly before being saved (and potentially shortly after his brothers died), or it could be Aegnor or Angrod. Angrod has the connection of being Gil-Galad's gramps, so that's another source for a flashback/history telling.

Finally, with the seeming Arondir-escape scene, and the shock-horror reveal of Galadriel as an Elf via her ears, I think it's a possibility that some factions of humans (Kings Men?) are explicitly anti-Elvish to the point of perhaps deliberately shaving Arondir's hair so that he cannot 'hide' his Elf nature. Slightly shades of Witcher/Dragon Age to be honest, but then again, Númenorean antipathy towards Elves in this time period was well established by Tolkien.

At this point I'm still mostly peering at everything with deep suspicion, but as it stands, there's nothing which has been shown which irreparably breaks Tolkien's setting. There's a lot of interesting possibilities being raised. Is it possible that they have just completely dropped a bollock? Sure, but I know it would get right on my tits if I wrote a story about an Elf with shaven hair, with a plan to show that his shaven hair is an important aspect of the character's past, and people just ignored that possibility and screeched in my face about it.

I am going to hope for the best, but prepare for the worst. Hence: having some fun with trying to theorycraft everything coming out of the Amazon money machine, while also constantly repeating the mantra that whatever does come out is merely a fanfic, and will not impact the books as I know them.

I do find the discussion about the not-shit-ness of the trailer to be amusing, though. If the trailer was dogshit, it would be held up as evidence that the show will be dogshit, of course. But apparently not being dogshit means it's just like WoT, which was dogshit, and thus this will be dogshit.

I fully expect the tv show to be imperfect, but then so were Jackson's movies. They were still a net good, however, despite character assassinating poor Faramir.

 

I thought those people were rocks. Nice catch.

 

My first thought thought about the galadriel scene was that it might depict the crossing of the helcaraxe, but that would not fit the timeline.

The arrow catching is a bit over the top and I am at a loss about the meteor man. If he is actually inside the fire, he must be some kind of Maia, right?

@Odran
Try to stop behaving like an egdy asshole, maybe then people wont assume that you are one.

 

Am I the only one that loved that? It was a straight-up callback to Jackson-era Legolas ridiculousness.

 

I think the shout out of meteor man as Sauron is probably the best guess. It's gotta be either that or just a completely original character. We know Sauron turns up in this period in fair form and seeks the friendship of the elves. We just don't know how he showed up. Posing as an emissary sent by the Valar is one way to do it.

 

Trailer looks miles better than WoT. I try to avoid hype trains now. I'll see it when it's released, nothing more to say.

 

This is just a speculation, but a lot probably changed with Christopher Tolkien resignation from chairmanship of the Tolkien Estate around 2017. He wasn't a person who would allow that many changes, but I'm not sure if that can be said about people who make decisions now.

I like the trailer. The CGI could use more work, but it's not bad, just needs to be less obvious it's done by a computer.

Other than that, while I like Galadriel, I feel that Elrond is off. Maybe it's the hair that aren't long as was established for elven characters.

 

Trailer was fine? Not sure what there is to be mad about. I have pretty much zero expectations for it to be good but here's to hopefully being pleasantly surprised!

 

In an interview with Tom Shippey (one of the resident Tolkien Scholars), he detailed what Amazon could and could not cover, and that's where the 'they are forbidden from breaking canon - everything must remain Tolkien' stuff came from. He was summarily departed from the project for reasons unknown.

So yeah I'd guess it has definitely changed to a more open stance on adaptations (and the rapid aquisition of rights by Amazon post Christopher's departure supports that), but I do not think it was to a position of rampant leeway. Like, there is a reason Simon Tolkien, who liked Fellowship a lot (not the second two) and broke ranks with his dad on the stance of working with Jackson, is just a director, not an executor of the Estate. Michael George and Priscilla have always been firmly Team Protect The Legacy.

Edit:

NotR breakdown. This guy remains my favorite fandom theorycrafter.

 

Another new Vanity fair with details from the showrunners. Read it.

I am thoroughly hyped now.