After a viral tweet mocked Prime Video's The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power's production techniques, a director from Netflix's Castlevania animated series, Samuel Deats, jumped to the show's defense.
The fan-delivered scorn was backed by a picture of a Rings of Power scene demonstrating how one background actor was copied and pasted into a crowd. Contextually, the criticism about the show's quality addresses the frequently evoked $1 billion budget estimated for the Amazon series. However, Deats, quote-tweeting the original tweet, explained that Castlevania is "full of duplicates," adding that he and his team would "much rather spend our time making everyone else hotter."
The Rings of Power's Character Controversy
The copy-and-paste criticism isn't the only controversy that The Rings of Power has been subject to. Fans criticized the action scenes involving Morfydd Clark's Galadriel, who is written in the novels as a non-violent character. Clark responded to these critiques, explaining that Galadriel's "serenity is hard-earned." She continued, "I don’t think you get to that level of wisdom without going through things. She actually speaks about [how] with wisdom, there is a loss of innocence."
In addition to the way that Galadriel's character is portrayed, many fans had negative responses to The Rings of Power as a whole after the first episode came out -- so much so, in fact, that Amazon had to put a hold on audience reviews of the show to ensure they weren't intentional review-bombing.
One of the show's most vocal critics is SpaceX founder Elon Musk, who wrote on Twitter that "[Lord of the Rings author J.R.R] Tolkien is turning in his grave," adding that "Almost every male character so far is a coward, a jerk or both. Only Galadriel is brave, smart and nice." Author Neil Gaiman shot back at Musk, writing that "anyone grumbling is either racist or hasn't read their Tolkien. Your mileage may vary."
However, there are many who believe that those fans (and Musk) jumped to negative conclusions about the show too early, and some cast members claimed that the last episodes of Season 1 are the best. Charlie Vickers, who plays Halbrand on the show, said his favorites are "the last episode, the eighth episode." He added, "I'm not going to say why, because I'm going to leave a few details unexplored." Other cast members shared the same sentiment.
The first 5 episodes of Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power are currently available to stream on Amazon Prime. Episode 6 is set to come out on Sept. 30.
Source: Twitter