Amazon’s ‘woke’ butchery of Middle Earth has been unleashed on the world, and as many Tolkien fans had long dreaded, it’s terrible.
Such is the backlash from fans of the original masterfully crafted visions of Middle Earth, that Amazon has decided to suspend comments on their platform for 72hrs to ‘weed out trolls’.
According to the Hollywood Reporter “An Amazon source says reviews are being held 72 hours to help weed out trolls and to ensure each review is legitimate.” Apparently Amazon holds that for something to be ‘legitimate’ it must be complimentary.
I beg to differ….
The ‘Rings of Power’ is the most expensive production ever made, so why is it so bad?
Tyler Durden encapsulated the reasons as he wrote “the intention was to take yet another beloved property (Lord Of The Rings) and twist it into a vehicle for more woke propaganda, including intersectional feminist messaging and forced diversity casting for a story that was written as an ancient historical record of England.”
Indeed the ‘diversity’ is beyond forced. He continues. “Imagine if a company decided to make a movie about a fantastical African mythology and half the casting was white? It would not go over very well…”
“Not long ago,” he says, “if a company or corporation faced intense backlash from millions of their intended customers, they would try to fix the problem and appease the people that put money in their pockets. In the past few years, though, things have changed. Now, if millions of people don’t like a product they are attacked and shamed by companies as “bigots, racists, misogynists, etc.”
He is correct as he states that the “idea is a rather authoritarian one – The consumer is now beholden to the establishment and its business partners. If the establishment approves of a product you are not allowed to dislike or criticize that product.”
“If you do, you are a bad person with malicious intent.”
If the producers of the show had wanted to write characters from different ethnicities into the series they could have done so. Of course, Tolkien readers will be aware that the people of the Haradrim from the lands of Harad were based on African and Arab races, and that the Easterlings from the region of Rhûn were inspired by the peoples of East Asia.
With such a phenomenal budget, what was stopping Amazon from expanding on what we already know about those intriguing people groups and making epic new content instead of opting for cheap tokenism? Too much effort?
Rotten Tomatoes gives the show an audience score of just 39% (although this is generous in my opinion).
Tolkien painted his characters and creatures so beautifully in the histories of Middle Earth. There is little room for interpretation of what the different peoples and races should look, and even sound like.
Elves, as the first children of Ilúvatar (the creator god in Tolkien’s universe) are supposed to be magical and beautiful, a step removed from mortals closer to divinity.
Here they are depicted using modern day common English, having modern haircuts, they are quite far removed from elves altogether.
The Amazon production is so canonically perverse, and disrespectful to the lore that to my mind it is nothing short of blasphemous.
There are so many grave inaccuracies that I could easily pen a 5,000 word essay about, but for the good of my health I’ll probably just resume pretending none of this ever happened.
Thank God, House of the Dragon is good so far.