I could give 100 examples but they all basically boil down to “this isn’t how it was in the books” or “this isn’t how Tolkien would have told the story”. Never mind that they don’t have the rights to the whole story and Tolkien never tried writing a TV series. Im one of the weird ones that wish it was 5 seasons of reenacting a story I’ve read a dozen times with no big surprises.

But that’s not what it is and I’ve just had to decide to judge RoP on what it is and not what I wish it was. For what it is it’s fine. I just have to compartmentalize it like I do with post-JJ Abrams Star Trek and post-JJ Abrams Star Wars. Oh, guess who worked with the RoP showrunners on the Star Trek reboots and then pushed Amazon to hire them for RoP? JJ Abrams.

He’s basically the king of completely missing the spirit of the original work that he’s remaking or adapting. Fortunately a decade and a half of dealing with him screwing with my other two fandoms has prepared me to accept his protégés screwing with another.

I have a long list of things I didn’t like about the Peter Jackson LoTR movies too. But they managed to capture the spirit of the books incredibly well. I’m not convinced RoP has or will.

So, yeah. RoP’s story is just ok. Seeing Middle Earth portrayed so beautifully is amazing though. Couldn’t care less about the diverse casting.

If anyone cares, here’s (some) of the issues that annoy me:

• The Sauron mystery (Tolkien didn’t write like that)
• Galadriel’s relationship to Gil-Galad (he couldn’t order her to do anything.)
• Acting like going to Valinor was something elves earned and that Gil-Galad could judge when it was earned.
• The whole mithril origin story even if it’s apocryphal (mithril existed in Valinor and Numenor but they all act like it’s a new thing.)
• Super compressed timeline they say they don’t want time skips, but Isildur is 234 when he dies and like 17 now so they’re going to have to skip somewhere. Especially since you can’t build Arnor and Gondor overnight.
• Middle-earth is tiny. People seem to teleport all over way too fast. Walking from Eregion to Lindon should take a couple weeks. Elrond and Durin seem to just fly there. Both LoTR and the Hobbit are about the journey. We never really see anyone on their journeys. They just show up.

And some that annoy others but that I don’t care about at all:

• Galadriel jumping into the sea to swim back to Middle-earth (Amroth did it too)
• the carrying capacity of the depicted Numenorean ships (they’re just larger on the inside)
• pyroclastic flow (if Frodo survives being in and on an erupting volcano, then this deadly eruption of gasses and whatever apparently isn’t an issue in Middle-earth)