According to my phone, I took that screenshot on August 16 of 2022, and given that the first trailer came out February 12, 2022, and the Vanity Fair article with that particular image came out February 10, 2022, it amuses me that it took them this long to come up with this response. Or did they respond before and I missed it? Certainly possible.
But what's so funny about this post? Well, two things.
First, it's these words: "Here's your proof from the book itself."
That quote isn't from a book.
That quote is from a letter, which, for the information of the Rings on Prime media team and all others who don't know, is a different form of literature from a book. This particular quote is from Letter 348, which is dedicated to describing the meaning of Galadriel's name (it's on page 473 of that link).
Incidentally, here's a screenshot that shows why it's important to actually click on articles, and not just read Google's summaries:
Okay, you might be thinking that it's silly for me to care this much about a quick little typo, but come on. This is after months of people criticizing this image online - even after months of the critics of this image sharing this precise quote online! - and it isn't even that difficult to find the letter. Someone had to photoshop that quote above the image, and cite it as "J.R.R. Tolkien", and didn't cite the letter, leaving some poor social media intern to look like a fool? It's just low-quality work, like the rest of the show.
Didn't Amazon originally start as exclusively a book-selling organization?
As for the second reason it's so amusing... well, look at it again:
Crown? I don't see a crown.
I've mentioned this before, so I won't go into detail about it, but I still want to highlight, first of all, the disparity between what the words say and what the image shows (which happened in the actual show, too!), and second, the fact that the post I linked to was published on June 28, 2022 - so I referenced this letter even before whoever at Amazon's social media account created this post.
And now that I'm looking at this quote again, I've thought about something else that I may as well bring up to make this a serious post. Well, semi-serious. Tolkien talks about Galadriel doing "athletic feats" - basically sports. That does not translate immediately to going to war. You yourself probably know someone who's done sports but hasn't gone to war or made their entire personality about war. Women had been competing in the Olympics since 1900, but that didn't lead to the lot of them suddenly going into combat roles in WWI or WWII.
The rebuttal to my point, of course, is that Tolkien describes her as "Amazonian", which does not mean "appropriate for a show made by Amazon", but rather is a reference to an all-women society of warriors from Greek mythology. I suppose it depends on what Tolkien means by "her youth", and whether that time in her life was over before or after Morgoth stole the Silmarils. I sure don't know the answer to that. Nonetheless, I retain my original opinion that the showrunners focused entirely too much on what they could get away with rather than what made the most sense from context clues. At least, that's what I think about their press. The show itself was... well, not that.
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