#saurbrand

[theywereraftmates]

[gracepureautumn]

I made his eyes red 🔥

Anyone else gasp at this quick little shot of future armored Halbrand?

Illustration by me, drawn in Procreate

[theywereraftmates]

If you squint and turn your head you can pretend it’s Galadriel’s hand he’s holding.

[cloudinthesky444]

I've always found the complicity and trust between Saurbrand and Galadriel curious, despite having practically just met.

This look caught my attention because of the earlier context; it was like: "You know, bestie, we've already discussed this, now help me escape." 🏃🏻‍♀️

*😼*

Their interactions are very smooth, and I personally find them completely free of awkwardness. They’re those typical interactions you have with your trusted bestie whom you’ve known for years—if they get mad and want to argue, then they argue.

"What the hell are you talking about? This is not what we discussed!!" 😞😡😡

If they want to conspire and discuss how to manipulate someone, they trust each other enough to do it. They rely on one another, and it even seems like each can perfectly identify the other’s thoughts. They speak openly, and there are times when they are shamelessly manipulative without any hesitation.

"You already know, I have a plan to manipulate that stupid queen and get that army. Are you with me?" Ahh 😭😭

Saurbrand flirts and jokes with her as you would with your best friend (of course, omitting the fact that all that sarcasm and joking had a romantic objective).

"Oh, you idiot, stop flirting with me. I have a surprise for you!!" 😡😡😊

nahh 😭

[misty-slays-blog]

Galadriel admitting that without Saurbrand everything has been a dull grey

[ceeyoutea]

obsessed with the lighting choices here. galadriel is literally the light personified and saurbrand is always in the shadow. it was all there ahhhhhh!

(yes she's the queen of light to be worshipped and he's the dark king, always in the shadow, the First and Foremost Worshipper)

[theywereraftmates]

This literally happens like every other week in Lothlórien in the third age.

[izalith-witch]

Anyone else get the vibe here that Galadriel was also talking about herself?

I mean, we know one of the reasons that Galadriel refuses to go to Valinor is she wants her own place to rule and eventually establishes Lothlorien.

And also one of the reasons she's drawn to Sauron is power.

Once again, connecting the two. Galadriel can push Saurbrand because she is Saurbrand.

[moo1982]

Are they alike?

I started a response to this post by @apoloadonisandnarcissus and then it got too long.

I must admit I haven't read Silmarillion ( Trying to find the time to start it 😂) but in S1 of RoP I believe Galadriel and Saurbrand were attracted to each other because they really understood each other and worked well as a team. They are alike in many respects: they are fiercely intelligent, bold, passionate, ahead of their time, even though outwardly she is often rash and impulsive and he is more calculating, diplomatic and sneaky. And yes they are both killers, have a superiority complex and are power hungry. Galadriel likes being a commander and is ambitious. She reawakens his ambitions and gives him a new purpose. But Galadriel also inspires him to want to do better, her empathy towards him and others does rub off: he saved her on the Sundering seas, even though he knew she was his mortal enemy, he saved Elendil and helped the Southlanders, they stopped eachother from killing Adar. We don't know what happened with the eruption: perhaps he somehow tried to stop it which resulted in him being wounded. I think that their dynamic of balancing and complementing each other, ying and yang style, with the fighting and the arguing but in the end agreeing to do something together could have worked.

In any case, l believe what truly attracts Sauron to Galadriel is neither her light nor her potential for darkness, but that she gives him a sense of belonging. In the storm she asked him to bind himself to her and that had a profound effect on him. In Tirharad he told her he wants that feeling he had fighting by her side forever bound to his existence. In Eregion he saw the opportunity to resurrect his plans for power and order in ME but he wanted to do that with her. Throughout S2 he realises he misses her. And she admits to Adar the world is a dull grey without him, she has been mourning loosing Halbrand. In the finale of S2 they are both hungry for their meeting after obsessing over each other all season (in Morfydd's words). Throughout their fight Galadriel is battling her own emotions as much as Sauron. Ultimately Sauron doesn't care if they are bound in light or darkness, as long as they are bound together. He won't let her, let the feeling, go. He will finally belong, they will belong together.

[theywereraftmates]

Of course Galadriel would charge a demigod with nothing but a dagger. That’s why she’s my favorite.

There was zero reasons for this scene to be so hot

And yet

[markantonys]

I keep seeing 'hot Sauron who fucks' takes, and they're valid, but MY GOD Adar OOZES with sex appeal, like it's just so raw? Aggressive chemistry with Sauron/Halbrand, Galadriel and Elrond!

Hot Sauron Who Fucks is out, Hot Adar Who Fucks is in!!!!! adar is out here making saurbrand (halron?) put his face in the dirt at his feet, giving galadriel bedroom eyes and whispering to her in quenya while she's holding a knife to his neck, declaring he will Make Sauron Choke On It, and effortlessly lifting elrond with one hand while choking him out. sorry, sauron, but adar has officially out-freaked and out-fucked you. the real reason sauron hates adar is that he's jealous that adar fucks more than him.

firstly, sauron fucks less this season in his annatar form compared to last season in his halbrand form. don't get me wrong, annatar!sauron is goooooorgeous and i personally find him much more aesthetically pleasing than halbrand!sauron (he serves absolute CUNT in that black outfit with the gold belt and long blond hair ft. hairbow), but he just has that Otherworldly Unfuckable air about him. he's beautiful like a marble statue - untouchable (and unfuckable).

meanwhile, in my opinion, s1 adar doesn't really fuck. he kinda gave off eerie vibes to me; there's a certain mystique about him that doesn't lend itself to fuckability, maybe a flavor of that same Otherworldly Unfuckableness. but s2 adar..........ooooooooh he fucks. he fucks severely. less eerie mystique, more warlord who will rail you into next tuesday. i was saying with my whole chest that elendil does nothing for me because i don't tend to be into dilfs, and approximately 3 days later i was calling adar daddy. that's his power. if you'd shown me a picture of this crusty ass elf a month ago and told me i would someday thirst over him, i would've thought you were insane. but once you actually watch him in action and hear him talk and absorb his vibes, good lord does he fuck.

[conundrumoftime]

As promised to a few people, the finally finished post about why I enjoy thinking/writing about Celeborn in a Haladriel context. 

[short note to say: this is me, talking about what I personally find interesting/fun. I am not interested in trying to prove anyone else’s likes and preferences right or wrong and I firmly believe that transformative fandom has infinite space for ideas. I won’t be disclaimering every single thing in here with ‘for me!’ and ‘ymmv’ and ‘obviously not everyone’s into this, but personally’ and so on, but the fandom’s been so weird about fandom things lately that I’m adding this here at the start.]

So I am deeply into Haladriel as a ship (this is probably not a huge surprise after two years and 30+ fics). And I’m also really interested in Celeborn, mainly from a books perspective - for now at least! - but also in the potential of him turning up in TROP. And the thing about this is, for me: I can write and chat and think about Galadriel’s relationship with Celeborn without Sauron being much of a factor at all, but when it comes to Haladriel as a show ship it always comes with the spectre of her missing husband there at the back of my mind.

This works great with my general shipping tastes. I don’t care much for love triangles in the traditional ‘heroine must choose between two romantic interests’ sense, but I love ships that get tangled up in each other; I love established relationships being complicated and interesting; I love conflicted feelings and divided loyalties. So it is very much a feature, rather than a bug, to be thinking “but she’s married and the husband’s going to come back at some point, so where does that leave this ship?” Because that’s the fun question: where does that leave this ship? 

When I’m writing Haladriel, Celeborn intrigues me in his absence. I like thinking about what fleeting thoughts Galadriel might have about him, and how that fits in her head with how she’s thinking of Halbrand (before or after she learns who he is). When she describes Celeborn to Theo, her memory of him seems very bound up with her memory of her younger self - they were happy, there was dancing in flowery forest glades, she didn’t really think the war would affect her - and it feels like she’s mourning that younger Galadriel as much as she is Celeborn. 

So how does the idea of feeling close to someone else now, feeling desire for someone else, sit with that? Would she feel guilty? Would she find herself comparing who she is now and who she was then? Does anything she feels for Saurbrand remind her of how she felt about Celeborn - the attraction, the bickering, the sense of being really deeply seen - and is it “this is so different” or “this is disturbingly familiar”? And if it’s the second one, how does she process that with the knowledge that this guy is Sauron? 

And he also intrigues me in his presence, and all the possibilities that creates.

At the moment in TROP canon Celeborn isn’t there. With the exception of Galadriel’s “and my husband” lines to Theo, he isn’t even mentioned. He’s been gone a very long time and it’s unlikely any of the characters we’ve met would have ever even met him other than Galadriel and possibly Círdan (and given that Adar mentioned Melian, possibly him too). Galadriel thinks he’s dead, an entirely reasonable assumption for a soldier who didn’t come back from battles that looked like this:

Which feels like a deliberate echo of the First World War that Tolkien fought in (another one I can think of is the Númenorean volunteer soldiers going off to war through cheering crowds): 

One of the many newly awful things about that war for Tolkien’s generation was the sheer number of the missing, soldiers who were never buried at all or whose graves say ‘Known Unto God’. The Menin Gate memorial to the missing has fifty thousand names; the idea of the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier came about after this war, a way to give a grave and a funeral and a ceremony to one soldier who stood in for them all. So the idea of a character who went away to the war and then was never seen again feels fitting.

But the thing is, we know Celeborn isn’t dead. We know he’s going to come back because unlike the characters, we know what happens in LOTR; we know this show’s set up as a prequel; and we know the Tolkien estate has rules in place about how far it’s allowed to diverge from where LOTR ends up, including ‘no killing off characters who don’t canonically die then’, so he’s almost certainly coming back in the show itself. 

So in show canon Galadriel will end up where she ends up in canon-canon. (This is not a show prediction (although I do have those too!), I’m talking about where her story ends up by LOTR). She will have Celeborn back; she will describe him as someone who has stood by her for thousands of years while they have ‘fought the long defeat’ together. And she will be leading the fight against Sauron in a very personal way, stuck in mental warfare with him, ‘ever they strive now in thought’ - and in TROP fic where I’m playing about with that connection as an interpersonal one that goes back to Halbrand, well, what does that mean for her and her returned husband? 

So I like thinking and writing about how those two people and two relationships sit together in her head. I like thinking about how much Celeborn must know about it, three thousand years later. (I joke about Celeborn occasionally being her answering service when she wants some time off from the mind-battle: sitting by her Mirror reading a book with his feet up, saying ’She’s busy just now, please leave a message’, or joining in with the ‘fair as the sea and the sun…’ in a slightly bored tone when Sauron tries to shock him with it. He fell in love with rebellious “I don’t care what the gods say” First Age Galadriel, he knows who he married). 

And for both of these, I find the relationship that TROP has set up for its take on Galadriel and Celeborn to have such potential for playing around with in fic. (Canon might let me down! But there will always and ever be AO3.) Because they’re not the two people they were, so they will to some degree have to get to know each other all over again. How do you reconcile someone who exists to you as a memory with the reality of them back now but changed maybe just as much as you’ve been changed? We know where they started, and we know where they end up, but this whole middle bit of their relationship in TROP canon is hugely uncertain and there are so many intriguing and wonderful ways it could play out. 

And I like thinking about what other angles the presence of Sauron adds to Galadriel and Celeborn’s book interactions, in this take on the story. She calling him “giver of gifts beyond the power of kings”, he calling her his “treasure”, which in his Sindarin would be ‘mîr’ and so could be equally translated as ‘precious’… Because, if he comes back in TROP canon when Sauron is still a very active adversary and antagonist, then they have to rebuild that marriage with his presence as this huge weight that’s just There. What has he been to them both? And where might that go?

[theywereraftmates]

Look at our scruffy rat boy making friends

[princessfantaghiro]

Watching my first beloved fairy-tale from my childhood...All i see is here now is MiddleAge!AU Galadriel × Celeborn and Saurbrand; jealous as Hell! ❤️‍🔥❤️‍🔥❤️‍🔥🤭🤭🤭

Fantaghiro = Galadriel; Romualdo = Celeborn, Tarabas = Sauron/Halbrand

😆😆😆😆

[brightvelvet]

GALADRIEL PLEASE 😭😭

I just finished S2E2 of Rings of Power and it just hit me that Galadriel has been suffering since day one of this show. No wins for this warrior, ever. It took the whole dramatic set-up Gil-Galad and Elrond did to demote her for me to realize how much shit she's been through.

Like back in season 1, Galadriel's going through heavy grief and trauma. She doesn't have a support system and she doesn't trust anyone outside of maybe this wise mortal King-to-be (Halbrand) whose also kind of fucked up. She gets no closure, her hope violently crumbles with the volcano eruption, and the Saurbrand reveal happens at Literally The Worst Possible Moment (Bad timing, dude).

Season 2 starts and everyone's keeping their distance from Galadriel. She doesn't have anyone she can turn to for genuine compassion. The problematic character traits inherent to the plot of season 1 are only exacerbated in season 2 so far as nobdy pulls her aside. She can't hide behind her higher rank anymore either. It's like the worst possible situation you could put her in!! She's so exposed and vulnerable and nobody is helping her!!!!

Like yes, she's one of the oldest elves living in Middle-Earth but also consider that she hasn't ever really gotten the chance to live. She has been the quinntessential soldier. Now she's a veteran and nobody really gives a shit for what she wants. I'm not saying she's right, we can all tell that her mental anguish is making her act recklessly, but the lack of recognition from everyone is disturbing.

There were a million ways Galadriel could have been better handled, all of them better than disregarding her arrogance and introverted tendencies-- which there's no way they couldn't have noticed develop over the years. Does no one think to help her beyond supplying soldiers? What was the thought process behind letting her loose like that?

I could never be a Galadriel-hater. She's struggling along on the bare minimum, as she has for centuries, and no one should be thinking her character doesn't fit with her story. She has no true security or stability, and no purpose beyond trying to avenge/fix her past. For the moment, Galadriel should be a misunderstood, tragic character.

One day, we know she'll learn better, how to live outside of war and death. But until then, I'm gonna be a little pissed on her behalf.

[ceeyoutea]

saurbrand:

galadriel: