Orientalist would be fair, but it's hard to call it anti-Muslim when the Calormenes aren't religiously close to Muslim. (And their culture is a mishmash of the Arabian Nights and fairy tale India.)

Misogyny strikes me as an extremely harsh charge for the author of a series that put active girl protagonists front and center at a time when it was completely unexceptionable to completely omit them from children's stories (see, for example, "The Hobbit") or to make them passive or dead weight. Lucy is the one who…

As I understand it, Lewis wrote an indulgent letter to a young fan asking to settle a reading order argument between him and his mother, ratifying the correspondent's internal chronological preference.

That may have had something to do with experiencing two wars in which aerial attacks were a direct threat to his personal well-being.

The Magician's Nephew is pretty much "The Secret Origin of Narnia!" It's mainly fanservice, but I think broadly appreciated by the (very common) sort of fan who wants to go back and find out how everything came to be.

Tolkien cared a lot about his world, but wasn't immune to the draw of money. (I'm pretty sure that somewhere in the discussion of that 1957 treatment he wrote something to the effect of "either art or quite a lot of money".)

Though the Dwarves in The Hobbit other than Thorin are pretty much entirely comic characters, at least up to the point when Fili and Kili die (offstage).

"Could use some yellow boots, but you're getting there."

And when Barry was the fun one who really liked his powers and using them to help people?

The citizens of ex-Communist countries seem to have thought so too circa the end: according to Wikipedia, the USSR stopped fluoridating in 1990, as did Czechoslovakia and East Germany.

My money is still on Pasha being murdered just based on his name, but suicide is entirely plausible.

Oh, yeah, make a puppy a hostage to Tuan's fortunes.

Yeah. It doesn't interest me (in general gimmick-driven events leave me cold). But the whole "what does this mean about heroes, and about America?" thing seems kind of overdone for a bog-standard superhero plot. Pretty much every hero who ever could have has been made to work for the Nazis at some point, and…

I'm pretty sure the giant implicit reset button was the only reason it was permitted. ("We're going to take the most admirable of the half-dozen characters of ours that the general public recognizes and make him a Nazi, permanently" is, I think, something Disney would have considered putting the kibosh on.)

Though that was probably the least true of The Lord of the Rings, which was under contract and which he was under pretty strong pressure from his editors to complete with reasonable speed. (Though since it wasn't his day job, there were limits to how much pressure they could bring to bear.)

That too, definitely.

I trust Chrisopher Lee's skill as an actor if that's what he'd been asked to play.

Saruman's stabbed by Grima (it's Grima who's shot down by the hobbits over Frodo's protests). And I'd say the ignominy of his death is the culmination of his long descent from greatness. But I can see where it would be hard to fit into the structure of a film.

Yes. Tolkien very well knows that Sam is the hero of the story (not to detract from Frodo's or Aragorn's heroism), and Sam's fate is probably the closest to what Tolkien himself would want: a long comfortable life surrounded by family.

I did! (Though I wasn't consciously thinking of it.)