@Brian Van De Walker I don't think your ever going to get away from plastic soldiers basically always being x-period warrior with a diffetne helmet. Even your examples boil down to a west europeans 14th/15th century knight, but ones is in a loin cloth and abandanna on a bad hair day, and the other is poor with sword that screams 'compensating' ;) . This is meant jokingly, but there is a point to that critique.
Like design wise I would cast your gaze more at late Roman inspirations for the Amazon Numenoreans. While you may see Chinese/Middle eastern, I see a pretty conscious push to try to merge the fashions of late antiquity with medieval fashion from Italy and Byzantium, which I think is a bit more on the money. (I mean, the only thing 'Chinese' about them is that they are wearing robes under thier armor, for example.) But they are just as unique design wise as your examples, but in a different way.
Trying to argue one is better than the other is dumb. It's all subjective. We've talked enough to where I think we both understand we've got very different aesthetic tastes, and that's fine - there's room for everyone in this hobby, after all, but we also have to look sqaurely at the fact that we aren't going to convince each other that our ideas are good. And that's ok!
The question I posed isnt actually if the designs are good (though again, I do love the infantry) - but if it would be smart to make a set based on thier design.
That would boil down to
-will/is the show popular enough to get people wanting some sets
and
-are the designs universal enough to have uses beyond just LoTR stuff?
While the verdict is very much out on the first, I think the second is probably a yes just from how distinct they look from everything else out on the market, and how hard it is to pin down thier influences, they are wonderfully generic in a way, and yet also distinct because nothing else out there is exactly like them. I get that you're going to disagree with the inherent value of doing a kit like that, but the fact that so many companies produce Romans, Vikings, Normans etc means there is a market for new versions of them -and likely- more fanciful but grounded takes on fantasy warriors like those Numenorean spearmen. I fall into that camp, for example.
But, I'd rather end on that I have no hard feelings about it, and hope you don't either - but let's just understand that nature of each others aesthetic tastes, and understand we likelly won't be convincing each other of much. ;)
