I think you're onto something there. My general attitude towards life, to be fair, seems to be that being too pedantic about anything just makes things less enjoyable. If you stop having so specific expectations and caring about whether things go exactly the way you imagined or not - well, things are so much less stressful and so much more fun. But I guess to a degree this is a personality trait/ question of temperament which one has limited control over.
It is an interesting question though, why pedantry seems to strike me (and many other people) specifically when it's about adaptations of literary works we love. Is it what we care about the most? Both a lovely and an alarming thought.
I think it is certainly partly because artistic choices are so much more than just pure artistic choices - they also reflect our values and what's important to us.
Am I being too pedantic, for example, in my criticism of Galadriel's portrayal in
The Rings of Power? Someone might think so, but I'm not just upset it's not how I imagined it or how Tolkien describes it. I'm upset because when I see Galadriel being portrayed as a pretty young woman among middle-aged men while those middle-aged men should be much younger than her (they are her cousins' children after all), I see another instance of the predominant (Anglo-)American media being obsessed with female leads being young and attractive while male leads are allowed to be older and/or uglier and it irritates me as a woman, a feminist, and well, as a person who has eyes and sees there are women of all ages and appearances out there.
But am I being too pedantic when I criticise the show's portrayal of ?Finrod? Probably; the main source of my irritation there seems to be simply that I always loved Finrod in
The Silmarillion and thought his death scene was one of the coolest things Tolkien wrote, and therefore to see him look and act differently than the character I imagined while reading and the change of his death scene were disappointing to me. If I let go of my pedantic fixation on the epic Finrod Felagund in my head, I can not care about the show version and be much happier. Also, as a criticism of an adaptation, I don't think simply "this is different" or "this is not like my personal mental image" is worthless - "this artistic choice sends a message that contradicts the original theme/idea/subject of the work" is a much better (and more interesting) criticism.
Of course, sometimes nitpicking about things is just fun bonding with your fellow geeks, and a bit of an ego boost too (don't we all know Tolkien's works so much better than these silly writers?
) And it's a very natural urge. I'm certainly the same person who at 12 or 13 went to see
The Two Towers in the cinema and launched on a rant about how Aragorn's horse is the wrong colour (not to mention it has a different name and backstory
). I think we should keep that all in mind just as long as we keep in mind the flip side - that complaining about the horse colours to your friends sitting on the same couch is already different from posting the same thoughts as "critique" online for everyone to see, not to mention directly contacting/harassing the creators about it. (I absolutely hate the current culture of tweeting at writers/directors/actors with all kinds of impolite and irrelevant junk, but that's an entirely different can of worms already.)
I guess what I'm trying to say is - the nitpicking can be fun in like-minded company, but one should make a difference in their head between it and actual thoughtful criticism of an adaptation, especially when posting their thoughts online. And accepting your own dislikes and disappointments as subjective and minor in the grand scale of human existence does wonders to your mental health.