@carlandrea , @sengawolf - off the top of my head (short bullet points, will provide further information if requested, but most of this is on my blog in some form or another):
Túrin is treated completely differently in the full-length The Children of Húrin and the drafts that made it up (Unfinished Tales is where most of that is). In the Silm he’s presented as arrogant, overpoweringly belligerent, aggressive, and mean-spirited. There’s even a passage about how Orodreth was afraid to countermand his orders in Nargothrond. In the drafts and the novel he’s kind to the powerless, chivalrous toward multiple women (including saving someone from sexual violence and putting a stop to that sort of thing in the spaces where he lives), and is massively popular and well-liked in Nargothrond with only Gwindor disliking him. Everyone who’s in his chapter gets more development in their actual own story, including antagonistic figures like Mîm and Andróg, both for good and ill.
Haleth has an all-female bodyguard squad and her people maintain their militaristic tendencies after her death.
Míriel is the inventor of the concept of sewing, and is the reason fitted clothes exist for the elves
Maeglin as he exists in the drafts is popular in Gondolin, considered handsome and charismatic and a supremely eligible bachelor whose House is fanatically loyal to him. He’s politically savvy, and seen as an equal on the council of lords, able to argue on the spot for a change of battle plans during the early stages of the attack on the city, and everyone accepts and agrees with his points. He’s stated in the Quenta (Shaping of Middle-Earth) to be “loved and trusted” by Turgon. The only person who dislikes him is Idril, specifically because he’s disrespectful of her personal space and constantly pining after her and sending her mental messages that are the equivalent of those “send nudes” texts you see from certain types of guys on the Internet. According to the Quenta the actual reason Turgon didn’t want them to marry was because he suspected his nephew didn’t actually love her but instead wanted to use their marriage for political gain. There’s absolutely nothing in any of the drafts about his desire for her being considered gross or incestuous, or about him being unpopular, or about him feeling cut off from his father’s culture or being traumatized by his childhood.
I wouldn’t be me if I didn’t mention the straightwashing - the absence of the green stone that Fingon received from Maedhros + all of the various statements or decisions or parallels made to reflect the significance of their relationship, Gil-galad being Fingon’s son, and the removal of the kisses Beleg and Túrin shared. If you read the Silm you’ll come to the conclusion that all these people were heterosexual.
In all the drafts I can think of but one Maglor commits suicide by drowning to parallel Maedhros’s suicide by volcano, and is not mentioned by Tolkien as being any sort of last survivor
Galadriel is a significantly more morally ambiguous figure in her earliest appearances, with Tolkien progressively making her more and more Correct and Pure; her Silm version is somewhere between her earliest and latest appearances but it’s still worth mentioning
I am not arguing that people who adopt Silm characterizations or Silm-based headcanons etc are wrong. It’s important to me that I make that clear because anyone can do what they want to do and all headcanons and fanworks are important and equally welcome in the fandom, death to elitism, etc. But that’s a significant part of why I, personally, cannot analyze or work with the Silm as canonical rather than as a good introduction to the broader Legendarium - there’s too many changes, and so much of what’s there just doesn’t tell the full story or actively misrepresents it.
romaincrisis
tangentwithtanner
ellievsbear
discoholicmusic
andulkaphoto
prguitarman
pixelskylines
kianamaiart
theartofmadeline
