>>215296945
Part of why they're good is the ways they're different from the source material. The source material is kind of weird. Its not written like popular fiction, and it contains a bunch of stuff that makes for very bad pacing, with a bunch of stuff that doesn't have to be in there, often written in a manner that doesn't directly serve the natural dramatic point of impetus of a scene. It wasn't conceived of as a good, entertaining story Tolkien wanted to write. It was conceived of as the Illiad of a forgotten world, so it bucks so many of the instincts anyone would use to write any other novel or make a movie in pursuit of authenticity to that concept
The Lord of the Rings movies wanted a bunch of stuff from the Lord of the Rings books, they wanted the hype and name recognition of that very famous book, but they had to do an actually immense amount of work to smooth it out into something that scanned and flowed like a normal movie. They just tastefully knew when to stop, preserving just enough of the idiosyncratic stiffness and pomp and distancing archaisms to make the world feel like a real place with its own norms and ways of thinking and acting, but dragging it just the right amount towards normal storytelling sensibilities and rules.
People acting like Rings of Power or even the hobbit are bad because its diverging from "Tolkien's vision" are in some respects off base. Apart from just how bad those things look and the diversity dimension, the main problem is that in trying to move towards more conventional and audience-focused storytelling, they're using bad writers who don't actually know how to write a good story. Its mostly bad for the same reason any bad movie with no source material as bad, except due to that general incompetence they're also much worse about identifying and stopping at the right point along the axis between the source material and normal movies.
