#tolkien hater

[thechaoticreader]

Popular Books I Read and HATED

*Disclaimer: If you like any of these books, slay! I'm happy for you! These are just my own consumer choices, and imo negative book reviews are just as helpful as positive ones!*

This list is not long because I don't actively dislike many books that I read, and I have a very good sense of what I will and will not like, but there are some I had to read/were misled into reading so here we go:

1. Tender Is The Flesh

by Agustina Bazterrica

My rant review is above if you want more details but recently I've seen a few videos that articulate my feelings in a way that I couldn't before so im going to add a few reasons here that were not included in the original post:

It gave very Qanon and general antisemitic vibes: i.e blatant conspiracy made up by the "wealthy liberal elites" to encourage cannibalism for their own enjoyment (I know she's Argentinian however that doesn't mean im not allowed to get the ick from it)

Purposefully inaccurate depictions of meat industry and disrespect for farmers (context: im a vegetarian from farm country with a roommate who works in the cattle industry - Angus beef if you're curious - so im very familiar with the process and cannot say in good conscious that it is all bad -> just support local farmers <3)

world building makes little sense

COWS DO NOT EQUATE TO HUMANS NO MATTER WHAT YOU DO !!!!!!!!

the "disease" doesn't make sense (even if its made up who would believe it)

No themes were treated with the depth nor nuance they require (capitalism, feminism, veganism etc.)

I think thats all I haven't covered but this is the only book I have ever read where my hatred of it continues to grow with each day. I went out of my way and deleted it from my reader and get annoyed every time I see it. And for the record (because yes i'm salty) I didn't hate it because it was too disturbing, in fact I've read and loved worse and ive been an avid horror reader since I was (admittedly too) young. I hate it because there wasn't a well done story underneath the gore. I'll say it loudly for the people in the back GORY HORROR BOOKS STILL DESERVE A GOOD/INTERESTING STORY, especially if you want to try to put complex themes in it. If you cannot write a deep story but you're good at and enjoy gore, write yourself a lil 100 page splatter punk and we can all have a good time <3

Unlike with Tender Is The Flesh I don't have a ton of thought out critical reasons for the rest of these soooooo I'm going to give my highly subjective reasons -> I totally understand why some like them <3

2. The Handmaids Tale

by Margaret Atwood

hated the writing style

It didn't keep my attention

disliked the ending so much I actually threw it across the room <3

3. The Hobbit

by J.R.R Tolkien

hated the writing style

male centered fantasy is not my vibe

my ADHD cannot handle long incredibly descriptive sections in books -> I physically fell asleep multiple times while reading this book

honestly even with the movie I fall asleep every time

0/10 book I want to read

10/10 bedtime story

4. Lord of The Flies

by William Golding

hated the writing style

hated most of the characters (and not in a slay anti-hero way)

was forced to read it in high school and it single handedly sent me into a 4 year reading slump... I missed so many good books because of this and will forever hold a grudge

5. Romeo & Juliet

By William Shakespeare

I'm too jaded and gay to enjoy this -> every single character is so painfully stupid

tbh im just bitter that his (imo) better plays get less love than this one, its way over hyped

but I will give it points for boring me so much that I wrote my first fanfic (Romeo x Mercutio if you're curious ... no its not posted anywhere and it never will be <3)

sidenote -> Shakespeare plays I love incl:

Hamlet (duh im a depressed emo gay on Tumblr)

Macbeth (also duh, witches and female manipulator... need I say more)

Othello (a slow burn for the true crime girlies)

Measure for Measure (absolutely underrated, please please please look into this play -> I saw a production of it and it was incredible)

[chaos-of-the-abyss]

i really don't get celegorm's death put into full perspective until i remind myself that he is older than the human race, and the person who killed him was the son of... not even one of the earliest humans. he had many, many, many, many times dior's life experience. hell he had many, many, many times the life experience of dior's father. and dior still killed him. that's embarrassing

[giallo4ver]

Watching people seriously ship romantically Sauron/Galadriel in the Rings of power knowing full well that he is the ORIGINAL Mansplain, Manipulate, Manslaughter and that he is manipulating the whole audience too into believing he has actual feelings and not just a thirst for power and corruption of pure souls:

[anghraine]

me, to myself: I've been ranting for over 20 years about my gripes with the Peter Jackson LOTR movies and especially their tremendously influential (mis)handling of Gondor, Aragorn, the legacy of Númenor, Elrond, etc, and been consistently annoyed by how much their fans insist on uncritical glorification while also trying to present themselves as fandom underdogs who must defend these inescapable behemoths from the smallest slight. Maybe I should try to focus on other things and put them behind me.

[news: Jackson is making a new LOTR project involving Aragorn and Gollum]

me: alternately, maybe I will never be free

[sapphologic]

Honestly, ROP haters are the biggest clowns. They complain and whine about Tom Bombadil and how It DoEsN't FiT ThE lOrE 🤡🤡🤡 - except it does, because Tolkien said that Bombadil wandered Arda and didn't settle with Goldberry right away. Which means, he could've been anywhere any point in time of the first and second age. And it's canon that he met Gandalf at least to talk about the One Ring.

The funniest thing is that on Instagram all these butthurt edgelord Tolkien purists throwing fits like their idiotic clamouring would change anything ... now that the new season is announced. And more seasons will follow. They have the contracts already.

I wonder why it's so hard for these guys to just shut up when they have nothing positive to say.

The only criticism I support is that they haven't cast Jack Black for Tom. Yeah. They should've. They really should've.

ALSO HIS BOOTS ARE YELLOW ARE THEY BLIND?!

[bilbos-stolen-untensils]

[onesizedgirl]

Naur because why the costumes in r*p are so horrendous good god what was the budget? Three peas and a leather boot?😭

[tarmairons]

hear me out,,

[kuneko-kokono]

casually dumping my unposted/unfinished south park art!!! enjoy

creek twitter banner + craig wallpaper.. my pfp and banner here but like!! im super proud of the background bc idk how i managed to make it blend really well

craigs gang in space!! actually was supposed to be a phone theme but i got lazy.. ill probably redraw it sometime

older fullbody sketches for practice.. also my friend made me draw tweek after saying i hated drawing his hair. fast forward now i love drawing it and coincidentally really hate drawing kyles hat. did i mention friend is a kyle fan...

i hecking love stan marsh. tho ill revist and tweak this one bc i like the composition a bit.. also a tiny bit of style but i hated how kyle looked so i dropped it

okkk thats all 🫡🫡 see yall when i draw mikoto yet again

[nighttimepatrons]

Listen, I'm just thinking about the inherent pretty privilege of elven society. And kinslaying aside, being unsightly is a moral failing.

[incorrectringsofpower]

[chaos-of-the-abyss]

[Celegorm and Curufin] purposed to keep Lúthien, and force Thingol to give her hand to Celegorm. [...] and Celegorm sent messengers to Thingol urging his suit.

celegorm's (and curufin's too but i'm talking about celegorm here) audacity here is just killing me lmfaooo like he "sent messengers to thingol urging his suit"... did he really believe thingol, with any amount of suave and practical and eloquent convincing, was ever going to say yes to him force-marrying luthien. every time i read this part i'm ctfu

[acornsandoaktrees]

me and my wife saw you from across the forest & we hate your vibe. she’s going to shoot you

[wilcze-kudly]

Still mad that Ar Pharazon is made up to be this lame Jafar ripoff mf in the rings of power. Honestly, evil advisors are getting really played out as a trope.

In the Silmarilion, he was a a warrior, a war monger in fact, who forced himself upon his cousin in order to usurp the throne. This character could've been used as an excellent critique of toxic masculinity, especially with the recent popularity of alpha males.

Having Miriel as a victim of spousal abuse would also be an interesting plot point as well, especially if juxtaposed with the free and very much in charge of herself (especially if they were to keep Celeborn and have. Look, I'm all for strong female characters, but if all your female characters are just the same 'strong, arrogant woman who can totally do everything a guy can fo because we are feminists here at up with the times studio' in dufferent fonts, well I'm gonna start thinking that you don't know how to write women.

Also wishing they went more horror with Sauron than 'villain romance'. Like apologies for wanting one of the most iconic villains of all time to be an actually fun antagonist rather than reliving every 'reader x (insert fictional villain) self insert fic from the early 2010s'

[thesolarangel]

Say it with me:

We will be open about all of the new casting choices for future RoP seasons. We will not criticize their appearance, we will not judge them for earlier performances, instead we will wait until we see them in the show and be open about how they approach their character.

Let's focus on the fact that we will get to experience Tolkien's world and characters on screen with every new season and be swept away by it and gain new inspiration for fanart, fanfiction and cosplay!

[cantsayidont]

Hateration holleration, fantasy edition:

WILLOW (1988): Uneven Lucasfilm fantasy adventure (directed by Ron Howard), allegedly conceived before STAR WARS, starring Warwick Davis as a Nelwyn (little person) farmer who must protect a magical baby called Elora Danon from the evil Queen Bavmorda (Jean Marsh) with the help of valiant but hapless adventurer Madmartigan (Val Kilmer) and eventually Bavmorda's combative daughter Sorsha (Joanne Whaley). Davis, Kilmer, and Whaley are all great, but the straightforward story is burdened with a lot of unfunny shtick (the treatment of the other Nelwyns, who are clearly intended as off-brand Hobbits, is particularly uncomfortable), clumsy worldbuilding, and a distasteful crassness that tends to undermine any sense of wonder. One of the properties absorbed by the Mouse in its acquisition of Lucasfilm, it was revived in 2022 as a short-lived streaming series (q.v.), set about 25 years after the original movie. CONTAINS LESBIANS? Nope. VERDICT: Fun main characters — it'd be hard not to like Sorsha, and Davis's stubborn dignity as Willow is appealing — but the terrible script nearly sinks it even as dumb popcorn fare.

WILLOW (2022): Belated, unnecessary episodic sequel to the 1988 Lucasfilm fantasy adventure film, released and subsequently buried by the Mouse in a fit of streaming service cost-cutting mania, returns Warwick Davis as would-be sorcerer Willow Ufgood and Joanne Whalley as Sorsha, now the queen, whose gay daughter Kit (Ruby Cruz) and her would-be knight-protector Jade (Erin Kellyman) set out on a quest to rescue Kit's handsome but hapless twin brother Airk (Dempsey Bryk) with the help of a pretty kitchen maid (Ellie Bamber) with an unlikely secret. Not as bad as some critics made out, particularly compared to more recent Disney+ offerings (which have been genuinely dire), the eight-episode series has an appealing cast and some fun moments, but the story is all over the place, with hazy dramatic stakes and too many awkward shifts in tone and direction. Perhaps the show's biggest misstep is its failure to make sense of the movie's slipshod worldbuilding, mistakenly treating the 1988 film as a Revered Fantasy Icon rather than a lazy collection of high fantasy clichés that was barely cohesive enough to sustain the movie's significantly simpler plot. CONTAINS LESBIANS: Aye, verily, or some other such fantasy utterance. VERDICT: Intermittently charming, and a modest improvement on the original, but way too sloppy.

THE LORD OF THE RINGS: THE RINGS OF POWER (2022): Predictably but dishearteningly awful Amazon Prime Video series is in some ways the opposite of the WILLOW show: a charmless pseudo-prequel to THE LORD OF THE RINGS, doomed from inception by a series of disastrous legal constraints. Forbidden to directly reference the Peter Jackson films and unwilling to pay the Tolkien estate for the rights to use material in THE SILMARILLION and UNFINISHED TALES, Amazon Studios instead contrived their own truncated, severely condensed version of Tolkien's Second Age, based solely on references in THE LORD OF THE RINGS to the forging of the Rings of Power and the fall of Númenor. The resulting eight episodes are ponderous, dour, and disconcertingly cheap-looking despite their enormous budget, offering neither the mythological sweep of the source material nor the indulgent pay-cable sex and violence of A GAME OF THRONES, and Morfydd Clark (as a young and sour-faced Galadriel) and Robert Aramayo (as a young and sour-faced Elrond) are poor substitutes for Cate Blanchett and Hugo Weaving. Worse, if you're not intimately familiar with Tolkien's legendarium (including the parts the show isn't allowed to mention), you'll likely have no idea what's going on, much less why you should care — and if you are familiar with that mythos, the show's clumsy, tone-deaf treatment of it will drive you mad. CONTAINS LESBIANS? No. VERDICT: So bad it's borderline unwatchable — much worse than Peter Jackson's already dire HOBBIT trilogy. Don't say you weren't warned.