'Who was begging for the romantasy angle on Tolkien?': Rings of Power just confirmed its love triangle
Days before season 3 premieres, the showrunners said "yes, absolutely" to a Sauron-Galadriel-Celeborn triangle. Tolkien wrote one of those three as happily married for six thousand years.
The confirmation chain is short and damning. At San Diego Comic-Con, Benjamin Walker joked to Jamie Campbell Bower — the show's incoming Celeborn — that "Sauron has slid into your wife's DMs," and called the season "a little bit of a love triangle." Asked by Nerdist whether Walker was right, showrunners J.D. Payne and Patrick McKay answered on the record: "The answer to your question is yes, absolutely."
Charlie Vickers, who plays Sauron, described his character's reading of season 2 in the same round of interviews:
"I think in Sauron's mind, maybe Galadriel didn't reject him."
Season 3 hits Prime Video on November 11, so the fantasy-TV flagship is entering its new season selling a will-they-won't-they between an elf queen and the Dark Lord.
What Tolkien actually wrote
Galadriel and Celeborn are one of the most stable marriages in all of Middle-earth — together across two ages of the world, thousands of years, no wavering on the page. Sauron is not a temptation in the books; he is the enemy whose ring she refuses in her most famous scene, and whose fortress she eventually throws down. The thread under the news needed no lore lecture:
"Gladriel and Celeborn are a solid couple, like pretty much all elf couples in Tolkien, she's not interested in Sauron or Gandalf or anyone else regardless of what rings of power or Peter Jackson really want to imply"
— a commenter on r/television
The show has been building this heresy openly: season 2 ended with Sauron offering Galadriel a crown and wanting her as queen. The difference now is that the triangle is no longer subtext fans argue about but the showrunners' own pitch for season 3, with the husband finally on screen as the third corner.
In the books, Galadriel's marriage survives six thousand years and two wars with Sauron. In the show, he has a real shot.
The audience swap
This is a choice about readers, and Amazon has made it. Romantasy is publishing's biggest engine — Fourth Wing, ACOTAR, enemies-to-lovers as a business model — and an enemies-to-lovers arc between Galadriel and Sauron is that formula wearing Tolkien's names. The viewers being courted are not the ones who noticed Celeborn's absence in season 1; they're the ones who will arrive for the tension the books forbid.
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The cost falls on one character. Book Galadriel's whole arc is that she is tempted by power and refuses it; a Galadriel who might be tempted by Sauron himself is a different person with the same ears. Whatever season 3 does with its triangle, the Galadriel audiences know from Tolkien and from Cate Blanchett's unbending version doesn't survive the premise.
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