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Oh, perfect! I don t know about you guys, but the only thing
I m more sick of than the woke SJW agenda making all my favourite cool epic manly characters into
womens and Woke Races is the way that live-action adaptations of Jr. Token err, J R R Tolkien,
are just SPITTING on his LEGACY by changing everything! It s crazy to me! Like, have some
respect! This guy was a great writer, I presume! And then these leftie Hollywood types come in here
and erase key details and change key characters and moments! Probably for their agendas!
Like, opening with some entirely invented narration, by a woman.
That wasn t in the book. Uh, hello, police? I d like to report a Mary Sue. There s about 5 women
in the whole original book, or so I m told, so ripping apart the flow of Tolkien s narrative to
shove one front and centre here? Yeah, uh, kind of feels like an agenda! Then the film omits the
crucial hobbit lore that opened the book, there s all that nonsense with Frodo and Gandalf made
up and then we get a dumb piece of slapstick that completely undercuts the epic tone. Welcome to the
MCU-ification of cinema, you guys! Then these woke libcucks put Rosie in the start of Film 1! She s
Sam s based tradwife, who s not supposed to appear until the end of the saga. Ding ding ding, I think
I hear agenda bells ringing! And in the books, when Gandalf comes back to ask about the ring,
he s not the panicky wreck that Peter Cuckson gives us here. That s clearly woke Hollywood
trying to undermine strong male characters. This just makes him seem like a weak beta male just
what Hollywood wants. The films take out Gildor, add in some dumb Harry Potter style wizard duel,
which Tolkien never wrote, they have the hobbits chased in another made up action scene by the
black riders it s like modern Hollywood thinks we don t have an attention span, that we ll glaze
over if there s not constant action. How cinema has fallen. Scorsese, et cetera. Anyway, what was
I saying? Oh yeah, this boring, homogenising Hollywood cut out like 90% of the songs,
completely changing the tone of the work to a more standard, lowest-common-denominator braindead
sludge, they cut out my goat Tom Bombadil, one of the most crucial mysteries of Tolkien s work,
and they cut the thrilling Barrow-Wights sequence, because God forbid any real substance get in the
way of pacing, keeping the movie moving for the mouthbreathing millennials in the audience.
This creates a major plothole, by the way the hobbits are just given elven blades by Aragorn,
which I guess he d just been carrying around for no reason, instead of finding old Numenorean
blades in the Barrow Downs. It s only because of this Numenorean origin that Merry s blade is
able to stab the Witch-King in Return of the King. Explain to me how this makes sense now! Right? You
can t this just goes to show how modern Hollywood has BAD WRITING, and doesn t even think about the
stories they create long enough to spot obvious issues like this. How Cinema has fallen, Scorsese,
etcetera!! And don t even get me started on Frodo s crossing of the ford or should I say,
Frodo s cucking of the cuck ford! In the books? In the real story that Tolkien wrote,
not this feminist fanfic? The mighty elf Glofindel rides to meet Frodo, and it s due to Elrond
Half-Elven s enchantment that the river floods to save our halfling hero. Here, it s Arwen,
because I guess the movie hadn t hit us over the head with Girl Power enough yet. So they have
her replace yet another strong male character, and have her cast some Mary Sue magic spell to
raise the river, because liberal Hollywood can t let men do anything! There s so many totally
fabricated Arwen scenes after this, as well. It s like, uh, hello if Tolkien wanted more than a
few glimpses of Arwen, he would have written them himself! This is pissing on Tolkien s grave and
not the cool male pissing either, where you can stand up and kind of hosepipe things no, this is
SJW feminist squat-pissing. That makes me SICK. This feminist revisionism only continues in the
second film, with a whole bunch of made up Mary Sue scenes by the beta screenwriters
like Eowyn sparring with Aragorn, instead of knowing her place and merely serving him wine,
their only physical interaction in the books. The nerve of these writers! They go on to shove Eowyn
in a bunch of scenes she shouldn t be in, that Tolkien didn t want her in. And the rest of the
Two Towers, or should I say the Tofu Towers, spits on Tolkien s grave just as much. Like,
take a look at the sword-designs for these Elves. This is diversity gone mad. Why on earth would
eastern, katana-style blades exist in Tolkien s non-Asian-derived world? Middle-Earth was based
on European myth and Anglo-Saxon aesthetics. Why can t you let white people have things, Hollywood?
This is a total perversion of Tolkien s world, of his wishes, just to offer another franchise up to
the evil altar of Woke Multiculturaism. For shame, New Line Cinema. Scorsese,
etc. Surprise surprise, the third so-called film in this trilogy isn t content sticking to the
script, either. Saruman s killed off at Isengard, a total departure from the book. Tolkien wanted
him to reappear later on, for the actual end of the lord of the Rings story the Scouring of the
Shire, a whole storyline that s ignored totally by these soyboy propaganda pieces. So much for
respecting the author s themes, I guess, guys! But nothing comes close to the film s dumbest,
most fake, most liberal Hollywood moment: the Witch-King s nonsense death.
Like, did these writers just stop trying to hide their woke agenda entirely? ...Ok, so I ve just
been told that, technically, that moment is in the book but making it the big climax of this section
of the film, puffing it up from just some thing that happens into this big SJW feminist soapbox
moment have you no shame, Hollywood? This isn t what Tolkien would have wanted! He didn t
write about Girl Power, he wrote about cool dudes doing guy stuff and being totally epic and manly,
none of this beta Mary Sue nonsense! Bro, all this Tolkien disrespect s got me so riled up!
And don t even get me started on the Hobbit!- Wait, hang on one sec - what s that? All the
people whining about adaptations destroying the Tolkien legacy aren t talking about the Lord
of the Rings films, laden with changes as they were, or even the barely-recognisable cinematic
mess that is the Hobbit franchise, and instead they re talking about Rings of Power, a new
series telling a new story inspired by sections from Tolkien s encyclopedia-like Silmarillion? You
re saying they re fine with all the additions, subtractions, incorporation of non-anglosaxon,
non-dark ages aesthetics, and invented scenes developing further the story s female characters
from back then, but that these exact issues are now deal-breakers for them, and taken to
be reflective of some evil leftist agenda? You re saying that they re eager to accept these
moments in the Lord of the Rings films because of a warm, heavy blanket of nostalgia clouding
their supposedly objective perspectives, and that if these critics were at all consistent in their
complaints, Peter Jackson s films would be held to be just as sacrilegious as Rings of Power? Wow,
that s, that s crazy. Hold on though, I ve got to finish recording this video.
Heeeeyy guys. Did you hear any of that? Crazy stuff, huh? Yeah, there, uh, wasn t actually
anyone there, by the way. So obviously that first part of this video was a pisstake. The vast
majority of the changes noted above, as I m sure you re all aware, were made to improve the flow
of the films, to flesh out characters important to the new emotional throughlines of this filmic
saga, and to streamline the relatively vast cast of characters in Tolkien s originals. With regard
to Rings of Power though, stuff like this is even more fine. It s not a straight adaptation
and it never claimed to be in part because the Silmarillion really isn t the sort of book you
can just film. People said that Lord of the Ring was unfilmable for decades, but that s a thousand
times more conventional from a formal point of view than the Silmarillion ever was. Telling any
sort of continuous, television-suitable narrative depicting these early second-age events was always
going to require inventing story elements and characters. And, sure, bits were picked
out and changed a little but, yeah, as I m sure you ve come to realise over this video? Peter
Jackson did that too. But if you don t like these changes? If you re really opposed to any of them,
just on principle, in a way that you weren t for the similar departures in Peter Jackson s
films? Just turn the show off. You don t have to watch it! The books haven t gone anywhere!
You can just enjoy this stuff in the way you did prior to Rings of Power coming out. A TV show
inspired by a work doesn t erase the original. It s an optional extra, one accessible to people who
maybe haven t had the time or inclination to dig through Tolkien s kinda dense legendarium. There
s no shame in tapping out from a show inspired by something you like if you re not digging it.
It doesn t invalidate your fanhood, in any way. But the flipside of this is that if you do have a
problem with this adaptation or that, and you don t watch it? You re not some true fan, a defender
of the real Tolkien in a world full of shallow phonies. People who do dig stuff like Rings of
Power, even people who make stuff like Rings of Power, aren t fake fans, they re not normies,
and they re not spitting on Tolkien s legacy. They re just enjoying the author s world in
a different way to you with the addition of this indirectly connected, auxiliary text.
I hope my regular viewers know me well enough to realise that I m not rolling out in defence
the Amazon machine out of, I don t know, brand loyalty, or anything else so cringe. Jeff Bezos
can eat my ass and you can quote me on that. This isn t even a defence of Rings of Power it couldn t
be really, since I ve not even finished the show yet. By all accounts, there are plenty of real
problems with this latest Middle Earth project. All I m asking is that we criticise those,
instead of this bullshit pearl-wringing over the fee-fees of a long-dead man. Tolkien s legacy is
immense. He more or less created the entire genre of modern fantasy. Frodo, Sauron, Melkor, Arda,
will outlive us all. I know the attention span of modern entertainment culture often feels fleeting
like new media properties are just utterly forgotten if they don t set the world on fire
right away but trust me, Tolkien s legacy was cemented well before Amazon ever started making
TV shows. You don t have to worry about it being tarnished and appealing to this imagined danger,
saucing up your content with some alarmist spiel on the idea that, somehow, this latest adaptation
is going to bury forever those original works? If you consider yourself a critic,
or a reviewer? That s a pretty disingenuous move. But to be honest I don t think I can make these
points any better than Sir Ian McKellen did, way back before the Fellowship
of the Ring ever hit cinemas. He said: The enthusiasts who have read the novels over and
over may notice every change but in doing so they will miss the point. Peter Jackson s movie does
not challenge the novel s supremacy any more than the distinguished book illustrations by Howe, Lee
et al were meant to replace Tolkien s descriptive words. Paintings, drawings,
animations and at last the feature films all augment our appreciation of Lord of the Rings.
And just watch the book sales rise as New Line s publicity for the film gears up.
Another point on this, the question that dominates my email: the adaptation of masterpieces from one
medium to another is as old as literature. Most of Shakespeare s plays are reworkings of stories,
poems or written history. When I moved Richard III from stage to screen,
I was determined to make a good film in honour of a great play. Had I left every scene and line of
the text intact in the movie, it would not have been a good one. Kurosawa s Throne of Blood,
my favourite version of the Macbeth saga, distorts Shakespeare to spectacular effect.
The play which inspired it remains intact. So, yeah. Maybe you think you know better
than me. Cool, that s fine. But do you really think you know better than Gandalf? I d just
take the L at that point. But I think that s about it for this video. I d like to just
shoutout theonering.com s list of film changes, which was super helpful when writing this video
even though I have, of course, both read and watched the Lord of the Rings back to front,
it was super handy to just have a comprehensive list to go through. Check that site out,
it s got a bunch more cool stuff on it! Thanks for watching though! And as always
I d like to extend a special grond-sized shoutout to all my Patreon supporters,
especially Jonathan Francis Bond, Kevin Douglas, Ian Fyfield, and Ztrangefolk.