I'm not going to expect anything. It wouldn't be the first time when the creators sound right before the premiere and still go wildly off with the source material.

That said, "the strange human Halbrand" is my pick for unexpected Sauron though they would probably need a twist he's not aware who is. If he's traveling to disover his past or something like that, it's deinitely him. I just fully expect that one of these new characters will be him in the first season only to be revealed in the last episode. The more likeable the person, the more likely it will be him. That way they could have the same surprise as the elves have with Annatar, since that one is not a mystery to the book readers.

 

That could honestly be a fun trope if done well. Halbrand seems a likely candidate. I fully don't expect to know who it is for sure until the end of Season 2 at the earliest. There will likely be a lot of red herrings as this is the central unknown of the series.

 

“We wanted to go to coastlines,” McKay says. “You’ve never seen the coastline of Middle-earth onscreen before.”

Haven't we seen grey haven at least?


"Yes, King Durin III is also in the show and he’s portrayed by someone who knows something about playing a bad dad. In Tolkien’s works, Durin III and Durin IV are not father and son, and the title of Durin is more complicated than just a name, but remember that McKay and Payne are compacting thousands of years of Tolkien’s Second Age down into one shortened timeline."

I am sceptical about their ability to compress the passing of time in a manner that won't take away from the feeling of vast parts of history passing.


"This Sounds Like a Lot of Made-Up Story! What of Tolkien’s Can One Expect?"

This question captures my sentiment pretty well. The whole thing reads more like middle earth will be turned into a setting in which people can do their high budget AU fanfiction and less than a retelling of Tolkiens Stories.

At least the music should be great, that is worth something.

 

Sadly, not got time to go into depth, but I can see that. 'Halbrand', if nothing else, and assuming it's from Old-English, could be 'Hal' = hidden or secret, 'brand' = fire.

On the other hand, it could 'Strongflame' (Hal -> Hale).

Will look into the rest later.

 

I suppose I am in the camp where I see some of the things they're doing and I don't like them; some of the stuff they're revealed I'm sceptical of, and some stuff I am almost certain I'll dislike, but overall I'm still optimistic, hyped and think that it'll be overall a good show.

Edit:

This does worry me.

 

It'll be difficult to establish the context of the setting without the Akallabêth to rely on. I suspect this is the major reason they're condensing the timeline down a lot.

 

Again, they very clearly can draw on details from other sources outside the purview of their rights contract. Otherwise they would not have been able to make that second age map, or have flat-topped Meneltarma in the background of their Numenorean port city.

The showrunners are completely correct. Like 80% of what is described in Silmarillion is at least casually mentioned in the appendices.

What the VF article implies is that if it's mentioned broadly, they can adapt it. But their adaptation also has to simultaneously be faithful to the specifics of the things they don't have the rights to. If they want to change something, or depict something outside purview, they'd need to go to the Tolkien Estate for permission, otherwise they could get slapped with intellectual copyright suits.

 

As long as they do not denature Lord of the Rings as Apple Tv did The Foundation, it should be worth it.

A Fanfiction instead of an adaptation. I am comforted by their constraint to not contradict the original work.

 

I suppose with any adaptation of written work to the screen, there's a balance to strike. I think any reasonable person can agree that either extreme (slavish devotion to the source material / original fiction with familiar names) is silly and there's a sweet spot in the middle where book/comic/etc readers will be sufficiently satisfied and newcomers to the franchise will be able to follow the show/movie without being confusued for not having read the source material.

As to where that balance lies and what exact elements must stay or be altered is up to every individual, and as they say, two people in a room will have three opinions on any issue. It's impossible to make an adaptation that will please everyone--book readers will always find something to complain about and that's part of the adaptation game, it is inevitable and imo showrunners who take up the job ought to stick to their vision regardless of the complaints. Yes, book readers will grumble and raise a meaningless storm on twitter--doesn't matter. If you compromise the quality of your work for the sake of pleasing the loudest voices, you'll end up with a bunch of bullshit. I say this as someone who has been one of the assholes who complained that this or that was changed because my personal preferences hadn't been met to my exact standard.

It's in the name. Adaptation, not exact translation from text to image. That is impossible to do. The written medium and the visual medium each have their own strengths and weaknesses. Text has an umlimited special effects budget. If I want to have an army of ten trillion dragons the size of mountains, I can have that in my written story because those words is all it takes to bring the trillion-megadragon army into existance. Adapting it to the screen would be impractical at best.

Though I have failed at it before and doubtlessly will again, I try to look at shows/movies adapted from books/comics as their own thing. In that vein, I recognize the HP movies as rather poor adaptations because they can't really stand on their own. The movies were made for book readers. Non-book-readers would be missing a lot of context and information that the movies just assume the audience already knows. On the other hand, having never read ASOIAF (well, I read some of the first book), I think the show was a phenomenal adaptation that does stand on its own. My gripes with the latter seasons aren't on account of differences from the GRRM text. I think the show was great for the first 6 seasons. We all know the faults of the last two, I shan't repeat them here.

To bring this back on topic, I have never read the LotR trilogy in full (although technically I think it's 6 volumes published in pairs, IIRC), I was bored out of my skull by the books and stopped at some point. I have read the Silmarillion and Children of Hurin, years ago, so I have an idea of what's what, but my recollection of that lore is extremely poor when compared to my memory of HP story details.

The Silmarillion, as I recall, often covers events that take place over hundreds of years in a very abridged fashion, the timeline jumps around to follow some characters, there are instances of the story "rewinding" to cover another event that took place around the same time of some other past events (like when the origin of the dwarves is told or what happened to the Grey Elves who never went to Valinor while their cousins were partying it up with the gods). I think in this case compressing some events in time is inevitable, filling in the gaps and inventing original material is inevitable.

All that is to say, I am staying off the hype train and out of the lore wars on Twitter and Reddit, I'll see what the show has to offer when it arrives.

 

Some of the audition dialogue was released a while ago, and given what we know about the characters, I'm much reassured by the lyricism of it all. Obviously not likely the in show dialogue, but it's quite good as is.

Tyra, Hennah, and Brannah feel very folksy, and these lines were meant to audition Nori and the other Harfoot who find The Stranger (Meteor Man).

The Eldien Beldor scenes (very very obviously now meant to audition Galadriel and Elrond respectively) is top tier elven mannerisms. It is not as polished as what Tolkien might write in terms of poetic meter, but it's very close. Especially Galadriel's parts.

The Aric / Woman bit is pretty obviously meant to audition Halbrand speaking to Galadriel. Halbrand being a likeable rogue exile is incredibly sus.

This is an excellent line. Galadriel is going to fucking slay.

 

Oh that is nice. Keeping to lyrical dialogue will drastically help with the feel of the show

 

This reddit user compiled a list of criticisms of the original LoTR films prior to release in 2001:

It’s interesting to see the parallels.

https://www.reddit.com/r/lotr/comments/strutc/a_look_back_on_how_fans_in_2001_criticized_pjs/

 

TIL some weirdo people think Kate Blanchett is ugly

 

Wow, this is actually pretty fascinating.

Just more proof as to how the more things change, the more they stay the same.

 

Remember how angry people were at Heath Ledger as Joker?

 

Who are we to deny the Return of the Cringe?

 

I assume it had something to do with Brokeback Mountain?

 

And a Knights Tail. It was seen as a romantic almost comic actor.

 

10 Things I Hate About You and few other films too. He had no role anywhere close to what people expected from Joker and then he basically redefined this character to something else yet fitting. A perfect example that you should always wait. There will be plenty that won't be good anyway allowing to complain all you want avoiding these few you would need to take back what you said about them.

 

https://www.theguardian.com/film/2022/feb/20/lord-of-the-rings-amazon-series-race

The guardian is weighting in on the nerdrage debate. It is the usual guardian position, so no surprise there. They try to connect any opposition to the project as alt-right trolling. Didn't even try to look for people voicing legitimate grievances. A bit disappointing, even for the guardians standard.