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I'm not sure who it was, the director, producer, somebody, who gave an interview fairly recently in which they stated one of the central themes was "how far into evil will you go to do good?" Given that that is diametrically opposed to the central theme of Tolkien's work, which is that it is worth not using/doing evil in order to fight evil even though it is much harder and requires greater sacrifice, I elected not to view this show.

Perhaps after it is done someone will say to me "oh it wasn't like that at all" and I will enjoy it then.

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> "how far into evil will you go to do good?" Given that that is diametrically opposed to the central theme of Tolkien's work

But this theme is pretty much in keeping with the darker subject matter of The Silmarillion.

The subject matter of the Simarillion is that we are all flawed and those flaws lead to suffering and ultimately the repeated triumph of evil over good. And that every once in a while flawed beings shine with such a brilliance that it redeems all the rest of it.

Honest question... I recall attempting to read the Simarillion and finding that it was a simple recitation of facts about middle earth. I abandoned this after some 150 pages.

This was many years ago, is my recollection flawed?

No. You're not actually supposed to read it, or he would've published it while he was alive.

He tried to get it published, for decades, starting in 1937. The publishers would never take it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Silmarillion#Development

I mean, you could view any story as a "recitation of facts" if you're really determined to take that point of view, but I don't think it's at all fair to dismiss the Silmarillion that way.

It's true that the first 50 pages or so are pretty much just worldbuilding, mainly focusing on the mythology behind the creation of the world (Arda) by Iluvatar and the various demigods. After that, you start getting into the details of what the elves did upon waking up as the first quasi-"mortal" inhabitants of Arda, and the subsequent eras of history. Some of it is painted in broad strokes, but there are plenty of chapters that zoom in on specific characters and their heroic and evil deeds, personal conflicts, betrayals, hubris and other tragic flaws, etc.

Sure, the style of the prose is a bit dry, but there's plenty of drama to be had in the story.

Wikipedia has a pretty good summary of the overall plot: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Silmarillion#Synopsis

It's best to treat the Silmarillion as you would read the Bible. The styles are intentionally similar and both evolve throughout the works. There are narrative diversions throughout Tolkien's work, but it's ultimately a history of Middle Earth rather than a narrative story.

Similar to how modern franchises will have a "story bible" for writers to reference for themes and consistency.

This is really interesting. Do you have any examples?

Usually these are internal documents not released.

The Halo story bible is an exception which has seen parts released: https://www.halopedia.org/Halo_Story_Bible

A portion of the story bible for ATLA was leaked: https://www.reddit.com/r/TheLastAirbender/comments/aj0mfp/th...

https://clickhole.com/this-is-vince-gilligan-s-series-bible-...

No. It is by all means poor with no literature value other than the fact that has relation to the hobbit and the LoTR trilogy that are masterpieces.

You might as well leave it be.

I think it's great, but it's pretty dense and it's one of those things that you get more out of it by reading it several times. First read through it's just a barrage of names and places, and you don't know who's going to be important later. The second time through you at least know who the main characters are and what decisions are important.

Some parts are more like a traditional narrative: the story of Beren and Luthien, and Turin Turumbar.

If you didn't find it enjoyable to read before you might not change your mind at a second reading, but if it really was a long time ago it's possible your perspective may be different.

No, not flawed, it took me a few tries. The beginning has a lot of mythology that closely parallels the bible in broad strokes. Eru is God, the Valar are arch angels, Morgoth being Lucifer. Maiar as other angels like Gandalf and Sauron. With a few twists like Ungoliant that seem more like something out of India's pantheon.

Then you get into the elf family trees and their migrations. Its really dry. But it really helps understand the motivations of individuals in the rest of the book and the other books. There are some diagrams in the back to help you plow through it.

Then there are the accounts of both individuals and nations/races. They are more like greek tragedy than anything else. Though sometimes it doesn't even seem like there needs to be a flaw to bring down the fall. It is like binging all of Breaking Bad at once. Not going to leave you smiling, but that doesn't mean it isn't art.

That’s poetic but it’s a poor way to characterize the First Age described by Tolkien in The Silmarillion, in which redemption comes literally in the form of a Deus Ex Machina.

It’s also not a great way to characterize the Second Age, since both a portion of the good and a vital portion of the evil sides in the conflict survive and both are very greatly diminished, but I don’t think the writings about the Second Age were really central to that work. That’s why the show (which I haven’t seen yet) seemed like perhaps not a terrible idea to me. There’s not much legacy there to tarnish.

Does The Silmarillion include a monopolistic antagonist that can spend hundreds of millions of dollars on something to simply give away for free (or as a loss leader)?

Amazon is going full Sauron here. They're a multi-industry-spanning conglomerate that preferentially ranks its own show and discards negative reviews, while leaving House of the Dragon and competitors out in the cold.

They have whole other business units to recoup the costs. This doesn't even matter to them other than as a means to grow even bigger and capture/kill more industries. Talk about power.

Why are our legislators asleep at the wheel? We need to give smaller companies and startups a way to fight this. It's madness that Amazon can be bigger than Walmart, have its own shipping fleet, serve the whole Internet, run homes autonomously, own the e-reader/book market, own game streaming, and now apparently throw Hollywood around and make their productions look cheap.

> Amazon is going full Sauron

This reminds me of something I read recently.

> ..Tolkien's vision of the greatest evil in the universe was something he referred to as "The Machine", which was his way of talking about accelerated industrialism and mass surveillance.

> He wrote multiple books where the main villains were a dragon who sits on a huge pile of treasure that he never intends to use but incinerates anyone who comes near it; a man in a giant tower who's wrecking the environment with his factories; and an evil being who uses what's essentially a listening device to control the citizens of Middle Earth.

> And now Amazon is making a Tolkien show.

What exactly is the problem here? If Amazon keeps cavalierly losing money on endeavors they will drag everything else down.

They aren’t going to hide the fact that the show sucks and they certainly just made that much harder by doing this.

In order for them to actually maintain their power this show would need to somehow help them create a moat (it doesn’t) or just make money on its own by driving subscriptions.

As far as abuses of power go, this is absolutely not one of them.

People make these shows and I don’t think anyone wants to make a shitty show.

The issue is that this was a high dollar show and it likely had to have a lot of sign off. Unfortunately, great art and vast pre-approval don’t tend to go hand in hand.

I’m afraid we’re turning a corner in our golden age of television into a dark world of corporate overreach.

> own game streaming

Xcloud and GeForce Now would like to a word with you. Does anyone actually use Luna?

I think they mean Twitch.

That makes even less sense given the trend of game streamers leaving it for YouTube.

I haven't noticed this trend, I know some streamers have moved but Twitch has been dominating the market for around a decade and YouTube is finally somewhat worth mentioning.

Except LOTR is an excruciatingly boring drivel and even the current GoT with its second-hand agenda is more entertaining and watchable.

Time will tell, but I am sensing a major fiasco for Amazon studios

What is GoT's second-hand agenda?

> Does The Silmarillion include a monopolistic antagonist that can spend hundreds of millions of dollars on something to simply give away for free (or as a loss leader)?

That was included in one of the paperbacks published by Christopher Tolkien as “Unfinished Tales.”

That was certainly a theme of much of Tolkien’s writing. Many characters fell out a desire to do good, and many others were confronted with the choice to do evil in the service of good.

Nothing about what the person being interviewed said implies that the moral of the story is “you should go really really far into evil to do good.” I’d say the implication of that question is the opposite.

Here's a prediction: This show is all about current events and the answer is going to be "Yeah, a lot of evil, and we're still the good guys"

So far, the closest we have seen something like that is Galadriel’s obsession with finding Sauron in a very Captain Ahab way. It may become a test for her to see if she is willing to do evil in this quest and whether she can pull herself out of that. I doubt that they are actively promoting doing evil as justified. That quote did contain a question.

That reminds me of the scene where Denethor told Faramir he should have taken the ring back so it can be used for good. Had Faramir done that Sauron would probably win.

9 Kings of Men fell to the power of the Dark Lord. What is a steward who can’t even love his children equally going to do that they couldn’t?

Well, compared to that time, Sauron didn't have his Ring and his Ring contained a lot of his former power.

If Aragorn took the Ring, he would be able to challenge Sauron. Denethor was somewhat of a lesser rank, but still an almost pure Numenorean. The Ring would have turned both of them to Evil, for sure, but not necessarily into servants of Sauron himself. They might just become the new Evil overlords of the world after defeating Sauron.

The main character flaw of Denethor is that he sacrificed his life to the cause of Gondor and Gondor only. Existence and might of Gondor were his main motivations, not preservation of Freedom or Good in the world in general. He was based on a stereotype of a proud medieval or Roman noble, though (untypically) a highly educated one.

Bro this is literally the entire plot of the original trilogy. Boromir, Faramir etc all want to use evil for good.

Nonsense.

> Faramir

In the movies, yes, but not in the books.

In the books, the dichotomy between them is pretty significant. Boromir gave in to temptation to use it to defeat his enemies and was killed because of it. Faramir did not, suffered a bit for not having that weapon, but survived and was rewarded in the end. They were extremely clearly intended as a moral lesson.

The movies completely reversed Faramir.

Also the book has a extra chapter at the end where the shire turns into a police state, Fordo leads a horse back revolution to kick out the corrupt hobbits who inslaved their own people with the new tools from the people with the machines.

I was surprised as an adult when I first watched the movie that it didn't have this ending to the character arch, missing the final stage of the hero's journey.

I'm surprised they haven't turned it into a movie over the past twenty years. I suppose they'd have wanted Elijah Wood back and I get the feeling he wouldn't be keen to reprise the role.

https://www.usatoday.com/story/entertainment/tv/2022/08/31/l...

co-creator J.D. Payne teases. "The question the first season asks is, 'How far into the darkness would you go to protect the things that matter the most?'"

You would actually like the show, the main moral is exactly the tolkien one you mention. The interview person is not saying it's good to do evil to do good, just that it is a theme in the show as it is in lord of the rings.

After just 2 episodes it seems too early to state what the theme is, unless you’ve seen more than the public has.

Tolkien several said he wanted see what other people with their own creative vision “with other minds and hands” could do set in Middle Earth. It doesn’t seem like he expected them to slavishly follow his own style.

> "I would draw some of the great tales in fullness, and leave many only placed in the scheme, and sketched. The cycles should be linked to a majestic whole, and yet leave scope for other minds and hands, wielding paint and music and drama.”

> Tolkien several said he wanted see what other people with their own creative vision could do set in Middle Earth.

That would explain why the Tolkien state sued "Dungeons and Dragons", and Warner Bross, and anybody trying to clone middle earth in their own shows...

This explains also why the Witcher would need to find a way to have elves depicted as much different as possible from Tolkien's elves. Tolkien's elves are extremely advanced technologically and the "de facto" standard now for the term, Witcher's elves are a tribe of poor forest people, closer to the (copyright free) traditional goblins, but that went extinct with Tolkien's work.

Why are you even trying to make an argument like that? The point, as I'm sure you very well know, is Tolkien wanted other people to contribute original material to Middle Earth on their own terms. He was all for it. The opinion of his estate since his death is different of course, but that's got nothing to do with his own opinion.

You are right, is not really relevant here. Fair point

It’s possible to tell two stories in the same fictional world with opposing themes.

Tolkien once wrote:

> You can make the Ring into an allegory of our own time, if you like: an allegory of the inevitable fate that waits for all attempts to defeat evil power by power.

If these writers are using Tolkien's name without respecting his beliefs, even Tolkien might have given the show a bad review.

Of course that's just speculation, but only a rare storyteller can tell an epic tale that isn't ultimately resolved by superior force. If this show can remain faithful to Tolkien's vision, I'll be very impressed.

What do you see as not respecting Tolkien’s name? The quote was "how far into evil will you go to do good?". that is a question, not an admonition. It sounds like they may explore that. If so, it would not be unreasonable to end up with the same “do no evil” answer as Tolkien.

Why should we give a bad review based on insufficient evidence?

A also think they are not directly related. I would think Tolkien is talking about Authoritarian Power of governments. i.e. don't vote Fascists into power.

When I hear how far into evil will somebody go, I think of an individuals choices to do evil for a perceived the greater good.

Kind of related, but not quite the same.

I don't agree, I think Tolkien was also talking about individual choices. Remember this bit?

> “What a pity Bilbo did not stab the vile creature, when he had a chance!

> Pity? It was Pity that stayed his hand. Pity, and Mercy: not to strike without need.

> I do not feel any pity for Gollum. He deserves death.

> Deserves death! I daresay he does. Many that live deserve death. And some die that deserve life. Can you give that to them? Then be not too eager to deal out death in the name of justice, fearing for your own safety. Even the wise cannot see all ends.”

And it was that small individual mercy that ultimately saved the world.

and I think that Galadriel could make some choices that she later regrets and has to learn the lesson the hard way about doing evil. This is why I don't see that quote as being against any of Tolkien's principles.

I’m sure Boccaccio was similarly nonplussed when Shakespeare produced Romeo and Juliet.

an allegory of the inevitable fate that waits for all attempts to defeat evil power by power

(Shrug) It seemed to work pretty well. The important part, both morally and practically, is how you treat your former adversary after defeating them.

Not really if you dont even understand the theme of the underlying story and its moral aspects.

It’s also possible to just make a neat show with good production values, solid acting talent, and lots of intrigue and spectacle. You can enjoy stuff so much more when you don’t convince yourself that you have some ownership of the fictional material or the material owes you something.

People should try being happy rather than angry. It's more fun!

The Tom Bombadil approach.

Too bad it's not what we got.

Well I'd posit that this question is absolutely interesting enough to explore without the specter of "authenticity" hanging over it.

It’s a question poorly suited for artistic exploration when the artist defines the outcomes.

The conversation isn’t over when the credits roll, rather that is the end of the beginning.

The issues is narrative isn’t bound by causality making such conversation hollow.

Hardly, talking about how some narrative is hollow and what would have actually happened is a fruitful source of lit papers. The source material is merely the beginning of that conversation, as you and I are literally demonstrating in this thread.

I don’t see how the actual story applies to this discussion as I haven’t seen it. I actually came here to see if it was worth watching.

This type of development is unfortunately par for the course with modern Hollywood remakes of older media and probably will only get worse over time. I am not familiar at all with the LoTR stuff that's going on, but it seems somewhat similar to what they've done with Star Trek. Discovery and (especially) Picard make a mockery of Old Trek in terms of vision and values. I saw a recent parody video that described the TNG Federation as "Vegetarian Space Socialists" that everyone finds annoying but it seems like the writers of Picard have taken it literally. I won't argue that Old Trek is the epitome of subtlety, but the basic premise was that the Federation represents a utopian society that has mostly put aside material concerns in order to promote peace and prosperity in the galaxy. Star Trek was a series of stories about what would happen when you take people from this utopian society and put them in uncomfortable and challenging situations. This worked amazingly well.

Picard and Discovery throws this out the window. It seems like the rough outline of the show was to shoehorn as much heavy handed modern political controversy in between the big budget space battles. The characters seem to be raring to fight at every juncture which is pretty much the opposite of the Federation's MO.

This has also happened with Star Wars but I feel less bad. I think Star Wars was always a bit less "high brow" than some of the other media being discussed here, but Disney seems to have scoured the entire script of the original trilogy for any lines they could stretch out into scenes for a spinoff film ("Kessel Run" for Solo, "Many Bothans Died" for Rogue One). To me this stuff is straight up cringe - at the same level as bad fan fiction.

Ultimately I have started to regard most of these films as products in the same sense as breakfast cereal at the grocery store. When they put out a new neon green version of lucky charms I don't get mad - I don't pay attention at all. Luckily, it seems like there are some filmmakers who are making interesting films even post-COVID (Robert Eggers, David Kwan and Daniel Scheinert) so I have some hope for the future. But these mega-budget reboots? I do my best to ignore their existence at this point.

The people who write these believe that the old hero myths stories are based on the wrong values, and they are on a mission to correct it.

Responsibility, sacrifice, being torn between good and bad, these are not what modern stories should be made of.

But for some masochistic reason these same people can’t write their own stories, they actually want to destroy existing stories, kill off the previous characters and storylines, and insert their own philosophy into the old worlds.

It’s ridiculous, and narcissistic, and I sincerely hope something that makes these companies go bust. I sincerely hope in the long run there isn’t a market for this behaviour. Star Wars certainly seems to have collapsed.

Star Wars hasn't collapsed, but it isn't cool among the kids anymore. There is much better stuff out there for kids and young teenagers. Take the Star wars Battlefield games as an example - those games were contentless, badly designed crap and quickly went to available-for-free. Even for free I could barely play it for an hour. Another example, when the new movies came H&M had star wars t-shirts in their stores, I never saw a single person with that new storm trooper helmet on their chest in my city.

Star Wars huge size and market came from all the toys it sold, now that is pretty much over.

Why is star wars not cool among the kids any more, when being a geek is very cool, sci fi is cool, much more than in the 80s and 90s.

Why is it that almost every generation had star wars fans yet kids don't find it cool any more NOW?

Perhaps it's because this new type of storytelling has no market appeal. It appeals to narcissistic preachy writers in hollywood, but not to anyone else.

I'm a massive Star Trek fan, I've watched everything with "trek" in the title, but the quality has always been very uneven.

Even TOS isn't without its preachy nonsense, like: https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Let_That_Be_Your_Last_B..., a "subtle metaphor" of racism and ethnic conflict.

Yea, I find the people who complain about Star Trek and its 'wokeness' who also state they are diehard fans confusing. TOS was very heavy handed in its progressiveness at the time. Uhara and Sulu were considered groundbreaking characters from a diversity perspective.

I also agree about the uneven quality.

I'd say the bigger difference is old Trek showed and talked about how they are better, while new Trek talks about how not being like them makes you horrible.

It’s also a completely overdone trope by now

I stopped watching after they butchered a snow troll for no reason.

According to the books, a gentle creature, that gets easily scared. The right way to calm it down involves tickling.

But Galadriel chopped up every single part of its body. Twirling around unnecessarily while doing so, after having shot it up with 6 arrow. For this reason I have elected to cancel my prime membership.

For those who aren’t aware this is either satire or confusion on the OP’s part. There are no “gentle snow trolls” in the source material.

And there was nothing unnecessary about the fight scene. It’s unrealistic in the way that Legolas is unrealistic in Peter Jackson’s movies, but no worse.

And there is no gratuitous killing of trolls in the source material either.

It wasn’t gratuitous in the context of the show. They were attacked by said troll.

The troll attack advanced the plot by serving as a catalyst for Galadriel’s troops deserting.

Unless you’re saying that just having a fight scene with a troll was gratuitous? But the books have plenty of battle scenes with trolls as well.

I mean it’s a fantasy show. They wanted to show that Galadriel was a elite fighter and they succeeded

They showed plot armor not an elite fighter.

Isn't that exactly what you would expect from one of the oldest elves, clad in some of the finest armor created by the ancient elf smiths? Tolkien's elves are superhuman entities, magical and supernaturally agile, strong, tireless and so on.

They are not elite fighters in the sense of, say, just being a Navy SEAL.

If you're looking at Rings of Power and expecting a being such as Galadriel to break a sweat fighting something like a troll, you have a strange set of expectations.

>Tolkien's elves are superhuman entities, magical and supernaturally agile, strong, tireless and so on.

Which is why it's s suprising that a frost troll took out 3 of them in one lumpy throw of some packed ice

The regular fall to orc arrows. Their durability is highly variable in the books.

Notice that there were no dead elves at the end of that scene, just some mad elves that refused to follow their leader any more. They got kicked around by the troll, but afterwards they were ok. Elves are tough.

No, I would expect risk and effort minimization through perfection of strategy and technique. When 1 v 1 combat looks more dangerous than a farmer killing a goat it breaks my suspension of disbelief.

>I would expect risk and effort minimization through perfection of strategy and technique

I don't think that's consistent with the fights in the books.

I mean Fingolfin physically fought a 40+ foot tall Morgoth in the Silmarillion. He was jumping around between huge pits that Morgoth's mace made when Morgoth tried to hit him. Fingolfin had a sword, while Morgoth held a mace that was bigger than Fingolfin, and yet Fingolfin was able to survive being beaten to the ground by said mace.

I don't think there's anyway to depict fights on screen like that without looking a bit silly.

If you start trying to realistically depict what it would look like to fight giant humanoids, you'd end up with something that is probably very interesting to people like you and myself, but that the majority of people would find boring. Plus that's not how the source material approached combat scenes.

Troll scene aside, I am just bored that it seems Disney and Amazon Studios share the same writers when it comes to their strong female leads.

Americans should, I think, not be allowed to write fantasy because none of them know fairy tales well enough, and worse, none of them are capable of dry humor. I assume if I watch this Rings of Power show it'll turn out to be written by Joss Whedon and everyone will constantly be quipping at each other and looking at the camera like on The Office.

I'll watch it if the writers room turns out to be staffed by weird old British Catholics though.

none of them are capable of dry humor

Bill Murray, Nick Offerman, and Steven Wright would all like a word.

We must have very different definitions of dry humor if those three are your examples.

Steven Wright is dry, at least his powdered water joke is.

If we are talking individual jokes sure. He is the closest of the three and keeps the dead face unlike Nick Offerman who’s brow is integral to the comedy.

However he regularly expresses emotions through gestures and subtle body language, so yes it’s close but not there over a full routine.

Now this was a good chuckle

the British office lasted one season, while the American version lasted 9. Gervais also wrote much of the American one.

There were two seasons of the British version of the Office, and a Christmas special.

I don't think you should take the longevity of each as a mark of popularity or quality. The British version wasn't cancelled - Gervais and Marchant ended it deliberately with a proper conclusion. I don't think anyone doubts more British series would have been commissioned if they'd wanted to carry on.

When Gervais was asked if he likes the American version his response was "Yes of course. It's made me very rich." That's his dry sense of humor, but I suspect it also hints at why they stopped doing the UK version and started on the US version instead.

Gervais has writing credit for literally one episode of the American Office https://www.imdb.com/filmosearch?role=nm0315041&job_type=wri...

And it has been said multiple times by people working on the American version that besides the inital setup, Gervais and Merchant had very little if any input and everything was done by the American wtiters/show runners.

> Americans should, I think, not be allowed to write fantasy

Aye! They write Fantasy like action movies.

They should take a cue from the Expanse. Like the wire, they just made the characters epic, male or female (having amazing actresses helped)

Did not watch but your description most certainly convinced me not to watch it.

The description is nonsense.

His description was sarcastic.

One would hope that "for this reason I have cancelled my Prime membership" would've made it obvious that they were joking. Alas.

The case of gentle snow-trolls susceptible to tickling existing in Tolkien's universe made me quite curious. The following turned up after a brief research session:

> Snow-trolls are mentioned only once in Tolkien's works, in reference to Helm Hammerhand stalking his enemies "like a snow-troll" during his sorties against the Dunlendings in the Long Winter. The trolls who lived in the Coldfells in western Eriador may have been similar to these. [1]

And the actual passage, from The Lord of the Rings, Appendix A, "The House of Eorl":

> Helm [Hammerhand] held the fortress during the Long Winter. He blew his great war-horn, and broke through the Dunlending ranks, clad in white, stalking men like a snow-troll slaying them with his bare hands. However, his sons Haleth and Háma were slain and Helm grew gaunt because of grief and famine; still his horn would fill the Dunlendings with fear each time it was heard. During one of his night sorties Helm died, possibly from famine and cold; his body was discovered frozen in the snow still standing. [2]

I would say the "stalking" and the subsequent "slaying" similitudes rule out the gentle qualities of the snow-troll.

For the record I haven't watched RoP yet; something feels wrong about this interpretation of Tolkien's work and I think I'll save myself the disappointment.

[1] https://lotr.fandom.com/wiki/Snow-trolls [2] https://tolkiengateway.net/wiki/Helm#cite_note-Helm-5

Amazingly she didn’t even run out of breath while running over swords of her compadres. Do elves posses superhuman stamina as in they can sprint a marathon and some such?

>He [Legolas] was tall as a young tree, lithe, immensely strong, able swiftly to draw a great war-bow and shoot down a Nazgûl, endowed with the tremendous vitality of Elvish bodies, so hard and resistant to hurt that he went only in light shoes over rock or through snow, the most tireless of all the Fellowship.

https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/513872-he-was-tall-as-a-you...

Yes. Legolas is shown in The Lord of the Rings to be capable of stalking his foes day and night, and he only has to stop because Gimli and Aragorn can't keep up.

In general, the elves, especially the older ones like Galadriel, are shown to possess super-human characteristics in all physical feats, including agility, stamina and strength (though the Men of the First Age apparently were stronger though less agile).

Galadriel also saw the light of the 2 trees which tends to make elves even more super human.

Troll was hungry af and was also hanging around that evil place, sus

I guess I understand that if one is a big Tolkien fan and takes the source material very seriously. But it sounds like a viewpoint that is almost certainly of little importance to the showrunners and the vast majority of potential viewers.

Personally I couldn’t care less about Tolkien’s legacy or anything like that, and it seems like a cool show with lots of very expensive spectacle on screen and I think that should be enough. I guess I’m just not big into the whole proprietorial fandom thing.

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