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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 -
I think there's a lot of reasons there, but the main reason is simpler. This is a thing made by people that aren't in love with Tolkien and his world. They are doing it for money, or for culture war reason, or for any other reason - but their primary goal seems to be something other than to cherish and enhance the Professor's legacy. This is the only way I can explain the decisions that were made and the approaches that were taken there. Dissecting the details can have its own fascination, but for me the main reason stays the same.
This is why, as a long-time (since the 80s, probably?) Tolkien fan, I am not even mad at them. As noted above, and I agree, it's just not Tolkien. It's using Tolkien for... whatever, I can't even care about it. Best thing that can be done about it is to file it to a dusty shelf of history where the weird curiosities are stored, and only take it out when we need to feel better by looking at something extremely cringe-worthy.
They're doing it cause they're not that important and helming a major IP like LOTR could make their career (like Game of Thrones put D&D on the map)
The real question is why studios continually favor hiring not just mercenaries but mercenaries with little experience, either with the direct IP itself or - more unforgivably- with big budget film-making at all. This was supposed to be Bezos' baby and he just defaults to industry standard practices that either failed (in the case of Star Wars) or only work because of very strong producer control (MCU).
Would he build his yacht or megamansion this way? Find relatively cheap builders with little experience or concern for the project as such?
Well, no movie has ever been pulled back because a consumer died. Crew members, on the other hand...
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I mean, every time the showrunners gave an interview, they just dug the hole deeper and deeper. Ten years working on scripts which never got made - but that was just down to mysterious causes no-one could anticipate, not because they were poor writers who only got work as script doctors and never had a credit of their own. And so then they decided "Hey, might as well try TV 'cos we're never gonna have our own movie" but they needed J J Abrams to pull strings for them even there:
"Yeah, so we're talentless hacks who went for this project out of desperation, luckily we had an in with a guy who could get us hired because we sure weren't getting the job on our merits. But why people criticise our show, well that's just trolls and racists, you know?"
They don't care what we think. They're selling themselves to the industry as "we had experience, took us a while to get here, now we're here". You tend to see this a lot with actors who talk about their long struggle or how many rounds of auditions and screen tests they went in for a momentous role.
This usually works better when your movie /performance isn't a total flop (it usually happens on the promotional circuit before release) but, as you point out, they have a solution to that: hiding behind the alleged victims of racism and sexism.
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I suspect maybe because mercenaries with experience can't speak fluent woke, and mercenaries with little experience can. And studio executives feel that if they don't have enough woke credentials, the critics and twitter mob will rip them a new one, and they certainly don't want that to happen. So it's not like they choose poor producers, it's that their criteria for choosing weren't "who would make the best story", but, for example, "who would ensure best hype among people that matter". Even if the goal isn't explicitly to make a woke product, if you hire people that don't rub the woke the right way, there would be wailing, and gnashing of teeth, and nobody wants that trouble.
Actually, if you read "Whither Tartaria" and numerous articles on the same topic lately, there are indications that yes, at least some mansions are built this way too - i.e. that the choice had more to do with social currents than with the expected utility of the result. Not sure about yachts, I know nothing about that.
I've seen some speculation that it is because they're unknowns, thus will be a lot more biddable to being told what to do and how to do it. A big-name A-list director with an established body of work can walk off set and even if the studio tries to say it's because the guy is an asshole, the director can appeal to what he's done before as evidence of the quality of his work and that the studio wanted a pile of shit which he wouldn't agree to. Hence the usual tactful "creative differences" angle when this happens. EDIT: I mean, look at Henry Cavill and The Witcher and now Superman. Nobody is saying, at least that I can see, that Cavill is in the wrong here. Most reaction has been 'he was a fan of the original Witcher stuff and the writers didn't give a shit about the lore so that's why he was pushed out' and even if reaction to the decision about Superman has been mixed, with some happy about a reboot, nobody says "yeah, that Cavill was rubbish".
A bunch of no-names? They can't afford to do that, because the studio can make it that they'll never work again. So they'll be "yes sir, no sir, three bags full sir" when the ninety dozen producers want this change, that added in, the other thing taken out (seriously, I counted up, and between executive producers and assistant producers and plain producers, there are something like thirteen of them for an eight-episode season, more than directors or writers!) and other executive meddling.
Payne and McKay have no big reputation or record, so if (say) Jennifer Salke says "No toxic masculinity! More women!" then we get Galadriel who can one-shot an ice troll, Míriel is now Queen-Regent, Bronwyn the Village Healer is de facto war leader of the Southlands villagers, and Elendil now has a daughter instead of a second son. "We need diversity!" Black Elves and black Dwarves coming right up, sir! Galadriel/Sauron romance - well okay, they probably thought that one up themselves.
Idk - star-crossed lovers are a staple of the most successful sci-Fi and fantasy movies/TV:
Both LOTR trilogies had them (Aragorn-Arwen, Tauriel-Kili)
Star Wars trilogies has them (Luke-Leia*, Anakin-Padme and Rey-Kylo - and that's just the 9 main films)
Game of Thrones (Jon-Ygritte, Lyanna-Rhaegar, Jon-Daenerys, Jamie-Cersei, Daario-Daenerys*)
Given this, it wouldn't surprise me at all if producers specifically asked for some star-crossed lovers. Assuming the orcs are off the table, that kind of leads to Sauron as the obvious choice (well besides maybe Pharazôn).
** These are stretches
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Maybe there just aren't that many mercenaries with experience [left]? Are the showrunners unionized?
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