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 fucking love Tolkien’s works, own everything he has written including is lectures, but I fucking hate the community, it’s important to be honest about the problematic aspects of the universe and the community is absolutely brain dead. Also, I fucking loved Rings of Power, I loved the diversity in the cast and just want more non white folks going forward. I know the story is a bit hamfisted but I think it’s great for a screen adaptation of what is essentially an info dump book and some afterwords.
The book puritanism is exhausting.
I will say I don’t particularly like the Peter Jackson movies, but it’s mostly because they aren’t the book in my head. (For me, Gondor is Yugoslavia, but medieval, and Mordor is the US Army, and that’s what I want to see on screen, damn it.)
But I don’t go out of my way to attack people who like the films.