Like just about every other nerd or nerd-adjacent person in the Western world, I am a fan of J.R.R. Tolkien's Middle-Earth books. The lore, the language, the mythos was very well put together and his works are timeless.
Naturally, some asshole billionaire decided he wanted to ruin it while he goes to space.
This new Amazon Lord of the Rings series looks to be a complete disaster of a story. I haven't watched the trailer, I've just heard various things on the Internet and seen some of the pictures of it. It's all nothing but a bastardization of Tolkien's original vision of creating British mythology.
We saw this kind of happen in the original Lord of the Rings series with Arwen. She was a very minor character in the book series, with her older twin brothers playing a larger role, who only shows up at the end to get married. But Peter Jackson and Fran Walsh felt that there were enough female characters in this adventure saga and so they added in a bunch of stupid romance scenes with Aragorn and Arwen.
Now two decades later we get diversity quotas fully met and Galadriel is a warrior woman, which fully masks her true strength as a character.
So, while I haven't watched the trailer, I'm going to make the following predictions on what is going to happen in the new series.
- Galadriel and Elrond will have a sex scene. Lore-wise, Galadriel is Elrond's mother-in-law, but hey, you need to get incest-adjacent material.
- There will be a ton of Game of Thrones-style betrayals resulting in tons of death and gore. Most of it will happen in Numenor as this show supposedly happens around the time of its fall from grace.
- Ar-Pharazon will rape his queen and this scene will be fully realized on screen. There is some contention as to whether or not he took Miriel as his queen willingly as there are a couple of accounts, but given that this will be Game of Thrones in Middle-Earth, I suspect that he will do this.
- Sauron will be portrayed as a complicated figure who isn't "wholly evil" in a similar vein to how Thanos was portrayed in Avengers Infinite War.
- Gil-Galad will probably have a male lover.
- Isildur's brother, Anarion, will probably be pan-sexual.
- There will probably be a sex scene between a dwarf and an elf. Gender to be determined.
You'll notice that a lot of my predictions revolve mostly around sex. That's because the stories were probably written by people who were writing erotic fan-fiction of Middle-Earth 20 years ago.
The fact is, all of Tolkien's published works should have entered the public domain upon his death. And whatever his son, Christopher Tolkien, published should have entered the public domain upon his death. Copyrights should only be own by individuals, not companies, and only by the original creator, unless said creator sells it to someone else while he is alive and in front of witnesses.
If the works of Middle-Earth were public domain, we probably wouldn't have garbage Amazon shows about them. This is because the Entertainment overlords are only interested in stealing the works of others and "adapting" it for "modern times". They have no original ideas, only ideas created by people better than them.
If the works were in the public domain, sure we would probably have garbage produced, but no one would bother with it because there would be people who would make better products related to it. Think of the works of H.P. Lovecraft and how there have been good products, like The Call of Cthulhu silent film, and garbage products, like Lovecraft Country.
Sadly, Amazon is now the gatekeeper of all things Middle-Earth and they will use it produce crap for as long as they can.