What Could Have Been/Literature: Difference between revisions

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** In ''[[Unfinished Tales of Númenor and Middle-earth|Unfinished Talesof Numenor and Middleearth]]'', it's shown that Tolkien considered making Celeborn a Telerin elf rather than a Sindarin elf, and changing his name to the Telerin form: Teleporno. (Imagine the [[Have a Gay Old Time|consequences]] if he had gone with that name. [[Perverse Sexual Lust|It's not like Galadriel, Celeborn's wife, wasn't sexy enough already]]...)

** There are '''far''' too many of these to mention in the new ''History of Middle-earth'' series. Perhaps the most radical are that Tol Eressëa was going to be England, Farmer Maggot and Treebeard were going to be villains, and Aragorn was going to be a [[Badass]] hobbit called Peregrin Boffin (alias "Trotter") who had been tortured in Mordor, or else a [[Future Badass]] version of Bilbo himself. He wore shoes (very unusual for a hobbit) and one proposed explanation was that he had [[Artificial Limbs|wooden feet]] as a result of his real feet having been ''[[Jack Bauer Interrogation Technique|sawn off by his tormentors]]''.

** Another one had {{spoiler|Boromir}} surviving the Breaking of the Fellowship, but then doing a [[Face Heel Turn]] and joining Saruman in the attack on Minas Tirith. (This was before the Rohan subplot was conceived.)

** The character of Arwen was introduced very late in the game. Originally Aragorn was to marry Eowyn, then Tolkien decided Eowyn should die and Aragorn never marry because he didn't get over his grief. Tolkien's wife convinced him not to kill Eowyn, so Arwen came into being. (This is part of why her and Aragorn's story is included in the Appendices rather than the book itself.) This created a fair amount of [[Fan Wank]] even when the books first came out, with some wishing he'd married Eowyn as originally planned.

* ''[[Harry Potter]]'': [[J. K. Rowling]] planned to kill off Arthur Weasley in the final book after she put off killing him in ''Order of the Phoenix''. (A remnant of this can be seen in the attack on him by Voldemort, which he survives. Rowling's reported outburst into tears over the character killed in this book may have actually been over Arthur, and in the end she couldn't bring herself to do it.) She changed her mind, "making up for it" by [[Dropped a Bridge on Him|killing]] {{spoiler|Lupin and Tonks}} instead.

** A deeper exploration of Meredith's marriage and Blumquist's past.

** A massive [[Plan]] , courtesy of Dr. Lehrl.

** Similarly, ''Visser'' was originally going to cover the careers of both Visser One and Visser Three, which is why the latter appears on the cover.

* In its earliest stages, ''[[Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close]]'' (now a movie) by Jonathan Safran Foer had nothing at all to do with 9/11. According to the author, however, when his brother read a draft of it and found that the protagonist was afraid of planes and skyscrapers, he asked if it was supposed to be about 9/11.