(no subject)

[anghraine]

A lot of Tolkien fandom has defended the PJ movies' sometimes drastic changes as totally valid artistic choices in an essentially separate creative work, so the meltdowns over the existence of changes in the Amazon series are ... hmm. Interesting.

(I don't like some of the ones we're hearing about, either—Elrond?!—but there is a blatant double standard going on here in how much independence adaptations should have. Can't lie that I have some schadenfreude, though.)

Comments

[beatrice_otter]

I think the issue is mostly that, for a lot of people, PJ was the intro to Tolkien. So even if they then moved to the book and preferred it, the PJ movies still had intellectual/emotional weight. And that's a large fraction of the fandom making arguments in support of it as an artistic thing.

But nobody has had time yet to get into the Amazon series who isn't already a Tolkien fan. So they're coming to it from a completely different place.

[anghraine]

Yeah, I assumed that they're applying different standards of What Adaptations Should Do because of how much they like and have had their visions of Middle-earth shaped by the PJ version. In fact, many of them don't seem to even realize how much Jackson et al changed from Tolkien. That doesn't make their arguments consistent or fair, however.