I am so sad there’s not more LoTR stories. Have written about this before: https://www.thecodedmessage.com/posts/tolkien/
For example, I do not think the Peter Jackson movies, despite the monumental effort that went into them and Jackson's genuine interest in the material, actually capture what Tolkien was trying to capture. I have written about this here:
http://blog.peterdonis.com/opinions/tolkiens-ring.html
I have not even tried to watch the TV series (I didn't even watch Jackson's The Hobbit movies), because it just looks like an even worse job of capturing Tolkien's viewpoint.
Imagine you took someone who had just read _The Hobbit_, and you gave them a copy of the _Silmarillion_ carefully scrubbed of any identifying information and all of the critical apparatus, just the barebones fiction itself, and with a cover story like 'I got this off Ao3, you might like it'. I wonder how many people would realize it was even in the same fictional universe, much less by the same author?
But, as he says in the foreword to LotR, that story got irresistibly drawn towards the older world, and became a story of its ending and passing away before its beginning and middle had been told. (I don't know if I'm giving what he said in the foreword word for word, but I think I'm pretty close.) So someone who read the LotR in its published form would see the connection, if for no other reason than some of the same characters (Elrond, Galadriel, Cirdan) appear in both works. And of course anyone who read the Appendices in detail would see even more connections, because Tolkien put them there on purpose.
(Btw, after the publication of LotR, Tolkien went back and reworked some parts of The Hobbit, notably the encounter with Gollum in Riddles In The Dark. That reworked version is what most people now have read. The really original version, published before LotR, is even less related to the legendarium.)
I don't know why this remotely is a controversial opinion. When I went to the cinema, the audience laughed when Gollum fell into the volcano, as Jackson clearly wanted them to. Would Tolkien have wanted that?
We're treated to a long scene of Gollum falling with the camera following him and him waving his arms and kissing up to the ring. Then the ring (of gold) floats on the lava and Gollum (of hobbit flesh) sinks. It turned into pure cartoon in the most dramatic scene in the series. It's not the only scene in the film with a "90s computer game cutscene" feel to it either.
I can't imagine he would have, no.
Another scene from the books that is totally absent in the movie, which I didn't discuss in my blog post, is the one where Gollum comes upon the sleeping Frodo and almost caresses him, as if he's reconsidering his whole plan of sending the hobbits to Shelob and taking the Ring for himself--and then Sam blunders in and ruins it.
I can't really provide details without spoiling the series for you, but if you watch the first season to the end[1] and then review your own blog post, I think you'll at least understand why I thought you might really like it.
FWIW, although he didn't live to see the finished work, apparently Christopher Tolkien liked what he saw of the preproduction, despite his dislike of Jackson's films.
[1] This is important, but again, spoilers. Even if you end up disliking it, or disagreeing with some of the choices they made, I'm confident you'll agree that the writers love Tolkien's writing as much as you obviously do.
I had heard of those things before, and my reaction was "ick", and it still is. (a) is completely inconsistent with everything Tolkien wrote about Galadriel. (b) is a huge change in the timeline of the Second Age, for no good reason that I can see except that TV audiences are not supposed to be able to follow a story that covers such a long expanse of time. Which I think Tolkien would have had the same "ick" reaction to that I have. (I'm not sure what to make of Christopher Tolkien's reaction, but I suspect his reaction was much more nuanced, or else he didn't see enough of the preproduction.)
I get that people like to, so to speak, play around with an imaginary world they like. I have no objection whatever to people watching Jackson's films and liking them, or watching this series and liking it. I just don't think the world they are seeing portrayed in Jackson's films is the same world that Tolkien imagined and wrote about. And based on the above, I suspect I would feel the same about The Rings of Power.
As far as loving Tolkien's writing goes, there are many different ways of doing that. I have no doubt that Jackson sincerely loves Tolkien's work. He just doesn't in the same way I do, since what he did with it is nothing like what I would have done. And again, based on the above, I suspect I would feel the same about the people who made The Rings of Power.
This is where free expression and intellectual property butt heads. Had our subject merely distributed his writings openly (free), it would be much harder to shut him down.
LOTR is great because it's a unique product of who Tolkien was, with his background in linguistics and experience in World War I and his Beowulf scholarship. Be your own interesting person and make your own stuff.
I feel like these days, real creativity is punished, and only 'meme'-able things get rewarded.
A new thing is great, not saying it isn't. Certainly, tributes of recent works are not a good commercial strategy. I personally haven't truly appreciated a great work like lotr or Chrono Trigger or Jurassic Park or what have you until I've recreated a small part of it out of love. Of course, this rant is limited to fan derivatives made out of passion. Attempts to deceive are another thing.
I'm sorry if I'm rambling and come off as angry, I'm not and appreciate your point. But I find this suggestion to leave out the tribute part in fan works to kinda be missing the point. For my stuff I'd rather have made it and have it taken down, over not having made it at all.