[Malankazooie]

Be prepared for the 'woke' comments to snake their way through the discourse about this (here possibly, but most likely out there in the wider interwebs).

[Malankazooie]

Malankazooie, on 08 February 2022 - 08:03 PM, said:

Supposedly something going to be shown during the Superb Owl. A rumor though, but I wonder what it will be if true?

It happened! And it doesn't disappoint! I don't think there will be any fence sitters after seeing it.

[Tsundoku]

Was it this?

[polishgenius]

Malankazooie, on 14 February 2022 - 01:55 AM, said:

I don't think there will be any fence sitters after seeing it.

I don't know, it wasn't that bad.

[QuickTidal]

This show looks fantastic!

I was on the watch party with The One Ring.net staffers, and other big Tolkien fans like the Tolkien Professor Corey Olsen, and everyone seemed to genuinely think it looks great!

What I think struck me most is how it's not trying to ape what PJ did with the movies, and isn't afraid to kind of do its own thing visually and tonally. Even the narration, which seems to be the proto-Hobbit Harfoots (and if I had too guess who it was, it's that girl with the curly hair in that early shot lit by the lantern), instead of someone expected like Galadriel helps give you a tonal difference.

Scattered thoughts after watching it about 15 times.

- Galadriel on what APPEARS to be the Helacaraxë leading the Noldor to the East after the Kinslaying. Some people have speculated that this is the Forodwaith instead, which is also possible I guess.
- The opening city could be anywhere. Though it DOES kind of look like Melentarma in the background, so if we are seeing a harbour it could be Romenna (where the Faithful reside, VS Armenelos where the anti-Valar King's Men reside), and some have even speculated that it's Alqualonde in Valinor but I think it's more likely that it's Númenór since the show focuses win the Second Age.
- We know that the first two episodes of the show will be showing the 1st Age events as a sort of long flashback, so anything is possible....but that likely means the majority of things in this teaser are from this episodes.
- Everyone seems pretty sure that the blonde elf in armour without a helm crying out in one of the last shots is Finrod Felagund, which would make that battle likely Dagor Bragollach (Battle of the Sudden Flame; last of the Wars of the Jewels).
- Can't tell if that's Howard Shore Score music or just trailer music, but I liked it.

I was already excited about this show, but after watching and re-watching that teaser and hearing it discussed so in-depth by die-hard Tolkien nerds, I'm really excited!

This post has been edited by QuickTidal: 14 February 2022 - 02:21 PM

[Tiste Simeon]

Yes I like this. They seem to have made an effort to keep to a similar visual style to the movies and I know they're not precisely trying to do the same thing but it's a familiar feel without it being a carbon copy. I was already going to watch it regardless but this has got me pretty hyped.

[QuickTidal]

Tiste Simeon, on 14 February 2022 - 01:20 PM, said:

Yes I like this. They seem to have made an effort to keep to a similar visual style to the movies and I know they're not precisely trying to do the same thing but it's a familiar feel without it being a carbon copy.

Yes, different but since it's largely New Zealand you still know you're back in Middle Earth! It was a good choice to shoot there at least for S1 to bridge between the movies and the show.

It will also be interesting to see Season 2 as they have shifted to shooting in the United Kingdom, partially to save some money (it was super expensive to shoot in NZ) and partially because the Tolkien Estate felt that they should since Tolkien was inspired by UK locations for his work, so it makes sense.

At any rate, I felt back in Middle Earth and that's good enough for me!

[Tiste Simeon]

QuickTidal, on 14 February 2022 - 01:40 PM, said:

Tiste Simeon, on 14 February 2022 - 01:20 PM, said:

Yes I like this. They seem to have made an effort to keep to a similar visual style to the movies and I know they're not precisely trying to do the same thing but it's a familiar feel without it being a carbon copy.

Yes, different but since it's largely New Zealand you still know you're back in Middle Earth! It was a good choice to shoot there at least for S1 to bridge between the movies and the show.

It will also be interesting to see Season 2 as they have shifted to shooting in the United Kingdom, partially to save some money (it was super expensive to shoot in NZ) and partially because the Tolkien Estate felt that they should since Tolkien was inspired by UK locations for his work, so it makes sense.

At any rate, I felt back in Middle Earth and that's good enough for me!

Yeah he taught up in Lancashire and walked around the Pendle area I think a lot of his inspiration came from there (though it's hardly as breathtaking as the NZ landscape)

[QuickTidal]

Tiste Simeon, on 14 February 2022 - 02:57 PM, said:

QuickTidal, on 14 February 2022 - 01:40 PM, said:

Tiste Simeon, on 14 February 2022 - 01:20 PM, said:

Yes I like this. They seem to have made an effort to keep to a similar visual style to the movies and I know they're not precisely trying to do the same thing but it's a familiar feel without it being a carbon copy.

Yes, different but since it's largely New Zealand you still know you're back in Middle Earth! It was a good choice to shoot there at least for S1 to bridge between the movies and the show.

It will also be interesting to see Season 2 as they have shifted to shooting in the United Kingdom, partially to save some money (it was super expensive to shoot in NZ) and partially because the Tolkien Estate felt that they should since Tolkien was inspired by UK locations for his work, so it makes sense.

At any rate, I felt back in Middle Earth and that's good enough for me!

Yeah he taught up in Lancashire and walked around the Pendle area I think a lot of his inspiration came from there (though it's hardly as breathtaking as the NZ landscape)

I think they'll use lots of Scotland and Ireland as the locations can be much more Middle Earth-y.

[flea]

Although this looks good, it will be interesting to see how the show runners structure the story. LotR works partly because it starts small and branches out, which is the typical structure for a quest story. Dramatically it works because we care about the characters on a micro level. What Tolkien did brilliantly, however, was to create scenes where the world expanded, which hooked me entirely when I first read the books. The biggest challenge will be to create the micro story with characters about whom we care. I love that we are going to see the full story of Galadriel, but I am most curious about what characters will emerge. My greatest fear is that the plots will resemble a rehash of contemporary story lines, essentially cliche, while I hope that the writers manage to successfully channel a version of Tolkien.

[polishgenius]

flea, on 14 February 2022 - 03:40 PM, said:

Although this looks good, it will be interesting to see how the show runners structure the story.

One of my main worries is that they're cramming a much longer timeline into a few years, to avoid having to constantly make new human characters while the elves stay the same.

One of my other main worries is I just don't like the visuals. It looks expensive, but if you played it on silent for me and told me it was Dungeons and Dragons or some generic fantasy I'd have believed you.

[QuickTidal]

polishgenius, on 14 February 2022 - 04:20 PM, said:

flea, on 14 February 2022 - 03:40 PM, said:

Although this looks good, it will be interesting to see how the show runners structure the story.

One of my main worries is that they're cramming a much longer timeline into a few years, to avoid having to constantly make new human characters while the elves stay the same.

This doesn't bother me. There's no feasible way to shoot these events so they happen as they do in the source material, so condensing it makes sense. Plus we have 5 seasons coming, so there's room there. I mean, they can hit all the main things and even if it just focuses in on Al-Pharazon's time they can probably communicate the things that need communicated about Numenor, the division of the peoples there, the conflict, and especially Sauron's influence. The Akallabeth is not all that long either, so Tolkien himself did a lot of condensing from one king to the next.

[Cause]

One thing that bugs me is that take Galadriel for example. She looks like a female human warrior not an elf. In the movies you could tell the elfs at a glance. It was obvious, they were cleam, otherwordly and have different armor design and clothes. This doesnt seem to make that as clear.

[Azath Vitr (D'ivers]

polishgenius, on 14 February 2022 - 04:20 PM, said:

flea, on 14 February 2022 - 03:40 PM, said:

Although this looks good, it will be interesting to see how the show runners structure the story.

One of my main worries is that they're cramming a much longer timeline into a few years, to avoid having to constantly make new human characters while the elves stay the same.

One of my other main worries is I just don't like the visuals. It looks expensive, but if you played it on silent for me and told me it was Dungeons and Dragons or some generic fantasy I'd have believed you.

'You thought Game of Thrones was hardcore grimdark? ALL THE HUMANS DIE at the end of the season! (... or episode, or minute, depending on the timescale)' would be amusing, but much as the popularity of prestige television and some amount of flexibility and experimentation has expanded recently... still too much more for a mass audience than I'd wager Bezos &co would wager (unless he extends his lifespan and oversees a human-computer and/or bioengineering advance in the general population sufficient to let them appreciate greater complexity (and faster change)...).

This post has been edited by Azath Vitr (D'ivers: 14 February 2022 - 05:04 PM

[QuickTidal]

Cause, on 14 February 2022 - 04:55 PM, said:

One thing that bugs me is that take Galadriel for example. She looks like a female human warrior not an elf. In the movies you could tell the elfs at a glance. It was obvious, they were cleam, otherwordly and have different armor design and clothes. This doesnt seem to make that as clear.

I'm not sure what you're talking about.

The elvish armour in the show on Gil-Galad looks almost identical to PJ's movies.

And Galadriel's silver armour (which is thousands of years older if they are showing the 1st Age events in those scenes) looks like a progenitor to that armour with the curves and layering just heavier and more protective.

And Finrod's (and those around him) looks like they match Galadriel's as that battle is also the First Age (defeat of Morgoth at Angband), just in Gold.

Also, clean? How do you mean?

Here's Finrod from the show.

 in.jpeg (146.79K)
Number of downloads: 0

And here is Elrond thousands of years later.

 images.jpeg (8.52K)
Number of downloads: 0

[Werthead]

Vanity Fair, who've had the inside skinny on this for a while, confirmed it was Galadriel in Forodwaith rather than in Helcaraxe. Apparently we do get a Helcaraxe flashback, but Galadriel is in different garb.

Spoiler

VF also seems to have rolled back the idea that the first two episodes are some kind of super-flashback to the First Age. Very clearly there will be flashbacks - we've seen Finrod and the Trees of Light pic - but the first two episodes focus on Galadriel in the Second Age. Her journey on the raft and shipwrecking is apparently in Episode 2. Someone also said there is some data on the Amazon site confirming that Episode 1 will only be 60 minutes long, but that might just be a placeholder. We do know that Episode 1 is called "Shadow of the Past," so heavy flashbacks are likely.

Quote

Plus we have 5 seasons coming, so there's room there. I mean, they can hit all the main things and even if it just focuses in on Al-Pharazon's time they can probably communicate the things that need communicated about Numenor, the division of the peoples there, the conflict, and especially Sauron's influence.

I think the timeline is more compressed than that:

Spoiler

It looks like they're starting just before the forging of the Rings, going through the forging and the War of Sauron and Elves. A popular guess seems to be that Sauron will be captured and chained at the end of the war (rather than escaping) and will be taken back to Numenor in chains at that point. He'll then corrupt the Numenoreans and then we get the Downfall. They could structure it a number of ways but Season 1 as the build-up, Season 2 as the War of Sauron and Elves, Season 3 as the corruption of Numenor, Season 4 as the Downfall and Season 5 as the Last Alliance makes sense.

That all rests on the information that the Numenor crew are indeed Isildur/Pharazon/Elendil and they are the Numenorean royal family when the show starts. We know they've been cast and will appear, but they could be in a different timeline of storytelling.

[polishgenius]

https://twitter.com/...253881651937283


This is a very small thing taken on its own, but it's an example of the kind of thing that is making me cynical about this show. Just a seeming lack of care for the details in amongst all the splashy effects and stuff. Tolkien made a whole set of rules about Hobbit names and how they translate into English. Proudfoot and Brandybuck had reasons for being that, and smooshing them together as a precursor just doesn't work and sounds, as commenters have said, like something created by an online Tolkien name generator.

Elanor is even worse because that was a name canonically invented for Hobbits by Samwise and Frodo. It should not be showing up as a Hobbit forerunner name hundreds of years before.

I won't spend too much time in here pissing and moaning since clearly y'all are more hyped for this than me but grrr, I'm nervous about this.

[QuickTidal]

polishgenius, on 14 February 2022 - 06:01 PM, said:

https://twitter.com/...253881651937283


This is a very small thing taken on its own, but it's an example of the kind of thing that is making me cynical about this show. Just a seeming lack of care for the details in amongst all the splashy effects and stuff. Tolkien made a whole set of rules about Hobbit names and how they translate into English. Proudfoot and Brandybuck had reasons for being that, and smooshing them together as a precursor just doesn't work and sounds, as commenters have said, like something created by an online Tolkien name generator.

?

The proto-hobbits of this age (The Harfoots, Fallowhides, and the Stoors) being naming variations on the existing clans of Hobbits we know of makes perfect sense since we know that ALL the Hobbit's in the Shire are descended from those three tribes, who blended in originally in Bree and began the Shire, who in turn begat the Buckland clans.

So a Harfoot, being named Brandyfoot (keeping with Tolkien's naming about hobbit hairy feet), and that eventually lives in Buckland and the family name becomes Brandybuck (like Merry) from Brandyfoot...like that genealogy is pretty easy to see happen in a few thousand years isn't it?

polishgenius, on 14 February 2022 - 06:01 PM, said:

Elanor is even worse because that was a name canonically invented for Hobbits by Samwise and Frodo. It should not be showing up as a Hobbit forerunner name hundreds of years before.

Um...who wants to tell him? Should I tell him? I'll tell him.

Elanor was a small, star-shaped yellow flower. It was one of the flowers brought by the Elves from Tol Eressëa to Númenor. Lining right up with this show's timeline...Sam and Frodo used the same flower to name Sam's daughter as the elves thousands of years earlier.

EDIT:

In before Macros says it: NERDS!

This post has been edited by QuickTidal: 14 February 2022 - 06:43 PM

[worry]

Are you guys Name-enóreans?

[QuickTidal]

worry, on 14 February 2022 - 06:44 PM, said:

Are you guys Name-enóreans?

LOL, goddamit Worry!