The Lord of the Rings

Galadriel so far is a badass, sure, but she clearly has her flaws (and doesn't seem particularly "nice: or "smart" so much as young, brash, and stubborn). And has others have pointed out, she has already been mentored, reprimanded, and saved by male characters. The eye rolling "powerful woman" stuff you see is when a woman character has seemingly been designed with the express purpose of hammering home the "I'm a powerful woman and I don't need a man" trope, which (so far) I'm definitely not getting here.

I also really like the reflection of the stars in the water parable as a theme for Galadriel's character. There's a certain amount of darkness to it that makes it interesting and portends her future moments with Frodo in the Mirror of Galadriel scene.

Overall it's very well thought out. The writers are clearly very familiar with the original material and have done a really good job extrapolating on it in a way that makes sense and fairly respects the lore. They have taken a few liberties (they kind of have to based on the era) and you could definitely nitpick, but imo it's soild- so far.

I'm also glad most of the dialog seems to be written for adults and the diction feels pretty "Tolkienish", especially the elves. Dialog like the scene where a character said "the ground here is riven with fissures" feels much more in line with Tolkien's writing than if they had said something like "look at all these holes in the ground."

It's also a little bit gritty, as others have mentioned. This is something I was particularly worried about. Being at least a little gritty and morally messy is something all the shows I like have in common. This show needed to have a little of that Deadwood/Rome/GoT grit in it to be worth watching imo.

On the race stuff- The black elf seemed unusual to me for all of about 60 seconds (just because we aren't used to seeing it really) and then it felt perfectly fine. You can tell Arondir is an elf by the way he acts/talks/carries himself. It turns out elves don't all need to be light skinned to feel like elves- not to me anyway.

Most of all, the story is actually pretty fucking interesting. The characters (so far) seem to have some depth. Even the hypersensitive critical reviewers acknowledge that there is plenty to be captivated by in the first 2 episodes- most of them anyway.

Still plenty of time for the show to jump the shark and become some sort of woke mess, but so far it's very good.