Shelob

Whatever she is all we do know is she is all kinds of evil. But if that's her human form then she is pretty hot.

I feel like I wrote that quickly and was a bit too trite. So, by way of clarifying, expanding, and maybe softening some of my hardline statements:

I'm more rolling my eyes at happy meal type stuff than games. Games, in general, if people have fun playing them, I say go for it. I used to play Lord of the Rings: Vol. 1 for SNES because that was all there was, and that's a *terrible* game. But I will acknowledge that, sometimes, you're a Tolkien nut and you want to immerse yourself in that world and play in Middle Earth and you takes what you can gets.

The thing that dispirits me a bit is that pre-famous Lord of the Rings was kinda niche, still very special, and like belonging to a special club (although it was pretty wide-spread, it felt like a secret club just with a large membership). Everybody who was there tended to love the source material deeply and would be appalled at watering it down. Nothing is ruined, of course, no matter how mainstream it gets, but there is a small sense of loss when a bunch of people who don't care come storming in and consume it like they would, well, a happy meal. It's like watching a five-star chef prepare a sumptuous banquet, sitting down and savouring every bite, and then a bunch of party people come in and start wolfing it down. They're laughing, having a good time, enjoying the food - and that's not a bad thing per se - but it's a bit depressing watching them miss the bigger picture.

Of course, nothing is ruined or diminished. The movies were flawed, but they were still great and the books are not (cannot) be harmed by such things.

As a final clarification/confession: I haven't played any of the games myself, although I did see the early ones being played quite a bit. They looked like generic action games; again: as a LotR fan, sometimes you take what's there.

The Game of Thrones influence worries me greatly, particularly with the Amazon series. I am a bit worried that that series will wind up being a woke, sexy nightmare.