Disregarding the black dwarf queen?? and the female orcs in battle, the show was always going to "pollute the lore" considering the Tolkien Estate would only sell the rights to LOTR and not The Silmarillion. The compressed timeline will be the undoing of this show.
Oh, boy. For those who don't know/don't read the KF ComicsGate thread, George Molho a/k/a GEEEOOORRRGGGGGEEEEE is (or possibly was?) probably the biggest paypiggie of YouTuber Nerdrotic, donating literally hundreds of dollars in "Superchats" weekly. He apparently had some sort of meltdown when Alex Jones was on-stream and Nerdrotic was not reading Superchats, and stopped giving, at least on a regular basis, at least as much. (The link above relates to the meltdown.)
We talked about this a while back. The only information we know for certain, iirc, is that Shippey left the production for vague reasons. Everything else is just speculation. Considering how much of a mess this production seems to have been it could be due to a number of things.
Yeah, Shippey (an actual Tolkien scholar) left and they replaced him with a Tolkien "scholar" bitch whose existence so far seems to only be to justify Amazon's diverse casting decisions in articles.
That's way too pessimistic. It's a TV show exclusively on a streaming service, not a TV show being broadcast to cable or a movie being played in theaters. The only way Amazon loses money is through Prime losing users or stagnating, which would not solely be the fault of a single show if it happens. Not to mention that Prime is not just a streaming service, but multiple services bundled together. This show is absurdly expensive for a TV show, but half a billion dollars is just a drop in the bucket for for a megacorp like Amazon, which lends credence to the idea that this is possibly a tax write-off.
Nigga you on crack.
Marvel-tier costuming. Doesn't look terrible, but it's basically "eh, good enough". Nobody put their passion into this costume. Say what you will about the Jackson films, the costuming department absolutely nailed it in terms of creating outfits that looked "fantastic" yet authentic and created a sense of cultural identity.
The only really smart thing about the design is the presence of star emblems. Gil-Galad's name meant starlight or bright star. Except the color in Tolkien's works that is associated with starlight is white and silver, not gold, so the heavy presence of gold makes him look like some sort of decadent nobleman. His hair was also supposed to be silver according to Tolkien's notes. The color gold is associated with the House of Finarfin, which Gil-Galad is a member of, it's true, but the heaviest symbol associated with him is a single silver star.
There is also writing on Aeglos in Tengwar. I don't notice either until a closer look. I assume some nerds have already translated it.
to be fair, Sauron would have appeared a Maia and before the elves of Eregion so yes he'd be "white"-meaning fair.
Its a villainous archetype-scummy, hunched back, cloak, pale ugly skin and uneven teeth. Probably directly copied from Wormtongue in the Jackson movies, or Satan from Passion of the Christ.
