There can be "Lord of the anything...." without it being linked to LOTR.
I mean... yes, there is Lord of the Flies(which makes more sense as a parody in this case), and there is also Lord of the Dance.
The word "Lord" is not copywritten to LOTR, so other people are allowed to use it without it being directly related to LOTR.
If you want to talk merchandsing then look at all of the recent releases for the movie (which I guiltily own some of). But there have been LOTR things for many years, it's just that this much attention wasn't drawn to it in the past.
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