Chaos erupts as film fans jump to the defense of ‘The Lord of the Rings’

There are some cans of worms you should simply never open, no matter if you’ve done the most rigorous risk assessment, no matter if you’ve conclusively balanced the gains and losses in a way that at least breaks even for you; there are just some threads in the universe that hold nothing but cosmic anarchy if tugged at.

But if you think that’s going to stop Reddit’s most mischievous, you’d be dead wrong. In fact, perhaps this blasphemous adrenaline rush is exactly what propels these perpetrators to these transgressions; the assertion of The Lord of the Rings films having grown stale over time may just suggest such a thing all on its own.

Needless to say, this take sparked one of the more unhinged conflicts we’ve seen on r/movies for some time.

At the vanguard of it all were two firm but fair rebutters, who calmly pointed out that it was most likely the original poster’s taste in films that had aged in a way that simply didn’t agree with Peter Jackson’s beloved collection. And, most importantly, there’s no shame in saying so.

But things got messy very quickly.

And despite the best efforts from the site’s more affable members, there are some people you just stop taking seriously at some point.

But it didn’t end there; the original poster’s take brought out some of the fandom’s most elite juggernauts; whether the rest of the fandom wishes to claim these folks may be an entirely different story, however.

We’ll see if this volatile subreddit is still standing in the aftermath of this one, although we suppose it’s survived much worse throughout the year. Hopefully, a lesson has been learned here; no good ever comes out of Lord of the Rings detractions.

And, in case you’re not a “real Tolkien fan” and you will be watching The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power, the first two episodes of the series are live on Amazon Prime Video right now.