Rings Of Power Has Revealed A Brutal Truth About The Harfoot Way Of Life

gamespot.com:

There are a lot of funny and/or relatable parts of Middle-earth spread all across the Lord of the Rings universe, but the Hobbits easily sit at the number one spot on the list. This is by design--Tolkien specifically crafted the Hobbits to be a sort of fantasy everyman, based partly on himself and his own hobbies (smoking, holing up in his garage to write and work, loving fireworks) and partly on what he believed to be «universal morals,» a direct quote from a 1967 interview called «The Prevalence of Hobbits» from London's The Sunday Times. Even now, decades later, the idea of Hobbits as the characters we can point to and say «they're just like me» persists--who hasn't made a second breakfast joke at some point?

But Hobbits are one of the youngest races in Middle-earth, and as such they're actively missing from the Second Age, where we land for Prime Video's Rings of Power TV show. Instead of Hobbits, we meet the Harfoots--and, at least in the first two episodes, the differences between the two were negligible at best. Sure, the aesthetics might be a little more nature-based, and they appeared to have a more direct fear of outsiders which prompted them to do all sorts of quirky, charming hiding and camouflaging, but for all intents and purposes in Rings of Power's premiere, the Harfoots were just Hobbits with the serial numbers filed off.

And then Episode 3, Adar, dropped a particularly bleak bombshell on us, with regard to Harfoot culture. This week, we learned that the Harfoots practice a, frankly, brutal version of survival of the fittest, and that part of their culture means anyone who «falls behind» in their great migrations is consigned to certain death. This, of course, is an issue because Largo's ankle has been