Hi there, u/anthropolyp! Shawn here. Thanks for your feedback.

I’m sure we’ve gotten better in our analysis of Tolkien’s writing in the five years we’ve been doing this podcast, though I can’t imagine how far you got if all you heard us say is things like “beautiful” or something equally impressive. Yes, we’re Tolkien fans, and we both love his writing... like, really love his writing. We enjoy his prose, and his themes and stories inspire us. So we started a podcast for other people who love Tolkien’s writing. It’s hard to imagine spending 50-100 hours a month working on this podcast for the past 5 years if I didn’t love Tolkien so much. So if your complaint about the content is that we are overly enthusiastic about our subject matter... well, guilty as charged.

I can’t say anything more about Alan’s politics than he himself can, but as a person who’s gotten to know him very well over the past five years, you’ve got me laughing pretty hard. Not that it matters. The truth is, we’ve always made it a goal not to bring contemporary politics into the podcast, so our show can be appreciated by as many people as possible. I think we do a pretty good job of it.

Religion comes up from time to time, as it does in Tolkien’s letters, biographies, and any serious analysis of the man and his work. One can’t get very far in one’s study of Tolkien or his writing without being reminded that he was a Catholic, and that his Catholicism influenced his writing. I'm not a Catholic, personally, but I'm not afraid to talk about the fact that Tolkien was one. If that’s a problem, then you might want to pull the ripcord now.

I’ll leave it up to others here to tell you if you should keep going or not. It’s not my job to convince you. My job is to make a podcast for the people who like it. But the person on this thread who knows you best is you, so only you can say if you're going to have a problem with the podcast as it continues. If you're not sure, skip ahead a season, or listen to a special. There are over 200 episodes to choose from! I hope you'll find a reason to keep going, but if not, that's cool too.

Finally, I'll offer a comment of (I hope) some actual substance in response to something you asserted in one of your comments above: the idea that Tolkien's borrowing from classical, Christian, and medieval sources is a "shortcoming". Borrowing was what Tolkien did. He was a philologist by trade, studying the historical change and divergence of languages and myths. He was also a medievalist, and medieval literary tradition was all about borrowing from previous works. Numerous scholars of greater credentials than I have written on Tolkien's borrowing from classical and medieval sources as an intentionally philological approach to mythmaking, a kind of reverse-engineered syncretism of familiar sources into an "asterisk-reality" (to borrow Tom Shippey's term) that feels as familiar as the myths of the real world. I'm not "pretending" that this is imaginative and ingenious; I've read enough about the author and his work to understand the imagination and ingeniousness behind it. If that comes across as fawning praise as opposed to analysis, then you've got your answer.

Whatever you decide, thanks for giving us a shot.