All six members of our weekly Dungeons & Dragons 3.5 (aka Pathfinder) group have now seen every episode to date. We're big Tolkien fans (I’m by far the least well versed in Tolkien’s work of the group, having only read The Lord of the Rings a dozen times and The Silmarillion once).
Our consensus is that Rings of Power is pretty good, not up to the Lord of the Rings films but much better than most other fantasy adaptations that we’ve seen this century (okay, that’s a pretty low bar) except for “The Witcher”. Rings of Power suffers badly because Amazon didn’t buy the rights to use anything from The Silmarillion. Amazon bought the sizzle, but not the steak.
The writers have to rely on the footnotes and appendices to Lord of The Rings and The Hobbit, and making stuff up. They’re adapting the book that Tolkien never wrote about the Second Age. Sure the show's writing isn’t top notch, but then they didn’t hire the writers for “Justified”
The storm of criticism in large part is because of the well documented tendency of many fantasy and science-fiction fans to go over the top in their criticism of adaptations which don’t conform exactly to their vision. Combine this with accusations of “woke” being whipped up by people, often to fire up people for the American elections later this year, and it has set the internet alight. There's a bit of Amazon bashing there as well.
The portrayal of Galadriel is accurate. Tolkien's Elves are not hippy humans with pointy ears. Elves, particularly those like Galadriel who were born before the Sun existed, are haughty, aloof and much smarter, stronger, tougher and faster than humans (Second Age Elves are arrogant pricks with plenty to be arrogant about). Galadriel doesn’t just think that she might be able to swim across an ocean; she knows that she can do it.
Galadriel in the Second Age isn’t the one in the films, hiding in the woods, doing a bit of magic and making a few gifts. Second Age Galadriel is on par with the top heroes of Greek mythology. She’s a commander of armies who’d take out half a dozen Xenas and a Balrog at the same time, on her own without too much difficulty.
She’s not a low-level D&D elf, we reckon that she’s more like a 15th level character with five Pathfinder mythic tiers (for those who don’t know the gaming references, that’s a character who is a borderline demi-god / Marvel Superhero). If anything Rings of Power has seriously downgraded her abilities.
Some other complaints that we disagree with. The black actor playing an elf is playing a Wood Elf isn’t woke casting (and he’s arguably the best male actor). Wood Elves are described in various sources as being much darker in complexion than other Elves (with one source mentioning coppery skin). It's a bit laughable to get angry about black Hobbits in a world where there are Orcs, Goblins and Trolls.
Irish Hobbits and Scottish Dwarves aren’t an issue for us. In the film the Hobbits all have different accents (Gloucestershire, Zummerset, Manchester and intelligible Glaswegian) whilst Bilbo Baggins is slightly posh English. In the films Gimli was Welsh, whilst the Dwarves in “The Hobbit” vary between Scottish and Irish, sometimes in the same sentence. But Elves always speak posh, like.