If they attack Rohan from the east? ... Though, assuming they go around Mordor to the east, that's an extremely long trek, possibly almost as lacking in fodder as going by boat. Maybe they could go through Ithilien instead, if they're already fighting with Gondor, too? IDK, all of these ideas seem bad in their own way. ^_^;

Don't get me wrong, I'm not against the idea of finding and highlighting women's stories in Middle-earth. My issue is that Héra's story seems to be one we've all seen done badly so many times: feisty princess who wants to do cool boy things instead of yucky girl things and is enough Not Like The Other Girls to get away with it. Now, being a warrior actually makes sense in Héra's case, given shield-maidens have always existed! But... I guess I'm jaded because it sometimes seems like people have no idea how to write female empowerment any other way. They made Arwen "more interesting" in the original trilogy by giving her a sword and a horse. They made Galadriel "more interesting" in Rings of Power by giving her a sword and a revenge complex. Éowyn was cool enough not to change because she already had a sword and a horse, and took them to go do boy things with the boys.

Granted, Rings of Power also has several other female characters with different MOs, and that's a good thing about it. But they still felt like they needed to make frickin Galadriel "more interesting" as a protagonist by heightening her more traditionally-masculine characteristics beyond, I think, what's indicated in the text, and at the expense of the rest of her personality.

And the problem isn't that women should never do "boy things." The problem is the underlying bias that boy things are cool and girl things are not, so the men's fighting gets glorified while anything that women do is downplayed or derided. Thus, Éowyn later finding fulfillment in marrying Faramir and becoming a healer seems like a let-down, a diminishing of her character rather than the maturation of it. It's clear that "maturation" is what Tolkien intended, but it can never work in a world where the line between masculine and feminine is rigidly defined and one side is implicitly regarded as more worthy (e.g. of tales; of a protagonist) than the other.

It's complicated.

But again, the whole "warrior princess" deal actually fits with Héra, so there's a good chance it all works fine... if they aren't playing too many tracks straight from Middle-earth Sue's Greatest Hits. I had this worrying thought that they might've looked at all the Suefic and gone "gosh, this stuff sure is popular; let's do exactly that!" ^_^;

~Neshomeh