How To Make Boring Characters — Rings of Power

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They clearly thought her being Galadriel was all we needed to care about her, because we already care about the original Galadriel.

U cannot use diversity and inclusiveness as excuses for lazy writing. That's what irritates me the most.

This really shows how lucky we were to have Peter Jackson doing the original Trilogy. It could have so easily been mishandled and then we wouldn't have had those classic films today.

Your rewrite of Galadriel's motivations made me realize she also just falls into this modern female hero stereotype of a young woman, loner, badass. Even for someone who's been alive for thousands of years. To make her into a mother who has depth would make her multi-dimensional, which for some reason is just incomprehensible to a lot of writers today. I don't understand it.

I cared more about Haldir's death in Two Towers more than I cared about anyone in this show.

I think another low-key reason that Galadriel was so hard to get invested in is because they gave her an end-goal that the audience knows with 100% certainty she will not achieve. Her goal, however poorly explained or motivated, is to kill Sauron, but we know who eventually does that and it isn't her. She isn't even going to be present when it happens. There's no tension or uncertainty there. It's very difficult to get worked up rooting for someone when you have no doubt that they will fail.

Your description of Elrond's apprenticeship under Celebrimbor made me feel more emotional than anything in the actual show. Not sure if I should be impressed, or even sadder.

They flucked up the Elves from the beginning by showing Guyladriel's troops being so negatively affected by the snowstorm because they are supposed to be able to deal with it quite well. Legolas was walking across the top of the snow without breaking the crust and these goofballs are dying off from it.

The Harfoots was probably the WORST story arc I've ever seen on a show. It makes me actively root against them with how hypocritical they are with how they stay together except for those who get injured then you leave them to the wolves to die.

A show that I think exemplifies that viewers will come back for the characters is Supernatural. The show ran 15 seasons. Most of the seasons after Season 5 were bad. But fans kept tuning in because they were in love with Sam, Dean, and a few others they met along the way.

The irony of that example you gave with Galadriel's daughter is that's actually what happens. She's kidnapped and tortured by orks. It's a big reason why Elrond, her daughter's husband, and his sons hate orks so much.

Fun fact: this remains the only show my family has quit out of boredom. We didn't even make it to the second episode because none of us cared about anyone.

Actually the show doesn't ignore the fact that she has a husband, though it does neglect the daughter. It's said in passing in episode 7, she has a husband, she sent him away to war (same war as her brother) in ill-suited armor and she says she never saw him again. Which makes her motivation to kill sauron even more bizarre. If her husband has not been found, why is she not looking for her husband? If she thinks he's dead, why is she not hunting sauron for both her brother and her husband?

Bringing her husband Celeborn and daughter Celebrian in as characters that spur a protective motive in Galadriel would make extra sense when you know that Celebrian is captured by orcs and tortured so badly she has nothing left of herself, and the only respite she could find was going into the West. A trip from which there is no returning. If they moved that from the third age to the second age (an easy enough thing to do, given their willingness to fudge other timeline elements), that devastating loss would be an excellent motivator that would resonate with anyone. Especially parents. Could even be a hard-punching season conclusion. She works so hard to protect her family from the horrors she endured only to see the absolute worst thing happen to her daughter. But no. Let's make her a loner that has absolutely no compelling loyalty to anyone. Cool.

What they did to Galadriel is the most unforgivable thing here. She's probably my favorite character from the extended lore. It's a genuine shame that Tolkien never finished fleshing out her full story because what little we got was so great. What we have in Galadriel is a story of a woman who left the perfect, harmonious, and undying realm of the gods to go back to a place of suffering and death because she wanted to be queen of her own domain - something she could never do in Valanor because the gods ruled everything there. She then watches her own family descend into madness and ultimately be destroy chasing after an artifact that they didn't need (Eru had already created the sun and moon to replace the light trees the Silmarils were made from), even getting betrayed by her Uncle in the most petty way because of this madness. She got dragged into a war she wanted nothing to do with and had to expend so much of her self to protect her domain. And in the end, when she had given up hope of ever getting what she wants, the ring of power falls in her lap - freely offered to her by Frodo - and she finally has the tool she needs to rule the world like she always wanted. It's the ultimate temptation, the hardest test of personal integrity she has ever faced. And she passes, because she learned all the right lessons from watching her family destroy itself during the Silmarillion: that getting what you want isn't worth if you give up who you are to get it. That is a fantastically compelling story and Galadriel also has an amazing set of powers that could be so much fun to explore - to sum it up quickly, her ability to perceive and communicate at great distances makes her able to command wars like she's literally playing an RTS. Think of the amazing battle set pieces you could get from those powers. Think of the sense of awe that can inspire, to see someone who can always have her people at exactly the right place they need to be to win with the minimum amount of risk to her people, and yet the greatest risks he has to face is the failings of her own family, who keep trying to drag her into their fight, leaving the real conflict not being whether or not she can win, but the question of does she respect her family as they descend into madness, or does she give up on them and do what it takes to protect her people? All that's set up in Tolkien's notes, but because it's only in bite size chunks, there's room for a creative storyteller to still have a lot of fun creating satisfying story beats to connect the dots and fill in the gaps. And these chucklefucks threw all that out because they wanted Galadriel to wield a sword, because the only way to be a Strong Independent Woman (TM), is to do things that are considered traditionally masculine. In trying to turn Galadriel into a Girl Boss, they ended up making her less of a Boss than she was in the actual lore. And as Stanly Kubrick demonstrated time and again, if you intend to deviate from the source material, you had better do something REALLY good. Otherwise, the fans who made the adaptation a potentially profitable venture will crucify you.

20:24 maybe not an EXACT example but in the Avatar: The Last Airbender S2 finale, Azula makes the "join me" speech to Zuko, offering to restore his honor so he can return as the Fire Nation Prince. It's quite perfectly set up, too. S1 emphasized how much Zuko wanted to restore his honor. S2 gave Zuko him perspective from life outside, both in terms of how the Fire Nation has affected the world and how he could be happy in a simple life making tea and not being a prince. And just before Azula makes her pitch, Katara, a victim of the Fire Nation who has previously vehemently hated Zuko and the Fire Nation until this point, offers him forgiveness and redemption. Shortly after, when he's confronted with the choice between these 2 world, it's not only tense because his decision is a HUGE momentum swing in the Azula's favor towards hunting Aang, who is lying and will bring anything but happiness for him, but also because it's entirely possible that Zuko would choose either side. The fate of the world, essentially, is left in the hands of a conflicted teenager who has near equal motivation to join either side. So, when he bursts into the fight to aid Azula with an angry cry with a hint of internal conflict, it's just so gut wrenching, but so fitting for the story. The heartbreak from S2 does make his redemption in S3 more rewarding, but the juxtaposition between his life with Iroh, living simply and serving others, and his life in the Fire Nation makes his choice to help the Gaang grounded in such a strong motivation that you just can't help but jump and cheer when Zuko poetically deflects his father's unbridled power with a technique he learned from Iroh (a technique based on seeing the perspectives of others, no less). Fuckin genius, really.

Did you call Galadriel a 'borderline Mary Sue'? Galadriel is a sentient ball of narcissism/plot contrivance so dense she bends reality itself. She is PEAK Mary Sue. No one bows in Numinore purely because she does not want to bow. She yeets herself to 'certain death' in the ocean and gets rescued by her love interest/the dark lord. She bullies a queen into invading a far off land then runs away with no negative personal repercussions when the whole campaign is an abject failure that blinds the queen. She bullies the dark lord into taking more power then gaslights him and the audience when everything goes wrong. Also she took a pyroclastic money shot to the face, the show would have been WAY better if it ended there.

It's funny how people expected this to be a big culture war flashpoint that we would argue over one way or another but instead everyone more or less agreed it was just bad

The even worse sin was ignoring that canonically Celebrimbors family murdered most of Elronds family for some shiny rocks