If the Trilby fits...

Ok, fine, not all Trilby wearers, but I mean, c'mon. Most of them. But that's not important right now. What is important is that Elon Musk, evidently hellbent on burning whatever good will might be left in the minds of anyone who hasn't paid attention to him in the past few months, has waded into the TLOTR: TROP nonsense.

The Trilby: for the discerning gentleman who interprets
strong female characters as a threat to his masculinity.

To everyone so concerned with author's intent,
just consider that Tolkien might have left some of
this stuff locked in a drawer for a reason.

That's The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power. You know, the streaming series based on J.R.R. Tolkien's notes which seemed to surface whenever his son Christopher Tolkien needed a new kitchen reno or whatever? But I kid. I'm sure Tolkien the younger was in no way motivated by profit when he edited together every scrap his father wrote and published them. Twice. And to be clear, the nonsense I referred to isn't the series itself, but rather the crackpot hatred of the it, because the show is fine. I'd go so far as to say that it's actually pretty good despite it coming at the price of giving Jeff Bezos more money. Or rather would if I wasn't sharing someone else's Amazon account. Wait, uh, allegedly sharing someone else's Amazon account.

I've eaten meringue's more durable
that some people's masculinity. 

But whatever. Rather than the chorus of butt-hurt cave-dwellers wailing about how some of the elves are Black and how the very idea of Black elves flies in the face of Tolkien's 100% accurate documentary about the magic fantasy land he made up, Musk's fragile worldview is instead rocked by the strength of Galadriel's character and the comparative weakness of the male characters. "Tolkien must be turning in his grave." He cries. And, ok sure, he probably is but not necessarily because of TLOTR: TROP, people of color playing elves, or its strong female characters.

Rather, I think he'd just be baffled by contemporary storytelling. Take the Peter Jackson films, which I recently suggested would set Tolkien's corpse to spinning. I think they're great, but the author would've almost certainly been turned off by the emphasis on action, quippy dialogue, and lack of songs, but that's just how we tell stories now. Have you read the books? They're practically musicals, which is fine, but if you're trying to sneak into Mordor, maybe don't burst into song every five minutes. That's realm of the dark lord infiltration 101.

"Sam, I get it. You like big butts, and while I appreciate that you cannot
lie, I would ask that you keep it to yourself for the time being. At least
until we're past all these orcs and I can fling myself into that volcano."

-Frodo, the Ringbearer, 

kind of over it.

The Double Down alone would
likely be enough to shred his sanity.

But I think one could argue that the author would take issue with any twenty-first century interpretation, so it's probably a good thing that he's dead. He'd also probably lose his nineteen-diggity's mind about virtually all aspects of living in 2022. The internet, streaming television, the broken, out of control capitalism that allows a single person to amass an obscene amount of wealth. All of it would send a reanimated Tolkien scrambling back to the cold embrace of the grave.

Sort of like how if you put Elon Musk
next to someone even worse, he might 
come off as tolerable. Might.

As for the specifics of Musk's complains, I mean, maybe he was watching some other streaming fantasy show loosely based on something Tolkien may have jotted down on a napkin in 1938? But I don't see it. Yes, two episodes in and Galadriel is an elven special forces bad ass and yes, she did encounter a guy one might describe as a nave. But even if Musk was on to something--he's not, but if he was--this is story telling and Galadriel is one of the protagonists. The characters Galadriel encounters have to serve the story and by contrasting with her they help to tell us who she is.

But the fact that the richest human on earth is so shaken by a strong, fictional female character suggests to me that no one, let alone someone so insecure that they take to Twitter to whine about elves, should control enough wealth to launch a roadster at Mars.

"Walking away from an explosion? But that's our thing!"

-Male movie characters