The Hobbit was based on an actual book. So were the Lord of the Rings. But people quibbling over material in footnotes (that clearly was not important enough to publish on its own) or the Similarian, which isn’t nearly as cinematic as the others… I don’t get the hand wringing over this bit of fan fiction straying from Tolkiens “notes”.

If you ask the family, they HATED the LOTR movies, believing they strayed from the material too far. Funny how nobody complains about those movies.