The showrunner for Amazon Prime’s The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power has claimed that J.R.R. Tolkien’s classic is about “climate change.” Patrick McKay, one of the showrunners, compared the destruction of the dwarf city of Khazad-dûm to climate change, according to Breitbart News.
McKay was asked about how his show is presenting the collapse of Khazad-dûm by extending out the event, and he argued that his depiction of the story has parallels with global warming.
“This is a thing where, how do societies fall? Usually it’s gradually, and then all at once,” he said. “If you want to use climate change as a metaphor, climate change is not an event. Climate change is a process that ebbs and flows, that’s always headed in a dark direction.”
“I think a kingdom as great and powerful as Khazad-dûm does not fall in a moment,” he added, explaining his decision to stray from Tolkien’s original stories. “The fall is the product of many disasters over time. And I think it would sell Khazad-dûm short for the Balrog to get out and then it’s all over. It’s more complicated. We think there’s a bigger story to be told here.”
As Tolkien fans have pointed out, as told in Tolkien’s Appendix A to The Lord of the Rings, Khazad-dûm is not represented as taking years or decades to fall, as McKay’s vision suggests. Tolkien stated that the city was abandoned roughly a year after the fearsome and strong Balrog appeared to invest it.
“Thus they roused from sleep a thing of terror that, flying from Thangorodrim, had lain hidden at the foundations of the earth since the coming of the Host of the West: a Balrog of Morgoth. Durin [the Dwarf King] was slain by it, and the year after Náin I, his son; and then the glory of Moria passed, and its people were destroyed or fled far away.”
All of this is more evidence of the show’s woke agenda being forced into another beloved classic. To be fair, the entire production has been a total disaster up to this point, filled with virtue signaling about “diversity” and I don’t know how Amazon can afford to do another three seasons of it.
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English (US) · 