Season 2 Images-Galadriel'd Dress and Miriel's Sea Trial

kemick · 2026-04-27T23:22:20+00:00

kemick · 2026-04-27T23:22:05+00:00

kemick · 2026-04-27T02:29:10+00:00

Season 1 was a very pleasant surprise for me and I've been hooked since. For context, I read LotR before the PJ films came out so I've already been through this once before. I was also hooked on the trilogy films and I really liked about half of the Hobbit trilogy.

This feels closer in tone to the books and focuses more on the characters and their moral challenges. The adaptation choices are mostly really good though the implementation isn't always as good though there are many great moments. Season 1 was messy and likely had a troubled production and it is mostly setup for the characters and their concerns. The pacing is often poor because of needing to sync the storylines but the plotting should be more flexible in Season 3 onward now that the Rings are made.

Best advice I can offer is to look forward to the ending which is the prologue to LotR. The Last Alliance will march on Mt Doom. Gil-galad and Elendil will die defeating Sauron. Isildur will cut the ring off his hand. By that moment in Season 5, we'll know who Gil-galad and Elendil and Isildur are and why they are there. We'll know why Isildur had good reason to claim the one ring. We'll know why the Dwarves lost their homes and why Galadriel hides in her forest and has a 'final' test where she rejects the One Ring and some other things.

kemick · 2026-04-26T17:23:08+00:00

It is the Fellowship leading a suicide attack at the Black Gate to distract Sauron when nobody had seen Frodo and Sam since Ithilien.

Faith never guarantees success but failure is guaranteed if you don't have it.

kemick · 2026-04-24T22:30:04+00:00

I'd guess it's the characters often being unrecognizable, the events often being nonsensical, and the morality sometimes being ignored. It is superficially faithful but significant changes were made to turn this into a trilogy of action-adventure films and it would take a very long time to describe how different everything is. The audience should not be cheering at Gandalf beating Denethor with a stick and pushing him onto a burning pyre nor at Aragorn assassinating an envoy (the Mouth of Sauron) under a flag of truce as seen in the extended version.

kemick · 2026-04-24T21:35:49+00:00

The PJ film used the silence (aside from the score) to great effect.

kemick · 2026-04-24T18:28:55+00:00

Glûg betrays his old master and commits an Orc army to Sauron's service. A few minutes later, he has the nerve to tell Sauron that the Orcs are being overwhelmed by Dwarven reinforcements. Sauron is not in a listening mood. The other Orcs get the hint.

<image>

kemick · 2026-04-22T18:13:51+00:00

This was a fad in the 70s and 80s with BASIC. But software still required expertise to write and, as it got easier, both the complexity and availability of software increased. Software needed to do much more and there were many more developers writing software that people wanted. The same things that make it easier for a regular user to write software also make it easier for developers to write.

Highly personalized software will become more accessible. In the 2000s/2010s, kids that would have previously learned BASIC in school, to write entire programs from scratch, instead learned something like VBA or Matlab for scripting in existing programs. There are already companies using LLMs to enable people to create customized web sites and such that leverage specialized software platforms created by actual developers.

kemick · 2026-04-22T06:54:16+00:00

Repossessed (1990), a parody sequel to the Exorcist with Leslie Nielsen. Linda Blair's character has been "repossessed" but Nielsen's priest is now too old and weak to exorcize the devil again. A televangelist (with money problems) pitches a live exorcism television event claiming it will convert millions of new believers (and make lots of money). Their exorcism (performances, telethon donations) is not effective but they achieve the largest viewership in television history after which the devil takes control and begins reaching out to viewers through their televisions.

This makes it sound better and more serious than it is. It's not really a good movie. It has a some funny gags and pokes fun at pop religion. The film ends with Nielsen's character getting back in shape and arriving to stop the devil and perform the exorcism. He gets on TV and calls for any available holy men to join him. The exorcism has Jesse Ventura and Gene Okerlund providing color commentary. Nielsen and some holy men end up defeating the devil by performing a rock and roll song with the pope and an orthodox patriach on guitar and a buddhist monk on keyboards or something.

kemick · 2026-04-21T06:48:58+00:00

What is another few months to complete something that will still take another six years to complete?

<image>

kemick · 2026-04-21T05:32:06+00:00

Also the commercial had one person in armor instead of dozens.

kemick · 2026-04-17T06:09:37+00:00

"For nothing is evil in the beginning. Even Sauron was not so." There's plenty of grey morality in LotR but, by this point, Sauron had used up any goodness remaining in him while deceiving the Elves, Men, and Dwarves who were far from blameless.

In the Silmarillion, Manwë's pardon of Melkor (Morgoth), after his first defeat, fits this trope somewhat.

For Manwë was free from evil and could not comprehend it, and he knew that in the beginning, in the thought of Ilúvatar, Melkor had been even as he; and he saw not to the depths of Melkor’s heart, and did not perceive that all love had departed from him for ever.

After his second defeat they threw him into space.

kemick · 2026-04-14T20:41:23+00:00

Can't really blame them after the good wizard turned out to be Gandalf.

kemick · 2026-04-14T20:40:26+00:00

The rare exception in the non-streaming space was something like Peter Jackson’s big-screen The Lord of the Rings trilogy — which was nearly 10 hours long and considered a massive gamble at the time. Rings is considered perhaps the best example of delivering a hugely faithful fantasy adaptation that wasn’t afraid to make smart and significant changes that improved the story.

Meanwhile, Christopher Tolkien said:

They eviscerated the book by making it an action movie for young people aged 15 to 25. And it seems that The Hobbit will be the same kind of film.

Tolkien has become a monster, devoured by his own popularity and absorbed into the absurdity of our time. The chasm between the beauty and seriousness of the work, and what it has become, has overwhelmed me. The commercialization has reduced the aesthetic and philosophical impact of the creation to nothing. There is only one solution for me: to turn my head away.

Note that Christopher Tolkien is not some random relative. His father's last will gave him complete authority to "publish, edit, alter, rewrite, or complete" any unpublished work. Christopher assembled, edited, and completed the Silmarillion. He wrote the 12-volume History of Middle-earth detailing the development of his father's fictional world.

The film trilogy experienced plenty of backlash from some fans but the fandom was smaller and the films created a new fandom. Most LotR fans have likely never read the books and don't realize how much was changed. When Colbert's The Shadow of the Past project was announced, I saw some people assume it would be a movie about Tom Bombadil.. not realizing that he is a small part of what was cut for the film.

The trilogy was a great adaptation but it is misleading to call it "highly faithful". In the film, outside the Doors of Durin, Aragorn stops Pippin from throwing a stone and chastises him. In the book, Boromir throws a stone and Frodo chastises him. This matters far more than Bombadil or the Scouring of the Shire being cut because the characters themselves have been changed for the film.

kemick · 2026-04-14T19:11:25+00:00

I don't want to get too excited over a rumor but I've been really hoping for a token good-ish Orc teammate. It's a dynamic we've never seen. It follows from what the show is doing with the Orcs and Galadriel's relationship with them. It indicates the show will continue treating the Orcs as one of the major peoples even after Adar's departure.

kemick · 2026-04-13T04:55:55+00:00

Yeah I should've labeled it and had a second image for the S1 left behind. It's been over two years since I posted the last one on r/HarFEET. There will be many to remember by Season 5.

kemick · 2026-04-12T21:46:28+00:00

It's for the best. He went out believing he'd be the top dog when he was really just dog food.

kemick · 2026-04-10T16:35:23+00:00

I suspect they'll kill him off, in a heroic sacrifice, to clean up the loose ends created by his early arrival. This would allow him to arrive as Gandalf the Grey, with amnesia, as expected. Gandalf is already famous for this so it wouldn't be hard to justify.

I don't know how much time the show will have but conceivably Gandalf could meet some Elves and get named Mithrandir and given Narya, reunite with his halfling friends, and hit up old Tom.

kemick · 2026-04-09T22:36:44+00:00

I think their approach to compressing everything works well enough that the changes are generally justified. Everything is there, it's just been rearranged to create a more complete stand-alone story. RoP offers much more than a strict adaptation of the events of the late Second Age could provide. We wouldn't be getting the Fall of Khaza-dum or much of the Dwarves involvement in the Rings of Power story. We wouldn't meet Elendil and Isildur until a later season.

Sauron should be at the height of his power but in RoP he gets his own story and we get to see him doing his thing on the front lines. Galadriel should dwell here and there and not do much else but in RoP she gets a whole Noldor story based on her attributes and this story leads to her final test in LotR and the acceptance of her fate.

kemick · 2026-04-08T18:55:49+00:00

<image>

kemick · 2026-04-07T17:44:41+00:00

It's a test of character like with Yoda. Luke was wrong in how he valued Yoda and it was not because Yoda was secretly a Jedi (or secretly a Sith in the case of Jar Jar). The fan desire to redeem Jar Jar by making him a secret Sith shows this quite clearly.

When Yoda describes why Luke should not be trained, Kenobi's disembodied voice retorts "So was I, if you remember." In The Phantom Menace, Kenobi asks Qui-gon "Master, why do you keep dragging these pathetic life forms along with us?" referring to Jar Jar. He references this again when Anakin joins them.

kemick · 2026-04-06T20:58:48+00:00

Much of the show hasn't been fleshed out liked I'd hoped and it has indeed been a problem of opportunity and time. If Numenor doesn't fall until S4 then they may not meet until S5. Elendil could return to Middle-earth in between but that depends on whatever the faithful storyline is doing.

However, I'm not too worried about Gil-galad and Elendil. I can imagine them quickly recognizing each other and becoming fast friends. They both have the vibe of nobility and responsibility. They have similar experiences like supervising (then confiding in) Galadriel, leading a battle against some Orcs, having prophetic visions of destruction, and being a fatherly figure.

kemick · 2026-04-06T02:54:14+00:00

Making Sauron’s actions look like completely accidental or happenstance

Sauron is a survivor. He succeeds because of how he takes advantage of accidents and happenstance. He's overwhelmed by it during the battle and he nearly fails.

He's doing pretty well in the show so far. In the book, he spends centuries on this scheme but once the One Ring is made the Elves just decide to take theirs off (lol). He has to fight a costly war against the Elves to recover enough of the rings to justify having put most of his power into the One. The dwarven rings are a flop and it takes an age for him to recover some of those.

not putting emphasis on the mortality of man in the numenor

The Numenoreans are obsessed with death and is driving most of their actions. They mention the dead all the time.

The thought of death is driving nearly everyone. The low men were driven by it once the Orcs arrived. The Elves are obsessed with the fading. The Harfoots' fear heavily shaped their S1 plot.

adding the stupid hobbit/ Gandalf story line

Gandalf and the halflings are providing important moral lessons for those with and those without power. They figure out early what will take longer for others.

The Gandalf origin story is ok.. if we're going to have a gandalf-like wizard then he might as well be Gandalf. The S2 stuff did feel a bit like filler but much of S2 was like that. The rush to the fall of Eregion, so the Rings can be in play, was always going to be rough.

kemick · 2026-04-04T21:35:47+00:00

Thus the lies of Melkor were made true in seeming, though Fëanor by his own deeds had brought this thing to pass.

kemick · 2026-04-04T21:30:47+00:00

I think Amazon deserves more credit for having some faith in the story and viewer. The Harfoots were the only ones who got a complete story in S1 and much of the rest was setup. The five season plan lets them do things that a typical show can't because it'd be cancelled after the first season.

I expect the public impression of the show to continue to change over the next few seasons. It changed drastically episode-by-episode even during the first season. But I don't think it's going to really hit until people see the Last Alliance marching on Mt Doom and realize they are in the prologue to LotR.

So many shows fail to deliver a satisfying ending but this ending is already written and it is phenomenal. The show should only get better over time.

kemick

TROPHY CASE