YMMV / The Last Ringbearer

• Uncertain Audience: Even setting aside the intrinsic paradox of being a Hate Fic (requiring familiarity with the text to understand but being created in an active attempt to desecrate it), The Last Ringbearer really struggles to answer the question of "Who is this for exactly?" Readers who want a less simplistic good-and-evil story than Tolkien painted will be put out to discover that, if anything, the Black-and-White Morality is starker here; at least Tolkien thought it would be really gauche to have his villains literally quote Nazis. Hell, at least Tolkien gave the Haradrim some sympathetic qualities and an historical justification for their actions; Yeskov instead throws in some quite genuinely harmful racism that makes them all out to be vicious, animalistic savages. Readers who want a more in-depth, "realistic" look at places where Tolkien tended towards mythological or fantastical explanations will run face-first into the fact that Yeskov, a biologist and palentologist by trade, isn't actually that great at history and the adjacent social-science disciplines, and is arguably much worse at constructing a plausible world than Tolkien, whose lifelong passion was Medieval studies, so it doesn't make for great deconstruction. Even Yeskov himself in an essay he purportedly wrote defending the story admitted he felt uneasy at the idea that someone who might love Tolkien's work could plausibly discover it first through The Last Ringbearer, comparing it to his own reading A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court before any of the actual King Arthur mythos stories and finding them impossible to take seriously.