even the non-righties are pissed

I occasionally watch videos by Nerd Cookies, a lady on YouTube who does nerdy commentary that's mainly about science fiction and fantasy. She's had interesting things to say about Dune (both the books and the movies), and right now, she's focusing on "Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power," an Amazon Prime Video series that is receiving massive, massive pushback from fans of both old-school Tolkien and Peter Jackson's LOTR trilogy. The showrunners for this Amazon project have gone way off-canon in creating the series, and every time the cast members or the producers/directors come out to speak publicly about their work, the PR only gets worse. Preview videos for the series all get heavily ratioed (to be ratioed: to have many more "dislike" votes than "like" votes), and Amazon has spent somewhere near a billion dollars on this project, which is going to be a massive flop. Now, I've never gotten the impression that Miss Nerd Cookies is any sort of raging conservative, so if even she is complaining about the colossal disrespect being shown to JRR Tolkien's legacy, you know it's got to be bad.

The litany of complaints includes the following points:

1. Galadriel is being portrayed as a gritty warrior, something Tolkien never meant for her to be, and this portrayal is probably in the name of modern feminism.

2. The Amazon story takes several millennia of history and compresses it all into a restricted time frame so that we don't see a long procession of new characters.

3. "Diverse" elves, dwarves, and hobbits should not be a thing in a tale that was explicitly meant to be western European in tone and content. Making the show "reflect modern realities" is simply pushing a woke agenda in our faces whether we're talking about race or sexuality. The reply to this nonsense is the "Make 'Black Panther' Japanese!" argument. No one would dare to say an African story needed more white people in it, and that shows you, right there, the crypto-racism of the woke agenda for "The Rings of Power."

4. The show's creators seem not to understand that Tolkien's Harfoots are, in fact, a subtype of hobbit. The Harfoot problem arose in interviews in which people pointed out that, according to Tolkien, hobbits played no significant role in the events of the Second Age, to which the showrunners apparently responded by saying that that's why they added Harfoots; the implication is that the showrunners think that Harfoots are not hobbits. The showrunners also said it was hard to imagine a Middle Earth with no little people caught up in the events of the time—just another instance of their disrespect for Tolkien's canon.

5. An exegetical question has arisen: the showrunners think that, if Tolkien had nothing to say on a given matter, then the showrunners should be free to take creative liberties. This isn't a completely illegitimate argument: the reason why we see so many disparate interpretations of Shakespeare is precisely because people took Shakespeare's literary lacunae and filled them in with their own stylings. Shakespeare himself would likely have approved: he wrote his plays with few to no stage directions because traveling troupes of actors had no idea what sort of stage facilities they'd encounter next, i.e., it would sometimes be necessary to change the onstage action to fit whatever setting they found themselves in. For Shakespeare, at least, the case can then be made that artistic license is warranted. There's a centuries-long tradition of taking such license, after all. But Tolkien is another matter. There's no indication (from what little I admittedly know) that Tolkien would have approved of people taking massive liberties with his work. If anything, Tolkien left behind a long history of correspondence in which he crabbily rejected this or that eisegetic misinterpretation of his work, e.g., the idea that Gandalf was somehow a stand-in for Jesus. (Eisegesis is basically when you interpret a text however you want without following any set traditions, established methods, or respectable schools of thought. Exegesis simply refers neutrally to interpretation, as of a text like the Bible.)

I remember, early on, being mildly curious about what "The Rings of Power" would offer us, but the more news and complaints I hear, the more convinced I am that I'm not even going to bother watching the series, despite being an Amazon Prime member. When it became evident that the showrunners had decided it was more important to shoehorn in a woke message than to respect a creator's work, that's the moment things turned sour for me. I'll watch the critical takedowns of the show, but not the show itself. Tolkien deserves better than what these twisted vultures are doing to his legacy. 

And that, folks, is how we ended up with a billion-dollar abortion of a production.