IMDB deleted all negative user reviews for The Rings of Power

This so much. Mixed skin color withing the same race in a fantasy world makes little to no sense to me. Also the fact that dumb characters (say the hobbit girls for example) are always depicted as white to avoid cheap woke backlash is so much of a clear sign of woke appeasement. At least give African mythology a chance and bring it to our screens, that'd make a lot of sense and would also bring a breath of fresh air to the fantasy world. Wokewashing a LoTR series adaptation gives me vibes of forced and lazy inclusivity.

Kunta Kinte was a slave in a story that heavily dealt with slavery, set in a time and setting where slavery was race-based, for an audience somewhat familiar with the history of that time and setting.

If you made him Dutch and portrayed by Chris Hemsworth you'd have to include in your movie all kinds of extra exposition and world building to set the background for the story.

Most of the race changes people have mentioned so far did not involve characters where their race was either important to the story or to reducing the amount of exposition and world building you need to convey the story's context to the audience.

The ironic thing here is that most of the reviews from critics of this show have been positive. Not necessarily wild raves, but, you know, pretty positive.

It's possible that the Critics Just Don't Get It, Man, or whatever trope people will pull out to explain why professional critics should be summarily dismissed and only the users reviews are real opinions that we should listen to, but I'd argue that it's also possible that fandom in general has become entitled to the point of toxicity over the last couple of decades. After decades of good "genre" movies being few and far between and good genre television, especially fantasy and superhero, being even more vanishingly rare, now we've got it coming out of our ears and we are, apparently, really fucking pissed off that what we get doesn't match the unattainably perfect shows in our heads or something. And this isn't even getting into the way today's politics have crept in, but it's extremely hard not to notice that a substantial subset of fans angry with The Rings of Power or Ms. Marvel or The Sandman or whatever are specifically calling out changes that they have to preface with "I'm not racist, but...". I suspect if they'd made a TV version of The Sandman 20 years ago, before any and all attempts at diverse casting would be met with outrage by a loud minority, and cast a black actress as Death, the predominant reaction would have been: "Huh. Weird, but maybe she'll be pretty good in the part, let's see."

I haven't seen The Rings of Power yet, and I don't know if I will, but based on most of the reviews from people who aren't in the Angry Angry Fan Brigade, I expect it to look really good, have solid casting, have somewhat pedestrian plotting, and suffer from somewhat clunky dialogue. I also expect it to feel unnecessary in the grand scheme of adaptations. But I don't expect to be some kind of affront to Tolkien fans everywhere, and I think the AAFB just needs to chill out about this, like they need to about so many other things. (For context, I feel Jackson's LotR adaptation looked really good, had solid casting, and had somewhat pedestrian direction, most notably in Jackson's inability to let any moment anywhere remain small and quiet.)

We're starting to see more people display courage and stand up to wokeness. It gives me hope.