The Rings Of Power’s Harshest Critics Seem Awfully Mad About Black Hobbits

If you go online right now and read about The Rings Of Power you’ll find opinions sharply divided, often along cultural and political lines.

Sometimes it’s hard to wrap your head around the latest online controversy.

How do people get so worked up about fictional shows and movies and video games, many of which are mostly geared toward kids? I mean, Star Wars has become one of the bloodiest fronts in the culture wars—and it’s a space opera made for kids with Ewoks and laser swords and goofy masked villains named Darth (calm down, I’m mostly joking. Mostly).

Now it’s The Lord Of The Rings’s turn. This is a fantasy epic that’s inspired all sorts of adaptations and spinoffs, including a video game about a Ranger who soul-binds with the spirit of an ancient elven smith in order to lay down 100-hit combos on hordes of orcs. But the real problem seems to be these hobbits-of-color. Clearly, Tolkien is rolling in his grave and what we need more of is novice students of Tolkien who just read the Wikipedia page and watched a YouTube video hollering into the void: “Where is Celeborn?!?”

Buckle up, folks, there will be blood.

The carnage is already piling up like so many elven helms after a centuries-long battle with Morgoth.

Lately, on my various social media timelines and on my YouTube channel, I’ve been bombarded with commenters angry about Amazon’s Lord of the Rings live-action TV show, The Rings Of Power. This same anger and outrage can be found on reddit, in the review-bombing of the show on Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritc, and pretty much everywhere you look if you spend anytime paying attention to this stuff on the internet.

I generally try to engage as much as humanly possible with fandoms, even with fandoms that I perceive as largely unhinged or toxic, but everyone has their limits. It’s important to try to understand why people are so upset with everything all the time because sometimes those grievances are actually well-founded.

Other times, however, there’s just a nasty streak to all of it, a mean-spiritedness tinged with bigotry and resentment and misplaced self-righteousness that gets under my skin. Perhaps it isn’t even the racism that irks me most, but the sheer quantity of people engaging in No True Scotsman fallacies, acting high and mighty as though they are the sole arbiters of What Is Tolkien and who qualifies as a True Fan and imparting upon us how the Professor himself would surely feel about all of this. It gets tiresome not because it’s a critique of the work, but because the art is so flagrantly secondary to the politics of it all. Outside of the hardcore Tolkien fans there are the legions of angry commenters mostly interested in scoring points against those they deem woke (which is anyone left of Mussolini these days).

As a brief aside, I want to make it very clear that I am in no way suggesting that people can’t or shouldn’t critique The Rings Of Power. Quite the contrary.

I believe there are many legitimate reasons you might not be happy with the show, including just how much it’s tampered with Tolkien’s lore (though I, personally, am approaching the show like expensive fan-fiction so they can go wild with changes and it simply doesn’t bother me) or the butchering of the timeline and so forth. It’s normal not to like casting choices or to find the pacing off or have quibbles with dialogue or creative decisions made by the showrunners. Where the show stumbles in terms of pacing, dialogue, conflict and so froth, critique away.

Typing out “this show is woke trash” is not a critique. It is a blemish on all that is good and holy in the world and you should be ashamed.

For every reasonable critique out there, it seems half a dozen more pop up shrieking about how Rings is too woke, that it is pushing a political agenda and cramming a message down our collective throats—without a lick of evidence. What message? What agenda?

This cacophony of outrage originated long before the show was even available to watch, based on trailers and interviews and the audacious presence of a black elf and a black female dwarf in a story that is, according to the legions of malcontents, a ‘white show’ as though ‘white’ was even a defining factor of antiquity. Tolkien’s myths take place in an era long before the notion of race even existed.

But when you spend your days and nights feeding on a steady diet of perpetually outraged YouTubers who make a solid living relentlessly hating everything with even a whiff of diversity in it, this is what you get. (I’m not a huge fan of identity politics myself, but it’s astonishing to me just what big business it all has become; perhaps this particular cottage industry needs The Rings Of Power to be woke whether or not it is, because stoking outrage pays the bills).

Much of this can be traced back to The Last Jedi, a film that was far from perfect but a far cry from the betrayal of all things Star Wars that Outrange Inc. made it out to be. The problems with the new Star Wars trilogy are indeed manifold, but often I find the anger over its shortcomings misguided at best. Was Luke really more of a problem in that film than the silly space chase? Was Rey being a “Mary Sue” really more of a problem than simply not developing any of the characters or their relationships enough? The best part of Episode IX was the Rey and Kylo Ren stuff; that film suffered most from recycling the Emperor and rushing just about everything.

Now, it seems the inclusion of black and brown skinned people in The Rings Of Power is apparently an assault on Tolkien and ‘the West’ itself. Some speak their bigotry quite plainly. Others dress it up a little, complaining that Tolkien was writing a specifically British and Norse myth that wouldn’t have included black people because British and Norse people were historically white.

Yes, well, there were no orcs, dragons, elves or dwarves in the days of British antiquity, either, but Tolkien was writing a fantasy, which allowed him to take all kinds of liberties that a history might not allow—like including magical creatures and fake languages. Yet somehow a single black elf and a couple black dwarves mean that Amazon is literally destroying Tolkien and all he stood for.

Then there is the thinly veiled misogyny. Galadriel, I have been informed recently, is a “Mary Sue.” This is “a type of female character who is depicted as unrealistically lacking in flaws or weaknesses” according to the online dictionary. Basically it’s a character, typically female, who can do everything she sets her mind to really well without any training and never faces any real obstacles because she’s just that good, and everyone loves her and thinks she’s the best.

Not to put too fine an edge on it, but this is insanely stupid. Anyone with even a small fraction of knowledge about Tolkien knows that Galadriel is thousands of years old with more experience in battle and opposing evil than just about anyone in all of Tolkien’s fiction.

Besides, not everyone loves her or thinks she’s right all the time. In the very beginning she faces mutiny from her elven companions. In the second episode, she’s scorned by a raft of human survivors and then later rescued by one—a white man no less! I thought in these “overly-woke” stories all white men were horrible and the women always saved the day? Yet Halbrand is the one diving in after Galadriel to save her from drowning.

That’s not how Mary Sues work. If Galadriel were a Mary Sue she would have made her elven lieutenant look stupid and convinced the others to keep trekking north. Gil-Galad and Eldrond would have told her she made the right choice and deferred to her vast wisdom. Later, Halbrand would have sunk beneath the water and she would have dived in after him. That’s how a Mary Sue operates in fiction. Simply being tough and experienced does not make a woman a Mary Sue.

My guess is that 90% of the people complaining made up their minds long ago and no amount of argument will change their minds that The Rings Of Power is woke and agenda-driven. I suspect that most have not seen the show given their arguments seem not to have changed in the slightest. I’m willing to bet that the vast majority don’t really know that much Tolkien lore, either, but are learning within the biased framework of their favorite angry content creators.

We now live in an era where people on both sides of the culture war seem hellbent on making everything political all the time no matter what. It’s a damn tragedy.

It reminds me of this PC Art Class sketch from Kids In The Hall:

This is funny because it lampoons both the overly PC students in the class, who make the entire act of painting a nude model about their own pet agendas, but also the meatheads.

After everyone leaves the class in a huff over various perceived micro-aggressions, there are only a handful of men remaining. The teacher mistakenly thinks these are the true artists, stalwarts who won’t let the politics of the moment interfere with their art. But the moment the model begins taking off her clothes they start hooting and catcalling. It turns out that only the execrable misogynists remain. Clowns to the left of me, jokers to the right . . . here I am.

This is my kind of humor, exposing both sides of a futile and masturbatory cultural debate for the frauds and charlatans they so often are, more obsessed with scoring cheap points and dunking on one another than actually engaging with the content they’re so obsessed about hating. Those of us alienated by both woke scolds and their perpetually outraged opponents across the aisle can empathize with the teacher and the model here. We are left in the middle, baffled, scratching our heads and wondering why nobody can just sit down and enjoy things anymore.

Say it with me:

Not everything needs to be this politicized all the time!

Can I get an Amen?

At a certain point, freaking out every single time a show or movie or video game doesn’t align 100% with your own particular beliefs and politics just makes you come off as deeply insecure. It’s a cultural sickness. Rotten to the core.

I have and will continue to criticize both sides of this debate as I see fit. Sometimes it’s the woke left acting crazy, dogpiling some unsuspecting sap, clamping down on free speech or wailing about cultural appropriation because a white lady is trying to sell tacos. I wasn’t fond of She-Hulk’s approach to writing strong female characters by making the men look bad. It just means the female protagonist still relies on men to be strong.

But the toxic fandoms that have risen up in response have grown into a reactionary thicket of abuse and seething hatred, stoked by the new demagogic YouTubers and a self-serving influencers class making big money off these pop culture properties they so love to hate.

Lost amidst all of this are many genuinely good people who simply want good stories, and whose own often more modest complaints are drowned out by the screeching, gibbering, cacophonous horde of scoundrels and goons.

It’s gotten so bad it’s almost impossible for almost any kind of ‘genre’ content to be made these days without some vocal contingent losing its collective mind. Those rare gems that everyone can agree on—like Arcane on Netflix—are great templates of what creators can do right, but hardly a blueprint to avoid controversy. The slightest tweak to this fragile formula can send the internet into a spiral of madness that nobody emerges from unscathed.

Sometimes I will critique the vapid excesses of the overly-woke fandoms and media, the censorious BS they peddle, the humorlessness and sensitivity and political correctness that threatens to suck the joy out of everything. Sometimes I will critique the thinly veiled racism and misogyny of the reactionary fandoms and media who form the yin to the others’ yang—though such an analogy suggests balance that simply does not exist.

Perhaps we can bring balance to the Force, dearest readers. You and I. The normal majority. Perhaps cooler heads will prevail, after all.

In the end, haters gonna hate. We just have to find a way to be part of the conversation without getting dragged down into he muck. To stop worrying and learn to love the bomb.

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