I think it's just time to stop having theories.
At this point I think even Lucasfilm doesn't have a clue what's happening.
I've shamelessly stolen the rest of this post from elsewhere as I thought it was excellent -
For younger viewers who want to understand how uncomfortable and pointless watching TLJ was:
If RJ did a ‘Lord of the Rings’ sequel
Aragon is living in hiding. He met somebody else with a ring and this time he took it, undoing all he achieved in not making the mistake of Isildur, and there’s no explanation why. But there’s cheap drama and ‘subversion’ of ‘your expectation that this makes sense or fits with what came before.’
Gandalf appears, he’s now Gandalf the Grey, despite having progressed to Gandalf the White halfway into the first movie. They felt people would remember Gandalf the Grey easier, so don’t care about what else was revealed about him after.
Tollo Taggins from The Commonwealth found a ring which has to be destroyed. At first he had visions of the other ring and stuff and there seemed to be a connection as a coherent sequel, but then the twist was there’s no coherent connection here and all that was just wasting your time and getting your hopes up with foreshadowing to nowhere.
Another dark lord has come along and created a ring, identical to the last one, there’s no explanation why. We’re told it doesn’t matter, it’s really deep this way.
The group starts out called ‘The Group’, then spends a lot of time making on-the-nose quips about how “We’re the FELLOWSHIP now”. It appears everything is undone.
You never see any of the towns or people of the world or anything, everybody is action heroes all the time 100%. The movies develop an almost hysterical aversion to explaining anything about what’s going on in the larger picture.
Tollo Taggins’ entire story takes place in 48 hours in which he’s kidnapped, mind-raped, thrown against trees, fights a desperate battle to not die, has a friend whose spine is sliced, and watches the enemy kill their own parent who Tollo quite liked. But suddenly the enemy takes off their shirt and Tollo begins blushing and making flustered comments, and wonders if maybe they were wrong. This definitely isn’t fan-fiction / day-time soap level story. This is a critical masterpiece which Lord of the Rings has sorely needed.
Two of the Group - er, Fellowship, like in the other movie - go halfway across Middle Earth to find an elf and a dwarf, because they need somebody to fight the orcs who are 50 metres behind them. They are told to do this by a computer game cutscene which gandalf magics up. They will need to somehow get into the centre of the orcs’ army but don’t worry about that. Instead of finding the heroes who they were supposed to, they have long exposition dumps where a character tells us how much we should hate people who should be pretty easy to hate if the movie just showed us. They all get murdered by a stampede of CGI so we hope the character is right. In their cell they happen to find another great warrior who breaks them out and appears to have been able to do so at any time, so surely must have something deeper which motivat- oh no, he betrayed them and never had any goal except wealth, so it’s not clear why he was even remaining in prison, with all those skills which should have made him a king there already.
The Group won’t listen to the one character among them who has actually done anything constructive and who blew up the enemy’s super weapon in the first part and saved them all, and instead aggravate him with and imply there’s no plan for the orcs chasing them and picking them off one by one, then sneer at him when he doesn’t automatically trust them, which apparently no longer has to be earned or thought about, so long as it accomplishes everybody’s ~favourite~ story trope of the heroes failing because they refuse to talk sensibly to each other. We learn that swords can be thrown backwards into armies far larger than them and basically destroy them, and always could be. There’s no hint of explanation for why they didn’t do this with all the earlier people who died with swords in this story, let alone the other stories. Swords are hella powerful now. We’re told it’s shallow to care about a coherent story when the graphics are really fancy.
Entire scenes and lines of dialogue appear to be directly copy-pasted almost beat-for-beat from the original Lord of the Rings, except far less coherently and without the worldbuilding and history behind them this time. Critics praise it as a fresh of breath air and a nice exploration of new territory for Lord of the Rings.
Two characters who barely even look at each other and just share exposition scenes appear to develop a romance purely because they’re the opposite sex and the only minority characters in the movie, who the director clearly had zero idea what to do with. Critics praise it as a nice maturing for Lord of the Rings.
The characters defeat certain rivals in the first movie. In the second movie, the rivals return and the characters defeat them again, quicker and easier this time. The rivals also teleport miles away between scenes when they are seconds away from executing the heroes.
There are ‘your Momma’ jokes where characters appear to reference 21st century day-to-day life concepts for a long draw-out humour scene where the lead ringwraith is made to look completely non-threatening. They become the target of physical slapstick jokes for the rest of the movie. The only threatening thing about them was their leader, Saurlon, who for some reason is a big eye on a tower who whispers the same rather unique lines to the heroes as Sauron did in Lord of the Rings. Critics call this a breath of fresh air for the Lord of the Rings movies. The apparently competent eye dies to the least competent character yet shown in a moment of raw luck, and we’re left with the slapstick comedy duo. We’re supposed to care about the threat which they apparently pose in yet another movie, somehow.
Aragon for some reason left a secret map to where he is, but it turns out he wanted nobody to know where he was and wants to die. Despite getting over his desire to run away from the throne in the original movies, he ran away from the throne.
