Tolkien is to creative literary genius what Amazon's RoP is to hack pulp idiocy. Both far surpass anything else in their field that they will be remembered 1,000 years from now as a kind of yin and yang of fantasy, a Manichaen duality of speculative letters. For every sublime, luminous beauty that Tolkien has gifted the world, Amazon has cursed us with a tedious, banal ugliness. It is unfair to compare the two directly on any one point, because Rings of Power is in every way the anti-Tolkien, patently sterile, parasitical, and inferior, but so much so that RoP becomes a monument in his own right, and counterbalances Tolkien. Could one exist without the other? Tolkien obviously could. But it is only by the contrast that RoP offers that we can truly appreciate the full depths and heights of Tolkien. Our understanding of Tolkien would be incomplete if Amazon had never spent a billion dollars on their vanity project. It is through only the abject failure and futility of Amazon that we...
