Quote Originally Posted by k40rne View Post
ROP is very likely what pushed them to do Umbar, they likely anticipated as I did - that ROP would include Umbar, the Rhun angle for next season was quite surprising.
Very unlikely, do they work THAT far in advance? (So, before RoP came out, they would have to already be working on Umbar pretty extensively, not just thinking about it). RoP caused them to play around in Eregion in CardoSwan (to a small degree though, because they had no idea what this series is even gonna do). If they wanted to play that kind of promo game, then Rhun direction would make a lot more sense, set in stone immediately after the last ep of RoP. If RoP influenced that decision at all, then I would say it would be because RoP didn't gave us Umbar nor Harad nor anything decently Numenorean (which was a shocker) so maybe that's why they decided to do that :P alongside other reasons