Why is Amazon’s new Lord of the Rings show taking so much flak? The way I see it, there are two (mostly separate) factors at play: Tolkien fandom and race.
First, Tolkien fandom. Despite the best efforts of the Tolkien Society to ‘queer’ Tolkien studies, the Inkling’s biggest admirers tend to be Christians on the cultural and political right. Most of this crowd (aside from those who think hating universally beloved things is a good substitute for a personality) loved Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy. His adaptation of The Hobbit, which took plenty of liberties in order to stretch about 300 pages into three feature films, was less well received. So when Amazon announced that it would be stretching even less material over even more screen time, fans were understandably concerned.
Add to that some early (though thankfully debunked) rumours about R-rated sexual content and a few virtue-signalling press releases about racially diverse casting, and soon jokes about disabled transgender elves were ubiquitous on conservative Christian Twitter.
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