Galadriel’s storyline in ROP rubs me wrongly in so many ways. Honestly, if an Elf really needs to be gallivanting around Middle-earth with a bunch of Númenoreans at their heels, it’s Elrond. He’s the young one here, whose angst would be a little more understandable in the scale and nature written in the show than Galadriel’s (not that she doesn’t have stuff to be angry about, I just expect better of her), with canonical connections to Númenor and thematic potential with his being Elros’ brother and thus the living embodiment of what Númenoreans crave. Meanwhile, if anyone should be dealing with the Dwarves of Khazad-dûm, it’s Celebrimbor and Galadriel - and especially the latter should be the political agent Elrond is made out to be. For the record, I do not actually condone this idea, but if we are talking in the terms of the story as it is being told in the show, it would make a lot more sense if Celebrían had the role of the warrior princess that’s been given to Galadriel. Canonically little is known about what she was actually like, and as a character she does not have the baggage of established lore and how fandom widely regards her role in the legendarium. Galadriel, meanwhile, has these in loads and we know she was being politically active and a wife and mother at this point of the Second Age. Weren’t the show’s creators harping on filling in the blanks or writing the book Tolkien never did write? Instead they’ve gone and erased an actual canonical character whose story was never very detailed, and completely derailed a character that does have plenty written about her. As the show’s version stands, it pretty much declares the story of Galadriel as a woman with a husband and daughter is not worth telling. Galadriel is not trying to reach her goals through her personal power, charisma or influence but through violence and bitterness.
And what did the first season accomplish? It made Galadriel’s goal vengeance, pure and simple. Even before the death of Finrod, it was something along the line of avenging the death of Two Trees. Not a word about her personal ambition of becoming a queen in her own right, establishing a realm or being a leader. Her story is of aimless wandering for an age, looking for some guy so that she can kill him to avenge a brother who is living happily in Valinor. Now, especially after that scene with her and Halbrand/Sauron, Galadriel’s story is twisted even further. Now it looks like it was Sauron who planted the idea of ruling as a queen in her head. And not even as a queen in her own capacity, but as subservient to him (Sauron does not share power, essentially he’s offering her nothing better than he offers to any common orc). This casts a completely different light on her rejection of the Ring in FOTR and undermines the importance of what this moment means for her as a character: the temptation is no longer her ruling as the supreme queen, but acting as Sauron’s bootlicker, which also makes the temptation look pathetic and thus her refusal no big deal. Essentially, Galadriel’s story is not about Galadriel anymore. It’s a story about men who leave her (Finrod and Celeborn), or who condescend on her (Elrond), or who use and manipulate her (Gil-galad and Sauron). I don’t even know what purpose this serves. Not only is this ship-baiting just tired, but also what it implies about her is pretty awful and humiliating. It’s contradictory to everything said about her in canon, or Elves and marriage. Galadriel even in her youth keenly reads and understands people and their motives and she is consistently the one person who recognises evil when it has not yet revealed itself and rejects it before anyone else. And yet here she is, dicking around with the enemy she has been hunting for millenia. It makes her look clueless, naive and stupid, her “quest” essentially a fool’s errand, and it paints her later struggles against Sauron not as the actions of a leader trying to do the right thing even though it costs her everything, but as a scorned ex trying to get payback for personal slight. It’s as if Amazon was not capable of understanding the concept of people choosing to do good for its own sake, and deciding to fight an almost hopeless battle because to do nothing would be worse. For them, every good deed has to have a personal stake or agenda. This undermines Galadriel’s “goodness” (and her greatness) even more, as if this show’s version of her hadn’t done enough to make her look as bad as possible. And it shows Amazon’s profound misunderstanding of Tolkien. Sidenote, now that I think more of this, I can’t help this feeling: Galadriel had to be the one to go to Númenor instead of Elrond, because show creators were too much of cowards to genderbend Sauron or ship-bait a male/male relationship (for the record, I think ship-baiting or queerbaiting are both stupid things to do). Appearing as a woman is completely within the reach of Sauron’s abilities, and he actually has the history of using shapeshifting either to fight or to entice. Hell, why is ship-baiting even necessary, unless to recycle once again some truly overused tropes? (Employing overused tropes in fanfiction is one thing, but I expect better from a big adaptation that makes a huge number of being faithful to the source material.) Tolkien in particular is known for his iconic friendships and love between comrades; in fact, it’s the friendships of his characters, not their romances, that save Middle-earth and a betrayal of faith and fellowship is no less devastating. Instead of a potentially interesting and new take, what we got is an entire season of Galadriel and Halbrand getting off on being mutually terrible people, her apparently being the reason he returns to his evil ways, and her agency stripped away from her so that she can pursue an essentially pointless vengeance. Even the person she supposedly loves is mentioned only once in a throwaway scene that does not in any way convince me that she actually cares about Celeborn. Also the erasure of Celebrían (who is canonically around the same age as Elrond) now leads to the logical conclusion that she will be born some time during this show, which makes her extremely young in Elven terms at the time of her marriage to Elrond. Yikes. Furthermore, this is a further violence done to Galadriel and her narrative, because canonically she and Celebrían were together at least for most of the Second Age, but now her daughter will be married off almost as soon as she has reached some sort of physical maturity. (Honestly, does anyone believe that Morfydd Clark looks and appears as if she could be the mother of an adult daughter? I have no trouble believing this of Cate Blanchett’s Galadriel. Both of these actresses are/were in their early thirties when they first appeared in the role of Galadriel. Maybe it’s not Clark’s fault – although her physical smallness in the role of a very tall and strong woman is jarring – and instead it’s because the character is written as such a petulant child that it’s horrifying to even think of her parenting anyone.)
