[TimorousBestie]

> The lord of the rings on Amazon isn’t otherwise great.

That really underscores how bad the author’s “drama requires moral ambiguity” argument is. The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power did everything it could to inject moral ambiguity into a very unambiguous text—Galadriel is now an obsessive that disregards the cost of her vengeance, Halbrand presents as a possible Aragorn ancestor, Adar is just trying to redeem the Uruk, etc.—but all of it falls flat, none of the reveals land (“I am good!”), and the end result is simply narm. The casting of Arondir and Disa hardly makes a difference in the light of all these writing flaws.

[everdrive]

This is one of the most frustrating aspects of modern writing. People think that 'mature' and 'realistic' character is interchangeable with 'a character who is a bit of a piece of trash who is awful for no good reason.' You have ridiculous stances such as 'I had to savage the countryside because people treated me wrong when I was younger.'

It's as childish as the older pure-good vs. pure-evil stories, except that instead of being satisfying in a simple sort of way it's just annoying and bad storytelling.