Also - should we approach this season Episode by Episode, or should the sessions focus on storylines individually rather than determining what happens in each episode?
Seems sensible and fitting. Would we have three frame narrators or one? If three, I would think they ought to be together, not bouncing all over settings in Middle-earth.
Well, a few weeks ago, Haakon, Nick and I were in the “Thoughts on the casting process and how it could be improved” thread and were trying to think of a role for Maisie Williams that we wouldn’t have to make up and the best any of us could come up with was Lobelia Sackville-Baggins.We have not chosen the Frame yet, so maybe none
Plus, he’s a relatively neutral party since Hobbits haven’t really been on the central stage. And he stole the Arkenstone as part of an attempt to avoid war.The question of whether or not to include Bilbo in this Frame was raised during today's session. I know it's fun to be all Bilbo!! about it, but of course we'd only include him if he played a significant role.
We do, however, need a character to be pushing for peace and forgiveness, and that was Bilbo's role in the Battle of Five Armies. He was literally asking them, 'Can't we all get along?' and trying to prevent them from fighting each other. So, if he returned on a 7-year-memorial, he'd want to see his old friends...getting along. If there were residual bad feelings, he'd want to root that out.
So, in some ways, he'd be the perfect catalyst for the types of rebuilding that we're trying to do here.
I'm not comfortable, as a writer, with changing an already awkward trans-racial fosterage story to one in which the boys who were violently abducted during a Kinslaying just happily, voluntarily, spend their entire childhood with the sons of Feanor even though their own great-grandparents are alive and well just a few miles away on the other side of the Isle of Balar. Especially not after reading and watching the adoption and trans-racial adoption documentaries during my company's recent Adoption Week. I was moved by those documentaries. Even adoptees who are abandoned at birth and adopted as infants by normal non-murderers of the same race as themselves, are often dissatisfied, grieve for the families they never met, and try to reconnect with their birth families even in childhood and adolescence.I'm not on board with changing Galathil's gender. I acknowledge that he's an obscure and undescribed character, but that's not necessary. Instead we should just give Celeborn a separate sister with a fittingly-tree-ish name. Galadlos or Faenorn or Celeblos, or something more clever. There's no reason he can't have an additional sibling.
More importantly than Galathil's gender, it's weird and maybe irresponsible if the parents of Nimloth are still alive after the Third Kinslaying, living on the Isle of Balar a few miles away from their orphaned twin great-grandsons, and not trying to regain the boys. (We would have to explain why they not only weren't sent to their relatives by supposedly contrite and well-meaning Feanorians, but also why they implausibly chose to stay with the Feanorians instead of rejoining their surviving family.) Or if Nimloth's parents leave and go east across the mountains before the Second Kinslaying, why leave their daughter, and never meet their grandchildren?
That would be much more plausible, and not an uncomfortable prospect to write it. I'm not against a sister going east with Celeborn.Is there a reason that this character (whether brother or sister) can't head off over into Eriador with G and C (and their followers, see my other post about naming conventions haha)