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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.
Things get compared to Ghostbusters 2016 too often, but in this case the analogy works. A product lacking in creative inspiration, love of the source material, or love of anything else really - the woke crap is bad in the same way that a rotten crutch is a problem for someone with one leg. If they'd filled it with my pet social causes, it still wouldn't make me interested.
The difference was that Ghostbusters 2016 was interestingly bad. There hadn't been a case of a "go woke, go broke" on that scale prior to that, as far as I recall. At this point, the novelty has thoroughly worn-off, so it doesn't even interest me as an example of bad TV.
What would interest me is a thorough comparison with LoTR 1978, which is very flawed in many ways but which I have an abiding love for nonetheless. When I saw it as a kid, my imagination was expanded and my sense of what is possible in storytelling grew. I slogged through even the most boring parts the books, which I wouldn't have done if I wasn't enticed by the film, because the film hooked me into Tolkien's world. The fundamental difference between LoTR 1978 and RoP seems to be that one had inspiration but not the means and the other had the means but no inspiration. Bakshi really wanted to bring Tolkien's world to the big screen and though he lost the war, he won many battles.
God bless Ralph Bakshi, he really did try to make a film that would be true to the books and be creative and push what animation could do. The worst thing he did was put a Viking helmet and no trousers on Boromir. Compared with what the Rings of Power lot managed to do between scrapping canon characters and inventing their own stupid lore (mithril came about because an Elf and a Balrog fought in front of a tree which was hit by lightning while a fourth Silmaril was hidden in its branches), this is high art.
And Rings of Power had nothing as catchy as this (sorry, Bear McCreary, you tried but Fiona Apple warbling over the end credits was nothing near as good).
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