There’s plenty to gripe about in this world, but some people take it upon themselves to imagine scenarios for the sole purpose of pissing themselves off. Take Varg Vikernes, who took to Twitter to rant about how “wokeness” would have corrupted the Lord of the Rings movies.

“Reminder that if ‘The Lord of the Rings’ films had been made today Aragorn would have been a woman (but Arwen still a she-Elf), Frodo & Sam would have been gay, Gandalf black & the only white male actors in the entire cast would have been Denethor, Gríma & Saruman,” he wrote, capping it off with “#Wokeness.”

MUCH to unpack here. First of all, Frodo and Sam would have been gay!? Were they not already gay? And I’m not alone in that sentiment:

You’ll notice that that’s a quote tweet. Most of the responses are in the quote tweets because, shocker, Vikernes limited replies on his original post to only his followers. We love an echo chamber!

But Vikernes isn’t your average Twitter troll. Nope, he’s a convicted murderer and arsonist! He stabbed Euronymous, a fellow musician in the Norwegian black metal scene — yeah, we don’t have time to unpack that statement either — and he burned down or attempted to burn down four churches. After all that, this is how he now spends his time: Getting mad about fake inclusive movies.

The most bizarre part of the whole saga? Vikernes chose to invent a hypothetical inclusive Lord of the Rings instead of pointing to the upcoming Amazon adaptation, which literally will be more inclusive than previous versions.

Actor Lenny Henry, who will star in the prequel series based on J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Silmarillion, told BBC Radio 4 that the show’s setting lends itself to more on-screen diversity.

“It’s about the early days of the Shire and of Tolkien’s environment, so we’re an indigenous population of Harfoots — we’re hobbits, but we’re called Harfoots,” Henry said. “We’re multicultural. We’re a tribe, not a race, so there are Black, Asian and Brown, even Maori types within it.”

The show will also be less male-dominated than previous Tolkien media. “There’s a very strong female presence in this,” Henry said, including leading actress Morfydd Clark. “There are going to be female heroes in this evocation of the story.”

So for anyone who, like me, read Vikernes’ diverse show pitch and thought, “That actually sound pretty good!”, just tune into the new version when it comes out in September. If it’ll feature queerness remains to be seen, but one thing’s for sure. It’ll make Vikernes really mad.

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