Sauron’s The Rings Of Power Love Interest Should’ve Been This Elf Character, Not Galadriel

This article contains spoilers for The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power.The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power clearly has no issue teasing romance between Tolkien characters, but it left one Sauron romance angle sadly unexplored. The Rings of Power season 1 ended the season-long Sauron mystery box, confirming that Halbrand was Sauron. This left season 2 free to focus on its Stranger mystery box while exploring Sauron in depth. While the show symmetrically ended season 2 by opening its Stranger mystery box and confirming that he was Gandalf, it had a whole season to develop its Sauron-Galadriel romance tease and explore Sauron’s relationships with other characters.

Poppy’s courtship with one of the pre-hobbit Stoors and Isildur’s Estrid romance have little to discredit them, offering levity and emotional pull for a modern audience without altering high fantasy master J.R.R. Tolkien’s source material. The Elendil-Míriel romance and the Sauron-Galadriel romance distort characters that Tolkien laid out, making them more questionable. But the show has used subtext very well, leaving multiple interpretations of these relationships possible. Cast and crew frequently share their views, but leave their romances open where it counts – on-screen. So, there was room for one more subtextual romance.

Sauron & Celebrimbor’s Relationship Would’ve Worked With Romantic Undertones

Queer Subtext Would Have Improved Their Relationship

It is a hot take, but Rings of Power season 2 should have sensitively applied subtle queer subtext and tropes to Sauron and Celebrimbor’s relationship. This would have made their power play more convincing. Annatar and Celebrimbor are a popular pairing in the fandom, referred to as silvergifting – “celeb” meaning silver and “anna” meaning gift in the Elvish language of Quenya. Showrunners Patrick McKay and J.D. Payne even confirmed that Annatar’s seduction was suggestive in the show, admitting “it’s easy for your imagination to go there” (via THR). Committing more to this bold but understandable headcanon would have paid off.

The show clearly wanted to portray a level of genuine connection and respect between Sauron and Celebrimbor – one that transcended Sauron’s deception. It was a stroke of genius that the show framed Sauron’s murder of Celebrimbor as a conflicted and emotional loss of control, proving that the partnership had been totally real to Sauron. The tension between fake and real affection is what makes Sauron and Galadriel’s relationship compelling, and the show was right to try and apply that here. This psychological depth is exactly what makes a five-season TV show a glorious sandpit for Tolkien’s sweeping epic.

Only in accomplishing good drama can the most faithful possible adaptation really be achieved, because only then are the core themes of the source material truly allowed to resonate with today’s audience.

However, Sauron and Celebrimbor’s genuine affection didn’t quite land. Celebrimbor wasn’t rising to Sauron’s level in creative or spiritual inspiration, power, wit, or potential, reactively following along. Meanwhile, Sauron wasn’t credibly vulnerable with Celebrimbor. If Sauron really believed that everything was Celebrimbor’s fault, like he said, he wouldn’t have found his loss so heartbreaking, because he wouldn’t have respected him enough. The show’s attempt to portray Sauron opening up to Celebrimbor was marked by a compromise of a faithfully heinous Sauron with good drama.

Dangerous people deserve dangerous dialogue.

But the reality is that only in accomplishing good drama can the most faithful possible adaptation really be achieved, because only then are the core themes of the source material truly allowed to resonate with today’s audience. Rings of Power should have plumbed the depths of two characters going too far and working too hard together in close quarters. It needed Sauron and Celebrimbor to engage increasingly in rare, ephemeral truthfulness at the end of long days when they were both too exhausted for anything else.

Subtle queer subtext and tropes could have underlined this dynamic perfectly. They could have formed so many analogies about “forbidden” but genuine emotion, affection, and respect between two people on opposing sides. Sensitively applied, this could have avoided both exploitation and canon contradiction. Tolkien’s elevated, sweeping epic can be sustained merely by not overtly shattering its reality. Meanwhile, lingering glances, sparkling banter to the point of flirtation, and penetration metaphors like knives thrown into walls could have underlined the danger and the stakes of this liaison.

Dangerous people deserve dangerous dialogue. An incredibly subtle Sauron and Celebrimbor romance tease would have worked on many levels because, in some ways, it’s more credible for Sauron to have sexual motivation than real affection. But the beauty of it is that that motivation could remain a mystery. The mounting effect of the romance undertones would have made it more convincing that Celebrimbor and Sauron had a good thing mutually going, making the breakdown of their relationship actually sad instead of just a canonical inevitability.

Celebrimbor Makes More Sense As Sauron’s Love Interest Than Galadriel

Celebrimbor And Sauron Developed A Working Relationship Canonically

Celebrimbor may have made more sense as a romance tease for Sauron than Galadriel. Galadriel was married to Celeborn in the Second Age, which Rings of Power had to subvert to make room for its Halbrand-Galadriel arc. But Celebrimbor had no such obstacles to falling for someone. Plus, Celebrimbor’s arc in Lord of the Rings really did push him close to Annatar. Galadriel met Sauron in Eregion in the Second Age in Unfinished Tales, but it was far from the dominant narrative – Tolkien had many versions of Galadriel’s story.

Celebrimbor’s gruesome death in Rings of Power season 2 was one of its most triumphantly Tolkienian parts. But Sauron and Celebrimbor’s connection lacks a certain degree of closure. Sauron’s character must now develop toward darkness, and further away from any real recognition of Celebrimbor’s impact on him. So long as the scope of the complex moral interplay of Tolkien’s Second Age was maintained, perhaps one moment of lucidity on Sauron’s part could be enough to somehow honestly say goodbye to Celebrimbor, as befitting one of ancient intelligence.

Queer-Baiting Is A Problem In TV, But There’s A Place For Queer Subtext

There Is A Place For Unfulfilled Queer Subtext

The application of queer subtext that goes unfulfilled in movies and TV is known as queer-baiting, and it is a real issue, but queer and unfulfilled subtext is not categorically a bad thing. Unfulfilled homoerotic undertones and other kinds of queer coding can be used well. As an adaptation of a classic story so widely loved and so institutional to English literature, British culture, and worldwide fantasy, Rings of Power is right to be operating within a carefully outlined radius of acceptable original material. Original material is needed in any adaptation, and the show is testing its boundaries.

The compromise faced by Rings of Power – that between faithfulness and drama – is the same compromise faced by all adaptations. But in no adaptation currently on TV is the challenge so pronounced. Having to adapt such an old text, written in such an archaic style, into a modern format, Payne and McKay have a harder job than perhaps any other showrunners out there. But the rewards are irresistible. “I have been awake since before the breaking of the first silence” was a spine-tingling line, as was Gandalf saying his name for the first time.

In adaptations like this, where huge compromise is an inevitability, subtext is key to pushing the story forward.

The beauty of subtext is that it allows content to exist in multiple worlds, allowing many to be right about their interpretation. In adaptations like this, where huge compromise is an inevitability, subtext is key to pushing the story forward. Sauron and Celebrimbor were on the right track in The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power and the additional queer subtext needed would have been so subtle it would barely have been there, negating the commercial exploitation of queer struggle. It would have just nudged the relationship into its power zone – a dynamic so convincing that anything was possible.

Source: THR