Due to the brilliance of Vranir and his amazing feedback and ideas, I deem the Harfoot plotline resolved and satisfactory for what will now be a full release. His idea was to have the Harfoots stay in one place, rather than travel the world, and this actually solved a lot of narrative problems in juggeling their (less interesting and important) plotline opposite the far more urgent and climactic ones.

I did indeed have to do narrative changes beyond this to create some tension and build some heart to their story, but I feel I’ve done a good job at this. And with that said, all the plotlines should now build upon one another and come to a satisfactory conclusion at the end.

Along with some few new updates and better-of-life improvements, many of which Vranir suggested up above, I am now rendering and releasing what I feel is a very strong film cut of the series.

The runtime is a little longer than I’d like, but still shorter than the previous workprint version and two of the Lord of the Rings Extended Edition versions. So it fits into the LOTR film slot quite well that way. When season 2 hits the streaming platforms and we get a clearer vision of what we have to work with for a sequel, it will also be easier to know if certain things can be omitted from Film 1 to keep it to a shorter runtime.

Thank you to all for brilliant feedback the last year (and especially vranir) and I hope the full release will make many a disappointed fan slightly less agitated towards the new iteration of Tolkien’s world.