There are a lot of opinions about the Amazon Video series Rings of Power. That’s fine, that’s to be expected. However, there are also some facts about the show that should not be in dispute, and chief among them should be the fact that Neil Gaiman did not write the show or have anything to do with it. Some people have made that mistake, and it’s led to some fantastic responses on Twitter, but Jo Hill may have beat them all.
To be clear, Neil Gaiman does have a new fantasy series available on a streaming platform, but it is not Rings of Power on Prime Video, it’s actually The Sandman on Netflix. The two shows did come out close together, so perhaps confusion was inevitable. Writer Joe Hill decided that if he was going to get it wrong, he was going to get it as wrong as is possible, with a hilarious tweet that brings one area Gaiman has written on, Norse mythology, and also get that confused with something else. Gaiman clearly appreciated the joke as retweeted it out to his own followers.
Everyone blabbing about @neilhimself’s awful Lorf of the Ring series for Disney+ but are we going to talk about his terribl MCU Thor films? Based on his character “Thor” from his novel “Nurse Mythologies”, the films star Chris Pine & are a bout a man who loves hammers and 1/37September 24, 2022
Actual Norse mythology and Marvel’s version of Thor, of course, have next to nothing to do with each other, Marvel's Norse pantheon is only loosely inspired by the real thing, but since Gaiman has written on the subject, clearly that means he’s to blame if you feel like Marvel’s Thor doesn’t stay properly true to the original myths.
How Neil Gaiman Got Involved In The Rings Of Power Blowback
The whole issue actually stems from Elon Musk. The Tesla founder and possible future owner of Twitter recently posted to the platform that he was thoroughly unimpressed with Rings of Power, saying that he thought author J.R.R. Tolkein would be “turning in his grave” over the series.
A fan asked Neil Gaiman, who had previously praised Rings of Power’s early episodes, what he thought of that, and Gaiman was critical of Musk saying he was not somebody that Gaiman would likely go to for literature criticism. This then resulted in somebody else, who defended Musk on Twitter, because that’s a thing people feel a need to do for some reason, to attack Gaiman over the show as if it were his show, which of course, it was not.
Fans Had a Blast Over The Rings Of Power Mistake
This has now led to fans all over Twitter attributing basically the entirety of all media, good and bad, to Neil Gaiman. Every book, movie and TV show ever created is now Neil Gaiman’s fault, at least every vaguely fantasy story. Joe Hill’s response may be the best of all, because it has elements of the truth in it, which the initial criticism did not.
It will be interesting to see just how long this joke lasts. It’s been a few weeks since this whole thing got started, but it doesn’t look to be dying out quite yet.
