So
Christopher Tolkien retired as head of the Tolkien Estate, and with this knowledge in mind, Amazon's LOTR TV series suddenly makes a lot more sense.
Especially the part where they seem to want to do a prequel? Which is a bit dumb, in my opinion. I mean, sure, you can focus it on young Aragorn doing his Awesome Mccoolguy shit, like walking through Moria, going to Harad, being Thorongil for like 20 years, all that shit, but it seems like that's sort of...completely not the point of LOTR. Like, shit, one of the great things about it is that while Aragorn's the guy who would
ordinarily be the hero of the plot, here he's a
supporting character, and we just gloss over a lot of the cool guy shit he does because that's not really important, like, say, all the action movie hero shit between 'having a chat with dead guys' and 'sailing a captured and repurposed pirate fleet to the Pelennor Fields'.
So, sure, baller dude, but it seems like it'll probably be missing the point.
Which, now that I think of it, is exactly what the last couple seasons of Game of Thrones have been doing, so, sure, fuck it, why not.