*Gender and race swapping doesn't bother me. The woke mania about race and gender does.
There was a push to make one of the hobbits female for the movie so its nothing new. Hollywoods always doing this. Either swap an existing character, or just insert a new one. Ive seen now at least 3 adaptions of 20000 Leagues that added in a female character or in one case replaced the main narrator with a woman.
Looking at this 'thing' they are making I just come back to the same question as had with the Rocketeer remake.
"Why didn't they just set it forward and have characters be the sons and daughters of the ones from the books?"
But we all know why.
The most they were able to do in Jackson's original trilogy was swap Glorfindel out with Arwen. Which really didn't bug me that much, since Glorfindel is practically in the dictionary under 'throwaway character' and Tolkien kind of strained a bit to justify NOT sending him along with the Fellowship.
It bugged me a bit because shoehorning Arwen into the "stronk womyn" didn't work for me. It didn't help that Liv Tyler has all the acting talent of a turnip.
I think that putting Arwen in that scene was a good choice. It showed her importance as a character in the story - something that Tolkien never properly developed (come on: let’s not pretend that everything he did was perfect; Tolkien even admitted that Tom Bombadil could have been cut from the book).
When it was rumbled that Arwen was at the battle of Helm’s Deep, however, the reaction was fierce. Interestingly enough, Peter Jackson didn’t attack the fans but cut her from the battle (there are stills that show her, blurred, in the background).
To me the real error was to write Eowyn as a “love alternative” for Aragorn. It never worked and it totally missed the real meaning of Eowyn’s “love” for Aragorn in the book - something that Tolkien, later, spells very clearly so there can’t be doubts about it. And of course Jackson totally fumbled the ball with Faramir. It was the biggest mistake he made in his adaptation.
The Jackson LOTR movies are fine, but I don't think any of the changes he made to the books are an improvement, though I can understand a couple, like compressing the time frame and cutting out Bombadil, as much as I love him. Even there, it's rather important in that Frodo gets tested in the barrow mound. And I was really bummed they cut the Scouring of the Shire because that reinforced the transformation of the hobbits into heroes and stewards of the Shire.
There was zero reason to bring elves to Helm's Deep. What alliance did the elves have with the Rohirrim? If he was so desperate to show cool elves in battle just put in a scene of the fighting that was going on in Mirkwood. Hell, they could have used that to create tension for Legolas.
But at least you can't say Jackson outright spit on the lore, with a couple minor exceptions in The Hobbit films. And even in those movies, a lot, albeit not all, of the stuff Jackson added (looking at you, interspecies love triangle) had some basis in the writings of Tolkien, if not the actual Hobbit book.