Prediction for where Rings of Power is going;
The show runners decided to make the big sin of numenor racism.
Fan bois will claim that the numenoreans were racist against elves in the books which just tells me they didn’t read the books.
By the fall of numenor the numenoreans were incredibly resentful of the elves, not because they were “taking our jobs”, or because they had “knife ears”, but because they were granted immortality by the creator and men were not.
One of the great undercurrents in Tolkien is that the Gift of Man bestowed by the creator is mortality. However, it’s a gift that men had been made to fear through the deceit and manipulation of Morgoth and later Sauron.
In the cosmology of middle earth once a being had left the presence of “God” to enter the dimensions of the physical universe, they were bound to the “circles of the world” until the end of it. For example, when Saruman is killed and Sauron defeated, they do not cease to exist or depart the world. They become disembodied and powerless spirits doomed to wander the earth until the end of time with no ability to exercise their will, influence their physical surroundings in any meaningful way, or satisfy any desire. When elves die their spirits are confined to the Halls of Mandos in Valinor until the end of days.
The Gift of Man is the ability on death to escape the circles and the associated weariness, loss and sorrow that’s a byproduct of atrophy in the passage of time. It’s suggested that mortals may be reunited with the creator in this way.
In fact, it’s intoned that Morgoth was jealous of this gift because he did not possess it and even in his darkness he wanted to be in the presence of Eru.
All of this is to say that Tolkien infused his cosmology with western spiritualism and catholic tenets.
Affronting God in order to obtain immortality and subsequently being punished for the hubris to fight the essence of our nature is not something Amazon’s anti-creatives want to touch with a ten foot pole.
In fact it’s antithetical to their ideology and the Message™️. I suspect this is one of the reasons Tolkien was targeted for this vulgar debasement.
