Amazon Prime’s second season of The Rings of Power has released, and just as with season 1 two years ago, this Second Age–speculating series is getting besieged.

Prominent YouTube critics such as The Critical Drinker and Nerdrotic have already savaged The Rings of Power as “woke,” vapid, and disdainful of its Tolkien source material. Now they are saying the second season is even worse than the first.

I have watched every available episode of The Rings of Power, that is, four episodes of season 2 at the time of this writing. And I can say that The Rings of Power is not a great show, but it is not nearly as bad as the haters are saying. I would go so far as to say that the most negative reviews are actually dishonest. These reviewers have made hating RoP part of their online identity, and they’re watching it to find excuses to hate it, not to give it a sincere appraisal.

One example of such insincere appraisal is the reaction to a clip from season 2, episode 3 that has been circulating on social media. In this clip, an orc expresses reluctance to go to war. After all, he reasons that the orcs have a safe homeland in Mordor, so why should they leave Mordor to fight elsewhere? This orc is then shown to have a mate and a baby, about whose safety he is evidently concerned.

Social media has raged against this clip because it ostensibly goes against Tolkien’s vision of orcs. Orcs are just malicious killing machines. They don’t love. This “daddy orc” character is going against the source material to appease “soft” modern sensibilities!

But Tolkien wrote about orc tribes, orc bloodlines, and wild orcs that were not attached to any dark lord. Obviously if orcs have tribes and bloodlines, then they must have family loyalties. Assuming they reproduce in the conventional way, they must have fathers and sons, and these fathers must have some level of concern for the survival of their offspring. These things can be easily inferred from Tolkien’s writing, so complaining that RoP features a “daddy orc” is silly. Daddy orcs are canon.

As for the daddy orc being reluctant to fight, that is also canon. In Tolkien, orcs are always violent, but opportunistically so. They raid along the edges of their territory, and attack people who stray into it. But they don’t go to war unless they have extraordinary motivation or if they are controlled by a dark lord. Orcs are naturally violent, but they aren’t naturally warriors.

RoP has consistently depicted orcs as bloodthirsty and savage, including in that same episode. There is no inconsistency in depicting them as bloodthirsty savages who also have families and prefer not to march off to war without a good reason. That’s not a betrayal of Tolkien. It’s actually a very logical interpretation of his lore.

People hating on this clip aren’t concerned with respecting Tolkien. They’re just grasping for reasons to hate a show that they have already decided to hate.

This isn’t helpful. If we want entertainment companies like Amazon to produce good content, then we need to judge fairly the content they produce. If the only feedback they receive from Christian fans is, “We hate everything,” then feedback from Christian fans becomes irrelevant.