Elon Musk is a fantasy fiction fanatic. As such, he follows the movie scene carefully. Since the Amazon Prime Videos series is in ‘his’ genre, of course, he would have an opinion on it as well. And the opinion seems to be exactly the opposite of what Amazon would like to hear. He slammed the production by saying that the movie is so bad, that the late author J.R.R. Tolkien is ‘tuning in his grave’.
To make such a bold claim, of course, he needs to give a proper explanation as well. And he did not remain short of it. He went to post an additional tweet where he explained that his dislike of the show is due to the fact that “almost every male character so far is a coward, a jerk or both”.
Jealous Elon Musk Not A Fan Of Amazon’s New ‘The Lord Of The Rings’ – ‘Tolkien is Turning In His Grave’
He went on to note that only “Galadriel is brave, smart, and nice.” Galadriel is a female character, a warrior elf. She is the lead character of the series that according to Amazon Prime happens thousands of years before the events happening in ‘The Hobbit’ and ‘The Lord Of The Rings’.
Everyone that follows Elon Musk cannot say that he is surprised by the billionaire’s tweet regarding the series. It is something that is well expected since he is in a direct feud with Amazon’s founder – Jeff Bezos. It is not the first time that Musk tweeted something to downgrade or ‘defame’ Bezos’s creations.
This ‘hatred’ between the two is fueled by the rivalry they face in professional fields. Elon Musk’s SpaceX company is a direct rival or competition to Bezos’s Blue Origin.
Seen from the eyes of Amazon, the new series ‘Rings of Power’ is a huge success. It scored more than 25 million views for the first two episodes in a fairly short period. It is by far the most successful series that Amazon Prime Videos ever launched.
Critics and experts grade this as a huge success as well. They reacted positively to the series in most of the cases and ‘Rings Of Power’ now rocks a Rotten Tomatoes score of 84% and a Metacritic score of 71%. However, while critics have given these scores to the series, the audience seems harder to please.
What happens with the audience scores is a totally different story. The audience scores on most sites are indeed poor. And since both critics’ and audience’s scores differ so much, the allegations arose that the series is a ‘victim’ of review bombing. According to the critics, Musk’s opinions and tweets are the spark that started and that fuels the review bombing.
An additional point on which the trolls base their criticism is the alleged racism appearing in the series. Twitter has trolled the series for featuring mostly non-white characters. However, the Hollywood reporter Richard Newby countered these views by pointing out that Tolkien never gave a clear image of the race of the characters.
“The most common refrain is that Tolkien didn’t include people of color in his stories. Not only is this untrue, as Tolkien described harfoots as having “browner” skin, but Tolkien didn’t often make a point to describe skin color, though he occasionally leaned on the open-ended “fairer than …”
A question arises from this all. Why is Elon Musk so severe in his criticism of the series? Maybe he wants to launch fiction series of his own? That would be interesting to see.
