The Rings of Power has faced lots of criticism, some of it coherent and mostly concerned with how entertaining it is (or isn’t), and some of it…worse.
The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power is coming up on the end of its first season, and things have gone…pretty well. Ratings have been strong and critical response solid, although there has been a portion of the fandom very upset by what they’ve seen. For better or worse, that part has gotten a lot of press.
In particular, a bunch of gremlins have been especially upset that The Rings of Power features people of color playing elves and dwarves, as well as having women in central roles. This kind of venomous, irrational backlash crops up time and again — it happened to the Captain Marvel movie back in 2019, it happened to that all-female Ghostbusters film in 2016, and it’s happening to The Rings of Power now.
And just so I’m clear, there are lots of legitimate reasons not to like The Rings of Power, but I’m not going to sit here and act like a big part of the reason the backlash to it has been so explosive isn’t because a lot of the haters are just passing their unfiltered rage and fear through sieves of racism and sexism. That’s always true of these culture war backlashes. For example, that 2016 Ghostbusters movie did indeed suck, but not because it starred women. It was just…a lame movie.
When one of these backlashes get rolling, it can sometimes be hard to separate the good faith critics from the angry babies. But the angry babies cry the loudest, so they get attention. “The hardest part was for people on the cast who have had things related to them privately that are just harmful,” Amazon Studios exec Vernon Sanders told The Hollywood Reporter.
J.D. Payne, who runs The Rings of Power alongside Patrick McKay, was especially upset by the backlash, even if a lot of people saw it coming. “The spirit of Tolkien is about disparate peoples who don’t trust one another and look different from one another finding common ground in friendship and accomplishing big things,” he said. “That’s the spirit we’ve tried to inculcate into every single comma and period in the show. That this aspiration would be offensive to people and enrage them … it’s very hard for us to understand.”
"What are they protecting? I don’t see how people who are saying these things think that they’re fighting for good. There’s a line in episode seven where Galadriel says every war is fought from without and within. Even if you’re fighting for something you think is good, if you do something worse in that fight, then you become evil. I don’t see how people who are saying these things think that they’re fighting for good. It’s patently evil."
I’ll give this to Payne and McKay: they do seem to have a genuine love for the works of J.R.R. Tolkien. You can see Galadriel say that line when the seventh episode of The Rings of Power drops on Amazon tomorrow.
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