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Comment by freetime2 | Hacker News Reader

> “The Rings of Power” has been fending off trolls for months, especially ones who take issue with the decision to cast actors of color as elves, dwarves, harfoots and other folk of Tolkien’s fictional Middle-earth.

This article feels a bit quick to write off the negative reviews as being from racist “trolls”. A quick look of reviews on Rotten Tomatoes [1] shows a lot of negative reviews that seem legitimate to me.

I personally enjoyed the first two episodes, but the show is far from perfect.

[1] https://www.rottentomatoes.com/tv/the_lord_of_the_rings_the_...

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There seem to be three types of review on there.

1. Hur hur, rubbish. 1 star (There are seriously reviews like that)

2. This isn't Lord of the Rings. 1 star

3. I really loved how they took that piece from the Silmarillion and explored the concept. 5 star

The people giving it low ratings don't appear to know the source materials. Disclaimer - I have not yet seen it so I am witholding judgement, but the reviews are embarrassing.

Most reviews I read noted the terrible writing and at best mediocre acting from several of the main characters.

On a personal level i don't care much if it's true to the source material, I haven't read it. Nor do I care that there are PoC in it. I do care that it's just at best a 6/10 (maybe a charitable 7?), which hurts based on the potential it had.

Amazon doesn't have rights to Silmarillion, though, so they can't take anything from there.

fwiw i found that a large proportion of the metacritic user reviews i looked at the night it come out appeared to be fake, not all containing racist/sexist content, and more seemed to take a "tolkein would be rolling in his grave" slant

it was a fun problem to consider though, how to evaluate whether a review is fake or not. obviously the most powerful tools would be ip logging or browser fingerprinting or requiring other user verification but absent that i wonder what approaches review verification services take based on the content alone. i use some plugin for amazon reviews that i think looks for similar terms but it seems like it can sometimes be overzealous when products are very simple so many reviews seem similar when they might be from unique people

It doesn't read as sole attribution, but rather a description of some trolls

Fair point. But that’s the only justification given in the article for the negative reviews, which I think gives the impression that the bulk of negative reviews are coming from said trolls. I think it would have been worthwhile to at least mention some of the legitimate criticism the show has received (pacing, dialogue, straying from Tolkien in other ways, one-dimensional characters, etc.)

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