Subject: I think I might be a Jackson purist.
Author:
Posted on: 2019-01-05 14:43:00 UTC
I think that mostly because the new series sounds like a terrible idea to me, but that might just be my desire to leave well enough alone, which is also why I can't get behind the Star Wars sequels.
Apparently this is a thing, and their contract says they have to be in production within two years. They hope to make the first season by 2021.
What we (think we) know: This will not be a retelling of the War of the Ring. Peter Jackson covered that (and he may be involved in this production to some degree). Instead, we'll be delving more into material from the Appendices. Season one is reported to revolve around a young Aragorn.
I have to say, I am so down for that. I'm leery about getting excited for anything LotR after the terrible adaptations we've had most recently, but... Look, my fondest wish as a young fangirl was to join up with Aragorn and go tramping around the wilds of Middle-earth on Ranger adventures and learn woodcraft and healing and stuff. You could not offer me any better bait to entice me to another Middle-earth franchise.
I really hope they don't screw it up.
Either way, of course, I anticipate a young, likely hot Aragorn spawning a whole new crop of Sues...
~Neshomeh
I thought I'd said here; apparently not though.
I'm pretty excited too, to be honest. I actually think Young Aragorn is one of the less interesting options, even with just Hobbit+LotR+Appendices to work from; he's tightly constrained by the fact that, canonically, people aren't supposed to know who he is.
He also presses Amazon up against a very specific problem: there's no climactic battle. More specifically, there's precisely one: the victory over the Corsairs of Umbar. All Aragorn's other endpoints are 'welp, done with this country now, on to another one'. There's no big victory, for the very obvious reason that that has to wait for the War of the Ring.
Which, if they're actually doing only one season of Estel/Thorongil, works out quite nicely. You start with him in the wilds, with Legolas (per B5A) meeting him. You show him meeting Arwen, and build on the Movie notion of him only being able to marry her if he becomes king. So he travels to Rohan and then Gondor as a sort of training, and winds up sailing from Dol Amroth to defeat the Corsairs. A nice, flowing storyline - but one which doesn't work at all if they try and cut it into multiple seasons.
So... if it is only one, what are the following seasons? Cribbing from something I wrote elsewhere, I think it's likely that the other seasons will follow the first, chronologically, which means... well, what are the options?
-Adventures of the Old Took. Obviously a bit out of its timeline, but viable, and a hilarious notion.
-Adventures of Tom Bombadil. ^_^
-Adventures of Balin in Moria. A bit of a downer.
-Adventures of Not-So-Young Legolas (And Tauriel). Time to reuse those Hobbit movie sets!
-Adventures of Evil Saruman. C'mon, we could definitely have a season of Saruman's fall into darkness. (Again, serious timeline issues, but this is Movie-earth.)
-Adventures of Young Imrahil. If Young Aragorn doesn't cover the Corsairs, then this Dol Amroth-centric series will.
-Adventures of Young(??) Galadriel. Who wants to stay in the woods when you can go be shiny at people?
-Adventures of Young Theoden. Horses! ... more horses!
-Adventures of Young Talion [Shadow of Mordor games]. Because what we really need is Mordor the Green and Pleasant Land, right? ... right?!
-Adventures of The War In The North. I suppose we should pay lip service to the whole plot of the books, yeah? In which case...
-Adventures in Scouring the Shire. Hey, PJ left it out, so we get to put it in.
And, finally...
-Adventures in Gardening. Just a whole season of Master Samwise peacefully tending his garden, looking after his kids, and being the best dang mayor the Shire has ever had.
hS
You may have said so here, too; it's possible it was a time I wasn't paying much attention, or I just forgot. All the brainspace I have to give Real Life these days is severely restricting my ability to keep track of everything else. The other day I had to look up who actually owned Narsil before it broke, Elendil or Isildur. {= (
Clearly I shall have to reread the Appendices in order to properly engage with this topic, but for now...
I think the secrecy around who Aragorn really is could add a nice bit of drama to the whole story if they do it right. He's in hiding for a reason, so the necessity of keeping on the down-low could make for some good peril if any servants of the Enemy are lurking about. I don't think it will be possible to keep it a total secret from the audience, but they could restrict themselves to merely hinting at why he's important, with the full reveal only coming at the end. If they're subtle about it, it'll be fun for those already in the know and nicely surprising for those who aren't. (Because you know some people will be coming to Middle-earth for the first time through this series. Every Comic Adaptation Is Someone's First.)
Also, there's potential in getting to know the other Rangers, such as Halbarad and the El twins, who got screwed out of their role in the movies.
I sorta want to focus on what he was doing in Rohan, though? I don't know exactly what that was, but he was running around with King Thengel and Young Theoden, right? Do we know there wasn't a big battle (if we actually need one)?
Look, I like horses. I am totally cool with Horses! and More horses! ^_^
I would also like a story about Merry and Pippin and Sam being awesome after the war, back home in the Shire. There's got to be some interesting political dramedy we can wring out of the Shire integrating into the Kingdom of Arnor under the leadership of the comic relief characters, right?
~Neshomeh
-Born 2931.
-Father dies 2933. Fostered in Rivendell as Estel. Journeys with the El-twins.
-2941: Quest of Erebor (book).
-2952 (age 21): learns true name, receives Narsil. Meets Arwen for the first time and falls in love with her. Heads into the Wild.
-2953 (age 22): Misses the last meeting of the White Council.
-2956 (age 25): meets Gandalf, visits the Shire, becomes known as Strider.
-2957 (age 26): begins journeying as Thorongil, heading to Rohan. Theoden is 11. Thengel has held the throne for four years. Saruman begins fortifying Isengard in this timeframe. Theodwyn, mother of Eomer and Eowyn, will be born in 2963.
-2958: Quest of Erebor, assuming the timeline is shunted forward 17 years by losing them in FotR-M. This matches up with B5A-M, where he's already known as Strider (per Gandalf).
-ca. 2970 (age 39): moves on from Rohan to Gondor, eventually working his way up to Ecthelion's most trusted counsellor. Denethor is 40 - yes, they're only a year apart! - and in 2976 will marry Finduilas, who will be 26. Boromir will be born in 2978.
-2979? (age 48): attacks Umbar and destroys its fleet. Refuses to return to Minas Tirith, but journeys on into South Gondor and heads for the Mountains of Shadow. Spends a while learning about Sauron's plans, then heads back towards Rivendell and enters Lorien around New Year, (ie, ca. April 1st).
-2980 (age 49): Aragorn and Arwen wander Lorien together for a season, and plight their troth at midsummer.
-3001 (age 70): Begins the Hunt for Gollum.
So there's possibilities there! You start with his 21st birthday (March 1st, 2952), when Elrond tells him his name and gives him his sword and ring. Then he meets Arwen, falls head-over-heels in love, and goes out into the wild when she doesn't return his affections.
You get a couple of episodes of Ranging, then have an adventure with Gandalf in the Shire. Gandalf prompts him to go south, noting that perhaps Elrond will look favourably on such a move, and we head off to Rohan.
Rohan and Gondor are both going to mingle politics with war, so we need to find a way to distinguish them. Remembering that Pippin contrasts kindly Theoden with harsh Denethor, we can treat Rohan in a 'family I never had' way, with Aragorn acting like an older cousin to Theoden and baby Theodwyn. They face incursions of goblins and Huorns from the north (which gives Aragorn a chance to hear tales of the Witch of the Golden Wood), and negotiate with Saruman.
Then on to Gondor, where Aragorn meets a very different reception. Ecthelion is wary of him; Denethor is actively hostile. He winds up in exile in Dol Amroth (where Angelimir rules, Adrahil has 15 years on Aragorn, and Imrahil is a teenager). We can probably tie his return to Finduilas' trip to marry Denethor - perhaps Aragorn thwarts an attack by the corsairs, earning him his place back in Minas Tirith?
So Aragorn grows closer to the Steward, though not to his son. For dramatic reasons, we're going to put his explorations of the South and East in here, having him vanishing and reappearing at odd times. That means the third-to-last episode can be 'gasp, a fleet from Umbar, but where is Thorongil?', the penultimate episode is 'haha, Thorongil smashes the corsairs', and the final episode can be his journey to Lorien and his reunion with Arwen, a sort of farewell tour of the first season, wrapping up the personal themes.
It does have possibilities, to be sure.
hS
So canon should be closely observed. No Hobbit Trilogy canon rapes.
I expected the Silmarillion, though.
[Checks] Okay, he stood down as director of the Estate, but not as literary executor (a year and a half ago).
I've never seen anyone (prior to you) say that Christopher is even involved, and in typical Tolkien Estate fashion, there's no real clues how much of Tolkien's material Amazon are allowed to use. Is this just another iteration of the Hobbit+LotR license that New Line have been using? Or have Amazon managed to get the remaining directors (including apparently JRRT's daughter Priscilla, and grandson Michael George) to release some of the Silm/Unfinished Tales material? Christopher has always been dead against that, but it's possible his resignation was a way for him to gracefully allow it without directly compromising.
hS
That would be deeply weird to me, but... there's a whole generation of people who grew up with the Jackson films (LotR, at least), much as many early PPCers grew up with Tolkien's books. So, like... could we end up with future PPCers complaining about how the Amazon series messes up Jacksonverse canon?
Check out this article on Fandom (which is how I found out about the series) and tell me the inclusion of a clip of Haldir's death and a section headed "Peter Jackson Had the Right Balance" doesn't kinda look like nascent Jackson purism.
Or tell me something else, if something else catches your eye...
~Neshomeh
See, I like the story of Lord of the Rings, and I own both the book and the films - but I am far more likely to watch the films than I am read the book.
Part of that may just be the particular edition of the book I own: a hardback of the full trilogy in one, so it's roughly the size, shape and weight of a breeze block, and I've always done a lot of reading while travelling - not exactly practical with this book. But another part is just the writing style is pretty heavy going,and sometimes feels like it takes actual physical effort to read through. The films are just a lot more easily accessible, and I find them entertaining enough.
But I am aware that the books came first, and that the films cu a lot of stuff out, and made a lot of changes.
I think I was lucky with the films in that I liked the story, but hadn't read the book for ages, so I just didn't pick up on the changes (which sadly wasn't the case for the recent Mortal Engines).
-Irish
If they explicitly link this to the movies - Sir Ian or Orli appearing seem the most likely ways, or Agent Elrond - then contradicting those movies is going to jar quite hard. I can see a partial recasting going very sideways - 'why does Arwen look different when Gandalf looks the same?!' - but also if they do things that would break the plot of the films.
The funniest thing will be if they do something book-accurate which disagrees with Jackson. How about black walls around Minas Tirith? Or accurate distances between various points?
hS
I think that mostly because the new series sounds like a terrible idea to me, but that might just be my desire to leave well enough alone, which is also why I can't get behind the Star Wars sequels.