Comedian Patton Oswalt Stans For Rings Of Power With Bizarre Tweet Praising The Humanizing Of Orcs

Rings of Power is a bastardization of Tolkien's work, but Hollywood and Patton Oswalt are doing damage control.

Amazon Prime Video’s Lord of the Rings: Rings of Power has been a dismal failure, from the ratings it garnered to the audience’s reception of a show that ignores so much of the work J.R.R. Tolkien put into his fantasy world. However, after the second season ended, Hollywood seemed to be on a crusade to justify it, using one of their mouthpieces, Patton Oswalt, to make bizarre statements in defense of the show. 

Season 2 of Rings of Power had many people rolling their eyes about the show—if they were still watching it. Initial ratings showed that nearly half of the audience had tuned out between seasons 1 and 2, with the bloated, 72-minute episodes being difficult for anyone to bear or return to. 

Part of the difficulties with Rings of Power is that the players obviously do not want to play within the rules of Tolkien’s well-established fantasy world. Early in the season, Prime Video presented something that looked like it was out of a meme with refugee orcs holding a small infant as a family.

Showrunner J.D. Payne showed his lack of knowledge of Tolkien by saying to Deadline at the time, “You read the books and you get these blips of moments where orcs are kind of on their own and they’re saying, ‘Hey, what if one day there could be a place just for us, we could have our own little land or our own little cottage by the sea, so to speak, where they have dreams, they have aspirations, they don’t just want to be mindless killing machines.'”

Beyond the orc incident, the show courted more controversy from Tolkien fans by portraying Sauron as effeminate and crying and making Galadriel and Elrond kiss in a bizarre scene that made little sense. These moments generated outrage among fans of the original Lord of the Rings works.

Even with the poor story points and bad audience reception, Amazon has shown it’s committed to at least a season 3 and has hinted it will stick with its “original vision” of five seasons. One of Amazon MGM Studios’ higher ups even made a bizarre claim that “55 million people have engaged” with the show’s second season, despite initial ratings seeming like 900,000 watched the initial episodes.

Enter comedian and actor Patton Oswalt, who’s made waves in culture recently by working for Heather Antos IDW Star Trek comics, writing a bizarre piece of fan fiction where a tribble fetishizes Captain Kirk in the most disturbing manners.

Now, Oswalt is making a more disturbing comment about Rings of Power, praising the writing team for humanizing Orcs. He posted to X, What makes season 2 of

@TheRingsofPower deeper than season 1 is seeing the orcs mourn their dead, struggle to find a home in the world, and worry about their families. Makes the battle sequences more exciting & heartbreaking. They’re not just a ‘faceless horde.’”

Commentators are retweeting the post, rightly saying that Orcs are evil, created by Tolkien as representations of demons, and humanizing them isn’t “deep writing;” it’s simply insulting to the audience’s intelligence.

Pop culture commentator Disparu may have hit the nail on the head with his reply, saying, “He saw a horde of evil deformed creatures and thought. That represents me for real, for real.”

Maybe Orcs are simply a matter of representation to those in Hollywood.

What do you think of Patton Oswalt’s bizarre comments about Orcs in Lord of the Rings: Rings of Power? Leave a comment and let us know.

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