> If you can show me in the source material somewhere that states that humans and elves can survive a pyroclastic flow that burns between 200-700c I’ll take back my statement.

It’s fucking fantasy dude. People do and survive the impossible all the time in the source material. Tolkien was not concerned about scientific accuracy of the heatwaves of a volcano, and neither should you be in a show that opens with elves in thin armor marching in a snow storm in sub-freezing temperatures.

> And if you think the Tolkien estate is upset that LOTR made 3 billion dollars you are sadly mistaken.

Well, I don’t think, and I never said it. What I did say was they didn’t like the interpretation. Christopher Tolkien very publicly said that Jackson’s movies made the stories into big action films and that he did not care for them. Go look it up.

> Also.. Seriously.. A leaf woke up the Balrog? Really? Not hundreds of dwarves mining an epic kazad dun… A fucking leaf?

I don’t know why everyone reads things so literally. It’s exactly like the scene at the end of An Unexpected Journey with the bird tapping on the mountain and Smaug waking up. Even if you are set on reading it as “the leaf woke up the balrog” It’s deep beneath the mountain in a sealed lair, that would not be hearing the work of the dwarves above. This is presumably the first thing that’s entered the lair and it immediately senses it.

> The Tolkien family is OK with that?

Yup!

I LOVE that the way you scrutinize the source material accuracy is through the most pea-brained, cinema-sins, wookiepedia nerd fixation on physics and believability. Not the spirit of the work, not the prose of the writing, not anything that a person should take away from a book. Tolkien’s writing is not fixated on inner world rules and physics. We must’ve read totally different books if that’s what you’re worried about in the adaptation.