A Catholic Memes community has banded together to see to it that Amazon’s upcoming Lord of The Rings show will be “based and chasted.” The petition on Change.org already has almost 38,000 signatures, with the goal being 50,000.
The petition claims that Amazon has hired “intimacy coaches” and has asked that actors be comfortable with “doing nude scenes in the castings.” It goes on to say that Tolkien’s work is “truly wholesome and packed with incredible Christian symbolism.”
It’s certainly true that Tolkien was indeed a devout Catholic, but this goes more in a hyperbolic way in stating that his “memory does not need to be stained with gratuitous nudity or even nudity in the slightest.” Tolkien’s works have been family-friendly, most notably with The Hobbit, which is a children’s book; however, taking the themes from three volumes of the Lord of the Rings, there’s a lot more content geared towards adults.
Even as late as 2001 when the movies premiered, The Lord of the Rings was actually banned in several churches and deemed “satanic.” A church in New Mexico even held a book burning event and has been challenged numerous times throughout its publication history as being “anti-Christian.” The books were usually paired with the Harry Potter series since the movies hit around the same time.
Tolkien’s estate itself hasn’t laid out any particular guidelines with morality clauses for the show, but more like what the show can, and can’t show in the timeline of the events of the books. So far all we really know is that the First Age is completely off-limits.
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