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I didn't want it to fail, I wanted a show set in Middle-earth and based on Second Age to be awesome. And it could have been, except that for whatever reason Amazon put it into the hands of two Bad Robot protegés who, in a ten year career, have failed to have a movie script they worked on made. J.J. Abrams must have some amazing kompromat to get these two in charge of a major production.
I understand compressing the timeline. I understand creating new original characters. I understand not being able to fit it all in, or changing elements to make the story work. I could even tolerate the "We is so woke and diverse!" crap if they'd been less gung-ho on "if you want an explanation for why there is a sum total of one (1) black Elf among all the white Elves, you are a racist hater bigot" and spent two sentences on "Dísa is a princess of the Eastern Dwarven House of the Blacklocks" (there, that explains our black Dwarf) and we had all Arondir's troupe of Elves be an off-shoot of the Silvan Elves (Tolkien split the Teleri into multiple branches, you could surely fudge something up) and they were all mixed-race like him, instead of the only two speaking parts in his garrison force being white Elves. Míriel is now black while her dad is white? Eh, who cares, at least this is a human character being played by a human, and again you can fudge up a backstory about her mother's ancestry.
But they didn't just change elements, they flat-out contradicted lore and invented their own crappy horrible explanations for why suddenly all the Elves in Middle-earth (or the Noldorin ones, anyway) will die because the Great Tree in Lindon is dying because of the Darkness and the only thing that will save them is the light of Valinor which is contained in mithril, which is now a magic metal that does Elvish healing. The Silmaril in a tree stupidity. Teleporting all over the place. Vague geography, vague timelines so that in the Southlands battle, you simultaneously have it be day while the Rohirrim, I mean Númenoreans, are riding to the rescue while the villagers are fighting the Orcs at night. All this bullshit after they put out heaps of interviews and articles about what huge fans of Tolkien's work they were, how they weren't going to change anything but update it for a modern world, how they were going to be so faithful to the lore. Also the pointless Arondir-Bronwyn romance; after all the talking up about the 'forbidden love', what actually happened? Nothing! And the two actors have no chemistry, so every scene of them together might just as well be them talking about knitting socks, or churning butter, or "I remember the day your grandmother was born"!
I ended up liking the bad guys better! This is not what you want to do!
I don't think it's blackmail, just plain old clout. Clout he probably does not deserve, but alas.
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