The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power is a high-budget adaptation of J.R.R. Tolkien's Second Age lore, focusing on events like the forging of the Rings amid elven, dwarven, and Harfoot societies, but it heavily prioritizes progressive ideological elements over fidelity to the source material. Aggregate themes across Seasons 1 and 2 include egregious race-swapped casting (e.g., non-white elves and dwarves in a historically homogeneous, European-inspired Middle-earth), feminist reimaginings of characters like a vengeful Galadriel, sympathetic orcs as prejudice victims, and emasculated male tropes, all serving DEI mandates and modern identity politics at the expense of mythic coherence and moral clarity. This results in an overall content rating profile of heavy ideological intrusion (averaging ~8/10 wokeness), driving audience backlash, review-bombing accusations, 'go woke go broke' chants, and plummeting IMDb scores despite production spectacle and improved S2 plotting.