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Submission statement for Southkraut: Bret Deveraux discusses everything The Rings of Power creators did wrong other than the culture war stuff. TLDR: they understand neither geography nor economics nor anthropology. Also, they are racist towards the Irish.
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Notes -
Oh, I have entire rants on this topic and I've relieved my mind more than once. Basically, it's not Tolkien. The characters may have the same names as characters he wrote, but they're not the same at all.
The Harfoots were particularly painful, but it's not so much racism as "Yank who has Irish name and a great-great-grand da somewhere back in the 19th century does typical Hollywood diddley-eye version of the Irish". Wince-inducing, but not meant to be insulting, just patronising. That the Harfoots are, as negative reviews have called them, dirty little psychopaths has nothing to do with my proud island race (ahem).
It's just one more example of how the showrunners do not have one single clue. They certainly don't understand Tolkien or his world.
One of the funniest reviews is this ongoing series of reviewing each episode. The guy is Australian, so warning for the language getting saltier as the episodes go by. But parody and criticism can't outdo the writers of the actual show who made it that "You can take a pyroclastic flow to the face and come out of it with nothing more than a dusting of ash".
This one is a little more on the nose, depending on your tolerance for comparisons to the Holocaust. It takes the position that the showrunners deliberately made Galadriel a psycho killer in a subtle psychological study, and not that they were incompetent buffoons who tried to do "driven by vengeance" but created "absolute bitch nobody could like". He also has a Northern Ireland accent, so some might need to turn on the subtitles 😁
Rings of Pyre
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