Rings of Power Cheapened Galadriel's Most Iconic LotR Moment
The Amazon series The Rings of Power has now completed its first season... seemingly failing to impress viewers.
Each episode witnessed a decrease in viewership as people quickly lost interest in the series. Many stones were thrown at the Lord of the Rings prequel series.
Some criticized the show for cramming thousands of years of material into a single story and creating unnecessary characters.
Another issue that has frustrated audiences is the fact that The Rings of Power deviates from the original canon of Tolkien's works.
One of the most notorious examples is Galadriel's character portrayal.
Meeting her in The Rings of Power, fans expected to see a regal Elf queen, but instead, the creators of the show turned her into a brazen warrior with a clear-cut hero personality, thus cheapening her most iconic moment from LOTR.
In The Fellowship of the Ring, Galadriel showed Frodo the mirror in Lothlorien, and he saw visions of the future. Then Frodo offered her the Ring, and she admitted her desire for it.
But her character-defining moment was her refusal of power.
She knew that if she took the Ring, she would become a terrifying queen, "Not dark but beautiful and terrible as the dawn! Treacherous as the Seas! Stronger than the foundations of the Earth! All shall love me and despair!"
However, The Rings of Power misinterpreted the underlying traits of her personality and portrayed her as someone who basically hunts down Sauron to prove herself as a hero.
The show even goes as far as having its own version of Galadriel's mirror scene, where she is tempted by Halbrand and offered to be made queen, which is similar to the Fellowship of the Ring's scene.
But if Galadriel had already refused Sauron's temptations, then it should not have been so difficult for her to refuse power again in Fellowship of the Ring.
The Rings of Power, therefore, created not just a character problem for Galadriel, but even a continuity issue, totally devaluating the iconic mirror scene.
So, the fans' reasons for frustration with The Rings of Power just keep piling up.
As the show has already been renewed for a second season, it's quite possible that the series will be met with even more scrutiny.