Mass Media Mass Imagination

I have decided to drop Rings of Power, and I'm glad to have now that I read of some of the nonsense the show is putting into the Tolkien fanspace about elves and mithril. This will be uncritically accepted by folks who haven't bothered to actually read anything and they will push it in any online discussion of Tolkien's writings.

Some folks are just happy to have any kind of story and visuals to fill their need for ever more material in their fan universe as they passively consume whatever crap the production studios push out. Lot's of thigs I just don't care, I enjoy the show, eat my snack and laugh at the silliness. But Lord of the Rings and Middle Earth are just far to big a psychological touchstone for me to put up with bad writing, poor characterizations, plot holes and changes to the lore.

But what bothers me, is how pervasive movies get in the fanspace. You can't imagine Aragorn now without Viggo Mortensen's face can you? Hard isn't it? People tell me "Oh it's just fanfiction, enjoy it!" Fanfiction is easy to ignore. But once some bad fanfiction is made into a show, well it gains a lot of weight in the on line community.

We run into this all the time on the Wargaming in Middle Earth Facebook group. We try to be very clear that we want to preserve a space for miniature wargames inspired by the books, not the movies, because there already are loads of Middle Earth Strategy Battle Game groups on Facebook for those players. But regularly someone comes along, wanting to discuss MESBG and talk about the official GW models (or worse, IP stealing knockoffs!) and we get accused of being elitist gatekeepers when we ask them to take that somewhere else.

It's really hard now to Google any images for The Hobbit without having to filter through the movie. Rings of Power will do the same for the rest of Middle Earth I fear. Instead of finding art by Alan Lee you'll just find stills from the show. When you try to talk about the Valar, elves and the philosophical underpinnings of Tolkien's writings, some show-fan will say that the show is now just as valid a source material as the writings of the person who created the setting. Honest, I had it happen with some chap when discussing the Scouring of the Shire. He called me a "elitist of shallow intellect" because I insisted that the books should have primacy when actually trying to talk about Tolkien's themes (not Peter Jackson's interpretation). I had, by the way, already agreed that for the movie structure the Scouring had to be cut out. But the removal does affect the themes, doesn't it?

And if you voice the opinion on line now that you dislike the show, you get jumped on. And blanket accused of not having watched it, but just being an elitist snob, or worse racist, hater. So even though I'd love to discuss Tolkien and his writings on line, I avoid the fanspace because one becomes a target if one doesn't just enthusiastically and uncritically lap up the next bit of media that Big Media shoves at us.

Now, I'm going to go back to painting my very not movie Rohirrim. And I have some very not movie Dwarves coming in the mail.