A full transcript of the online chat that Peter and Guillermo del Toro held to answer fan questions about the Hobbit movies. Links & interesting thoughts from ithiliana and sandelwood.

( summary in bullet points )

( Will the actors reprise their roles? (Short answer: yes!) )

Me: I read this as saying that the Elves could appear, but really very few of the Men and Hobbits would make it, even into the second film. They're just too young. The Hobbit events occur in 2940 of the Third Age, and LOTR in 3018. Aragorn, who was born in 2931, could show up. But Frodo wasn't born until 2968 and Boromir in 2978. Plus, the actors are all ten years older. I'm hoping that the ones whose characters aren't around will at least get to do minor roles. Ah well.

And Christopher Tolkien trying to terminate film rights to The Hobbit because New Line has been playing fast and loose with the accounting. Silly man. Royd Tolkien, OTOH, is a hottie.

matildabj points out that release dates are 2011 for the first one and 2012 for the second, and in fact there's a bit in the Q&A where some fan asks if they meant to use the 10-year-anniversary of LOTR, and Peter says, no but it's a clever idea.

ETA: caras_galadhon points out that the last bit is from Pete, not Guillermo, fixed.

The election is for what I suspect is a largely symbolic seat on the LJ Advisory Board, but symbols matter.

fandom_votes has lots of info on why voting for a fandom-oriented candidate is a good idea, and where the various candidates are in fandom. metafandom has many links to posts on the topic.

I'm voting first for rm, who I've seen while wandering friendsfriends and is generally both rational and insightful. My second choice is vichan who founded fandom_counts, and my third is legomymalfoy who has a lot of fandom endorsers and a good platform.

OTOH, I very much dislike jameth who is a poster of horrible blinking animations (which completely disqualifies him in my book) and tends to slag off fandom (ditto).

VOTE before May 29! Vote for three different people: second and third choices count during runoffs. Vote!