Amazon’s Lord of the Rings series trailer divides fans

A new one-minute trailer for Amazon Prime’s upcoming ‘The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power’ series has been uploaded to the platform’s YouTube channels, revealing the vast world of the new show and giving viewers a glimpse at several of the main characters. However, it has drawn a negative reaction from many online.

Ever since details first emerged about the show, many fans have been up in arms over its casting choices and significant overhauls to Tolkien’s lore, which they believe were made only to satisfy modern sensibilities and inject progressive multicultural messaging into the well-established world of Middle Earth. 

While the new trailer already has over six million views at the time of writing, the like/dislike ratio is probably not what Amazon wants to see ahead of a show that cost nearly half a billion dollars to produce: 49k likes to 15k dislikes on the main Prime Video channel, and an even split on regional channels such as Prime Video UK, with 9.3k likes to 9.7k dislikes.

The comments section isn’t doing the show any favors either, as the overwhelming majority of posts are a copy-pasted Tolkien quote in various languages which reads, “Evil cannot create anything new, they can only corrupt and ruin what good forces have invented or made.”

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Amazon’s ‘Lord of the Rings’ series unveils new details

While that quote isn't exactly word-for-word what Tolkien said, it seemingly represents the sentiment coming from a lot of fans of Tolkien’s works, who have been expressing their disdain with Amazon’s perceived lack of appreciation for the source material. While many had said their expectations for the adaptation were already quite low, details revealed in a recent Vanity Fair ‘first look’ article only made things worse. The images in the article raised many red flags for many fans and confirmed their suspicions that the series’ showrunners would prioritize diverse casting and political correctness over maintaining Tolkien’s established lore.

It was revealed that the show will feature many racially diverse characters that were created especially for the show, like a black beard-less dwarven princess and a black elf, both heavily featured in the recent trailer and promotional material

Another glaring issue to many fans is the fact that existing characters and lore have also received significant overhauls compared to Tolkien’s source material. One prime example is Galadriel, an elven queen known for her magic and extraordinary beauty, who is now depicted as an armor-clad warrior, leading armies and battling on the frontlines in a war to avenge her slain brother. 

Lord of the Rings fan site TheOneRing.com (not to be confused with TheOneRing.net, which has labeled critics of Amazon’s adaptation as racist trolls) has even posted an entire Twitter thread detailing most of the issues the fandom has with Amazon’s changes, providing excerpts from Tolkien’s books and personal letters to prove the many points.

Meanwhile, a number of outlets have been defending Amazon’s show by labeling any critics of the show as racist bigots and ‘anonymous trolls’, resembling the failed marketing strategies of the new Star Wars, 2016’s ‘Ghostbusters’, and other recent adaptations which blamed fans for not liking their new politically correct directions.