Mid-Season Notes

Nicholas Palazzo

Well-Known Member
Ok, the execs shot down the idea of Ingwe's sister, but have no fear. We can still make Indis his niece by marriage. I'm thinking that if her parents are deceased, no one's going to be able to really put the kabosh on her marriage to Finwe.
 
I'm going to have to wait until the podcast is out before I can comment properly. I thought episode 2 was some of our strongest work. Sigh.
 
They really liked the Vairë tapestry idea! But Corey was concerned that her seeking out Finwë to show it to him 'on purpose' is a bit of a douchey goddess-of-fate move. So...modification rather than throw everything out. There were good constructive comments, but in the future, I'm much less inclined to point out our variations to them and say 'can we do this?' I'd rather let them decide what jumps out as worth commenting on. In the original session, the Hosts had requested that Finwë be uncertain about this whole Valar thing in the beginning and then become enthusiastically gung-ho over the course of the episode. Which....you guys did, but with maybe a bit too much moping about Míriel and not enough of a chance to see his excitement about 'this place is so cool and amazing and all the elves should see this!' I think it can be tweaked to work.

And no, Ingwë can't have a niece unless he marries someone with siblings, and the first elves to wake up woke up with their spouses - so Ingwë really, really REALLY can't have any relatives if we're making him the first Unbegotten elf to awake. Indis will have to be his daughter and the dead stolen-by-the-Hunter-and-(presumably)-tortured-to-death-by-Tevlido character will have to be his wife. [And since we've pushed a few times on this, it's time to give up and live with it.]

Haakon did suggest that she could be re-embodied and return from Mandos, so that at least is one way to salvage this situation.
 
So I finally got around to reviewing their comments... here are my thoughts.

Ingwë is the first elf.

Prof Olsen is pretty adamant on this. Fine. I concede. I still don’t think it’s the right choice, but it is acceptable and I acknowledge there are some benefits. I do want to talk about those benefits briefly.

Firstly, it lends legitimacy to Ingwë’s position of high king of all the elves. Yes, it does. However, I don’t think (and I may be wrong) that the fact of his high kingship will ever come up. Like in the published Silmarillion, the fact of it may be mentioned, but it is as a plot point (ie having to do with a specific episode’s conflict/plot) won’t come up. I can think of a few fringe cases where it might in future as a conflict resolution device, but on the whole, nah. It’s not going to come up, and if it does, it will be limited to an expository sentence, “Ingwë is the high king of all the elves, you know.” (Again, I may be wrong.)

Secondly, there is a certain mythic power in him being the first. In fact, that’s basically all he’s there for in the story. Yes. I agree. More than any other reason, this is why I’m fine with accepting him as the first elf. To my mind this does open up another issue, though: aren’t we somewhat diminishing that mythic power by merely noting in exposition his status as the first, rather than showing it? (Storytelling is all about showing not telling, remember.) The decision by the execs to not show the awakening of the elves was made because they were afraid it would look hokey. The outline fairies (largely at my instance) revisited that. It was concluded that showing the awakening didn’t get us to the episode one conflict any quicker and was thus superfluous (I think I convinced at least some that we could show it in a non hokey, mythically powerful way, though I’m sure there were still doubters). This remains a good decision. Yet I can’t help but feel if we’re now going to make a thing about having Ingwë be the first, we should see him being the first. My proposal would be to have the awakening as the very last thing in the dénouement of season one episode eleven. If we want Ingwë’s mythic power to be a real thing, we can spend twenty seconds to establish it beyond expository dialogue.

Unrelated to the awakening (honestly, I thought I was done fighting for it…) I say we accept Indis as Ingwë’s daughter. It maybe gives us some good conflict grist later. This probably means “Little Indis (?)” from the early episode character lists becomes “Adolescent Indis”

Also, sure, it can be Ingwë’s wife who is dead. She can even come back in episode two from Mandos and meet up with Ingwë. That’s a lovely scene, why wouldn’t we want to do that? Plus it gives Ingwë (and the Vanyar by extension) a non-spiritual reason for being so pro-Valinor in the debate and migration later.

Episode two changes.

So they want the episode two conflict to be among the Valar, with the ambassador’s all around positive response to Valinor fueling the Ulmo-Vána-(kinda-)Yavanna faction’s utter unease about the whole elves in Valinor thing. This new conflict means we’re having a new protagonist who is not Finwë and is a Vala (maybe a Maia). This means we’re telling a whole different story. So we metaphorically screw up the episode two outline, throw it in the waste paper basket and start again with a blank page. We can maybe preserve some of the Finwë stuff for a B plot, but probably not since they weren’t interested in pretty much any level of ambassador conflict.

I’m going to reiterate: complete restart for episode two. This probably means a whole new script discussion session for it.

Which is a damn shame. I thought episode two was some of our best work (I like it way more than episode one, which they apparently had no problem with, despite its many flaws).

I’m really pleased that they liked the Vairë thing. It was a cool idea. However, it was a device to resolve the Finwë conflict. Which isn’t a thing anymore, so neither is the Vairë wrap up. We might be able to repurpose the idea, but that’s really something to be decided in the redo of the episode two discussion.

As a side point (that isn’t relevant, because there is no Finwë conflict anymore, and hence no tapestry based resolution), Prof. Olsen was concerned that Vairë could seem malicious in hindsight when the audience realises the totally ambiguous nature of the tapestry and Finwë’s narrow interpretation of it. Yes, I wanted at least some of the audience to be quite uncomfortable with Vairë’s completely obscure motives. I wanted there to be a section of the audience with reasons to suspect that the Valar connected with fate (specifically Vairë here, but by extension Námo too) don’t always act in an entirely benevolent manner. But remember, it’s not relevant anymore, so let’s not argue about that again.

Personally I’m not keen on the episode conflict being among the Valar. For me, this season is the elvish story and the Valar should only be present where they serve that story. But clearly this notion is not shared by the execs who want episode two and the trial to be Valar-led. As they pointed out, it does make the season more of a handover from the Valar to the Elves, which works. It also opens up interesting possibilities, like having Melkor being the protagonist for the season finale. So while I’m not keen, there’s enough consolation for me to get on board with the idea.

But boy-oh-boy a full episode rewrite is a bitter pill to swallow.

Finwë and Míriel

So when Prof Olsen said about the comedy of manners and Míriel being a Brontë heroine in episodes one and two, he was clearly referring to episode three. Anyway… From what I could tell, the issue with the comedy of manners wasn’t Míriel but with Finwë’s characterisation, which is mostly an episode two issue.

They want him to be a stronger leader and not moping for the missus. I will point out that this characterisation was deliberate, and there are good reasons why we arrived at it, but I’m not willing to die in a ditch over it. Plus, we’re apparently starting from scratch with episode two anyway, which will have the side effect of solving this problem for us. So, yay, silver lining? #stillbitter

Rating

From the inconclusive ramblings, I’m going to take away the following guidelines:

We should strongly tend towards being suggestive rather than explicit. However, we can show explicit mature content (violence, horror, nudity/sexuality) sparingly and respectfully (i.e. never for the sake of it and never lingering) on occasion, when the story demands it. I would expect this to be once or twice a season, for example, certainly not every episode.

The Island

They don’t like the additional island trip. I’m not going to go into detail, since it’s late here, and this is actually quite an in depth technical point that I have to go back and review the episode discussion for.

My immediate response (which may be wrong, I’ve not done the research yet or even thought this through particularly) is the second island trip was necessitated for story structure reasons and maintaining a consistent antagonistic force for the story of time pressure for the Teleri. I think a proper defence of the additional island trip could be written. As I recall we did it because it solved a few different problems in context of making the story conflict work.

Maybe we could rewrite with a single trip. If we did, it wouldn’t be a start from scratch job a la episode two (silver lining) since I don’t think we’d need to change the protagonist and episode conflict. Still, if we can get a strong coherent defence of the idea written up, that would be worth doing as it would be less effort than what is still a major structural rewrite, if we are of the opinion that the hosts can be swayed into believing we knew what we were doing with the second island trip.
They really liked the Vairë tapestry idea!
That's nice and all, but as pointed out above, the tapestry idea is predicated on there being a Finwë conflict to resolve... which they don't want. They can't have both of: no ambassador conflict and the Míriel tapestry climax. And really, the whole thing only works as a climax.
... in the future, I'm much less inclined to point out our variations to them and say 'can we do this?' I'd rather let them decide what jumps out as worth commenting on.
Agreed wholeheartedly. Lesson learned: we should only point out things we want them solve, not our points of deviation.
 
I think that I've already corrected the Island issue for Episode 4. It was a minor change, but no one liked it, so we can have the Island be a new thing later in the episode. The Vanyar don't have a particular sub-plot in this episode now, but Ingwë and Finwë can have some conversations and help develop their friendship. I'm a little annoyed that people complained about this change without bothering to figure out how it fit into the episode (maybe because I didn't tell anyone that the Vanyar reach the Sea *first* in this version, while the Noldor hang back and wait for the Teleri to catch up?) and it really was purely for structural reasons. But, okay, fine, if it's out, I can restructure without that.

I agree that Episode 2 is much harder to redo. Perhaps in November we can return to it. If any of our sessions go quickly/smoothly, we might have time to revisit it, but...probably needs its own slot.

I don't think we're meant to throw out the Finwë plot - just to make it a B-plot with a less dragged-out resolution. The idea is to have Finwë skeptical and uncertain when they go - his motivation is to check out this Valinor place and see if it's really a good idea for the elves to go there. The difference is that, once he sees what Valinor is - he's meant to be an enthusiastic convert. We had his 'I don't know about this' last for awhile, and then even when it did change to 'yeah, I want to be here,' there was the 'but Míriel won't want to.' I think they want us to just do...a bit less moping with Finwë. Speed along his conversion process, if you will.



No one reminded them that Finwë and Míriel are meant to marry in Valinor, so no one complained about us moving the wedding up to Episode 3. I think it fits where we put it, but my main motivation for having that happen then was if Finwë and Míriel going to Valinor was going to be such a big deal, that sounded like a relationship issue to work out before getting married....and thus get married before the journey. But if that's less of an issue now....well then.

At some point, I feel I should go through the script outlines and pull out all the changes/alterations to the Silmarillion material, just so we keep track of the changes we've made and be sure to weave them back into the story later.
 
I don't think we're meant to throw out the Finwë plot - just to make it a B-plot with a less dragged-out resolution. The idea is to have Finwë skeptical and uncertain when they go - his motivation is to check out this Valinor place and see if it's really a good idea for the elves to go there. The difference is that, once he sees what Valinor is - he's meant to be an enthusiastic convert. We had his 'I don't know about this' last for awhile, and then even when it did change to 'yeah, I want to be here,' there was the 'but Míriel won't want to.' I think they want us to just do...a bit less moping with Finwë. Speed along his conversion process, if you will.
As a bit of an outsider, that was my understanding, as well. It seems less that they (read, Corey) want Finwe completely undivided and more that they want any tension to come from his own perspective, not what he assumes Miriel's will be. That's just removing the third part of the story MithLuin outlined above, not the whole one. And really, a "reluctant to excited" story is more streamlined, and less likely to annoy viewers, than a "reluctant to excited to worried about the missus". If he's reluctant on his own grounds then we can keep the Vaire tapestry (an idea which I adore) as the final piece of persuasion.
 
I should acknowledge that I wasn't part of that script discussion and just came to it later, so am just as much an outsider as anyone else when it comes to Episode 2 ;).
 
I don't think we're meant to throw out the Finwë plot - just to make it a B-plot with a less dragged-out resolution. The idea is to have Finwë skeptical and uncertain when they go - his motivation is to check out this Valinor place and see if it's really a good idea for the elves to go there. The difference is that, once he sees what Valinor is - he's meant to be an enthusiastic convert. We had his 'I don't know about this' last for awhile, and then even when it did change to 'yeah, I want to be here,' there was the 'but Míriel won't want to.' I think they want us to just do...a bit less moping with Finwë. Speed along his conversion process, if you will.
As a bit of an outsider, that was my understanding, as well. It seems less that they (read, Corey) want Finwe completely undivided and more that they want any tension to come from his own perspective, not what he assumes Miriel's will be. That's just removing the third part of the story MithLuin outlined above, not the whole one. And really, a "reluctant to excited" story is more streamlined, and less likely to annoy viewers, than a "reluctant to excited to worried about the missus". If he's reluctant on his own grounds then we can keep the Vaire tapestry (an idea which I adore) as the final piece of persuasion.
Sadly, I'm not sure I agree. I just re listened to find the pertinent quote from the podcast. At 35:44:
[rap battles ...] Nick is wondering how to introduce conflict into that episode? *Sigh* In episode two the primary conflict is among the Valar. I think that actually there needn't be that much conflict within the ambassadors themselves. The ambassadors themselves can all be all-over pleased – be like more or less unanimous in thinking that Valinor is awesome and that itself can be part of the tension as like Ulmo is looking on and face palming as the ambassadors are gushing about valinor and he's going "guys - dangit". So I do think that conflict doesn't have to be elvish. [... complaining about Finwë]
To me that really doesn't leave much room for any ambassador-based conflict. I guess it comes down to how you read, "there needn't be that much conflict within the ambassadors themselves." To me, it suggests at most a C-plot level of ambassador conflict.

But if there's consensus for fighting for an ambassador B-plot, I'm in favour of it. Whatever it is, though, it can't be Finwë pining for Míriel (at least not in a form close to recognisable to what we have at the moment). But anyway, details are for a later discussion session.

Oh, and, Marielle, don't be an outsider forever – come join in the outline discussions, we're all very nice (except me, but Nick censors me, so that's fine).

No one reminded them that Finwë and Míriel are meant to marry in Valinor, so no one complained about us moving the wedding up to Episode 3. I think it fits where we put it, but my main motivation for having that happen then was if Finwë and Míriel going to Valinor was going to be such a big deal, that sounded like a relationship issue to work out before getting married....and thus get married before the journey. But if that's less of an issue now....well then.
While, yes I agree that was definitely a driver for having their wedding in episode three, my big reason for wanting it there is because it is a solid interesting event that is not just a debate that the debate can spiral out from. So for me, it is still doing good important story-based work in episode three.
 
Last edited:
Yes, that's true, and I remember him saying that. But he also re-explained the point from the original session, about Finwë being a bit of a skeptic and needing to be convinced, and then coming home most changed. Finwë is going to go through a change (how much 'conflict' is involved is up for debate), and thus we do have a side story there.

I do think Corey Olsen was looking for a Valar-centric plot, and his example of the ambassadors all being more-or-less thrilled to be there would be *after* Finwë came around.

But yes, we do have to work all of this out now and re-pace everything.
 
Yes, that's true, and I remember him saying that. But he also re-explained the point from the original session, about Finwë being a bit of a skeptic and needing to be convinced, and then coming home most changed. Finwë is going to go through a change (how much 'conflict' is involved is up for debate), and thus we do have a side story there.

I do think Corey Olsen was looking for a Valar-centric plot, and his example of the ambassadors all being more-or-less thrilled to be there would be *after* Finwë came around.

But yes, we do have to work all of this out now and re-pace everything.
I agree Corey's looking for a more Valar-centered episode, but I also agree we shouldn't just drop Finwe into Valinor, having been a skeptic, and then send him back converted: we need to show that journey, even if it's a B- plot.

Oh, and, Marielle, don't be an outsider forever – come join in the outline discussions, we're all very nice (except me, but Nick censors me, so that's fine).
Thanks! Hopefully one of these days I'll be able to participate.
 
Back
Top