Fangirl ramblings...
Mar. 8th, 2015 12:24 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
tanithryudoIt's been raining all morning. I feel like a zombie. Spent my stam on PAD and no GW2/STO. Might as well vomit some junk from my sleep deprived mind.
So. Have LOTR movie vs book ramblings plus a few more pokes at the YvtW xover.
The War of the Ring was much smaller scale in movie canon.
So I was worrying about how to write the battles in the northern part of Middle Earth that occurred during the War of the Ring for YvtW when I realized...they probably did not exist in movie canon.
So what happens is this, circa book!Hobbit, The Necromancer (aka Sauron) gets kicked out of Dol Guldur. There's a short period of peace, but then he sends Khamul, the Lt of the Nazgul, back there to take command of the place. It was then used as a staging ground for attacks into Lorien, northern Mirkwood (Thranduil's people), and probably also Dale (along with the Easterlings of Rhun). During that fighting, Lorien bore the majority of the attack from Khamul & the orcs, while Dale & the dwarves of the Lonely Mountain bore the majority of the attack from the Easterlings (both races lost their kings in the long siege).
In movie!canon, however, Lothlorien apparently could afford to send off Haldir plus an army (division?) to back up the Rohirrium in Helm's Deep. Since the Battle Under the Trees would have taken place around the same time that Aragorn & co were in Rohan, it's obvious that in the movie, no such threat to Lorien existed.
The Battle of Dale... Remember the scene we saw in Two Towers, when Frodo & Sam reach the Black Gate? They see an army of Easterlings...marching into Mordor. Rhun is north of Mordor, and Erebor northwest of that. So if they were being sent to attack Dale, they're going the wrong way.
Also, remember that in the book, the Council of Elrond happens because everyone important just happened to land on Elrond's doorstep around the same time. The dwarves & men of Dale came with news that the Easterlings were threatening them to surrender or die. Legolas came with the news that they lost Gollum because they were attacked (right at the gates of their stronghold, no less) by forces of Sauron (most likely sent out of Dol Guldur). Boromir was on a quest following a dream and a riddle, not even sure that Imladris even existed, and got very lost before finding his way to the place in question right at the right time. Elrond was genre savvy enough to recognize when the hands of Destiny were moving, and thus pulled everyone into a formal council.
Now, contrast this with the movie, where Elrond explicitly sends out invitations to the rest of the world to attend his council meeting, because he sure as heck ain't gonna keep the One Ring as Imladris. We see this in Faramir's flashback, where Boromir appears to know Imladris exists and most likely where it is. But what we don't see? We don't see the dwarves & other non-Boromir men talking about Easterlings threatening Erebor. Legolas makes no mention of Gollum, and the implication seems to be that Aragorn never caught him or asked Mirkwood to guard him. Boromir was the only one who complained about their territory under threat.
You know what I think happened in the movie universe?
Sauron never bothered to send anyone else back to take up Dol Guldur once Galadriel kicked him out in Hobbit 3. Rhovannion remained more or less at peace, or at least not at war, while Sauron tunnel visioned (*badum-tish*) on Gondor and to a lesser extent Rohan as his targets.
The post war landscape was also different.
In the book, after Sauron was defeated, Mirkwood (now Eryn Lasgalen) was split into three parts. Thranduil still held the northern 1/3. The Woodmen & Beornings got the middle 1/3. And the southern 1/3 went to Celeborn and the remaining Galadhrim that didn't sail west.
During one of the many epilogue scenes in ROTK, we see however that Celeborn sailed with Galadriel in the movieverse. Add that onto the heavy losses Haldir's force took at Helm's Deep, I would guess that whatever remnant of Lothlorien that didn't sail would be small and wouldn't be able to remain as a separate political entity.
Similarly, the Woodmen and Beornings were one political/cultural entity in book!Hobbit. In movie!Hobbit, all we saw was Beorn, implicitly the last of his kind. Yeah. They're probably not going to be holding a third of the forest there.
With the added population from the remnants of Lorien, coupled with that fact that without a Battle of Mirkwood during the War of the Ring, Thranduil would not have lost further population numbers during said time period, means that movie!Thranduil probably came out the strongest of the polities in the North. He probably also re-assumed territorial rights of the entire forest (or as much as he wanted of it anyways).
Then, in the south, book-verse we had the Lord of Aglarond and the Lord of Ithilien (aka Gimli & Legolas) after the war. But does that still happen in the movie?
Reviewing the Rohan segments, it does not appear that Gimli ever went down to the Glittering Caves and thus fall in love with the place. In the book he got stuck in the cave with Eomer during the thick of the fighting. This obviously never occurred in the movie, where the only people who were seen in the caves were the civilian refugees of Rohan.
As for Ithilien, we pretty much skipped over the march from Minas Tirith to the Black Gate (superspeed, man). However since geography hasn't changed (ha), they must have still at least traveled through that place. Also, movie!Legolas seems very close to Aragorn, having met him soon after the Battle of Five Armies and were friends before FotR, so he might have wanted a reason to move next door after Aragorn settled down (he certainly wouldn't have much of a job to do in Eryn Lasgalen at this point, anyway). On the other hand, what we saw of Ithilien with Frodo & Faramir didn't look like a place that needed fixing, honestly. So I suppose it could go either way, whether the entourage of elves Legolas brought to Aragorn's coronation was a group of colonist ready to settle and fix up Ithilien.
(And speaking of the entourage of elves... they obviously had to have been from Mirkwood...*maybe* some from Lorien, since apparently all the Rivendell elves left for the Havens halfway through Two Towers. Except for Elrond of course. And the two blacksmith elves who apparently worked at superspeed to make Anduril so that Elrond still had time to ship it to Aragorn before he left Rohan for Gondor. *facepalm* WTF guys.)
Continuing down this tangent... movie!Arwen seems to be an only child.
Cuz we certainly saw no hide nor hair or even vague mention of Elladan or Elrohir!
The guy in charge of the Haven-train, where Arwen was to leave "with the rest of her kin", was Lindir, retroactively so named in the Hobbit movies. No sign of her brothers.
The Grey Company never made it to Rohan. What, they didn't inherit the superspeed skillz Aragorn did? Elrond had to make the delivery of Anduril himself.
Nor were they conspicuously present when Elrond gave Arwen away at Aragorn's coronation. Legolas played the big-brother role there. Actually, there was also a deleted scene from FOTR where Legolas says goodbye to Arwen with a rather intimate elvish greeting. Yeah.
So, I dunno. Unless they're the two blacksmith elves that (superspeed) remade Anduril (another wtf moment there in themselves), which seems unlikely, the sons of Elrond have been absent the entire War of the Ring. Which is...odd, given their supposed backstory.
So what does this mean for the YvtW xover?
Yeah, going with book backgrounds and (some) movie characterizations. Simply because the movies cut out waaay too much of the world building details. Missing characters are all still present, mostly in their book incarnations in that case.
So we're still going to have fighting up north in Mirkwood/Lorien and Dale/Erebor. Though the Battle Under the Trees is probably going to be easier on the elven forces, given we kinda axed a couple Nazgul early on the rest got pulled to deal with our heroes in Gondor.
We're going with the Grey Company helping out at Helm's Deep instead of Lothlorien elves. Lucky for us we have teleportation and portals to get them over in time since they apparently failed their superspeed lessons in the movieverse.
And the sons of Elrond, y'know, exist. *facepalm*
Still undecided about Aglarond/Ithilien and the whole sea longing business. I suppose it doesn't matter in the short term, because given the closer relationship he had with Aragorn, there are other motivations for Legolas to sail after Aragorn dies, even if the sea longing is not in play.
So. Have LOTR movie vs book ramblings plus a few more pokes at the YvtW xover.
The War of the Ring was much smaller scale in movie canon.
So I was worrying about how to write the battles in the northern part of Middle Earth that occurred during the War of the Ring for YvtW when I realized...they probably did not exist in movie canon.
So what happens is this, circa book!Hobbit, The Necromancer (aka Sauron) gets kicked out of Dol Guldur. There's a short period of peace, but then he sends Khamul, the Lt of the Nazgul, back there to take command of the place. It was then used as a staging ground for attacks into Lorien, northern Mirkwood (Thranduil's people), and probably also Dale (along with the Easterlings of Rhun). During that fighting, Lorien bore the majority of the attack from Khamul & the orcs, while Dale & the dwarves of the Lonely Mountain bore the majority of the attack from the Easterlings (both races lost their kings in the long siege).
In movie!canon, however, Lothlorien apparently could afford to send off Haldir plus an army (division?) to back up the Rohirrium in Helm's Deep. Since the Battle Under the Trees would have taken place around the same time that Aragorn & co were in Rohan, it's obvious that in the movie, no such threat to Lorien existed.
The Battle of Dale... Remember the scene we saw in Two Towers, when Frodo & Sam reach the Black Gate? They see an army of Easterlings...marching into Mordor. Rhun is north of Mordor, and Erebor northwest of that. So if they were being sent to attack Dale, they're going the wrong way.
Also, remember that in the book, the Council of Elrond happens because everyone important just happened to land on Elrond's doorstep around the same time. The dwarves & men of Dale came with news that the Easterlings were threatening them to surrender or die. Legolas came with the news that they lost Gollum because they were attacked (right at the gates of their stronghold, no less) by forces of Sauron (most likely sent out of Dol Guldur). Boromir was on a quest following a dream and a riddle, not even sure that Imladris even existed, and got very lost before finding his way to the place in question right at the right time. Elrond was genre savvy enough to recognize when the hands of Destiny were moving, and thus pulled everyone into a formal council.
Now, contrast this with the movie, where Elrond explicitly sends out invitations to the rest of the world to attend his council meeting, because he sure as heck ain't gonna keep the One Ring as Imladris. We see this in Faramir's flashback, where Boromir appears to know Imladris exists and most likely where it is. But what we don't see? We don't see the dwarves & other non-Boromir men talking about Easterlings threatening Erebor. Legolas makes no mention of Gollum, and the implication seems to be that Aragorn never caught him or asked Mirkwood to guard him. Boromir was the only one who complained about their territory under threat.
You know what I think happened in the movie universe?
Sauron never bothered to send anyone else back to take up Dol Guldur once Galadriel kicked him out in Hobbit 3. Rhovannion remained more or less at peace, or at least not at war, while Sauron tunnel visioned (*badum-tish*) on Gondor and to a lesser extent Rohan as his targets.
The post war landscape was also different.
In the book, after Sauron was defeated, Mirkwood (now Eryn Lasgalen) was split into three parts. Thranduil still held the northern 1/3. The Woodmen & Beornings got the middle 1/3. And the southern 1/3 went to Celeborn and the remaining Galadhrim that didn't sail west.
During one of the many epilogue scenes in ROTK, we see however that Celeborn sailed with Galadriel in the movieverse. Add that onto the heavy losses Haldir's force took at Helm's Deep, I would guess that whatever remnant of Lothlorien that didn't sail would be small and wouldn't be able to remain as a separate political entity.
Similarly, the Woodmen and Beornings were one political/cultural entity in book!Hobbit. In movie!Hobbit, all we saw was Beorn, implicitly the last of his kind. Yeah. They're probably not going to be holding a third of the forest there.
With the added population from the remnants of Lorien, coupled with that fact that without a Battle of Mirkwood during the War of the Ring, Thranduil would not have lost further population numbers during said time period, means that movie!Thranduil probably came out the strongest of the polities in the North. He probably also re-assumed territorial rights of the entire forest (or as much as he wanted of it anyways).
Then, in the south, book-verse we had the Lord of Aglarond and the Lord of Ithilien (aka Gimli & Legolas) after the war. But does that still happen in the movie?
Reviewing the Rohan segments, it does not appear that Gimli ever went down to the Glittering Caves and thus fall in love with the place. In the book he got stuck in the cave with Eomer during the thick of the fighting. This obviously never occurred in the movie, where the only people who were seen in the caves were the civilian refugees of Rohan.
As for Ithilien, we pretty much skipped over the march from Minas Tirith to the Black Gate (superspeed, man). However since geography hasn't changed (ha), they must have still at least traveled through that place. Also, movie!Legolas seems very close to Aragorn, having met him soon after the Battle of Five Armies and were friends before FotR, so he might have wanted a reason to move next door after Aragorn settled down (he certainly wouldn't have much of a job to do in Eryn Lasgalen at this point, anyway). On the other hand, what we saw of Ithilien with Frodo & Faramir didn't look like a place that needed fixing, honestly. So I suppose it could go either way, whether the entourage of elves Legolas brought to Aragorn's coronation was a group of colonist ready to settle and fix up Ithilien.
(And speaking of the entourage of elves... they obviously had to have been from Mirkwood...*maybe* some from Lorien, since apparently all the Rivendell elves left for the Havens halfway through Two Towers. Except for Elrond of course. And the two blacksmith elves who apparently worked at superspeed to make Anduril so that Elrond still had time to ship it to Aragorn before he left Rohan for Gondor. *facepalm* WTF guys.)
Continuing down this tangent... movie!Arwen seems to be an only child.
Cuz we certainly saw no hide nor hair or even vague mention of Elladan or Elrohir!
The guy in charge of the Haven-train, where Arwen was to leave "with the rest of her kin", was Lindir, retroactively so named in the Hobbit movies. No sign of her brothers.
The Grey Company never made it to Rohan. What, they didn't inherit the superspeed skillz Aragorn did? Elrond had to make the delivery of Anduril himself.
Nor were they conspicuously present when Elrond gave Arwen away at Aragorn's coronation. Legolas played the big-brother role there. Actually, there was also a deleted scene from FOTR where Legolas says goodbye to Arwen with a rather intimate elvish greeting. Yeah.
So, I dunno. Unless they're the two blacksmith elves that (superspeed) remade Anduril (another wtf moment there in themselves), which seems unlikely, the sons of Elrond have been absent the entire War of the Ring. Which is...odd, given their supposed backstory.
So what does this mean for the YvtW xover?
Yeah, going with book backgrounds and (some) movie characterizations. Simply because the movies cut out waaay too much of the world building details. Missing characters are all still present, mostly in their book incarnations in that case.
So we're still going to have fighting up north in Mirkwood/Lorien and Dale/Erebor. Though the Battle Under the Trees is probably going to be easier on the elven forces, given we kinda axed a couple Nazgul early on the rest got pulled to deal with our heroes in Gondor.
We're going with the Grey Company helping out at Helm's Deep instead of Lothlorien elves. Lucky for us we have teleportation and portals to get them over in time since they apparently failed their superspeed lessons in the movieverse.
And the sons of Elrond, y'know, exist. *facepalm*
Still undecided about Aglarond/Ithilien and the whole sea longing business. I suppose it doesn't matter in the short term, because given the closer relationship he had with Aragorn, there are other motivations for Legolas to sail after Aragorn dies, even if the sea longing is not in play.
