You remember the "Rings of Power," right? Amazon's approach to "Lord of the Rings?"
I'm going to assume you didn't watch it. Not many did despite Amazon sinking a billion dollars into its creation, but to be fair, it doesn't deserve to be watched on every metric. It's filled with your standard modernization tropes. Girlbosses that are better than everyone else at everything, writing that treats you like an idiot, and of course, moral relativism.
The bad guys are only the bad guys because... they are. Even at one point, Sauron himself begins to sway toward the good side when he falls in love with Galadriel, who rejects him, turning him into an angry incel. As ridiculous as that is, these Amazon writers are also trying to make orcs into redeemable people capable of familial love, as well as holding empathy and sympathy for their own kind.
In other words, the exact opposite of how Tolkien wrote them.
I covered this briefly in a YouTube video, namely on the moment where Amazon tried to paint an orc as concerned for his wife and child. As I said in the video, orcs are not redeemable by any measure, and they won't just betray their own at the drop of a hat; they'll cannibalize each other just because they're hungry.
As it turns out, they're doubling down on this idea, according to leaks from Amazon. Now, boss babe elf Galadriel will have an orc companion and ally.
I want to point this out because underneath it is a serious issue being pushed by the modern left, and that's that there is no real morality. According to them, all morality is ambiguous.
The truth is that moral relativism is a joke where the punchline is you.
I find, far too often, that many Hollywood creators seem to think that morality is relative, and that appears in so many different creations nowadays. Of course, you can make a great story out of taking a bad guy and putting him in a sympathetic light, but even then, the best of these stories doesn't shy away from the idea that the person or people you're watching are the bad guys.
"The Godfather" is a really great example of this. You like Michael Corleone, you root for him, but you're not under any delusion that he's a good man, and he pays for his villainy dearly in the end. Tommy Shelby of "Peaky Blinders" is a similar kind of character. A fascinating man who you hope overcomes those who threaten him and his family, but just like the Corleone family, you wouldn't want to be tied to the Shelbys in real life.
But the art of creating a sympathetic villain has become less nuanced. Now, the left seems more obsessed with trying to get you to root for the villain based on the idea that they have redeemable qualities that, when looked at with even a little scrutiny, are flimsy at best.
Why do this? What's the point?
Because if morality is black and white, and there is a definitive right and wrong, then what much of the left values and considers virtuous is evil. Abortion is only "moral" if framed as "freedom" and "choice," and opposing it is considered immoral because, as they love to frame it, you're trapping a woman with a pregnancy she got from being raped or even raped incestuously.
Creating "trans children" is plainly evil, but it can be made "moral" if you try to frame it as helping children who clearly have a mental disorder that isn't a mental disorder, and inject life-altering chemicals into their bodies to stop them from ultimately killing themselves. The data shows that their depression only increases during and after the transition, but better safe than sorry, right? Just shut up and create more transgender activists... for the children.
READ: Transgender People Are Not Under Threat and Their Movement Is the Height of Narcissism
Supporting Islam is clearly the "moral" thing to do because the only reason anyone is violent is because of the oppressive system we've forced on everyone around the world, and this system only supports white males, so the "moral" thing to do is turn a blind eye to the murder, rape, and immorality of oppressive systems that have been oppressive since ancient times.
By the way the left tells it, the real enemy of morality is morality. The only real virtue is the immediate pleasure of the individual, and the collapse of anything that suppresses that is the only goal worthy of pursuing.
Not every situation we come across is going to be easily definable as good or evil. We aren't capable of knowing the future or what our choices will ultimately result in. These instances don't mean we should rewrite virtue overall. Some things are just evil, some people have just embraced evil, some ideologies are just evil, and some governmental structures are just evil.
These aren't concepts we need to blur. There's nothing "modern" or "progressive" about being soft on evil because it came about from tragic circumstances or a bad misunderstanding. You cannot make evil good just by having sympathy for it.
A demon cannot be a friend.
