i think the thing i’m disliking the most about the amazon show so far is how it flattens out all the elven and dwarven (and human too, to a less pronounced extent) cultural complexity of tolkien’s world? as someone whose engagement with the legendarium pre-reading the silm was mostly through the movies, one of the best surprises i had while reading it was learning that elves have ethnicities! they have different cultures, they have different languages, they have inter-group tensions and messy history that fuels it, it made them feel so much more like actual people than the aura uniform wisdom and unchanging perfection the movies gave off, and though the old man didn’t give the dwarves nearly as much attention i know he sketched out several different dwarven cultural groups, multiple of whom show up across his work
and the show just... isn’t depicting any of that? it’s presenting the elves as ‘the elves’, with one high king, one war against sauron, one grove where they honour their heroes. granted, i’ve only watched two episodes, but the fact that we haven’t had a hint that there are any elves who aren’t ambiguously noldosindarin is... concerning. it’s a little more implicit with the dwarves (at least to the extent i’ve seen) but the mere fact that the king of khazad-dûm could potentially banish elrond from ‘all dwarven lands’, as if there were no dwarven realms outside of the misty mountains, says a lot about the assumptions behind the writing
sure, you could say all that internal elf drama would be too much for a casual audience to keep up with, but half our protagonists are elves! if there was ever a time to discuss their different cultures and worldviews and opinions of each other, you’d think it’d be here, if nothing else to add texture to the world and make the characters feel like actual people! as it is, though, all the elves in the show feel more like the impression someone who only knows this world through its cultural reputation would have of them, rather than the complex, flawed, lifelike cultures tolkien actually wrote. to an extent the whole show feels like that - middle-earth-y, without being middle earth
