I’m not going to watch a series of YouTube videos, but I strongly dislike the films and have read everything Tolkien that’s been published, repeatedly, from Let

I’m not going to watch a series of YouTube videos, but I strongly dislike the films and have read everything Tolkien that’s been published, repeatedly, from Letters to HoME to the Nature of Middle Earth. This is flatly untrue. The show compresses thousands of years of events into a few months at most and reorders them to boot, changes fundamental facts about the world (the absurd idea behind mithril, Elves being forced to leave by some corruption in the Second Age, for example), and places characters in places they never were and doing things they never did or that didn’t even make sense - Gil-Galad having the authority to order someone to sail west is absurd. And no, as I mentioned above, this wasn’t because of licensing, the facts published in the Appendices they did have licensed that were radically changed. More importantly than narrative details, it’s even further from the spirit of Tolkien than the films. I can’t understand why people make this claim. It’s just bizarre. Of course there are people with the same names and some of them get together and make some Rings (though it was partly different people, and others in different guises, and the Three came after many other Rings, and they did it for different reasons), but this doesn’t make it a faithful adaption by any means. They made a creative decision to wildly diverge from the story, but people seem more interested in denying that than talking about how good the new story is on its own merits. It has about as much to do with Tolkien as the I, Robot film did Asimov.