[Formendacil]

This is a great topic--I don't think the slowness of replies is indicative of anything other than that, because this is a HARD topic. It's easy to say "RoP did XX wrong"--and I think we all have some proposition to put in place of "XX," though the values will vary. It's harder to say "and, therefore, an it were I, I would have done YY." As I was forcefully reminded in the context of having a 4-year-old, there's a difference between being able to recognise (to read it: a mental skill) a letter and write it (a manual skill).

In my own case, some of my biggest--well, most frequent--complaints were more in execution than in the grand scheme: dialogue and pacing and how things were cut together. And while I'm enough of a would-be amateur writer that, if you gave me RoP's text and didn't let me change anything of consequence, I would still want to try tweaking the dialogue, I don't think that's particularly consequential, and I don't think that's what Bêthberry is looking for. And I'm certainly not enough of a screenwriter (that is, I am not one at all) to tell you how to fix the pacing and timing--only enough to say I think it needs it.

That said... if you gave me the same brief as Amazon: make a multi-season show based off the Appendices with the same limitations (i.e. I can't just film a 1:1 dramatic reading of the footnotes to The Nature of Middle-earth), I think I have ideas that might have made the final product better.

1. Eliminate sub-plots! There's too much going on. I understand that they want to show us all of Middle-earth, to explore the whole world, to show off vast, epic scope and marvels, but... whose story is this? As a result of such a broad sweep, everything gets abbreviated. I think, to introduce us to this show, they need to pick a plot as the A-plot and stick with it. Ironically, they do HAVE an A-plot, and it's the same one I would pick:

2. The Elves! Season 1 should be all about the Elves and their internal politicking. Scrap that stupid "we need mithril or we'll be extinct next spring" constraint: if you spent four episodes showing how the Elves are restless and eager and starting to feel the first hints of fading, you don't need that atextual plot device. The hints of this are there: Gil-galad having no party with Eregion and Annatar, Galadriel being involved with Eregion in some way, and Celebrimbor totally putting the craft ahead of any other voice. But this should have been the dominant plot of the entire first season, not crammed into (at best) an episode and a half. There are some corollaries:

2A. Show just how FAST time moves for the Elves. Some of the best stuff in the Elrond/Durin relationship are about how the races view time--say, 20 years--differently. You could easily have parts of the story (sourcing materials, making contact with Númenor) where you meet a non-Elven character in their youth and meet them again old. If the focus is on the Elves, this becomes a short-hand for how time moves differently for them and it also allows the show to go from having a LONG time frame to a narrow time frame (zooming in)--one of the problems, I thought, was that RoP somehow flitted all over the landscape and thereby made Middle-earth feel quite a bit smaller. A similar thing happens to the time-scape: granted, of course, that they're changing timelines, but there's also no real sense at all for how LONG the Elves have been in Middle-earth: it doesn't feel particularly long at all.

2B. You want Original Characters? Where the [expletive not inserted] are the Gwaith-i-Mírdain? Celebrimbor has, at most, a few interns working with him in RoP, but they should be a whole GUILD: and if Celebrimbor is, of course, their leader: the genius grandson of the world's greatest genius, the weight of expectation that comes with being Fëanor's grandson would be far more hammered home if you had more characters: you could have some elder craftsman who worked an age with Aulë, is prickly to Dwarves (till the Aulë connection is demonstrated), and tells Celebrimbor "I smithied side-by-side with Mahtan." You could have some young whippersnappers who don't remember the orks getting a bit too close to Adar-territory. You could have female and POC characters--the Guild is supposed to be cutting edge and bold and into this intoxicating mix, you add Annatar.

2C. We were cheated of Annatar. There's hints of it, but I want a whole season of it! I think they did Sauron completely backwards: they said "we know the fans know Sauron is coming, so let's make a game of who he is." That is backwards: they should have shown us who Sauron is and then shown how he pulled the wool over all the eyes--heck, they should have shown him teetering on the edge of redemption. Galadriel should have had the "Sam waking up and pushing Gollum into evil forever" moment instead of being "completely right, after all!"

2D. On this note: Galadriel probably wouldn't be the Warrior Woman (in Season 1). There probably wouldn't be a war in Season 1, unless you insisted on a subplot among the Men of the South (which, again: I think you should pick which subplots you mean to keep). But that doesn't mean she can't be one ever: she SHOULD be to an extent in flashback to the First Age and she can be again once Sauron invades Eregion--it's just that insisting that she be one NOW requires that the Elves be fighting things now, and that's just missing the point: this is Elvendom at its peacetime zenith--this is when there really aren't any enemies!

3. On the subject of subplots: I think the best one to keep is the Southlands-turn-into-Mordor. If you insist on having Arondir there in some form... fine--a connection to "that which was before Mordor" in later seasons is fine. This makes a good connection for the passage of time: Arondir is a guardian to Bronwyn's great-grandmother, her grandmother, her mother in successive episodes before getting to Bronwyn. But you have to make a few changes here too.

3A. No Númenor to the rescue--no Númenor at all in Season 1, save references by the wistful Elves. Save them for later seasons (and make the reveal that they've Fallen into a shock and a tragedy--have a Glorfindel type return from the Blessed Realm and give a status update on blissful Westernesse, if you need to). If you need the cavalry to come, give it to the Silvan Elves (use some sort of Tauriel, even, Captain of Oropher's Rangers, if you need a Warrior Woman).

3B. Lean even more into the tragedy: don't let Bronwyn and Theo (who need new names, BTW!) travel with their "saved" people to Pelargir: this should be a rout, a retreat. If Orodruin is involved at all (which... maybe I save for Season 2 or 3 so that Sauron can do it himself), it shouldn't be a demon ex machina: let the Southlands think, in a season or two, that they really do have no choice but to become the Haradrim that are forever on Sauron's side. And let someone like Arondir become bitter at the passage of time and the shortness of mortal life--this can even be a deciding factor for the Gwaith-i-Mírdain, if you like, when he arrives, bloody and beaten to Eregion with tidings of the destruction of the Silvan Elves' allies.

Having said I would put MORE focus on the Elves' (and, by extension, the Dwarrowdelf) story, and that I would remove Númenor, and keep the Southlands but somewhat changed, that leaves the Istar/Harfeet. This got the most set-up-with-no-payoff of the stories in the show, so by removing the Sauron "mystery," I am sort of removing its raison-d'etre. Perhaps it could be reworked or dropped entirely...

My season 1 would look something like this (taking the 8-episode format as a given):

1: The Prologue(s): lots of First Age flashbacks, the Gwaith-i-Mírdain form in Eregion. Galadriel already chafes to form her own realm (I suppose Celeborn can be her tragic backstory... I... I guess. Whatever). She breaks away at last and the Gwaith-i-Mírdain go with her. In the South, we see the Silvan Elves (a SEPARATE realm) establishing a watch-tower in the Southlands, while Great-Grandma Bronwyn has a crush on Arondir.

2: Lots of stuff about the differences between Elves and Others (you can keep a lot of the Durin/Dísa stuff, though Elrond maybe isn't the best ambassador right now. Throw in some Original Character, if you like, or have Galadriel do it--she does say all the right words about Dwarves to Gimli, after all). Time should be passing: Arondir's Elves can have a set-piece battle against those every-multiplying orks in the Hills. There can be dark muttering among the Evil Barlimans of the world--maybe we see the Lugrom Hilt being passed down from father to son.

3. Annatar shows up. Gil-galad will have no truck with him. This is when we get Bronwyn & Theo and "the present," with Oropher pulling out of the Southlands (this was just a quick mission for them--and maybe the Sea is too near). If we're retaining The Stranger and the Harfeet, this is where they should really come on-screen (though there can have been hints of them earlier which pay off now).

4. Annatar and Galadriel are close, as he is with all the Mírdain. Adar can be still be revealed here. Basically, the remaining episodes can follow the rough beats of the real RoP (RRoP), but with the extra screentime created by the removal of Númenor being given to internal squabbling and experimenting of the Elves of Eregion (maybe a mission by Herald Elrond to Celebrimbor is rebuffed, but Galadriel starts getting Bad Vibes from Annatar, and this leads to whatever her big discovery is later in the season.



All of which is to say... the reason this thread has few replies is that it takes a LOT of time to reply to properly. I don't feel like I've answered it adequately, but I'm out of steam and bedtime looms. You get the idea, though--I hope!

EDIT: X-posted with Huinesoron, it took me so long to get here--and he pre-agrees with me that Númenor should have been saved!