It's not as though those of us who have enjoyed the series are blind to its faults. By our discussions here, it should be obvious that we do see and point out some of those very faults ourselves. But we also see enough that we like or that interests us that we keep on watching. (Whether or not we will still be that interested if it takes two or three years for another season to be made and released, that remains to be seen.) But it seems like there are people all over the internet who really do want to ruin it for us, if they possibly can.
And it's not as though I am unsympathetic to the purist view. (Though I maintain that some who present themselves as purists are no such thing. One of the articles I read that seemed quite scholarly and used a lot of quotations to bolster its points, quite impressed me until it mentioned "the Christ-like white elves" which is where it lost me. Because, as anyone who has read the Silmarillion and the HoME books knows, so many of the First-Age elves were cruel and selfish.) I get it. I have myself been extremely irritated, countless times, by dramatizations of beloved books. But just because I sympathize it doesn't mean that I'm going to stop watching, until and unless it does something that sufficiently outrages my own sensibilities. (And it's only got one episode left in which it might do that, and then I'll
have to stop, at least for the next couple of years.)
But as for those things in ROP that contradict "canon" I still contend that since Tolkien often contradicted himself in the material that was posthumously published, there
is no canon except what was published with his own approval during his lifetime. For instance, he changed his mind about details pertaining to Galadriel a number of times later in life. But a lot of what some people, people writing articles and reviews around the internet—I'm not referring to anyone here—take for Tolkien's version of Galadriel is actually Peter Jackson's version of Galadriel. After all, a lot of the article and review writers admit that they haven't ever read any of the books. They have this idea that the movie trilogy was super-faithful to the books, and it absolutely was not. (I loved it, but I was also
very much aware of the many occasions when it was not at all true to the books.) I think they changed as much as the current series has—and they had the books right there, a complete, fleshed-out story, unlike what the screenwriters for ROP have, and yet they strayed
a lot. Some of their original material I thought was quite weak, annoyingly so. And I remember well that many people on this very site spent a long time discussing the most obvious places where it strayed, and that some of those discussions went on for years. (They were still going on when I arrived here in 2004, and I wouldn't be surprised if some of those discussions were still active when you arrived in 2007,
@ctg, and you and I might have participated in the same conversations back then.) But because people no longer discuss those things—having exhausted all there was to say on those subjects—a lot of reviewers who came to the franchise much later, are under the impression that it was all perfect, and that to stray from Jackson's interpretations is to stray from canon.
But what I will say is that the internal logic in the three movies did seem more consistent than what we are seeing in the TV series, or at least they kept us excited enough and in enough suspense, that we didn't take time to nitpick as much. (Of course that very suspense, for those of us who knew the books very well indeed, was a result of the fact that they
did stray from the books, so we never knew, the first time we watched the movies, quite what might happen next. I remember expecting the Nazgûl to jump out at Frodo at any moment, in scenes where I
knew from the books that they wouldn't do any such thing. But even while he was still at home, the script was already so different that I couldn't be
sure of anything.)
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