Kids' play: Orym and Hobbes, old art, the Amazon series, and new book copies!

The days are just packed! 

I bundled up most of the previous book orders aaaaand new ones are in my shop! If you missed the last batch, grab one of the new. I'm sort of hoping I can stay abreast of orders this time and won't let them sell out, but we'll see! They'll never be gone for long. 

I'm also getting very good at drawing firecrests, much better than I was at any point while doing the actual book. They're basically feathered tennis balls with a toothpick. XD

I'm also still firmly embedded in halfelf/halfling/quarterling fluff, so there you have kid!Will and kid!Orym from Critical Role playing and somehow managing to look like Calvin and Hobbes, which was completely unintentional amd very welcome. 

Drawing them as kids reminded me of a piece I'd meant to dig up for a while. In October 1994 (ten years and a day before the birth of my first child, funnily, who will turn 18 this year, scarily). It must have been "The War of the Jewels" (from the History of Middle-earth) that had just come out in 1994 and which I'd read, which talked about the development of elf-children and the way they played, which immediately resulted in some very cute art: 

Those of you who have seen the "Rings of Power" Amazon series will immediately understand why I sat bolt upright at the first few minutes of the first episode - there was little Galadriel and other kids, and they were making little ships! It was exactly as I had imagined it. (If I had been into backgrounds then, it would probably be even clearer. XD) 

I haven't talked about the Amazon series here at all, and I probably won't, much - it's just completely failed to grip me, and continues to do so. The first five minutes were glorious. I'd come equipped with snark and sarcasm to MSTK the heck out of it. Then the opening sequence in Valinor left me speechless, with all my defenses down. I wanted to dive in and love it. Then came sycophantic ghost writer Elrond and Mullet King Gil-galad ignoring threats like the Ghostbusters Mayor, and twisted the knife. 

There have been moments I really liked - the Walking Song and the music in general chief among them - but overall, I feel it's generic, it doesn't make me care for any of its characters, often makes me laugh out loud with weird lore, and keeps up suspense about "Adar" and the meteor stranger in a way I find simply annoying. 

I've been obsessed with filling gaps for all my adult life. It's part of what draws me to Tolkien, and I do it with every other subject matter that fascinates me. Rings of Power could have been a masterful gap-filler. They had wisely taken a space in time of Tolkien's lore where there were many gaps, and it would have been fun to see them fill these - while leaving the stuff around the gaps intact. I've already likened the Amazon series' approach to gap-filling to my Latin students translating Ovid - instead of filling the gaps and leaving the stuff around intact, they go off wildly and hammer everything into the weirdest shapes so it'll fit the filled gaps. It's driving me mad on so many levels. So yeah, it's been a letdown. But I've felt let down by pretty much all "franchise" content in the last year or two, from Star Wars to Marvel to Fantastic Beasts and Jurassic World. It all feels like a meal warmed up once or twice too often. 

What are your thoughts on the Amazon series?