It’s very confusing to me how some refuse to accept that Mairon/Sauron can feel “human-like” emotions like love or lust, while projecting human-like traits like “narcissism” or “sociopathy” onto his character.
Sauron is a immortal deity, who was created by Eru himself. He’s one of the Ainur; he helped shape the world during the Ainulindalë, the “music of the Ainur”. He looks at Middle-earth in ruins and thinks the Valar have forsaken it. He steps in because, in his mindset, he’s the only deity willing to do something about it. Of course he’s “arrogant”, and thinks he owns the place. He helped creating it, in the first place.
You all also conveniently forget just how alike Sauron and Galadriel actually are, and why they are each others foils to begin with. Many of you are falling into the same trap as the “lorebros” by ignoring that character arcs exist and that “Rings of Power” Galadriel is thousands of years away from her Third Age persona. She’s not the “Lady of Light” yet, and even Sauron himself has just begun his “Dark Lord” arc.
Not only Sauron and Galadriel are both arrogant, but self-righteous, too. They both love to be on power-trips. They lie left and right, and manipulate others to get their way. We saw Galadriel do this in both Season 1 and 2, already. They both use others for their own ends. They don’t care about rules, they are their own authority. They are used to get their way, and get pissed when they don’t. They both turned their backs on the Valar (returning to Valinor/refusing their judgement) for the same reason: pride. They know each others minds because they are alike.
Of course Sauron wants her as his queen; she’s the perfect pair for him. And together they would, indeed, wreck havoc. This would be a power couple of nightmares, for everyone around them. There would be no escaping them, they would enslave everyone to their will. They are both beautiful, and Sauron is seductive. He already brought this side of Galadriel to the surface in Season 1, when we saw her flirting with him (and this is probably the explanation for Tolkien approval of Boorman’s script).
I read a lot of people saying that Sauron would destroy Galadriel’s light if she joined him. Actually, she would be far worse than Sauron. Tolkien did say that Gandalf would be worse than Sauron if he had the One Ring, and this is true for Galadriel as well. Which explains these quotes from her:
She recognizes this, she’s not that self-deluded. She’s talking about herself on a power-trip, not about how Sauron would “destroy” her.
This headcanon (and I’ve seen this in the Galadriel x Sauron fandom, too) that Galadriel is some “pure of heart she-elf, holy and divine-like character” is extremely bizarre, because this is not what we are being shown in “Rings of Power”. Nor is it what Tolkien himself wrote. For starters, Tolkien, being extremely religious, would never copy-paste his faith into magical elves. The characters that are granted with that imprint are the Valar themselves because they are meant to be of divine nature (the actual Gods of his lore). And Tolkien himself went back and forward with this idea, too. Maybe he felt it was too blasphemous, I don’t know.
This will be my wildest take yet, but Halbrand turning out to be Sauron is a aphrodisiac for Galadriel, actually. She wanted the king, yes, because the smith wasn’t good enough. But at the end of the day, Halbrand was a Southlander, a “low man”: Galadriel tells him this once they arrived at Númenor in 1x03 (“these men are not like you”). But he turned out to be the most powerful being around, and he wants her at his side. And you can bet that only makes her want him even more. And Sauron is probably aware of this, too.
This is why he’s grinning here: you thought I was a mere “low man”, did you? Even with him on his repentant era, we saw Mairon’s self-control in Season 1. He allowed Galadriel to say all kinds of arrogant stuff to him, and saved this grin for last. His pride was the reason why he couldn’t bring himself to face the Valar’s judgment, after all.
Besides: was she truly deceived by Sauron, or did she deceived herself, in Season 1? Because she’s the one who kept pushing the king of the Southlands onto him, and even acted behind his back with Queen MĂriel. This is why Elrond calls her out on her bullsh*t on Season 2: “it was entirely of your choosing”. She wanted the lost king who could ride her to victory, and Sauron delivered.
There’s a lot of misunderstanding of the kind of villain Sauron actually is. He’s a cautionary tale of “be careful of what you wish for”. That’s why he’s the seductive power that makes every dream come true. Listen to Adar, he’s the one who spills the tea in “Rings of Power”. Sauron is a sharer of gifts, a wish granter, but it comes with a cost. And he’s not “chaotic evil”, he’s pure “lawful evil”; he’s methodic, a control freak and highly organized. And that’s why he’s able to gain an insane amount of power for a mere Maia.
Indeed it was; Galadriel went to Eregion, is standing there, and has the Nine, because it’s by Sauron’s design. Everything he did was to culminate in this scene. He’s a mastermind, he planned everything. And you all actually believe it was Elrond on that tent, as if Sauron, the control freak, would let anything to chance. As he so cynically says, himself:
Sauron was able to perceive Finrod, Beren & co infiltrated his fortress masquerading as Orcs, because the Orcs were acting weird. This is how calculating he truly is. Morgoth was the brute force, Sauron was the mind. And you can bet Morgoth’s overworked secretary Sauron had everything catalogued, curated and organized by size, shape and color, back at Angband fortress. He had that thing running like clockwork. He was created as a Maia of order, after all.
For my Zodiac enthusiastics out there: this villain is peak Virgo energy. Everyone associates Sauron with fire, but nah, his whole personality is Earth element-coded (and Aulë himself is very connected with Earth element, not only by creating mountains and gems/minerals, but he’s also married to “Queen of the Earth”, Yavanna).
He did had some bumps along the way: killing Celebrimbor in a rage fit, and Galadriel getting captured by Adar, but it all worked out for him in the end (except Galadriel throwing herself off a cliff, he wasn’t counting on that one, either):
We saw him lose control in “Rings of Power” and acting chaotic because it was meant to symbolize his return to “his old ways”, his fall into evil again, into Morgoth’s servitude. Morgoth was “chaotic evil”, he was the nihilistic God who wanted to destroy and corrupt everything Eru created. This is not Sauron’s character at its core.
And this is not “gaslighting” either. This is Sauron actually talking facts. It was Celebrimbor’s arrogance and vanity that allowed him to “fall prey” to Sauron. And he, indeed, chose it. Because Celebrimbor wanted to surpass Fëanor, he wanted to craft legendary objects, he wanted to create a mythos like his grandfather’s Silmarils. And Sauron gave him just that. Celebrimbor’s sins are pride (vanity), greed and envy.
Celebrimbor couldn’t care less about Halbrand (the “low man”); he used his knowledge and then forgot about him, not because Galadriel told him to, but because Halbrand was no longer useful to him. He had already forged the Three Elven rings of power (to help the Elves cheat death). And is with this that Sauron tempts him, again. And he becomes the emissary of the Valar because that’s what Celebrimbor wanted, that’s the validation he was seeking (like Galadriel wanted the king of the Southlands).
This goes back to Adar in 2x06:
Adar: But sooner or later, he sees you. Not just who you are, but who you wish to be. His eye bores a hole and the rest of him slithers in. For a while, he even makes you believe that his power has become yours. Irresistible power... that makes every desire's fulfillment seem inevitable. An ocean of color against which everything else feels forever thereafter...
Galadriel: A dull gray.
Adar: What did he promise you? [...] Do you want to know what he offered me? [...] Children.
Galadriel: Then it would seem he gave us both what we desired.
Adar: You see, it is not his lies which must be extinguished. It is him.
And this is perfectly aligned with Tolkien religious message: sin, and the price to pay for being a sinner.
These characters are not “hopeless victims” of Sauron. They are active participants on their own torment by choosing to sin, and this is symbolically represented by them aligning themselves with evil (Sauron). This is pure Christian doctrine. The showrunners have to spin it into “modern takes” of “domestic abuse” or whatever for the audience to understand, but that’s not the core message here. This is Tolkien preaching, folks. This is Tolkien saying “you all need Jesus”.
Adar and Galadriel parallel each other in a lot of ways, too. In Tolkien lore, Galadriel is described as “repentant sinner”. And Adar is a repentant sinner, too, making amends.
In the legendarium, Galadriel’s sins are pride and greed (power hungry). And “Rings of Power” built upon this and added a new one: lust. She turned her back on the Valar, and that’s why she’s banished from Valinor (heaven) in the first place.
I’ve read some speculating that she’s not actually banished and only remains on Middle-earth because she wants to. But no, that doesn’t fit Tolkien lore; the legendarium is fluid, and allows for multiple interpretations, but the core message needs to be there, all the same. Galadriel’s punishment for sinning is to be banished from heaven and she needs to repent to be allowed to return. This make complete sense with Tolkien’s work and his religious views.
But in “Rings of Power”, Galadriel’s greed is also connected with her love for Halbrand/Sauron (and I already talked about this here). So far, we haven’t see Galadriel expressing her desire to have a kingdom of her own; it’s Sauron that introduces this point, and he’s the reason why she refuses the Valar’s pardon and stays on Middle-earth, to begin with (to hunt him down).
Meaning: the reason for Galadriel’s banishment will have to be connected with Sauron in “Rings of Power”, because that’s the angle the show is exploring and working on, and they can’t ignore her banishment because that’s a huge deal in her overall character’s arc, and why she becomes “Lady of Light” and fights Sauron. When she rejects Frodo’s offer of the One Ring in the Third Age it’s her last temptation, and she humbles herself and proves to the Valar that she’s worthy of returning to Valinor, at last.
And this leads me to another notion: catholic guilt. I was raised catholic in a extremely catholic country (it’s cultural), so I recognize many of Tolkien’s religious background on his work without trying (he, too, was a catholic), and the Tolkien experts of “Rings of Power” seem to be heading in this direction, too, and that explains why Galadriel and Sauron have romantic and sexual chemistry, and there’s so much sexual innuendo in their interactions.
A crown (clitorical symbol = vagina) penetrating a sword (phallic symbol = penis)? “Rings of Power” can’t get any more obvious than this with the Freudian symbolism.
“Catholic guilt” is the deep feeling of shame after having sinned. This is often associated with sex, and having a high sex drive (usually females). And this makes perfect sense with the Eldar customs (sex = marriage; sex = children; and other puritan views of sexual acts), and why any Elf would feel deeply ashamed, guilty and in need of repenting for thousands of years (“catholic guilt”) after going against these rules.
What does this mean? Galadriel will get a taste of that D, sooner or later. And it makes more sense for it to happen when he’s fully Sauron (and not Halbrand), indeed. Because then, she can’t racionalize it as “having been deceived”. And for that sense of deep shame and guilt to kick in, she’ll have to want it, too; it has to be consensual, on her part.
And for this she’ll be punished (banished from Valinor) and will have to repent for thousands of years into the future. Even if they don’t explicitly say this on the show (which they won’t, not only they won’t go there but this religious message doesn’t really fit nowadays standards). I highly doubt any this will be explicit, at all, but there will be innuendo, symbolism, and clues of this happening in future seasons. It might even happen in Season 3, actually (in connection with Galadriel spiraling down into darkness as a consequence of Morgoth’s crown wound).
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