LotR Fans Find The First Rings of Power Scene Off-Putting For This Unlikely Reason

Some of those reasons are more obvious than others. Such as dialogue which attempts to be metaphorical and deep, and comes off as dumb and pretentious ("Do you know why a ship floats and a stone cannot?"). Or casual disregard of the lore, which raises the question whether the showrunners cared at all or bothered to read their own script ("I won't always be here to speak them to you" – something a man would say, not an immortal elf living in a land without any sort of apparent danger, double stupid points for that being almost immediately followed by "We had no word for death").

But there is one more reason why some of The Lord of The Rings' fans found the first scene off-putting. Namely because of its suggestion that elf children would be shitty, destructive bullies – this is just "too human" of behavior for a fantasy world, according to Reddit.

One of the elven kids even sounded like a boarding-school bully, down to the accent, while the group in general acted like petulant modern teenagers (weird modern-ish haircuts did not help).

Sure, human kids placed in an environment where they have no want of anything, nor expect to have a want of anything ever, probably would be busy establishing a pecking order of popularity, with all the associated bullying.

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But fans expected something better from elves, semi-otherworldly beings, gifted with, among other things, incredibly clear memory of their experiences, good and bad (knowing this does not even require digging into the lore, Legolas once was surprised to learn that non-elves have memories and emotional impact of what they have lived through fade over time in the main text of The Lord of the Rings).

Particularly in a scene which starts with "Nothing is evil in the beginning". Way to maintain your thematic consistency, showrunners.

The discussion about whether it was proper for elven kids to act like that went back and forth, but while theoretically this part of the scene can be made fit with Tolkien's' legendarium, if you stretch things enough (there were arrogant, power-hungry and even downright evil elves in the past), the fact remains that it did not fit with its own declared theme, a negative more weighty than failing to follow the literary source.