“Superfans”
A few days ago Amazon plopped one of the most cringe-worthy videos I’ve ever seen onto YouTube. It *claimed* to be a video of four “superfans” of The Lord of the Rings reacting to the new trailer for “The Rings of Power,” and it was just astonishingly painful to watch. Basically they are everything wrong with modern woke corporate “fandom,” demonstrating a lack of understanding just what the frak Tolkein was on about in favor of unhinged “influencer” nonsense. These four Brits exemplify the soy-boy, alphabet-people hipster cliches, with one “guy” hoping that Sauron will appear in the series and be “hot” so he can dream about “fixing him.” You can *smell* their parents disappointment through the screen.
If you *must* watch it, here is:
Lest you think that Amazon UK just happened to randomly stumble across the four least credible, least serious fans of Tolkein, it turns out that Amazon did the same nonsense for several other countries. The *same* nonsense.
Despite the scripted, woke nature of this “round table” of genetic defectives, some important truths slipped out. The four UK “superfans” consist of one seemingly ethnically British person and three non-ethnic-Brits; a seemingly unlikely ratio in the land of JRR Tolkein. But the point is raised that they are *thrilled* to finally be “represented” in the Tolkein universe. And yet… they claim to have been fans *before* this series. Thus they were fans of white dwarves and white elves and white hobbit, as Tolkein described them. They didn’t actually need “representation” to be fans. They were fans (if they really were fans, and not just paid actors) of the story, characters and world that Tolkein created. They weren’t fans of the story, characters and world created by an Amazon algorithm.
Given the scripted nature of this atrocity, this is how Amazon wants to portray their little project. It’s not an accident. This is what Amazon thinks of Tolkein, his works and those who have actually been fans of them for years and decades.
If Amazon really wanted to produce a quality product that respected Tolkein and the fandom, they’d have a “roundtable” with acknowledged scholars and long-term fans. This group of people would, theoretically, be able to say “why, yes, it looks like it really respects Tolkein and I approve.” The fact that Amazon has no such offering tells you a lot.
Shrug.
Maybe in fifteen, twenty years, Elon Musk will have bought the rights to LotR and the Silmarillion, and will produce a *proper* multi-year projects covering the First and Second Ages. We can only hope, cuz this thing fills me with STD-levels of basement-level expectations.