I’m a huge Tolkien fanboy, loved LOTR and the Silm since I was a kid. But I swear interacting with other super fans is like walking on thin ice. Everything’s chill as long as you go with the hive mind, but then you say that you think X character isn’t that good or that a certain aspect of the plot wasn’t done well and you get dogpiled. This also includes the obvious, like the blatant racism on display with orcs and elves or the treatment of some characters who are implied to be neurodivergent or gay. The r/tolkienfans subreddit comes to mind, I’ve seen a lot of threads turn into passive aggressive shitflinging because the OP talked about gays, praised the movies or made a “childish” thread about a character they like (God forbid every post isn’t an essays worth of analysis)
Rings of Power definetly made things worse. If you expressed anything but pure contempt for the very concept, and everything attached to it. You get called out hardcore. I told a guy that it didn’t look too bad and suddenly, I’m a fake fan that loves to consume corporate trash. Amazon’s an evil company of course, but I remember a lot of th backlash being more about the women and POC than anything Bezos is up too.
I think you get that in many subcultures/communities. Especially on subreddits. People want to gatekeep their little community. It’s unfortunate, but it kind of comes with the territory.
I just think Tolkien fans in particular are super two faced.
It can be appreciated for what it is and for some positive messaging but, given the mythology, can also be interpreted as promoting a certain kind of white supremacist politics.
I can see how this tension world cause rifts in the fan base. I can also see how a diverse cast would annoy those who enjoy the white supremacist undertones (fuck them, though).
(I’ve not seen the new series, btw, so I don’t know how diverse it actually is – one thing I’ll say is that while there’s a lot of talk about how Hollywood is going woke, the idea that this is a new trend is ahistorical because lots of older movies and series are rather more diverse than the current culture war would have us believe. Not that things were or are perfect; just that on-screen diversity is not new.)