Tolkien's storytelling is very straightforward. You look at the Silmarillion, you look at Unfinished Tales, you look at Lord of the Rings, you look at The Hobbit, and the stories all work very simply, and very plainly. He is not hiding or withholding things in terms of the characters, their nature, or their intention. He is signposting IMMEDIATELY what a character is, what they're like, and what they want. The story is then about how these characters are changed by those pursuits. That's it. The resonance is all in how their characters change, how their goals change, and how their outlook on life and their surroundings change. And those changes drive the story forward. That's how he tells stories, that's how all his stories work.

The showrunners took that storytelling engine and completely broke it for the sake of making a show that is completely, slavishly adherent to episode-to-episode, week-to-week cliffhanger/mystery storytelling. Nobody speaks plainly, someone's always hiding something, intentions are obfuscated, personalities are muddled, and instead of the plotting being a result of the characterization naturally leading to an event, the events are forcibly pressed against the characters to "reveal" something about them that we didn't "know" was there.

Poor turbosperg can't understand ulterior motives or innuendos. L