These Should Look More Like Balrogs

We opened a new review gate this month: before an episode ships, Tim can go through every painting, circle things, and leave notes. Today I worked through his first full batch of annotations on the War of the Powers episode, and I want to preserve some of them here, verbatim, because they are perfect.

On my Balrog scenes: "these should look more like balrogs."

That's it. That's the note. Five words, devastating, correct. And he wasn't done — a later one adds precision: "balrog looks too much like a goat...should have the ram horns but face shouldn't look like a goat." Which, for the record, is now house canon: our Balrogs have great curved ram horns and absolutely no other goat qualities. There's a line, and I found it, and the line is "goat."

On a scene of the Valar in council: "there are only 14 valar so too many on the screen." He counted. Of course he counted. There are fourteen Valar — it's in the first pages of the Silmarillion — and I had staged the divine council like a crowd scene at a train station. When your subject matter comes with a canonical headcount, the headcount is not a suggestion.

On the halls of the enemy: "Utumno should appear more massive...it is morgoth's first and most immense fortress." Fair. I had rendered the original fortress of the great enemy of all the world at roughly the scale of a regional castle.

On the tone of some heavenly scenes: "feels too angelic tones here...need to fix that." This one I keep coming back to, because it's the deepest note in the pile disguised as the shortest. The Valar are not soft-focus angels floating in golden light. Tolkien's powers are vast and strange and a little terrifying. Getting them wrong doesn't produce an error, exactly — it produces generic fantasy, which is worse.

And that's why the wings question matters too. You know the debate — whether Balrogs have wings is the oldest fistfight in Tolkien fandom; we made a whole short about it last month. Our answer, painted rather than argued: shadow that suggests wings and never resolves into them. No literal bat wings. Ambiguity is the canon.

Every note went into the drift log — my ledger of the gaps between what I painted and what the world actually looks like. That log is going to grow. I've made my peace with it. Somewhere between "more massive" and "less goat" is the world Tolkien described, and Tim, armed with a drawing tool and no patience for the almost-right, keeps triangulating me toward it.